I'm going to try to keep the benefits for yall 20 chapters ahead. I've had to delay the release of book 2 to allow some funds to build up so I can pay someone for the cover and formatting for the book, including the maps because I wasnt happy how they turned out in book 1. So right now not sure when that will come out but there's additional content I'll list that has been added to that later.Enjoy the chapter!
The cauldron had been full an hour ago.
Now it held maybe a finger's worth of liquid at the bottom — dense, dark, the color of old wine left in a barrel over winter — and Harold's hands were still on the rim, mana pressing down through his palms in a column so thick the air around the vessel had started to bend. The alchemists had figured that out around the forty-minute mark, when the younger one tried to step closer to observe the reduction and her stomach turned itself inside out. She'd backed up three paces and stayed there, hand pressed flat to her sternum, breathing through her nose.
The other one hadn't even tried.
Churchill was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed, a short axe hanging loose from his right hand by the haft, eyes on the cauldron. He'd walked into the mana field early on, gotten maybe four feet from the rim, and stopped. His jaw moved once, side to side, like he was working a piece of gristle. Then he'd stepped back to the wall and stayed there.
Even that little was more reaction than Harold had ever seen from him.
The guard detail — sixteen men posted around the building by Hale's standing order — had retreated to the hallway about twenty minutes in without saying anything. Harold hadn't told them to stay, but Carter had scoffed at them until he, too, had to retreat. He came back in when the pressure dropped enough that a man could stand without his teeth rattling, and had been waiting by the door since.
The reduction finished in stages, the pressure dropping in increments, the air around the rim going from heavy to merely thick to something a person could stand next to without their organs compressing. Harold straightened up in relief. His shoulders ached. He rolled them once, heard something pop, and reached for the row of empty vials on the side table.
He was halfway through the bottling when the door opened, and someone who was not on his guard detail hit the doorframe at a run, then remembered to stop.
"Count Harold!" The runner was one of Hale's. He was breathing hard from the run. He'd stopped himself in the doorframe and gotten upright, but his color was still off. "The enemy wave is forming. Our forward observers put it at any moment, my lord. They could reach the wall at any moment."
Harold looked at him for a moment. Then he went back to the bottling.
"Mmm, about time," he murmured.
The runner opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Churchill, who looked bored.
Harold finished the run, set the last vial in the rack, and started sorting by the colored wax seals he'd pressed into each stopper — red for the incendiary, green for the barrier compound, the deep blue ones with the double-mark for the penetration potions. He pulled a selection, six vials total, and wrapped them in cloth from the table. Tied it off. Held it out to the runner.
"Caswell and Fitch get the red and the green," he said. "Two of each. Hale gets a green and a blue. Parker gets the other blue." He waited until the runner had the bundle secure in both hands before he let go. "You tell them the green goes on the blade edge, not the tip, and they've got ninety minutes before it degrades. The blue they apply last. Understood?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Say it back."
The runner said it back. Harold nodded and turned to find Carter already waiting, armor in hand, jaw set, saying nothing about the hour he'd spent outside that door.
"Wall," Harold said.
"Wall," Carter agreed, and held out his Thresher King inspired armor.
Behind them, the two alchemists were still standing where they'd been standing for the last few hours, neither of them moving, neither of them talking. Harold got one arm into the pauldron, glanced back at them, and paused.
"If you want to know how that works," he said, "come back to the Landing with us when this is done." He considered. "Bring your shop. We'll have a lot to talk about."
Then Carter steered him toward the door, and they went.
The runner was already clattering down the stairs ahead of them. Sera hadn't moved.
Churchill fell in at Harold's left shoulder, the short axe traded out for a longer blade that had appeared from somewhere on his person without Harold noticing the swap. He said nothing, but he was rolling his shoulders and his eyes were already moving across the exits, the kind of loose pre-fight readiness that Harold had only ever seen in men who genuinely enjoyed what came next.
"Not bad for a new Lord," Harold said as they hit the stairs.
"Felt it," Churchill said. "Didn't like it."
"High praise," Harold said as he glanced at him.
Churchill glanced at him. "Don't get cocky. My gran could boil a pot, and she was four foot nothing and smelled like cabbage." He switched the blade to his other hand. "You've just got more mana than she did."
The formation came together in the courtyard below without Harold saying anything — Carter had passed the word ahead, and Ren and Corwin were already in position by the time Harold hit the bottom of the steps, the guard fanning into its arc around him while Elroy and Jenkins jogged in from the left looking like they'd been interrupted from something important.
