Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

That first shot from the shore triggered a scatter of copycats, each of them falling short and astern as they failed to take the Iteration 's cruising into account. It came to Corcoran that the Scorpions would have no real experience of shooting at a moving target and that leadshotters, even at their best, were not designed for it.

He looked upriver, where there was one obvious impediment to making a strafing pass against the Scorpions. He ran astern to his helmsman, a Chasme halfbreed called Hakkon, mentally trying to size up the Iteration with the bridge's arches.

'Can we get past the bridge, if we wanted to?' he asked. There was another scatter of leadshot, and he heard the whoosh of water as the misplaced barrage broke up nothing but the river.

Hakkon tugged at his chin. 'Probably,' was all he would say. 'Let me get closer to see.' The bridge had plainly been built to stop large vessels passing upriver, but for the Khanaphir a large ship had a mast and a sail. The Iteration made a sleek, low profile in the water.

'Close to range!' one of his men called, just as another leadshot raised a great spire of water astern, near enough to rock them.

'Keep moving!' Corcoran shouted. 'Just keep moving!' He ran forward again. There was a constant sporadic pounding from the Scorpion engines now, one or other of them hurling metal every few minutes. A scatter of optimistic crossbowmen were loosing at them, standing knee-deep in the shallows. One of the bolts got as near as to rattle off the hull.

Corcoran watched the Scorpion masses still pushing for the bridge. There was a light rain of bodies dropping from where the fighting was, Scorpions hurled back by the Khanaphir or pushed off by their own side.

'Now!'

This time he remembered to hold on, as every smallshotter detonated at once. The fistfuls of stone and metal shot scythed into the nearest Scorpions, killing dozens where they stood.

'Don't slow down!' Corcoran shouted. 'Under the bridge! Under the bridge!' The arches looked smaller than he had gauged. If I'm wrong about this, we'll look like fools … and then we'll die . A lucky shot from the Scorpion artillery clipped across the deck, smashing the rail to both port and starboard in a hail of splinters. The smallshotters were being reloaded with an artificer's care, upended to receive the shot and wadding, and then turned down again for the little pot that was the firepowder charge. A few crossbow bolts clattered from the hull, and one of Corcoran's men swore as one dug into his arm, shallow enough to sag straight out again.

The swiftest of them managed a second messy shot, loosing back at the Scorpions, and then the shadow of the bridge covered them, ancient stones closing in around them and gliding by on both sides, close enough to touch.

'Keep reloading!' Corcoran told them, his voice echoing back down the length of the massive archway. 'They'll be there on the other side.'

But their leadshotters won't , he realized. Almost all the Scorpion artillery had been brought to the south of the bridge, to catch the Iteration . Until the Scorpions moved their cumbersome weapons back, the ship could sit still in the water and pulverize Scorpions. Corcoran grinned at the simplicity of it.

The boat's sides scraped against stone, but the crew were fending off the bridge with poles and Hakkon had a steady hand. Now they emerged into the dawning daylight, levelling their smallshotters at a surprised Scorpion army.

Totho crouched behind the barricade again, sliding another magazine into his snapbow. Field-testing, they call this . He would need to give the weapon some decent care tonight, as it had seen more action this last day than any other score of snapbows anywhere in the world. Yes, tonight. Hold on to that thought .

He had heard the thunder of the Iteration 's rail-engines, but the Scorpions were still not slackening off. Their crossbowmen were killing archers from behind their fence of shields, while their warriors were still locked man to man with Amnon's Guard. When Totho had last looked at them, the defenders of Khanaphes had been awash with blood, not one of them without some wound, except Amnon himself, and yet not one giving ground.

He levered himself up cautiously. With a snapbow, he could crouch low, as the Khanaphir archers could not. He had already felt one crossbow bolt bound painfully from his helm, leaving a dent that pressed against his head every time he moved it.

'Fliers!' Tirado shouted. 'Look to the sky! Fliers!'

Fliers? Scorpions don't fly . For a moment Totho was too surprised to do the obvious thing and look up. Then he saw the Wasps coming in, only a handful of them, but he caught sight of what their lead man was holding.

'Shoot them down!' he called out, at the top of his voice. 'Kill the Wasps! Kill the airborne!'

He loosed his own shot, but against a swift-flying target it flew hopelessly wide. The other Khanaphir simply had not responded. Their world scarcely admitted an 'airborne' aspect to war. They were busy killing Scorpions on the ground.

Totho shot a second bolt, missed again, and then threw himself off the barricade, dragging the nearest archer with him.

The first Wasp grenade was off target, shattering on the bridge's edge in a sudden flash of fire that startled many but harmed nobody. The second dropped neatly into the massed archers close to where Totho had just been.

It was a simple clay pot with a cloth fuse, but someone had patiently packed it with nails and stones and a solid charge of firepowder stolen from the leadshotters. The simplicity of the device was an affront to artifice: clumsy, inaccurate and unreliable.

On this occasion, simplicity won out. Totho saw the explosion erupt amid the archers, shredding men and women to pieces so that their flesh rained down on friend and foe alike, hurling others off their feet to tumble down on the stones or plummet into the water. A section of the wooden battlement the size of two men was blown off into the Scorpion crossbows, leaving a broad space of the archers' platform unprotected. Totho covered his eye-slit as a rain of splinters and metal and pieces of bone rattled against his armour.

Another grenade went past, exploding on the bridge behind him as the thrower miscalculated his own momentum. A firepot of oil landed amongst the archers on the other side, in a shocking gout of flame. Totho raised his snapbow, remembering the brutal chaos of the siege of Tark, where Wasp airborne had been thick in the sky. He caught one of the men turning, missed twice and hit with his last shot, the bolt tearing through the man's thigh. The Wasp spun out of the air and dropped down past the bridge's side.

Then he heard the Iteration 's smallshotters again, but this time to the north of the bridge. A shudder rippled through the Scorpion ranks, and the crack and boom of the ship's weapons sounded again and again, shot overlapping shot in their eagerness. Despite the damage done by the grenades, the Scorpion tide began to ebb. The archers that remained were not letting up, loosing arrow after arrow even as parts of their barricade burned.

At last, their rear ranks continually raked by the Iteration 's insistent fusillade, the Scorpions drew back.

They had a pack of carpenters on the barricades trying to repair the damage that the grenades had done, hammering new wood into place frantically, as the Scorpion horde reordered itself for its second charge.

'We can't last another one of those assaults,' Amnon said, finally down from the breach after hours of holding the line. He had his helm off and his face was streaked with sweat, darkly bruised about one eye where an axe had glanced from his helmet.

'Meyr, how many Wasps did you see amongst the Scorpions, back in the Nem?' Totho asked.