Raw explosive power was an undisciplined brute. Controlled scattering was an applied exact function.
At noon on the day following the arrival of Bronn’s vanguard on the northern ridge, Giles Croft stood on the north gatehouse stronghold. The newly cast Blunderbore Batterer rested on its heavy white oak pivot carriage, its four-inch flared bronze-iron bell pointing down across the southern raised stone road.
Through the cold mountain air, one hundred and fifty yards down the roadbed, sat the test target.
It wasn’t a simple painted plank.
At Giles’s direction, Captain Kenneth Drake and Toby Karr had erected a full-scale mockup of a heavy shock infantry squad.
Twenty wooden mannequins, carved from pine posts by Caleb’s apprentices, stood shoulder-to-shoulder in two tight ranks. Each mannequin was clad in scrap ring-mail salvaged from Sir Gareth’s defeated raiders. He carried wooden shields faced with raw ox-hide.
Behind the two ranks stood a six-foot oak siege mantlet, two inches thick, supported by slanted spruce shores.
Giles peered through his pocket sighting scope, checking the range and height.
“Target distance: one hundred and fifty yards,” Giles said in his standard dry tone. “Lateral target frontage: twenty-two feet. Height set to positive three degrees.”
Kenneth Drake stood beside the gun carriage, holding a glowing sulfur slow-match in his gloved fingers.
“A squad in tight formation,” Kenneth murmured. His veteran eyes measured the wooden mannequins across the snow. “In a royal charge, sixty veterans would advance behind those mantlets, shields locked rim to rim. An arrow volley would rattle off the hides. Even a giant crossbow bolt would kill one man and stop in the timber.”
“A giant crossbow bolt is a single moving vector,” Giles replied, checking the friction primer seated in the gun’s touchhole. “It operates on linear driving force. Canister shot operates on volume spatial saturation. When three hundred and twenty independent penetrators scatter over a Gaussian cone, single armor coverage becomes statistically irrelevant.”
Master Borin Bronze-Lung climbed up the stronghold ladder. He carried a copper powder measure and a wooden rammer.
“Bore swabbed and dry as bone, Lord Giles,” Borin barked. “Chamber cleared of soot.”
“Load the propellant,” Giles commanded.
Toby Karr stepped forward. He carried a tube-shaped canvas cartridge containing four pounds of screened, corned pyritic blackpowder.
Borin guided the powder bag into the flared bronze muzzle. With three steady strokes of the wooden rammer, the dwarf drove the charge home against the breech face. The muffled thud was echoing through the stone casemate.
Next came the munition.
Toby hoisted a heavy, wire-bound canvas canister—the 320-shot Canister Sabot round assembled the last afternoon.
The round slid down the four-foot bore with a snug, sharp air hiss: shhh-clunk.
The turned white oak sabot cup seated firmly against the felt wadding, its concave bottom resting directly against the powder bag.
“Prime the vent,” Giles instructed.
Borin pushed in a slender brass quill filled with fine mealed priming powder into the touchhole, pricking the powder bag below with an iron needle-point arrow.
Giles stepped back three paces, putting his fingers to his ears.
“All personnel clear of the pivot pin recoil envelope,” Giles announced. “Kenneth, take the shot.”
Kenneth Drake stepped to the flank of the carriage. He blew on the tip of the sulfur match, bringing the ember to a bright, glowing cherry-red.
He touched the match to the priming quill.
PHZZZZT!
A sharp hiss of white smoke erupted from the vent.
A heartbeat later, the world vanished into blinding, world-ending thunder.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The blast was a huge, bone-jarring blast wave that slammed against the granite low roof walls. It shook the bedrock beneath the gatehouse.
A massive gout of orange flame and billowing white smoke belched from the flared bell mouth.
The four-hundred-pound bronze-iron barrel recoiled wildly, sliding four inches backward along its greased oak guide rails, heavy spiral steel recoil springs absorbing the shock with a harsh metal screech before returning the gun smoothly into battery.
Downrange, three hundred and twenty chilled iron pellets, propelled by four pounds of corned blackpowder at eleven hundred feet per second, screamed across the snow.
The wooden sabot cup shattered at the muzzle, releasing the cloud of iron spheres into a rapidly expanding, thirty-degree cone of faster-than-sound death.
The crash at one hundred and fifty yards was instant.
CRACK-RATTLE-CRUNCH!
A blinding blizzard of crushed pine splinters, torn iron mail links, shredded ox-hide, and crushed stone erupted from the target area.
The sound was not the clean thud of arrows. It was the terrifying, shredding sound of a giant iron sickle sweeping across a field of dry wheat.
Silence slammed down over the southern raised stone road.
The thick white sulfur smoke drifted slowly across the snow. It carried the pungent stench of burnt gunpowder and scorched oak.
Kenneth Drake slowly lowered his slow-match. His mouth hung open, his hands trembling as he stared through the settling haze.
Where twenty armored wooden mannequins had stood in disciplined formation, there was nothing left standing.
Nothing.
All twenty pine posts had been snapped off at knee height, their upper torsos wiped out into flying kindling.
