The great drafting table in the central citadel tower was covered by four joined sheets of heavy calf-skin thick parchment, held flat by polished granite paperweights.
Giles Croft leaned over the thick parchment with his brass parallel ruler and a steel-pointed drafting compass.
Around the table stood Captain Kenneth Drake, Master Duncan Stone-Splitter, Master Borin Bronze-Lung, Lady Millicent Croft, and Toby Karr. A single iron stove glowed in the corner. That kept the ink fluid and the room warm against the howling mountain gale.
“Look at this,” Giles said, tapping the center of the drawing with his wooden ruler.
On the thick parchment lay the outline of Grey Crag, transformed.
Instead of the traditional high upright curtain walls and square towers that had protected medieval castles for a thousand years, Giles had drawn a fine, detailed, geometrically perfect eight-pointed star.
Low, squat, pentagonal arrowheads projected sixty paces outward from the main castle wall at precise forty-five-degree intervals.
Between each arrowhead ran a sunken curtain wall. It was flanked by recessed artillery platforms and protected by a broad dry ditch.
Kenneth stared at the drawing, scratching his scarred jaw with an iron-tipped finger.
“Where are the towers, Lord Giles?” Kenneth asked. “Where are the high castle walls?”
“There are no high castle walls,” Giles said flatly.
He rested his ruler across the profile view.
“High upright stone walls are a total failure mode against heavy moving artillery,” Giles explained. “If an eighty-foot stone tower takes a three-ton boulder thrown by a frost-giant, the sideways tearing force shatters the stonework face. The wall buckles at the base, and sixty feet of stone collapses outward into the ditch, creating a convenient rubble ramp for the enemy to walk over.”
Kenneth looked down at his own boots, memories of old border sieges tightening his mouth.
“I saw it happen at the Dun-Krag breach,” Kenneth said quietly. “The ducal engineers built a great round tower of granite, thirty paces tall. The siege trebuchets hit it with five heavy stones. The whole tower cracked like an egg and slid right down into the moat, taking eighty archers with it.”
“Exactly,” Giles said. “Traditional castle design assumes attackers fight with arrows and scaling ladders. It fails fully against packed moving bombardment.”
Duncan Stone-Splitter leaned in, his thick thumbs tracing the sharp point of Bastion Alpha. “So you made them low?”
“Low, wide, and angled,” Giles said. “The Trace Italienne. The star-castle wall.”
To make the principle clear, Giles picked up a small wooden test wedge from his desk drawer.
Beside it, he placed a flat box-shaped block of pine. He dropped a heavy steel bearing ball from a height of two feet straight onto the flat pine block.
THWACK.
The steel ball struck square, leaving a deep, circular indentation in the soft wood.
Then Giles held the sloped wedge beneath the ball and dropped it again from the same height.
TICK.
The steel ball struck the angled wooden face, glanced sideways with a sharp click. Then he bounced across the floor without leaving a mark on the timber.
“Bending shape,” Giles said. “The salient angle of each castle wall is sixty degrees. When a giant hurls a boulder straight at this point, the rock doesn’t hit a flat, straight-across surface. It strikes an angled face. The striking force is deflected sideways at a thirty-degree glance, expending eighty percent of its force into the empty air.”
Toby Karr tilted his head, studying the lines connecting the castle walls.
“And the space between them, Lord Giles?” Toby asked. “In the old ditch, if the enemy reached the base of the wall, the archers above couldn’t shoot them without leaning out over the edge.”
“Dead ground,” Giles said, nodding with satisfaction. “The classic weakness of square towers. An attacker at the foot of a square tower is fully invisible to the defenders on the low roof wall. But look at this shape.”
Giles ran his brass rule along the flank of Bastion Beta, sighting directly along the face of Bastion Alpha.
“Castle wall Beta’s flank face is straight-across to Bastion Alpha’s wall,” Giles showed. “Every foot of Bastion Alpha’s stone retaining wall is directly in front of the gunports of Bastion Beta. If a frost-giant reaches the ditch in front of Alpha, he’s not safe. He’s standing fifteen paces from the muzzle of a battery firing down his flank from Beta.”
Kenneth took a slow, sharp breath.
He set his ten-foot pacing rod on the floor and bent closer to the thick parchment.
“Enfilade,” Kenneth whispered, the old sapper instincts awakening in his eyes. “Flanking fire across the entire circuit. No blind spots. No dead angles. If they charge Bastion One, Bastion Two shoots them in the ribs. If they charge Bastion Two, Bastion One shoots them in the spine.”
“Linked crossfire,” Giles said. “Sharp-angled holding. The star isn’t designed to keep an enemy out through passive height. It’s designed to catch an attacking wave in a three-space-folding slaughterhouse of overlapping moving fields.”
Master Borin stroked his copper-braided beard, his sight fire gauge swinging from his neck.
“And the earthworks, Lord Giles?” Borin asked. “Dressing granite for eight star-points would take every quarryman in the mountains three seasons.”
“We don’t build solid granite walls,” Giles said. “Solid stone is brittle. We build composite stone retaining walls.”
