The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman (45 page)

Thirty, Corathel estimated. No more than thirty-five.

“We’d have them at better than ten to one,” Jasyn pressed.

“And when our civilians break?” Lar interjected. The soft rumble of his voice was like that of distant thunder, deep and ominous. “They’ll crush one another—and us—in their own stampede.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we place them in the van. Their weight at our rear would be enough to—”

“Our rear may fall prey any day now to those enemies we left behind,” Corathel reminded his Second General. He lowered the spyglass and shook his head. “This people did not follow us all this way to serve as fodder—on either front.”

A leaden silence ensued, until Lar said, “It appears we are trapped.”

The bitter truth churned in Corathel’s stomach. Three days it had taken them—three long, grinding days for those who had evacuated Leaven to be herded west through the mountains and then south to the Gaperon. Riding his own shield, farther to the east, Corathel had been sick with fear for all that might go wrong. His scouts’ constant reports, though encouraging, were not enough to completely ease his mind. Only when his smaller diversionary force had reunited with the main civilian body—and the four six-thousand-man divisions that protected it—had he finally heaved a sigh of relief.

For a few hours thereafter, he’d felt as if the desperate road they’d taken might actually lead to safety. He was still hobbled by his wounds, and weakened from his long time abed, but determined to put all of that behind him. The lands of Kuuria were within reach. Once he had recombined his armies with the ten thousand sent from Atharvan to guard
that
civilian retreat, and added whatever strength King Thelin and the Imperial Council had marshaled…well, they just might stand a chance.

Then had come word from a forward scout of the blockade that awaited them. The sun had just set—upon the land
and
his hopes, it seemed. After leaving orders with Maltyk for the host to make camp at the Gaperon’s northern mouth, Corathel had ridden ahead to see for himself what lay before them, joined by Jasyn and Lar. Together, he and his chosen lieutenants had worked their way onto this barren jut upon the Gaperon’s western slopes, and found themselves overlooking what appeared to be a dead end.

“Chances are,” Jasyn said, not yet cowed, “this horde is the one that bypassed Leaven. Civilians themselves, for the most part. And we’ve got Kuurians on the other side. Put all our strength up front, I say, and drive through.”

“A grand bloody mess,” Lar predicted. “But he may be right, sir. We just may have the strength to eradicate this group.”

“Should we make the attempt and fail,” Corathel replied, “or take too long in doing so, we’ll be crushed ourselves by those on our tail.” Again he shook his head. “And without a rear guard, our civilians would suffer the meat of that blow. I say again, our numbers are insufficient to both clear the way
and
shield against pursuit.”

He glanced over at Owl as the Mookla’ayan chieftain gave ear to one of his handful of remaining savages. The little band had chased after Corathel when he had broken away to follow his scout to this point. Ahorse, Corathel and his lieutenant generals had outpaced their stubborn followers for a time, but the slow trek along the paths of the mountain slopes had given the fleet-footed savages a chance to catch up.

The elf’s words and gestures seemed to have turned Owl’s attention to the eastern ridge, across the pass. Owl nodded, but said nothing.

“What do you suppose they’re seeing?” Jasyn asked.

Corathel couldn’t guess. At this point, he would have welcomed any advice the savages had to offer, but trying to communicate with them always ended up giving him a headache. He had searched for an interpreter among his troops, yet hadn’t been able to turn one up. Barring that, he might as easily wish for a giant bird to bear them all safely over the mountains to Souaris as for the ability to understand their barbaric tongue.

Sensing his gaze, Owl looked to him, but gave no reaction.

“It doesn’t matter,” Corathel decided. He turned back to the scene below, and sighed. “We’ll have to think on this.” As sour as Jasyn’s plan tasted, their only apparent option was to redirect themselves west. Krynwall did not offer half the strength—or room—that Souaris did, and Corathel was far less confident in General Rogun’s willingness to permit refuge than he was in King Thelin’s. Be that as it may, he would seek word from his western outriders as to the possibility, before making a decision.

“Come,” he said, rising from his crouch. “Let us claim what rest we can, and see what the dawn brings.”

