Dragonfly Falling

Thirty-Eight

The bulk of the Wasps could retreat far faster than the Ants could follow, and they took flight down the rail track towards their camp, their rail automotives and their massed artillery. The sentinels and many of the armoured shield-men, however, could not simply fly away. Faced with no choice, and with a fierce desperation that left a lasting impression on their enemies, they stood their ground, holding up the Ant advance still further so that their comrades could escape. In a tight square of armoured men, surrounded on all sides by the implacable Sarnesh soldiers, they fought on with bitter determination until every last man of them was dead.

The Ants re-formed their lines, their shield-lined formations, with some of them that had sustained heavy casualties breaking up to form new groups. Others near the back began to move the wounded out. Two automotives had been smashed before the leadshotters had been silenced, and a third had ground to a halt with artificers hurriedly prying armour off to get at its engine. The Sarnesh went about reassembling their battle order with the minimum of fuss, with calm deliberation. The Wasps were allowed to fall back, to exhaust themselves in the panic of flight. The Ants would follow at their own inexorable pace.

The warriors of the Ancient League were another matter. They had not stopped when the Sarnesh had redrawn their lines. They harried the Wasp-kinden mercilessly, chasing them in the air, raking them with arrow-shot. It seemed at first that they might continue their hunt all the way to Helleron. Che, trying to focus her telescope on the nimble figures in green and grey, abruptly overshot them. There was nothing but black and gold now in her field of view. She took the glass away, trying to see what was going on.

The Mantids and their allies were now falling back, surging to meet up with the plodding Sarnesh lines. Beyond them the Wasps were making a new stand, rallying into another wall of shields and ready airborne. Behind them.

She felt just then that things had started to tip, although she could not have said why. She was no tactician, but something spoke inside her.

A rail automotive had pulled in to the broken end of the rails in a great plume of steam. More Wasp soldiers were rushing out of it, hurrying forwards to join the battle. Reinforcements from Helleron, she saw, but something new had communicated itself to her. She could not be sure what.

There were Ants all around. One word to them would be a word to the whole army. She had no words, though. She had nothing she could warn them of.

Still. ‘You should take care,’ she said to the nearest Ant surgeon, ‘your people at the front.’

He was washing blood from his hands and he stared at her as if she were mad. Out on the field, transport automotives were removing the bulk of the wounded. The worst would be treated here, the rest removed to Sarn. The surgeons were hard pressed to keep the pace.

‘The Queen is consulting with her tacticians,’ the surgeon said suddenly, and Che realized that she had been heard after all. The man’s eyes unfocused for a moment, and then he said. ‘We will press ahead. We must destroy them, drive them until they can fly no more, and then wipe them out. We must break their siege engines in order to protect our walls.’ He nodded. ‘It will be a long, hard fight.’ She realized the last words were his, and the rest had been the Queen’s.

During the first clash of the battle the Wasps had been able to bring forward more of their siege train, another batch of leadshotters and a few of the smaller catapults that could be wheeled out intact rather than needing assembly on the spot. The Sarnesh automotives would have a harder time of it from now on. Even as Che watched, the first artillery engines began to discharge, their shot mostly flying wide or short, and the Sarnesh advance continued with the same patient progress, the wide sweeping wings of scattered Mantids and Moths surging a little ahead of it.

The next batch of the wounded had now arrived, and she gave up her watching, went to do what good she could with bandages and needle. It unnerved her, tending these wounded Ants. They did not curse or scream, because each was taking strength from all the others, from their suffusing solidarity. Somehow a show of pain would have been more reassuring to her. All around her the Ant surgeons worked in skilled communion, linked with each other and with their patients. It made Che feel clumsy and awkward. They even gave her the least of the wounded to tend.

There was a moment — she remembered it well later — when all the soldiers around them stopped, just for half a second, all at once, and she knew that out on the battlefield something new had happened. She tied off the wrapping on the man she had been working with, and took up her glass again.

The Ant advance had stopped as they tried to work out what had happened. The fresh Wasp troops from the rail automotive had formed a double line ahead of them, but at a range that a heavy crossbow would find stretching. They had loosed some manner of weapon, though. The rattle of missiles had struck all the way along the Ant line, short darts like nailbow bolts that had bounced from shields or got stuck in armour, although a few unlucky soldiers had been injured in the face. Beside them, a few of the lightly-armoured Mantids had fallen.

