CHAPTER NINE
“This time they’re being cautious,” Esmond said, bracing his feet automatically against the pitch and roll of the ship.
“How so?” Adrian said curiously, peering towards the shore, where the causeway swarmed with workers and troops, like a human anthill.
“They’re putting in a wall with a parapet and fighting platform along the edge of the causeway as it goes out, see? And they’ve got their building yard completely surrounded with a ditch-and-stockade, and they’ve brought out those two fighting towers—they’ll push them out as the causeway proceeds. The catapults on them outrange anything a ship can mount, and they’ve got archers packed tight in there too. They can shoot from shelter.”
“Hmmm,” Adrian said. “Not good, brother.”
similar situations tend to produce similar solutions, Center said.
Meaning what?
Center tends to get a little oracular now and then, son, Raj thought with a chuckle.
Well, that’s appropriate.
What he—or it—means is that this isn’t the first time these tactical conditions have come up. Back on Bellevue, I got a reputation for originality partly because Center kept feeding me things that other generals had done, back on Earth before spaceflight. I’ve studied more since Center and I have been . . . together. There was a man named Alexander . . .
“Adrian? Adrian?”
Adrian shook himself, stopped squinting at the eye-hurting brightness of water on the purple-blue sea, and looked at his brother.
“Sorry.”
“I know Scholars of the Grove are supposed to be detached, but we have a problem here.” A scowl of frustration. “Or are you still mooning over that Confed girl?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think of practical matters,” Adrian said, slightly annoyed.
I’ve been getting that detached business since I was fourteen, he thought. One of the earlier Scholars had had the same problem from his family, and had cornered the olive-oil market for a year, just to prove a philosopher could also outthink ordinary men in ordinary affairs.
“Don’t think of it as a problem,” Adrian went on aloud, with a smile he knew was a little smug. “Think of it as an opportunity.”
He began to speak. Esmond’s eyes narrowed, then went wide. When he’d finished, the older Gellert spoke:
“Well, I will be damned to pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity. That just might work—and it’s a little longer before we have to let them know about the rest of your surprises. Captain!”
Sharlz Thicelt hurried over. “Sir?” he said.
Esmond looked up, frowning a little—there were few men taller than he—and spoke:
“What are the prevailing winds like here, this time of year?”
“My General, they vary. Usually from the northwest, particularly in the afternoons—an onshore breeze, very tricky. It dies at night and backs in the morning, though. Of course, the Sun God alone can predict the weather on any given day; at times there are strong offshore winds, particularly if we get a summer thunderstorm, and—”
“Thank you very much, Captain Thicelt,” Esmond said hastily; the Islander loved the sound of his own voice—something of a national failing in the Islands as well as the Emerald cities. “That may be very useful. Very useful indeed.”
“Odd,” Justiciar Demansk said, shading his eyes with one hand. “Those look like merchantmen.”
The causeway had made two hundred yards progress, and the siege towers were half that distance from shore. Already the inner surface looked like a paved city street, flanked by fortress walls; attempts at hit-and-run sniping hadn’t been more than a nuisance. And we’ve sunk one of their galleys. That had been the stone throwers on the siege towers. Nine stories of height made a considerable difference in one’s range; when they got out to Preble, the tops would overlook the city wall by a good fifteen feet, and the archers and machines there could sweep the parapets bare for the infantry. Thousands of workers hauled handcarts and carried baskets of broken rock out to the water, and the sound of it dropping into the waves was like continuous surf. Masons worked behind them, setting up the defense parapet, and where it hadn’t reached yet the workers were protected by mantlets—heavy wooden shields on wheeled frames. All was order, and rapid progress. At this rate, they’d be out to Preble in less than a month. And the troops would be royally pissed at having to work this hard for this long—it was worse than road-building detail, itself always unpopular. Added to what had happened there during the uprising, and the fact that Jeschonyk didn’t even intend to try and keep the men in hand, and it was going to be a very nasty sack.
