The forty burning clay jars did not fall like clean rain; they tumbled end-over-end through the sleet with a hollow, roaring whistle as wind whipped the blazing tow-wicks stuffed into their necks.
“Down behind the merlons! Wet hides over the lime troughs!” Alden Bram bellowed, shoving two mason’s apprentices flat against the inner plank walk and throwing his own broad back over the cedar sand-box to keep the flying resin off the dry scoops.
The first twelve jars smashed against the sloped slate roof of the west hoarding directly above Jon Hale’s head. Red earthenware shattered with a sound like a dropped crockery cupboard, and sixty gallons of boiling pine-pitch mixed with rock-sulfur and mutton tallow splashed through the joints of the cured oak planks in ribbons of sticky, blue-edged orange flame. Unlike ordinary brushwood fire, alchemical siege-pitch did not wash off in the sleet; it clung to vertical timber, wool sleeves, and iron bolt-heads alike, feeding on its own yellow sulfur crust and filling the covered scaffold walk with a choking, sulfurous black smoke that burned the throat raw at a single breath.
A flaming droplet the size of a walnut spat through the roof seam and landed squarely on the shoulder of a young weaver’s jerkin three feet from Jon. Before the boy could scream or beat at the sticky fire with his bare palms—which would only have glued the boiling resin to his skin—Jon snatched a heavy wool horse-blanket from the alum-brine tub beside the post and…
