The heavy scent of damp subsoil, crushed shale, and fresh pine sawdust hung thick over the southern outer edge of Grey Crag. Along the edge of the newly excavated sixteen-meter dry ditch, three hundred laborers and off-duty militia recruits shoved wheelbarrows loaded with coarse mountain gravel up a broad ramp of packed clay.
Giles Croft stood atop the counterscarp lip. He held his twenty-four-inch sighting scope level against the southern breeze. Beside him, Toby Karr knelt in the gravel, tapping white-painted wooden side stakes into the turf with a brass mallet.
“Drop the stake another two inches, Toby,” Giles instructed without looking up from his fine-scale circle. “Station Three-Bravo must align exactly with the sixty-yard focal point of Bastion Alpha’s left flank embrasure. If the side peg is out of posture, the archers will miscalculate their curved drop.”
“Yes, Lord Giles!” Toby drove the pin down with a clean thud, adjusting his weighted drop-line against the notch.
Twenty paces back, Captain Kenneth Drake and Master Borin Bronze-Lung watched the earth-moving crews sculpt the terrain. Instead of digging a sheer pit or raising an upright low roof wall, Giles had ordered the digging spoils graded into an artificial hill sloping gently upward toward the ditch rim. He ended in a sharp gravel counter-grade.
Borin scratched his copper beard, leather-gloved fingers caked with damp clay. “Lord Master builder, you’re smoothing out the road for them! If an enemy marches from the valley, this gentle slope gives them an easy uphill walk. In mountain holds, we carve sheer cliffs so the enemy breaks their fingers climbing!”
“Borin, climbing a cliff is an obstacle only until someone brings a ladder or a siege tower,” Giles said. He straightened from the transit. “What you see is an engineered glacis with an integrated moving slowdown profile.”
Borin blinked. “A... Glacis?”
“An artificial earthen incline with a twenty-eight-degree counter-grade,” Giles replied. “When an enemy brings a six-ton tortoise ram against a castle, they rely entirely on driving force: mass multiplied by speed. On flat ground, forty men speed up a heavy timber ram to a jogging speed, generating enough striking force to crack an iron gatehouse.”
Giles gestured down the sloped turf with his wooden ruler.
“Here, however, the approach forces the ram uphill against gravity, shedding eighty percent of its forward driving force before it ever sees the ditch. And when the carriage reaches the crest, it meets twelve feet of loose, three-inch angular traprock gravel. Angular traprock has an exceptionally high rolling pushback multiplier. The front wheels sink, the balance point tilts backward, and forward speed drops to zero.”
Borin frowned skeptically. “A six-ton engine stopped by loose gravel?”
“Then let’s run a field test,” Giles said. “Kenneth! Bring out the proving carriage.”
Kenneth Drake snapped his fingers. At the bottom of the glacis, six draft oxen were hitched to a decommissioned border siege ram. A three-ton oak-framed battering carriage heavy with iron hoops and a bronze ram head, salvaged from earlier border skirmishes.
“Whip them up!” Kenneth bellowed, raising his ten-foot pacing pole. “Charge the castle wall!”
The drivers shouted, cracking leather whips. The six heavy beasts lunged into their harnesses. Iron-rimmed wheels groaned and rattled as the three-ton wooden monster rolled up the graded slope.
At first, the carriage gathered speed, rumbling over hard clay at five miles per hour. The militia recruits lining the castle walls gripped their spears. They watched the timber beast surge toward the crest.
Then the carriage hit the upper third of the glacis.
Instantly, the slope sapped its charge. The oxen strained, hooves slipping on the twenty-eight-degree incline. The carriage slowed to a crawl. The front iron wheels struck the twelve-foot catchment bed of loose. Then, angular traprock gravel, the coarse stone shifted with a grinding screech.
The front wheels sank eight inches into the rock. The sudden slowdown threw the rear oak chassis wildly upward. The heavy bronze ram-head swung forward. Then, the carriage’s balance point shifted past the critical tipping plane.
CRACK!