Demansk felt a little sorry for the inhabitants of the island city. The Confed occupation had been enough to drive anyone to distraction . . . although not, in his opinion, to suicide. Which was what came of massacring Confederation citizens; the ones spared for the mines would be the lucky ones. Jeschonyk was talking about a special Games for the captured adults; a Games Without Issue, pairs forced to fight to the death and then the winners matched with each other, with one survivor left to be poled.
He took an orange out of the helmet he had balanced on one knee and began to peel it with methodical care. We’ve really got to do something about provincial government, he thought. Every time there was a political crisis at home there was a revolt somewhere, and it was all because of the tax-farming system. They’re our subjects, we’ve got to stop treating the provinces like a hunting ground. As it was, a provincial governor had to extort to the limit, to stand off the lawsuits that would be launched when he retired; for that matter, anyone who crossed swords with the tax-farming syndicates would be sued into bankruptcy or exile.
The Preblean flotilla was approaching the causeway from the northwest, with the sun behind them and to their right, and the wind directly astern. Hmmm, he thought. Four galleys, and they’re each pulling a merchantman. Could they be trying an assault?
No, they weren’t insane, or that desperate yet. He had a full brigade of troops ready to hand, with more to draw on—the working details had their equipment stacked and he’d drilled them in moving rapidly to kit out and fall in.
“Then what are they doing?” he asked.
Helga’s got me spooked, with her tales of that damned Emerald she took up with, he thought sourly. This is the modern age, not the plain before the walls of Windhaven during the Thousand Ships War. The gods do not don mortal disguise to fight in mortal quarrels, if they ever did.
Still . . . “First Spear,” he said. “Get your outfit standing to.”
“Yessir!”
That would be done competently, he knew. He squinted again, then stiffened as the rebel flotilla came into closer sight, just outside catapult range from the siege towers. The galleys were casting off their tows, turning, their oars going to double-stroke; heading away, then halting and backing water, their sterns to the causeway. The tubby deep-hulled merchantmen were sheeting home their big square sails, though. Heading straight for the causeway . . .
No. Their crews were diving overside, climbing into small boats and rowing like Shadesholm back towards the galleys. One paused, just close enough to see, and pumped a hand with an outstreched finger towards the Confed forces. The four ships came on with the tillers of their dual steering oars lashed and the wind steady on their quarters, faster now, little curves of white foam at their bluff bows. And smoke, smoke curling up from under their deck hatches.
“Messenger!” Demansk barked. “The towers are to open fire on the ships—rocks. Knock down their masts, or sink them—immediately. I’ll have the rank off the commander who lets them get through. Move!”
Demansk was a man who rarely raised his voice. The man ran as if the three-headed hound of the Shadow Lord were at his heels, and the Justiciar ground his teeth in fury.
Emeralds, he thought. No discipline; he’d fought them from Rope to Solinga, talking less and hitting harder. But they were . . .
“Sneaky. And these Gellerts, they’re sneaky even for Emeralds.”
The tendrils of fire licking up from the hatchways of the ships were growing even as he watched, pale in the bright sunlight, but full of promise and black smoke.
“Burn, you Confed bastards!” Esmond whooped.
Beside him on the raised stern of the galley, with his head on the curling seabeast stemhead, Adrian winced slightly. A rock from one of the tower catapults splashed into the water a hundred yards astern; either someone there was getting vindictive or they were really bad shots. More fifty-pound rocks were striking the fireships sailing in at six knots towards the Confed siege tower, knocking bits off their railing, making holes in the sails, some of them crashing through decks or striking masts. The holes in the deck simply gave the fires spreading belowdecks among the barrels of pitch and tar and sulfur and oil and tallow more air, miniature volcanoes shooting up after each hit. One ship’s mast did fall over; the high stern of the merchantman was still enough to keep it drifting steadily before the wind towards the tower, although it turned broadside on.