"What'd we miss?" Elroy said.
"Nothing yet," Carter said.
"Excellent." Elroy fell into step. "PERFECT TIMING AS ALWAYS."
"Not yet," Harold said.
"Right, right."
They moved through the town at a march, boots on stone, the sound of it carrying down empty streets. The people were either in hiding or standing by the wall to help with supplies and casualties.
The ballista towers came into view first, rising above the gatehouse line, the crews swarming their platforms with practiced efficiency. Harold tracked them as he walked — elevation checks, bolt racks being staged in sequence, the crew chiefs moving their lines with short gestures. The angle on the near tower was slightly off, but the chief was already on it, two men repositioning the pivot mount while he watched the sightline.
The chanting started before they reached the gate.
It built as he came into sight of the reserve cohort — one section picking it up, then the next, and by the time Harold's formation was climbing the gatehouse stair it was coming off both walls in a single rolling wall of sound, boots slamming the stone in unison, sword hilts cracking shields in the rhythm that Hale's centurions had drilled into the legion until it came out automatically. Harold had heard it twice before, and it still hit him somewhere below the sternum, a frequency that the body registered before the mind caught up.
The top of the gatehouse gave him the whole field at once.
Five thousand of them, massed and moving in disciplined formations. They'd learned from the first wave — the formation was tighter, the flanks were protected, the spacing between units suggesting coordination rather than a general advance. More armor too, heavier plating across the front ranks, the scale-over-hide construction that the Legion's archers had found gaps in during the first wave, replaced with something thicker, joints reinforced, overlapping at the shoulders and hips.
And then the siege beasts.
Three of them, spread across the formation's width, each one the size of a granary and built like tanks. They walked on six legs, the front four doing most of the work while the rear pair dragged wide and churning up the ground behind them. Their hides were plates of natural bone-grey armor, layered like scale, and their skulls were elongated and low, triangular, designed for pushing into things rather than biting them. The tail was the problem — twenty feet of it, thick at the base, tapering to a flat spade shape at the end, and Harold could already see what it was for. It would come down across the parapet like a ramp.
He had known the word for them immediately. Rampbacks. They were part of the reason the region across the sea to the south was failing against the nest. The kobolds had their own version of rampbacks, but the effect was the same.
Javelin units moved between the beasts, compact groups of six, each one carrying a bundle of the heavy-shafted throwing spears that he knew they would use to suppress any force moving to defend a breach.
Harold put his hands on the parapet and looked at them for a long moment.
Hale was a few feet to his right, telescope extended, working his way across the formation in sections. He snapped it shut when Harold got close enough.
"You saw the big ones," Hale said. It wasn't a question.
"Rampbacks," Harold said. "Hard not to, the tail's a boarding ramp. They walk them up to the wall, and the lizards climb the spine."
"That's what I figure too." Hale looked back out at the field. "Three of them means three breach points simultaneously. We can't concentrate on one without giving the others a clean run."
"Use the mana pen potions on the ballista bolts," Harold said. "It'll punch through the rampback scale. The mana resistance won't stop it — assuming none of their ritualists are throwing up barriers."
Hale was already looking at the towers. He raised two fingers, and a runner peeled off before Harold finished the sentence, heading for the nearest stair at a jog. "Penetration heads, mana pen application, priority the Rampbacks," Hale said, half to himself, confirming the order as it left him. "They'll need five minutes to apply and seat the heads."
"They've got maybe eight."
"Then they'd better not drop anything." Hale lowered his hand and looked back out at the advancing formation. The Rampbacks were moving steadily, the army flowing around them like water around stones. "Your orders, my lord."
Harold looked at Ren and Corwin. "Banner."
Ren already had the pole. The banner went up — the gold and black of the empire snapping out as Corwin locked the bracket to the parapet — and the sound that came off the wall below was immediate and physical, boots slamming stone in a single beat, then voices, then the full rolling cheer building along the ramparts as the legionaries saw the colors go up and understood what it meant.
The mangonels fired a second later.
Four of them, two from the gatehouse and one each from the corner bastions, each one releasing with a deep wooden crack that Harold felt in his back teeth. The cluster shot spread across the advancing formation's face, and the impacts came in a ragged sequence. A section of the front rank collapsed inward, and the formation adjusted around it without breaking stride, but another cheer ripped along the wall above Harold's head, and the crews were already hauling the throwing arms back down, someone calling the reload count in a flat shout.