The main steering tongue snapped like dry kindling. The three-ton carriage pitched heavily left, flipped onto its side with a thunderous crash. Then it slid six feet backward down the slope, spraying gravel across the grass before coming to a dead halt.
The six oxen stood unharmed in their harnesses. The battering ram lay overturned in the mud like a dead beetle, its iron axle bent at a forty-five-degree angle.
Silence dropped over the low roof wall.
Master Borin stepped forward, tapped the bent axle with the tip of his boot. Then he stared at Giles in shock.
“The ground threw it over,” Borin stammered, beard trembling. “No catapult stone. No boiling oil. Just... Angled gravel and dirt!”
“It didn’t throw it over,” Giles said, checking his pocket watch. “The balance point exceeded the wheelbase balance triangle under dynamic slowdown. Basic building. An iron tortoise ram needs flat, compacted soil to maintain aimed heavy rush. It can’t operate on an engineered glacis. Clear the wreckage and salvage the iron plates for the forge. We have archery drills to conduct.”
Giles stepped back onto the wooden staging of Bastion Alpha’s left flank.
Below him, three hundred militia recruits stood in three disciplined ranks. They wore studded leather brigandines and iron skull-caps, holding heavy yew composite bows. Unlike the royal legions, these men were former turnip farmers, charcoal burners, and debt-exiles who had fled the southern baronies. Their faces were pale with the knowledge that two thousand hardened hired blades were marching up the valley.
Kenneth Drake stepped to the front of the company, ash pacing pole held horizontally across his chest. His wolf-claw scars looked dark and jagged in the afternoon gloom.
“Listen to me, you ditch-diggers!” Kenneth barked, voice echoing off the granite stone retaining walls. “You have all fought in peasant levies before. You know what happens when drums beat: you panic, loose every arrow in your quiver at the first horse you see, and by the time their heavy foot reaches the wall, your quivers are empty and your arms shake like dry reeds!”
The men shifted uncomfortably, eyes on the ground.
“Not here,” Kenneth said coldly. “On this star, we don’t shoot arrows. We operate a grid.”
Kenneth pointed his pacing pole toward the white and red stakes Toby had planted across the glacis and ditch floor.
“Company Alpha on Bastion Alpha: you’ll not fire a single shaft at anyone standing directly before your face. If an enemy captain spits on your boots from sixty yards away, let him spit! Your target is Sector Two-Bravo—the ditch in front of Bastion Beta’s wall!”
He turned to the second company.
“Company Beta on Bastion Beta: your target is Sector One-Alpha—the ditch directly beneath Bastion Alpha! When the enemy charges into the ditch to attack Company Alpha, they will turn their shields toward Company Alpha’s low roof wall. That exposes their unshielded right flanks to Company Beta’s arrow slits at point-blank range!”
Kenneth pulled a polished brass whistle from his breast pocket and held it high.
“One blast: Squads One and Two loose into Sector One-Alpha. Two blasts: Squads Three and Four rake Sector Two-Bravo. Three blasts: volley into the gravel catchment. You don’t aim at men. You aim at the white stakes! If your shaft lands ten inches from the white peg, you eat dry oats for three days!”
Kenneth blew the brass whistle.
TWEET!
“Draw to the cheek!” Kenneth bellowed. “Sector One-Alpha! Release!”
A timed together snap of fifty bowstrings cracked across the stone terrace. Fifty needle-point arrow-tipped arrows rose in a tight sharp-angled arc, crested thirty feet in the air. Then he plunged down with a hiss into the turf around the white stake of Station One-Alpha.
Every single arrow struck within a ten-foot radius of the marker, burying themselves to the fletchings in the clay.
Kenneth blew two sharp blasts.
TWEET!
Instantly, the archers on Bastion Beta released from their flank embrasures. Fifty more arrows plunged down from an orthogonal ninety-degree angle, crisscrossing the first volley in a spotless, diamond-patterned grid of whistling steel.
The intersecting lines of fire left not a single square yard of open space between the two castle walls.
