It made sense. Those creatures, whatever they were, had to be of fantastic weight—all of it settling upon four relatively small feet. Something that large could not easily manage its own mass, Amara was sure. A crippled foot might prevent the beast from moving at all.

Of course, the thousands of mantises running in a living river around and sometimes upon those feet could make it a bit difficult to reach the target. One of the High Lords might make short work of it, but they were mostly engaged above, and the Legion firecrafters had already exhausted themselves.

Of course... one didn’t really need to hurt the bulks. They only needed to stop them, before they breached the wall and left gaps into which the vord swarm would pour, running down the retreating Legions before they could reach Garrison.

“Bernard,” Amara said, her own voice thready. “Riva.”

“Hah,” Bernard said. He turned to Giraldi. “Centurion, signal arrows. One: Lord Riva to report to me. Two: General call for engineers at this location.”

Signal arrows were bright enough to be seen for miles. The message would get to Riva within a moment. It would take him little longer to fly back to the front, but Amara was not sure how much time they actually had.

It seemed to take forever, and the bulks pressed ever closer. The mantises seemed to go mad with eagerness as they did, as if the bulks were pushing out some kind of psychic bow wave. One breach appeared atop the wall, and another, and Bernard dispatched reserves to reinforce the weakened areas.

There was the roar of a nearby windstream, and Riva, dressed in trousers and a loose, unbuttoned shirt, his hair a wildly tossed mess, looked blearily around the wall. He spotted Bernard and moved to him, lifting his fist in a salute and glancing out at the bulks as he did. He froze. “Bloody crows.”

“Bloody crows,” agreed Gram.

“We need water,” Bernard said to Riva. “My lord, we need to water that ground, and we need to do it now.”

Riva opened and closed his mouth a few times, then seemed to shake himself. “Oh, of course. Bog them down. We’d need a river to do it in time.”

“The Rillwater,” Bernard said. “It isn’t far from here. Maybe a quarter mile southwest.”

Riva lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Possible, perhaps. Engineers?”

“Assembled below.”

“Aye, aye,” Riva mused. “Just like irrigating a field. Only more so. Excuse me.”

Riva leapt from the wall to the courtyard below, braking his fall with windcrafting, and turned to the engineers. He began issuing rapid orders. The men gathered in ranks and knelt to place their bare hands against the earth. Riva, at the front of the group, did the same, and several hundred experienced engineers, led by Riva, began to make the earth quiver.