“Haven’t a prayer of sinking them,” he said.
You could sink an ordinary galley by catapult fire, if you were lucky. They were lightly built, racing shells of fragile pine, quickly made and quickly worn out. Freighters had oak frames and much thicker hull planks and frames. They were built to take strains and last; many sailed for thirty or forty years before they had to be broken up. The only real way to sink one was to ram it, or burn it . . . and these weren’t going to burn to the waterline until long after they hit the causeway.
“They’re bringing up men with oars,” Esmond said.
Adrian could see them too; someone had been bright enough to rig a pump, to keep them covered with water. They’d never be able to stand the heat, even so. Probably.
“We’d better discourage that,” he said. “Captain Sharlz, if you could bring us broadside on?” He turned and looked down onto the gangway of the galley: “Simun! Six arquebus teams—target the men trying to fend off.”
“Sir, yessir!” the underofficer shouted back, as the galley heeled and turned in its own length, oars churning and then going to a steady slow stroke to keep the craft on station.
Puduff. Puduff. Puduff . . . Sulfur-stinking smoke drifted back to the poop. Men fired, stepped back for their loading teams, stepped forward again, intent on their work. The first six rounds brought one man down—good practice, at this extreme range. The four-ounce balls and seven-foot barrels gave the arquebusiers more range than any torsion catapult, though.
“Bastards don’t know what’s hitting them,” Esmond chuckled.
That they don’t, Raj added. There’s no reason for them to associate a bang and a puff of smoke with someone getting killed. But they’ll learn.
They did, as more of the men getting ready to fend off the fireships went down. Confed troopers trotted up, raising their big oval shields to hold off whatever it was that was killing their comrades. Adrian could see the bronze thunderbolts on their facings glitter as they raised them; another row behind held them overhead, making a tortoise as they would for plunging arrow fire. Habit, but it was also habit that kept them so steady. Even when the first soldiers went down; the arquebus balls knocked men back, punctured shields, smashed through the links of mail.
This time Esmond winced; Adrian sensed he wasn’t altogether happy at seeing personal courage and skill and strength made as nothing by a machine striking from twice bowshot.
“ ‘Strong-Arm! How the glory of man is extinguished!’ ” the elder Gellert murmured; a king of Rope had made that cry from the heart, the first time he saw a bolt from the newly-invented catapult.
“Progress,” Adrian replied. Then: “Cease fire!”
The first of the fireships would ground not ten yards from its target. The Islander sailors had done their work well.
“Ungh.”
A man not two paces from Justiciar Demansk went down, grunting like someone who’d been gut-punched. Unlike a gut-punched boxer he wasn’t going to get up, not from the amount of blood that welled out around his clutching fingers. Better he bleeds to death now, Demansk thought with a veteran’s ruthless compassion. I’d rather, than go slow from the green rot. A puncture down in the gut always mortified. He could smell shit among the blood-stink, even from here.
“That went right through his shield,” he said aloud.
“Fuckin’ right it did,” his First Spear said. “Sir, you’ve got to get out of here! You get killed, who’s going to command this ratfuck? I can’t, and them bastards in the command tent, most of ’em can’t.”
Demansk shook his head. Jeschonyk actually had half a dozen reasonably experienced advisors—one good thing about the past twenty years of Confederation history was that the upper classes were full of men who’d seen red on the field. He turned in exasperation, keeping his voice low:
“I can’t expect the men to hold steady under this if I don’t—”
Ptannggg. Another trooper went down in front of him, a hole punched through his shield. Justiciar Demansk found himself on the rough stones of the causeway as well, blinking up at the First Spear’s horrified face.
“Where’s the velipad that kicked me?” he muttered.
His hand went to where the pain was, the left side of his torso, and then he jerked it away from metal burning hot. When he looked down there was a trough along his flank, ploughed into the thick cast bronze of his breast-and-back muscled cuirass. Lead was splashed across it.
