Scorpions were falling through the gaps in the line. There were moments, moments only to spare.
'Now!' It was not Amnon's voice but Meyr's. The huge man staggered back, slapping a half-dozen Scorpions back into their comrades' halberds with one arm, while he hauled at Amnon with the other. For a moment the Scorpions occupied the breach, but they could not come through it. Teuthete was there, and she was killing them as they came. She had a Khanaphir sword in each hand, and the spikes of her arms were flexed wide, and every edge and point she had was busy taking blood. She was never still, a swift storm of needling death that could not hold them more than a few seconds longer, and yet was holding them nonetheless.
'Now!' roared Meyr – and Totho hacked twice, and three times, then a leaping Scorpion slammed an axe into his back. The force of the blow drove him to his knees, though it twisted from his mail. He fell on the mauled rope and it snapped.
The tons of stone were abruptly in motion for a thunderous second. Totho turned and caught the axeman across the face and the gut, even as the Scorpion turned to look at his fellows. The sound of the stones clashing together was like the end of the world. For many Scorpions it was just that.
Meyr shouted something incoherent, then he and Amnon were killing the few Scorpions who had got through, as gripped by battle-rage as their enemies had ever been. Totho only had eyes for the slender figure now standing atop the tumbled wall of stones. Teuthete had leapt up there with Art-sped reflexes, even as the stone descended on her, and she stood there for a moment, proud and defiant, bloody with the demise of her enemies. The crossbow bolt found her as she stood, took her under the ribs with force enough to throw her from her perch. The fall robbed her of grace, and she was dead as she struck the bridge. After the pictures had faded, there was a great silence amongst the Masters of Khanaphes. Che put her hands to her head, feeling the world tilt about her. It had seemed so real. She had been there, right there on the bridge. She had been all over the city. Her mind's eye had been dragged wherever the Masters had wished, to the sacked western city, to the refugee-clogged streets of the east. The colours had been over-bright, burning like fever, running like paint, and yet it had all been so real.
That was Totho, she thought numbly. Totho fighting, but why?
'Che?' Thalric had his hands on her shoulders. 'Che, what happened?'
'They're fighting,' she said, shaking. 'On the bridge. Couldn't you see?'
'Che, there was nothing to see,' Thalric insisted. 'You just… you were just staring into the dark.' She saw blank incomprehension on his face, and a measure of the same on the normally expressionless Vekken behind him.
'The city hangs in the balance,' she whispered. 'The Scorpions assault the bridge, and only a tiny few hold them off. It is the end for Khanaphes, it must be.'
'This is a grave disappointment,' said Elysiath. 'Have our servants fallen so low that they will allow our enemies into the city?'
'It does not seem possible,' agreed the man beside her, his tone unhurried, conversational. 'The vagabonds of the Nem should not have been able to pass the walls. That suggests treachery within.'
'Our people have turned away from us while we slept,' Lirielle agreed. 'They flee rather than fight. They are no longer what they once were.'
'How can you say that?' Che glared at them. 'They are dying for you right now!' Totho is dying. He could be dying even now.
They looked at her patronizingly. 'They have indeed grown weak. How dare they abandon half the city,' Elysiath said sternly. 'They deserve all they get. They should have trusted in our walls.'
Thalric laughed at them. The sound of his derision broke across their pontificating like a dash of water, shocking them with its irreverence.
'Your walls?' he sneered. 'Your walls fell in a few brief hours to Imperial leadshotters.' The faces of the Masters remained quite composed, but Che could still detect the slight uncertainty in their eyes that showed they did not recognize the word.
'Leadshotters,' Thalric repeated slowly. He had seen it in them too. 'Siege engines. Machines. Old relics of my own people, but great big magic to your poor citizens, because they've been living in the Bad Old Days for the last few centuries.' He took a deep breath and she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders. 'And, from what you've been saying, that's your fault. You've kept them back. You've kept them ignorant. You've kept them yours. '
'How dare you speak to us thus, O Savage,' Elysiath demanded. Her voice was not angry but cold enough to cut to the bone. 'Utter another word and we will send your mind into a darkness so deep that you will never be found.'
Che expected Thalric to say more but, looking back at him, she saw him grimace, baring his teeth. Whatever he might normally believe, in this dark tomb beyond anything he knew, he believed in that threat.
'And what will you do to me?' Che asked them. 'Tell me, O Masters of Khanaphes? When I speak the same truths?'
'What is this insurrection?' the man said, almost good-naturedly. 'Savages may babble their nonsense, but we discerned merit in you. Our people have grown weak. There is no more than that.'
'A leadshotter…' She stopped because she now realized she could no longer explain it as she once had, '… is a great engine that throws stones hard enough to shatter a wall. The Wasp Empire in the north possesses hundreds of them. My city has many stationed on its walls. The Ant city-states of Accius and his cousins, they field dozens each. Helleron must make more than a thousand crossbows a year in its factories. There are automotives for freight and for war. On the seas there are armourclads, metal ships that float. In the air they have heliopters and orthopters and ships of the air.' The image of these ravening hordes of progress was making her dizzy, slightly ill just to think of it. 'Look in my mind. I can no longer understand what I remember, but look there. See it all. I gift you with five hundred years of artifice.'
They had gone very still. She could feel them taking up the lifeless stones of her memory with their cool, slimy fingers, turning them over and over. Thalric put his arms around her, hugged her to his chest. She wondered if it was a gesture for her reassurance or his own.
'The world has moved on,' she said. 'Everywhere but here.'
'The Moths have fallen,' observed Lirielle. 'What is this?' Despite it all, there was such mourning in her voice that Che felt sorry for them.
'But the rabble of the Nem…' the man began, and trailed off, any confidence ebbing from his voice.
'They will not stand still for ever,' Che said. 'Clinging to whatever life the desert could give, fighting each other for a few scraps, they have been slow to change, but all it took was a prod from the Empire, and they are now inside your city.'
For a long moment the Masters stared at one another, trying to cling on ponderously to what they had believed, in the face of all they had now seen. They don't know what to do, Che realized. They slept too long.
'You will help, surely,' she pressed them.
Elysiath turned a haughty look on her. 'So much is lost, it hardly seems worthwhile to salvage what is left.'
'But they're your people,' Che insisted.
'They have bitterly disappointed us,' the man stated. 'They have squandered all we left them.'
'They have forgotten all I taught them of war,' rumbled dark Garmoth Atennar from behind them.
'But they're now calling out for you!' Che told them. 'They pray to you. They invoke your aid.'
'Do they?' Elysiath actually cocked her head to one side, listening in some way that Che could not imagine. She smiled faintly. 'Ah, yes, they do. How faint they sound. Ah, well.'
'"Ah, well"?' Che protested. 'Don't you see what that means? It means that they believe in you still. To them, after all these centuries, you are still the Masters of Khanaphes. You are what they have lived for, and now you are the reason why they are all going to die. You still have a responsibility to them. They are your servants.'