‘If it’s any consolation, Pallidea’s out there somewhere as well, and I’d like nothing more than going to find her. We’re too stretched. They can look after themselves, Reeth. Our job’s trying to stop the invaders.’
‘All right. But I’m going for her as soon as I get the chance.’
‘Fair enough. Now let’s get ourselves organised, shall we?’
Runners were dispatched to find Frakk, and a crew of carpenters was brought in to work on the trebuchet. Rapidly, the device was rigged with multiple wagon wheels.
As the work was being completed, Darrok received another glamoured message. This time, incongruously for winter, it came as a swarm of wasps that droned the tidings.
‘Somebody at HQ’s bored or desperate,’ Darrok commented.
‘What’s the news?’ Caldason said.
‘We’re holding off the landing west of here, just. But it’s taking too many defenders away from other fronts.’
‘How many other landings do we know about?’
‘Quite a few. But we’ll have to leave them to somebody else. Let’s concentrate on our patch.’ He turned in his hovering disc and looked to the barn doors. ‘Where is that sorcerer?’
On cue, Frakk arrived, escorted by a small company of fighters. He looked dishevelled and befuddled.
‘Have you been told the plan?’ Darrok asked without preamble.
‘Er…yes. Well, the basics.’
‘We’ve got to move this to the next bay,’ Caldason said, nodding at the catapult. ‘Is it possible?’
‘Well, I’ve never tried moving anything this big before, but in theory it should work.’
‘Do you have enough of your…’
‘Energy cubes. Yes.’
‘How would we control the thing, steer it?’
‘With a wheel, like…’ Frakk scanned the barn. ‘Like that.’ He went to a wagon wheel that had been left standing upright, and laid his hands on it. ‘We connect it to the axle and it steers the load this way. Left…right. See?’
‘What about starting and stopping?’
‘Ah, that and regulating the energy flow is a magical function. It needs a sorcerer to control it.’
‘Then you’re coming with us,’ Caldason decided.
Darrok didn’t join the trebuchet party. With too many calls on everyone, they decided Caldason alone would be in charge. The group he took with him numbered just ten, including Frakk.
The Claw rumbled along ponderously, with the wizard steering, his knuckles white on the wheel. Caldason accompanied him, standing with an arm looped around one of the wooden uprights. The rest of the band rode on horses and an open wagon. It was evening by now, but they burned no lights.
The ships of the invasion fleets felt no similar need. They were lit up by oil, wax and magic, and glowed like a fairy-tale city. All along the shoreline there were fires and gaudy detonations.
‘Can’t we go any faster?’ Caldason yelled.
Frakk swallowed and nodded. The trebuchet lurched forward.
They struggled to avoid potholes, and several times had to detour to evade steep inclines, but the power driving the wheels never faltered. Another half hour of bone-rattling saw them at their destination.
‘Well done, Frakk,’ Caldason told him.
The sorcerer reddened bashfully.
A crowd of defenders, deeply in need of heartening, cheered when they saw the trebuchet.
Most of the islanders were stationed on a sweep of ridges that looked down onto the bay, and commanded the only road. The bay itself was illuminated by spiked lanterns, bonfires and glamour orbs, making it almost as bright as day, which was a necessity for invaders trying to establish a bridgehead. Barges were transporting men and siege engines from ships to shore.
There were four or five land leviathans on the beach. Like moving houses, or more accurately, small fortresses, they held men, perhaps as many as fifty in the larger examples, and teams of horses. The latter were yoked to ingenious mechanical systems that produced the motive force. Each of the contraptions was iron clad, and probably spell protected. There was nothing magical about their means of propulsion, unlike the trebuchet, but their armoury included magical weapons of destructive ferocity. They moved slowly but were notoriously hard to stop.
The islander’s main strategy was to rain arrows down on the beach. While it was difficult to see what else they could do, given their meagre arms, it was really no more than a hindrance.
Caldason had several of Darrok’s men with him, members of the personal army that originally policed the Diamond Isle. Several had used the trebuchet, though not in anger. He put them in charge of operating it, and ordered the machine brought forward. Frakk didn’t have to do a thing, since scores of volunteers heaved the brute into place. Its pitching arm was wound back and secured and the generous leather cradle was spread out. From the scrubby terrain, a rock was selected, big enough that it took eight men to move it.
‘What’s the target?’ an operator wanted to know.
‘That one.’ Caldason pointed to a leviathan freshly unloaded and making its cumbersome way up the beach. ‘And be ready to reload fast.’
The operators set to adjusting the Claw’s alignment by spinning wheels and depressing levers.
‘Fire!’ Caldason yelled.
The arm went up and over so fast it was a blur. Its rock spun through the air in a great arc, plunging towards its target. People on the beach scattered as the projectile descended.
It missed.
The rock landed mere feet from the leviathan, felling a handful of warriors but doing no harm to the siege engine.
Caldason bellowed, ‘Reload!’
The operators worked frantically to modify their settings. Arrows were winging up from the beach below, along with bolts of magical energy. The islanders replied in kind, though with less intensity.
‘Fire!’
The trebuchet whipped off a fresh shot. This time, it reached its goal. It wasn’t a direct hit, but in a way, something better. The rock struck the back end of the leviathan as it was negotiating a slope. The fortuitous angle, and the force of impact, flipped the tank as though it were a toy. As it lay on its side, men scrambled free, several leading wounded horses.
The islanders were quick to capitalise on their luck. They let loose a shower of flaming, tar-tipped arrows. Dozens streaked to the leviathan’s exposed and vulnerable underside, and almost immediately the machine was belching acrid black smoke and dancing sparks.
Flocks of arrows and sizzling energy beams again scoured the ridges. Once more, the islanders returned fire as best they could, and were cheered to see several invaders engulfed by flames.
‘New target!’ Caldason ordered, pointing.
They got off a couple more throws in fairly quick succession. The first was a dream hit, landing squarely on the roof of a vehicle with a deafening crash. For all its armour, the leviathan had little resistance to such a blow and was crushed to two thirds of its bulk.
Perhaps over-confidence accounted for what happened next. The second rock missed its objective by a considerable margin, though it did bounce into a wagon, wrecking it.
Looking for a fresh target, Caldason glanced out to sea. A barge was coming in, carrying two leviathans and a number of soldiers. He decided on a change of tactics.
‘Could you hit that?’ he asked the gang master.
‘It’s on the edge of our range. But we might make it if we use smaller rocks, and maybe we’d need to hit it more than once.’
Caldason told them to try.
In the event, the first shot scored well. By good fortune it came down on one of the few clear spaces on the barge’s deck. A shattering of timber was followed by an erupting spume of water. By the time the trebuchet had been reloaded, the barge was going down.
The second volley was another hit. It didn’t pierce the craft, as its predecessor had, but it did enough damage