“The Justiciar’s dead! The commander’s dead!” someone was wailing.
That pulled him out of his dazed wonder. He took a deep breath; there was a shooting pain in his ribs, but nothing desperate, no blood on his breath or grating of bone ends.
“I am not!” he said. “Get me up, gods condemn you!”
Hands pulled him up; he walked up and down behind the ranked troops, letting them see him.
Some way of making hellpowder throw things, he realized. Throw them farther than a torsion catapult can, and too fast to see. That’s what those puffs of smoke on the galley are.
Another thought brought his eyes wide, appalled. “First Spear!” he snapped. “Get those men with the oars away from there.”
“Let it ground, sir?” he asked, puzzled.
“We can’t stop it.” Still less push it around the front of the causeway, to drift harmlessly downwind. Somebody out there—those damned Gellerts—had probably timed this very carefully. “Have the battalion retreat—get everyone else out behind us. Walking retreat, shield-wall formation, but be damned quick about it. Move!”
He turned himself and began to walk to the rear. He’d been campaigning most of his fifty years; there was nothing in him of the need to prove his courage that had driven a young tribune to lunacy, so long ago. And the First Spear was partly right; nobody else was going to do this job better, if he couldn’t.
“They’re bugging out,” Esmond said, disappointment in his voice. “Someone got a rush of thought to the head.”
Adrian nodded tightly; he wasn’t grieved that fewer men would be burned alive. The first of the fireships was almost in contact with the sandbank the causeway was being built on . . . almost . . .
“There!” he said.
The comandeered merchantman touched, lurched forward and then stopped dead. With a long slow crackling audible even over the growing roar of the fire, the mast toppled forward, to lie with its burning sail over the rock of the causeway. It fell towards the tower, but did not quite touch it—men were leaning out of the upper works of the siege tower, reckless of arquebus bullets, and pouring water down the layers of thick green hides that made up its outer skin. Any moment now . . .
BUDDUFFF.
The force of the explosion was muffled by the hull of the ship, and the weight of combustibles lying above it. That confinement increased the force, as well. The burning deck of the fireship vanished in a spectactular volcano of flame, burning planks, beams, and dozens of barrels of flammables; many of them had ruptured in the hull as well, and added their sticky, fast-burning contents to the cone of flame that leapt upwards. It wasn’t aimed at anything in particular, but the breeze bent it south and eastwards . . . and most of it fell across the wall of the siege tower. Buckets of water became utter irrelevancies, and so did the layers of hide—they dried out and began to burn almost immediately. When the explosion cleared, the whole flank of the tower was already burning, and smoke was pouring out of the arrow slits and catapult ports all along the other side of it. Men jumped too, men with their hair and clothes aflame. A few were running from the other side, but not many could have made it down the ladders. The tower was a chimney now, sucking in air from the bottom and blasting it out the top and every opening along the sides, the thick timbers and internal bracing adding to the holocaust.
The next three fireships drifted into the red heart of the flames and exploded almost immediately. Adrian felt a huge soft pillow of hot air strike his face, making him fling up a hand as his eyeballs dried. When he blinked them clear the first tower was falling onto the flaming pillar of the second, nine stories of burning timber avalanching down unstoppably. The second tower cracked, shedding men and planks and hides; part of it hit the shallow water beyond, but the thick stump of it remained to burn with the whole of the first. Pieces of flaming wood flew through the air for hundreds of yards, well into the walled camp where the Confeds had crammed their carpentry supplies and naval stores. Fires started there, too; he could hear trumpets and drums as officers tried to organize fire-fighting parties. It would be difficult, though—the way to the nearest water supply was thoroughly blocked by the conflagration on the causeway.
There, stone would be beginning to crack as it glowed white-hot. Esmond was laughing, and the crews of the galleys were joining in—even the rowers were grinning through their oar ports on the outriggers, and the soldiers and sailors on deck were dancing, snapping their fingers and making obscene gestures towards the shore.
