Tim Lebbon - Dawn

The Shantasi returned fire, launching arrows and bolts skyward at the undersides of the intimidating machines. They had never seen anything like this. They had all read of magic, what it could do and how it aided the land before the Cataclysmic War. And they had all seen dead machines, before and after the Breakers had their time with them. But this was all new. Leathery wings flapped; metallic appendages swiped and cut; stone bodies deflected arrows; fleshy organs expelled gases as the machines passed overhead and turned for a rapid second approach.

“Spartlets in five heartbeats!” O’Gan shouted. He had turned to watch the Krotes’ return, lying flat on the ground with his sword resting before him on a sprig of dead bracken. Almost as soon as he shouted, the spartlets were released.

These were vicious creatures. Having spent decades as chrysalides beneath the sand, the touch of fire would burst their shell and set free the winged serpents within. Newly hatched spartlets were jealous things; any other species they encountered within their own airspace for several hours following birth would be set upon with claws and poisoned fangs. Though only the size of a man’s hand, they had the fury of a desert wolf.

When the fire pots were uncovered, several thousand spartlets rushed skyward in screaming, whistling clouds.

The Shantasi hugged the ground and watched. They had never used spartlets on this scale before, and they had no idea what to expect.

The winged serpents spread out, ignoring one another and expanding across the sky. And as the Krote machines powered in a dozen steps above the ground, the spartlets converged on them, attacking machines and riders alike. Arrows vented groundward, and the fire-shitting machine gushed more flames. But in seconds the Krotes became too concerned with their own exposed flesh to think about engaging the Shantasi below.

A machine passed directly above O’Gan, the Krote on its back slashing at the air. O’Gan rose and hacked with his sword, catching a trailing tentacle and parting it from its home. The flapping thing fell to the ground, a spartlet attached and jabbing again and again with its freshly exposed fangs.

“At them!” O’Gan shouted, but the call was not needed. The Shantasi were on their feet, loosing arrows and bolts at the confused shapes. The sustained firepower of almost two thousand weapons gave the Krotes plenty more to worry about.

The fire-shitting machine collided with another, and they impacted heavily into a copse of dead trees. Fire rolled along the ground as the machine ruptured, and its thrashing limbs were blasted across the battlefield as huge, flickering shadows. The survivor from the other machine dashed from the fire and took on several Shantasi, cutting them down with a slideshock and several throwing stars before more came to their aid. They drove him down with sheer volume of numbers, and O’Gan saw glittering swords dulled as blood smeared their blades.

Another machine fell farther away, rolling over the ground with the crumple of folding metal. Its rider was crushed beneath it, but the machine rose on unsteady legs, thrashing out with blades as long as five men. Several warriors ducked beneath the blades and went in close, their own swords at the ready. The machine glowed blue, light burst from it in a pulse and O’Gan saw the skeletons of the Shantasi crumple as the strange fire faded again.

He ran toward the machine with other warriors, sword and other weapons at the ready.

There were a dozen machines still circling above them. Several still poured hails of arrows or fireballs down at the Shantasi, but mostly they seemed more concerned with the spartlets attacking in droves. Another machine fell, its wings tattered, its rider drifting away and striking the ground a few steps from his mount. Neither rose again.

“Use poison sacs!” O’Gan shouted as he approached the heavily bladed construct. It was starting to glow again, a blue umber that cast strange shadows beneath its low stomach. “Don’t get too close! See if the poison will do it!” He stood back while three Shantasi lobbed poison sacs in carefully judged arcs. One of them burst on the machine’s slashing blades, but the other two struck its body, spraying across several globes that could have been eyes. It dipped as it tried to wipe the affected area against the ground. The Shantasi darted in with blades drawn.

O’Gan readied himself to be wiped out. Magic did that, he thought, running past the scattered bones of the original attackers. But though the machine still glowed, the pulse did not come. O’Gan and the warriors hacked at its underbelly, keeping close so that they stayed within its killing circle, using Pace now and then to move out of the way of its rolling body. One of them leapt onto its back and buried a spear to its full depth.

The machine grew still, and they thought they might have won.

But then it went mad. As its end closed in, the machine began to roll and thrash in a final venting of fury. The Shantasi on its back was cut in two by a swinging blade, her head and shoulders tumbling to the ground and being kicked toward O’Gan by the machine’s thrashing legs.

“Back!” O’Gan shouted, unable to take his eyes from the surprised expression on the dead woman’s face. She ran a fruit shop not far from the Temple in Hess. Not even a trained warrior, and look what she did. Disgusted, terrified and shocked, still in that moment O’Gan believed that they could win.

They withdrew and left the machine to its death throes.

Where are the serpenthals? O’Gan thought. Have they left us so soon?

Across the battlefield, similar engagements were taking place. More machines had fallen, victims of the spartlets, and those still flying were doing so erratically. As O’Gan ran from the dying machine and the decapitated woman, he saw three more enemies tumble to the ground. They cut down Shantasi as they fell, and one machine exploded and cast a hail of deadly shrapnel before its blossom of fire. The Krotes who had survived the spartlets and the crashing of their machines took on Shantasi hand to hand, and several vicious fights were taking place. O’Gan went to join one of them.

Soon there was only one machine still circling, its rider hanging dead amongst its confusion of spidery legs, with spartlets pecking at his face. The machine seemed trapped in an ever-decreasing spiral, drifting lower and lower and casting globules of molten metal in a spray as it came down. A Shantasi screeched as he was caught in one spray, bringing his hands to a face that was no longer there. Another warrior dashed in and pulled him away, holding his hand tightly as he drew his knife across the mortally wounded man’s throat.

The machine eventually crashed to the ground and thrashed its limbs for a time, but the Shantasi were content to stay away and let it die.

Fires raged where machines had come apart. Another exploded, a thumping detonation that knocked O’Gan from his feet even though he was several hundred steps away. A cloud of boiling gas was blasted out, searing and scorching everything and everyone in its path. Shantasi lay scattered around the destroyed machine, many dead, many more injured, and O’Gan turned away because he knew that he could not help.

Fifteen machines and their riders, he thought, and how many have we lost? Two hundred? Three?

After a while the sounds of combat ceased, and the moans of the dying began.

O’GAN HAD NOT killed for thirty years. Now he stood with Krote blood on his sword. He wiped the blade on a dead Krote’s leathers, blood gathering and flowing and catching the moons, and in it he saw the reflected shadows of spartlets still flitting above their heads.

Medics and Mourners moved here and there, helping injured Shantasi where they could, slitting their throats and chanting them down where they could not. O’Gan tried to shut the chanting from his mind.