The Seal of the Worm (37 page)

‘What . . .?’ he got out, and a man next to him went down, shrieking. A pincer as large as Oski’s whole body had clamped the luckless soldier’s leg, the bone already shattered in its iron grip. As Oski watched, a crab the size of a small automotive began hauling itself up on to the pier, the wood creaking and protesting under its weight.

In a heartbeat he was in the air, seeing stingshot – even snapbow bolts – scatter off the thing’s carapace. And, the next thing he knew, the entire wharf front was heaving, the creatures climbing sideways from the water everywhere, snapping mindlessly at anyone luckless enough to be near. Even as he tried to phrase an appropriate military response, some part of Oski’s mind was shouting,
What the pits are they doing?
As though there was some naturalist’s explanation, some freak migration that could rationalize what he was seeing.

‘Back, back from the water! Form a shooting line where you can do some good, you morons!’ The order was unnecessary. The entire waterline had come alive, bristling with legs and pincers and stalked eyes as a wave of bafflingly enraged sealife boiled from the surf with a weirdly unhurried inevitability. Some of the creatures were picked apart by bolts from those soldiers already safe behind the barricades, and Oski saw a pair of them just explode into wet shards as one of the leadshotter crews woke up and began doing their job.
Vrakir! Did he bring this on? Is this what he saw? How could he . . .?

The Sentinel at the waterfront tilted itself, trying to lower its leadshotter enough to do any good, whilst its rotary piercers began chewing up the emerging crustaceans, the firepowder-charged missiles rapidly disassembling the animals into their component pieces. Then the vehicle was tilting further, at an unhealthy angle, and Oski let his wings speed him over, thinking perhaps that a particularly large beast had somehow got underneath the automotive’s legs.

Even as he closed in, he saw the entire vehicle jerk forwards by a man’s length, an impossible sight as though there was some great magnet beneath it that had just yanked it across the stone of the wharves, halfway onto one of the piers. The Sentinel’s legs were scrabbling, digging in for purchase, and yet it was shuddering closer to the sea even as Oski watched.

He spotted them then, the tentacles that had snared it, four or five thick rubbery cables snaking across the automotive’s armoured shell. A ripple of muscular contraction shivered through them, and the Sentinel lurched again, its front half hanging over the water, legs waving frantically, uselessly.

Before Oski’s eyes, it wavered, caught on the fulcrum of its body, and then whatever unthinkable monster had hold of it just pulled again, as effortlessly irresistible as an earthquake, and the vehicle was gone into the sea.

He swung back towards the Imperial lines, where concerted snapbow volleys were flaying away the slow advance of the sea creatures. Order was being restored, and he was only hoping that the owner of the tentacles wasn’t up to the brief walk that separated his new position from the water.

Even as he touched down, another cry went out, and he turned to see something new emerging from the sea.

It was a man – or the shape of it was something like a man – wearing a colossal suit of armour, and almost as broad as he was tall. Before Oski’s eyes, the apparition hooked its way out of the ocean, water streaming from its joints. The sword it bore was the most mundane thing about it, and even that was the length of a man, curved forwards to a savage point. Seeing the enormous claws of its gauntlets, Oski wondered that it needed the blade at all.

By then there were a dozen of them clambering to their feet along the waterfront, and behind them the water was seething with more: great plated shoulders breaking the surf, claws driving gashes into the pylons of the piers, as they lumbered and lurched onto dry land.

He did not even have to give the order; the snapbows were already prioritizing these new targets. Bolts were sleeting down on the Sea-kinden even as they advanced, their forward steps ponderously slow. Oski watched, frozen at the barricade, seeing the bolts dance off that armour like raindrops. A couple fell, perhaps struck in the joints or through those narrow eyeslits, but the rest just forged on as though it was only inclement weather: still slow but closing all the time.

‘Where’s my pissing artillery?’ the Fly fairly shrieked, and even as he did so, he saw a ballista spear ram into the shoulderplate of one of the leaders, knocking it off its stride for a moment before it continued its inexorable progress.

