There were two decks stacked on top of each other, connected by a short series of metal rungs. Heavy armored doors swung open from either deck to allow access to the cramped, dark, hissing guts of the machine.
Its lower bowels seethed with fulgent coal. Huge swing gears thrust themselves in roaring grease-spitting revolutions. Massive chemiostatic cells pumped blazing green blood through mechanisms linked bewilderingly to brass and steel fixtures on the pistonlike parts of groaning hydraulics. Gauges measured temperature, flow and speed.
Four great triangular arrangements of toothy wheels pulled the engine forward, laying down a never-ending metal ribbon of blunted blades. The entire engine lifted upward and backward like a boot. As the shift drum turned in some deep sealed transmission, the monster lurched east down the shore, flinging out briquettes of tread-shaped ground.
The thing was heavily armored, riveted and brown with age. A clutch of heavy pipes jacked backward off the bulkhead behind the decks, coughing blackness into the air. Gun cradles housed massive gas-powered ballistae that fired steel spheres filled with pressurized vitriol mixtures.
Roric stood on the top deck, twenty feet off the ground, whooping as the artillery popped from the ballistae and hurtled across the river. On the other side, a violent concussion rent the ground.
Detonated mud and shrapnel twisted outward like sound. A plume of green mist ripped upward like an irate ghost, screaming silent molecular death to anything in its path.
Garen stepped out onto the deck, gripping the railing to keep his balance on the bucking, grated floor. He offered Roric a leather mask with a canister snout.
Roric thanked him at the top of his voice. He wondered briefly what it would be like to ride one of the heavies.
Saergaeth must have known better than to waste effort on the bridge. Although he was miles away, his troops returned volley with what looked like bored fear, vaguely conscious that one of the canisters might hit them directly.
They didn’t even aim except in haphazard fashion, eyeballing coordinates and guessing at wind. There was no point. They knew the bridge was wired. Even if they melted the Iscan engines, the demolitions team would ensure they never crossed.
Besides, Fallow Down was the last bastion of Iscan power north of the river. An entire regiment of men still rebuffed the attack as Saergaeth struggled to secure the muddy ground.
Roric wasn’t worried. His father had moved a battalion across the bridge, stationing them on the south side, and although he had returned to the town for additional supplies, the danger was minimal.
For some reason, Saergaeth wasn’t pushing very hard. After Bellgrass had fallen, the renegade king seemed to pause, unwilling to spread himself too thin.
He’s waiting, thought Roric. Biding his time until his zeppelins are retrofitted for war. By that time, Roric planned to be somewhere else.
North of the river, over the steep wooden rooftops of Fallow Down, a storm was bloating. A great horn of cloud curved out of the sky, white and gleaming on top, black and treacherous underneath. It spiked down into the ground like a massive rooting claw.
It had developed with savage speed, tumefying out of nowhere.
Roric felt the urge for a better view. As his father’s son, he laid claim to more clout than approval but when he asked the commander of the engine to gun the machine for higher ground his request was accommodated with surprising pliancy.
The light war engine hunched forward as it tore up Dürm
th Hill, providing a decent view across the river toward the south of town.
Trees shattered into pulpy pink blossoms, ripped into hirsute shreds by the huge stuttering tracks. Birds and panicked soot-tails bolted from their hiding places as the machine powered east toward the summit. It hunkered forward on strange scorpion joints against the grade.
A lone gruelock that had been lurking in a tree swung into a deep ravine before Roric could shoulder his crossbow. Its black furry body swept gracefully through the branches, several arms moving at speed, unaccustomed but shifting nevertheless quickly from the role of predator to prey.
When they hit the summit, the engine relaxed to a chugging idle, flexing its body back into its usual shape.
Garen and the commander stepped out onto the top deck with Roric, removing their gas masks in order to talk.
“Good view,” said the commander. He had to grimace to keep his teeth from chattering with the machine’s pandemic vibration.
Fallow Down had turned into a tactical maze. All the noncombatants had crossed the bridge south into the High King’s lands or tramped north to side with Saergaeth.
It was the age-old ugliness of civil war: father against son, friend versus friend. The town’s layout spread old stone and rusty fingers in starfish multiplicity from a central square. It looked squalid and gray, oppressed by the blossoming cloud.
Roric snapped open his spyglass. Despite the jittering of the deck, he could see troops in the streets and snipers with crossbows patrolling rooftops. To the west, beyond the range of engagement, Miskatoll’s light war engines continued to scud along the bank, occasionally sending a glittering emerald arcing over the river to lift in a puff of poison on the south side.
The Somber Hills tumbled morosely to the north, already black and sodden under the shadow of the storm.
“He’s toying with us,” said the commander. “He won’t cross here. Clever bastard’s worked through the mountains. Bendain’s Keep is under siege.”
Fear leaked like treacle down Roric’s spine. Kennan Keep was next in line.
“He probably wants the whole string of keeps as zeppelin stations,” said Garen.
As the men speculated, Roric’s understanding unfolded. If Saergaeth controlled the keeps in the Greencaps, he would control the lowlands as well. His enormous fleet of zeppelins could then pummel the open plains at their leisure and retreat into the crags like dragons to roost.
“If Caliph Howl ain’t building airships like Mathias Starlet, he’s going to be serving steel wine in Isca.”
“That’s true enough,” muttered Garen.
Roric marveled. The fact that Saergaeth was outwitting Caliph pumped a quiet, petulant, albeit vicarious sense of victory through his veins.
“What the fuck is going on with those clouds anyway?” asked Garen.
All three men gazed at the horn-shaped storm whose hook had bled in swizzled patterns toward the river. At first it looked like the sky had gone rampage-wild. Weltering in frenzied tumbling gouts like a pot of boiling milk hung upside down.
The chaos defied gravity.
Foaming snub-nosed lumps of vapor pushed toward the ground and then retreated, sloshing back into a sky that shuddered like pudding.
Variegated layers of atmosphere burst like invisible pillows, scattering sudden snow. The three men would have cursed if they hadn’t been so surprised.
Despite the sudden cold that rolled across the plains at subsonic speed, the air wavered and danced as if through a mirage of heat. Something vast rippled across the sky like momentary circus glass, bending the clouds, warping the structures of Fallow Down like brown kelp.
Across the river, Saergaeth’s engines seemed to shiver in the cold, wobbling and trembling like metal bees on honeycomb.
Roric stood at the edge of miles of warped space. It was as if the very air were melting.
The snowfall rolled and veered erratically as though hesitant to fall. Hovering like ash. A shadow six miles in every direction passed over the ground, sliding from the Somber Hills toward Fallow Down. It cast the town in purple umber and dyed the river muscles black.
The entire sky thrashed madly for an instant, flailing as though seen through the bodies of a million glass eels.