For the briefest of seconds, he can feel all those tiny souls stringing his body like lamps on a wire. Then he reaches for the red thread, and pushes them into the spinner.
The machine screams like a wasp hive, and he feels the force of it expand outwards, like a blossoming flower. The horses stagger with the weight, and Shipwright curses, the palm of her hand blistering to raw strips.
‘Damn you!’
‘Sorry. Keep it going! Please.’
The next spear hits the spinner’s field dead on, ploughing a straight course to Shipwright’s skull. Before it gets there, it’s lifted, spun, shivered into shards of falling metal and wood, which fray into harmless splinters as the bubble created by the spinner soars to full effect.
Fascinating, if he wasn’t shitting himself.
The souls leave him. The spinner whines like a boiled cat.
It’s a few hundred yards to their own lines now. Then at his back, a tearing, percussive sound, as if the earth had suddenly learnt to flow like water.
A stark, tall woman sings at the edge of the Empire’s line, her voice layering, harmonising with itself, lifting the soil as her lungs rise.
Shroudweaver urges his horse faster.
A splintering behind them as one of the ruined cottages is caught, lifted, the stones tearing with furious noise, arcing down into the ranks of Hesper’s marines. Blood. Screams. Where the stones land their line folds inwards in a mess of yelling bodies.
They’re a breath away, two, when the rising earth clips the back hooves of Shipwright’s horse, lifting them both in a somersault over the lines. Arissa and Shroudweaver follow a second later.
He doesn’t have time to disentangle himself, so the only thing he can do is twist to put the horse’s body between him and the earth.
When he lands, he can hear the horse’s shins snap. He pulls himself free of the screaming animal as the shield from the spinner winks out; rolls to one side as spears land, one through the poor beast’s throat, the other just shy of his shoulder.
Staggers to his feet, breath ragged, soaked in hot blood.
Pulls Shipwright free. She’s somehow mostly unharmed, buried in a crater under the body of her horse, hollowed out by the dying implosion of the spinner. Her left hand is a blistered, bloody mess clutched in his own.
‘We’re going to talk about this, Shroudweaver.’
He grins despite himself, picks up a shield from a dying marine, still clawing futilely at the spear through her guts. His head swills with terror and elation.
From their left, Arissa reels to her feet, armour dented and helmet bloody over one brow, her sword coming clear of its scabbard.
She yells for the charge, and the rest is a blur.
Perhaps he remembers his legs lifting, pounding the torn earth.
Perhaps he remembers the shape of that stark, tall woman swaying as a crossbow bolt bows her ribs, her harsh harmonies falling silent, stilling the earth.
The ships’ crews diving through that winnowing rain of spears, into the rats’ warren of cottages and outbuildings. The skeleton of the Summer Town filling with steel.
The mercy of return fire as the ship’s ballistae began to find their mark, skittering off some of those tall shields, punching through others.
The slow advance of the dead, then faster as the Gem’s hands rose, stumbling and hurtling over the broken ground. The livingsoldiers hanging back, locking shields and lowering spears. Letting the dead do the work.
Faster still, some with feet torn and ragged, others only a little paler than the living, tucked inside neat boots that were once embroidered by lovers, punched by the skilled hands of craftsmen.
The marines aren’t fazed. Quick economical barks that would normally flit from mast to mast peel their charging groups into neat crescents.
The dead hit them in silence, met with roars and curses. The back of each crescent crumples and the sides sweep in, men and women armed with cruel cutlasses and the single-sided slip daggers so beloved of Hesper’s back alleys.
They’d planned for this, for fighting something that might not want to drop with any decency.
‘Go for the legs,’ Shroudweaver yells. A dreadlocked woman flashes him a wicked smile, ‘Whatever you want, Weaver.’
