Oh Rukhsana… oh, my love, what have I done to you?
‘You,’ said a voice at his shoulder.
Adept Ahrum looked up quickly. Dinas Chayne was standing over him.
‘Sir?’ Ahrum asked.
‘Why are you accessing this material?’ Chayne asked.
‘I was told to, sir, by my superior. It is a request from the Uxor Primus of the Geno Chiliad.’
‘Trying to clean house, I suppose,’ said Chayne.
‘I imagine something like that. The Chiliad are very conscious of the fact that they have been found with a traitor in their ranks.’
Chayne nodded. ‘All right. Carry on. Process your findings to the Uxor Primus, but copy me the details first.’
‘Sir?’
‘That’s an order.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
Chayne turned away and went to resume his conversation with the senior adept.
Adept Ahrum continued to type. He pulled up the interrogation report submitted by the companions that afternoon. There were two names.
He depressed his station key and rose to his feet. Both the senior adept and Dinas Chayne looked over at him.
‘Adept?’ the senior adept asked.
‘Request permission to access the docket archive.’
‘On you go, Ahrum,’ nodded the senior adept, and turned to continue his conversation.
Adept Ahrum left the chamber. In the hallway outside, he threw off his russet robe and ditched his biometric. John Grammaticus tucked them away in an alcove out of sight and walked away down the corridor in the lamplight.
Two names. Soneka. Bronzi.
DINAS CHAYNE CUT the senior adept off suddenly.
‘That man. That station,’ he said, pointing to the vacated cogitator.
‘Ahrum, sir?’ asked the senior adept. ‘He’s a sound fellow, good at his work. What is your problem, sir?’
‘Something about him. Something familiar,’ murmured Chayne.
‘Sir?’
‘I’ll be right back,’ said Chayne, and left the station. Outside, the hallway was empty.
TWELVE
Mon Lo Harbour, Nurth, black dawn
THE FIRST PERSON to realise that something was terribly wrong was a subahdar in the Zanzibari Hon called Lec Tanha. Tanha had woken early, before first light, with a sore head and an ardent wish to continue sleeping. A solid sort, dependable, he had pulled on his boots and his cape, and climbed the bank of the earthwork from the camp to oversee the watch change.
He took a restorative pinch of peck. It was an eerie time of day, with the first daylight milking into the sky. A loose wind was blowing, scudding the land between the vast earthwork and the besieged city with a spectral fog that moved like crop smoke.
Tanha checked his sidearm, took another little furtive pinch, and conversed with two of the duty officers. He entered the observation redoubt, a fortified platform on the lip of the earthwork. The redoubt was open to the sky, and the wind riffled Tanha’s hair. He took out a set of field glasses, and aimed them at Mon Lo.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, sniffing.
‘What’s what?’ replied the redoubt’s vox-officer.
The distant, wind baffled screaming still sounded like tinnitus. There was a scent on the wind that smelled like wormwood.
‘That smell,’ Tanha said.
‘Damned infidels are burning something,’ said the vox officer. ‘Incense?’
‘No,’ said Tanha. ‘Something else.’
He looked up and listened into the windy air. A distant sound was mingling with the tinnitus. Tanha put his hand against the sand-bagged edge of the redoubt’s parapet. He felt a deep, ominous trembling.
‘Get the major general on the vox,’ he said quickly.
‘What,’ the vox-officer replied. ‘At this hour?’
‘Get Dev on the line now!’ Tanha ordered.
The vox-officer scrambled to his set. Tanha raised his field glasses again and looked down into the wreathing fog bank.
Subahdar Lec Tanha saw what was coming towards them.
He managed to speak, in a desperate, fearful stammer, the first two syllables of his wife’s name. Then he died.
A KILOMETRE TO the west, and exactly thirty seconds later, Dynast Cherikar, a senior commander of the Regnault Thorns Second Division, turned sharply to his tribune, Lofar.
‘Can we usually hear the sea from here?’ he asked.
The tribune shook his head. ‘No, sir.’
‘But you heard that? A wave striking a beach?’
