The flash from the northern bluff was not an instruction to surrender; it was an execution order.
Two leagues to the north, where the limestone ridges overlooked the gray loops of the river, an artillery observer had stood in the leafless scrub with a silvered glass mirror, waiting for the white flag to halt before the False Gate. The signal was not meant for the borough militia, nor was it meant for the fifty Host sappers locked inside the blind stone cul-de-sac. It was meant for the chemical charges stitched into the lining of a ten-year-old boy’s coat.
“Jon! Bram! Run!” Iven screamed, her voice cracking into a ragged, desperate shriek that echoed off the frozen granite of the amphitheater.
She lunged forward across the slush of the quarry floor, her hobnailed boots throwing up sprays of grey mud, her woolen scarf tearing free from her neck as she fought the drag of the freezing wind. Her hands clawed for the collar of Jon’s wool coat, her face pale as a corpse in the snow.
“It isn’t a friction wire!” she shouted, her words stumbling over each other in sheer terror. “It’s a delayed alchemical siphon! Ors has an observer on the ridge with a glass tube and a signal mirror! They primed the bottom reservoirs before the boy cleared the trench lines!”
