Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

“They have realized that something is wrong,” Hasp said. “Or King Menoa has already issued orders. They will attack us soon.”

Dill lowered Hasp to the deck of the ship. Then he reached a hand under the hull and lifted, hoisting the whole vessel clear of the waters.

With the Sally Broom safely in his grip, he set off to meet Menoa’s bleeding ships.

Rachel left John Anchor laughing and drinking with one of Rys’s commanders and walked through the streets of Coreollis along with Trench and Ramnir. They had arrived two days ago-and just in time, for the Mesmerist reinforcements had been spotted approaching via the Red Road on the western shores of Lake Larnaig. But something else had unnerved the populace of Rys’s city-something vast and terrible-and it was this that she had set off to see.

Coreollis was now preparing for battle and Rys’s Northmen were everywhere. Trained veterans well used to repelling attacks from the Mesmerist hordes, they filled the streets of the city. As Rachel and her companions walked down a narrow lane, they passed a unit of mounted soldiers. Like the god they followed, these men wore silver plate forged here in Coreollis. They were tall and golden-haired and broad of shoulder-a race descended from the Skarraf Northerners who had claimed this handsome city a thousand years ago. And yet Rachel had noticed an edge of cruelty to their ways. They were quick to show disapproval, and quicker to inflict punishment on the hapless locals.

Coreollis lay in the shadow of the Mesmerists and yet it had never come under siege. Menoa’s hordes, it seemed, required blooded ground to sustain them as they crept from one battlefield to the next, and Rys’s soldiers had exploited this weakness to their advantage, keeping the threat away from supply lines open north of the city. They had effectively corralled the enemy to an area that had seen intense conflict over the last decade, refusing to let the Mesmerists encircle the city.

Now a sense of urgency filled the streets. Rachel, Trench, and Ramnir passed a quadrangle full of shouting warriors engaged in combat practice, almost colliding with a runner who had been distracted by this melee. Wide steps led them down to an esplanade before the city GateTowers, where soldiers formed ranks before marching out to positions outside the city walls. Commoners hurried about them, carrying supplies to the archers and pike-men on the battlements. As they reached the base of the steps, the trio passed two soldiers of the Flower Guard who were untying their horses’ reins from a post.

“Hey, donkey man,” the first guard said to Ramnir. “Fetch me some hay for my beast.”

His companion laughed.

The Heshette leader made no reply, but his hand went to the knife at his waist. Trench stopped him.

“That’s a threat,” the guard said. He was a foot taller than the Heshette and was twice his width. Sunlight blazed on his breastplate. “You don’t reach for a weapon in the presence of the Flower Guard. Someone needs to teach you fucking heathens a lesson.”

The other guard was older. He grunted. “I think Anchor brought those bastards in to work in the stables. Have you seen their women? I’d rather sleep with my horse.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Ramnir said.

The older guard paused, then straightened, frowning.

Rachel had already pulled Ramnir out of one fight since they’d arrived, and she didn’t like the look of these two.

“Please, gentlemen,” she said. “We’re guests here. We mean no offense.” She pulled the Heshette leader past the men and out between the GateTowers. “They’re just nervous,” she said as the city walls fell behind and the landscape opened before them. “Because they know they have to face that. ”

They stood at the edge of the Larnaig Field, a gently sloping bank leading down to the lakeshore about half a league distant. Soldiers of the Flower Guard, the Knife Guard, and the City Guard had gathered on several of the dirt embankments before the walls of Coreollis. To the west Rys’s ballistae squatted on the rolling landscape. The city stables lay to the east, from where Rachel could hear the rhythmic metal clanks of a farrier working at his anvil.

King Menoa’s armies waited on blooded ground by the water’s edge: a mass of queerly shaped figures and machines. There were ten thousand or more, and very few of them resembled men. Half a league away, a force ten times this size was moving north along Red Road to join them. From this legion rose a pall of greasy smoke.

But the giant in the lake took Rachel’s breath away.

“The arconite?”

Trench nodded.

Ramnir remained silent.

The skeletal figure towered over the ship floating close to its shins, which listed badly, black smoke pouring from its toppled funnels. A few of Menoa’s troops had launched boats to rendezvous with the automaton and the ship. The sleek black craft plowed through the still waters of the lake without oars or sails, leaving dark trails behind them.

Rachel hissed. “How do we kill it?”

“With swords and axes,” Ramnir said.

Trench shook his head. “The first arconite could not be killed. It still lies trapped in sapperbane chains below the drowned city of Skirl. More than one hundred thousand warriors died trying to subdue the beast. I think this one…” He inclined his head towards the giant. “…is bigger.”

“Look!” Ramnir said. “Something is happening.”

The arconite stooped and picked up the entire ship in one hand. Then it strode towards the shores of Lake Larnaig, as if to meet the Mesmerist craft.

It moved slowly, its bony legs propelling high waves before it. The afternoon sun glimmered on the lake behind it, and the vast expanse of water shone like silver. In the far distance rose the cliffs and misty mountains of the Moine Massif, appearing as thin as vapors.

Three of the five Mesmerist boats had drawn near to the approaching giant, but now hesitated, keeping a short distance back.

“Something is wrong,” Trench said.

Rachel sensed it, too. Figures were moving hurriedly aboard the Mesmerist craft. She could imagine frantic orders given. The boats began to retreat.

A warning horn sounded somewhere behind Rachel. Evidently the guards on the city walls had spotted the Mesmerists’ unusual behavior in the lake. She turned to see Rys’s soldiers racing across the top of the city battlements, shouting down orders to their comrades within.

“It has begun,” Trench said.

Harper stood on the hurricane deck, battered by the wind and three hundred feet above the surface of the lake, as Dill smashed his way through a flotilla of Mesmerist boats. The giant automaton did not require a weapon. His passage through the waters swamped the craft on either side. He stomped on those immediately ahead of him, reducing their living hulls to bleeding shards. Icarates fell into the lake, their weird armour pulsing with vivid blue flashes as they sank from sight.

But some of the craft fought back. Directed by Icarate priests, the boats began to change shape. Their gunwales flowed into new forms: metal contraptions with barbed spinning discs, multijoined insectlike arms with claws, clusters of pipes and arm-thick whips designed to expel poisons. Clanks and whispers and whoomphs of air heralded these assaults. Fiery blue and red arcs of spitting fluid soared high above the lake and exploded against Dill’s chest. The missiles screamed on contact, for these had been souls ingrained into the fabric of the boats.

Dill barely appeared to notice the assaults. He shrugged them off and kicked the boats aside, leaving a bloody wake behind him.

Now Menoa’s encamped force was massing on the lakeshore. Driven by their Icarate priests and witchspheres, the demons swarmed over the bloody ground. A group of heavy armoured boar-like beasts made up the vanguard. They gouged their tusks into the ground and bellowed, and threw up clods of wet red earth. Their segmented-plate hides bristled with spines and steamed in the sunshine like hot lead.