The southern approach to Rustgate Outpost was a loose civil disaster. A shallow drainage ditch, freshly dug through black peat, separated the outer stone retaining wall from the pine scrub. Forty yards out, where Giles had planned a three-tier gravel macadam roadway, there was only churning mud, jagged dark rock rubble, and sixty heavily armed raiders marching in tight formation.
At the head of the column strode Sir Gareth the Cleaver. The renegade royal knight stood six feet four inches tall, wrapped in blackened munitions plate. It held a massive tower shield. A five-foot-tall iron pavilion shield chased with glowing sapphire runes.
Behind Gareth, fifty-nine hardened outlaws of the Broken Horn clan marched with notched broadswords, hunting bows. A twenty-foot iron-tipped log slung from leather harnesses: an improvised battering ram.
“Look at them!” Gareth’s voice boomed through his visor. “An exiled lordling playing with mud bricks! Form the shield wedge! Trample their ditch, burn their timber, and take the granary! Any man who brings me the lord’s brass eye gets twenty silver marks!”
Up on the newly cured concrete gate stronghold, Captain Kenneth Drake drew his trench-sword, knuckle joints white.
“Lord Giles,” Kenneth whispered, taut with veteran dread. “That pavilion shield carries a royal Third-Circle Aegis ward. It projects a nonstop ball-shaped mana barrier. I saw one take three direct hits from a royal twisting force giant crossbow at Oakhaven. An arrow won’t even scratch the paint. If they reach the gate timbers with that ram, we’ll be fighting in the streets.”
Giles stood behind the low stone low roof wall. He peeked through his pocket magnifying glass at the approaching formation.
He was thoroughly, deeply annoyed.
“Look at that terrible spacing,” Giles muttered, adjusting his wooden ruler. “Sixteen-inch lateral intervals. Zero echelon dispersal. They’re funneled straight down the axial centerline of our main storm runoff hall. If a digging builder lined up his haul trucks like that, his commercial license would be revoked on the spot.”
Behind him, Master Borin Bronze-Lung and two dwarven smiths grunted under the weight of a massive bronze rig.
It wasn’t a royal giant crossbow. It was a thick-walled, short-barreled cannon cast from glowing-bronze, four feet long and flared at the muzzle like an angry trumpet horn. It was mounted on a heavy, greased cast-iron swivel pintle bolted directly into the cured concrete low roof wall with four one-inch anchor studs.
“Pintle locked, Lord Giles!” Borin panted, wiping soot with a leather sleeve. “Bore width is four inches at the breach, flaring to seven inches at the bell! Swivel turns smooth as pig fat!”
“Height: plus four degrees,” Giles commanded calmly. “Bending: zero. Bore swabbed and dry?”
“Clean as a dwarf’s tankard!” Borin barked.
Toby Karr scrambled forward. He carried a tube-shaped canvas cartridge packed with four pounds of coarse, corned pyritic blackpowder.
Borin rammed the powder bag down the bronze bore with a wooden rammer, the heavy thud echoing off the stone.
Next, Toby hoisted a heavy canvas canister bound with iron wire. Inside rattled three hundred and twenty cast-iron grapeshot pellets, each the size of a walnut, packed tightly in animal fat and sharp river gravel.
“The gravel spreader is loaded!” Toby squeaked, eyes wide as dinner plates.
Kenneth blinked, staring at the flared bronze tube. “Gravel spreader? Lord Giles... You intend to break a royal runic shield with a barrel of river gravel?”
“It isn’t just gravel, Kenneth. It’s three hundred and twenty cast-iron moving penetrators with a total mass of eighteen pounds,” Giles said, pulling his brass slide-rule from his pocket and checking the sight posture. “Sir Gareth the Cleaver’s magic barrier operates as an isotropic fluid-dynamic mana membrane. An incoming spell or a single giant crossbow bolt strikes it. Then, energy is deposited over fifty to a hundred split seconds, giving the barrier’s mana nodes time to redistribute power from surrounding leylines. That’s why it stops a giant crossbow.”