Lofar looked dubious. ‘I heard something,’ he conceded. They were walking the top of the earthwork, on a standard morning patrol. Cherikar turned and looked towards the east. A great cloud, like mist or spray vapour, had enveloped the top of the earthwork a kilometre away. It was hanging in the air, like a pale hill that had not been there before.
‘What is that?’ Cherikar asked. Lofar did not reply. The duckboards under their feet had begun to shake.
The dynast and his tribune instinctively raised the spikes of their armour, barbing themselves with the psycho-receptive steel quills that gave their regiment its name. Studded all over with lethal blades, they drew their weapons, and turned to meet the onslaught.
The beautiful, mechanised blade systems of their ancient warsuits did not save them, nor did the weapons in their hands.
‘GET UP!’ TCHE roared. ‘Get up now!’
‘Go away or I shall kill you,’ Bronzi told his bashaw, and turned over in his bed roll.
Tche kicked his hetman squarely in the arse, which was presenting a reasonably generous target area.
‘Get up!’ Tche shouted.
Bronzi got to his feet, rubbing his offended backside, blinking in the half-light of the frame tent. His mind was addled, trying numbly to distinguish bits of memory that were real from pieces of dream that were not.
He was reasonably sure that geno bashaws didn’t usually wake their hets with a boot in the seat of the pants.
‘What?’ Bronzi asked.
Tche stared at him. There was a token of anxiety in the bashaw’s eyes, the sort of look that no man as big and well-muscled as Tche should ever have the need to display. ‘Get up, het,’ Tche repeated.
Bronzi was already heading for the tent flap, hopping as he tried to run and put on his boots simultaneously. He could already hear it, plain as day.
The murmur.
From a distance, war made a particular sound. The quake of the ground, the throb of engines, the rattle of weapons, the thump of detonations, the holler of voices; it all blended together into a kind of ominous murmuring, the feral grumbling of a monster waking over the next hill.
Hurtado Bronzi had heard the murmur dozens of times in his life. It had always augured days that he was lucky to live through, or hours that he could never forget.
Outside, first light was on them. Commotion ran through the camp as the Jokers scrambled to readiness. Bronzi looked up at the sky. The slowly turning clouds were staining pink, like blood in water or Nurthene silk. He could smell wormwood on the wind’s bad breath. To the east, what looked like a vast, slowly creeping dust storm had shrouded the Army lines, obscuring even the dark shoulder of the earthwork.
Bronzi pushed through his swarming men, yelling out orders, and calling for a vox. Bashaws spread out from him like shrapnel from a grenade, conducting and relaying those orders in unequivocal tones, putting rigidity and structure into a company caught on the back foot.
Still calling for a vox, Bronzi hauled himself up the ladder of one of the observation derricks. Halfway up, he looked down at Tche, and called his name. Tche tossed his scope up to him. Bronzi caught it one-handed, uncapped it, and scanned east.
Adjacent to the Jokers’ encampment, an Outremar infantry group was assembling from its tents and billets with the same kind of mad scramble that beset the geno. Beyond that, yes, now he saw it.
Veiled by the dust, the sporadic flash-flash-flash of explosions looked like
someone flicking a signal lamp behind a dust shawl. The blasts were ripping off as quickly and frenetically as firecrackers. He could hear heavy weapons chattering and the bass drum beat of artillery positions waking up. Drums too, real drums, beat wild and rapid tattoos. A few seconds later, las-batteries in reboubts to the south-east began spitting incandescent shooting stars north into the dust cloud, adding their squeals to the communal murmur.
Bronzi saw movement in the filmy edges of the advancing dust storm, and resolved it into shapes, figures.
‘Holy fug,’ he whispered.
Once, during his childhood in Edessa, Bronzi had witnessed a blight swarm on the move. For centuries, great tracts of Osroene and the Mesop Delta had been seeded with gene cereals as part of the Emperor’s program to improve food yield for the regenerating world, and surge years of insect over-breeding were triggered every few decades by over-abundant harvests. The swarm had darkened the sky, turning day to night, a dense river of locusts seventy kilometres long.
He had never forgotten the sound of a trillion wings, a purring noise like the murmur of war. He had never forgotten the sight.
He was reminded of it forcibly.
