Omega Point (25 page)

  "I do beg your pardon," said Tarquin smoothly, his amber eyes rolling open. "It's not quite the stuff of saga. He had a lot of help."

  "Ah," said the hare fearfully, "I see."

  "Now leave us alone," said the lion, "I don't like to be reminded of it and your chatter does grate on the nerves. I ate a few poets in my time. They didn't agree with me."

  The hare pounded the truck with his good foot. Quivering, he turned to the others. "How about a rousing song?" he said nervously. He started to sing, but it fell flat. No one joined in. All of them looked at Richards warily.

  "Nice," he muttered, turning to look out of the truck.

  "He was extremely annoying," said Tarquin, loud enough so all could hear it. "And I do so hate being annoyed. Almost as much as I hate poets."

  Richards pulled his helmet onto his head. "You're a great help."

  The train proceeded onto a viaduct leading down from the city. A hundred metres of clear air were between Richards and the ground where the bridge piers rooted themselves in the minedout plateau. The track ran close to the valley that divided Pylon City's domains from the Magic Wood. Dense brush cloaked the chasm to the bottom. The river looked like a ribbon of steel, hammered into perfect loops and laid into a model world.

  "Bloody hell, that's a long way down." Richards was feeling a sensation he thought might be vertigo. He didn't like it much.

  "Relax," purred Tarquin. "We'll be fine, provided there isn't another earthquake."

  "Oh, thank you," said Richards. "Thank you ever so much. That makes me feel so much better." The viaduct went down in a long curve, bringing them closer to the valley edge until it straightened out as the track hit the ground. The railway ran on the very edge of the canyon, but if Richards looked to the front of the train or off to the west up to the moors, he could pretend it wasn't there.

  The men and animals of the train made themselves comfortable, sitting on the sides of their trucks or on their knapsacks. Conversations started up.

  By the time they had left Pylon City it had been past midday, and the landscape they travelled through was one of afternoon. Bright light diffused through clouds like wire wool, a glare that picked out every pockmark on the plateau. Slagheaps and open pits ringed with cranes rushed by. Spurs to the railway ran to quarries cut into the moor, an industrial moonscape, where only tufts of colourless grass, lank and sparse as hag's hair, thrived.

  "It is horrible, is it not?" said the hare.

  "It is," agreed Richards, tapping his fingers on the truck. The hare glanced concernedly at the lion.

  "Don't worry about him. He's mostly all mouth now. The most biting thing about him is his wit, and that's not very sharp."

  Tarquin bared his teeth.

  "It appears we are heading south, off the plateau," said the hare, "to bring Lord Penumbra to battle where the land slopes into the Broken Lands, a fine defensible position. It will prevent any advance by Penumbra up The Rift, and ensure that Jotenlend, the source of much of Pylon City's food, is protected."

  "Sounds good."

  "Ah, you know a little military theory?" asked the hare eagerly.

  "No, not really," admitted Richards. There was so much he did not know while the Grid was denied to him. "My partner does all that."

  "Well," said the hare, "this is of course only my supposition, but it is the most sensible course of action. I have studied many of the great generals of Pylon City and the long war poems," it said shyly.

  "Odd hobby for a hare," said Richards.

  "Many of my brothers and sisters revel in the wild chase and the feel of the wind in their whiskers, but this pleasure is denied me. So I developed interests outside of the ordinary." It paused. "Like poetry!" It looked at Richards expectantly with that "ask me to read you one of my poems" type expression that poets get. Richards stared blankly back at him. The hare became bashful and turned away.

  The ruined world changed piece by piece to a landscape of scrubby fields and the clouds cleared. The train passed close by rough dwellings, hugely tall with doors three times bigger than a man, their walls made of enormous boulders. Of the Jotens, there was no sign.

  The sun set. The sky above the train remained a pure lightblue for a time, and the men gambled at knucklebones until it was dark.

  Richards tried as best he could to get comfortable. He watched the alien sky. Away from the glare of Pylon City's sodium lamps, the stars twinkled brightly, competing with the sparks the train pumped into the night with its smoke.

  "A river of fire," said Tarquin sleepily. "It is a river of fire, and it is consuming the world."

  "That old hare's not the only poet on board, eh?" said Richards.