“O
GRE!” HER FORWARD SPOTTER ROARED.

General Vashen slammed the door to the primary boiler and scrambled for her seat at the helm. Ignoring her driver’s worried glance, she threw open an iron viewing slat. The wash of cool air that poured through was like a mother’s breath upon a stinging wound. Yet the scene beyond caused her stomach to clench.

“Full to grinder!” she yelled back at her crew.

“Full to grinder!” they acknowledged.

The drillers were already in place, working the pump handle back and forth in steady cadence. As the order was given, their pace quickened reflexively. It mattered not. Under this new, steam-powered configuration, it was up to the boiler master to determine the allocation of energy maintained by their labors.

He worked to do so swiftly, turning a series of knobs and levers that would redirect power from the wheels to the grinder. They could not surrender all momentum, of course, but given what lay ahead of them…

Vashen looked again through her tiny window. The ogre was still coming, a lumbering monstrosity that might have been taller than their rover were it able to straighten its hunched, gnarled bulk. The stump of an uprooted tree served as its cudgel, broken roots caked with dirt and blood. The grinder was turning, but not fast enough, she feared.

“Impact!” the spotter called down, hunkering in his turret.

Vashen grasped a pair of handholds welded against the rover’s inner wall. The ogre hefted its cudgel, cheered by the swarm of skatchykem around it. The weapon came down—

And was promptly ripped from the creature’s grasp as the grinder roared to full strength. So stunned was the beast that it did not even attempt to move aside, but was caught headlong by the rover’s drilling snout. Rocklike skin cracked and tore, and a spray of blood filled the air, some of which flew through the viewing slat to spatter Vashen’s face. She closed her eyes at the ogre’s bellow, under which she heard its bones crunch and splinter amid the grinder’s metal tooth-wheels.

The rover’s meal was soon finished, the deep, crackling thunder of its munching replaced by the high-pitched whine of barbs and teeth spinning in empty air. The warder general wiped her eyes with a sleeve and saw that the ogre’s brethren were wisely clearing a path along the road, sliding to either side of the lethal grinder. Their weapons banged and raked against the outer
walls of the rover’s steel-and-iron shell, while the skatchykem themselves shrieked and hissed with contempt. But, for now, the rover rolled on.

“Return to wheels, three to two,” she commanded, licking the scar upon her lips and tasting the ogre’s blood.

“Wheels, three to two,” came the echo, and the boiler master set to readjusting the rover’s power ratios.

She’d had good reason to doubt, in the beginning, the success she enjoyed now. The theories presented by the outsider who called himself Htomah had
appeared
sound, but she was Hrothgari, and her people knew better than any other, perhaps, that diagrams and implementation were often separated by a wide gulf of trial and error. When King Hreidmar had asked her opinion, she had allowed only that it
could
work, not that she believed it
would
.

Had she laid wager, the only purse she would have won was that her people could make the requested modifications in the time allotted. After much discussion between these Entients and the king’s engineers, it was decided that seven siege rovers would have to suffice. Given what they might be expected to go up against, Vashen herself had argued for no fewer than twice that number. But
time
, Htomah had kept insisting, was their greatest enemy, and had to be taken into account.

Seven days for seven rovers. The Hrothgari had completed them in six. But there would be no time to test them—no chance to make further modifications or to learn if the Entients’ powers could be trusted. To get them out of Ungarveld, the rovers had been constructed in segments, floated on barges along rivers from beneath the earth, and quickly assembled under the light of moon and sun. All would have to work as planned, for there was no going back.

It was for that reason that Vashen had insisted upon captaining one of the rovers herself. Her most natural place, others had argued, was at the head of the Hrothgari army as it led their people south. But the best hope for their safe emergence was a successful diversion. If their small pack of siege rovers failed to provide that, the Hrothgari’s main populace would likely be caught out in the open and fall quickly to the very fate they were risking so much to avoid.

As primary commander and first defender of Ungarveld, the warder general would not let that happen.