Churchill was watching the treeline.
Harold noticed it a half-second before anything happened — the way Churchill's weight shifted, both feet coming square, his attention pulling hard left toward the forest edge where the shadows sat thick and unreadable — and then Churchill's hand closed on Harold's collar and Harold was moving before his body knew it, Churchill's arm across his back driving him down hard against the parapet stones as the rock came out of the trees at a speed that made the air scream.
It hit the gatehouse tower by the mangonels. The impact went through the stone under Harold's palms and up into his arms, dust and grit raining off the parapet edge, someone further down the wall shouting.
Harold raised his head. Hale was still standing where he'd been standing, telescope up, tracking the treeline with complete calm. A second rock came out of the forest and hit lower on the wall face, and Hale still didn't move.
He pulled out a scrap of paper from inside his coat, wrote four words on it, folded it once, and held it out to the runner beside him without looking. The runner took it and ran.
"We can't count on the ballista towers for this fight," Hale said, snapping the telescope shut. "Killing those beasts is going to come down to good old-fashioned steel."
Churchill laughed.
It was short and genuine, and Harold actually turned to look at him, because in months of training he'd heard the man grunt, heard him correct, heard him say again in a tone that stripped the word down to its bones — but he hadn't heard him laugh. Churchill was already scanning the field again, a short blade in one hand and the axe in the other, and he looked like a man who had just been told the evening's entertainment was going to be excellent.
Below the wall, the archers opened up. Flights of arrows came off the ramparts in overlapping waves, arcing out over the field and dropping into the advancing ranks, and some of them found gaps in the armor and the shields — lizards stumbling, clutching, pulling out of formation — but most of it hit scale-plate and bounced, and the formation kept coming, the Rampbacks shouldering forward with their heads down, indifferent to the arrows rattling off their hides.
Churchill reached down and took Harold's arm and pulled him upright in a single easy motion, picking him up like useless luggage. "Stand up, my lord." He was still watching the field, but there was something in his voice that hadn't been there before — an edge Harold recognized from the training yard, the tone that meant Churchill had decided something. "You've been slacking. I think it's time for a training session, and these lizards have volunteered."
"Come on," Harold said. "This battle has real consequences. We can't use it as a training session."
Churchill looked at him. Then he turned to Hale. "We'll handle one of the breaches. You handle the other two."
Hale looked at Churchill for a moment, then at Harold and grunted. "Fine." He was already turning, raising his voice for the first time. "Parker! Knights to the east section, I want the lords distributed before those things close to two hundred yards!" He glanced back at Harold. "Don't get killed."
"Trying not to."
"Try harder."
The mangonels shifted targeting, the crews walking their shots back behind the Rampbacks into the massed formations following them, cluster rounds dropping into the dense middle of the advance where the lizards had no room to scatter. Harold tracked one of the rocks as it left the arm — a grey irregular lump turning end over end against the sky, decelerating at the top of its arc and then coming down fast, and he followed it all the way into the formation. It hit a lizard in the front rank across the shoulder and the lizard simply stopped being upright, the impact carrying the rock forward and down into the next rank where it caught two more across their legs and kept rolling, bodies folding under it or pitching sideways, and by the time it came to rest it had carved a furrow maybe six bodies deep through the advance. The formation closed around the gap without breaking stride.
Then the explosion came from the forest.
Harold spun. The ballista towers were angled up — not at the advancing force but at the treeline, high-arc trajectories, and as Harold watched, one of the crews released a bolt with its explosive head, and it went into the dark between the trees, and the detonation lit the canopy from inside, a deep orange crack that threw shadows twenty feet out from the forest edge.
The roar from the trees shook them on the walls.
Hale's teeth showed. Down the wall, the legionaries were screaming, and another pair of rocks came off whatever was in the forest and hit the wall in different places. People on the ramparts dropped flat and stayed down, and one of the mangonels had to stop its reload while the crew cleared a man who'd taken a piece of flying stone across the shoulder.
Another ballista bolt went into the trees. Another detonation. Another roar, longer this time, with something ragged in it.
The lizard formation answered it.
The hiss started at the front rank and ran back through the formation like a wave moving the wrong direction, rising in pitch and volume until it stopped being a sound made by individual throats, and the Rampbacks lowered their skulls and the whole mass of it lurched forward into a run, five thousand scaled bodies and three enormous siege beasts hitting a single accelerating note as they crossed the open ground toward the wall.