  "Mmf," said Tarquin.

  In the morning they woke to war.

 

"Troopers!" A shout roused Richards from where he sat, bored, staring out over the plains. "Prepare to disembark!"

  "Now there's a man who enjoys his job," said Tarquin.

  "Jesus, he's worse than Otto," Richards said. His limbs cracked with unpleasant organic noises as he stood. He'd barely moved since he'd woken, and now felt as brittle as a straw doll. There was more to a human's constant, twitchy motion than staying upright, he was learning, like not letting their irritating meat outsides seize up.

  The soldiers hauled themselves from the trucks to join a stream of troops marching beside the tracks.

  "Right, my sleeping beauties," said the sergeant. "We are going to go for a walk. Word has come down to me that the line has been blown ahead by Penumbra's saboteurs. All you lot should think on how nice and healthy you'll be once you've walked. Who knows, there might even be time for a spot of breakfast before the war starts."

  "Really, sarge?" said an eager trooper.

  "No!" roared the sergeant. "Now get a bleedin' move on, or I'll shoot you myself and save Penumbra and his monsters the bother."

  Richards fell into step with something like a rat. It gave him a filthy look.

  "Charming," said Richards.

  The day was the kind autumn shares with summer: a cold morning with the promise of a hot afternoon. The sky was a uniform grey, its light joyless. Ahead it turned to an angry black, a thick band of deeper cloud foreshortening the horizon. Bursts of lightning lit it from within, thunder answered by tremors from below.

  "Look!" said the rat. "A storm!"

  "That's not a storm," said the hare with some amount of awe. "That is the death of the world. The Great Terror. I must record it in my poem."

  "Quiet in the ranks there! You can all have a natter after you've had a battle," bawled the sergeant. "Until then, keep your cakeholes shut."

  They walked five abreast alongside the railway embankment on a plain of grass that was almost completely flat. No farms, nor mines, only one small building, after the railway line curved west, red-brick, about a mile from the route of their march.

  "Last Station," said the hare. "From there the railway heads out to cross The Rift."

  A familiar odour percolated into the air. Burnt ground. The army took in the wasted land before them with a chorus of mutters and shouts.

  "Will this be the fortune of the Magic Wood?"

  "And the city?"

  There was an abrupt change in scenery, the plateau ending in a thick scar where two world fragments clumsily joined. Beyond it lay a plain criss-crossed with ravines and gullies, giving the landscape the look of an angular brain.

  It was scorched black. Charcoalled trees clawed at the sky, the gullies steamed, the grass was burnt down to the roots.

  "The broken lands, twice broken!" said the hare.

  The army marched onto the brow of the hill and fanned out, directed in columns to their positions. The centre of their battleline was a low blister in the slope. Commander Hedgehog and his best warriors had taken up station there. A mix of large forest animals armoured head to toe surrounded him and his staff. Behind this position were the army's artillery pieces, globular balls of crystal sporting long brass barrels. They looked spectacularly dangerous.

  "See!" whispered the hare from behind Richards. "Hedgehog has the men of the city at the heart of the army. He is guarded by the Big Animal Division and the City Guard. They have lightning lances, terrible weapons. I should expect we will be stationed out on one of the flanks, behind a skirmish line of lancers. When the enemy breaks through them, range will no longer matter, and we will be able to put our swords and spears to deadly use at close quarters!"

  The hare was mostly right. The Pylon Guard were few in number, so Richards' regiment was stationed behind a line of arbalesteers. These crossbowmen were not of Pylon City and wore colourful clothes at odds with the Pylonites' sober garb. Their forms were not so well rendered, their language a musical tongue he did not recognise. Protecting their right flank was a detachment of foundrymen. Further out roamed groups of skirmishers backed up by squadrons of light thog cavalry.

  "They'll stop anything getting round the back," the hare explained enthusiastically. "Or, when we break the enemy's line, force it apart like a wedge."

  "He's enjoying this far too much," muttered Richards to Tarquin.

  From behind came a rhythmic clatter: armoured weasels, well over a thousand of them, marching to fill the gap in the allied lines to Richards' left. They wore scale and plate, articulated to accommodate their sinuous bodies. Each carried a pike and a steel buckler with a spiked boss. Blood-red pennants fluttered from helmets and shields and streamed from the ends of their pikes.

