Tim Lebbon - Dawn

“You can kill me later,” Lucien said.

Kosar opened his eyes. The Monk had not pulled away from the sword, and a drop of blood ran down his throat from where the tip had punctured his skin.

“After this is over, if we’re both still alive, you can kill me then. But now I’m needed here as much as you. One sword could be the difference between winning and losing.”

“There’s no winning!” Kosar hissed.

“I don’t mean here,” Lucien said. “I mean there.” He nodded at the mountains behind them, peaks hidden by the haze of falling snow.

Kosar lowered his sword and sat back, following Lucien’s gaze. “They must be in there by now,” he said. I hope Trey is all right, and that Hope hasn’t gone mad. I hope Alishia is still alive, and that there’s still time.

“Every second we gain them here could be the instant they change the world,” Lucien said.

Kosar climbed the shelf of rock they had been sheltering behind and looked northward. To the east and west he could see Shantasi doing the same thing. Snow muffled the air and aided the semidarkness, but he could still make out their shapes, slung with weapons and glinting here and there when another explosion rose above the horizon, rumbling in many seconds later and making snowflakes dance off the ground.

Everything felt so hopeless.

O’GAN PENTLE, along with hundreds of Shantasi, charged the Krote machines attacking by land. Even before the two sides met, the air was filled with flying metals and streaking arcs of fireballs, and here and there jets of some mysterious liquid that melted whatever it touched: metal, rock, flesh and bone. The Shantasi returned fire, using Pace to dart left and right, confusing the Krotes and scoring many hits. Once a Krote was killed, his or her mount became confused, but still remained dangerous. Many Shantasi were run down by rogue machines.

The first line of charging Shantasi met the first wave of Krotes, and the fight turned to chaos.

Shantasi used Pace to dart behind the machines. Some bore bows and slideshocks, others leapt at machines and tried to scramble up their sides, knives clasped between their teeth or swords brandished in one hand. Most of them were shrugged off and trampled beneath metal or stone feet. Others gained the machines’ backs, only to be shot down by the Krote riders.

One group of warriors unleashed a storm of flies from fat pouches on their belts. The flies remained close together, buzzing low to the ground until they encountered the staggered stone legs of one fighting machine. They rose, shifting in fluid sheets as the Krote waved his arms about his head. The cloud expanded and the individual creatures seemed to blur, and O’Gan fell flat to the ground and covered his head with his arms as the Shantasi fired several burning arrows into the swarm. There was a soft hiss and then a deafening explosion, and when O’Gan looked up the Krote had been blown to shreds. His machine slumped to the ground, limbs waving, broken legs clawing uselessly at the cauterized ground. Black specks drifted down beside it, dead flies or flesh turned to ash.

O’Gan stood and surveyed the battle. It’s all about time, he thought. He glanced up and saw another flying machine spinning out of control as spartlets harried at its rider. We can never defeat them, but we can holdthem.

Something burst from the ground to his left, a sound louder than anything else on the battlefield, its impact harsher. O’Gan flinched away. A machine bore down on him, a white spidery thing with a dozen whips lashing at the air and fire belching from vents along its sides. He raised his sword, ready to parry the first of those deadly whips, screaming in defiance and certain that every second he lived on could give magic that extra chance it needed.

The machine was a dozen steps away when it was struck in the side. It slipped, scoring furrows in the soil with its braced legs, and the thing that had come up from the ground launched into a frenzied attack.

Serpenthal! It was the largest sand demon O’Gan had ever seen, easily the height and width of six men, and its many separate parts worked as one as it attacked the machine. Whips were torn away, the construct’s body was ruptured and it gushed a foul black fluid as its rider was plucked from its back. The serpenthal crushed the Krote like an insect and dropped his remains into the mess of his dying machine.

The Krotes’ advance had been slowed. Machines still streaked for the huge blaze beyond which a thousand Shantasi waited, but many others were involved in vicious fighting. They cut down warriors with fire and fluid and arrows and discs, and the cries of the dying came from all around.

Another serpenthal appeared from the east and joined in the fray, setting upon a bulky machine and ignoring the hail of molten rock pumped at it from the machine’s nostrils. Another, and another, and O’Gan had never heard of so many sand demons being seen at the same time. It made the battlefield a stranger place than ever.

Several Shantasi ran past him, one of them grimacing as he tried to pull an arrow from his chest, and set upon a machine. It was small and rounded, running on stone wheels that flickered with blue fire. The Krote sitting astride its thin neck turned toward the charging Shantasi, firing a slew of arrows and bolts that took down three before the others reached the machine. They attacked, and O’Gan went to their aid.

He darted left and right as he went, using his Pace in the hope that the Krote would almost lose sight of him. O’Gan felt the drain on his strength every time he used Pace, and he knew that this would be a shorter fight than he had wished for. But it’s a braver suicide than many Mystics chose.

By the time he reached the machine, the other Shantasi were dead at its feet. He glanced briefly at the battle raging all around: a serpenthal in a frenzy a hundred steps away; a Shantasi warrior releasing a toxic pallid wolf against one machine; Krotes slaughtering anything that crossed their path. A group of Shantasi dead lay to the north, and in the heat of a blazing machine O’Gan was sure he saw movement in their limbs, a flicker in their eyes.

And then he faced the machine and its grinning Krote rider, and he smiled back as he raised his sword.

LENORA RODE THROUGH the battle, buffeted by the screams of the dying and the sound of arrows whipping through the air. The darkness was lit by burning machines and bodies. The air stank of fear and blood. An arrow glanced from a knot of scar tissue on her neck and she laughed, realizing that she felt more at home here than she had for a very long time.

A Shantasi tried to climb onto her machine, and Lenora let him think he had succeeded before turning around and burying her sword in his shoulder. “Meet my machine,” she said, and a dozen mouths opened in the side of her construct, biting into the dying Shantasi as he slid from its back.

Two eyes on the side of her machine stared up at her, pleading, blinking, and she turned away. Haunt me, will you, boy? she thought. Well, no need. I’m already haunted.

Ducianne rode alongside, grinning from ear to ear. “This is the life, eh, Lenora? This is the life we’ve always meant to live!”

“This is only their advance,” Lenora shouted. “The rest will be hiding past that fire to the south.”

“Shall we send the dead against them?”

Lenora looked back at the huge machines bringing up the rear, their cages alive with thousands of dead Noreelans. “Not yet,” she said. “There’ll be much more than this.”

“Do you think so? Do you think the Shantasi have more to throw at us?”

Lenora glanced left at where a huge shadow fought with a machine. The two seemed evenly matched. It was a dark, twisting thing that seemed to part and merge again with every movement. She turned to Ducianne and shrugged. “Whether they do or not, we’re adding to our army all the time.”