The Scarab Path

Forty-One

The Scorpions had been massing since before dawn, forming up into great clattering, complaining companies along the western bank. The eastern sky barely showed the first grey signs of light as they made their first sortie. It was a rabble. Totho had already seen enough to know that there was a hierarchy of usefulness within the enemy ranks. These were the losers, first to be cast away and first to die. They came in a great screaming horde, and if they possessed any appreciation of their place in the world, Totho could not perceive it.

If we could bottle that mad fervour, he thought, then we could sell it for a fortune to any general or tyrant you'd care to name.

The archers took their places and drew back their bowstrings. The poor light would work against their aim, and the Scorpion charge was uneven, the faster outstripping the slower and leaving gaps for arrows to fall into. Sometimes poor discipline offered its own tactical value.

Four dozen strings sang almost as one. The militia, denied any use for its spear detachments, had packed the barricade with bowmen, shoulder to shoulder. So far they had been the blade that had killed score upon score of the invaders, whilst the Royal Guard, with their armour and spears, had been the shield to fend off the enemy strike. The Guard had died steadily throughout yesterday's fight, their numbers already savagely depleted from the disastrous field battle. From the way they stood firm, Totho guessed they would do so until the last of them fell.

He spared his snapbow for now, letting the Khanaphir archers do their work. A solid volley hammered into the howling advance just before it engaged, and what reached the Royal Guard was pitiful, thrown back into the arrowstorm without a single loss to the defenders. The very sight of Amnon seemed to turn the Scorpions away.

'More coming!' Tirado shouted down. 'Shields!'

The archers had become old hands at arcing their shots over the curve of the bridge to fall blindly amongst the packed enemy advance. This time there were fewer cries of pain, more sounds of arrows thudding in wood. The Many of Nem were being taught battle tactics the painful way, but they were learning.

The advance was slower now, warriors not used to bearing shields were getting in each other's way. The arrows still found the odd mark, and an injured or dying man with a three-foot shield became a hazard to all around him. Teuthete and her people began loosing their own shafts, the bone and stone heads cracking stolen shields wherever they landed, or clipping the rims to punch home into faces or legs behind them. Totho sighed and worked the snapbow handle, charging pressure. He loosed all five shots at once in a narrow arc, forming a fist that smashed the shield-wall in as his bolts holed shields and flesh and barely slowed. He ducked to recharge, the archers all around letting fly so that each shield soon grew heavy and unwieldy with arrows. Men were running from the construction works on the east bank with fresh quivers. Khanaphes seemed to have an endless supply of arrows.

If we had a snapbow that could fire a bolt every few seconds, and it had a magazine of hundreds, Totho thought, I could hold this bridge alone … or with one man to feed in the bolts. I should mention it to Drephos.

'Crossbows!' Tirado called out, his high-pitched voice clear over the sounds of battle. The Scorpions in the second rank had brought up bows and levelled them over the shoulders of their comrades. The men behind them had shields up over their heads to protect them, a crude imitation of Ant-kinden tactics. 'Crossbows!' Tirado yelled again.

The Royal Guard had braced themselves behind their shields, but the heavy crossbows the Scorpions had been given were powerful enough to penetrate straight through half the time. They could not give up the breach. Tirado could shout at them all he liked.

Totho remained down until he heard the massed clack of two score crossbows. He saw men and women hurled back from the breach, shot through. Others stumbled, taken through the leg, or simply because of the massive impact on their shields. Amnon was crying for them to hold, and the archers kept aiming down for that elusive gap between shield-lines that the crossbowmen were shooting through.

Totho popped up and struck down another handful of shieldmen, giving the archers a clear shot at the men behind. The Scorpions were already surging forward, armoured warriors pressing from behind, the crossbowmen separating to let them through. Amnon cried to hold again, and then the lines clashed together. Greatsword and halberd battered against Khanaphir shields, as the Scorpion finest strove to smash their way through the weakened line with main force. Amnon himself was unmovable. Their strokes slid off his sculpted armour, deflected from his shield. He fought with his spear until the shaft splintered, and then he hacked at them with his sword.

To the right of him the line wavered. A huge Scorpion had leapt up to the barricade, hurling back two of the Guard, laying about him with a double-handed axe. Teuthete put an arrow between his neck and shoulder, shooting almost vertically down into him, but there were another three Scorpions taking his place, eager to force that one breach that would undo the defenders.

