For six days and an hour after Barnaby received his orders, the alliance scouts mapped the drainage approaches while the smiths assembled the pipes. The surface army kept the imperial garrison occupied with feints until the tunnel team was ready.
Above ground, the scorched plains of the Vermilion Capital shook with thunder.
Sera Thorne’s Storm-Pike carved arcs of sapphire lightning through the dusty haze, deflecting the heavy crossbow bolts of the Imperial Blood-Hound Corps.
With a sharp flick of her wrist, she drove the star-iron tip through the masonry of a forward watchtower, toppling fifty crossbowmen into the ditch below.
To her left, Mina Vance glided across the cracked earth like a winter spirit.
She raised both sleeves, sending a thirty-foot wall of glacial frost across the red dirt that trapped fifty charging war-hounds in solid ice. The ferocious beasts snapped their jaws at the freezing air, their flaming red fur extinguished under a blanket of pure white rime.
Behind them, Elder Sterling sat calmly on an overturned supply cart.
He took a slow sip of warm plum wine from a small silver gourd, then turned page seventy-two of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride with his left hand.
