When an army marches upon an enemy castle, military tradition demands inspiring speeches, banners unfurled in the wind, and the thunder of war horns.
Giles Croft stood on the high watching balcony of the Citadel Keep, his brass transit level mounted on the stone railing. He held a pocket stopwatch and an ivory calculating slide rule.
Beside him stood Captain Kenneth Drake, his brass spyglass trained upon the eastern horizon.
Five miles away, emerging from the dark pine woods of the border ridge, the private army of the Grand Aether-Coal Trade ring advanced in a huge, smoke-shrouded arrowhead formation.
Thirty heavy war-crawlers led the van.
Each crawler was a forty-ton iron dreadnought, its riveted armor plates black with coal soot. It was driven by massive twin steam boilers that vented thick, rotten-egg black smoke into the gray autumn sky. Mounted in armored sponsons on each side were twin potion-made melted rock waste cannons. Weapons designed to fire eighty-pound shells of molten iron and sulfur-pitch across two miles of open country.
Flanking the crawlers marched ten thousand hired blades of the Ironfang Legion, clad in blackened plate armor. He carried heavy pike-rifles and potion-made grenades.
The earth trembled beneath their timed together advance. The rhythmic, bone-shaking thumping of thirty heavy coal-pistons sounded like the heartbeat of a clockwork monster crawling out of the deep pit.