The Sarnesh started their march again, the automotives grinding solidly along beside them. Wasp artillery-shot was falling sporadically about them, and another of the armoured vehicles was brought to a halt when a stone shattered its left track. The advance was undaunted, though between the officers at the leading edge of the Sarnesh army a quick analysis was taking place of what new weapons the Wasps possessed and how they might work.

The twin archer lines of the Wasps suddenly sprang forward in a flurry of wings, covering ten yards in a great flying leap. It was a chaotic display, obviously unpractised. For a moment they were everywhere, in utter confusion, and then they were struggling to get themselves in place as the other troops, who had so recently fled, moved forwards again to back them up.

As one the Ant soldiers picked up their pace. The leading officers could see more of the weapons now, and they seemed to be firepowder bows of some sort, like nailbows, but there had been no smoke and no sound other than a distant crackle when they had loosed.

Drephos had driven him hard in order to be here now. It was only because the foundries of Helleron were so well supplied, so easily turned to any mechanical endeavour, that it had worked at all. Totho had been working day and night, and forcing his workforce through the same punishing schedule. Towards the end he had allowed them three or four hours of sleep at most. How they had hated him, the halfbreed that fate had set over them, and now Dre-phos’s right-hand man.

The factories were still working now, of course, but Totho had left them to the care of other hands. Drephos had come to him one day, after his life had become just a murderous round of unceasing manufacture, and told him, ‘It’s time.’

‘Time for what?’ Totho had asked dully.

‘Time for the real test, Totho.’ The master artificer had earlier been radiant with enthusiasm, eagerly rubbing his disparate hands together. ‘The soldiers have practised. They are passable, and the efficiency of your invention easily makes up for the deficiency in their training. We are ready to take your gifts to General Malkan.’

‘You want me to go with you?’

‘Are you going to tell me you don’t deserve it?’ Drephos had asked him. ‘Totho, I am very proud of you. I made absolutely the right decision when I took you in. The least I can do is let you witness your creations in action.’

Which means the warfront. Totho had opened his mouth, and a host of words had thronged there, as he stood looking into Drephos’s expectant face. I don’t want to go to war. I don’t want to see my work killing other people. But he had remembered Drephos’s words about hypocrisy. I am a weaponsmith. I owe it to my victims to be there. As a personal service.

‘I’ll go pack, Master,’ he had said, and Drephos’s answering smile had actually cheered him.

The rail journey would have been intolerable had he not been so tired. They had crammed every soldier they could into the pirated carriages, their kit, their supplies and disassembled war engines, spare parts for fliers. It had been a mobile war waiting ready to be deployed. Drephos and Totho had been given no more space than the soldiers, huddling shoulder to shoulder with bad-tempered Wasp artificers and officers. It would have been intolerable if Totho had not slept through almost all the journey, awaking with an artificer’s senses only when the automotive began to slow.

There had been a great deal of babble at that point and when Totho had asked what was going on, a gesture from Drephos had silenced him. The master artificer was already on his feet, armoured hand clutching a leather strap to steady himself and listening hard.

‘The battle’s just begun,’ he had announced. ‘We cut matters a little fine.’ Pitching his voice higher to carry across the crowded carriage he had called out, ‘Now, listen, I have orders! I want a messenger to bring General Malkan to me instantly. I want all the snapbowmen ready to engage immediately. I want them drawn up in ranks beside the rails, loaded weapons to hand. Pass the word back!’

Although the entire journey had been a protracted grumble about Drephos and his presumption, when he did give an order the officers moved briskly. The automotive ground to a screeching halt and began spilling Wasp-kinden from every door, doing their best to find their places. Totho could see the bulk of Malkan’s army trying to re-form, evidently severely bloodied by the Sarnesh troops. It’s exactly like the stories, he thought, arriving just in the nick of time to save the day.

The snapbowmen that were Drephos’s new experiment made their ragged ranks, but he drove them forwards, forwards until they had passed the fleeing host of the first engagement, until Totho, running with them, could see the dark line of the Sarnesh advance, the great wall of shields.

One of them loosed, perhaps just a fumble of the trigger, and abruptly they were all shooting, together and individually, and Drephos was shouting at them. The master artificer had his breastplate on over his robes, but he still looked nothing like a soldier or an imperial officer. He cursed the soldiers with utter fury, though, threatening them with impalement on the crossed spears unless they reloaded and stood ready.

