The Seal of the Worm (38 page)

Meanwhile, the Wasps were all over, darting about in the air like shoaling fish, in plain defiance of logic. They kept trying to break up the advancing front of the Sea-kinden wave, but their little weapons merely crackled and pattered against the stone of Rosander’s mail and that of his picked warriors who wore suits just as heavy. For the rest, reinforced shell was still good enough to fend off the worst of it. Rosander was frankly amazed that these diminutive landsmen put such stock in those little weapons, but then he hadn’t yet seen one of them who looked strong enough to wear the requisite weight of armour.

Rosander saw fierce fighting ahead – his line was getting broken up by the sheer maze of the place – and he realized that he had lost track of the shape of the battle entirely. The walls rising on every side made it worse than a weed forest for getting lost, and he saw ahead that a band of Dart-kinden had got ahead of him, engaging the Wasps with nothing but their spears.
Let them die, then
, was the obvious conclusion, but against that was the thought of a decent fight, because the enemy were standing their ground, having found a foe they could hold off. The enemy were still hopping about like mad things, though. They had discovered that the Darts’ spears had stinging cysts that could lash out nearly a man’s length, so they were constantly repositioning themselves, and using their little bows and that flashing Art of theirs to whittle down the Sea-kinden’s numbers.

Rosander raised his left arm and aimed along it as best he could, pitching up to catch the land-kinden as they took to the air. Pressure-driven weapons had been brought to the Sea-kinden from the land almost by accident, but the mechanics of the Hot Stations had not been slow in re-engineering and improving them. Rosander’s hand – almost lost within the great hooked mass of the gauntlet – clenched on the bar trigger, and the weapon set in his armour snapped out a handful of bolts, picking one Wasp straight from the air. Each shot was accompanied by a jet of mist as water vented from the battery, and the last bolt barely made it six feet away from him, so that he waved his stone hand in the air.

Immediately, Chenni was there, his top mechanic, clambering up to crouch on his shoulder and open up the compartments in his mail, first replacing the water battery and then feeding in more bolts.

‘You’ve got the land map?’ Rosander demanded of her. ‘You know where we are?’

‘Easily, Chief.’ With deft fingers she closed him up again and unfolded the land-kinden document, its fragile material already starting to come apart from too much damp and rough handling. ‘I reckon we’re – oh, will you look at that!’

Something new had arrived, and for a moment Rosander thought it was one of the land-kinden’s beasts, which had been strangely absent so far. Then he looked again, and saw the way its high-fronted segmented body gleamed: no animal but a machine.

‘Looks better than your ones,’ he grunted.

‘Give me a chance to take a look inside, Chief. I’ll build you one.’

The Wasps were now fleeing, and he thought the Sea-kinden warriors had driven them off, but then devices at the base of the new machine’s front spun into life and scythed the Dart-kinden down to a man, before they even knew what was going on.

‘Let’s get it,’ Rosander decided on basic principles, just as the machine seemed to notice they were there. Certainly it opened its single eye wide once it saw them.

A moment later, Rosander was knocked sideways, his knee crunching onto the flagstones.

‘Nauarch!’ and ‘Chief!’ rang in his ears, sounding oddly distant, and his warriors began helping him up.

‘Where’s the weapon? Someone go and throw it off a roof!’ he demanded, but they told him that the machine had gouted fire from its eye.

‘Chenni?’ he bellowed, in sudden fear, but she was at his elbow immediately, looking bruised but intact.

‘Javel’s dead,’ she told him. ‘Pushed his breastplate clean in.’

‘Bastard,’ Rosander decided, and began lumbering forwards with his followers in tow. By that time the thing was ready for another shot.

The slap of the leadshot knocked him flat, and his left arm was instantly numb. His head was ringing within his helm, and for a few seconds he had no idea where he was or what was going on. Then Chenni was shouting at him to get up, and that sounded like a good idea, and he was lurching to his feet, his bannermen streaming on either side towards the offending machine. His shoulder armour had been struck square on; had it been just stone, it would have cracked down the middle and taken his arm with it. His people knew what they were doing when they built armour, though. They knew that it had to allow some give, to take in the shock of a blow without passing that force straight through to the wearer. There were hollow cells like coral forming lines that dispersed the impact away and, as they laid down the stone, layer by layer, they interleaved wires of the new Hot Stations steel in a branching network that strengthened and reinforced. Now his broad pauldron had shattered into a hundred pieces, but all those pieces were still bound together and holding.

