But I didn’t know. And from what I could see, Cup and the drone between the two of them was enough for the Half-Ax fighters on the hill. Or maybe I only told myself that because I wanted to go on. There might be anyone inside that engine, or no one. Down in the cut was where Mythen Rood was fighting and dying, so that was where I had to go.
Running into the midst of all them fighters I would of died quicker than a breath on a cold day, only at the last moment one of the drudges swung in beside me. They had come round the hill instead of straight down it. The guns on their backs was spinning round and about the whole time, shooting this one and that one as they went. Then one of them jumped straight over the cut bank and kept on going while the other fell in with me. Its metal hooves tore up great clods of grass and weeds and earth as it slowed to let me come alongside it.
“Mythen Rood!” I shouted. “Mythen Rood for aye and ever!”
Then I run out of road and crashed down into the cut, where people I knowed as well as I knowed myself was now struggling hand-to-hand with fighters in grey. I seen Gendel Stepjack there, with tech in his hands that blazed and boomed. Issi Tiller standing with a knife in each hand over his brother Chass, that had fallen. And Catrin in the midst of all swinging her firethrower as if she was Dandrake’s reaper come to gather the last harvest.
I had come down on my arse, but scrambled up again quickly as a grey man run at me. I stabbed at him with my knife but I struck metal instead of meat as he blocked with his sword. Somehow he flicked my knife up out of my hand and stabbed me in the shoulder as if them two things was one thing. The pain as the blade sunk into me made me stagger and almost fall down. Seeing that I was now without a weapon, the Half-Ax man stepped back to get a better swing on his next stroke. He never got to make it though. The drudge stitched the air with bullets, shooting him down.
“Koli,” Monono said out of the drudge. “You need to keep your—”
A bolt of blue lightning shot right through the drudge and buried itself in the ground at my feet. The drudge fell over on its side, smoke pouring out of a great breach in its flank.
A woman walked by me. A woman of Half-Ax with silver braids in her hair. I knowed her at once for a Rampart – or whatever it was that Half-Ax had instead of Ramparts. Her hands was on fire, but the fire was blue instead of yellow. Nor it didn’t do what fire should, which is to rise up from what was burning, but went ever back and forth between her two hands until she pointed with one hand or the other. Then the fire would go where she pointed and work ruin on whatever was there. This was what had brung down the drudge.
She walked by me, like I said, and I seen she was heading for Catrin. Two men of Mythen Rood – Marto Tailor and Evred Bell – stood in her way. The woman made a sign with her hand like she was bidding them step aside, and they was both of them dead before they could be sorry for it. Blue fire made an end of them.
Catrin turned now and saw the woman coming. She took aim with the firethrower and sent out a great jet of flame. The Half-Ax woman spread her arms wide and catched the flame in between them. Her own blue fire seemed to drink it in, and growed ever brighter as it drunk.
The one drudge that was left come galloping along the cut and stopped alongside me. Monono spoke out of it. “This is the wrong kind of craziness. Get on board, Koli-bou. We’re leaving.”
“I can’t, Monono,” I shouted over the fighting’s din and clamour. “These are my people that I growed up with. I’m not going to leave them.”
“Get down behind the drudge then.”
I didn’t do that either. I followed the Half-Ax woman down the cut.
Spinner
69
The woman with the tattooed face ducked down behind Challenger’s ruined tread, where I couldn’t see her. I knew she was still there though, for arrows kept appearing in the chests and shoulders and necks of Half-Ax soldiers.
Their leader rallied them and tried to flank her, but that meant turning their backs on the drone. No doubt he thought it was dead after it fell down on the ground, but it was not. Choosing its moment, when the Half-Ax tally were all or most of them in range, it stabbed out with its hurtful light and took three of them before they could turn.
That left the leader and two others, a man with dyed red hair who carried a morningstar and a woman with a pike. The woman thrust down at the drone, pinning it to the ground and then breaking it in two. The leader and the other man ran at the archer, who loosed one last arrow and then was forced to use her bow as a staff to fend them off.
“Elaine,” I said, clambering up the turret ladder one-handed, “make a noise!”
As I climbed awkwardly up the ladder, cradling the metal bottle at my side, a booming yell split the air. It sounded like a mountain was trying to sing. There were words in the song, but they were so loud I couldn’t find the edges of them to make sense of what was said. Only that Albion was in there, and death, and glory.
I came tumbling out of the turret and down onto Challenger’s flank, where I landed on my stomach. The archer was on the ground, wrestling with the Half-Ax leader. The other man had doubled the chain of his morningstar in his two hands and now was looking for a way to get in close and slip it round her neck.
He went by me without seeing me, which was just as well. I put the wand to the back of his skull and pressed the stud. He fell without a sound. Without a head.
“My hope, my heart, my home!” Elaine screamed through Challenger’s speakers. “Aaaaaaaalbion!”
The pike-woman ran at me, but all that Half-Ax patience and carefulness had gone from her at last. I rolled off Challenger’s side onto the ground, and her wild thrust went over me as I fell. Then I was inside her reach where a pike is only a long stick. I shoved the metal bottle hard into her stomach. She fell to her knees. Before she could rise again, I swung the bottle round in a big, clumsy circle and drove it into the side of her head.
I turned my face away from the bloody mess I had made to find the Half-Ax leader already dead and the archer kneeling over him, drawing her bloody knife out of his throat. She turned to look at me, giving me a nod as cool as if we’d just walked by each other on the gather-ground.
“You as good with an edge as you is with a cudgel?” she said, holding out the dead man’s sword for me to take. She had already taken off his belt, on which three or four grenades were still hanging.
“I would of said no,” I answered. “But I done things already this day that I would of said I had no gift for.”
I grabbed hold of the sword.
“And the sun’s been up just a little while,” the woman said. “I’m Cup. Who are you now?”
“Spinner. Spinner Tanhide.”
The woman’s eyes went wide. “No lie?” she said. “You’re Spinner? I thought you had got to be like an angel out of Edenguard the way Koli talks about you.”
“You – you know Koli?” I stammered.
“Who’d you think was with me just now? It was his stupid idea to help you people. I would of been happy to ride on by.”
“But— We thought—”
“You thought what?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I changed my mind about the sword and took up the morningstar instead. I stood up. “Let’s go.”