When he turned back to Totho, though, he was calm personified. ‘Well out of effective range here,’ he said, ‘but did you see?’

‘See, Master?’

‘Our bolts reached the Ant lines,’ Drephos confirmed, and he was smiling as though he had just been given a present. ‘Within range, from here. The Sarnesh even stopped for them. Your remarkable invention, Totho!’

Abruptly he was all business again, looking around at his soldiers. ‘On my order, I want a ten-yard jump forwards to put us properly in range. Ready yourselves!’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Now!’

Totho had to run, to catch up with the line again, but Drephos flew. He flew badly, very awkwardly, like a wounded man, but he put himself through it nonetheless to stay alongside his secret weapon. Totho’s secret weapon. By the time they arrived, the Wasps were just about in order, forming their two lines, one kneeling and one standing. It was a familiar formation that crossbow units all over the Lowlands used.

‘Stand ready!’ Drephos called. He had officers for this task, of course, but they stood there dumb whilst he made his own voice hoarse. He was quivering with excitement, uneven features stretched in a mad grin. ‘Charge your bows!’

In ragged unison the Wasp snapbowmen cranked back, pressurizing the air in the weapons’ batteries. Totho could see in his head just how they worked, the designs he had made when he was still an apprentice at Collegium.

‘The rest is trimming,’ Drephos had explained to him, after the first test. ‘Your battery is the revolution! We could put a firepowder primer there instead of your device, and use the long tooled barrel, but firepowder is clumsy. The discharge rocks the weapon, and so you have no accuracy at any range, and it’s dangerous and expensive to boot. Your discharge of air barely makes the weapon shudder as it vents, and it is both safe and free. A revolution, Totho! War marches on another step!’

There was something obscene about Drephos’s expression now. The excitement that shook the man was almost sexual.

‘Loose!’ he yelled.

The leading edge of the Ant advance simply disintegrated, men and women collapsing backwards with nothing but surprise and pain. There were round holes punched in shields, split rings in chainmail, and soldiers all the way along the line were abruptly dead without warning, even as the snap-snap-snap of the bows sounded all around Totho.

In a split second, the Ant tacticians must have made their decision, for the Ant lines were abruptly charging forwards with all speed despite the distance, going from a steady plod to an outright run without warning and without confusion. They outstripped their Mantis allies for a moment, and they avoided their own fallen without fail, not even slowing. For any other army, moving in full armour over such a distance, it would have been madness, but they were the strongest soldiers in the world, wearing mail for years until it became a second skin. It could be done, and they did it.

On the flanks the Mantids decided they were not to be outdone, and soon made up the distance, dashing along in their light armour, their leather and their scale, rending the air with their war-cries over the utter silence of the Ants.

They had taken the new weapons as crossbows, imagining the Wasps desperately reloading, winding them back, while seeing the approaching Ants closer and closer. One more round of bolts at close range and then the charging Sarnesh would break them.

The next salvo of snapbow bolts ripped through them, catching men in the second, the third and fourth ranks. Sarnesh soldiers at a full run were brought to an instant halt as their fellows ran into them, too close in their tight formations to stop or turn. On the flanks there were Mantis soldiers spinning and falling, jerked suddenly back by the power of the bolts. The Ant advance stumbled, faltered, and then surged on into the next lash of the snapbows.

Totho’s stomach lurched, and he felt his hands clenching uselessly. He wanted, he wanted so very badly, to look away, but he fixed his eyes upon what was unfolding throughout the Sarnesh lines. I have a responsibility to my victims.

‘The tests already told us, of course,’ Drephos breathed, even as his soldiers reloaded. ‘This is the true experiment, though. All those Ants in their metal armour, and when our bolts strike metal, they flatten or even bend, and yet they still keep going. They spin, even. A man without armour might have it lance straight through him and leave no more than a hole, if it missed his bones, but any armoured man whose armour fails is a dead man there and then.’

Totho stared. He felt nothing except cold, as if someone had stabbed him somewhere vital, and he was simply waiting to die. He felt nothing, and he realized that meant not even guilt or remorse.

At the Great College they had told him that he would never amount to anything.

‘Loose!’ the master artificer called once again.

