serious matter, keeping the townspeople alive is a serious matter.’
‘Freedom’s light burns within each of us. It can never be diminished,’ said the Notifier.
Damn her foolish religious cant. Did her faith offer any succour to those dying and maimed, as their light flickered from the world? Superstition is the enemy, that’s what the seminaries taught back home. Well, the Circlist church’s teachers had never had to crouch in the dirt and be pounded by gill-neck artillery all day long. There was a sudden surge of movement as militia fighters below flooded into the narrow communication trenches, surging up towards Daunt and the next defensive ring.
‘Prepare the charges!’ Daunt yelled. Along the firebay one of the engineers began fiddling with the ignition wires, readying to detonate the barrels of liquid explosives in the communication passages, sealing their defences against infiltration counterattacks from below.
‘They have come out in support of your plan,’ said the Notifier, somewhat superfluously.
‘See if they can convince those gill-necked bastards down there to vote on going home,’ said Morris.
The town’s fighters poured into the trench, taking posts in the firebays and fixing their sights on the slopes below. Their chainmail armour was covered in mud, those portions of their faces that were visible under their gasmasks streaked with soot and tears and sweat. Manoeuvring through the narrow gap of the trench, the militia’s young powder monkeys sprinted, sacks of ammunition drums and propellant jangling as they squeezed through the confined space, voices calling out for patronage in a cruel imitation of a street hawker’s cries. The day was edging towards twilight. When night fell, the gill-necks would have the advantage, their eyes born to the half-light under the waves.
Daunt indicated the powder monkeys. ‘Their sacks are half empty.’
‘That’s the problem with putting out bullets like a hailstorm,’ said Morris. ‘We’re running low of ammunition.’ He patted his gas rifle. ‘Anyway, that’s what the cutlery on the end of this if for. Never thought I’d be pig-sticking on a battlefield again.’
Daunt nodded grimly. He gazed down at the massed gill-neck ranks climbing relentlessly towards them. The heavy bunker guns along the slopes had fallen silent half an hour ago, preserving their shells for the moments when the rolling-pin tanks rumbled forward. Where previous advances had been halted, burning formations of gill-neck vehicles of war littered the blackened parkland in front of the volcano.
‘Fire in the hole!’ yelled the engineer as he plunged the stick down on his detonator.
A wall of rubble and fire erupted into the sky, showering the gill-necks’ forward ranks with shrapnel and rock shards. The defenders’ abandoned trench circuit had collapsed in on itself, any dead fighters left inside incinerated along with the front of the invaders’ line. Hundred of bodies lay piled on the lower slopes, a few wounded gill-necks trying to struggle out of mounds of shattered flesh even as the next wave of Advocacy marines beat their way over their own dead and dying. Rifles discharged along the Advocacy ranks, a rippling line of smoke from their guns as bullets bounced off the lava slopes and caught some of the defenders in the head. The line that had just fired halted, clearing their rifles and pulling out a fresh charge, allowing the soldiers behind to step forward and bring their guns up towards the trench.
One of the militiamen to Daunt’s right slumped against the revetment, his dying body shuddering as a companion pulled him off the firing step, clearing the way for another fighter to take his place on the trench board. He wasn’t a man anymore, a living being with dreams and hopes and interests and family. He had become a dead weight clogging the workings of Daunt’s killing machine.
‘Wait for, wait for it. Range!’
A bass roar sounded the length of the trench, rifles jolting with the thud-thud-thud of their volleys. Each defender had the legs extended on the end of their gun barrel, sweeping the rifle left and right, invaders collapsing at the receiving end of their deadly arc of fire. Overhead, the whine of their foes’ falling shells droned louder and louder, a fountain of explosions shaking the slopes above Daunt. Rock fragments scythed the trench from the rear, Daunt feeling the impact across the back of his helmet and chain-mailed spine as if someone was trying to drive nails through his back. Further down the line, larger shards had decimated the defenders, militia crawling wounded over the trench’s dead. There were gaps in their firing line. Gaps Daunt had no one left in a healthy enough state to plug. Daunt turned to the rear revetment, the smoke of the artillery barrage landing obscuring his view. The next trench ring was still being carved out of the rock by Lord Trabb’s automatics. They had nowhere left to retreat to. The locals no longer had the numbers to hold the line long enough for the mining machines to finish the job.