The Nurthene were spilling out of the roiling haze in huge numbers, a blight swarm of charging infantry and racing cavalry sweeping in over the earthwork and down across the Imperial lines like an avalanche. Echvehnurth warriors led the host, their whirling falxes glittering in the curiously dull light. A tide of nurthadtre followed them. Through the dust and broken light, their pink silks looked black, like the bodies of milling, teeming locusts. Bronzi saw swaying standards of reeds and crocodilia, banners of lizard skin trailing like friable green metal, nodding totem staves depicting scale, tooth and biforked tongue.
There was no regimentation, no order of battle. Nurthene cavalry charged along in the midst of the massed foot troops. He saw individual lancers, whooping and howling, mounted on galloping monitors the size of grox. Giant caimans, dull as coal, their scutes and teeth plated in gold, trudged forwards, bearing howdahs full of echvehnurth archers on their broad backs. Primitive gunpowder rockets whooped out of the host like fireworks, exploding amongst the Army encampments. Fletched darts fell like rain.
The murmur was no longer a murmur. It had become a roar.
Bronzi leapt off the derrick ladder and landed amongst his men. Whichever Army component had been camped east of the Outremar infantry group’s billet had already been swallowed up by the Nurthene storm, and Bronzi had seen enough to know that the Outremars were falling in droves, falling like gene crops beneath a hungry blight swarm, as the storm swept on across their position. Bronzi reckoned that he had less than five minutes before the Nurthene assault reached him.
‘Akkad formation!’ he bellowed to his bashaws. ‘Six lines, cannons to the front! Mortars to the ridge there! Relay this! Relay it!’
The Jokers moved like an intricate mechanism, forming structures across the land south of the earthwork. Two lines of alternating pike and carbine rifle solidified along the northern edge, behind the livestock corrals and the latrines. Cannon crews grimaced as they struggled to heave their heavy weapons, ammo crates and tripods to new positions. Men ran past him, lugging the iron tubes of mortars across their shoulders.
‘Forwards! Forwards!’ Bronzi yelled at the rifle cadres. He was waving his sabre above his head. Tche appeared, and passed Bronzi a vox-horn.
‘Jokers, Jokers, Jokers!’ Bronzi yelled. ‘Mass incursion at CR88 and eastwards. Reporting mass assault at this time! We are preparing to resist! Support requested!’
‘Joker lord, we are aware,’ the vox replied. ‘Stand ready. March in fortune. We are redeploying strengths to your position.’
‘Standing by,’ Bronzi snapped. He tossed the vox-horn back to Tche. ‘Get the fugging banner aloft!’
Bronzi looked back at the doom rushing to engulf them. He realised it wasn’t the crowing enemy forces that he really feared, despite their numbers, but the slow dust cloud that came with them and disgorged them, towering ten times higher than the earthwork ramp.
It was like a mountain about to fall on him.
THE CHAMBER OF the terracotta palace secured for central operations had turned into an undignified scrum of shouting, gesticulating personnel. A crowd of uxors and senior officers had invaded the place, demanding information as they jostled to get a look at the main strategy display, a hololithic chart table that dominated the centre of the room. Some of them were half-dressed, their eyes puffy with sleep; some were still buttoning tunics or fastening robes. Around the chamber walls, the vox adepts of Tactical and Provisional called out reports from their cogitator stations in voices that overlapped the queries of the crowd.
‘Incursion reports CR88 and eastwards!’
‘Massive numbers!’
‘Support stations engaging! We have—’
‘No response from CR89 and CR90!’
‘Get a station report from the 4th Hussars!’
‘Reporting losses at CR91 and—’
‘Say that again! Again!’
‘Losing your feed, CR90—’
‘CR93 reports contact!’
‘Silence!’
Major General Dev entered through the west door. ‘Take your places and behave according to your ranks,’ he snarled. Uxors and officers alike, cowed by his tone and his authority, fell silent and straightened respectfully.
Dev’s adjutant took the major general’s helm and sword from him, and Dev stepped forwards to the table, peering at it.
‘They took us by surprise?’ he asked.
‘Completely, sir,’ said the senior adept.
‘Assessment?’ the major general asked, leaning on the edge of the chart table and peering down. The glow from its surface underlit his face.