He sketched a cross-section on the margin of the thick parchment.
“The outer skin is three feet of dressed granite cut stone, sloped backward at a ten-degree batter to resist overturning,” Giles said. “Behind that granite skin sits fourteen feet of compacted clay, gravel, and crushed shale rammed solid with air-powered rammers.”
Borin blinked in shock. “Fourteen feet of dirt behind three feet of stone?”
“Rammed-earth composite armor,” Giles said. “The rigid granite face breaks the first point impact. The plastic rammed-earth core dampens and absorbs the blasting blast wave through internal granular friction. A three-ton boulder might chip the surface stone. But the earth backing swallows the blow without cracking the wall.”
Duncan slapped his thigh with a crack that sounded like a pistol shot. “By the hammer. It’s like backing an iron breastplate with boiled bull-hide. The metal stops the edge, and the hide stops the bruise.”
“Exactly,” Giles said. “Total digging volume: twelve thousand cubic yards of subsoil for the scarp and counterscarp.”
Lady Millicent looked up from her tally-book, tapping her quill against her lip.
“Twelve thousand cubic yards of digging means six hundred wagon-loads of gravel every day,” Millicent calculated. “We’ll need eighty extra wagon drivers and thirty draft oxen. The grain requirements alone will rise by twelve bushels a week.”
“Then allocate the grain, Millicent,” Giles said. “If the star isn’t built before Ymir-Krag clears the pass, we won’t have a grain depot to feed.”
Toby leaned over the edge of the table.
“How do we dig through the frozen ground, Lord Giles?” Toby asked. “The ground is frozen iron-hard.”
“We bring up the steam hoses from the earth-heat pipe hub,” Giles said. “We thaw the digging trench in ten-pace sections. While one gang thaws, the second gang digs. The third gang hauls the spoil to the castle wall backing. Nonstop cyclic operation.”
Borin chuckled deep in his chest. “A boiler that melts the earth and an army of shovels. The ancestors would call it madness, but it beats swinging a pick against frozen slate.”
Giles adjusted his glasses, pointing to the flank casemates.
“Borin, each flank platform needs two heavy pivot mounts,” Giles instructed. “We need cross arcs of forty-five degrees and depression angles of fifteen degrees to cover the ditch floor.”
“The foundry will cast the bronze pivot rings tomorrow,” Borin promised. “I’ll have my best smiths on the boring lathe.”
The amber HUD pop-up alert flashed across the calf-skin thick parchment, lighting up the sharp angles of the star with a clean, golden sheen.
Giles stood up, rolling his shoulders to work out the stiffness of five hours at the drafting table.
He walked to the narrow arched window of the tower and looked north.
The blizzard had subsided into a vast, silent ocean of white drifts. Under the pale light of the winter moon, the jagged pinnacles of the northern glaciers rose like frozen daggers against the starry black sky.
Suddenly, a sound echoed from the high pass two leagues away.
It wasn’t thunder.
It was a deep, rhythmic shaking that rang through the granite foundations of the citadel tower.
THUM... THUM... THUM...
On the northern ridge, half a mile outside the settlement outer edge, stood the abandoned timber watchtower that the penal pioneers had built during the first autumn.
Across the night sky, a huge dark shape arched through the moonlight.
It was a boulder the size of a hay wagon. It screamed through the thin mountain air with a low, ear-splitting roar.
CRASH-THOOOOOOM.
The three-ton granite mass struck the wooden watchtower dead center.
The heavy pine timbers blew up into a blizzard of splinters and flying logs. The stone foundation footing cracked like an eggshell, throwing a plume of frozen shale thirty feet into the air.
Where the tower had stood for six months, nothing remained but a smoking crater in the snow.
Silence dropped over the valley once more, heavy and choking.
Toby dropped his pencil. His face was white as lime. “That... That was from the high pass. Half a mile away.”
Kenneth Drake picked up his pacing rod, his scarred face hard as granite, his jaw clenched tight.
“Ymir-Krag’s vanguard,” Kenneth whispered. “They’re zeroing the range.”
Giles looked down at the crushed wooden crater, then looked back at the calf-skin drawing on the table.
He picked up his pocket watch, checked the time, and snapped the brass case shut.
“Timber belongs in stove chimney pipes and roof beams,” Giles said calmly. “Duncan, muster forty stone-cutters from the night shift. Kenneth, bring two companies of ditchers with sleds and shovels.”
Duncan tightened his leather belt with a grunt. “We’ll need three boilers running full blast to soften that frozen ground, Lord Giles.”
“Then fire Boilers Two and Three,” Giles said. “Toby, fetch the boundary stakes and the linen chain. We lay the salient angle before the moon touches the western ridge.”
Kenneth raised his iron-shod rod, a grim smile touching his scarred mouth. “The men know what a giant boulder does to wood, my lord. They will dig like moles to put fourteen feet of dirt between themselves and that ridge.”
“Good,” Giles said, pulling on his work gloves. “Get the lanterns. We start digging Bastion Alpha tonight.”