But then Wang gasped beside him. One of the larger beasts surrounding the Queen had risen to its full height and unfurled what appeared to be great fan-like shields on either side of its head. Shao had no idea what the shields were composed of, but they must have been tougher than steel, because as the first fireball reached the Queen and her cortege of Paladins, Shao saw it hit the shield in a shower of sparks and bounce harmlessly away.
Within seconds the rest of the Paladins had risen to their full height and extended their own fan-like shields. Shao saw fireball after fireball hit the shields and deflect away, leaving barely a mark. Enclosed within the protective barrier, the Queen remained entirely unharmed. Directly below, meanwhile, the Tao Tei continued to follow her bellowed instructions, hurling themselves relentlessly against the mirrored surface of the Wall.
Then they stopped. And for a moment an eerie silence fell. Wang and General Shao looked at one another. Down below them, on the Wall, the thousands of Corps soldiers seemed to pause too, as though readying themselves for the next stage of the battle.
The mirrored defenses had fallen. Now they were just so much glittering shrapnel at the base of the Wall. The stone surface had once again been exposed, leaving the Wall vulnerable to renewed attack.
The Queen used the vibrating web between her horns to issue another order, and all at once the Tao Tei surged forward en masse and hurled themselves at the Wall once again. But this time they dug their taloned claws into the crevices between the stones and began to haul themselves upward. Some fell back, but many didn’t. The Tao Tei were climbing the Wall!
Trying to hide his anxiety, to appear calm and authoritative, General Shao stepped forward. “Close combat!” he shouted.
Immediately his order was conveyed up and down the length of the Wall. “Close combat! Close combat!”
Although General Shao had hoped it would never come to pass, this was another eventuality for which the soldiers of the Nameless Order had prepared themselves. Over and over again they had practiced their strategy for what would happen if the Tao Tei ever managed to breach the Wall. They had practiced it until every single man and woman could have performed their designated tasks in their sleep. And now the day had finally come when they were being forced to put that strategy into operation.
Within the inner Wall the Tiger Corps were busily pulling levers and adjusting mechanisms. As a result of their endeavors, the raised “nests” on which the Eagle Corps warriors perched with their crossbows suddenly cracked open, releasing great coils of barbed wire netting. As this was happening, the Crane Corps soldiers, now uncoupled from their sky rigs, moved back to form themselves into a defensive barrier, the rigs themselves, no longer needed for the time being, folding up and descending through trapdoors in the floor that had opened to receive them. The forward positions vacated by the Crane Corps were now taken up by the purple-armored Deer Corps, who advanced to a point directly behind the raised nests of the Eagle Corps archers. At an order from Commander Deng, which was relayed along the length of the Wall, the Deer Corps warriors raised their turtle-shell-like shields in unison, creating a formidable barrier between themselves and the enemy.
Despite the anxiety he was feeling, General Shao watched the preparations with pride. His soldiers had trained well, and now, with conflict against a terrifying enemy looming, they were acquitting themselves admirably. Whether they would win the upcoming battle was an impossible question to answer, but he was sure of one thing: whatever happened today, the men and women under his command would fight with courage and conviction, and would not give up until the very last one of them was dead.
6
William and Pero had a grandstand view of the action as battle was joined. Despite the best efforts of the red-armored archers, the first wave of screeching, green-skinned Tao Tei suddenly appeared at the top of the Wall, scrambling and clawing their way over the battlements. There was no reticence about them, no hesitation. They were insatiable creatures, who wanted only to tear and kill and devour. They had no notion of fear or pain or death. Each and every one of them was purely and simply a compact, ferociously equipped war machine.
William had been in enough battles to know how chaotic, how disorientating they could be. He knew that to survive you needed to keep a clear head, to keep your eyes and ears open, to react quickly and efficiently. As the first wave of Tao Tei swarmed up and over the battlements he took in all that he could, his mind simultaneously assessing his and Pero’s chances of survival. He knew that to have any hope of living through the next few hours, if not minutes, they needed to have their hands in front of them rather than bound behind their backs.
As had been the case for some time, the young black-armored soldier and his silent companion were now more concerned with what was happening in front of them, rather than with what their two prisoners might be doing behind their backs. Acting quickly, William jumped down from the buttress and pushed his shoulders back, stretching his arms as far as they could go. Gritting his teeth against the pain in his bound wrists, he forced his hands down his back, at the same time bending forward until he had managed to get his tethered hands over and beneath his backside. Crouching low, and eventually dropping to his knees, he then contorted his body still further until he had managed to push both his feet through the loop of his conjoined arms. By the time he struggled back to his feet his hands were in front of him. Although they were still tied together, and his wrists were slippery with blood as a result of his efforts, at least he could now use them to defend himself if needs be.
When he saw what William was doing, Pero followed suit. It took both men around thirty seconds to perform their contortions, by which time the Tao Tei were cutting a swathe through the front line of red-armored archers. Some of the archers’ arrows had pierced the creatures’ eyes and killed them, but it hadn’t taken long before the ascending Tao Tei were overwhelming the archers through sheer weight of numbers. The first thing William saw when he straightened up was one of the archers being swept from his perch by the massive taloned claw of a Tao Tei. The archer flew through the air, flailing and screaming, then sailed clean over the Wall and disappeared from sight, plummeting to his certain death far below.
Having broken through the line of archers, the Tao Tei leaped towards the barrier of shields held in place by the purple-armored soldiers. As though unaware of the danger in front of them, though, many of the creatures were instantly caught in the coiled barbed wire nets that had unfurled from the archers’ nests. Although the coiled and razored nets didn’t shred their flesh, as they would have done to any normal adversary, they did hamper their progress enough for the purple soldiers to use their long lances to impale many of the creatures through the eyes. Within minutes many of the Tao Tei lay dead, tangled in the nets, but that still didn’t deter those that were following on behind from surging forward.
And eventually, again through sheer weight of numbers, the Tao Tei began to gain the upper hand. From his vantage point, William saw that the creatures were beginning to bypass the barbed wire nets by trampling over their dead fellows, who had effectively done the job of flattening the nets for them. He winced as one Tao Tei opened a massive mouth and bit not only a purple soldier’s shield in half, but also the man who was standing behind it. Another Tao Tei further along the Wall clambered up on to the dead body of one of its fellow creatures and used it as a springboard, leaping straight into a line of shields and scattering them and the soldiers behind them like skittles.