His men were all swarming around the machine now, battering brutally at its armoured sides, and Rosander stumbled over to them, determined to take out his hurt and anger on the thing. It was loosing its weapons, from the front and from the sides, but they were meant to kill lesser things than a Greatclaw Onychoi garbed for war.

‘Don’t mess around!’ he boomed to his followers. ‘Tip the thing over! Let’s see what its guts look like!’

He cast aside his sword and hooked his right hand beneath the lip of curved plates where he could glimpse the machine’s articulated legs. It was trying to back out now, but the Onychoi had it surrounded, pounding and rocking it, whilst others joined Rosander in heaving up one side.

He put all of the strength that would fit in one arm into the effort, and there were four or five others of his kind – huge men with a colossal build that none of these landsmen seemed to have – and they were strong, and in the end the machine just wasn’t as heavy as he had expected. Abruptly it was tipping over, the warriors on the far side scattering so that the great metal beast slammed down on its side and began to revolve slowly as its legs continued to piston.

The underside was metal too, but Rosander was willing to bet that it was nowhere near as tough. He cocked back his good hand for a strike, aiming for the point where the legs met the body.

Out on the water, the Sea-kinden were still arriving. Great clumsy automotives, just enormous curved shields over their powering legs, were clambering onto the wharves, assisted by dozens of Onychoi, or being lifted onto land by hastily erected winches. They were mounted with big spring-powered bolt-throwers and began crawling determinedly forwards the moment that their metal feet were squarely on the ground, shouldering for room amongst the soldiers and the crabs that were still dragging themselves out of the water.

Rosander strode through this bustling chaos, taking a break from the front line because his arm was bruised from wrist to elbow, and because the bannermen of the Thousand Spines were already stationed at most of the places they had been heading for. He had left Chenni in charge because she had a good head on her and could read the map.

Further out, a submersible was surfacing, the curved apex of its nautilus-shell hull breaking the surface as it jockeyed carefully in towards the docks. As Rosander limped closer, he saw a handful of figures clamber out and take stock. He saw the Kerebroi woman, Paladrya, in conference with the little Smallclaw Wys whose submersible it was, and beside them was a stocky figure, armoured head to foot in light shell mail, with a Sea-kinden snapbow in one hand and a landsman shortsword in the other, shifting his footing to keep his balance until he could just step off onto a pier.

Rosander dragged his helmet off, grinning fiercely. ‘Well, now! And you wonder how it would have gone if we’d come for you after all, back then? Wonder no more, landsman!’ He laughed, despite his pain. ‘What would you do now if we decided we wanted to keep this place, once we win it for you?’

‘Oh, I’d find some way to take it back. You know me, Rosander.’ Gauntleted hands reached up to tug away the helm, revealing a dark, serious face, its eyes flicking from the Nauarch to the cityscape beyond.

Stenwold Maker had come home.

Twenty-Five

Greenwise Artector had intended to get out, he really had. When the Eighth Army had descended on Helleron, however, it had come howling out of Three Cities territory far quicker than anyone had expected. He had just not been ready.

He could still have slipped out, nevertheless. Sufficient applications of care and money would have allowed it, because money always spoke loud in Helleron. He had been watched, though. The other magnates of the city already knew that he was a man the Wasps would want to speak to. He had faced a choice, in the end: he could have abandoned his family and staff within the city and crept out like a thief, or he could remain, public and noticeable, sending his family and staff away instead. He had sought within himself for that courage, the self-sacrifice he had always believed he was capable of. Somewhat to his surprise, he had found it. He had stayed on until it was too late to leave, just so that his kin, his servants, his entire household could get clear.

Then, with the noose already closing on him, he had vanished.