She had selected each of the crews herself—no easy task given the number of uncertainties involved, and considering that she did not wish to strip the army of its leaders. Fortunately, it was not necessarily warriors she needed. Each converted mole required a team of operators, but the great hope was that few would be required to wield hammer or blade. She took officers as captains, engineers as drivers and boiler masters, warders as spotters and hurlers, miners as pushers and drillers, and general laborers to fill out support positions and to serve as reserves. For each rover, more than two dozen dwarves rode within, keeping the war machines churning day and night.

And so they had for more than a week now, rolling south and west across the eastern half of Tritos. At its heart, each rover was still an enclosed hand-
car. Wheels and grinder were driven now by a steam mechanism of valves and rods, pistons and boilers, rotating cogs and spinning flywheels, as laid out by Htomah—generating a strength of energy that no team of dwarves could match or maintain while pumping manually on the seesaw lever arms. The problem was the scarcity of fuel available to them to keep the fires burning and the boilers steaming. That was where the Entients’ sorcery—and Vashen’s greatest fears—came into play. For it made no sense to her that the fires would continue burning without wood or coal, or that the boilers’ water supply should remain full with but a few drops of sweat and the occasional rain shower to replenish it. Yet Htomah and his friends had claimed to have tied the renewal of these fuels to the dwarves’ labors. So long as Hrothgari on the pump levers maintained their endless push-pull cycle—pushers on the wheels, drillers on the grinder—the rovers would continue rolling and chewing along.

“Long enough to rendezvous in the south?” she had asked Htomah skeptically.

“If you do as I say, yes.”

Only now, after eight full days, did she truly believe him. She had even given up trying to understand how they managed it, and simply accepted the Entients’ work for its results. Her chief concern now was in dealing with the skatchykem that had assailed them for the past three days. A handful at first, her foes now stretched far and wide beyond her spotters’ range of sight. Should any of their vessels suffer a failure—mechanical or magical—at this point, its passengers would be stranded within this sea of enemies, left to starve and rot until the skatchykem tore their way inside and raised the dead up as their own.

Small wonder her nerves had grown tighter and tighter over the past few days. It had been bad enough before, praying to Achthium that so many complex mechanisms would hold strong against the rigors of movement over such rough and varied terrain. With thousands of enemies now battering them day and night, trying to get at those seen to be riding within, it seemed but a matter of time before the assault exacted a critical toll.

“Made short work of that one, eh?” her driver shouted, loud enough to be heard over the hiss of steam and churning thrum of machinery.

Vashen stroked the forked braids of her chin beard and gave him a nod. She was already hoarse from shouting commands, and would likely be deaf before this ordeal was done. Htomah had failed to warn them about the forgelike conditions she and her crew would be called upon to endure. The shrieks and squeals and groans of metal, the roar of fires, the whir of spinning teeth, the grinding of studded wheels over mud and stone and corpses, the rhythmic huffing of the pushers and drillers, the snarls and grunts of the hurlers whose job it was to pepper the enemy with missiles so as to tease and torment and draw them on…all was magnified by the thick plates of iron and steel that shielded them now from certain death, creating a cacophony that raged endlessly inside her skull.

At the same time, she had come to cherish these sounds. For they were the breath and heartbeat of the monster in which she rode, a living creature of fire and metal shambling its way inexorably across the land. Should its pulse cease, so too would hers.

Given the latest exchange, however, her confidence was soaring. That ogre had presented the fiercest test yet, and had scarcely caused her rover to shudder. Doubtless, the blades and teeth of her grinder had suffered damage as a result; mincing one ogre did not guarantee that it could devour another. But she liked their chances better now than before. With any luck, the skatchykem would take note, and do better to clear a path henceforth.

So long as they do not clear away altogether.
Strange, that they hadn’t done so already. They seemed to have been summoned, as Htomah had promised, by the pillar of smoke risen from each rover’s tail. After three days of bitter failure, however, she would have thought they might stray in search of easier prey. It left her to wonder if the Entient had worked some additional sorcery to fuel their obsession, or if their madness truly ran so deep.

