Insurgency (Tales of the Empire Book 4) Read online

  And when that wall went, the enemy would be in the city in force. The damage the lesser war machines had done to the outer walls had widened the breach enough that more than twice as many men would be able to assault the gap now as had in that earlier attempt. There was simply no hope of the beleaguered defenders holding the sigma. It was a lost cause.

  Kiva turned and glanced across the battlefield. Again, the dreadful machine was wreathed in smoke and had rolled back an impressive distance. And yet already people were heaving it into position with the aid of teams of horses while the next cart was brought forward. A quarter of an hour was Kiva’s estimate, based on the previous firing. Then the machine would ring out again and Velutio would be open to the invader. Echoing footsteps drew his attention to the opening at the top of the tower’s staircase, and a man in a prefect’s uniform, his black plume plastered to his bronze helmet in the damp air, emerged onto the tower top, heaving in breaths.

  ‘It’s time, sirs,’ he said quietly. Quintillian nodded and gestured for the man to lead on before following. Kiva watched for a moment as that great iron tube was slowly trundled back into position, then his gaze slipped down to the walls by the sigma and along in first one direction and then the other. The men were leaving the ramparts. It was time.

  ‘Majesty,’ called Quintillian from the doorway of the stairs.

  Kiva nodded, but his gaze swept on, taking in the remains of the city. Over it hung a pall of grey dust, and the grand roofs and delicate spires that marked 100 generations of construction were all but gone. The night had seen demolition on a scale undreamed of. Could Velutio possibly look any worse after it fell to the enemy?

  ‘Kiva,’ urged his brother from the doorway.

  With a last sigh, the emperor tore his eyes from his ruined city and entered the stairwell, following Quintillian and the prefect down the seemingly endless flights to the ground. There, outside the tower in the Forum of Swords where military parades traditionally began and displays of martial prowess were the norm, a small party of the imperial guard awaited. There were no other soldiers visible, though the shouts of officers manoeuvring men into position around the city-labyrinth were omnipresent.

  A hand grasped his shoulder unexpectedly – something unheard of for the emperor, since no one would dare try such a thing. He turned to find Quintillian beside him, a grave, determined look on his face.

  ‘Time for you to go the palace and, when the time comes, to the island.’

  Kiva frowned. ‘Not a chance, Quint.’

  ‘Kiva, you are the emperor. People look to you as the head of state. They need someone to follow and to feel is looking after them. That is your job – your responsibility. You are their emperor. And just as the people have to survive, if there is to be an empire, the emperor has to survive too.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Kiva snapped. ‘If the civil war, the fall of mad old Quintus and the rise of our father taught us anything it’s that emperors can come and go. They can be found hiding under a bush or working in a tannery. There are a hundred men in this city alone that could rule as wisely as I.’

  ‘Kiva.’

  ‘No,’ the emperor said with an air of finality. ‘Say what you will but it’ll fall on deaf ears. I will not stand in the background and watch empire and city crumble before me. If it must happen then I will do whatever I can to stop it. I can do no less.’

  Quintillian narrowed his eyes at Kiva, grasping both shoulders. ‘Then stay with me, brother, but stay behind me. I will not be the man who let the emperor die in our hour of need. Stay with us and bring heart to your men by presence alone, but I will not let you get close enough to the enemy to wet your blade. Do you understand?’

  The two men locked eyes for long moments, engaged in a battle of wills. Finally, Kiva nodded. This was not the time. The time was coming, and it was coming today. Just not quite yet.

  ‘All right. Where first?’

  Quintillian turned to the prefect. ‘Are the lines drawn up?’

  The officer bowed his head. ‘They are ready at the sigma, and each unit designated last night is in position, sir.’

  ‘Good. All right, Majesty. We oversee the last defence of the sigma and the prefect will give us a nod when the lines are about to fail. Then we fall back to the next position, and the next, and so on until we reach the palace gates. Got it?’

