The midday sun broke through the northern storm clouds. It cast a dazzling golden glare across the frozen expanse of Grey Crag.
The great battle was over, but the work of town administration had only just begun.
Across the northern snowfield, where sixty-five Frost-Giants and fifteen War-Mammoths lay stopped, fifty town salvage squads moved with machine-like discipline.
Teams of draft oxen and four captured, lightly wounded mammoths hauled heavy timber sledges across the snow, clearing fallen boulders, salvaging cold-iron armor plates, and stacking thousands of pounds of cured mammoth bone for the fertilizer mills.
In the outer counterscarp ditch, twelve hundred royal border legionaries sat in orderly ranks under parole. It was wrapped in warm woolen blankets provided by Grey Crag’s public works department.
Beside them, large iron cooking pots of hot mutton broth and crusty barley loaves were distributed by Sister Teresa’s orderlies.
Not a single royal soldier was mistreated. Not a single wounded man was denied medical treatment.
In the southern field hospital, forty wounded legionaries lay on clean linen mattresses in the warm, hypocaust-heated lower galleries of the insulae blocks, their wounds dressed with clean antiseptic wash and herbal salves.