The leaders had bigger, better armour than the rest, he saw. Those behind seemed to have something that looked like chitin, for all it was warding off snapbow bolts better than steel would, but that first wave wore more massive suits that looked pale and encrusted, almost like . . .

Stone. Stone armour!

A leadshotter boomed from behind him, and he saw the ball plough into the rear ranks, smashing three of the sea warriors down before bouncing into the water. Another ball ploughed into one of the leaders, and Oski saw the man’s breastplate appear to disintegrate in a great cloud of shards and stone dust. He whooped for progress and the power of good engineering, but the sound died in his throat. The target had been knocked flat, but even now it was struggling to its feet, its armour mazed with cracks and hanging with loose fragments, and yet holding together; and somehow the thing inside it was still alive.

‘Has someone gone for the general?’ he demanded, watching that advance grow closer and closer.
I’m an engineer! I shouldn’t have to think of these things!

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Prepare to fall back to the building line.’ The artillery was really opening up now, two or three engines apiece concentrating on the same target. He saw those gargantuan armoured forms begin to falter, individuals being cracked and broken, smashed to the ground and not getting up, and yet the wave itself did not slow. All the engines he had lined up, and it was not enough. Who could ever have believed—!

‘Sir!’ A soldier grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back as if he was a child, even as the first monstrous figure reached the barricade. The clawed gauntlets seized on the wooden barrier, all those planks and pieces of furniture that Oski’s men had taken hours to nail together, and tore it asunder with one convulsive motion.

At least we’ve got them outranged
, he thought, scooting backwards across the sky towards the rooftop emplacements. But, even as he watched, he saw one of the stone-clad monsters raise a hand towards the retreating Wasps, and heard a series of explosive clacks – distinct over all the other sounds of battle. Bolts, the length of Oski’s arm, were being spat out from some piece of clockwork mounted
within
the thing’s armour. That was when everything changed for him. That was when he suddenly recast the scene before him: not just a vision from some impossible nightmare, but an invasion, an amphibious assault such as the Empire had never even conceived of.

Oski’s military mindset returned then, so that he shook off the shock and began darting from crew to crew, ordering the aiming of their engines whilst shouting to the rank and file to form shooting lines, to get their swords ready, above all to
hold
. They had to give General Tynan time.

Tynan was already half clad in his armour, his slaves buckling on each piece even as he took in the reports. The phrases he heard were fragmentary, unbelievable: an invasion from the sea – not in boats but the sea itself – monsters, men, scuttling beasts, the docks lost already. He had given orders to mobilize every soldier he had in the city, but he was keenly aware that there were several thousand Ant-kinden within striking distance of the walls, and surely
this
was what they had been waiting for.

Further reports were still coming in, but he could not just sit and wait for a complete picture, because every new word that reached him would be critically out of date.

‘Are the Ants moving?’ he demanded. No word had come back, though some Farsphex scouts were already in the air to go and look. Tynan spat in dismay, still trying to assimilate what was going on, desperate to believe that what he was hearing was an exaggeration, and yet each successive report matched and exceeded the last: casualties, lost ground, destroyed engines.

‘Where the pits is Vrakir?’ he demanded.

‘Here, sir.’ And there he was, the Red Watch man, the Empress’s voice. To his credit, there was no gloating, no triumph. He looked just like Tynan felt – a man hauled from his bed in the middle of the night and still trying to make sense of a hostile new world.

‘Get to the docks and take charge, Major. Leave the engines to Oski, but the soldiers are yours. Your “death by water” has just turned up.’

‘Yes, sir,’ and the man was off, like a model soldier.

‘General, the Vekken are marching. They’ve been reinforced, sir.’ This came from a Fly-kinden landing practically on Tynan’s shoulder.

‘Reinforced with what?’

‘We’re not sure, but it looks like Spider-kinden, sir,’ the Fly told him, falling over his words in his hurry to get them out. ‘And new automotives as well, sir, and some sort of artillery.’

‘How did it arrive? How did we miss the ships that brought it in?’ Tynan demanded.

‘Sir, there were no ships. We’ve been on watch for the Tseni, or even a Spider fleet. There’s been nothing!’