At close range, the twin ranks of the snapbowmen stopped the advance in its tracks. So many men and women fell in that one instant that those behind were caught, trapped now with a tangle of dead comrades before them who a moment ago had all been living and breathing, had been kindred minds within theirs.

‘Down bows and back!’ Drephos told his protA©gA©s. ‘General Malkan’s move, I think.’

‘Why stop now?’ Totho asked hopelessly.

Drephos smiled at him. ‘Ammunition, Totho. Have you any idea how many bolts we’ve loosed in the last few seconds? Let Malkan spend his men instead, since they are more easily replaced.’

Already the Wasp soldiers of Malkan’s army were rushing past on either side of the firing line, both on the ground and in the air, descending on the battered Ant-kinden with sword and sting.

Before setting out, General Malkan had left Drephos two thousand soldiers in Helleron, but in the end the foundries, though working day and night, had produced only twelve hundred snapbows, and so Drephos had done the best he could with what he had.

Back among the surgeons, Che was tying another bandage when the invisible wave of news washed over them. In an instant all the Ants were up, and beginning to move the wounded onto the transport automotives. They worked as carefully as they could, but there was an edge of haste to them that she had never seen in Ants before.

‘What is it?’ she asked them. ‘What’s happening?’ but they had no answers, just grimly took up each wounded soldier who still had a chance of survival and stretchered him or her away.

Sperra took her telescope back from Che and leapt into the air, putting it to her eye and holding place with her wings.

‘They’re retreating!’ she called, her voice shaken. ‘The Sarnesh are falling back!’

‘What?’ Che asked. It made no sense. They had been advancing steadily. ‘What’s going on? Tell us, Sperra.’ Beside her, Achaeos patiently strung his bow.

‘The men at the front are standing their ground, but the Wasps are all over them, and the rest are. they’re running. They’re actually running. They’re keeping their shields over their heads, but they’re coming back fast.’

All the remaining automotives were pulling up, and there were men throwing open the doors of the train. Che stared at it all in disbelief. ‘This can’t be happening!’

‘The Mantis-kinden on the right edge are still fighting,’ Sperra was saying, her voice sounding less and less steady. ‘They’re fighting like madmen, I’ve never seen the like, never — but they’re all fighting alone. They’re killing them, killing the Wasps, but there are so many coming at them now — they’re falling! All of them, they’re falling!’

‘What about the left flank?’ Achaeos called up to her.

‘They’ve drawn back with the Ants. The Sarnesh who stayed to hold the line, they. they’re being overrun! What can they do? They can’t get all the way back here before the Wasps catch them!’

The last Ant adjutant assigned to the Mantis left-side company saluted Scelae. He was shaking slightly, but nothing else in pose or voice told anything more of the horror that was in his mind.

‘They suggest you pull back,’ he told her. ‘Two companies are going to stand here and hold them off, to allow our people to reach the automotives and the rail line.’

‘Will that be enough?’ Scelae asked.

‘They say it will have to be. We must fall back towards the city.’

Scelae cast around. She had lost no more than a quarter of her force because, spread out as they had been, the new Wasp weapon had whipped mostly into empty air around them. ‘You!’ she called, pointing to one of her Moth-kinden, a girl and one of their youngest. Scelae had no time to assess her fitness for the task, time only to give the order.

‘Get on to that moving rail-machine,’ she said. ‘Then fly on to Dorax when it stops. Fly, and keep flying until you’re there. They must know of this. Go now.’

With a look that was close to tears, the Moth darted off.

‘I need help,’ Scelae said to the other Moths, a mere dozen gathered close to her. ‘I need what help you can give me. I know I cannot command it, but you see what must be done here.’

‘We see what a Mantis must do here,’ said their eldest, an old man of more than sixty years. ‘We shall give you what we can.’

‘What can we do?’ one of the others demanded. ‘The sun is out! What can we achieve, in broad daylight?’

‘You forget yourself,’ said the eldest. ‘Magic is fear, uncertainty, doubt. Where better to find these things than on a battlefield? Now join with me.’

Scelae turned from them, trusting them to do what they could. To the expectant Ant adjutant she said, ‘When your companies make their stand we shall stand with them. Tell your masters that.’

‘That is now,’ the Ant said, and indeed the Wasps were approaching, on the ground and in the air, a wave of the Wasp soldiers who so recently had been fleeing, but were now howling for revenge.