In Giles’s vision, an amber pop-up alert box snapped into sharp relief.
Giles nodded slowly. “Ammunition smooth speed up by over two hundred percent. Grouping the arrows into predetermined spatial hitboxes prevents target saturation and reduces arrow consumption. It’s a self-running zone-defense script.”
Down in the ranks, recruits stared at the pincushion of arrows bristling in the grass with superstitious eyes.
Bran the carter lowered his bow and whispered to young Hal: “Did you see that? The Lord Master builder marked the earth with devil’s numbers! When the captain blew the whistle, the arrows flew right to the chalk lines like they were drawn by spirits!”
“It’s the Sacred Matrix,” Hal whispered back in awe. “Sister Teresa told us this morning: the Lord Master builder has divided the world into squares of doom. Any sinner who steps on a white peg gets his soul nailed to the dirt!”
Sister Teresa strode behind the second rank, a jar of consecrated sheep fat in hand. She rubbed it along linen bowstrings while murmuring fervent benedictions.
“Praise the Divine Quadrants!” Teresa chanted, dark eyes blazing. “The cords of payback are strung! The wicked shall step onto the holy grid, and their blood shall water the sharp-angled garden of the Lord!”
Giles let out a slow, weary breath, massaging his jaw with a thumb.
“Sister Teresa, it’s not a sharp-angled garden of doom. It’s an intersecting field of fire based on elementary trigonometry. An archer shooting at a moving target on an open field has an accuracy rating below twenty percent. By pre-ranging the kill zones to eighty-yard fixed sectors, we eliminate human estimation errors. Please refrain from describing basic volley fire as necromantic soul-harvesting.”
Teresa bowed deeply, knuckles to forehead. “Your modesty is vast, Lord Master builder! You hide sky sorcery beneath the humble guise of measuring sticks!”
Giles closed his eyes briefly, turning away to inspect the low roof wall. “Right. NPCs will rationalize their lore however their dialogue scripts dictate.”
As dusk settled, sub-zero wind howled through the stone embrasures with a hollow wail. Torches were lit along the salient castle walls. He cast long shadows across the angled granite faces of the star-castle wall.
Suddenly, a dull thrumming began to vibrate through the shale bedrock beneath their boots.
THUMP... THUMP... THUMP...
Kenneth Drake dashed to the southern watch-angle, planting his pacing pole and peering through his brass telescope.
A sea of torches spilled out of the southern pine gorge a league away. Black and crimson banners of the Southern Iron Marquisate fluttered in the torchlight. In the column rolled forty armored baggage wains, three balance weight catapults on sledges, and twelve hundred armored mercenary infantry in tight formation.
In front rode fifty heavy knights on barded chargers. And at the vanguard rode a showy carriage of gold-trimmed lacquer and purple velvet. It was flanked by heralds holding silver trumpets.
“They’re here,” Kenneth growled, hand on his sword handle. “The Marquisate’s punitive vanguard. And look at that carriage... That isn’t a mercenary captain.”
Giles adjusted the sighting scope focus ring, squinting through the thirty-power optics at the carriage.
Through the crosshairs, Giles saw a thin, sour-faced man dressed in an extravagant gold-stitched brocade coat and powdered white wig. He grabbed a scented silk handkerchief to his nose as he peered out the window with open disgust.
“An clerk,” Giles noted dryly, checking his pocket watch. “Royal tax herald with an office writ. Traveling with an armored escort on unpaved right-of-way.”
“Lord Giles?” Kenneth asked, knuckles white on his handle. “Shall we light the pitch cooking pots?”
“No,” Giles said calmly, closing the sighting scope case with a clean latch click. “Let them set up camp in the lower valley. Their approach speed is barely one mile per hour. If they try to roll those heavy engines onto our glacis, the shape will introduce itself. In the meantime, Kenneth, have the cookhouse dish out hot barley stew with salt pork for all three companies. A heat deficit incurs an immediate stamina penalty on bow draws. We have a busy morning ahead.”