The northern horizon didn’t stay quiet for long.
At the second hour of dawn, the morning sun rose behind a haze of rotten-egg smoke, lighting up a sight that made the lookout sentries on Bastion Tower One sound the double-alarm gong.
Emerging from the mouth of the Wolf-Tooth Glade, three miles across the frozen tundra, was the crowning clockwork terror of the steppe horde: “The Earth-Devourer.”
It wasn’t merely a siege tower. It was a mobile castle of timber and beaten iron, eighty feet in height and sixty feet wide at the base, built upon twelve solid hardwood caterpillar tracks. Its forward face was protected by three-inch-thick plates of hammered bog-iron angled at forty-five degrees to deflect incoming giant crossbow bolts.
From its lower assault deck protruded a bronze-headed battering ram sixty feet long, cast from six tons of melted temple bells and tipped with a pointed iron drill head.
On the upper decks, four massive two-arm twisting force giant crossbows—each twice the size of Fort Ironpass’s defensive engines—were manned by crews of thirty barbarian engineers.
The entire huge assembly, weighing not less than one hundred and eighty tons, was propelled across the frozen ground by eight adult northern mammoths. The beasts were chained in pairs with heavy forged iron links three inches thick, their hairy shoulders scarred from iron whips, their tusks fitted with serrated bronze scythe blades.
