City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [177]
In instant retaliation, Brynd summoned the garudas.
*
Erupting out of the morning sky, they soared over the northern streets of the city, then showered their replenished munitions on the main advancing units of the invaders, exploding flesh and rubble with equal intensity.
Enemy forces staggered back under the flash-flames that ripped through the narrow lanes till only a few Okun survived. Had there been an endless supply of Brenna relics to deploy in this way, Brynd might have had some cause for optimism. But the reality left him as morose in spirit as ever. And worse still, the mute bombs launched from the ships cramming into the harbour kept picking off the garudas in mid-flight, so that they tumbled towards the streets, exploding in a shower of feathers and flesh across the rooftops.
*
More industrious weapons were released. There was enough sheer bulk of the enemy now that the Empire’s forces deemed it appropriate to utilize catapults. Normally reserved for sieges, the Ninth and Tenth Regiments of Foot deployed trebuchets and mangonels from behind their front lines. On the Citadel Brynd watched these great constructs, the length of five horses, being wheeled into position, like slow-moving beasts, their tops breaching the rooftops.
Soon they were busy launching colossal chunks of broken masonry at the mass of invaders. Boulder-sized debris also shattered the surrounding buildings, disabling the progress of the enemy and making their ability to reinforce key positions more difficult. They were fast destroying much of the city, Brynd realized, but this had to be done to save the rest of it.
The last sight that Brynd witnessed, before he departed the Citadel, was of rumel and Okun corpses being slung back towards the enemy.
But he then gave an order for these machines of war to hold fire.
Now was the hour of the Night Guard.
*
They lined up, twenty elite fighters, garbed in shadowy darkness. All were mounted on black horses that stood motionless despite the commotion going on around them. Brynd withdrew his sabre and watched faint flickers of cultist technology skim and shimmer across its metal surface. Well armed, and well protected by contoured body armour, they headed east along the wide boulevards, past onlookers from the civilian militia. Brynd felt the heavy weight of expectation, as smoke began to blow back from the Brenna bombs.
Only minutes from the front line.
He was disturbed by the numbers of civilians that had stayed put here – refusing to abandon their homes right in the warzone – and had not evacuated themselves through the tunnels as instructed. A woman in rags ran screaming towards the soldiers, and gripped Nelum’s feet. She screamed for them to stop the fighting, shrieked that four of her sons had died in the first wave of attacks. Brynd nodded to his lieutenant, who pushed her gently away, and she collapsed to the floor sobbing, as the Night Guard continued past.
This war would be an endless, thankless task.
He took a deep breath and felt the thunder in his heart. To Brynd, these minutes seemed like the longest in his life.
Some missile collapsed the corner of a building about fifty yards away, and rubble clattered across the plaza. Frustratingly, at any given point, Brynd couldn’t see what was firing the mute bombs.
Suddenly, another one connected with a nearby store, but the expected explosion didn’t follow. And stranger still was how it fell to the ground – so slowly, and almost changing shape.
A nearby Dragoon moved his horse over to investigate. Brynd ordered for Lupus to ride with him in pursuit of the soldier.
The terrain was littered with minor debris and large chunks of masonry, so they dismounted, and hitched their horses to a railing outside a