  "Aren't they glorious?" whispered the hare in awe.

  Richards raised an eyebrow. "Don't weasels eat hares?"

  "They do indeed," said the hare, nodding, not rising to the bait. "And I know I should not admire them, for a pack of them did devour a sister of mine. But still, all that is behind us now, now we are part of the League of Humans and Small but Brave Animals!"

  "Snappy," said Richards.

  "How could we fail to lose with such ferocious beings at our sides? A thousand armoured weasels, each a born killer. Glorious!"

  "Yeah," said Richards slowly, remembering their behaviour in the bar. "And each a born weasel."

  Richards had time to re-experience the boredom part of the boredom and terror warfare combination. They stood in their position for several hours, and once again he became uncomfortable. He was debating taking a piss right there when the hare spoke again.

  "Oh my!" said the hare. "Here they come!"

  The sky went dark. A hush came over the army of men and beasts. The enemy approached. Shadow preceded it, and darkness followed.

  The horde of creatures came from the south, appearing over a ridge three miles away, drawing toward them with unnatural speed.

  "Oh my," said the hare with a tinge of fear. "There are rather a lot of them."

  In the main the army was composed of vile-looking humanoids. Like the alliance, monsters brought from all manner of places on the Grid.

  "Every hero needs his mob," said Richards grimly, doing a quick calculation on the balance between heroic human players and system-controlled monsters in your average game. The odds he came up with were unfavourable. Not for the first time he wondered how the hell he'd ended up in this mess, and decided to blame Hughie.

  Steam curled from haemites. Immense war-beasts studded the horde like rocks on a polluted beach. Steam-powered towers, bristling with cannon, crawled across the broken lands on caterpillar tracks. Around these marched monstrous trollmen, swishing tree-trunk clubs as they walked.

  "Look!" said the hare, his lips wobbling with fear. "Morblins! There… there must be over five thousand of them! And daibeasts. And, by lord Frith, that is a low-dweller. A low-dweller!" An unpleasant chant filled the air, a droning that made Richards' skin crawl. An oily reek descended across the battlefield, the exhaust of engines, steam, the stink of unwashed bodies.

  Nearby, one of the soldiers began to cry.

  "Shut it, you," said the sergeant. There was a tremor in his voice.

  The front rank of what Richards took to be morblins, small, pot-bellied, grey-skinned creatures, had a great many armoured hounds amidst it. The largest morblins held onto the leashes of these dogs, who half-dragged them towards the allied lines.

  The enemy stopped, facing off against the league.

  Silence fell. Thunder rumbled. Pennants cracked in the wind.

  Then a howl as the dogs were set loose. They rushed across the plains, baying.

  "Steady, Richards, steady," Richards told himself. The rush of fear his human facsimile provided him was powerful.

  "Keep your spear up, Richards, don't lose your head. Should anything get through I'll shift to stone," said Tarquin urgently. "Just remember you won't be quite so nimble when I do. Keep that in mind, dear boy, and it'll all be tickety-boo. You'll see."

  "I don't see why we can't just fuck off," Richards said.

  The commander of the arbalesteers shouted, and the first rank readied themselves. Two hundred heavy crossbows clicked into place on their tripods. They waited, their arms steady, their gaze unwavering. The commander held his arm. The hounds came on.

  "Company!" called Richards' sergeant. "Present pikes!" Richards cursed his quaking limbs as he fumbled his spear into place.

  "This is where it all begins my friend," said the hare behind Richards. "Wish me luck."

  The arbalesteer captain dropped his arm, and the world dissolved into violence.

  Two hundred barbed quarrels sped unerringly. The yelps of two hundred dogs filled the air.

  A shout went up from the morblins, and they broke into a run towards the allied lines, the trollmen beside them, the ground thundering as they came. The air crackled with electricity as the lancers of Pylon City discharged their weaponry into the front of the horde. Hundreds fell, burnt and writhing, but there were thousands behind. The lancemen parted ranks, and with a mighty squeak a horde of vole mercenaries, the vanguard of the League of Brave but Small Animals, hurled themselves through the gap towards the approaching morblins. There was a crash as the lines connected.