  ‘Agreed,’ Kiva nodded, and the small party hurried through the streets towards the sigma. As they reached the Square of Stone Demons with its grotesque statuary poking from each building corner, their mouths jetting water from high gutters, Kiva felt his breath catch in his throat. Here had once been the Demon Gate. The outer gate had gone entirely and been replaced with the shoddy sigma wall that had been so easily overcome. The inner gate had simply been walled shut and reinforced. The only signs of it ever having existed were a roughly arch-shaped line of lighter stone in the smooth surface, and the marks of where twin turrets had been dismantled, their shape still visible in the stonework underfoot.

  Only now there was a new mark. A hole halfway up, with cracks spreading from it across the stone surface. The square itself stood empty, ominously so. And then Kiva spotted the defenders waiting, gathered in the streets and alleys that led off the open space. Barely had the emperor and his entourage moved into position with the tense soldiery, when a deep booming noise heralded the third shot of the dreadful weapon.

  Kiva watched the walls of Velutio fall in spectacular proximity. All he could see of the actual strike from this side of the defences was its effect. Huge shards of smooth stone flew out from the wall, followed by the compacted and mortared rubble that formed the core of the structure. Even this far back, Kiva felt the blast as a wave of stinging dust that swept across the defenders. The hole at the centre had not widened, but where there had been a cobweb of cracks across the surface before, now there were deep fissures, yawning in the stonework. There was a groan like the complaining of giants, as though the earth itself moaned, and then the wall shuddered. Kiva, a long-time student of architecture, found his sight drawn up to the joins at either side where the wall met each of the two adjacent towers. Sure enough the stones there were cracking and tearing away from the huge square bulks. There was another groan, and a sound like a paving slab being snapped, though magnified in volume a thousand times.

  And the wall fell. It began so slowly, with the stonework tearing away to either side and the centre bowing towards them. Then, when the wall was leaning precariously enough that Kiva fancied he could almost see the outer parapet over the top, the sides gave way. The entire stretch of wall slowly toppled inward, the centre coming down faster, the fissures and depressions in it weakening the stonework there more than elsewhere.

  There was a sound like an armoured god falling to the ground, and Kiva went deaf. For a moment it was as though he was lost in an all-consuming fog. All sound had gone except a whistling in his ears, and beyond the men to either side of him, all was a tan-grey colour as the cloud of dust billowed around the square. Gradually the aural whining began to die down and over the top of it he could hear the sound of hundreds of men coughing. He too was coughing, he suddenly realized.

  The dust settled very slowly, but gradually the scene coalesced through the murk and Kiva’s nerves twitched. The walls of Velutio had gone. A slope of stones projected from the two nearest towers, but all that remained of the defences in between was a sea of rubble, pock-marked by huge chunks of stonework that had survived the fall, some still displaying the crenellations of the battlements.

  And slowly another shape resolved in the dust. A dark cloud beyond began to take the form of a tide of humanity flowing towards them, barbarians and rebel soldiers and nomad horsemen all massing around the hole in Velutio’s defences. Men would be dying in the press, soldiers and barbarians crushed under the hooves of nomad horses, for this was a simple swarm of mixed enemies with no plan and no order. The Khan could organize his army only so far, but he was astute enough to recognize that when the city
became open to them, no words in the world would be capable of instilling order in the resulting attack. The barbarians and the nomads alike would simply devolve into an orgy of death and rapine.

  From the Square of Stone Demons issued six streets. Two led along the inside of the walls, and these had been partially blockaded, though the collapsing wall had largely sealed them off anyway. Two more led off north and south, parallel to the walls and one block further back. One of these was blocked thoroughly as a stables and a tavern had been pulled down to seal it off. The other was filled with worried-looking soldiers. Similarly, of the two streets that led west towards the heart of Velutio, one had been blocked with the rubble of a cooper’s shop and a house, and the other contained Kiva and the forces of the city. They would not hold the enemy here for long, but every quarter-hour another ship left the palace taking the innocent citizens off to the island, and so every quarter-hour they held here meant that another hundred people might live.

