First Lords Fury Page 0,175

perhaps a quarter of an hour after Amara emerged from the steadholt's hall. Trumpets sounded. Legionares stood ready as engineers finished closing the gates that had been crafted into the walls, until the walls presented a single face of solid granite, its front smoothed to a gleaming finish. She stood beside Bernard upon a tower ten feet higher than the wall. Defensive towers had been spaced every hundred yards down the length of the wall, here a little less than three miles long.

A courier put down upon the tower, briefly kicking up a small gale of wind, and saluted. "Count Calderon, sir."

Bernard didn't take his eyes from the field ahead of him. "Report."

The young man stood there, blinking uncertainly.

Amara sighed and beckoned him. He took a few tentative steps closer.

"There," Amara said, once he was past the windcrafting she was maintaining to keep Bernard's orders from being monitored by enemy crafters. "Can you hear now?"

"Oh," said the courier, flushing. "Yes, ma'am."

"Report," said Bernard in exactly the same tone as before.

The young man looked mildly panicked. "Captain Miles's compliments, sir, and there's a sizeable enemy force moving to the north, sir, to circle around the end of the wall!"

"Hngh," Bernard said. "Thank you."

The young man's eyes widened. "Um? Sir? Captain Miles is afraid that the enemy will turn our flank. There's nearly a quarter mile of open ground at the end of the wall before it reaches the flank of the mountain."

"And that's a problem?"

"Sir!" the courier protested. "The wall isn't finished, sir!"

Bernard bared his teeth in a wolfish smile. The leading wave of the vord was now dressing its ranks and preparing to charge. "The wall is exactly what it's supposed to be, son."

"But sir!"

Bernard paused to give the young man a hard look.

The courier wilted visibly.

Bernard nodded. "Return to Captain Miles, give him my compliments, and inform him that he is to stand fast. An allied contingent has been placed to support him should he need it." He paused and looked at the young man. "Dismissed."

The courier swallowed, saluted, then dived off the side of the tower. He managed to call up a windstream just before he hit the ground, then raced away to the north.

Amara looked at Bernard, and said, "Couldn't you have told him more?"

"The fewer who know, the better." He rested his hands on a merlon and nodded calmly as the vord began to move forward in unison. "Giraldi. Signal the mules to stand ready. Section leaders will give the command to begin."

Giraldi's voice bellowed down the wall as the ground began to rumble with the vord's charge. The order was picked up and relayed down the line.

Bernard lifted his hand over his head and watched the oncoming enemy. Once again, as the vord closed to within a few yards, they let out a vast shriek that shook the walls, and once again, their cries clashed with those of the legionares upon the battlements. Bernard stood watching the nearest legionares intently as they lifted their javelins, and when the first of them threw, he snapped his arm forward, and screamed, "Loose!"

The mules went to work.

Each of the contraptions was built around a boxlike frame. Wooden support struts rose above it, to support a long wooden arm with a shallow bowl at its end. Amara wasn't familiar with the details of the devices, but each arm was drawn back by a crew of two men, who used raw strength and very minor woodcrafting to pull the arm all the way to a horizontal position. A pin, placed in the device, locked the arm back - and when it was removed, the arm snapped forward with startlingly energetic violence. When it did, it carried so much power with it that the entire framework jumped up off the ground at one end, like a cantankerous mule kicking out with its hind legs.

When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred mules placed in ranks behind the walls kicked up off the ground, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of small glass spheres, soaring up over the walls. They leapt up into the air and spread out into a glittering cloud that caught the light of the lowering sun, throwing back sparkles of scarlet, orange, and gold.

Then the fire-spheres struck the earth and burst into globes of hungry fire, hundreds of them all at once, spread out over a wide swath of land.

"Bloody crows!" screamed a nearby legionare.

The fire seemed to ripple out in a long ribbon as each

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