“FALL BACK!” ONE CENTURION cried.

I watched from the rail as one unit pulled back across one of the arching bridges that spanned the river a thousand feet below. The Cielcin followed on, nahute swarming about them like a plague of locusts, tearing at the defenders.

The bridge exploded an instant after. Chunks of mortar and white stone flew in every direction. Red flame, black smoke, the tangled shrapnel of bodies torn asunder. In the middle distance, one of the Cielcin siege towers erupted in a cloud of fire that tore the crumbling walls about it apart and set the trees on the terrace to burning.

Sparrowhawks screamed above, circling over the city, tangling with the black darts of Cielcin fliers that had come down with the towers. If I stood by the rail and looked up along the terraced wall of the Valles, I could see the square ramparts that lined the edge of the valley and the winged shapes of Irchtani wheeling overhead, their zitraa flashing in the sun. Beyond them, the sky glowed red and violent white as weapons fire discharged in the void about Ondu Station.

The sirens wailed above it all, a ceaseless, flat droning in the ears. The noise gave the tableau a sense of unreality as I watched, a part of and yet apart from the violence. Gunshots sounded on the level above us, and I heard the thump and rattle of armored feet. Briefly I caught a glimpse of white armor and red tabards on the terrace above, the cough and shout of plasma fire as the men fired over their shoulders. A school of nahute swam on the airs after them, writhing, churning, hungry for flesh. There must have been three dozen of them.

“Here!” I cried, waving my hands. “Here!”

One of the soldiers spied me as they rounded the bend beyond—and to my horror I saw that they were all peltasts. Unshielded. There were seven of them, the remnants of some larger unit. Where their decurions were I could not guess. Spying me, they changed plan and half-threw themselves down the steps, the evil drones grinding at their heels.

“Lord Marlowe!” one cried.

“Back!” I shouted, pushing the man past me. “Valka!”

The last in line of the peltasts stumbled on the uneven flagstone steps that led to the thoroughfare and staggered a moment against the rail. It was one moment too long. Three of the nahute overtook him, snarling heads catching on the rubberized polymers of his suit underlayment, tearing as they burrowed. The man’s screams were piercing even with the sirens’ blast. Blood sheeted over white ceramic.

He was dead before I got to him.

The nahute emerged a moment later, wet and dripping. I destroyed them before they could fully emerge and shake off the blood and torn flesh. Half a dozen more locked onto me and charged, rebounded as they struck my shield curtain. It would take their primitive machine brains a moment to work out the shield’s weakness, but in that space of time they were within the reach of my sword. Highmatter shone blue about me, and the serpent machines fell in pieces.

But there were too many. Behind me, my guard opened fire, and I heard screaming as one of the alien drones found its way through the man’s defenses. Try as I might to attract the worst of them, the nahute kept coming. I felt the teeth of one grind against one armored thigh, piercing my shield by accident. One hand flailed reflexively and snapped the thing away, but it was too late. The diamond-bit teeth had caught on my armor and began to turn. I flipped my sword round and slashed at it, hewing the metallic snake just behind its jaw. Grasping what remained, I tugged it loose and cast its ruin upon the stones at my feet.

There were always more. The air about churned and buzzed with the thrum of their primitive repulsors, so loud and so close that even the wailing siren was dimmed.

And then they stopped, and full dozens fell lifeless to the street about me.

Turning, I saw Valka standing with hand outstretched and head cocked to one side. She gave me a satisfied little nod and tapped her temple. I could not see her face through the featureless red of the visor, but I knew her tight smile was firmly in place.

“What would you do without me?” she asked.

Something huge and dark fell on her from above. Man-shaped and more than man-high, white hands grasping. Valka yelled as the thing crushed her beneath it. A moment later, a half dozen more of the scahari warriors fell from the street above. Another of my guardsmen fell with a scimitar in his throat. I didn’t hesitate, but threw myself toward Valka’s attacker and opened it from hips to shoulder blade with a rising flicker of my moonlight blade.

