HOME IS THE HAUNTER
GARTH NIX
THE CANNON WAS one hundred and twenty-five feet long and its rifled bore tapered from six feet in diameter at the breech to two foot nine and three quarter inches at the muzzle, using the old measures of the Mergantz system. Cast in bronze, the vast weapon’s entire length was adorned with cryptic writings and fevered drawings of tormented souls, acid-etched into the metal. Never designed to be moved at all, the great gun was currently being transported upon a dozen carefully-lashed-together ox carts, the whole being drawn by six mokleks, the shorn and gentled draft animals that were not to be confused with their wild cousins, the hairy mammoths of the icy wastes.
Sir Hereward was seated inside the howdah of the lead moklek, resting uncomfortably on the slightly-padded shelf that was supposed to be a seat, and might have served as such for a shorter and slighter man. He would have preferred to be astride a battlemount or a horse, but their last horse had died the week before, and their last battlemount a few days after its final meal of horse.
The mokleks would go next, Hereward thought, though their most pressing need was for water rather than food. He could then survive on moklek meat and blood for a considerable time thereafter, but without the draft animals the cannon would have to be abandoned here on the featureless steppe, the interminable grassy plain that he had loathed from the start of this ill-fated journey.
. . .
