They stood at the edge of the Larnaig Field, a gently sloping bank leading down to the lakeshore about half a league distant. Soldiers of the Flower Guard, the Knife Guard, and the City Guard had gathered on several of the dirt embankments before the walls of Coreollis. To the west Rys’s ballistae squatted on the rolling landscape. The city stables lay to the east, from where Rachel could hear the rhythmic metal clanks of a farrier working at his anvil.
King Menoa’s armies waited on blooded ground by the water’s edge: a mass of queerly shaped figures and machines. There were ten thousand or more, and very few of them resembled men. Half a league away, a force ten times this size was moving north along
But the giant in the lake took Rachel’s breath away.
“The arconite?”
Trench nodded.
Ramnir remained silent.
The skeletal figure towered over the ship floating close to its shins, which listed badly, black smoke pouring from its toppled funnels. A few of Menoa’s troops had launched boats to rendezvous with the automaton and the ship. The sleek black craft plowed through the still waters of the lake without oars or sails, leaving dark trails behind them.
Rachel hissed. “How do we kill it?”
“With swords and axes,” Ramnir said.
Trench shook his head. “The first arconite could not be killed. It still lies trapped in sapperbane chains below the drowned city of Skirl. More than one hundred thousand warriors died trying to subdue the beast. I think this one…” He inclined his head towards the giant. “…is bigger.”
“Look!” Ramnir said. “Something is happening.”
The arconite stooped and picked up the entire ship in one hand. Then it strode towards the shores of Lake Larnaig, as if to meet the Mesmerist craft.
It moved slowly, its bony legs propelling high waves before it. The afternoon sun glimmered on the lake behind it, and the vast expanse of water shone like silver. In the far distance rose the cliffs and misty mountains of the Moine Massif, appearing as thin as vapors.
Three of the five Mesmerist boats had drawn near to the approaching giant, but now hesitated, keeping a short distance back.
“Something is wrong,” Trench said.
Rachel sensed it, too. Figures were moving hurriedly aboard the Mesmerist craft. She could imagine frantic orders given. The boats began to retreat.
A warning horn sounded somewhere behind Rachel. Evidently the guards on the city walls had spotted the Mesmerists’ unusual behavior in the lake. She turned to see Rys’s soldiers racing across the top of the city battlements, shouting down orders to their comrades within.
“It has begun,” Trench said.
Harper stood on the hurricane deck, battered by the wind and three hundred feet above the surface of the lake, as Dill smashed his way through a flotilla of Mesmerist boats. The giant automaton did not require a weapon. His passage through the waters swamped the craft on either side. He stomped on those immediately ahead of him, reducing their living hulls to bleeding shards. Icarates fell into the lake, their weird armour pulsing with vivid blue flashes as they sank from sight.
But some of the craft fought back. Directed by Icarate priests, the boats began to change shape. Their gunwales flowed into new forms: metal contraptions with barbed spinning discs, multijoined insectlike arms with claws, clusters of pipes and arm-thick whips designed to expel poisons. Clanks and whispers and whoomphs of air heralded these assaults. Fiery blue and red arcs of spitting fluid soared high above the lake and exploded against Dill’s chest. The missiles screamed on contact, for these had been souls ingrained into the fabric of the boats.
Dill barely appeared to notice the assaults. He shrugged them off and kicked the boats aside, leaving a bloody wake behind him.
Now Menoa’s encamped force was massing on the lakeshore. Driven by their Icarate priests and witchspheres, the demons swarmed over the bloody ground. A group of heavy armoured boar-like beasts made up the vanguard. They gouged their tusks into the ground and bellowed, and threw up clods of wet red earth. Their segmented-plate hides bristled with spines and steamed in the sunshine like hot lead.
Dill reached the shore and crushed the first of them underfoot. Engines thundering in his chest, he kicked at a pack of the hapless beasts. Their broken corpses flew far across the Larnaig Field.
The shadow of the steamer now fell across ranks of seemingly more human figures-the brawlers, murderers, and gladiators Menoa had left mostly unchanged but for sharpened metal limbs or patches of steel and iron skin. These attacked with hatchets, spears, knives, and long curved blades. But Dill’s ankles did not linger to receive their blows, and he left the field unscathed.
War machines continued to spit fire at the arconite, and at the steamship he carried over the heads of Menoa’s forces. But Dill cleared the long thin battlefield in less than a dozen strides and set out across the upwardly sloping ground to meet Rys’s waiting forces at Coreollis. Hunting horns sounded among the horde, but they did not pursue the giant.
Hasp watched grimly. “They’ll wait for all the reinforcements to arrive before marching forth,” he said to Harper. “They must first butcher slaves to bloody the battlefield in preparation for the assault, and they must steep themselves in the living earth. But the attack will come soon.”
Menoa’s main force was already pouring into the encampment on the lakeshore. Harper had never seen such vast numbers arrayed against mortal men before. The ranks of adapted warriors and beasts stretched in a long dark curve around the eastern shore of the lake. Countless twisted metal weapons glinted in the late-morning sun. A vast pall of red vapor enshrouded them-the breath from their dead lungs, she realized. She heard their bones and armour clicking, and felt the ground tremble as boots and hooves and wheels churned the
“So many,” she said. “Can Dill possibly defeat them all?”
“Easily,” Hasp said.
“Then why would Menoa attack?”
“Because to flee now would be madness. The arconite would simply crush them on the
Dill halted outside the city gates and set the steamship down upon the green grass. The
The vision of this giant had stunned the Northmen on the battlements to silence. But then, from within the city came a soft, thick fog; pushing through the gates and over the thick granite walls.
Jack Caulker felt that his moment was near. As an outsider, he’d found no solace among these cruel northern men, who jeered and spat at him. And despite his demands, Rys and the other gods had not seen fit to grant him an audience. Indeed, he’d spent most of the journey here cooped up like an animal belowdecks along with the Heshette hags and their livestock.
The nights had been tortuous, for whenever the cutthroat slept, his nightmare returned. Night after night he would become that same old woman in her flimsy gown, standing on the battlements of Rockwall Fortress. And night after night he would plummet to his death in the valley below, pushed by John Anchor. Caulker slept in fits and bouts, always waking to the sound of his own screaming. His eyes were constantly red and sore. He itched and twitched and felt insects crawling over his skin.
But he kept close to Anchor’s side. The Adamantine Man remained jovial, laughing loudly at the news of the arconite’s defection from Hell’s armies. Caulker had been watching him carefully, keeping one eye always on the pouch of soulpearls tied to the giant’s belt. Anchor consumed one soul each day at noon when the sun had risen to its zenith. After examining the glass beads to find the strongest and most pure, he would swallow the imprisoned ghost and then slap his huge fists together and bull at the mighty rope to test his strength. Caulker had noticed that Anchor’s great strength ebbed and flowed around these repasts. He was weakest just before he feasted.
The leather pouch of soulpearls never left the big man’s side, and yet he made no effort to hide this treasure
