Tales of Engines & Demons - Volume 1 **SAMPLE**

Rourke - Siege's End

The exploding war-engine tore the ancient façade from the houses of the Crescent, and threw an expanding ball of fire across the park. The trees there had long since been burned to stumps, but the flames clung to their edges, while the burning marionettes of the engine's crew staggered among them, before falling down and dying. Smoke from the burning city discoloured the sky, turning it from the cold blue of the fallows season to a flat grey, its surface scored by the pencil stroke thin lines of falling natha-bombs.

From his position high on the fortress' battlements, Templar Rourke lowered his duo-noculars and reached inside his coat for his notebook and chamber pen. The city's war-engines were indeed as decrepit as Warvitch's initial assessment had suggested, and he would have to include that confirmation in his report. As his fingers found the edge of his notebook, a grinding rumble of collapsing masonry interrupted the explosive rhythm of the siege. Rourke lifted his duo-noculars to his eyes again, and focussed them on the city's outer fortifications.

His view of the north gate was blocked by a cloud of thick dust. As he watched, it tumbled in twin waves along the city's encircling wall. He took the tumult of masonry debris as a sign that a substantial section of the wall had fallen, and shifted his view to inspect the ground beyond it. Sure enough, the forward earthworks that Warlord Parus' forces had spent the last few weeks digging were already beginning to fill with attackers. The closest trenches, parallel to the city walls, were too heavily buttressed to see into, their depths hidden from view, but he could see things pouring towards them along the feeder trenches. A chance shaft of weak sunlight pierced the overhead murk and flashed on sharpened blades, the polished domes of helmets, claw armour, and tail scythes.

The city's war-engines should really have been directing their own natha-bombs onto those trenches, but Rourke suspected that New Broker's defences were no longer being co-ordinated by anyone substantially qualified to undertake such a duty. That judgement was confirmed when he swung his noculars down to view the suspected breach, and saw the city's defenders forming up in the surrounding streets. He tutted loudly and shook his head. The city may not have the foresight to drench the impending attack in natha-fire, but the enemy forces would not spare Broker's defenders from the same fate.

The soldiers down there were lining themselves up for slaughter, and the bombs that would soon begin to fall on them would not be fired by antiquated war-engines leftover from the Predation wars. Rourke was sure of that fact because, on the day the enemy engines had appeared on the field, he'd studied them closely from the city walls and had confirmed Warvitch's suspicions. Warlord Parus had rogue Engineers in his employ, and his war-engines were all newly built.

The broil of masonry dust soon cleared enough to reveal the breach in the wall; a savage V of emptiness where half its height had fallen. A ragged slope of stonework filled the road below it, leaving a two metre gap between its highest reach and the lowest point of the breach. Rourke guessed that the slope of rubble on the breach's far side would reach a similar height.

The attacking forces would be bringing up siege ladders, and New Broker's archers were already streaming along the wall from the safety of the northern gate's fort in anticipation of that first wave of attack. It looked as though whoever was in command of the walls knew what they were doing, because he could see two units of spearmen, and another of swordsmen, climbing to the battlements to support the archers at the breach. If they held their nerve, there was a possibility that they would be able to hold out for a time, and if whoever was commanding the city's war-engines got their act together...

His thoughts were distracted by a sudden movement at the rear of the attacker's line. He swept his duo-noculars up to focus on its source.

"By Fortak's light!"

Two grim shapes had climbed from the crevasse of the attacker's rearmost trench. Four metres high at their shoulder, they loped across the earthworks, crossing trenches as though they were nothing more than pavement cracks. Riveted armour plates at their shoulders and backs slid back and forth as they moved. Their scaly hides beneath were slickly green in the sky's shrouded sunlight, and venom dripped from their exposed fangs, to smoke on the churned earth between the trenches. They reached the first tumbled stones of masonry below the wall and began to climb.

It looked like Parus had run out of patience, and did not want to waste any more time in the capture of New Broker and its secrets. Rourke slipped his noculars into an inside pocket of his coat.

"Time to go," he said, brushing grime from his elbows as he stood.

Pain cramped up his right hip, and he was forced to support himself against one of the battlements' stone merlons until it had passed. He had been kneeling for far too long, and his aging body was rebelling. Limping until the pain in his muscles subsided, he made his way along the empty battlements of the fortress as, on the city walls below, the screaming began.