The clink of the iron oarlock had barely died into the river roar when the southern sky erupted in blinding, sulfurous crimson.
A heavy incendiary flare, fired from a trench mortar on the willow bluffs, screamed upward through the freezing drizzle, leaving a corkscrew trail of oily black smoke before bursting five hundred feet above the weir. In the harsh, blood-red glare that washed over the valley, the full scope of the catastrophe stood revealed twenty-four hours ahead of every schedule Jon Hale had recorded in his ledger.
Marshal Ors had not waited for his siege batteries to dry out. Having deduced from Iven’s flight that Harth had learned of his flume targets, the supreme commander of the Ash Host had launched an immediate, night-time assault, committing his entire shock vanguard to the river works before the morning bell could sound.
Out from the black shadows of the willow island, where the current divided around the gravel shallows, three monstrous flat-bottomed sapper barges emerged. They were eighty feet long, armored with double tiers of green bull-hide soaked in brine to resist pitch arrows, propelled silently down the current by sixteen-man rowing crews whose oars were muffled in coarse sheepskin fleece. On the raised timber forecastle of each barge, mounted behind three-inch oak mantlets reinforced with iron straps, sat a massive steel-bowed cranequin ballista, its four-inch hemp winch line coiled on an iron drum beside an eight-foot forged steel harpoon.
