The sound of incoming siege artillery was not a whistle. It was a rhythmic, tumbling thrum that displaced the air with the weight of falling mountains. Five stone-hard boulders, each the size of a tavern hogshead, tore through the low cloud layer. Their surfaces were crusted with turning to stone lichen and jagged dark rock crystals, hurtling toward the cobblestones of the Lower Plaza on an end-post high-speed arc.
In the triage courtyard, orderlies threw themselves across stretchers. Wounded militia pressed their faces into the mud, bracing for the moving impact that would wipe out the field hospital and pulp everyone within forty paces.
Titus didn’t flinch. His broad, blunt snout raised toward the sky. His dark golden eyes tracked the dropping masses with the ancient, unrushed shape of a creature born from earth-shaking plates. He gave a single, ringing breath out through his nostrils, sending plumes of gray dust swirling around his heavy front talons.
With a movement deceptively fast for a two-ton chelonian, Titus drove his front limbs deep into the street. The heavy cobblestones buckled and shattered like dry clay beneath his granite-plated claws. He didn’t merely brace his weight. His thick, root-like claws bored four feet into the underlying bed of tightly packed river slate. He anchored his skeletal frame directly to the deep-rock bedrock of Sector 7.