“A thousand men lost, there,” Esmond said, slapping his hand exultantly on his swordhilt. “A thousand men, and a month’s work, and all those materials. Lovely.”
Even against the wind, Adrian thought he could catch a whiff of the smell. He gagged slightly and nodded.
“That will set them back a little,” he said. “But I think we’re going to be real, real unpopular over there now.”
“Well, then,” Esmond said, clapping him on the back. “We’ll just have to continue closing the door in their face, won’t we?”
“It’s called a ‘trebuchet,’ ” Adrian said to the carpenters and blacksmiths and shipwrights. “And it’s a form of catapult.”
He was standing on a platform of rammed rubble behind the city wall, the section nearest to the Confed’s causeway. Everyone had been up there, and seen the redoubled efforts—this time the blocking wall along the sides was like a small city’s, and the towers pressed forward to the edge of construction were squat monsters sheathed in plates of beaten iron and brass, glittering like malignant serpents in the bright sunlight.
The craftsmen crowded around to look at the man-tall model he’d built. It had two heavy tripods, linked by an iron axle. Pivoting on that was a beam, anchored about one-third of the way along its height. The short end of the beam held a box full of rocks, itself pivoting on an iron bar driven through the outermost part of the beam; the long end had a leather sling on its end, holding a fist-sized ball of rock.
“How does it work?” one carpenter asked after a minute, baffled. “There’s no twisted sinew, no bow neither—how does it throw things?” He made a sign with one hand. “More of your hellpowder sorcery?”
Adrian smiled soothingly. “No, this is pretty straightforward,” he said. “I’ll show you. Simun.”
The underofficer motioned two arquebusiers forward. The other hundred were on the wall, happily potting men through the wooden shields that the Confeds moved forward to protect the working parties. They’d doubled and redoubled the thickness of planks on those, until they could barely move them over the uneven ground of the forward working surface, but the odd ball still penetrated. More still hit men behind the row of shields, or on exposed limbs, or struck the working parties that tried to move the mantlets forward. Other gunmen waited patiently for one of the trapdoors on the siege towers to open and spit a catapult dart at the city. They were just within extreme range . . . extreme catapult range, that was. The arquebuses were comfortably within their range, and a dozen fired every time the Confeds made the attempt. Men died within the tower, but that was secondary—a four-ounce ball travelling at nine hundred feet per second did unpleasant things to a torsion catapult’s frame and fixings whenever it struck.
Simun chuckled, looking over his shoulder, then signed to the two men. They hauled on ropes running through a block and tackle, and the long arm of the miniature trebuchet came down until he could slip an iron hook into a ring driven into the wood just above the sling. The load in that now rested, just touching the ground.
“Here, sor,” he said, handing a lanyard to Adrian.
“So, we pull this—”
Thwack.
The heavy basket of rocks pulled the short arm of the trebuchet down. The long arm moved more quickly, leverage driving it. The sling added to the momentum, and the rock blurred across the fifty yards to the wall in a streak of vicious speed. It cracked into the granite facing hard enough to spall off a foot-square flake. The craftsmen and sapper officers gave long, admiring whistles.
“The thing is,” Adrian went on, resting a hand on the model, “that we can build this as big as we can get timbers for—and Prince Tenny and the Syndics have authorized us to demolish buildings, even temples. We’re a shipbuilding city, here, so we’ve got plenty of men used to working to these scales, and with heavy cables and pulleys. We’ll need winches to pull down the throwing arm, but when it’s ready we can throw really big weights; we can throw them on a high arc, to lob over the wall, and we can throw them all the way to shore, or nearly—dropping them right on the Confeds’ heads.”
A circle of beatific grins broke out as the image slowly sank into the consciousness of the onlookers.
“Shark-Toothed Sea Lord,” one said, awed. “Like it was raining boulders, eh, lord? But how do we aim it?”