Morris extended his telescope to peer down at the ruins of the town’s once palatial library. ‘Bugger. They’ve brought their howitzers up. They must have been counting our counter-battery fire. They’ve guessed our magazine is as good as empty. Nothing to throw back at them but spit and words. We’re in trouble.’
‘If we’re not, Mister Morris, it’ll do until the real thing comes along.’ Daunt took the telescope and peered through it. Beyond the cannons lined up behind the library’s rubble, a long column of armour advanced trundling up one of the streets, the guns spined along the length of the tanks raised as if in salute… or elevated for an attempt at storming the slopes of the Isla Furia.
Along the rubble, the Advocacy’s gunners had finished reloading their big guns and the carriages began to slam back as they expelled thunder. More accurately ranged this time, explosions flowered fore and rear of the circuit of trenches. Daunt fell back as a shockwave snarled itself around his body and hurled him off the firing step. He grasped the bare skin of his face. His gasmask had been blown off his helmet, the smell of cordite overwhelming now. As Daunt struggled up through the dust, a rockslide from the trench walls nearly toppled him onto his back again. In front of Daunt, Morris lay stretched out, his body covered in dirt… but only some of his body. Morris’s legs were visible protruding from the landslide, too far away from his torso to still be connected to the Jackelian.
Morris reached his hand out towards Daunt, his gas rifle clutched in bloody fingers, an offering of war. ‘Take it.’
‘I can’t.’ Daunt’s voice came out like a husk, a rasp of dust and blood clearing his throat.
Morris weakly pushed his rifle out again towards Daunt. ‘I bloody love this, vicar. And I’m getting out in good order. You can revel in the fury. But the end’s always terrible. When it stops. Your rage fades. Just thousands of corpses. The cries of the lost and dying.’
Daunt crawled forward, the smoke clearing in the trench. So few standing, so few bursts of fire replying to each new shelling. The ground shaking and vibrating. If the crack widened under them, would they plunge down into hell?
‘Do you have a hell?’ Daunt yelled down the trench, his cry lost on the surviving fighters. Some crouching, others dying, survivors releasing the blades folded under their rifle barrels. Preparing for their last stand. Or is this it?
‘I can feel it,’ moaned Morris, his words bringing Daunt out of his shock. ‘My soul leaking away back into the world, mingling with it all. Tell me I’m going to come back as better people, vicar.’
We’ll learn the lessons of this life. Return to the one sea of consciousness, diluting into the infinite until our essence is cupped back out again into the world. Daunt took the Jackelian’s ice-cold hand. ‘We all will.’
‘I already have!’ Out of the smoke and fire along the slope he stepped. Iron feet crunching the ground. A scarlet pulse running down his vision plate as strong and steady as a heartbeat. His chest shining and bright. Boxiron. But not Boxiron. The creature of the metal combined with one of the Court’s human-milled marvels, sealed and connected by a power far beyond that of the race of man. As the smoke drifted sideways, Daunt saw hundreds of the Court’s miners stood lined up behind the steamman. Bunker doors were springing open across the slopes, no cannons emerging — only the massed ranks of the Court of the Air’s mining force. They emerged unconcerned into the blast waves of the Advocacy strafing, stone shards rattling off their hull plates as they formed into long columns. Then the legion charged down the Isla Furia.
‘Boxiron?’
The steamman’s head slanted down, taking in his shining polished brutal new body, as if he was seeing it for the first time. ‘Yes-’ he raised his fist and behind him a legion of miners raised theirs in a mirror reflection of the steamman, ‘-I think I am upgraded. By the will of King Steam.’
Daunt gawked. A slipthinker. Boxiron was now a slipthinker, able to inhabit multiple drone bodies and make their will his. The highest caste of steamman society. Unlike the empty shells back in Tock House, so many suits of armour without their controlling presence in residence. But Boxiron didn’t have an army of inactive drones. He had an army of hulking mining mechanicals, their fists spinning as drill-bits and shovels and pickaxes. Able to carve caverns out of solid rock, or chunks out of an invading army.
‘Mechanicals,’ groaned Morris. The dying adventurer’s words came out through gritted teeth. ‘Mechanicals