He tapped the flared muzzle.
“This under-road drain cleaner propels eighteen pounds of projectile mass at nine hundred and twenty feet per second. Impact interaction duration per pellet is about thirty split-seconds. That’s four orders of size faster than the barrier’s refresh cycle. The shield won’t have time to absorb the blow. It will suffer nearby moving shear failure.”
Kenneth stared blankly. “Local... What?”
“He means it’s going to rip that shiny shield into kindling, you daft soldier!” Borin roared, striking a spark on a sulfur slow-match. “Stand back!”
Forty yards out, the bandit vanguard crossed the outer edge ditch.
Sir Gareth the Cleaver raised his sword. The sapphire runes on his tower shield flared with blinding bright glare. A dome of shimmering blue light—a ball-shaped mana barrier thirty feet wide—swelled from the iron face, hovering like a semi-clear sapphire bubble.
“FEEL THE WRATH OF THE AEGIS!” Gareth roared, his men cheering behind the glowing wall. “BREAK THEIR GATE! NO QUARTER FOR LOWLAND SCUM!”
Giles stepped to the stronghold low roof wall. He pulled a brass lanyard cord connected to the friction primer in the cannon’s vent.
“Clearing the under-road drain in three... Two... One.”
Giles yanked the lanyard.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The roar was a cataclysmic, bone-jarring blast that shook the very bedrock beneath the outpost.
A brilliant cone of blinding orange fire and white-hot gas erupted from the flared muzzle. It scorched the air with sulfur and burned animal fat. The four-hundred-pound bronze barrel recoiled three inches on its iron trunnions, heavy recoil springs absorbing the shock with a violent metal screech.
Downrange, the sky vanished behind an expanding, cone-shaped hurricane of three hundred and twenty faster-than-sound iron spheres and razor-sharp quartz aggregate.
The moving crash was instant.
Sir Gareth the Cleaver’s shimmering blue mana barrier didn’t ripple. It didn’t absorb the blow.
Instead, three hundred and twenty independent moving vectors—each carrying seven hundred foot-pounds of nearby striking force—struck the mana membrane within a span of twelve split-seconds. The nearby shear pressure exceeded the barrier’s critical threshold by nine thousand percent.
With an ear-splitting, glassy SHATTER, the entire sapphire dome imploded into a blinding cloud of harmless azure sparks.
The faster-than-sound iron storm didn’t slow down. The cloud of grape-shot slammed directly into the iron pavilion shield and the dense mass of men behind it.
CRACK-THUD-CRACK!
The heavy iron pavilion shield was blown backward with terrifying moving violence, crumpling like tin foil against Sir Gareth the Cleaver’s breastplate. The impact snapped the knight’s left forearm, caved in his steel armor. Then he launched his two-hundred-and-forty-pound armored frame ten feet through the air into the mud.
Behind him, the front three ranks of bandits were wiped out by the expanding iron cone. Armor plates were punched holes in, shields splintered into matchsticks, and men were tossed like ragdolls into the flooded ditch.
The twenty-foot battering ram was snapped in half as if struck by a giant meat-cleaver, the iron head cartwheeling into the trees.
Silence slammed down over the southern approach.
The thick white smoke of pyritic propellant drifted slowly across the ditch. It showed a forty-yard cone of total devastation.
Where sixty screaming raiders had charged, twenty-four lay groaning in the peat, weapons scattered and shields shredded. Sir Gareth the Cleaver lay half-sunk in the ditch, ruined pavilion shield smoking in the mud beside him, clutching his broken arm and gasping through his shattered visor.
The leftover thirty-six bandits stood frozen in the scrub, splattered with mud and gravel. It stared at the smoldering stronghold with eyes dilated in total terror.
“THE DEMON CANNON!” one of them shrieked, dropping his sword.
“HE SHOOTS LIGHTNING AND MOUNTAINS!”
“RUN! RUN FOR THE PASSES!”
The bandits broke. They threw down their weapons and fled into the southern pines in blind, stampeding panic, trampling each other to get away from the stone gate.