  The forces of the Khan and Lord Aldegund poured into the city across the still-settling ruins of the wall. Several were injured or killed by sliding or falling rubble in their desperation to bring death to Velutio. It was a chaotic invasion. Men simply swarmed wherever they felt looked best, which meant that every exit, blocked or not, was targeted by the enemy. A few tried to climb the blocked streets alongside the walls, but that quickly proved too troublesome, and they gave up, rejoining the mass. Others poured into the blocked streets. Kiva, standing near the rear of the force and atop a raised platform which granted him and his brother an excellent view of the action despite the dust cloud, felt a small surge of hope as he watched those doomed invaders.

  Archers were not prized by the imperial army, or rather had not been so traditionally. Since the interregnum and the rise of the mercenary armies, the value of missile troops had become more recognized, and yet still archers were generally drawn from the lesser classes of the more provincial regions, with the hardy citizens of the old imperial centre forming the traditional heavy infantry. Yet the archers, for all their lesser status, were today proving their value.

  Those two streets that had become blockaded dead-ends quickly filled with the enemy, attempting to climb the rubble and descend into the streets beyond. But as the first man – a spear-wielding barbarian with black, braided hair and a beard like a badger – began to crest the mound of rubble, an arrow whirred from the upper storeys of one of the surrounding buildings and took him full in the face. He toppled, dead immediately, onto the detritus. Behind him, two more barbarians, both hungry for battle, suddenly looked up in surprise at the falling man. Arrows took one in the throat and the other in the chest, and both fell, adding their bodies to the barricade.

  As if that had been a cue for the archers, arrows began to hiss and whirr through the air from all the high places, some in the streets leading off picking the targets and carefully holding back the tide, others simply loosing randomly into the crowd, where aiming was unnecessary and every missile would injure or kill, even if it was released blind.

  And then Kiva could no longer watch the overall situation unfold, for the street that he occupied became a battlefield itself. Three hundred soldiers formed a barricade of their own, six-men deep with the front a shield-wall and the next two files jabbing over the top with long spears. The officers at the rear shouted orders and archers in windows above loosed into the press beyond, but the men at the front of the defences took the brunt of it. The shield-wall buckled and bowed repeatedly as the soldiers were pushed and buffeted back by the sheer weight of the enemy pressing against them. As spears lanced out overheard, striking eyes and temples, ripping into skulls and necks, the soldiers engaged in the shield-wall itself thrust out again and again with their blades, tilting their shields for a single heartbeat to allow the sword the space to do its work, then closing the wall again. The nomads, screaming their rage in their odd tongue, were falling like leaves from an autumn tree, and with every passing minute, the pile of dead grew, the attackers finding it a chore and a boon at one and the same time for, though it was difficult footing crossing the pile of dead, the height of the body pile was beginning to give them the slightest advantage over the men of the shield-wall.

  Kiva watched from the back as gradually men in the front line began to die and those in the rear ranks shuffled forward to take their place. Each time the man in the second rank threw his spear over into the crowd and slipped into the line in front, drawing his sword and taking his place in the wall. Then those in further ranks began to shuffle forward too.

  Time passed in a sea of carnage. The air filled with the tinny tang of blood and the stench of opened bowels that managed even to overcome the cloying cloud of still-settling dust. Kiva watched while the men in the rear lines started to thin out as they continually moved forward to plug gaps. He could see each and every death as he watched. A nomad smashed through the mouth with an imperial blade, fragments of white tooth and bone flying through the air with the spray of blood. And even as that ruined face fell away a barbarian who had lifted his arm to stab down at the line received an imperial blade in the armpit, the blow hard and deep, blood fountaining out. But the soldier had trouble removing his sword in time and as the corpse fell away it took the blade with it. The desperate soldier tried to recover, but a howling nomad with a short, curved sword jammed it to the soldier’s neck and ripped it upward, yelling triumphantly as he cut the throat so deep he almost beheaded the man.

  The soldier had barely hit the ground before another was in his place.

  Death stalked the streets of Velutio, lapping up the carnage.

  A hammer blow to a soldier’s face that crushed his skull into his own brain.

