The old quarry ravine was a natural sound tiered arena of sheer granite and frozen talus.
Two hundred yards south of Rustgate, the upright stone walls rose sixty feet into the gray sky, muffling the bitter mountain wind into a hollow whisper.
Snow lay banked four feet deep along the northern scree, untouched save for the boot prints of the trial team.
Giles Croft stood on the quarry floor, sighting along his boxwood folding rule toward the far rock wall.
“Target spacing three paces,” Giles instructed Caleb Thorne-Wood. “Set twenty pine dark shape targets across a sixty-foot arc, forty yards from the firing stake.
I want them angled straight-across to the outward baseline.”
Caleb and four High Timber sawyers drove pointed ash stakes into the frozen gravel, mounting two-inch thick pine planks shaped into rough silhouettes of charging quadrupeds.
Each target stood three feet high, braced with rear struts to resist the wind.
Bram was sweating despite the bitter cold. He drove the rear slanted struts into the frozen gravel with a twelve-pound sledge.
“Two inches of heart-pine,” Bram called out, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “At High Timber, a wild boar charged a board this thick and just bounced off with a bruised snout.
If these iron pellets can crack this pine, they’ll tear the ribs out of a frost-wolf.”
“A wild boar has a moving impact speed of fifteen feet per second,” Giles said, checking the weighted drop-line on target seven. “These chilled iron projectiles exit the concave deflector dish at about twelve hundred feet per second.
The moving impact is not comparable. A projectile at twelve hundred feet per second induces water-pressure shock throughout fluid-bearing living tissue.”
Caleb bent by the target base. He drove an oak wedge under the strut to lock the upright angle.
“Target array locked, Lord Giles,” Caleb reported. “Twenty silhouettes facing the firing stake.
If the blast spreads sixty degrees, every single board sits inside the pattern.”
Toby Karr hurried back and forth with his chalk-reel, snapping white range lines across the snow at ten-yard intervals: ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty.
“Baseline marked, Lord Baron,” Toby shouted, wiping frost from his nose. “Forty yards true to the stake.”
At the firing datum stake, Master Borin Bronze-Lung and Giles examined the heavy Directional Ward-Pad prototype.
Giles drove two heavy ash stakes into the frozen ground, seating the curved oak backplate firmly against the wood.
He checked the level with a brass spirit vial, ensuring the convex face was angled three degrees downward toward the target center.
“If the angle is level,” Giles explained to Borin, “half the pellets fly over the mob’s heads due to barrel-less propellant lift.
A three-degree downward tilt ensures ninety percent of the shrapnel impacts between six inches and thirty inches off the ground.”
Borin adjusted the copper friction quill in the rear vent with a small wrench. “She’s primed, Giles.
Wire is hitched to the spring sear. Thirty paces of wire running behind that granite boulder.”
Kenneth Drake walked down the line of wooden targets, inspecting the two-inch seasoned pine planks.
“These are solid boards, Lord Giles,” Kenneth remarked. He tapped a dark shape with his pacing rod. “Seasoned heart-wood.
An arrow from a seventy-pound war bow only penetrates an inch at this distance.”
“An arrow has a sectional driving force of point five slug-feet per second,” Giles replied, pacing back to the firing stake. “Eight hundred chilled iron pellets sped up by two and a half pounds of propellant generate collective striking force exceeding two hundred thousand foot-pounds.
The destructive mechanics are entirely different.”
“Clear the lethal arc,” Giles called out, raising his red signal handkerchief. “All personnel behind the stone cross. Toby, fingers in your ears.”
The team pulled back behind a massive, ten-ton granite boulder thirty paces to the flank.
Kenneth Drake stood beside Giles, his knuckles resting against the cold stone, his jaw tight with excitement.
Captain Kroll leaned around the granite edge, his scarred face intense with skilled focus.
Giles pulled his pocket watch, checked the second hand, and nodded to Kenneth.
“High-speed trial zero-one,” Giles announced. “Scattering and penetration proof. Three... Two... One... Trigger.”
Kenneth pulled the copper lanyard with a sharp, steady jerk.
THUNDERCLAP.
The sound didn’t echo. It wildly tightly packed the air inside the rock ravine.
A blinding sheet of orange-white flame erupted from the firing stake, with an ear-splitting crack that rattled the teeth in Giles’s jaw.
A violent blast wave slammed against the granite cross, showering their shoulders in powdery snow and dislodged lichen.
A dense cloud of gray sulfur smoke roiled across the quarry floor. It smelled sharply of burned animal fat, potassium nitrate, and shattered wood.
For three seconds, nothing could be heard except the high, ringing whine in their ears and the clatter of dislodged gravel rolling down the scree.
“Ancestors above,” Borin breathed, coughing into his leather sleeve. “The whole mountain shook.”
“Move forward,” Giles commanded. He stepped out from behind the boulder with his magnifying glass and folding rule. “Inspect the target array.”
The team walked through the thinning gray haze toward the forty-yard baseline.
When the smoke cleared, Caleb Thorne-Wood stopped dead in his tracks, his jaw dropping slack.
“By the Gods of the Wood,” Caleb whispered.
The twenty pine targets were gone.
In their place lay a sixty-foot swath of splintered, shredded matchsticks.
