The raised rail embankment at Milepost 22 rose twenty feet above the sodden Riverbend flood plain.
From this curved granite promontory, the entire battlefield lay mapped beneath Giles Croft’s sighting scope like a land-mapper’s drafting grid.
One thousand eight hundred yards across the misty flats, fifty huge balance weight trebuchets stood in a crescent formation. Their massive oak balance weight boxes, loaded with ten tons of granite rubble, hung motionless between sixty-foot upright gallows.
Around the engines, three thousand royal engineers, winch-men, and crossbowmen labored in wild confusion. Heavy iron winches groaned as iron chains dragged the throwing arms down to their release catches.
On an earthen knoll three hundred paces behind the siege line, Grand Duke Val-Khorne sat his armored charger. He was surrounded by sixty mounted household knights.
The Grand Duke’s seven-foot runic greatsword pointed relentlessly toward the railway embankment.
“Stone weight three hundred pounds,” Giles said, his voice flat as he turned the fine-scale screw of his brass sighting scope. “Pivot height sixty feet.
Balance weight ratio forty to one. By all laws of classical mechanics, their theoretical maximum range can’t exceed four hundred and twenty yards.”