Not that such frustration was inconceivable. It must be vexing indeed, she thought, to be able to crawl all over one’s enemy and yet fail to crack its shell. For all its armored protection, her force’s pace was…ponderous. Were it not for the swarm of foes, she could have crawled alongside without sweating a drop.

Which was more than she could say riding inside. The air was hot and stifling within these iron walls, clouded with a haze of dust and smoke.
’Tis no worse than some of the caves back home
, she reminded herself, and drew strength from the thought. The shadow-earth in which she had been bred and raised was leagues behind her—a prison, despite all that her kin had shaped and fashioned and constructed within. The wide world awaited, and she would make it her own.

She shut her viewing slat with a determined grunt and clambered back down to renew her inspection of the boilers, nodding and grinning at the crew members she passed. The fires burned as hot as they had eight days ago, upon setting forth. The sparks struck and fanned beneath the floor by those working the pump levers up and down, up and down, seemed indeed capable of fueling the Entients’ sorcery indefinitely. Or was it the other way around? Either way, she saw no cause for her persistent suspicion that Htomah had hidden something important from her.

Her boiler master, Duggarian, was wiping his brow as she came upon him. He greeted her with a scowl.

“Is something amiss?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Nothing I can see,” he grumbled over the engines’ roar.

She patted his shoulder in understanding. Dugg had grasped Htomah’s designs quicker than most. But he was even worse than she about accepting results whose cause he did not comprehend.

“You fret too much over what cannot be helped,” she said. “If they could have explained it to us, I’m certain they—”

“We’re using up water too fast,” he replied impatiently. “I’ve been adjusting the cutoff to minimize unnecessary flow loss, but at our current rate, we’re going to run dry long before we reach the southern mountains.”

It was Vashen’s turn to scowl. Her gaze shifted to a set of pipes leading up to the roof of their rover, where gutters had been carved to collect and channel rainwater into the feeder tanks. “Could our friendly parasites have impaired our gutters?”

“I don’t see how,” Dugg snorted. “Even if the brutes were to recognize their function, I’ve not seen the weaponry that would be needed to damage the troughs. I’d sooner believe that the old man’s…
spells
are losing strength.”

“He assured us that wouldn’t happen, not so long as we had even a trickle to keep them fed.”

“We’ve not had a good rain since starting out,” he reminded her. “Might be he was counting on it.”

She could not argue there. She and the king’s engineers had questioned Htomah and his friends endlessly, it seemed, but there was still plenty about this venture that remained unknown. The Entient himself, Vashen had sensed, did not have all the answers, and had served up hopeful assurances, in those cases, rather than share his doubts.

But there was nothing to be done about that now.

“We’ll make do,” she promised him. “Might be we’ll all have to sweat a mite more, else cut our ale rations and burn that.”

Dugg harrumphed. “I’d sooner
double
those rations, and let the beast choke on what my own body can’t keep.”

“There’s that, too,” she agreed. “And a pity it would be. Just in case, pray for rain, hmm?”

He shook his head, and she moved on. Hurlers busied themselves at the arrow slits on either side, firing darts and jabbing with spears at those who poked futilely back at them. The openings were little more than ventilation holes, angled downward so that the dwarves inside could attack from above while those below were left to aim and scratch at the inner ceiling. She would have enjoyed causing a few more casualties, even knowing as she did that they would only rise anew. Alas, she would have to settle for the destruction of those who ventured too close to her grinder. Those ones, at least, would not haunt her again.

The grinder roared as if in response—once, twice, in quick succession, finishing its victims almost before they could scream. Mere morsels, those. Humans. She had learned to tell simply by the pitch of the whirring drill teeth. Though far outnumbered among this horde by the various races of Eldrakkar and Gorgathar, humans were the weakest and most clumsy, and thus the last to clear her rover’s path as it cored its way through their thick, jostling press. Her fool enemies would push and shove to get close, then push and shove to get away. Those who tripped and fell or failed to squirm past the others were caught by the grinder—which often seemed to draw as much delight as anger from their fellow skatchykem.