City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [169]
The commander had done what she asked.
She dismounted and hauled out the first of the amplified Digr-Brenna relics. She had modified several of them so they could sit on spikes, and with a small mallet pounded one into a gap between the cobbles.
Lupus loitered close by, watching intently.
‘Please, Lupus, keep clear. I’ll be all right on my own. It’ll get dangerous very soon. Please, go now – and take my horse with you.’
His understanding was instant, and nothing seemed to demonstrate his respect for her more than when he silently turned his horse away.
‘I’ll be at the east end of the harbour, waiting.’ A smile and he was gone.
No time for emotion, not now. Deep breaths.
She wedged another device in a gap, where it leant at an angle, but remained upright. Another twenty paces, another relic, and so on; all the time she had to endure the fearsome racket of the enemy ships crunching their way towards the shore.
For ten minutes, Beami continued at her task, her cloak billowing around her. She dared not stop to examine the hulk of metal now towering immediately before the shoreline.
There, that was the last of them.
She took several more deep breaths – and fled.
As she ran she heard the ship doors opening, the sound of them lowering to strike the stone quay, then the clanking of footsteps across a metal bridge. Things crawled out from inside, unnatural creatures with shells. Whatever they were, they were armed and came skittering across the quay towards her, towards the city, pouring out of the boats as if they’d sprung some vile kind of leak.
Deep breaths, remember.
There were shouts and cries from within the city, people beginning to react to this sight. An arrow whipped through the air from somewhere deeper in the city, and she prayed that the soldiers would not come forward to meet the invaders in combat, not yet.
Patience.
She crouched to plant the detonation device as one of the creatures scuttled forward, now only twenty feet away from her. With her heartbeats slamming in her mouth, she waited for as many of these things as possible to descend onto the harbour front. A subtle twist of her hand, and she set off her chain of devices.
A web of purple light shot out across the quayside. In an instant the harbour front ripped into the sky.
Cobbles exploded upwards all along its length and the aliens began to scream, unnatural and piercing, suffering under such an almighty display of her cultist power.
Deep breaths.
A brutal hail of stone fragments slammed down around her, and she ran further along the street to take shelter in a doorway. Ripped body parts and portions of exoskeleton clattered along behind her, coating the road with blood. A rumel head, severed by the blast, spun towards her and finally fell still, eyeing her reproachfully.
Suddenly she could sense the underpinning cohesion of the ground begin to fall apart, and she realized that she needed to escape. Dashing through successive street junctions, her cloak flapping around, she kept glancing back, but none of the unnatural invaders seemed about to catch her.
She turned to witness the next phase of her handiwork while nestling in the shelter of a narrow alleyway.
A terraced row of housing shook and leaned over in a surreal fashion, then fell forwards as if the buildings themselves were drunk, smothering any enemy left standing from the first assault.
Masonry dust and smoke obscured the scene, and when it partially cleared it revealed that hundreds of the creatures had been massacred – with no cost to civilian life. Beami felt an adrenalin rush at having for a moment halted the invasion, so she did not quite understand why she was crying and shaking.
Lupus burst through the smoke, still on horseback, and in silence he hauled her up behind him. She clasped her hands around his waist, and with her cheek pressed up against his back they rode off to the sanctuary of the Citadel, through gathering numbers of soldiers shifting forward to form a line of defence.
Out of the corner