Valka seized my hand and I helped her to her feet.

“You were saying?”

Pallino fired a round from his lance that felled another of the attackers, and Renna and another soldier did for another. Valka drew her sidearm, the antique plasma repeater, and unloaded three rounds in the back of a third. The remaining Cielcin tried to flee, to break off and regroup—but it was too late. Another decade of troops poured forth from the shadow of the tunnel mouth and claimed them.

In the eerie stillness that followed, some of the others picked over the bodies, relieving them of knives and scimitars and other artifacts worth saving.

“Where do you come from?” Pallino asked the survivors.

One man, a triaster, answered, “Up a ways.” The man turned his head from the chiliarch, not seeing him or else afraid to see.

It was not a substantial answer, not an informative one. “Name and rank, out with it!”

The fellow just turned away, glancing back at his fellow dead on the stairs. Pallino slapped him with the butt of his lance. “Eyes up, soldier!”

The man seemed to come back to himself. “Kuhn, sir. Four-Beta two-two. Triaster.”

“Fourth Cohort . . .” Pallino said. “This your first?”

“Sir, no sir.”

“Then stop acting like it,” Pallino’s words came flat. “The hell happened?”

“Demons!” one of the others said. “Giants, sir!”

Giants. Behind my mask I shut my eyes, gathered what scattered pieces of myself I could to ask, “Were they chimeras?”

The men of the Fourth Cohort had not fought aboard Iubalu’s ship, nor had any of them plumbed the depths of the fortress at Arae.

“Chi . . . what?” The legionnaire struggled with the antique word.

“Machines,” I said. “Metal.”

Triaster Kuhn only bobbed his head. I imagined his face green, lips compressed behind the dull white helm.

Giants. The word conjured memories of Iubalu’s looming bulk, its white arms and swords, its fingers like scalpel blades. Bastard creation of Cielcin blood and Extrasolarian praxis, hateful and accursed.

“Giants . . .” I said, and pointing to the tunnel, I said, “Triaster, take your men to the rear. You’re no use to anyone as you are.” I brushed past the fellow, stepping over the bodies of the Cielcin as carefully as I could, white cape gathered in one fist, blade unkindled in the other. “We need to see what’s going on out there,” I said to Pallino. “Send two decades.”

---

Pallino chose two of his decurions. With Siran gone, the chiliarch had not appointed a new prime centurion to replace her, and the duty fell to two officers who had been with us since before Aptucca. I watched them go: the glint of red fires on armor the color of bone, the way the decurions’ crests swayed as they ran. Still I felt useless waiting and watching. Weak. I tried to reach for my vision of the endless present, but try as I might to look in those directions no mortal eye was meant to see, I could not find it. I could not focus, and my frustration only further alienated me from the sight.

Cannon fire filled the air from the inner wall above as the wreckage of towers fell like rain. Off in the distance, another of the towers erupted in white flame, and a cheer went up through the comm line.

But it was not to last.

“More ships incoming!” Lorian’s words came like evil prophecy falling from on high, and accompanying them came the roar of entry and the scream of retro-rockets as Cielcin siege towers crashed against the shores of our world.

“Keep firing!” I said, watching another of the towers explode as it slowed in its final descent.

A horrible flash filled the air. Not the red glow of weapons fire like lightning beyond the clouds, but something orange and horribly present, and a dozen things happened at once.

The sirens died, and all the lights of the city of Deira from the highest terrace to the river far below. An instant later the earth groaned and shook as with spasm, and I staggered against the rail. Shouts and cursing filled the common band, mingled with cries of despair. The city was dead. I knew before I asked Lorian what had happened.

“They hit the nuclear generator,” came the intus’s words. “City’s switching to emergency power.”

“Geothermal?” I asked, thinking of the tunnels and the old mines that ran beneath the Storm Wall.

“Yes.”