“We can move the whole frame around for direction,” he said. “That won’t be easy, but we can do it if we’re careful how we build the underlying platform and if we apply plenty of manpower. For distance, we just fire ranging shots, adding or subtracting rocks from the basket on the short arm—that’s where the impetus comes from, you see. We store up . . .” He halted; the Islander he was using had no word that precisely corresponded to “force.” “We store up the ability to throw by hauling up the basket, you see. Then when it comes down, all that, ah, strength, is transferred to whatever we’re throwing all at once. By altering the weight, we alter the strength—as a man does when he’s throwing a rock by hand.”
A few seemed to grasp what he was driving at. There were blank looks from the others, and he removed his hat and sighed. Sweat ran down his forehead and stung in his eyes; it was hot, and the stone buildings everywhere around reflected the heat.
“We can do it,” he said. Center had filled his mind’s eye with images of what the trebuchet could accomplish, and precise step-by-step instructions in making it. “And when we do, it’ll ruin the Confeds’ whole day.”
Men on the wall looked down, grinning reflexively at the laughter around Adrian. It spread spontaneously along the parapet, until the wall was ringing with cheers. Morale in Preble was very good.
“Enjoy it while you can,” Adrian muttered below his breath.
Out there, the resources of the Confederacy would be moving, moving—slow at first, like an avalanche did. But very heavy in the end.
Experience had shown that the base of the causeway was safe from the weapons on Preble’s wall . . . and if you stayed low, from the ones on the galleys harassing the quarter-mile length. Justiciar Demansk stood, scowling and watching the stone stream forward, the dead and wounded trickle back. A solid line of guards was detailed to check that nobody came back without a real wound; they leaned on their shields, stolid and bored and glad they weren’t out at the sharp end right now. The smell of sweat was heavy on the air, the smell of velipad and greatbeast dung, the dusty odor of cracked rock and the salt-silt of the shore.
At least we’re getting plenty of time to drill the new recruits, he thought. That was the one good thing about siege operations, even this gods-cursed one. He ground his teeth as he watched the sails of a convoy of merchantmen appear on the horizon. Preble would be eating well; intelligence said they had six months’ supplies, and they could import grain—from the Southern continent, through the freeport at Marange. As long as they had money, and they had plenty of that, too. Melting down the Temple treasuries, from what he’d heard; when that was done, there was always the King of the Isles.
“We’re certainly not going to starve them out as long as they hold the seas,” he said. “So, how do the men feel, First Spear?”
“Pissed off and scared, sir,” he replied promptly. “They want to get stuck into those damned rebels out there, but they’re starting to think that every time it looks as if we’re getting anywhere, the fuckers come up with another trick. Sir.”
Demansk nodded sourly. I can’t think of anything else they could do, he mused.
They’d planted iron-tipped stakes in the shallow water a hundred yards out from both sides of the causeway, using conscripted local sponge divers. No more fireships, thank the gods.
The arquebuses—spies and prisoners had brought the name back from Preble—could punch through shields, but not walls or reinforced mantlets, or the iron plates on thick timber of the new siege towers. The trickle of casualties from the towers was getting worse as they got closer to Preble, and so was the continuous sniping from galleys ranging along the causeway, but the Confederation had a big army. Soon enough they’d be within effective catapult range, and a little after that of archery. The Confed army had a lot of mercenary archers, too. The new towers were an absolute bitch to move, they were so heavy they’d had to use iron-plated wheels under them, but as a side benefit they ought to be fairly immune to battering rocks from catapults, as well.
“What am I missing?” he muttered.
“Sir! Heads up!”
Demansk felt his eyes go wide with surprise as he saw the tumbling dot rising from behind the walls that fringed the peachpit shape of the island city. I’m getting to absolutely hate feeling that expression on my face, he thought angrily. It was a rock, obviously. And equally obviously it was huge, a quarter of a ton, far heavier than anything a catapult could throw—could have thrown, before the gods condemned him to this nightmare operation. Once more he felt the ground shifting below his feet, as the certainties of a lifetime—of uncounted lifetimes, back to the times of the heroes—crumbled.
