Of course, the thousands of mantises running in a living river around and sometimes upon those feet could make it a bit difficult to reach the target. One of the High Lords might make short work of it, but they were mostly engaged above, and the Legion firecrafters had already exhausted themselves.
Of course… one didn’t really need to hurt the bulks. They only needed to stop them, before they breached the wall and left gaps into which the vord swarm would pour, running down the retreating Legions before they could reach Garrison.
“Bernard,” Amara said, her own voice thready. “Riva.”
“Hah,” Bernard said. He turned to Giraldi. “Centurion, signal arrows. One: Lord Riva to report to me. Two: General call for engineers at this location.”
Signal arrows were bright enough to be seen for miles. The message would get to Riva within a moment. It would take him little longer to fly back to the front, but Amara was not sure how much time they actually had.
It seemed to take forever, and the bulks pressed ever closer. The mantises seemed to go mad with eagerness as they did, as if the bulks were pushing out some kind of psychic bow wave. One breach appeared atop the wall, and another, and Bernard dispatched reserves to reinforce the weakened areas.
There was the roar of a nearby windstream, and Riva, dressed in trousers and a loose, unbuttoned shirt, his hair a wildly tossed mess, looked blearily around the wall. He spotted Bernard and moved to him, lifting his fist in a salute and glancing out at the bulks as he did. He froze. “Bloody crows.”
“Bloody crows,” agreed Gram.
“We need water,” Bernard said to Riva. “My lord, we need to water that ground, and we need to do it now.”
Riva opened and closed his mouth a few times, then seemed to shake himself. “Oh, of course. Bog them down. We’d need a river to do it in time.”
“The Rillwater,” Bernard said. “It isn’t far from here. Maybe a quarter mile southwest.”
Riva lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Possible, perhaps. Engineers?”
“Assembled below.”
“Aye, aye,” Riva mused. “Just like irrigating a field. Only more so. Ex cuse me.”
Riva leapt from the wall to the courtyard below, braking his fall with windcrafting, and turned to the engineers. He began issuing rapid orders. The men gathered in ranks and knelt to place their bare hands against the earth. Riva, at the front of the group, did the same, and several hundred experienced engineers, led by Riva, began to make the earth quiver.
It didn’t take long. There was a moment where nothing changed, then the charging mantises began to appear with their lower extremities covered in mud. The mud splatters began to go farther and farther up their legs—but the ground before the walls had been superheated several times over the last day, and had baked into something almost like hardened clay.
“More!” Riva shouted. “More, crows take you!”
The strain upon the furycrafters was enormous. One of the engineers let out a strangled squeak and abruptly fell onto his side, thrashing and clutching at his left shoulder. Two others simply collapsed, dead or unconscious.
Rushing water abruptly spread over the ground beneath the walls, rolling across it like a vast mirror that reflected the deadly glory of the ongoing aerial battle.
They waited, while the engineers kept up the effort of redirecting the little river. Men collapsed every few moments. Lord Riva’s face became strained, with blotches of color on his pale cheeks. The water rose.
Then one of the vordbulks let out a higher-pitched bellow as one of its feet slid out from beneath it, sliding on the smooth clay surface made slippery by water and by the dust and grains of dirt churned up by the passing of so many mantis feet. It listed far to one side, like a ship wallowing between swells, but then slowly, slowly righted itself. A moment later, it took another step and resumed its advance
“Close!” bellowed Bernard back toward Riva over his shoulder. “Can you give them a shake?”
“Aye!” Riva panted, his jaw set. Then he closed his eyes again, speaking to the engineers, and suddenly the earth itself groaned. It jerked and quivered once. Then it lurched abruptly to one side, and Amara staggered against Doroga, who caught her and prevented her from falling.
Out on the field, two more vordbulks, no more than two hundred yards from the walls, screamed and slipped, falling awkwardly. They pitched over toward their sides in motions that were rendered slow-looking by sheer scale. It took them what seemed like seconds to fall, letting out bone-shaking basso calls of distress as they did. They hit the ground hard, driven by their own vast weight, sending tons of water and mud flying into the air with the impact. Dozens, if not hundreds, of vord were crushed beneath each of the monstrous creatures, whose weight was sufficient to leave a deep impression even in the baked clay. They thrashed, their limbs crushing more vord, and moaned out low calls that made the surface of the shallow water around them quiver.
“Good enough,” Bernard said. “Good enough. It’ll have to be.” He looked at Giraldi, suddenly sweating. “Centurion, the stone.”
Giraldi reached into his pouch and retrieved a smooth, oblong stone of the same color as the wall. He passed it to Bernard, who placed it upon the ground, and said, “Prepare to sound retreat.”
The trumpeter looked nervously out at the field and licked his lips.
Bernard took a deep breath, then drove the heel of his boot down onto the stone, shattering it.
A pulse of cold wind seemed to flow out from the broken stone, raising dust and smearing fresh blood into new streaks. Seconds after it did, one of the merlons, the large blocks of stone atop battlements, suddenly quivered and groaned, its form twisting into a new shape. What looked like a Phrygian sled dog seemed to come shuddering out of the block of stone as if digging its way from a snowbank.
It promptly turned, lunged forward, and crushed a vord warrior against the opposite merlon, splattering the mantis to shards of broken chitin and smears of green-brown blood.
All along the walls, the canine gargoyles came to life and began smashing into the vord with implacable ferocity—and once all of them were free of the merlons, the stone beneath that recently vacated place began to quiver and heave, and more gargoyles began to emerge.
“Sound retreat!” Bernard ordered.
The trumpet began sounding the signal, and the Legions moved back instantly, as if Bernard’s voice had carried to each and every one of them. Amara joined her husband and the rest of the command staff as they turned to abandon the walls, while all around them more and more canine gargoyles tore their way free of the stone that made the wall and began killing vord with what looked like ferocious glee, their upcurved stone tails wagging.
The mules and their teams were already on the move, and as Amara reached the Valley floor again, she noticed—the ground was growing soft even on this side of the wall. Riva stayed where he was, gasping, both hands on the ground.
Amara rushed to Riva’s side, and said, “Your Grace! We’ve got to go!”
“In a minute!” he panted. “Ground on this side of the wall is all loose earth. Watering it will slow them down even more.”
“Your Grace,” Amara said, “we do not have a minute.” She turned to the engineers and snapped, “You men heard the signal. Retreat.”
Exhausted, only a few of them had enough energy to salute, but they all groaned to their feet to begin shambling away from both the steadily shrinking wall and the steadily growing numbers of gargoyles.
Amara looked wildly around her. Everything was flashing colored lights and screams and confusion. Here and there, vord broke through the living wall of angry gargoyles. Knights Terra and Ferrous would close in on each of them, slowing their progress to give the tired legionares more time to retreat. Men dragged the wounded toward safety. Horses screamed in panic. Vordbulks continued their vast, deep bellowing while the mantises shrieked and screamed fit to pierce Amara’s eardrums.