Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(91)

Diversions. There was something in that, but she didn’t have time to follow the thought. She joined the line of soldiers moving up to take their spots. Tonight, the ramps she climbed were slick with rain, narrow and ancient, and she held tight to the railing. A single misstep could send her crashing backward into the soldiers massed behind her, and that wouldn’t do at all.

She was almost cheerful, which felt strange; it was cold and storming, there was an army at the city’s gates that outnumbered the High Garda almost two to one . . . and she was happy. No getting around it: she was born for this. Her father would be scandalized. Her brothers would be jealous.

Her mother would be so proud.

Something whistled in the air far above her head, and she jerked her chin up to track its progress. Couldn’t see the missile, but it must have been fired from the Russian army’s positions. Greek fire? She couldn’t see any fuse burning. And that sound . . . it seemed wrong. She’d grown accustomed to how ballista-fired bombs sounded. Those kind of missiles made an eerie whistling sound, too, but at an entirely different pitch; the whistle was attached to the bomb to create an unnerving effect on troops below. This seemed fainter, more as if the sound was a mere by-product of its flight.

“Move!” someone yelled behind her, and she quickly advanced up the ramp. She’d only made it half a dozen steps when the world exploded behind her. Not the awful gleam of Greek fire, but a hot orange like a forest set ablaze, and when she paused and turned, she saw devastation. Half a neighborhood blown apart, walls flung down, roofs shattered. Bodies running, falling. Burning.

That is not Greek fire.

She didn’t know what it was, but it had a tremendous force to it, as bad as or worse than what they were used to seeing. This wasn’t something the fire crews had prepared to handle. They needed water, and a lot of it. And no one had prepared to fight whatever this madness was.

More whistles overhead. The Russians were firing their strange weapons blind, trying to strike sheer terror, and it was working. She watched a temple crumble, a warehouse explode. What if it hits a Medica facility? Homes? Schools? She felt physically sick with rage, and her muscles ached with holding it inside. She didn’t know if the Iron Tower or the Serapeum or the Great Archives could stand against this unknown bombardment. Whatever this awful stuff was, it held a horrible power, and it was entirely new to them.

“Squads to the wall!” Captain Botha shouted, and his voice carried even over the chaos. Glain ran to claim her spot, with her High Garda companions elbow to elbow. “Ready!” Beyond them other captains were positioning their own companies. Down on behind them, more soldiers fortified the gates. Others were readying ballistas to fire into the enemy forces. It was a massing of High Garda force that had rarely been seen, and never here in Alexandria. “Hold!”

Santi was up on the wall, Glain realized; she saw him standing with his captains as they spotted the Russian deployments. He shouldn’t be here. He should be safe in the Serapeum. But that wasn’t Santi; he, like her, needed to be in the thick of it. She looked around at the squad she’d inherited from Tom Rolleson, now their lieutenant; she saw Troll farther down the row, watching the company’s formations. “Blue Dogs!” she yelled. “Get ready!”

They gave back the sharp bark of agreement. She watched Rolleson, not the enemy. What the enemy might do didn’t concern her now.

More bombs came flying overhead. What happens when they get our range? she thought suddenly, and imagined one of those landing here on the terrace. It would be sheer carnage.

Whatever Santi was waiting for, it wasn’t anything the Russians were planning. And she almost missed it, except for the whisper of wings above her in the darkness, and a sudden stop to the rain on her head as an automaton flew over their position.

The mechanical dragon that Thomas had designed floated down, almost invisible in the darkness. And then it breathed a horrifyingly huge stream of Greek fire down on the army below. The light glazed on the huge metallic wings as the dragon hovered, its snakelike head bent forward. It was a nightmare come to life, and for the first time Glain was glad to see it.

It was not targeting the soldiers, she realized, but some odd-looking devices farther back, tubular and on wheels. The Greek fire hit those structures and the metal melted in on itself with shocking speed. A series of violent explosions ripped the night apart, casting sharp fragments through the opposing army in a bloody swath.

Glain couldn’t help the cheer that tore out of her throat; she shouldn’t have been glad of their deaths, but she was. They’d have cheered for hers.

The Russians turned their gunfire on the dragon, but it wasn’t alone. The smaller winged forms of automata sphinxes plunged out of the rain and began to tear through whole columns of soldiers like paper.

It was sudden, total war.

“Free fire!” Rolleson shouted, echoing a command she couldn’t hear, and Glain repeated it for her squad as she aimed her rifle down at the running troops below. They were coming steadily, and she respected them for that; it wasn’t a panicked stampede but a measured assault. One of them threw something metallic at the gates. She heard the explosion. Felt it through her boots. Had they breached the barrier? It was hard to tell. She picked targets and fired, rocking the recoil with her shoulder and repositioning precisely for the next shot, and the next, and the next. Shadow targets, illuminated only by the light of the burning things—some new sort of ballistas?—that the dragon had torched. The darkness lit again with more explosions as ammunition ignited. Spectacular and awful. She averted her eyes briefly from the glare, then picked off three more attackers.