‘Well, at least the poor gits will be better shielded in the gas mine’s tunnels than inside the city. Porcelain walls might keep you cool from the heat, but they’re bloody shrapnel coffins in a fight, see.’ His last few words were mangled by the detonations of the two giant cannons, their artillery relocated in front of the cable car station and landing shells within the city boundary. It was a hard thing to do, to order gunners to land shells on their own people. But the forces along the jungle-flanked wall had become so intermingled that the impact of the barrage was killing as many Advocacy soldiers as locals. Out beyond the thermal barrier surrounding the island, the invasion fleet was now bridging the killing zone unopposed. More soldiers to pour across the island, more predators to prowl the set Daunt was trapping the citizens inside.
Eventually the sea-bishops hidden among the invaders would track down and eliminate the faked signals emulating King Jude’s sceptre and then there would be only one hiding place left. The volcano. They would throw the entire gill-neck military machine against the slopes, with not a care for the natives sheltering inside. It all came down to time, if only he could buy enough time. Buy it with bodies. What a bitter currency to fund my strategy. A line of detonations stitched their way across the cable car concourse, the distant whoop of gill-neck mortars falling across their position.
Daunt ducked reflexively along with Morris behind the makeshift command post in the volcano’s shadow. A hailstorm of tiny stones and dirt jounced off the sandbags and ricocheted off the cable car station behind them. As the dust of the explosions cleared, Daunt saw that the columns of fleeing Nuyokians had been broken, limbless bodies scattered as though seeds from a dandelion head, wails of moaning rising around smoking craters. The rain of mortar shells on their position had left Daunt with a dusty, gritty taste on his tongue, his clothes covered with a layer of dull volcanic dust. A sudden wave of fatigue washed over him. How long since he had last eaten or slept? Everything was war; it was as if there had never been a time when he had known peace. Daunt couldn’t faint now. This was his slaughter. He would look the refugees in the eyes as they passed. He would feel their fear and taste their pain. The Circle save him, but the ex-parson’s ear was attuned to this carnage now. Daunt could tell the difference between heavy bombards and light gallopers, between the short-barrelled cannons on the rolling-pin tanks, tracks pulling them over the rubble of the walls, and the heavy howitzers that the gill-necks had assembled on the island’s shores. The pacifist had a day of practical lessons to add to his years of book learning. A day stretched into a year, subverting the lessons of the church. From how every battle could be avoided, corrupted into by what means their lost cause might be turned around.
Running across the ground of the mud-trampled parkland opposite, one of the city engineers came skidding past the sandbags. ‘The blasting barrels you requested have been assembled, Court man.’
Daunt turned to the crumpled map of the city he had procured, laid out across a porcelain bench. ‘We don’t have much time. Bring down the towers along this line-’ he tapped the map, ‘-and then this one.’
The engineer looked indignant. ‘You are asking me to destroy our city?’
‘Walls and halls are not your city,’ snarled Daunt. He pointed to the struggling lines of citizenry pouring past their position. ‘ They are Nuyok. Bring these two districts down, collapse their under-streets into canyons and we will force the gill-necks to funnel through this central area. A mountain pass for us to defend, such as the steamman knights held in the Battle of the Gauge Heights.’ The engineer looked as if he was going to argue further, but Daunt silenced him with a jab towards the low buildings on the far side of the parkland. ‘These palaces need to come down too. The Holy Kikkosico Empire’s defence of Los Tarral showed that it’s many degrees harder to assault through rubble than through standing structures.’
‘Those are not palaces,’ the engineer sounded disgusted. ‘That is the great Library Publico of Nuyok.’
‘Good engineer,’ Daunt seized the man by his ceramic chainmail. ‘I have killed thousands of men, women and children today. Let’s burn a few of your books on their shelves too.’
The engineer stumbled back, looking at Daunt as if he was mad. ‘We will clear the shelves, where we can, where we have time.’
‘Who will read them?’ Daunt shouted as the engineer exited the command post. ‘Can corpses read your precious shelves of books?’
Morris pulled his rifle in tight on his shoulder, flashing a look of concern at the ex-parson. ‘You need to rest. I slept an hour at the back of the station on one of the spare stretchers.’