They met a wall of aviation-grade steel as Meyr rammed them with his shield. With all the thunderous momentum he could muster, he flung all three Scorpions back onto the blades of their fellows. The force of his charge took him beyond the barricade, momentarily in the midst of his enemies. He swung at them with a great bronze-reinforced club that had been a scaffolding bar only two hours before. As the enemy hacked at his mail, he hurled them left and right with monstrous blows, making even the burly Scorpions look like children. Amnon was shouting for him to get back in line and the Scorpions were all about him, halberd-blades seeking his throat, his armpits, any gap in his mail. Meyr finally stepped back, finding the barricade's edge by concentration and memory, and then retreating behind the reformed line of Royal Guard.

There was no shortage of the Scorpions, however. They were still packed solid all the way to the western shore, with no sign that they would ever break off.

'Tirado!' Totho ordered. 'Send for the Iteration!'

The Fly-kinden saluted, and darted off down the river. The archers were drawing and loosing as fast as they could, sending their shafts towards every unprotected piece of Scorpion skin they could see. Still Amnon held firm in the midst of the Royal Guard's overlapping shields as the Scorpions hurled themselves onto the bloody points of the Khanaphir spears. Now Meyr was fighting from behind the line, using his height and reach to swat any Scorpion that gained a foothold on the barricade. At any moment it seemed that the Scorpions must lose their fervour, that the attack would ebb away in a flurry of final arrows, but still they pressed and pressed. The corpses were mounting up and they used them as stepping stones up to the Khanaphir shields. A score of the Guard had fallen and been replaced, and the numbers of waiting reinforcements were now getting sparse. Totho saw old Kham, Amnon's cousin, jerk backwards with a huge gash splitting halfway into his chest, dragging the Scorpion sword from its wielder's clawed hands as he fell.

On board the Iteration they had kept the engines turning over, waiting for the call. In truth Corcoran had hoped that it would be noon before the ship's intervention was needed, but Tirado dropped down on him before the sun was clear of the horizon.

'Already?' the Solarnese demanded.

'Oh, yes,' Tirado confirmed. 'Absolutely yes.' He was in the air a moment later, zigzagging back towards the embattled bridge.

Corcoran cursed, thinking, It isn't our city, for the thousandth time. He shouted the orders, though. They had learned a lot from the Empire, those in the Iron Glove. If you wanted to do well, you did what you were told. Totho's got a plan. Totho's got a plan. He repeated it to himself over and over, ignoring the way it sounded hollower each time.

They cast off, and the Fourth Iteration's engines rumbled them towards the bridge. Its approach would not have gone unmarked by the enemy, and even now they would be wheeling out the leadshotters, not to be caught by surprise as they had been the last time.

'Get the smallshotters to the rail!' Corcoran called. 'Once we're in range I want every damn one to go off. Cut them a new road back to the Nem: grapeshot and scrapshot all weapons.'

He took out his glass and unfolded it to its full length, raking the western shore for the enemy's disposition. Sure enough, there was a roil of activity there, but the mass of Scorpions pushing to take their place on the bridge was so dense that the crew of the Iteration could slaughter them blindfold. They've stepped it up today, Corcoran realized. It was barely dawn, and yet the Scorpions were already throwing everything into the fray.

He spied the smoke from the first leadshotter before he heard the sound, clutching at the rail in sudden fear. The shot went short and wide, though, so far off that it was useless even for ranging. That's it lads, you go and waste your powder. His own people knew the limits of their weapons. They had their steel lighters ready, carefully withholding their fire until their weapons were well into range.

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.

The Mole Cricket hunched close. 'Two dozen, three, somewhere around that number.'

'We were lucky,' Totho decided. Amnon just raised an eyebrow, thinking no doubt of all the archers who had burned or been blown apart by just a few hurled missiles. Totho shook his head. 'Believe me, we could have lost it all, right then, except the men who came over were Slave Corps. The Empire's Engineering Corps has trained grenadier squads and they'd have made more of a mess than we could hope to clean up. The Scorpion commander's making use of what they've got, but it's makeshift. Most of what they threw at us went wide, even into the river.'

'They'll come again,' Amnon said. 'It won't take many of them.'

'Leave them to the archers,' Totho told him. 'They're ready now, and I get the impression they take it personally.' The archers had not lost many to the Scorpion main force, only receiving a few casualties from crossbow bolts. It had taken the grenades to seriously bloody them, and Totho knew that when the Wasps came back, they would fly into a sky filled with arrows.