On the stronghold narrow high walkway, Captain Kenneth Drake stood with mouth open, trench-sword hanging limply at his side. He looked from the smoking ditch back to the short bronze barrel, hands trembling.
“By... By the Emperor’s blood...” Kenneth whispered. “An Aegis shield... Wiped out in the blink of an eye. Sixty men broken by one breath of iron.”
Borin Bronze-Lung burst into a booming laugh, slapping the hot bronze barrel with his glove. “Gravel spreader! Ha! He called it a high-pressure under-road drain cleaner! Did you see the knight fly, Kenneth? Flew like a grouse caught in a gale!”
Sister Teresa leaned over the low roof wall, eyes ablaze with righteous fury, pumping her brass slurry lance into the air.
“See THE SCOURING FLAME OF JUSTICE!” Teresa screamed at the fleeing bandits. “RECEIVE THE PELLET OF PURIFICATION, SINNERS! THE Master builder HAS SWEPT THE ROADBED CLEAN!”
Giles didn’t cheer. He pulled a brass pocket rule and a steel feeler gauge from his coat, inspecting the bronze trunnions for hairline stress cracks.
“Recoil system performed within design envelope,” Giles said in his standard flat voice. “Pintle anchor bolts show zero shear shifted weight. Low roof wall concrete sustained no dynamic flaking off. solid strength confirmed.”
He looked down the flared bore, scowling slightly.
“Bore fouling is unacceptable, however. Pyritic blackpowder leaves heavy potassium sulfide residues in the throat. Borin, fetch kerosene and a stiff brass wire brush. If you let carbon buildup sit in the breach, chamber pressure increases by twelve percent on the next firing cycle. Clean the equipment before you celebrate.”
Borin saluted, grinning. “Aye, Lord Giles! Cleaning the trench-sweeper right away!”
Down in the ditch, two frontier guards dragged the moaning, mud-soaked form of Sir Gareth the Cleaver to the base of the stronghold ladder. His broken helmet had been pulled off, revealing a bleeding forehead and scared, bloodshot eyes.
“Who... Who are you?” Gareth wheezed, staring up at Giles as the engineer adjusted his sighting scope on its tripod. “What sorcery was that? No circle mage can cast a spell that tears an Aegis shield to shreds! Are you an arch-artificer of the First Throne?”
Giles looked down from the low roof wall, pencil poised over his drafting clipboard.
“I’m the town project work boss of this settlement, Sir Gareth the Cleaver,” Giles said evenly. “You were marching without a permit on a loose ground base within an active construction zone. Your trespassing caused an eighty-minute delay in our foundation curing schedule. Kenneth, lock him in the timber shed and put him on gravel-hauling duty as soon as his arm sets.”
Gareth blinked, slack-jawed. “Gravel... Hauling?”
“Thirty tons of aggregate, to be precise,” Giles replied. “You broke the road, you help pave it. Move him out.”
Kenneth nodded with a vicious grin, prodding the captured knight with his ten-foot measuring rod. “On your feet, ‘Sir’ Gareth! You heard the Lord Master builder! The stone doesn’t wait!”
High on the southern ridge, hidden behind the dense needles of a blue spruce, a solitary rider sat on a foam-flecked black courser.
Dressed in the gray-and-gold wool of a Royal Country Courier, the rider slowly lowered a brass telescope, hands shaking so wildly that the lenses clattered against each other.
Tucked into his leather saddlebag was a sealed parchment bearing the wax eagle crest of the Royal Ministry of Fortifications—an audit summons demanding the immediate surrender of the penal outpost.
The courier looked down at the smoking ditch, the shattered pavilion shield, the twenty-four groaning raiders, and the massive concrete water tank pulsing with clean mountain water on the terrace above.
“Sweet Saints above...” the courier whispered, his voice trembling in the freezing wind. “They sent him out here to die in the mud... And he has forged an iron castle out of thin air.”
Turning his horse, the courier dug his spurs into the beast’s flanks, galloping southward to carry the terrifying news back to the capital.