‘We’re still waiting for orbital appraisal,’ the senior adept replied. ‘There is an atmospheric peculiarity that—’
‘I’m not waiting for orbitals,’ said Dev sharply. ‘Someone give me a decent assessment!’
‘A major incursion has breached the earthwork in an eleven-kilometre line between CR88 and CR96, Wadi Ghez, so-called the Little Sink,’ said Sri Vedt, the Uxor Primus, tracing her finger across the hololithic chart. ‘I cannot appreciate precise numbers, but it feels like tens of thousands.’
‘I would concur with the Primus,’ said Uxor Bhaneja. ‘Their forces struck eight minutes ago, and overwhelmed the earthwork by sheer dint of numbers.’
‘And took us by surprise?’ asked Dev. ‘A force that size? They just sneaked up a division of warriors and dropped them on us? Doesn’t that seem unlikely?’
‘They are cloaked by a vapour cloud,’ said Uxor Sanzi. ‘That must surely be more than the dust produced by their movements. The cloud struck the earthwork first, with a kinetic force akin to a tsunami.’
‘More air magick?’ suggested a Torrent officer.
‘Do not,’ said Dev, raising a finger to him, ‘do not let the Lord Commander hear you utter those words.’
The Torrent officer made a quick namaste and backed away.
Dev glanced towards the uxors around the table. ‘Thank you for your frank appraisal, uxors. How accurate should I consider them to be?’
‘Our ’cepts are sharp,’ said Uxor Sanzi.
‘We feel this,’ added Uxor Bhaneja. ‘I have a Company at CR90, the Jacks. I ’cept that they are already dead.’
Dev nodded. ‘I am sorry for your loss, Uxor Bhaneja.’
Bhaneja nodded back and, tearful, accepted Sri Vedt’s consoling embrace. ‘Everyone will be mourning losses before the day is out sir,’ said Sri Vedt.
‘We are mobilising the armoured cavalry at CR713,’ Dynast Kheel of the Thorns announced, ‘and the Outremar reserves at Tel Sherak.’
‘Sri Vedt has directed four geno companies to move along the line to support the forces at CR88,’ said Honen Mu. ‘More are needed, in my opinion.’
‘Provided they bring their armour support,’ put in a Hort officer. ‘
Armour’s what we need—’
‘Armour will not suffice,’ Mu responded. ‘A muscular infantry riposte will be quicker to deliver. These are low tech warriors with blades and black powder bombs, and—’
‘Stop wasting time with debate!’ Kheel growled, rounding on the tiny uxor. ‘This is a shambles! There is no unification of command!’
Honen Mu looked Kheel straight in the eyes, or at least what she could see of them beneath the bulging thorns of his visor.
‘I believe, Dynast,’ she said levelly, ‘that Major General Dev is in charge.’
‘That was my understanding too, Kheel, so stand down and bite your tongue,’ said Dev with a brush of his hand. ‘Senior, where are the nearest Titans?’
‘Princeps Jeveth has already ordered the three Titans closest to the incursion forward to engage,’ the senior adept replied.
‘Bless that old goat for not waiting for an order,’ Dev nodded. ‘We need to bring the weight of the Hort and Torrent forces in to dam this flood.’
He began to track deployment lines across the glowing chart, conferring with the adepts and officers. Sri Vedt watched, approving of his decisions, gently correcting any detail she ’cepted as unwise.
Mu wondered if it was complacency that had cost them. Besieging forces often suffered from that flaw. The expedition had bested an entire world, and driven the last of its resistance back into one city to die. No one had expected the Nurthene to go back on the offensive.
No, it wasn’t complacency, she decided. She reminded herself that the Nurthene did not think the way Imperial humans did. Their actions were determined by values quite alien to Mu and her kind. Driven to the brink of defeat, the Nurthene had not resigned themselves to an inevitable fate.
They had fought back, the way any cornered beast would.
We have underestimated the creatures of this world too many times in this campaign already, Mu thought. Please, let us not be about to do that again.
THE STINK OF wormwood was oppressively strong, and the roar of the approaching host had become so great that Bronzi could no longer hear the voices of the men around him raised in prayer.