Amnon sighed. He looked impossibly tired. 'It was only your ship's weapons that drew them off.'

'True. And yes, we can't rely on that. The Iteration won't manage such a good round of broadsides again. They'll distribute their 'shotters either side of the bridge, force her to keep moving.'

'The next charge, do you think?' Amnon's eyes held his gaze.

I should say something reassuring at this point, but I cannot lie to him. 'The next charge,' Totho agreed. 'It seems likely. After that we abandon the defence to Praeda Rakespear's theory, and I hope it's sound.' He looked back to the east shore where construction still went on.

Dariset approached them. 'There's a stir amongst the Scorpions,' she said. 'They're getting ready, we think.'

Amnon nodded to her and pulled his helm back on, his fingers lacing the buckle without the need for thought. If only Drephos could see how we field-test this armour, Totho thought bleakly. I should put a report in a bottle and drop it off the bridge: Armour performance sufficiently above tolerance to outlast that of the flesh.

'They're moving!' Tirado cried out. 'Shield-carapace to the front again.' The Fly was crouching atop the wooden battlements, resting there until he absolutely had to take flight again. Totho hopped up to join the archers, but the curve of the bridge hid the initial Scorpion movements. Everyone knew the distances by now. The archers were nocking arrows; they would loose them before the first enemy appeared over the crest of the arch. The Scorpions themselves would take their time in their early advance, and would start breaking into a charge as the first arrows landed on them. The carpenters, their work less than half done, dropped down to the bridge again and fled back to the east bank.

How many have we killed? Totho wondered. The Khanaphir cleared the bodies away each time, otherwise there would surely be a ramp of the dead to overcome the barricade. There was still a mighty host arrayed on the western shore, undaunted and more thirsty than ever for blood. Were they hungry yet? How were the sands of time falling on the other side of the river? How long would they have to hold off the Many of Nem before their war-host began to disintegrate?

I think it is now clear that it will be longer than we have the capability to withstand them.

The Scorpions came into sight amid a hail of arrows. The first four ranks held stolen shields fore and above, shrugging off the worst of the storm until the painted wood bristled. There would be crossbowmen concealed inside that carapace to either side, and in the centre a core of furious armoured warriors with two-handed swords and great-axes, the hammer that would leap up to strike the Khanaphir guard.

It was as well learned as parade-ground drilling now, by both sides. The shields were raised, the crossbows jutted, the vanguard of the Scorpion host leapt up the buckled stones towards their foes, impaling themselves on spears, splitting shields, trying to break the Royal Guard by sheer strength. The archers loosed and loosed, riddling either side of the charge with arrows, trying for the pale gaps between the dark armour. Crossbows raked them, plunging into the wooden barricades, flying overhead, hurling the unlucky backwards with the impact of their short heavy bolts. Totho trusted to his mail and shot into the fray, knowing that no shield or armour would save his enemies from him.

Amnon was crying again for them to hold firm. Totho saw him in his place at the fore, lending the others his strength. Meyr fought, looming over him, a Nemian halberd held in one hand like a wood-axe. Abruptly there were a lot of Scorpions up on the stones, hammering at the Khanaphir. They were dying, the attackers. They were pierced through with spears, hacked with swords, but they had a courage, an insane and reckless courage, that Totho could not understand. They were dying, but were replaced as quickly, and now the ragged defenders were giving ground. Amnon's voice boomed high above the fray, exhorting them in the name of their city to stand, but it was not their will but their sheer strength that was giving way.

'Fliers!' came Tirado's own shout. 'Wasp airborne!'

The archers, save for those closest the breach, immediately turned towards the sky. There was a scattering of Wasp-kinden coming in fast over the heads of the Scorpions and the defenders' arrows began to reach out for them. They dodged and darted about in the air, two of them dropping as the shafts found them. Totho turned his attention to the breach again.

Meyr was fighting unarmed in the front line now, simply grabbing Scorpions and hurling them off the bridge, or slapping them back into their fellows with bone-crushing force. Their swords and axes rang off his armour, lacing it with scratches and dents. He barely seemed to notice them. Totho saw a halberd slam down on the giant's wrist and just leap back from the double-linked chainmail that covered it. Stone me, but we built well when we built that.

There was a wash of heat from a fire grenade, but it had landed amidst the Scorpion flank after its bearer was shot down. The other impromptu grenadiers were veering away, the arrows coming at them too thickly to dodge. Another spun head over heels down into the water.