  A nomad taken through the neck by a spear from the second line, blood jetting from the wound around the shaft.

  A barbarian stabbed between the ribs by a well-aimed blow that pierced the heart in a fountain of crimson.

  A severed hand, still gripping a knife as it cartwheeled through the air.

  Bone. Blood. Torn flesh. Severed appendages.

  Kiva felt sick. He had seen battle twice in his life, both times from the comfort of the command position. Never had he experienced the horrifying gore and stench of real combat this close. Next to him, Quintillian was watching with a professional eye. Nothing seemed to faze the younger son of Darius.

  ‘Time to go, Majesty,’ a prefect said loudly from nearby.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We barely have enough men to plug a gap now, sire. This shield-wall will fall in minutes.’

  Quintillian nodded and grasped Kiva’s tunic. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Through the maze.’

  The next hour was the most fraught, heart-stopping, vomit-inducing and horrifying of Kiva’s life. He only realized that they had held the enemy at the square for half an hour when Quintillian pointed it out. It had seemed like mere moments. He’d panicked that they’d fallen too quickly, but the knowledge that the grisly fight at the blocked street had saved 200 citizens gave him heart. Then, as they pulled back gradually through Velutio, he kept estimating the time and nodding to himself every time he pictured another ship sailing to safety with 100 innocents on board. Four more as the pair retreated up the slope. And during that hour they occupied three different blockades with the troops assigned there, the emperor’s presence giving much needed heart to the defenders.

  The blockade on the Street of Western Brewers had fallen hard, one of the city’s most popular breweries having been torn down and felled across the narrow street along with two private houses. The enemy bodies there piled up in the hundreds as the 120 defenders fell to such an extent that the imperial party was urged on again before the barricade fell. Kiva had been sad to move on. After so long wallowing in the stench of blood and shit, the smell of the hoppy beer from the ruined brewery that ran endlessly between the cobbles and even managed to drown out the miasma of battle had been more than welcome.

  The Str
eet of Golden Statues fell quickly. With only 100 defenders, some wily enemy found a way into one of the adjacent houses and managed to circumvent the barricade, he and those who went with him falling on the poor bastard defenders from behind. Kiva and Quintillian were sent on by a captain, up the hill towards the palace once more.

  The barricade in the Street of the Troubled God held well. Though it had been assigned only 70 men, it was one of the narrowest thoroughfares in the city with some of the tallest buildings, and the resulting barricade was impressive. There they had held for so long that Kiva had even begun to hope they could keep the tide of enemies back.

  It was foolish, of course, for this was only one branch of the invading army. A sea of men flowed through every possible street across the city, and when he and Quintillian were taken to a viewpoint in an old belfry, the emperor stared in disbelief, only now recognizing the true hopelessness of the situation. The defenders had been pushed back two thirds of the way up the city, and still the enemy were crossing the walls far below, hungry to bite into flesh with their blades. It simply boggled the mind to imagine how many men the Khan and the rebel lord had between them.

  ‘The palace,’ Quintillian said quietly. ‘The last barricades will fall quickly. We have to get to the palace and defend there before you and I get trapped. We can hold the palace for hours while the civilians leave. Then we will make our last stand. Half the military in the city are waiting there, and we have artillery on the walls.’

  Kiva nodded, and the two men ran on, still accompanied by the imperial guard. They reached the great Imperial Way, which remained clear as it was simply too wide to consider blockading effectively. Kiva was hurried through the great gate and into the tenuous safety of the palace, the immense portal slamming shut behind him like the boom of a heavy tomb lid. Quickly, they hurried to the top of the gate tower. The palace grounds were filled with people – the ordinary folk of Velutio milling about in nervous tension, waiting in borderline panic for their turn to board the ships. The doorway to the harbour stairs was blocked with people trying to muscle their way further forward in the queue as officers held them back. That heavy doorway led to a long sloping staircase through the rock that descended to the bottom of the cliff and the sheltered, secure palace harbour where ships would be coming and going repeatedly. There were only four ships in the waterway between Velutio and Isera, and they would be on the move constantly.