Burning in an enclosed space obeyed the laws of heat-powered spreading, not the dramatic conventions of ballad poetry.
Two and a half pounds of corned black powder deflagrated behind a wooden sabot cup. Then, the gas volume swelled four thousand times in less than a split second.
In the upper firing gallery of the gatehouse outer gatehouse, Giles Croft’s hand dropped.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung yanked the braided friction lanyard with the full weight of his dwarven shoulders.
CRACK.
The friction igniter struck a five-hundred-degree spark into the meal powder priming train.
A blinding flash lit up the gallery floor, followed by a world-ending, mountain-splitting roar.
BOOOOOOOOOOM.
The heavy four-hundred-pound bronze-iron barrel kicked upward against its oak pivot pin stops with fifteen tons of recoil force.
The oak carriage groaned, the forged iron straps biting deep into the seasoned wood. But Duncan’s crushing concrete floor absorbed the thrust without cracking a single grain.
From the wide bell-muzzle pointing down through the north murder hole, a fiery gout of orange fire, white sulfur smoke, and three hundred and twenty chilled pig-iron pellets erupted vertically into the stone entry hall.
The physical result in the confined ten-by-thirty-foot granite hall was total clockwork total ruin.
Traveling at eleven hundred and fifty feet per second, the cone of solid iron shot struck the roof of the three-ton battering ram.
It didn’t pierce cleanly like arrows. It hit like a packed meteor strike.
The double-layered green ox-hides were shredded into boiled away ribbons.
The four-inch seasoned oak roof timbers exploded into thousands of smoking, high-speed splinters.
The heavy forged iron mid-air chains holding the thirty-foot tree trunk snapped like dry thread under the moving hammer blow.
The eight-hundred-pound iron wolf skull crashed straight down into the granite floor with an ear-splitting, bone-jarring slam, splitting the stone doorstep into three fragments.
At the same time, the sound excess pressure of the blast struck the stone hall.
In an open field, sound waves scattered into the sky.
Inside a solid granite box with twenty-foot walls and an arched concrete ceiling, the one-hundred-and-eighty-decibel blast wave rebounded twenty times between the stones in a split second.
The air pressure spike hit the trapped raiders like an invisible iron fist.
Iron shields were ripped from trembling hands and thrown against the walls.
All one hundred and fifty men were slapped flat onto the granite floor by the bone-shaking wave, their helmets ringing like cracked bells.
The sudden excess pressure disrupted the fluid in their inner ears instantly, destroying all sense of balance and inducing violent, incapacitating nausea.
Men lay groaning on the flat stone slabs, clutching their ears, unable to stand, unable to lift a weapon, vomiting into the slush in total physical confusion.
Not a single iron pellet had been aimed at human flesh. Every ounce of shot had spent its striking force pulverizing the timber carriage into matchwood.
Yet the psychological and body effect was more total than a field of corpses.
Up on the gallery platform, the six slanted smoke chimney pipes drew the dense white clouds of sulfur smoke out into the winter air, leaving the gunners clear-eyed and breathing fresh mountain wind.
Borin leaned over the grating, his copper-braided beard parting in a massive grin that shook his belly.
“The dragon’s mouth has spoken,” Borin bellowed through his wool ear-pads, his laughter booming off the vaulted rafters. “The ram is toothpicks. Look at them. Not a sledge left standing.
Sister Teresa stepped to the northern grating. She peeked down through the thinning smoke at the groaning, flattened raiders.
She closed her eyes, clutching her brass pendant, her voice trembling with solemn respect.
“The proud are brought low,” Teresa whispered softly. “Their engines of wrath are turned to dust, yet their breath remains in their nostrils. The mercy of the Living Stone has spared their blood for honest repentance.”
Down on the ground floor behind the inner drop-gate, Captain Kenneth Drake pulled the wool plugs from his ears.
He stared through the heavy iron bars at the entry hall floor.
Where a terrifying three-ton battering ram and one hundred and fifty bloodthirsty veterans had stood moments before, there was now only a smoking mound of splintered oak, snapped chains, and men begging on their knees on their bellies.
Kenneth made the sign of the hammer across his breastplate, his voice hushed with awe.
“Gods above,” Kenneth murmured. “Three hundred iron balls and a cup of powder. He broke their minds without even shedding their blood.”
Giles Croft walked down the stone spiral stair, his measuring rule tucked under his arm. He stepped onto the raised stone road beside Kenneth.
“Raise the inner drop-gate four feet,” Giles commanded. “Deploy twenty constables with ropes and clubs. Disarm every man, bind their wrists, and escort them to the lower storehouse vaults.”
Kenneth signaled his men.
The iron ratchet clicked as four guards cranked the inner drop-gate winch. They lifted the heavy bars four feet above the threshold.
Kenneth’s constables strode into the entry hall, kicking aside daggers, broadaxes, and morningstars.
The captured raiders offered zero pushback.
They were weeping from burst ears, clutching their throbbing temples, and crawling blindly across the floor like newborn pups.
Giles stepped through the gateway, his boots crunching over shredded ox-hide and shattered oak splinters.
He stopped beside the scarred giant sub-chief, who was sitting slumped against the wall, his head resting in his dirt-caked hands as blood trickled from his nose.
Giles knelt beside the fallen warrior.
