The north gatehouse of Harth trembled beneath the impact of four tons of compressed river air.
Through the brass tube of his naval spyglass, Jon Hale adjusted the knurled focusing ring, squinting through the salt-fogged lenses at the northern bluffs. The sight that filled the circular frame tore every page from his memory.
In twelve previous lifetimes, the first forty-eight hours of the siege had followed an immutable, bureaucratic rhythm. Marshal Ors was an imperial veteran who fought by the textbook: two days of cavalry skirmishing along the outer willow ditches, thirty-six hours of methodical entrenchment behind wicker mantlets, and a slow, ponderous deployment of supply wagons along the salted corduroy turnpike. The first heavy stone engines had never loosed a counterweight before the tenth bell of Day Three.
Now, it was barely the tenth bell of Day One.
Yet across the open meadow below the birch bluffs, five massive trebuchets were already assembled in firing lines, their five-ton counterweight boxes packed with broken river quarry-slag. Behind them marched two full regiments of dismounted Ash Host cuirassiers, their blued-steel breastplates gleaming dull and greasy through the oily smoke of burning peat. They carried no cavalry lances, no decorative pennants, and no extra baggage. They moved with the grim, hurried efficiency of veterans who knew they had stolen a march on their enemy.