With the raid sirens gone, there was nothing to deaden the noise of fighting, the screams of men and Cielcin, the crack and roar of fires and of weapons. It was almost quiet, and the sudden clearness of the air lent an eerie sense of stillness to all that passed above and below and about us, as if we were all a part of some frieze carved on a Chantry wall.

“We’re well outside the exclusion zone,” Lorian said. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. The power plant had been built nearly forty miles from the Storm Wall, far enough to keep the people safe from radiation. “The wind could be a problem.” The blast must have carried radioactive material higher than the level of wall.

“Let’s pray not.”

A horrible sound arose from the depths of that fading city. High and piercing, vibrating clearer and colder than the noise of any human throat. I felt my blood run cold. There was no sound like it in all the human universe, for its makers were far from human. That terrible sound had once issued from deep caverns beneath alien suns where the forefathers of the forefathers of the Cielcin had scrambled in the ceaseless dark. It was the sound of black caverns, of volcanic tubes and grottoes filled with blind things that splashed and paddled in forsaken pools. It was the noise of creatures that spilled blood and sacrificed to nameless things in darkness deeper still.

“Lorian!” I said, voice tense even in my own hearing. “Lorian, open fire!”

The commander did not reply. Not with words. The Javelin missiles rained down the city and broke against the shoals of nahute defending the towers. Another of the siege towers blew apart, blasting shrapnel five hundred feet into the sky.

Snatches of comms chatter clipped over one another on the general comm, bits of shouted intel overlapping as I tried to make sense of the shape of the fighting on my suit’s display.

“Half a dozen towers in the industrial quarter—”

“—lost the whole eighth decade.”

“Man down! Man down!”

“Stick to your target! Remember the simulations!”

“—the size of them!”

“Came in too fast, I—”

And then I heard the fateful words, the words that told me my hours of waiting by the sidelines must end: “They’re climbing the inner wall!”

I switched lines. “Kithuun-Barda!”

The Irchtani commander’s voice croaked in my ear. “Lord?”

“Don’t let the Cielcin take those guns!”

“We see them!” he said. “They’re climbing with their bare hands! These are not Cielcin.”

“They’re chimeras,” I said. “Udax and I killed one in our last battle.”

“There are many more than one,” the kithuun answered.

I clenched my jaw. “I’m coming to you.”

Pallino, who had heard that much at least from where he stood beside me, said, “You should stay here, Had! Let me go.”

“No!” I shouted. “We’ve waited long enough. The lower city’s overrun. If we lose those guns we’ll have them knocking on the Storm Wall gates in half an hour. We’re going.”

The old myrmidon paused a moment, the Pallino who was my officer warring with the man who was my friend. “Right then,” he said at last. “Decades eight, nine, ten: hold the gate and be prepared to pull back if you’re overwhelmed! All the rest: with me!”

---

The base of the wall was not far: up the way the retreating soldiers had come and along a short path beneath the shuttered fronts of shops and eateries to where the banks of public lifts stood. We encountered no resistance as we hurried along. The bulk of the fighting was further north along the valley, near the center where the city was widest and the shadow of the largest bridge fell across the ravine.

The Irchtani screeched above us. As we rounded the corner, I beheld a great swath of the striated rock rising above the domes of the low, concrete buildings built along the lip of the terrace above us. The lift tubes—built into that mighty edifice—rose perhaps five hundred feet above our heads to the battlement-crowned heights of Deira’s inner wall. The flash of plasma cannons and the roar of the Javelins played from those battlements, and I saw Irchtani auxiliaries leaping from the merlons and wheeling in the air, shooting and sweeping the swirling nahute from the sky with their long cutlasses.

And I saw them, not darkly clad but armored as Iubalu had been in plate of shimmering white, their jointed limbs and spade-like hands sinking deep into the stone of the rock face and into mortar where masonry began. Kuhn had been right to name them giants, for even at a distance I knew them to be more than twice the height of a man—perhaps three times. Like were they in design to Iubalu, and yet unlike, for though their size was greater, they lacked the second set of arms and elongated, feline torso, having instead too-long legs bent backward like a goat’s.