The boulder dropped into the water with an enormous splash, a hundred yards short of the left-hand, southern tower side of the causeway. The water was shallow enough there that the tip of it remained sticking up above the water. Men began pelting back, their mouths open Os of fright—conscripted local workers, he noted with somber pride, not Confed soldiers.
“First Spear, evacuate the causeway,” he said heavily. “Everything but enough men in the towers to stand off a fast attempt at a landing.”
Wouldn’t it look lovely on his record if he pulled everyone out, and a commando set the towers on fire again? But he wasn’t going to waste more troops, not if this got as nasty as it might.
The evacuation was orderly enough; five minutes later men were filing past him in columns, profanely shepherded along by his troops, and they were taking their baskets and hammers with them, their carts and beasts and timbers. One of the surveyors was jittering around the edge of the circle of Demansk’s personal guards, probably come to complain about the interruption to his work.
“Heads up!”
Another quarter-ton boulder. This one grew with remorseless speed, dropping down from the sky like an anvil thrown by the gods from heaven, like the dim legends of the end of the Golden Age before history. Demansk traced its curve with his eye and sighed.
CRACK. It hit the forward left corner of the southernmost of the pair of towers. Iron plates sprayed out as the bolts and spikes that held them to the wooden frame sheered off. Fragments of rock and iron and wood sprayed across the forward end of the causeway, knocking down a few men not yet withdrawn; he could see the sudden red gush of arterial blood, imagine it running pink into the sea, and the sudden frenzy of sea life there—scavengers had gathered from all over, and swimming had become much less popular.
“Get the men out of the towers,” he said.
“Sir—”
“They’re going to pound them into splinters and there’s not a fucking thing we can do. Get them out!”
Luckily, whatever-it-was out there on Preble seemed to take a long time to load—not as long as he would need to get the ultraheavy siege towers out of the way, but at least five to eight minutes between rocks. The archers and artillerists in the towers were pouring back in disciplined but hasty streams, jog-trotting past him, when the third rock struck the tower halfway up its length. The whole squat wide-based mass rocked backward, and the projectile didn’t shatter or rebound. Demansk winced; that meant it had broken right through the surface, even though it had struck at a glancing angle as it fell from on high. Like the fist of a god, he thought.
In fifteen minutes the towers were empty; and the southern one was leaning like a drunken man, and he could see daylight through the frame. Half a dozen more shots, and it was a toppled wreck. A hundred thousand arnkets, he thought. That much in materials alone; metals were expensive, on that scale. Not to mention the man-hours that had gone into it . . .
More waiting, a half-hour, and then a boulder skimmed the northern tower’s top and cracked into deadly splinters on the causeway behind it. The next one fell with malignant precision right on the roof, and he could hear the crack of rending wood as it slammed down the center of the tower. Five of the huge rocks served to send it toppling backward, with a chorus of groaning, rending, slamming sounds like the end of the world. When the dust cleared he could see it lying prone, the hole the first rock had made in the roof like an eye in the sagging rectangle of immensely thick timbers that made up the frame.
Another pause, and another tumbling dot from Preble. As it grew, he could see that it was trailing . . . not flame, but blue smoke. Like . . . like one of the grenades, but so much bigger. Which means . . .
“Down!” he shouted, diving for the ground; his repaired back-and-breast gouged at him as he landed on the paving stones. “Down, you idiot!”
He reached out, grabbed the thick muscular boot-clad ankles of the First Spear and yanked, pulling him level. Then the world went out in thunder and pain.
“There’s a bloody hole in the causeway where that big iron barrel of hellpowder landed!” Esmond said enthusiastically.
a crater, Center whispered pedantically at the back of Adrian’s mind. There where times when the god-spirit-machine reminded him of a particularly literal-minded instructor of rhetoric he’d studied under in the Grove.
