The white snow on the logging skidway didn’t absorb the sound of five hundred charging beasts.
It shook like the parchment skin of a huge kettledrum.
The frostblight wolves were moving at twenty-four miles per hour down the six-percent grade, their massive claws kicking up geysers of frozen powder.
To their hungry instincts, the cleared hall between the spruce timber and the outer ditch appeared as a wide, clear highway leading directly to the wooden wall.
The heat sat at twenty-six degrees below zero, the freezing gale whipping diamond dust across the front rank.
Giles Croft stood on the north corner castle wall. His brass pocket stopwatch was held loosely between his fingers.
Beside him, Captain Kenneth Drake held his iron-shod measuring rod upright like a spear of office. His knuckles turned bloodless inside his gauntlets.
“Two hundred yards,” Kenneth muttered, the gravel in his voice rasping through his woolen face-wrap.
“They aren’t slowing down. They’re bunching up into a wedge.”
“Natural flocking behavior,” Giles said in his flat, measured flat voice.
“When high-speed quadrupeds navigate a narrowing topographic channel, the trailing files match the speed of the vanguard to avoid crash.
The lateral squeezing forces their formation into a dense column.
That is classic pathfinding funneling.”
High in the north watchtower, Maeve Swift-Ear held her sound ear-trumpet to her ear, calling down to Giles through the speaking pipe.
“The wolves’ lateral scouts are hitting the abatis barriers on the east flank, Lord Giles!” Maeve reported, her voice clear and fast.
“They’re finding the tangled spruce bolls too thick to leap.
The flankers are turning back inward toward the logging road!”
Giles nodded without looking up from his field board.
“Friction redirection,” Giles told Kenneth Drake.
“A hunting beast’s pathfinding routine evaluates energy waste per linear yard.
By felling eighty hemlock tops into dense linked abatis hurdles along both flanks, we raised the terrain movement cost to twenty times that of the cleared sled skidway.
Their instincts force them straight down the center line.
They’re funneling themselves into our retention pit.”
The lead beasts crossed the white painted stake planted in the snow at one hundred yards.
Their azure ice horns gleamed beneath the iron sky, their breath trailing cyan mist that froze instantly into diamond dust.
Directly ahead of them, the ground appeared to rise into a gentle, rolling white knoll.
It was Giles’s reverse earthen berm. A six-foot ridge of excavated soil thrown up along the outer lip of the ditch, hiding the drop from approaching line of sight.
The human and animal optic tracking systems project terrain continuity based on visible horizon lines. Because of that, a negative upright drop hidden behind a gentle berm remains fully invisible until the crest is reached.
The wolves crested the berm at full extension. It leapt into the air expecting open ground on the other side.
Instead, their front paws struck the forty-five-degree counterscarp bank.
The result was a total collapse of physical traction.
The slope had been shaved back to a precise forty-five-degree grade by Kroll’s former hired blades, packed with heavy oak tamping beetles, and stripped of all loose snow.
Against frozen, compacted river clay, the static friction multiplier dropped below zero point zero eight.
An eight-hundred-pound animal moving at twenty-four miles per hour strikes an icy forty-five-degree slope. Then, level braking becomes physically impossible.
The lead wolves tried to dig their crystal-clear claws into the earth.
SKRRRRRRR.
Sparks flew from the frozen shale as their claws snapped away without purchase.
Their hind legs whipped over their heads.
The front rank flipped wildly end-over-end, tumbling down the ten-foot scarp into the bottom of the ditch in a flailing tangle of limbs and snapping jaws.
Before the first rank could scramble upright, the second rank cleared the berm at full speed.
They plunged directly onto the backs of their fallen packmates.
Then the third rank hit.
Then the fourth.
Within five seconds, nearly two hundred massive frostblight beasts were piled into the ditch floor, buried beneath their own forward driving force.
The ditch had become a boiling, churning churn of snapping teeth, crushed ribs, and thrashing tails.
The beasts couldn’t climb the forty-five-degree clay slope behind them. Their claws merely slipped on the frozen earth, sending them sliding back to the bottom.
They couldn’t leap toward the wooden wall, because the upright inner stone retaining wall rose twelve feet above the trench floor, crowned with sharpened hemlock fraises.
“They’re jammed tight,” Kenneth breathed, his scarred jaw dropping in sheer skilled amazement.
“Two hundred of them... Stacked like cordwood in a cellar chute.”
“Striking force management,” Giles replied, clicking his stopwatch.
“Forward driving force can’t be destroyed; it can only be redirected.
By transferring their level heavy rush into upright downward gravity fall, we have reduced their combat mobility to zero.
Archery squads, initiate volley fire.”
Toby Karr gripped the low roof wall railing. He stared down at the flailing mass of beasts in the ditch.
“Why didn’t they leap clear across the ditch, Lord Giles?” Toby asked, his eyes wide.
“A mountain wolf can jump twenty feet when hunting stags!”
“High-speed flight path physics, Toby,” Giles answered, tapping his brass pencil against the timber.
“A quadruped bounding at twenty-four miles per hour with a fifteen-degree takeoff angle achieves a theoretical level clearance of fourteen point two feet.
Our ditch is eighteen feet wide from scarp to counterscarp.
No terrestrial living organism can defeat Newtonian gravity.
Every leap was exactly guaranteed to end on the downward slope.”