Nineteen of the twenty two-inch seasoned pine planks had been crushed.
Chunks of punched holes in timber lay scattered across the snow, riddled with hundreds of jagged, smoking puncture holes.
Giles walked the line with his rule. He measured the impact pattern on the single surviving target at the far western flank.
The board was eighteen inches wide. It had taken forty-two direct pellet hits.
Every single chilled-iron ball had punched fully through the two-inch seasoned pine. That left ragged, splintered exit holes that had blown the rear grain out in fist-sized chunks.
In the granite rock wall sixty yards behind the target line, hundreds of gray craters were pitted into the solid stone. It was surrounded by silver lead-and-iron smear marks.
“Scattering angle fifty-eight degrees,” Giles recorded, writing with steady fingers on his pad. “Level spread fifty-four feet at forty yards.
Mean penetration through seasoned pine: two point one inches. Striking force transfer exceeds four hundred foot-pounds per pellet.”
Borin bent over a shattered target strut, prying out a twisted iron ball with the tip of his belt knife.
“Hard as diamonds,” the dwarf said, holding the blackened pellet to the winter light. “It didn’t shatter on the oak. It just chewed straight through.”
Captain Kroll walked slowly down the shredded line, touching the jagged stumps of the target stakes. His face was pale beneath his stubble.
“A company of heavy cavalry,” Kroll murmured, his voice trembling slightly. “Forty horses in armor.
If we had charged into this... There wouldn’t have been enough left of my men to bury in a trench.”
“Cavalry armor is twelve-gauge rolled plate,” Giles noted dispassionately. “At thirty yards, these chilled iron pellets have enough sectional thickness to defeat mild steel plate.
Against unarmored living quadrupeds, the lethal probability within the sixty-degree cone is ninety-eight percent.”
Lady Millicent arrived at the edge of the quarry with her tally-book. She was followed by two High Timber sawyers carrying empty baskets.
She adjusted her steel glasses, looking across the field of smoking splinters with a cool, test glance.
“The ordnance ledger needs proof,” Millicent said, stepping carefully over shredded pine boards. “Each unit consumes two and a half pounds of black powder, four pounds of chilled iron bearings, and eight ounces of rendered animal fat.
Fabricating twelve outer edge units will eat forty-eight pounds of iron scrap.”
“We have three hundred pounds of reclaimed iron tire from Skag’s wagon,” Giles said. He measured a crater in the granite rock wall with his depth gauge. “And forty pounds of sulfur in the dry storage bins.
The material inputs are within available inventory.”
Borin tapped the rock wall with his hammer, dislodging a flattened iron bearing embedded half an inch deep into solid granite.
“Look at that penetration,” Borin murmured, holding the mangled slug on his calloused palm. “It struck the stone, flattened into an iron penny, and took a chunk of granite out with it.
Giles... If this hits a wolf’s cryo-horn at thirty yards, the horn won’t deflect it. The crystal will shatter like ice under a drop-hammer.”
“The hard martensitic shell on the chill-cast iron defeats the brittle crystal-clear structure of the horn,” Giles noted, writing the metalworking figures in his book. “Material hardness exceeding sixty Rockwell-C overcomes low-fracture-toughness silicates.
The physical law is total.”
Sister Teresa stepped out of the ravine path, where she had been watching from the ridge.
She stared down at the crushed clearing, her hands clasped tightly against her habit.
“The wrath of heaven,” Teresa whispered, her eyes wide with religious awe. “The Lord Master builder has forged the thunder of the ancients to smite the abominations of the frost.”
“I forged an engineered fragmentation munition, Teresa,” Giles said, closing his notebook. “Kenneth, collect the iron fragments for recycling.
Caleb, order twelve oak backplates from the sawpit. We have forty-eight hours to arm the north outer edge.”
Kenneth Drake leaned on his pacing rod, looking from the shattered timber to the northern passes.
“They’ll come in a rush,” Kenneth said grimly. “Wolves don’t skirmish. They hit a line in mass, hoping to overwhelm the defenders by sheer weight of bodies. If we place twelve of these ward-pads along the counterscarp, how do we fire them at the same time?”
“Timed together tripwire relays,” Giles explained, pointing with his wooden ruler. “We run a heat-softened copper bus-wire along the outer ditch lip, raised eighteen inches on ash stakes. When the vanguard trips the main line, the tension drops a counterweighted master trip-bar on the narrow high walkway. All twelve charges detonate within five split seconds of each other. The rolling blast will break their assault driving force before they touch the ditch.”
Before Kenneth could answer, a distant sound drifted down from the high northern peaks.
It wasn’t thunder.
It was a long, waving, bone-chilling howl that ripped through the mountain passes.
A heartbeat later, forty more howls joined it, then a hundred, then three hundred—a terrifying, clashing chorus of crystal-clear shrieks echoing off the frozen glaciers.
The explosion had traveled three miles through the frozen shale.
And the pack had answered.
Kenneth Drake’s hand snapped to his quiver. “They heard the blast, Lord Giles. They know where we’re.”
“They knew where we were three days ago, Kenneth,” Giles replied. He turned back toward the stockade. “Now they know we have artillery.
Master Borin, double the casting shifts. We have nine thousand pellets to pour.”