‘Plainly there has!’ Tynan snapped, feeling the fabric of his control fraying, a bad moment for his temper to start getting away from him. He calmed himself instantly, taking a moment’s breath to remind himself who he was. ‘The Sarnesh will be on the move as well. Lieutenant Gath, you have the north wall, and make every shot count. Captain Haldric, you have the west against the Vekken and whoever they’ve got with them. Hold them off. I refuse to believe they’ve suddenly inherited sufficient engines to bring the walls down, and neither Ants nor Spiders are noted for flying over things. Get some heavies on the wall tops to repel climbers, and put as many bolts into them as you can.’

The two designated officers saluted and were off to their tasks. The mood around Tynan was bizarre: men were confused, perhaps frightened, and yet they were a field army that had been without a fight for too long. Better this than beating and imprisoning Beetle civilians.

Which leads me to another point.
‘What about the locals?’

‘Nothing yet, sir,’ a sergeant reported. ‘Maybe it’s because of what the slavers have been doing, but all quiet on the streets so far.’

‘Sir.’ One of the messengers from the docks held up a hand, and at Tynan’s nod went on: ‘I saw some of the locals take a look at what’s coming out of the sea. They were shuttering up and barring their doors, sir.’

Stab me, what if this
isn’t
a Collegiate reconquest at all?
He thought of those emptied villages, the mysterious attack within Collegium itself, that irresistible suggestion of another, unknown enemy.

‘I need a messenger to fly north to Colonel Brakker and the relief force, and also a Farsphex to get word to Capitas. They need to know.’ Tynan felt distinctly unsteady now, as though the ground was shaking with the forces of history moving all around him.

The fight for the docks had been fierce, in the end. The Sea-kinden troops had carried the battle all the way to the Port Authority buildings in their first rush, tearing up barricades, casting down engines and killing every Wasp who was fool enough to stand still for too long. After that, the Imperials had recovered from their surprise and begun to fight back. They had a lot of light artillery mounted on roofs offering a good view of the wharves, although how they had known that an attack was coming in, nobody could say. The Sea-kinden had no fliers, and only relatively modest ranged capability. The big shock troops, the Greatclaw Onychoi, were not climbers, and many of them could not even squeeze up the buildings’ internal stairs.

They kept marching. The Imperial lines that had been drawn up to halt them were simply not physically capable of it. The Greatclaw warriors in their formidable armour shrugged off snapbow shot and ignored the Wasps’ stings and swords alike. Spears splintered from the plates of their carapaces as they struck about them with their curved swords of weighted bronze, or with the claws of their armour and their Art. Each rooftop emplacement became like an island as the tide came in.

Behind the Greatclaws came the others, a hurrying mass of soldiers from the sea, eyes wide at their own daring, braving the storm of snapbow shot; rushing forwards because to stand still would be to die. They were the Kerebroi and their allies, the people of Hermatyre, and for most of their lives they had believed that to set foot on the land was to die.

For many of them, that would be true, but they were paying a debt; their Edmir had asked it of them, and it was a new world.

Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train, didn’t care about any of that, for all that it was his people in the vanguard of the invasion. He was here with his Greatclaw warriors because there had been a plan once, to do just this, and he had never quite forgotten it. Oh, he had been shown how foolish an idea conquering the land was, but
this
. . . he had always wanted to know how it would have gone, and now he had been given the chance to find out.

The irony in how that chance had come about was not lost on him, but he didn’t let it slow him down.

The Wasps defended each building fiercely on all sides, shooting at the Kerebroi as they climbed the walls, fighting sword against spear to save their artillery. Once a roof was cleared – the surviving Wasps on it casting themselves into the air when it was either that or be overwhelmed – the Smallclaw came in. The little artificers of the sea had not been idle, and the diminutive Onychoi wore light armour of moulded shell and carried weapons that would be familiar to any land-kinden who had seen a snapbow. They set up their own shooting positions, their long bolts raking the Wasps on neighbouring rooftops, whilst their mechanics began examining the artillery that they had prised from the enemy’s hands.