Kenneth spun around, thrusting his iron measuring rod toward the narrow high walkway.
“Archers!” Kenneth bellowed.
“Volleys by files! Pin them to the clay!
Loose.”
The eighty defenders along the castle walls stepped to the embrasures.
Dan and Jock, standing side by side, drew their heavy ash bows until the goose-feather fletchings brushed their cheeks.
THWACK-THWACK.
Eighty ash bows snapped in timed together rhythm.
Heavy white ash arrows, tipped with three-inch chisel bodkins forged from chilled bog iron, rained straight down into the writhing ditch.
At twenty feet range, the bodkins possessed devastating piercing power.
The chisel tips didn’t deflect.
They punched clean through crystal-clear ice armor, splintering frozen bone and pinning thrashing beasts to the ditch clay.
A chorus of shrill, metal yelps echoed along the wooden wall.
* * *
Up on the north castle wall, Borin and Douglas stood beside the heavy swivel giant crossbow.
Borin grabbed the rear tiller bar. That turned the two-ton ash frame until the grooved firing channel pointed directly down the throat of the ditch.
“Target rich environment, lads!” Borin bellowed, his belly shaking with savage glee.
“You couldn’t miss if you shut both eyes and sneezed.”
Douglas pulled the heavy ash cocking lever, the double spring-steel dogs clicking smoothly over the ratchet wheel.
Toby Karr slotted a twelve-pound, five-foot chisel bolt into the brass carriage track.
Kenneth reached over, wrapping his gauntlet around the release lanyard.
“Clear the cross!” Kenneth shouted.
He yanked the cord.
THWACK-BOOM.
The eighteen-hundred-pound twisting force skeins released with a bone-jarring crack.
The five-foot iron bolt became a gray blur of pure moving violence.
It struck a monstrous frostblight wolf in the center of the retention pit, punching through its ice-armored shoulder, passing entirely through its ribs, and driving four feet deep into the beast behind it before embedding in the frozen ditch clay.
The blast wave alone shattered the ice back shell of three next-door beasts, showering the ditch in azure splinters.
Borin threw his weight against the crank winch crank.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
“Racking round two.” Borin roared.
“Feed the beast.”
Douglas heaved on the giant crossbow crank winch, his face flushed red in the freezing air.
“Racking bolt three.” Douglas shouted, dropping a five-foot chisel-point bolt into the greased brass channel.
Borin sighted through the notched height plate. He tracked a massive frostblight brute that was trying to claw its way up the clay scarp.
“Eat cold iron, you overgrown mongrel.” Borin roared.
He slammed his fist onto the release trip.
THWACK-BOOM.
The eighteen-hundred-pound twisting force limbs snapped forward against the rope stops.
The heavy chisel bolt struck the climbing beast dead center in the chest, punching clean through its frozen ribs and pinning it four feet deep into the compacted clay wall.
The beast gave one convulsive shudder and went limp, hanging from the ditch scarp like a pinned butterfly.
Down in the ditch, Kroll and his veteran fighters moved along the narrow high walkway firing steps, thrusting twelve-foot ash bill-hooks through the wooden wall palings.
A thrashing wolf tried to scramble up the upright clay stone retaining wall. Each time, an iron bill-hook caught it under the jaw. It dragged it back into the killing pit.
“Keep them at the bottom.” Kroll barked to his men.
“Let the arrows do the work! Save your steel for the clean-up.”
Kroll looked up toward Giles, shaking his head in disbelief.
“They’re slaughtering an entire war pack without a single scratch on our timber,” Kroll muttered to his squad.
“I’ve spent twenty years on the border. I’ve never seen men fight a battle without sweating through their armor.”
“We aren’t fighting a battle, Kroll,” Giles said, appearing at the top of the castle wall ladder with his brass leveling rule.
“We’re clearing a digging site of load-bearing obstructions.
Keep the arrows cycling.
The rear echelons are attempting to break around the eastern berm.”
Down across the snow slope, the surviving elements of the wolf pack saw the carnage in the ditch.
Their forward charge faltered.
The rear ranks split into two flanking wedges, attempting to skirt the outer edge of the ditch and sweep around toward the low ground of Sector Three.
At their head charged the elite packguard. Forty massive beasts, their fur matted with dark blue rime and their eyes blazing with vicious cunning.
They swerved away from the center ditch, bounding toward the hidden terrain hall where the twelve Directional Shrapnel Ward-Pads lay hidden beneath pine brush.
Giles Croft turned his field glasses toward the eastern sector, his voice leftover level as a land-mapper’s line.
“Flanking maneuver detected,” Giles noted calmly.
“They’re pathfinding directly along the tripwire deep ring line.
Prepare the aimed blast array.
Kenneth checked the arrow bundle racks along the narrow high walkway breastwork. He tapped his pacing rod against the timber.
“Archery crews have expended three hundred and twenty chisel bodkins, Lord Giles,” Kenneth reported, his eyes scanning the quieted retention pit.
“We have more than a thousand arrows leftover under the tarpaulins.
Every man’s quiver is restocked from the lower racks.”
Giles adjusted his woolen scarf, checking his pocket stopwatch.
“An ammunition waste ratio of one point seven bodkins per stopped quadruped,” Giles observed with cold and exact test.
“That falls entirely within our supply smooth speed envelope.
Process rule-following prevents ammunition starvation during multi-phase engagements.””