The great bronze dragon-cannons which studded the Outer Wall were loaded, double-shotted for a devastating first volley. These were so enormous that, when they were fired, their operators had to stand against the wall and scream to prevent their eardrums bursting. Their range was immense but that night Uvoren did not expect them to be used at more than fifty yards. Roper would be declared an outlaw and blown apart.
The fire-throwers’ tanks, held deep within the Outer Wall, were charged. When the enemy drew near, pedals would be used to pump air into the tanks and raise the pressure, ready for use. These could drench all those within thirty yards of the wall in sticky-fire, hot enough to melt flesh and unquenchable except when smothered in sand. Certainly, they were the most feared instruments at the Hindrunn’s disposal.
Ballistae and siege bows were manoeuvred into position and bolt-caches positioned nearby.
The plate-hurlers—mechanical weapons that could fling sharpened steel disks into the enemy ranks to produce devastating cutting wounds—were shuffled into position and loaded with their heavy projectiles.
Buckets and buckets of arrows were brought to the top of the wall. Next to them, old masonry was piled, ready to be hurled down.
The refugees beyond the Outer Wall could hear these preparations, deduced there must be a hostile army approaching, and fled into the evening. Those within the walls saw the legionaries mustering in the street and the weapons being carried to the outer layers and hurried away. It would not have been unusual to prepare the fortress in this way with a Suthern army nearby, but everybody knew who these weapons would be aimed at. They knew Roper and his ruined army were drawing close. Everyone had heard of the disaster at Githru and that Roper was soon to be declared that worst of things: an enemy of the realm. An outlaw. A creature without loyalty, whose body would be obliterated to prevent it rising to fight with the dead when Catastrophe emerged from the sands in the east. In the conflict between the Wolf and the Wildcat, the only sensible thing to do was to get out of the way.
Shaded figures scurried up the street, too preoccupied to pay attention to the two women who sat in a bordering garden beneath a hawthorn. The taller woman was propped against the wall of the house at her back; the smaller against the trunk of the tree. Even through the gloom, the taller woman’s green eyes shone as they tracked the figures before her. They were mostly women, clutching wood, nails, charcoal, axes and sacks of dried fruit; the last items needed to prepare their households for the impending siege. Their men were elsewhere: already waiting armoured at their stations.
There was a long-established and unspoken agreement in siege warfare. If you forced an opposing army to storm your stronghold, they would make you pay for your resistance once inside. If the Black Lord could somehow force entry, the fury of his soldiers would be terrible. They would almost certainly vent it on their own home, which, after all, had turned against them first with cannon and fire-thrower.
“A lot of fear,” observed the tall woman.
Her smaller companion was the young serving girl, Glamir, who worked in Tekoa’s household. She did not turn to face Keturah as she answered. “We should go inside. What if Uvoren comes for you?”
“The Captain of the Guard has bigger issues on his mind just now. He’ll probably come when he’s finished with my husband, and a closed door won’t stop him.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s going to be a tedious conversation.”
Keturah was not thinking about Uvoren. She was not thinking about her husband. She was not even thinking particularly of her father, trusting him to find his own way through whatever happened beyond the walls.
She was thinking about the friends she had, marching under Roper. Or maybe now marching no longer, but spent by him; left at that feverish battlefield by the sea. But some must have survived: kind men, with whom she had often shared a joke and a snippet of gossip. Who had trained their particular interest on her; tried to charm and impress her; given her little presents they had made; appeared outside her father’s house to sing to her when drunk. More than once, Tekoa, his brow thunderous, his manner abrupt but his eyes gleeful, had dressed in his mighty legate’s cloak and stormed outside to the gathering circle of onlookers and demanded that, unless they removed this twittering scoundrel at once, he would take a testicle from each one of them to be hammered together for a bar of soap.
How would they behave, those kind men, if they broke past the warriors waiting on the walls, and forced their way into these streets? The most likely possibility, she considered, was that they would come and find her, to protect her from the blooming chaos and others who stalked these passages with less worthy motives. But there was an alternative that she could not quite put from her mind. Perhaps, instead, their thoughts would be contaminated by the violence. She did not fear the appearance of a fierce stranger, crashing through her bolted door, as much as she feared that figure being one of her friends. Or rather, a shell that resembled a friend, but walked more purposefully, each step like a lunge. In the aftermath of great battles, she had seen men rendered unrecognisable by the horrors through which they had passed. Creatures beyond emotion and beyond reason; their consciousness savagely truncated, wide eyes set on her. She pitied them, but she also feared what it would do to her to see those figures prowling the dark streets beyond her door, or worse still, trying to get through it. Whether that was truly what her friends were, when pushed beyond the harsh laws of her country, she
