The dawn on Mount Khor-Vann didn’t bring light. It brought forty tons of forged river-steel.
At five-thirty in the morning. Meanwhile, the last embers of the refectory fire were turning to grey ash, the sky-fleet launched its main assault. Lord Malakor had abandoned all pretense of aerial finesse. Having lost his scout cutters to giant crossbows and his chemical attack to underground steam, the old oligarch committed his heavy siege armor.
The Gilded Titan—a two-hundred-foot heavy assault ram-ship plated in six inches of case-hardened iron—dropped through the morning clouds directly above the outer gatehouse of Cloud-Rest.
Suspended beneath its huge, armored prow was an eighty-foot moving battering ram. A solid metal tube of forged river-steel, four feet in width, tipped with a diamond-fluted breaching head and powered by four internal steam-pistons that generated three hundred thousand foot-pounds of high-pressure impact.
The Gilded Titan was an engine designed for the total eradication of terrestrial defiance. In the wars of the Grand Duchy, sovereign princes had spent decades constructing border keeps with ten-foot granite castle walls, believing that stone was eternal. The High Synod had answered those keeps with the high-pressure ram.
Suspended beneath the assault ship’s armored keel, the eighty-foot forged steel ram was driven by four heavy steam-spreading cylinders that drew power directly from the ship’s main locomotive boilers. When the high-pressure valves tripped, sixty thousand gallons of white-hot steam drove the four-foot diamond-fluted head forward with the speed of an artillery shell. There was no stonework in the world…
