Chapter 301 -294: The Wrong Weapon
The five warhounds came down the far bank and went straight into the water.
"They’re goin’ in," Hesk said.
The canal was deep enough to sink an adult there but the machines went in and kept going. Water came up over their lower parts and did not slow them, and then they came up the another bank with mud sheeting off the front.
Marsh had his spy glass on them the whole way.
"Every cannon off the swarm. Onto those things."
"Sir, if we come off the swarm the demonities will be on us in four minutes."
"I know that. Now onto the machines."
The call went down the line.
"Cannon one, shifting!"
"Cannon two, shifting!"
"Cannon three, on target!"
"Cannon four, on target!"
Nineteen crews swung nineteen cannons off the demons swarm onto five walking tin monstrosities nobody on that line had ever seen.
"Cannons ready sir!"
"Fire."
Then the rounds landed.
WHUMP BOOOOMMM. WHUMP-WHUMP BOOOMM. WHUMP BOOOOOM
Five or six rounds went wide by a few metres and came down in the mud to either side of tanks. The rest landed close, all round them, and the bank went white from end to end. Mud and water went up in sheets a hundred paces in every direction.
One landed directly on the second machine.
It went out of sight inside the fire. When the light dropped it was slewed sideways with its front pushed round, and stopped.
Down the line somebody started cheering, and then another man, and then the whole of Hesk’s crew.
Bren did not join them. He watched the tin can sit there for four seconds.
Then it straightened out and came back on the bank.
The cheering immediately stopped.
"Reload," Marsh said. "All nineteen. Again."
Bren stopped looking at the machines. He was looking at the ground where the masses had come down, and at the burn on it, and at how far the mud had been thrown.
"Captain."
"Not now, Marlok."
"Captain, it’s the wrong weapon."
Marsh turned round.
"Look at that ground. Look how far the mud went." Bren pointed with the tally book. "This canon doesnae punch through. It was never built to punch. It comes apart into fire and takes everything soft that’s inside it, and that is what ye want when there’s four thousand of them wading through a meadow."
"And against it?"
"Against one hard thing it’s a bucket o’ fire thrown at a rock."
"We hit that one squarely."
"Aye. And it sat down for four seconds and got up again." Bren’s voice had gone flat. "Ye can hit it again and ye might take somethin’ off the outside of it. That is all I have got for ye, Captain, and I don’t like sayin’ it."
"Then I want the heavy battery."
"The heavy battery is eleven miles south covering the ford, sir," said the officer at his shoulder. "Four pieces, all dug in. To bring one across we would have to lift it, move it, and re-site it."
"How long?"
"Two days."
Marsh let that go without answering it.
The machines have already come up near the earthworks upto hundred paces out.
Then they stopped.
All five of them, in a rough line, without hurrying. There was no obstacle in front of them and nothing falling on them at that moment. They simply chose the ground and halted on it.
The round part on top of the nearest one began to turn, and the pole out of the front came round with it.
Bren watched the end of that pole travel along the line of cannons and stop.
It was pointing at the fourth.
"*Down*," he said. "Get down—"
**CRACK.**
No white light. No mana mass.just a sound like. A a hammer coming down on an anvil the size of a house, and then the fourth cannon stopped existing.
Bren was forty paces off but it still put him on the ground with his head ringing.
When he got his head up there was a gap in the earthworks with smoke coming out of it. The cannon was in three pieces and one of them lay thirty paces behind the line. Of the six men who had crewed it he could see two, and neither of them looked like they were going to get up anytime soon.
Two hundred paces out, the pole came back round and stopped.
**CRACK.**
The seventh canon went out with the crack in its frame that had not moved in two years.
**CRACK.**
The eleventh canon, with the runes thinning at the mouth.
They were not firing quickly. There were long seconds between shots when nothing happened at all, and that was the part the crews could not stand — waiting while a pole came round and chose.
"They’re takin’ them in order," Hesk said. There was blood down the side of his face and he did not seem to know it. "Left to right. They’re just walkin’ along the line."
"Vann." Marsh was already moving. "Mage post. I want Ilder here, and tell him what he is coming to. Then send to the goblins — every airship they have, over this bank."
The adjutant went.
"How long for Ilder?"
"Twenty minutes, sir. He is at the second post."
**CRACK.**
The fourteenth cannon came apart and earthworks with it.
"In twenty minutes there will not be a cannon here for him to stand behind," Marsh said.