I despaired, recalling how difficult the battle against Iubalu had been, for there were two—no, three—dozen of the hateful things climbing the terraces above. They did not move quickly, though they climbed faster than any man, horrid hands climbing hand-over-hand with the inexorable precision of clockwork, closing in on the missile batteries that lined the canyon’s lip between the city’s upper and lower quarters. The hand that had fashioned them I knew too well, having encountered their laboratory beneath the mountain fortress of Arae.

Here was the black product of an alliance between mankind and the Empire’s two greatest enemies. The once-human magi who called themselves MINOS had accepted the Faustian bargain Raine Smythe and I had refused on the Demiurge; they had sold themselves and their services to the Cielcin.

To Syriani Dorayaica.

And for what? For power? For knowledge—like Faust himself? Or out of simple resentment? Hatred of the Sollan Empire?

“Shoot them down!” I shouted.

The men about me aimed lances and plasma burners and fired.

The shots struck home, and the Cielcin demons kept climbing.

“Bastards are wearing shields,” Pallino said. “Hold your fire!”

“Up to the walls!” I said, and signaling the Irchtani kithuun, I added, “Barda, don’t let those things up there!”

With the funiculars and the freight lifts all disabled and the city power gone, access to the higher levels was possible only by a series of winding stairs that switched back and forth across the face of the mighty cliff. These were reserved for the poorest citizens of Deira in peacetime, those unwilling or unable to pay the single-kaspum lift toll, but that day—I thought—the stair would command a toll steeper still.

I was halfway to the base of the stair when I heard it again: that guttural, metallic roar, more like the noise of a jet engine than the scream of any throat and yet at once terribly animal in its wetness and evident malice.

For there was laughter in the sound.

Turning my head, I did not know what it was I’d expected to find, but nothing could have prepared me for the horror that was to come. Smoke filled the streets beside us, and the opening to the largest of these was framed by a round arch that supported a bank of apartments.

A hand appeared from the smoke. A white, six-fingered hand felt around and gripped the bottom of the arch. Then an arm emerged and a pointed elbow followed by the fingers of another hand that gripped the far corner of the apartment block. The world was momentarily silent, and I stood transfixed, stunned to realize that each hand was the size of fully grown man.

For a moment, I thought that the worst of my visions had come real, that here was one of the Watchers dragging itself from the Stygian black of dreams. The way it pulled its incredible bulk through the avenue put me in mind of some terrible infant clawing its way from the birth canal with taloned fingers, and the masonry crunched in its grasp. But this was not one of the nightmare things I had witnessed in my visions, but a terror of ceramic and steel.

A metal face appeared, and the terrible impression I had had of an infant only intensified, for it was bulbous and swollen, its huge machine eyes glowing like dying coals. It screamed again, jaws mighty enough to snap a man in two, and, with titanic effort, dragged its broad torso forward, shoulders scraping the sides of the avenue and cracking the archway.

And then it stood, and kept standing. Twenty feet tall it was, twenty-five. Thirty! A hulking monstrosity in black and white, clear cousin in design to the lesser giants that climbed the wall above, but greater than any I had seen. Greater than Iubalu, greater than the living failures I had encountered in the experiment tanks of Arae. Great almost as the smallest of our colossi.

I knew then with certainty that here was another of the Vayadan, the holy slaves that gathered round the person of the Prince of Princes, and facing it there in the square before the wall and the ascent, there was but one thing I could do.

“Run!” I pushed Renna past me, and four others after her, and turning spurred my men toward the stair.

Answering some command, perhaps, or heeding only the call to violence in its blood, one of the lesser demons on the wall above let go. It fell more than two hundred feet and struck the stones on all fours. The hindmost decade of our little force peeled off and spread out along the perimeter at the base of the stairs, for to keep tight formation against such a foe was to court death swift and hard.

Flagstones rose to meet me as I climbed, and my suit’s positive pressure helped to force hyper-oxygenated air into my lungs. Still, my breath came hard, and I spurred Valka on ahead of me, steadying her with a hand.

