A nighttime siege relies on one tactical advantage: the defender can’t shoot what he can’t see.
Three miles north of Grey Crag, across the frozen peat bogs of the Black Moss, three hundred shadow-stalker beasts were advancing in total silence. They were massive quadrupeds with hard-shelled black hides that absorbed all surrounding starlight, armed with four-inch serrated bone talons and six compound eyes evolved to hunt in utter darkness.
For hundreds of years, winter swarms had overrun frontier settlements by crawling beneath the pitch-black horizon until they were fifty paces from the stockade.
Giles stood on the command platform of Bastion One on the northern star-wall, his sighting scope transit level folded, his heavy wool coat buttoned to the chin.
Beside him stood Captain Kenneth Drake, his ten-foot iron-shod pacing rod planted on the low roof wall flat stone slabs. Behind the crenellations, eighty marksmen of the Frontier Legion stood with their moving breech-loading rifles resting on timber sandbags, squinting into the iron-hard black plain.
“They’re out there, Giles,” Kenneth murmured, his hand resting on his sword handle.
“Maeve’s scout trumpets picked up their claw-clicks in the peat two minutes ago. But the night is black as pitch.
My men can’t lay sights past seventy yards without shooting blind into the fog.”