The airships came in eleven minutes.
Three of them, low over the earthworks, engines labouring, the goblins already hanging out of the gondolas. They had heard enough from the runner to know what they were coming to, and they came at standard height they used against infantry, which was anything but sensible.
They went over the machines and dropped everything they had.
The charges came down on the top plate and near the hulls. The tops of two machines lit up. Something came off the third one but there was too much smoke to see anything clear on those machines.
"There," Hesk said. "*There*—"
The lead machine’s turret came up.
The pole tilted toward the sky, and the airship above it was two hundred feet up and slow and turning, and there was nothing about it that was hard to hit.
**CRACK.**
The shell went through the gasbag near the front and out the other side, and the ship folded in the middle and came down across the water meadow in one long collapse with the gondola swinging under it, and the fire ran the whole length of the envelope before it reached the ground.
Nobody at the earthworks made any sound at all.
The other two immediately climbed away hard. One of them had gas venting out of a tear along its flank in a white streamer that followed it all the way south.
But the third machine was not moving.
The charges had opened it along the top, and it sat there unmoving.
"One," Bren said. "That’s one of them down."
"One," Marsh said. "It cost an airship and eleven goblins."
**CRACK.**
The sixteenth cannon went.
Marsh looked along his line. Six gone. Thirteen still standing, all of them useless, their crews waiting behind them for a pole to come round and choose.
"Get the cavalry up," he said. "All of them. And bring me my horse."
The officer stared at him. "Sir, a lance against that—"
"A lance against that punches a hole." Marsh was already unbuckling the spyglass from his belt and handing it off. "But they have stopped, they are two hundred paces out, and they are looking at my cannons instead of at their own flanks."
"Sir, that is four hundred riders."
"Soon won’t be if we don’t take action" He took the reins from the boy who had brought the horse. "Ilder cannot bind what he cannot reach and other spells will have limited effect. Put the riders in among the machines and he arrives to something he can work with. Leave them sitting out there and he arrives to a hole in the ground and a great many dead gunners."
He got up into the saddle.
"Marlok."
Bren looked up.
"If any of them are still standing when this is finished, get inside one."
They went out in an arrow formation.
One rider at the point. Three behind him, then five, then seven, widening back into the body of the detachment — four hundred horse shaped into a single wedge with the narrowest part of it in front.
Standard formation for piercing. A line sweeps across a front and pushes it back. A wedge puts every horse in the detachment behind one point, so that all four hundred arrive at the same place in the enemy’s front and go through it instead of along it.
Marsh rode at the front.
The warhounds immediately noticed them.
The lead machine did not wait for them to close.First shell came into the wedge four ranks back and took eleven riders with it, and where they had been now there was a hole in the formation.
The wedge closed up and kept going.
CRACK. CRACK.
Two more. One went wide and put a crater in the meadow. The other directly into formation.
Then the hatches opened on the tops of the hulls, and a demon came up out of each one, shoulders and head clear of the plate, and took hold of the guns mounted there.
The top guns started firing, and the head of the wedge came apart. Horses and riders went down together into the standing water, and the wedge rode through what was left of them.
Those top guns turned much faster than the poles could. A rider who got round the flank was still in front of one.
The only good news was the demon working it was not safe anymore either.
Somewhere behind Marsh a rider put a lance through one of them at a full gallop and took him off the top of his own machine, and that gun stopped immediately.
The wedge reached them.
Lances came down on the front plate and skidded off.sime went into the sides and stopped at a hand’s width in and snapped. Riders got round the back where the plate was thinner and put lances into the engine housings, and one machine began tearing somewhere inside itself and slewed hard left, went on slewing left, and could not straighten.
Marsh went for the lead machine.
He came in from the flank with his lance down and nobody left near him, and took the strike on the joint between the hull and the round part on top of it.
The lance went in about a hand’s width. The same as all the others.
Then he used his lance skill with lance immediately lighting up increasing its penetrating power.
It went all in smoothly — down the shaft, through the point, and out into the plate on the far side, and every seam on that hull lit from the inside at once. A white line ran along every join it had, front to back and top to bottom, as though somebody had put a hole through both sides of the machine.
Then it stopped.
Marsh’s tried taking his lance back but well it simply broke into two pieces. He went past the machine at a full gallop, hauled his horse round it, and sat there with both hands on the saddle and his head down.
"That’s two," Bren said