Dawn arrived over Fort Karst not with sunlight, but with an earth-shattering roar that tore the morning sky in two.
The air above the dark rock crags shrieked as eighteen thunder-mortars fired in a coordinated, rolling salvo from the high gravel shelf of the Red Scree. The sound was not a crack. It was a physical blow. A low-hum pressure wave that hammered against Ren’s chest bone, blew out the leftover sheepskin windowpanes in the high keep. Then it sent thousands of screaming mountain ravens bursting from the black cliffs into the freezing fog.
Two seconds later, the sky rained fire and iron.
CRASH.
The first salvo struck the southern curtain wall and the outer dry ditch. Two hundred pounds of solid cast-iron shot and explosive sulfur canisters slammed into the dark rock facing. The moving impact was titanic. Blocks of fiery rock, jagged and as black glass daggers, exploded across the stone wall-walk with faster-than-sound fury. In the ditch below, a potion-made canister burst on impact, throwing up a sixty-foot geyser of sticky, yellow-green sulfur flame that instantly melted the snow into bubbling, toxic sludge.
Down in the lower bailey, three thousand refugees huddled beneath timber sheds and soaked wool blankets. It screamed in collective, helpless terror as the bone-shaking shakes shook the foundations. Children pressed their hands to their ears, their cries swallowed by the thunder, while mothers prayed wildly to the silent gods of the valley.