He placed two fingers against the man’s main neck blood vessel, checking the pulse rate. Then he lifted one eyelid to check the pupil response.
“Bilateral pupillary constriction intact,” Giles observed calmly. “Severe bone-shaking shock, temporary sound trauma, and inner-ear vestibular disruption. No skull depression or neck spine fracture.”
The giant looked up at Giles through glazed, bloodshot eyes, his lips trembling wildly.
“What... What kind of devil are you?” the sub-chief gasped in a ragged, broken croak. “The thunder came from the ceiling... The sky fell on our heads...”
“It was a sound and moving excess pressure crushing weight,” Giles explained patiently. He handed the man a clean woolen handkerchief from his coat. “Hold this to your nose to control the tiny blood vessel bleeding. You’re a captive of the Barony of Grey Crag. As long as you submit to town power, you’ll receive medical treatment and two square meals a day.”
The hardened killer stared at the clean linen handkerchief in his trembling hand, then stared at Giles as if looking upon an immortal king from the Founding Age.
The giant lowered his head, breathing with shallow, trembling relief.
“Mercy,” the giant whispered, clutching the cloth to his face. “Mercy from the stone...”
Lady Millicent walked into the cleared entry hall, with four ledger clerks carrying tally slates.
She stepped delicately over a pile of broken ram chains, inspecting the harvest of captured materiel.
“One hundred and fifty elite prisoners secured,” Millicent recorded with crisp satisfaction. “Three tons of seasoned oak timber fragments suitable for firewood or charcoal kilns. Eight hundred pounds of high-grade forged iron in the wolf skull and mid-air links. Total civic payback value: eleven hundred gold sovereigns.”
“Direct the oak scrap to the bathhouse boilers,” Giles instructed. “The boilers need nonstop fuel to maintain the moat heat slope.”
“Already assigned,” Millicent replied with a crisp nod.
Suddenly, a series of shrill, panicked cries echoed from the upper narrow high walkways of the outer curtain wall.
Toby Karr came tumbling down the stone steps two at a time. His boots skidded across the frosty flags.
“Lord Giles. Captain Kenneth,” Toby called, his face pale as fresh snow. “Look outside. Look at the ridge.
Giles and Kenneth climbed the outer castle wall stair to the open castle wall.
The bitter mountain wind struck their faces, smelling sharply of pine needles and impending snow.
Across the frozen valley, three hundred yards away, the battlefield had erupted into total, berserk pandemonium.
Warlord Bronn had watched his entire elite shock corps and his prized three-ton battering ram vanish into the gatehouse entry hall. He was followed by a thunderous explosion of white smoke and complete silence.
Not a single raider had emerged.
The gateway had not fallen.
The walls had not cracked.
To Bronn’s savage, primitive mind, his army had not been defeated by superior building. It had been swallowed by the jaws of an underground demon.
The warlord had fully lost his sanity.
He stood high in the stirrups of his black destrier, his bearded face purple, his eyes bulging with psychotic, foaming madness.
He swung his burning greatsword in wild, whistling circles, screaming curses that curdled the blood of his own men.
“Witchcraft,” Bronn’s screech echoed across the snow like an animal caught in a trap. “Devils of the dirt. You ate my men. You ate my ram.
He turned his blood-crazed glare upon the leftover two hundred and fifty warriors of his host.
“All of you,” Bronn shrieked, foam flying from his lips. “Take axes. Take ladders. Charge the moat. Run across the ice. Tear the stones down with your bare hands. Charge.
He drove his spiked spurs deep into the flanks of his warhorse.
The stallion leaped forward through the snow, leading a mad, suicidal stampede of two hundred and fifty screaming brigands straight toward the frozen moat.
Kenneth Drake drew his broadsword, his jaw dropping in utter disbelief.
“They’ve gone mad,” Kenneth whispered. “They aren’t even pushing Tower Two. They’re charging on foot across the frozen bank.”
Giles looked down at the twenty-foot-wide moat, where forty feet of liquid mountain water lay hidden beneath the thin cosmetic crust of sifted snow.
Then he looked up toward the high southern ridge. There, the two-mile stone aqueduct channeled fifty thousand gallons of high-pressure mountain water from Eagle Peak.
A cool, decisive light entered Giles’s eyes.
Giles pointed toward the huge aqueduct stone support pillars rising against the southern skyline.
“Fluid head math,” Giles explained to Kenneth as they reached the emergency control platform. “The intake pool at Eagle Peak sits two hundred upright feet above our moat basin. Over a two-mile nonstop concrete run, that height differential generates eighty-six pounds of pressure of static crushing pressure at the base valve.”
Kenneth gripped the cold iron rail, staring up at the massive stone channels.
“Eighty-six pounds of pressure,” Kenneth repeated. “What does that mean when the valve opens?”
“It means that opening the emergency release water gate converts static potential energy into a dynamic water-flow surge,” Giles said. “Fifty thousand gallons of high-pressure mountain water will flush through the spillway chute in sixty seconds. When that wall of water strikes the frozen moat, the ice sheet will shatter like window glass, creating a ten-foot high-pressure tidal bore across the northern ditch.”
“They want to cross our water,” Giles said quietly. His hand reached for the emergency water gate drain tube lever. “Let’s give them the entire river.”