'They're circling left!' Tirado shrieked, his voice increasingly hoarse. 'Coming in over the water-' A moment later he screamed, 'I'm shot!' Totho searched the sky for him frantically, but the Fly had already been thrown from it, transfixed by a crossbow bolt, a tiny figure writhing amongst the Khanaphir wounded.

'Hold fast!' Amnon cried out, in a voice fit to be heard by the spectators at either end of the bridge. Totho heard the boom of the leadshotters from the shore and knew that the Iteration was coming in to try and relieve them. A moment later began the rapid rattling of its smallshotters. The Khanaphir were still holding the breach but there were none of the Royal Guard left in reserve; every man and woman was now committed to the fray. Totho saw Ptasmon and Dariset fighting to Amnon's left. Dariset's face was awash with blood from a gash to her brow, her helm knocked clean from her head. Ptasmon's shield was shattered and he laid about himself with both spear and sword. Totho emptied his snapbow into the attackers and reached for the next magazine, slotting it fumblingly into place. With frantic speed he charged his piece, already knowing he would be too late.

A Scorpion lance rammed into Ptasmon, piercing his scaled hauberk. Totho saw his mouth gape wide, and then Ptasmon had thrown himself forward into the enemy, hacking blindly at them, bringing half a dozen down in a tangle of limbs. Dariset was screaming something Totho could not hear.

Totho drew his own sword. It was a shortsword, as he had trained with in Collegium. There was nothing special about it. He unslung his shield.

Che …

He leapt down from the archery platform and found Ptasmon's footprints, shouldering his way into the shield-wall. He was no great warrior, but a man adequate through dull practice with the blade. I trust to my artifice. I trust to the armour that the Iron Glove's intellect has brought into being. He put his sword into the face of a looming Scorpion, the reciprocal axe-blow bounding from his shield with a force that ran all the way up to his shoulder.

Shards of broken water scattered over the deck after the leadshotters' latest miss, too close for comfort. The Iteration was heading for the bridge arch again, keeping itself a moving target, but the Scorpions were gradually learning. The art of the artillerist was not something that should come naturally to a savage pack of barbarians, but field practice was the best practice. Corcoran had the uncomfortable feeling that he was standing in as some kind of training instructor for the entire Nemian nation.

The smallshotters cracked and boomed from the port rail, their crews reloading as swiftly as they could, also now considerably more practised than they had been. It was the sort of thing that Totho or the Old Man went on about, the way that war honed invention and its uses. Corcoran was a pragmatist, though: the philosophy of artifice interested him only in so far as he could make money by selling it.

The next booming impact on the river was right at their stern, rocking the whole metal-reinforced ship as though a giant had taken it up and shaken it. They were in long crossbow range, too and, although the bolts that rebounded from the hull or clattered on the deck were a nuisance, a lucky shot could still be fatal.

He could see nothing of the fighting on the bridge itself, but the Scorpions were crowding the shore again, each pushing for his turn in the meat-grinder. They're all mad, Corcoran decided. They must be. The wise man would step back and wait. No sense throwing yourself into the teeth of the mill. Plainly the Scorpions felt differently.

A crossbow bolt skipped across the rail and hit his backplate with the force of a light slap, making him stagger into the next swell. His armour was not the aviation-grade stuff that Totho wore, just blackened steel breast-and-back and an open-faced helm, but at this distance it was more than adequate.

'Get those archers off us, someone!' he snapped.

'Get them yourself,' one of his artillerists replied. 'Look at them.' It was true. Since the Iteration's last pass the Scorpions had brought a load of wood and stone rubble to the bank and the shallows. The Scorpion crossbowmen were using this to shoot from, and the scattershot the smallshotters were loaded with could do little about it. It would be wasting time and ammunition to try and winkle them out. Already many of the smallshotters were being loaded with fistfuls of glass, stone and nails. The Iron Glove's quartermasters had not anticipated the Khanaphir delegation getting into a war.

I never wanted to be in a war, Corcoran reminded himself. I just wanted to sell the means to other people. Is that so wrong? It had been a pleasant time, initially, living it up as a foreign dignitary in Khanaphes, but then it had all gone to the pits.

They were passing into the bridge's shadow now, Hakkon keeping a steady hand on the tiller. One of the leadshotters on the far side touched off too eagerly, and they saw a shower of glimmering water through the archway.

'Speed up! Engines full!' Corcoran decided.

'Not in this space-' Hakkon started.

'Do it! They'll be ready for us else!'

