The Reformer

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