The Gellerts were sitting on chairs brought up to the wall’s parapet, with a table laden with watered wine, olives, fish, ham, bread and fruit. Esmond was tearing into the food with methodical speed, his eyes glued to the shore and the Confederation works.
“Yes, as long as the gunpowder holds out we can batter it to pieces faster than they can rebuild it,” Adrian said.
Esmond nodded, smiling. “It’s a pity we can’t reach their camp that way—perhaps we could mount one of the trebuchets on a ship? A big merchantman, say—take out the mast, put the trebuchet on the center.”
“Accuracy would go to the Shades,” Adrian said, surprised and impressed. Esmond was starting to think in terms of the potential of the new devices.
Weapons technology diffuses faster than anything else, Raj said, his mental voice somehow tired and amused at the same time. Medicine and new ways of growing crops may get ignored as outlandish nonsense, but come up with a better way of cracking skulls and they’ll fall all over themselves to get their hands on it.
“But pretty soon,” Adrian said, “it’s going to occur to the Confeds that nothing we’ve shown them is much good against moving targets—like ships, for instance.”
Esmond’s smile turned to a scowl. “King Casull will support us with the royal fleet,” he said.
The brothers’ eyes met. We hope, went unspoken between them.
“ . . . save the arm,” someone was saying.
Justiciar Demansk’s eyes blinked open. There were two physicians hovering over him, and Helga. He looked down; his left arm was immobilized with bandages and splints, and just beginning to deliver a ferocious ache. For the rest he felt the usual sick headache-nausea you got from being knocked out, and bruises, wrenches and sprains. About like a bad riding accident, he decided, and pushed the body’s complaints away with a trained effort of will. The scents of canvas and the sharp smell of medicine made him want to vomit, but that passed as well.
A few curt questions settled that he wasn’t badly damaged—his First Spear had taken a bad head wound, been trepanned, and they were unsure whether he would live; now, that hurt.
When the doctors were gone at last, Demansk let his daughter raise his head and bring a cup to his lips. A distant sound like thunder made him jerk a little and spill the water on the thin sheet.
“More?” he said.
Helga nodded; the tent was dim, and it made her eyes seem to glow green at him. “More. The causeway is in ruins.”
“Not to mention the reputation of everyone concerned with this fiasco,” he said, laying his hand down on the pillow. “You know, this young man of yours—”
“Scarcely mine, Father!”
“—this Adrian Gellert, he threatens the whole course of things as they are. Starting with the Confederacy.”
She snorted. “Oh, come now, Father. We’ll take Preble, eventually.”
“We may, but it’s going to be very expensive. Why do you think the world is the Confederacy and some outlying regions now, instead of a tangle of little cities and valley kingdoms, the way it used to be?”
“Because we’ve got a better army, of course. And the gods favor us, supposedly.”
“The two often go together,” Demansk said dryly, not returning her smile. For one thing, it hurt too much. “But one reason is that cities don’t hold out for years, the way they did back during the League Wars, or even the wars of the Alliance. The Confederacy can take most towns in a month or less. Your . . . this Freeman Gellert has made sieges a lot more expensive again, all of a sudden. If these innovations—” the word had sinister connotations of decay and evil, in Emerald and the Confederation’s tongue as well “—spread.”
Helga laid a cold cloth on his forehead, and he held back a groan of relief. “Always thinking of the welfare of the State, eh, Father?”
“If a Demansk doesn’t, who will?”
She nodded. “But Father, what’s to prevent us from using these . . . new devices?” He noted that she avoided the word he’d used. “A city’s a big concentrated stationary target. From what I’ve seen and heard, hellpowder would be hell on fortifications.”
He blinked, startled. “You know,” he said, “there may be something to that . . . I’ve been sort of focused on getting into Preble against the Emerald’s toys.” He thought for a moment. “That bears considering, girl. It certainly does.”