Henry Neff - The Maelstrom

The peculiar clouds and Rowan’s alarm had the desired effect. Whole battalions hurried toward the citadel at full speed. Max looked frantically about for Scathach, scanning the stampede of running figures and mounted knights to no avail. Sarah rode toward him on her charger. Her shield was dented and she was bleeding from a cut upon her forehead, but she did not appear to be seriously injured.

“Everyone’s heading in,” she assured him. “Are you coming?”

Max shook his head and implored her to go along with the Trench Rats. When it was clear he would not be joining them, she finally left to help evacuate the last of the wounded. Max turned YaYa to gaze out at the emptying battlefield. The ravens and gulls were also departing, hopping off of bodies and taking urgent flight. They wheeled south in dense, screeching flocks as swiftly as their wings would take them.

Twilight was settling upon the battlefield, leaving the grisly shapes in shadow. The wind was picking up once again, blowing in from the north along with a curtain of cold, glittering rain. The drops hissed on hundreds of fires and pinged on thousands of broken shields and bodies scattered across the landscape. Thunder rumbled high above in the swirling clouds, and Prusias’s drums began to sound again.

Boom boom boom boom!

Far to the north, Max spied movement. Raising his spyglass, he saw that Prusias’s palanquin and troops had regrouped and were moving again, creeping south toward Rowan’s citadel. Leaving them, Max swept the glass across the closer terrain and searched frantically for any telltale lights or motion.

At last he found a pinlegs. It was less than a mile from Northgate, scuttling over an ettin’s corpse. There was a second one a few hundred yards to the right, descending a shallow hill. Max’s heart was racing as he discovered more.

Five … six …

Hastily wiping rain from the lens, he resumed his count as more tiny red lights blinked in the deepening dusk. He’d tallied nine when the pinlegs seemed to halt their advance. The one Max was watching had climbed atop the empty, smoldering armor of a slain rakshasa and began circling like a dog chasing its tail.

Suddenly, the world went white.

The landscape disappeared in a phosphorescent flash as thirteen bolts of lightning struck the battlefield. With a whoosh , the surrounding air rushed toward the strikes as though filling a vacuum. The resulting winds blew with hurricane force, staggering YaYa and bending all the trees inward as though a bomb had imploded. All across the battlefield, bodies and carcasses were rolling and tumbling brokenly toward the strike sites along with acres of dirt and soil to create huge, spiraling vortexes. Thirteen mushroom clouds formed, rising ever higher toward the churning maelstrom above.

At last the swirling plumes crested and began to dissipate. Thousands of broken bodies and horses rained back to earth as the clouds settled. Shapes emerged, dark mountains that seemed to sway and shiver as though stirring from some long slumber.

The earth shook.

Initially, Max thought the dreadnoughts were elephants—colossal war elephants the size of castles. But that impression changed as soon as the creatures awakened.

Many eyes appeared in the gloom, piercing the dusk like monstrous searchlights. They scoured the smoking hills and trampled plains until they fell upon the citadel.

Giant flares shot out from Rowan’s towers, arcing through the rain to illuminate the creatures as they began to move. Max watched in mute horror as their particulars began to emerge.

Like the pinlegs, the dreadnoughts appeared to be a hybrid of animal, demon, and machine. Their heads were shaped like that of a pulpy pale octopus, knotted and swollen with muscles and vascular cables that connected them to shiny black bodies that resembled the abdomens of huge, bloated spiders. Enormous black smokestacks jutted from their backs in knuckled ridges, belching fire and smoke into the air as though great engines and furnaces burned at the creatures’ cores.

The dreadnoughts had eight long limbs, but they were nothing like a spider’s. Four of the limbs were thick, elephantine columns of muscle and flesh that bore the brunt of the creature’s weight and propelled it forward. The others were enormous, bloodred tentacles that sprouted from its sides, swinging grotesquely, digging and dragging through the wet fields as they helped to balance the towering creature.

Max found their uniqueness horrifying. No two monstrosities were exactly the same. The Workshop might have built them, but there was an organic asymmetry even to their creatures’ manufactured elements. They looked like they’d been grown and nurtured in colossal vats, a jumble of mutated cells that had been made to grow around a mechanical core until the machinery and engines were subsumed and buried within living tissues.

They had no mouths, not even a truly discernible face. There were only vast, unblinking eyes set atop bodies so colossal that Max could hardly comprehend them. The creatures must have been three hundred feet tall. Just one looked capable of razing Rowan to its foundations and yet thirteen were now advancing upon the citadel fifty yards at a stride.

The gae bolga twitched and gave a magnetic pull almost like a divining rod. The weapon tore Max from his spellbound stupor, bringing him back to the rain and wind and YaYa chuffing once again as the ancient ki-rin mustered whatever reserves she had. He gazed up at the attackers, at the smoke billowing from their backs, at the faint red pentacles now glimmering along the creature’s underbellies. Max’s ring began to burn again.

They’re just imps , he told himself. Imps in huge bodies, but imps all the same .

He recalled the words and warning of the Fomorian after the giant had reforged the gae bolga beneath the waves.

This weapon can never be broken. The wounds it makes will never heal. There is nothing it cannot pierce and nothing it cannot slay, for its essence will destroy both flesh and spirit … this blade will slay gods as well as monsters.…

That weapon was calling to him now, urging him forward. Max was not a mortal being; he was a demigod, a prince of the Sidh who had just driven half of Prusias’s army back across the field. The Morrígan could see his greatness; why couldn’t he? Max was stronger than they, wilder than the storm, and when his anger was roused, nothing on this earth could stand against him. He was invincible.…

Trembling anew, he stared out at the dreadnoughts like a rabid wolf. He spurred YaYa forward and she obeyed, breaking into a trot and then a rolling canter. The gae bolga burned, scalding Max’s hand as the blade keened and screamed like the Morrígan herself.

Breaking into a gallop, YaYa streaked across the battlefield, as swift as an arrow. She soon left the ground behind, springing into the air and racing over the gales and gusts as though they were a shorter path to her enemy. The dreadnoughts loomed even larger, filling Max’s view so that everything else disappeared. It was growing ever hotter, ever louder. Scorched air filled his lungs; all about him was the sound of heavy, churning machinery and the belching fires from the smokestacks. He focused on the nearest one’s central eye, so huge and luminescent it might have been the moon. Gripping the gae bolga , Max stood tall in the stirrups and reared back to strike as Scathach had taught him.

The impact was like a bomb.

Max and YaYa were thrown back with inconceivable force. They crashed into what remained of Trench Nineteen’s embankment, careening over rocks and sharpened stakes until they rolled down into the trench itself. Clawing blindly at the wet earth, Max sensed the gae bolga ’s searing heat and seized hold of it. Coming to his senses, he glanced about and saw YaYa lying on her side in a small crater. Great waves of steam rose off her, as though the ki-rin were a meteor that had fallen to earth. One of the embankment stakes had impaled her shoulder, while a sickening shard of bone protruded from her foreleg.