The Mechanical Crown

The precursor war

Waiting on the wall for five minutes, Roldan counted the seconds and noted the approach of the army, gauging their speed. After being satisfied of an accurate calculation, he returned to the ladder and slid down it, feet gripping its edges. Landing on the street below with a thud, his knees aching more than they would have twenty years ago, he ran along the wall until he found the correct sewer gate. Its bars had been cut and prised apart and two soldiers stood at the entrance.

"Are they still in there?"

The soldier nodded. "Been down there for two hours now, must be."

Roldan marched into the large drain entrance, the tunnel tall enough that he didn't need to crouch, and walked into the gloom. Torches were lit in the walls - no source lamps down here - and he followed them until he heard voices in the darkness.

"Michels!" he shouted.

"Who is that?"

"Stryke," Roldan said. The tunnel had angled down and he must have been deep below the ground, past the wall. "How are we doing?"

"Nearly done," Michels said, emerging from the dark, a lamp fixed to his head. "We'll be done by nightfall."

"You have about forty minutes."

Michels paused, never one for displays of emotion. "They're attacking now?"

Nodding, Roldan gestured up at the wet, dripping roof of the sewer. "They're coming straight for the gates, as we expected. Siege towers are moving in to scale the walls."

"'As we expected,'" Michels muttered, "other than being a month early.

"They have new weaponry," Roldan said. "Archers, unlike anything I've seen before. Their range is great than you might expect. Be careful when you come top-side."

"We will be." Michels ran a filthy hand down his face, dragging the loose skin below his eyes. "We'll do what we can. Send a trail of soldiers into the tunnel so that we can get our timing right."

"Will do," Roldan said. He turned to go, then halted and glanced back at the other man. "Strange times."

"The strangest. Never thought I'd be using these outside of the walls."

Half-running, slowing only to avoid slipping on the wet floor of the sewer, Roldan emerged back out into the city to discover the nearby streets mostly deserted, other than of armed soldiers and civilians. "That was fast," he noted to the nearest soldier.

"We stonebreakers know how to be efficient."

"You have your orders? You know when to retreat to the upper levels?"

The soldier nodded. "Yes, sir. Is it really necessary, though? It seems a bit much."

"It's necessary."

Turning away, Roldan moved uphill, through the city to the north, around its winding streets, now eerily quiet and empty. Some fires lingered in furnaces, either too hot to quench or where those tending to them had lacked the time to extinguish them. Without the usual throngs of people, the streets took on an eerie, disturbing feel, as if it Roldan were glimpsing a ruin waiting to happen.

It wasn't just him, of course; commanders and captains of the guard were spreading out through the city, hastily putting into action ideas which has only been considered a few days prior. Some of them knew what was at stake; some of the civilians no doubt thought there was a chance of victory. Roldan knew better, but would not say as much to any of these people as they prepared to defend their home.

Climbing higher, to the next level of suspended city that hung atop the lower streets, Roldan observed the vats and troughs that had been re-purposed and moved into position. Bruckin's industry had been turned at a moment's notice to sabotaging its own streets and alleyways.

Yet higher, taking the cable car back up to where a vantage point gave him oversight of the approaching army. Roldan crouched behind a pile of sandbags, the hissing blue arrows preying on his mind as he looked through a telescope at what was to come. There was a motion from the rear of the Treydolain forces as the enormous arms of city-scale trebuchets flung their contents into the air. Instead of single, large projectiles the trebuchets instead fired flurries of smaller rocks and flaming debris, which flew over the army and smashed into the buildings on the outside of the city walls, impacting on them like a hail of a thousand arrows. Entire structures collapsed instantly, flattened by one salvo after another, until there was nothing left standing. The way was clear for the army to approach the gates unhindered. Roldan was glad to have overruled Lief's advisers, who had wanted to establish an elite group of soldiers in the outer town to set up an ambush. They would all have died in the first impacts.

The siege engines accelerated now, pulled by pack animals and pushed by source-fuelled engines at their rear. The towers would be filled with soldiers, ready to ascend and clamber atop the Bruckin walls.

Another salvo from the trebuchets, this time larger and more solid, aimed directly at the walls. The outer stone and decoration disintegrated but the core of the wall's structure was unmoved, prompting an audible cheer to reverberate up from the streets and down from the towers above. Bruckin still thought of itself as impregnable.

The siege towers drew nearer, crunching over the remains of the buildings beyond the walls, the towers' enormous wheeled treads unconcerned by the uneven ground.

It was time for Bruckin to reveal the first card in its hand.

Shifting the view of his scope to the wall, he saw the signal go from the observers there, down to the soldiers in the street below, to those standing guard outside the sewer. He knew that word would be passed from soldier-to-soldier through the tunnel, until it reached Michels and his crew. Roldan began counting under his breath.

The siege towers rolled into place, now only a handful of minutes away from reaching the walls to unload their deadly cargo.

There was a muffled flash and a layer of dust flew into the air, in a long line parallel to the wall and precisely at the distance where the siege towers found themselves. The ground shimmered, then cracked into a thousand fractured pieces, then erupted in a ball of light and energy and muck and earth which continued to grow, bigger and bigger still, launching the ground into the sky as if an enormous hand was pushing up from underground. The siege towers rocked, buckled, and toppled, either collapsing in on themselves or falling to one side before sinking into the newly created trench that ran half the length of Bruckin's southern wall.

Roldan reserved a thought for the men and women who would have been within the siege towers, ready to storm the city, who now found themselves crushed beneath mud and wood and metal, down in the dirt with the worms and rats and sewage.

He turned his scope back to the sewer entrance, which was now blackened and had left a streak of vented heat stretching all the way to the buildings on the opposite side of the street. Off to one side stood Michels and his crew. Michels put his hand to his forehead and saluted, somehow aware of where Roldan lay. The man had operated in this city for years, had plotted techniques to overthrow and destabilise it; now those same techniques were being turned against the external attackers. Had the King thought to use Michels' local cell he would have been able to defeat Bruckin without needing an army. Instead, he'd chosen to destroy the King's Eyes and all their associated knowledge and experience.

As perhaps the only two surviving Eyes, the irony of the situation was not lost on Roldan Stryke.

He wondered what Erin, the friendly little girl from the village of Lagnin, was doing at that precise moment.