Empire in Black and Gold

the wash of fire singeing his eyebrows and fragments of metal gashing his armour and his scalp. A moment later he saw the cupola rock back with the impact. Then four men were dashing past him. One, the Beetle with the blunderbow, was cut down by the remaining fore crossbow, almost falling onto Stenwold’s legs. Rakka the Scorpion was already past, long-hafted axe raised high, and Balkus and Sperra were following close behind. Stenwold saw Sperra leap into the air and launch a bolt at the bowman behind the ballista, but it merely rebounded from the weapon’s armoured housing. Then the ballista was sweeping around, trying to pick her out of the air, its tireless mechanisms throwing bolt after bolt at her. In the confusion, Rakka gained the side of the automotive.

The huge man had only an axe and, even as he raised it, Stenwold could not understand what he meant to do. Then the Scorpion brought it down where the leg closest to him met the machine’s housing.

It seemed a futile gesture but Rakka was stronger than Stenwold realized, a strength augmented by surging tides of Scorpion Art. The axehead bit deep into the leg’s casing, buckling the pistons and gears operating within. When the automotive took its next step, that same foreleg made only half the gain, slewing the entire machine round.

A sting blast scorched across Rakka’s bare back, and the Scorpion howled in pain. Balkus returned the shot, the chamber of his nailbow flashing again and again. Rakka now had the axe up once more, every ounce of his strength focused on that single point of the machine. With a wordless battle cry he brought it down once, and then twice, even as a second bolt of energy impacted between his shoulder blades. The leg had canted to one side with the first stroke, its joints abruptly frozen. The second blow must have cut almost through it because, when the automotive took its next step, the damaged leg snapped off entirely and the machine tipped forwards, back leg waving in the air, its nose grinding into the dirt.

‘Clear it!’ Stenwold shouted, rushing ahead. Balkus was meanwhile helping Rakka away, whereupon Stenwold lit his last grenade and hurled it at the ballista’s cupola.

It bounced, but he had overshot, and so it struck the sloping hull beyond the weapon and rolled back. Then it thundered to pieces and in its wake the ballista became a shredded splay of metal around an open hatch.

Stenwold looked for Balkus and saw the Ant lowering Rakka’s body to the ground before snatching his nailbow up again. Even before Stenwold could call it, he was rushing forward, stepping up onto the tilted hull. He levelled his nailbow down the hatch and emptied it at the crew as they tried to climb out.

There were more Wasps out there, at least another two squads that had been following up behind the automotive. Stenwold felt old, weary to his bones, his heart like a hammer pounding in his chest and his lungs raw. He was past all this. He should be safe in some distant study with his papers, like all good spymasters. He squared himself up, advanced to the cover of the wrecked automotive, waiting for them.

But they were not coming closer: instead they were fighting. He could not tell who they were fighting save that it was armoured men, not Achaeos’s raiders. Then he could tell, and could not quite believe. They were Helleren militia, men with pikes and crossbows and chain mail. They were not as mobile or as savage as the Wasps, but there were more of them, and they were giving a good account of themselves.

His first thought was that it was Greenwise who had sent them, but how would he have known? The obvious answer then came, that there had been enough commotion in this place to attract someone’s attention, and when the guardsmen had arrived they had taken the closest combatants rushing towards the embattled engine as their enemies.

Thalric came in high, fast. He saw the Mantis-kinden duellist spin, dance, another two men falling back, and dying as they did so. There was a chill in the Wasp’s heart. He was better travelled than most of his race, so he had heard tell of Mantis Weaponsmasters, the last scions of a truly ancient cult. He could not really believe it but here was the very thing.

He would have no second chance now. He watched the swift passes of the Mantis’s claw, the step of his feet, the rhythm of his fight. Thalric was no novice himself: his Art-sting was second nature to him, stronger than it was in his fellows, and he himself more practised with it.