Scrap iron mail was shredded into tangled wire nests, torn to pieces by dozens of independent moving impacts. The two-inch-thick oak siege mantlet behind the squad looked like a honeycomb, punched holes in by more than one hundred ragged, smoking holes.
And behind the mantlet, the granite retaining wall of the ditch was scarred with hundreds of deep gray craters where the chilled iron balls had crushed the solid rock.
Kenneth Drake dropped his helmet into the snow.
The veteran trench commander stared across the open ground, his face pale as bleached canvas.
“God have mercy on whoever charges this gate,” Kenneth whispered, his voice cracking with sheer dread. “There was an entire squad there. Armored men with shields and mantlets. In half a second... There’s only kindling and shredded iron.”
Borin Bronze-Lung burst into a booming, breathless roar of dwarven laughter, slapping his thigh until his leather apron rattled.
“Look at that spread!” Borin shouted, wiping tears of soot from his eyes. “That’s not an under-road drain cleaner. That’s the scythe of the Under-Forge. One shot, twenty graves.”
Giles didn’t cheer.
He walked out along the raised stone road with his steel measuring tape and his notebook, with Toby Karr.
As he reached the shattered target area, a cold stillness settled in Giles’s chest.
He picked up a twisted scrap of mail armor. It was punched holes in by three chilled iron balls, the steel rings snapped like dry twigs. Next to it lay the cut arm of a wooden mannequin, splintered into matchsticks.
These were pine posts today. But in two days, living men would stand where these posts had stood. Men with blood, mothers, and scared eyes.
Giles stood quietly in the snow, looking down at the torn iron.
“Our objective isn’t slaughter, Kenneth,” Giles said quietly as Kenneth joined him. “Before this weapon is discharged against personnel, you’ll issue a formal parley ultimatum. If they advance after the warning, we target their siege engines, not their ranks.”
Kenneth looked down at the shredded mantlet, then nodded slowly. “Understood, my lord. We give them a chance to turn back.”
Giles knelt in the snow, measuring the scattering pattern of the impacts.
“Scattering cone width: twenty-four point two feet at one hundred and fifty yards,” Giles announced, writing the figures with a steady pencil. “Three hundred and fourteen distinct projectile strikes accounted for within the target envelope. Hit smooth speed: ninety-eight point one percent.”
He inspected a section of punched holes in oak mantlet.
“End-post moving penetration exceeded three point five inches of seasoned white oak,” Giles noted. “The wooden sabot functioned within design tolerances. Zero bore scouring detected.”
Giles stood up and looked back at the gatehouse.
“The test is successful. Mount both Blunderbores in the outer gatehouse casemates right away. Battery One sweeps the bridge raised stone road. Battery Two covers the murder-hole drop-zone.”
As Giles spoke, the wind shifted wildly.
A freezing blast of arctic air howled down from the northern crags. That brought with it a dusting of fine, needle-like ice crystals that stung the exposed skin of their faces.
Giles pulled his pocket heat gauge from his vest.
The liquid silver thread was plunging like a dropped stone.
“Twenty degrees Fahrenheit,” Giles observed, watching the numbers drop. “The heat slope is collapsing rapidly. Air pressure is rising.”
Kenneth walked up beside him, pulling his woolen scarf over his mouth. “The Deep Winter Freeze. It has hit early.”
Giles looked down at the twenty-foot water moat encircling the settlement.
Along the edges of the concrete stone retaining wall, the rushing mountain water was slowing down. Slushy, crystal-clear needles of gray frazil ice were forming against the stone scarp.
“Frazil ice nucleation,” Giles said, crouching beside the concrete lip. “When churning water supercools to twenty-nine degrees, discoid crystals form throughout the water column. The crystals adhere to underwater surfaces and lock together.”
Within hours, the freezing wind would turn the surface of the moat into a solid, glistening sheet of ice.
A flat, level ice bridge, stretching from bank to bank.
Kenneth stiffened, looking from the freezing water to the dark forest where five hundred raiders waited.
“My lord,” Kenneth said, his voice dropping into grave military alarm. “The moat is freezing. If that water turns to ice, Bronn’s infantry won’t need boats or bridges. They can run right across on foot.”
Giles looked at the thickening crystals of ice forming in the current, his eyes narrowing behind his round glasses.
“A flat sheet of ice isn’t a bridge, Kenneth,” Giles said in his standard deadpan flat voice. “It’s an unreinforced crystal-clear brittle plane with zero pulling flexural capacity. And we control the heat slope.”
Borin Bronze-Lung joined them at the moat lip, blowing hot breath into his mittens.
“The hypocaust bathhouse boilers are dumping two hundred gallons of boiling wastewater into the drainage under-road drains every hour,” Borin said, catching Giles’s thought. “We can divert the hot boiler discharge straight into the inner scarp.”
“Exactly,” Giles said. “Warm water discharge maintains an open liquid channel ten feet wide along our entire outer edge. To the eye, snow will cover it like a solid crust. To an eight-hundred-pound armored formation, it’s an immediate floating lift failure.”
Kenneth grinned through his frosted beard. “A moat that looks like ice, but acts like soup.”
He turned back toward the gatehouse.
“Toby, call Master Duncan and Caleb. We need to forge sabot bolts for the springalds. We need to prepare the aqueduct heat bypass.”