The nearest Ant companies had formed a long shieldwall two men deep, with crossbows levelled at the rear. The soldiers braced for the impact of the Wasps, knowing that in their sacrifice, their inevitable deaths, they would buy their kin time to run for home.

When that was all they had to give, they gave it gladly.

‘Ready!’ Scelae called. Already there were Wasp airborne streaking overhead, diving on the running troops, their stings crackling, or racing onwards towards the auto-motives.

She had lived a long enough life, she decided. Spying for the Arcanum in Sarn, she had not thought to be given this honour at last: to die as a Mantis ought.

‘Hunt out your deaths!’ she cried out to her warriors, and they raised their weapons and rushed forwards.

‘I cannot see-’ Sperra gasped. ‘No! I see some soldiers staying behind to hold them back. The Mantis. The Mantis-kinden are fighting on the left. They have charged the Wasps-’ She choked on the words for it had been like watching sand disappear before a wave. They were in there, though, spinning and slashing, inside the Wasp formation, cutting and killing, and dying. ‘They are holding them!’ she cried out. ‘I think. I think some of the Wasps are fighting with each other! They are falling on each other, butchering each other in mid-air.’

The first of the running soldiers were past them now, heading for the train. The wounded were still only half loaded on board.

‘I think-’ Sperra continued, telescope still to her eye, and just then the first of the Wasp airborne struck her, sending her tumbling from the sky. He had been lunging blade-first, but in his haste only his shoulder had struck; he swung round for another pass and an arrow sprouted beneath his armpit, and he spiralled away with a yell.

Achaeos nocked another to his bow. The Ants doubled their pace with the wounded soldiers, knowing that some would die from the exertion, but more would if they did not.

‘Ach!’ Sperra was now holding her ribs, cursing but desperately trying to find her telescope. Che lifted her bodily onto the nearest automotive, despite her protests.

‘Go!’ the Beetle told her, and then the machine was moving, grinding off, as soldiers flooded along beside it, filling the train neatly from the front carriages back, orderly even in defeat.

Achaeos loosed his second arrow, and then a brief moment of desolation and despair swept over him. Out on the field, the madly fighting ball of Wasps had swept over the little group of Moth-kinden, silencing what magic they had raised against the minds of their enemies.

He put a third arrow to the string and drew it back, but the fire of a sting-blast washed past him, struck him to the ground. He heard Che scream but it was distant, very distant, because his pain was so large and so immediate.

It hurt so much more when they lifted him bodily onto the automotive’s flatbed amongst the wounded he himself had been tending. ‘Che!’ he cried out, and he had a vague glimpse of her face even as the vehicle began to move, but his out-thrust arm was clutching at nothing. He was leaving her behind. The train was moving now as well, and there was only one automotive left, and it seemed full to him. ‘Che!’ he yelled again, through the searing pain. She was shouting something back at him, but he could not hear it.

Che looked round, and saw that she had left it very nearly too late to do the sensible thing. She ran for the last big transporter, clutching at the rungs and slats. It had already started to move, and she felt her grip slipping. She called out, but the driver was only listening for the voices in his head. She stumbled helplessly-

One of the Sarnesh inside leant over, caught her by her belt and lifted her in effortlessly. There were Wasps passing over them now, but most were starting to turn back, not wanting to get too far from the main body of their army. The vehicle’s driver flung the machine forwards over the uneven ground, aiming for the line of the rails, and Che heard a kind of whistling noise that she barely had time to register.

Something caught her a massive blow across the head, the slats of the automotive’s side slamming into her as the ball of metal from the leadshotter ripped through the back of the automotive in a maelstrom of jagged shards. The automotive was suddenly veering around. All around her the Sarnesh were leaping out even before the vehicle had come to a halt. Che was too stunned to follow, lying in the automotive’s belly with her head spinning. A moment later there was a muffled crack from the engine and the machine was enveloped in smoke.

Choking, gasping, Che drew her sword, half jumping and half falling from the back of the vehicle as it ground to a stop. Everywhere she looked, there were Wasps. Behind her the train and the automotives were retreating towards Sarn, and she had the single candle-flame of comfort that at least Achaeos was on one of them. The others who had been unlucky enough to be on the last automotive out were fighting already, falling to the swords and stings of the Wasps. She felt herself begin to tremble, her sword shake in her hand.

So ended what would become known as the Battle of the Rails.