As Tisamon lashed out at another of his soldiers, Thalric chose his moment and loosed, the golden energy of his bolt streaking ahead of him like a falling star.

Impossibly, the Mantis was already turning away from the bolt, twisting away from it even as he fought. Thalric saw it strike, though, lashing down the Mantis’s side as the man finished off the last of his opponents, throwing him against the Pride’s hull and bouncing him backwards to where he collapsed.

Victory soared in Thalric’s heart and he stooped on the Pride, determined to finish this. He heard a voice, and it surely must have been Cheerwell Maker’s voice, cry out, ‘Tisamon!’

Thalric landed ahead of his men, sword in his right hand and his left spread open to unleash his Art-fire. The Mantis was hunched about the wound, struggling to rise. One blow and it would be a simple matter to break into the engine room and dispatch whoever was inside, dispatch Cheerwell, if it was her.

The idea hurt him, but it was for the Empire. It was war.

He looked up, and Tynisa descended on him from atop the engine. She led with her sword, and she shrieked something as mad as the rage-racked look on her face.

His blade was coming up, and he was falling back, but too late, too late.

The point of the rapier lanced for his chest. It struck the banded imperial armour and pierced it with the slightest bending of the blade, but the plates slowed it enough that when it met the copperweave beneath it merely scraped down the links, severing them one after another, drawing a line of agony down his chest that was nevertheless only skin deep, until it ripped free of his ruined armour and stabbed him through his thigh.

He dropped to one knee with a cry of pain and lunged forward with his own blade. It caught her in the belly but it was a weak blow, dulled by shock and hurt, and it skidded across her arming jacket before it drew blood, slicing along her waist and then bloodying her arm on the backstroke. She reeled backwards and he saw her fingers open, and yet the rapier hung in her hand still, refusing to be dropped.

He stood, fell to his knee almost immediately, but already loosing his sting at her. It melted a fist-sized dent in the metal of the Pride as she lurched out of the way.

‘You killed him!’ she screamed at Thalric, and he fell back and rolled as she lunged at him, the rapier’s tip drawing a line of blood across his scalp. He came up swinging, forcing her back, left hand pulled back for another shot.

Tisamon lurched to his feet. They were both deadly still in that moment as he levered himself halfway up, and then forced himself to rise the rest of the way. One arm was wrapped about his burned side, but his claw hung ready for battle, steeped in the blood of two dozen Wasps and not slaked yet.

His bared teeth might have been a grimace of pain or a smile of anticipation.

Faced with that sight, wounded and battered and with this monster on its feet again and standing like an executioner, Thalric felt his nerve falter. He had feared before, but it had been a rational fear. Now he kicked backwards, wings flickering in and out of his back, putting a distance between himself and this mad killer and his even worse daughter. Then his men were there, rushing into the fray, and he watched Tisamon and Tynisa take them on. Both injured, both more ragged in movement than before, and yet they held their ground. Thalric gathered himself, looking round for the automotive which surely must be there by now.

It was burning, he now saw. Three legs were rigid and one gone entirely, flames licked from within its cabin, gusted from its eyeslit. Beyond it he could see a slow trail of fire in the sky where the spotter blimp was drifting downwards in ruin.

Che pulled another two levers and turned one of the crank wheels, feeling the power within the engine start to vibrate the footplates beneath her. She was almost there, she knew. The glass-fronted chamber was almost incandescent, with Scuto peering into it through two layers of cloth. She could feel the whole of the Pride shaking, and she knew its inventors had never intended such intense stresses on it.

‘Almost,’ she said, and gave the wheel another three turns, bringing the supercharged elements within the engine’s long body closer and closer. She could only imagine the lightning crackling one to another, faster and faster until it was lightning no longer, but pure motive power.

‘Che-’ Scuto began nervously.

‘Just a little more,’ she told him.

‘Che!’ he said. ‘No more! We have to go!’

‘Why?’ she asked, and looked up from the controls.