The beast below bellowed and swept its arms through the roof of the nearest building, dislodging the sniper that had nested there and sending the man’s mangled body careering over the heads of those fighting in the square below. Heedless of the men about it as a boy is to the insects beneath his feet, the demon advanced toward the wall, its shield and heavy armor drinking the fire forced upon it like sweet rain.

I climbed faster, hearing the metal crash behind. I knew the demon had killed our decade and was climbing the stair, limbs punching through men as it crawled after our heels.

Boom.

The hollow reverberation of a grenade blast sounded, and looking back I saw the metal monster reel and stagger back, momentarily disoriented, its armor cracked. Someone had tossed a mine at it, slow throw bypassing the shield as the device’s electromagnet clamped it to the ferrous endoskeleton beneath the white zircon of its armor.

But the steel limbs twitched, and though black ichor ran from the ruin of its jaw, it came, heedless to its own injuries as the undead SOMs that had served the Painted Man in the Arslan tea house. Smoking, staggering, the horrid creature stood.

The giant in the square bellowed again. A flaring flight of missiles flowered from its shoulder and studded the masonry about us, blowing stone pillars and fascia apart. A rain of splinters fell about us, rattling against my armor.

“We’re going to die here,” Pallino’s voice snarled in my ear. “There’s no way we’re making the top.”

“ ’Twas a mistake!” Valka put in, unhelpful.

Of the seventy that had left the safety of the tunnel mouth, perhaps forty remained.

“Climb!” I ordered them all. It was no mistake. The wall had to be defended. It was only that it might be impossible.

Unless . . .

“Barda!” I rasped, sheltering with Valka behind the pillar on the landing as the blast of another magnetic mine sounded behind us. “Barda, we’re pinned down on the stair!”

I did not hear the Irchtani kithuun’s reply, for the vayadan-general below chose that moment to scream again.

This time another scream answered it, free and high and wild on the winds, and for a moment—despite the horror and dire moment in which we all stood—I was a boy again, and running on the wall-walks of Devil’s Rest playing Simeon the Red.

Gray- and green-feathered shapes fell from the sky, pulling knots of nahute in their wake. Plasma fire peppered the stair behind us, and turning I beheld the spread of mighty wings and felt the wind buffet me.

There must have been three hundred of them.

How they had come so fast I could not say, but there they were, and a moment after clawed feet with talons long as daggers gripped my shoulders and my feet left the ground.

One of the Irchtani had me in its claws, and with each beat of its wings we rose higher, leaving that doomed stair and the Cielcin behind.

“You are heavy, Devil Man!” came the familiar voice, and I recognized Udax.

“That is twice now I owe you my life!” I said.

“Which puts you in my debt!” the centurion replied.

Despite the nahute and the enemy fire still thick around us, I laughed. “Just so!”

Another of the xenobites carried Valka ahead of me, and there were Pallino and Renna. Another explosion rocked the stairs behind, and I saw the ruined demon fall back at last in splinters. The magi of MINOS had done their work well, for the inhuman things were built to withstand far more than any man or Cielcin could bear.

One soldier leaped from the rail, and a diving Irchtani caught him by his ankle mere feet from the ground. Another stood on the precipice, hand outstretched. I thrust out my hand. “Take it!” I cried. “Jump, you fool!”

The man did not jump, for in that moment the ancient stair—which had stood since the founding of Deira when the settlers had carved their strange metropolis out of the Valles Merguli—cracked and broke as last. I can still imagine that I felt his hand brush mine as he fell, and cursed myself. My vision might have saved him, if I could have but reached it in the chaos.

I do not know his name, did not see his face in those last moments.

I had a lingering image of the crumbling stair as we flew up and away: the lower levels of masonry rotting with flame and rocked by weapons fire. One of the Irchtani above us was struck by a missile launched by the horrific titan below and fell with his human charge—but not Udax.

We flew.