He heard the roar of the Iteration's engines mount until the air beneath the arch shook with it. There was a spray of sparks and a shriek of tortured metal as the starboard side ground into the stone before the helmsman could correct the course. The weapons crews had all unhooked their smallshotters from the rail, for fear of losing them to the sides.

'Brace yourselves, this isn't going to be fun!' Corcoran shouted at them. He had no idea whether they had heard him, but they all looked sufficiently braced.

The Fourth Iteration leapt out from the archway on to the open river, above the bridge. The crews were already replacing their weapons when the Scorpion ordnance burst around them.

For a moment it seemed that the entire river had erupted. They could see nothing through the spray drenching them from all sides. Something struck them hard about the bows, heeling the Iteration well over to starboard, and pointing her away from the Scorpion shore. Another solid shot came down from its arc and smashed the starboard rail near the helm. Hakkon was wrestling with the wheel, trying to turn them back.

The ship rocked back, engines still churning at full speed. At least one man had been lost over the side, and more than one of the smallshotters had dropped straight past the rail. Corcoran half clawed, half rolled over to the port rail, holding hard to it, trying to take stock.

The first of the smallshotters cracked, sending its fistful of debris into the gathered Scorpions.

It could have been worse. There was either a dent or a hole in the bows, but above the waterline. It could have been worse.

'Watch out!'

He had no idea who called, in that spare second, no guess in what direction to be watching. He just clung to the rail and closed his eyes.

The impact, when it came, was shattering. The deck jumped beneath him, almost hard enough to throw him overboard. The ship lurched, a movement so unnatural it was as though the water had been changed, for one moment, into something solid and jagged.

Corcoran reeled, staring about. He saw the fresh plume of firepowder smoke, but not from where the main Scorpion artillery was positioned. This was on the flat roof of one of the riverfront houses. They got a leadshotter onto the roof? Whoever had been aiming it had been good enough to drop a shot straight on them …

He became aware that the clamour of battle was missing one important sound.

'The engines! What's wrong with the …' The words died even as he turned. The stern of the Iteration was a splintered mess. Whether by chance or skill, the rooftop artillerist had struck true. There was a hole broken clear through the deck. The wheel was gone, and if there was anything much left of Hakkon, then Corcoran did not want to go and look at it. A vast white cloud was vomiting up from the hole. And that would be steam, Corcoran decided. The bastards have cracked a boiler.

The Iteration, turned halfway from the enemy, was cruising to a slow halt, though the smallshotter men were still loosing shot with grim determination.

Corcoran's hands slipped to the buckles of his armour and released them, the mail clattering to the deck. He thumbed off his helmet even as the first of the enemy leadshotters took its next shot at them, clipping the bows by a gnat's wing.

'Time to go!' he called. 'Leave any way you can. Swim, fly, grab a plank and paddle! I mean it, lads!' All around him there were men already taking his advice. They shed what little armour they were wearing with frantic speed. Those who could get airborne, Bee-kinden and a few halfbreeds, flashed open their wings and took off for the far shore. Others were still carrying on the fight, reloading and emptying the smallshotters as fast as they could.

Another enemy shot raised a tower of water astern, and then one struck them full amidships. Corcoran was thrown off his feet, clean across the deck, stopping only when he tangled with the broken rail. He heard the snapping of timbers and the shriek of abused metal. 'Abandon ship!' he screamed to anyone that would listen. His people were jumping into the water in ones and twos. It was a long way to safety across the river, but they were not short of wooden ballast to help them along. The locals did not swim, and surely the Scorpions did not, but most of the Iteration's crew had been born and brought up around the clear waters of the Exalsee.

Corcoran kicked his boots off. The ship was listing at a sick angle, the port rail almost under water. The men who threw themselves into the river from there were providing targets for the crossbowmen, whose bolts skipped across the waves towards them. Corcoran scrabbled and slipped, trying to reach the higher starboard rail to throw himself clear there with the ship's bulk to shield him. There was an escalating shriek from the engines, and he knew that whatever damage they had sustained had not prevented the boiler pressure rising: they would blow at any moment.

With a supreme effort he grasped a strut of the starboard railing. A crossbow bolt struck the slanting deck nearby and fell back into the river.

Sorry, my love, he mentally addressed the dying ship, but it's time we were parting. He bunched himself for the effort of hauling himself over the rail, but then the engine went with an enormous crack, shaking him loose, and the stern half of the Iteration tore itself to pieces in a hail of splinters and shrapnel that scattered even the Scorpions on the bank.