Page 87 of Into the West

Thank the gods that those things are meant to take rough handling. They had to be; after all, the Empire only had heavy wagons or canal barges to move their stores, and once out of the Empire and onto the battlefield, there were no canals, and probably no roads, either. So transit would not be kind to lesser builds. Unlike the Spitters, which used stone balls or stubby “bolts,” the ammunition for a Poomer was whatever the Poomer loaders fancied, from glass fragments and pottery shards to chains to solid projectiles. Those were all inert enough until fired to be handled roughly, but the explosive cartridges—if those went off prematurely, you could lose half a supply column. So they had to be triggered, very precisely, by a spring-loaded mechanism on the Poomer itself that snapped into a special divot on the back of the cartridge.

They loaded the barge with all it could carry, and without being directed, one of the Dolls took the Tow-Beast’s head and led it toward the river wall as fast as the Doll’s legs could go—which was a lot faster than a human, and just about matched the Tow-Beast’s trot. Mud roared up as high as the Dolls’ heads with every beat of the heavy horse’s hoofbeat. Ten more Dolls formed a flying vee and pushed—and in a few cases, threw—the livestock out of the way, for the speeding barge to get through the maze wall’s nearest gate. Out of the crowd of milling animals and herdsfolk came a floating barge, another Tow-Beast, and another Doll leading it. And three more Dolls on top of it, to add to the work crew.

“I need—” he said to Rose.

Before he could finish the sentence, she had picked him up in her arms again and was running for the wall.

Thankfully, she put him down at the foot of the stairs, although at this point, the last thing he was worried about was his dignity. His heart racing, he ran up the steps two at a time, and with Rose close behind, impatiently shoved his way past the guards until he reached Delia, whom he found in the middle of the pack of mages.

“It’s the Red Forest,” Sai told him, expressionlessly. Jonaton was cursing, fluently and fervidly, under his breath. “I thought those damned Tayledras said it would be no problem!”

“I guess we just found out they’re fallible,” he replied, peering through the curtain of snow at the huge red blur charging up to the wall. “Careful with your mage-sight, but it’s left a trail of magical damage behind it. What the hell is there in magic that we can use against that thing?”

“The green mages seem to be able to sap it, a little, but they tell me it’s like handling poisonous thorn-branches with thorns as long as your hand. They’re having to be careful or it can turn against them and infect them. They’ve slowed it down, at least, but they can’t do more than that.” Sai shaded his eyes with his hand, and finally spat in disgust. “I didn’t want to do this, but—” He cleared his throat. “Schwande! Logan! Sera! Moklas! Clear this damned snow away!”

Those were their only weather mages, who normally confined themselves to predicting weather, and occasionally steering it gently. Back in the old land, they’d limited their powers to keeping actual disasters at bay: slowing a downpour so it didn’t become a flood, carefully coaxing rain into being when things were too dry, steering rain away from fields that still needed harvesting so that if you happened to be there, you would see the unharvested field dry and ready, and the harvested one next to it getting dumped on. They had never, in all the time he had been the Duke, used their powers to directly disperse weather. Such large-scale interference in weather was the provenance of Imperial weather mages with the Army. Generals did not care what collateral damage occurred, as long as they got the result they desired, so the four had been especially secretive for years.

As a mage himself, he sensed energies moving high above him, but that was the limit of what he could understand. The price to be paid for it, it seemed, was the sudden headache everyone got from the intense change in air pressure. Guard and mage alike winced, popping their ears. Loose snow lifted from the ground before turning to raindrops, which immediately fell back down. The snow in the air vanished from the Vale and the river valley, as if cleared away by an invisible hand. Sun broke through the clouds, which cleared away from above the Vale, as an ever-expanding, rainbow-lined hole in the overcast.

A low moan—involuntary—escaped from virtually everyone on the wall, as the enemy lay fully revealed below them.

Acre after acre of the thing, seething with hate and anger, every “tree”—though only the gods knew what those things actually were—thrashing in seemingly coordinated waves. Is it going to come over the wall? Can it come over the wall?

“Magic might backfire on us, if we try anything like a spell to control it or attack it with pure power,” Ceri cautioned. “It might absorb the magic and become even stronger.”

“Hey! Before we try any more magic on it than we already are, try shooting something at it?” Jonaton suggested, although his worried face and his tone suggested that he didn’t expect anything they threw at it physically to work.

The thing had stopped just short of the Veil; Kordas didn’t know if the Veil had stopped it, or if it wasn’t sure what the Veil was—or even if it had any thoughts at all. The tops of the “trees” were just below the top of the wall, and lower than the parapet—but he had the feeling that if the thing wanted to, or realized that it could, it would climb right over the wall. He raised his voice. “Guards! Fire at will! Any target!”

A veritable rain of bolts arced down at the nearest “trees.” And as he had expected, there was no reaction. The arrows might as well have been dewdrops.

“Someone bring me up one of the Poomer charges,” he shouted, somehow keeping his voice steady. “Delia, come over to me.”

Delia made her way through the mages to his right until she was at his side, crossbow in hand pointed downward. She looked as white as the snow had been, but her voice was steady when she answered him. “What can I do?”

“You know how the Spitters work, right?” he asked, as he took the cask-sized cartridge from Rose, who had gotten it from another Doll mid-staircase who had brought it up from the barge. It was a gray cylinder, flat on both ends, with a spot in the middle of the “back end” where the snap trigger of the Poomer was meant to strike. “This is just like the cartridges for the Spitters, but on a much larger scale.”

She nodded.

“Plant this thing somewhere down there in the Red Forest, and then hit this spot as hard as you can with a bolt,” he said, pointing to the recessed, red-painted spike pit. Kordas held it with the pit facing directly upward.

She looked away from him and stared at a spot just below them, among the thrashing trees. The rippling edges of the Forest advanced, then retreated as they touched the Veil, then advanced again . . . but each time, they stayed in contact with the Veil a little longer. And Delia just stared, as if mesmerized by the movement, while she mechanically cocked her crossbow. He restrained the urge to shout at her. Why is she taking so long?

Suddenly his hands were empty, and the trees just below them winced out of the way of the gray cylinder that appeared to have spontaneously appeared among them, driven halfway into the ground.

Before he—or they—could react, Delia had her crossbow in her hands, aimed, and fired.

POOM!

The cartridge went off spectacularly, blowing a hole in the forest that showed the ground and snow beneath it, sending bits of oozing tree, dripping substrate, and snow in every direction, as the people on the wall ducked behind the parapet. A few of the dragonflies buzzed drunkenly around the mess before seeming to get their bearings and ducking back inside one of the “mouths.” The hole was easily the size of three houses, and at the sight of it everyone cheered.

Until the hole closed right back up again before their very eyes.

“Bring up another,” Delia said steadily. “And if any of the rest of you have some magic way to drop a cartridge trigger-side-up in that mess so I don’t have to—”

“Guards! Loading line for Delia!” Kordas shouted behind her, and four guards formed into a close circle behind Delia, with her as the fifth spot of the circle. They all readied crossbows, and as Delia fired one bolt, the guard on her left took the fired bow and safely pointed it downward, then handed it to the second guard, who pulled it, handed it to the third who loaded it, who then handed it to the Guard on her right, who then placed the ready-to-aim loaded crossbow in Delia’s hands while her previous crossbow began the loading circuit.

Half a dozen of the mages, including Jonaton, made a grab for the cartridge another of the Dolls was bringing up, and within moments, there were more Dolls forming another chain on the parapets to put Poomer cartridges in the mages’ hands.