All the routes in and out of Helleron had sported eyes on the lookout for this rogue magnate. One of the Council of Thirteen that had governed the city would be recognized, and many on the lookout had been former colleagues, former employees – men who knew his face. The airfields were watched, the gates likewise. After that, there were Wasp soldiers on the streets, and his name was first on their list to apprehend: Greenwise Artector, the missing magnate.

Even so, perfect vigilance was impossible to maintain for long, whether it was the hirelings of the rich or the soldiers of the Empire. Helleron was ostensibly a free city where the ruling council – its thirteenth place now filled by a woman who had until recently been the fourteenth most powerful merchant in the city – took careful advice from a colonel in the Imperial Consortium on all matters. The city’s trade – its life’s blood – ran free, especially that conducted with the Empire to the east. Greenwise could have got out by now, if he had been willing to risk it.

Instead he had decided to take a stand.

He had fallen far from his old haunts. He had gone to the slums, where a man could lose himself and just about everything else. Thankfully he had been making preparations for this day ever since the end of the last war. Helleron’s gangs, the fiefs, had not been friends of the Empire, and the Wasps had done their best to eradicate the network of criminal cartels whose interlocked gears made the city’s underside turn. Greenwise, like many magnates, had his contacts beneath the surface, but he had been marked as a man who opposed the Wasps. Criminals, mobsters and murderers, thieves and racketeers, who cared nothing for anything but their own illicit properties, saw in him something worth keeping alive. Not a hero exactly, for they had no use for a hero, but an ally in these hard times.

They had resources and he had knowledge, and together they were making plans. Greenwise wanted to hurt the Empire and, most of all, his former fellows on the Helleren Council. His new friends from the fiefs wanted to do the same by filling their pockets and perhaps shedding a little blood. The Empire hated their chaos, and the Consortium hated any flow of money it did not control. Had the Wasps used a lighter hand last time round, then no doubt the Imperial merchant arm could just have bought into Helleron’s cesspool of vice, but the crackdowns had closed that door.

Now Greenwise, with a sword and a crossbow hanging from his person and dressed in clothes that would not have been fit to clean his servant’s boots not so long before, was guiding a gang of thieves towards the heartland of the rich. Their target was the townhouse of a man named Scordrey, perhaps the most influential merchant in the city. Nobody was feeling inclined to think small these days.

At the moment Greenwise was working with two fiefs. The Whoresellers fleshed out their pimping with fencing and protection rackets, and the Bitter Men were strong-armers and housebreakers daring or lunatic enough to try and crack a target this big. Greenwise Artector, erstwhile big man about town, was hurrying through the narrow covered streets of Helleron’s poorer quarters in company with a pack of Fly and Beetle thieves, a lean and loping Scorpion who was second in command of the Bitters and a halfbreed locksmith and appraiser that the Whoresellers had hired. He himself was along with them because he had kept one of Scordrey’s men on his payroll for years, knew three quiet ways into the man’s house and had a very good idea of where the strongroom was and how to get into it.

Helleron was a cramped city, and a cunning man who knew the right paths and shortcuts could make the transition from the gutter to the mansions of the rich in surprisingly few steps. So it was that Greenwise and his crew were passing through the slums along the back of a row of refineries, but ahead of them rose the roads where the houses grew larger and the streets were better lit.

There were watchmen, of course, the city’s militia, but the Whoresellers had greased a fair number of palms these last few nights, and if any watchman turned out to be incorruptible enough to get in the way, then Greenwise reckoned it would be a poor night for that man. The same would apply if they ran into a Wasp patrol, especially as the Imperial hand lay light on the richer parts of the city – only two or three soldiers at a time.

The ground shook, just a little, but at first Greenwise assumed that some machinery in the refineries was responsible. Nobody else raised the issue, so they were soon on their way.

‘This alley takes us to Shoffery Row,’ he murmured. ‘From there to Servil Street, where there’s a tunnel that can take us to Brackish Lots, practically behind Scordrey’s house.’

‘Handy,’ the Scorpion grunted.

‘It is indeed. It’s how his staff receive deliveries without the great man’s view being cheapened,’ Greenwise explained, thinking for a moment about the recent times when he himself had lived with such considerations.