‘I can sleep when I’m dead,’ said Daunt. He pushed Morris away. ‘Monsters win battles, Mister Morris. That is the real lesson of history. Cold, heartless madmen who march innocents into the mincing machine of war. We face monsters, but what are we? What must we become? Monsters killing monsters.’
‘You won’t get the taste for it, vicar. Not you. For some this is beer and mumbleweed and sex. But you’re better than us.’
‘Better!’ Daunt thumped the map. ‘Everyone in the Northeast of the city will be cut off in a few minutes. My last order to them was to fight to the end. No quarter. No retreat. I am better. You thought we’d have folded by now, surrendered. You gave me odds on it. But the city is still fighting. How many generals could have done that? How many colonels and field marshals could have prolonged the killing here for so long?’
‘You’ll know when it’s time to stop,’ said Morris, sitting down. ‘And that’s better than most.’
One of the Court’s guards came into the post, pushing back a strange black mask that covered his face, an evil grasshopper head made of rubber and leather and twin respirators, one hanging on either side of his visor. He passed a wax-sealed tube across to Daunt. ‘Lord Trabb’s complements sir.’
‘What is it?’ asked Morris as Daunt scanned the message pulled from the container.
‘Bob my soul, but just once I would like to receive some good news today. The Court’s spotters on the rise are reporting the fall of the wall on the south side. Lord Trabb’s worried that the advance of the gill-necks towards us will trigger the Court’s defences. Their automated gun ports on the slopes won’t differentiate between refugees and Advocacy marines right now. It’ll be a hard pounding for everyone.’
‘Then turn the damn things off,’ said Morris.
Daunt handed the tube back to the Court’s messenger, addressing him directly. ‘No. Keep the artillery running. Any stragglers will have to come in under fire.’
Morris looked horrified, his eyes flicking towards the frightened women and children filing past them. Another round of mortar shells scattered across the concourse, militia yelling and screaming over the impacts, trying to shepherd the mob into the safety of the mountain refuge.
‘I won’t pick up a gun myself,’ Daunt told Morris. ‘Because I’m a good Circlist and a better hypocrite. I won’t pick up a weapon because I’ve got you and everyone else to do that for me.’ He picked up the map and left the post, glancing back at Morris. ‘On your feet, sir. It’s not time to stop yet.’
Down the darkship sank, spinning slowly, the only signs of the trench’s fierce depth the occasional animal-like tremor along the craft’s oily floor, something to accompany the creaking from its hull. Unlike a Jackelian u-boat, there were no gas lanterns to light the drop into the abyss, but the craft seemed to emit a hellish red glow which the pilot’s viewing port could translate into a form of vision. The occasional snake-like trench dweller passed the darkship in front of the jagged, falling walls of the trench, moving through a sea of blood.
Gemma Dark came strutting down the narrow cabin, cock-of-the-walk since she had captured Charlotte and Commodore Black. In a rare flash of generosity she had ordered Jared’s shoulder bandaged, although Charlotte suspected that had more to do with a desire to prolong his time under interrogation, rather than any softening of heart towards her brother. ‘You want to know an irony, brother? It was the airships of the Royal Aerostatical Navy that first chased me down here, their depth charges that set off a rock slide, breaking the ancient machines holding my allies locked in a snare of suspended time. Parliament freed them, but my wrecked u-boat was the first thing their scouts came across.’
‘A pity they didn’t gorge their chops on your bitter old bones,’ growled the commodore.
‘Oh, they killed a few of us,’ said Gemma. ‘Stripped our minds and fed on our blood. That was when they realized the similarities between our two peoples. Both of us hunted and harried to the ends of existence, persecuted for who we are. They needed allies to take their first tentative footsteps outside, re-entering our brave new era, and the cause had run out of friends a long time ago.’
‘Only because you’d seen most of them killed, sister,’ muttered the commodore.
‘Not quite as many as I should have done.’
‘You’ve made a bad bargain,’ spat Charlotte.
‘Tell me that when I am sitting on the throne of Jackals as the Kingdom’s first true queen for over seven hundred years.’
‘You won’t be queen,’ laughed Charlotte. ‘You’ll just be in charge of the abattoir for a short while.’
