The knight who carried the bomb out was named Aldous, and Harold had picked him because he ran like the wind.
Aldous had the housing loaded into the pre-dug hole before the third wave crested the tree line, two legionaries with shovels going out with him, packing earth around the iron casing up to the carrying rings and smoothing the surface until the dirt looked normal. Harold had watched from the wall until the three shapes slipped back through the gate, and then someone handed him coffee that he drank without tasting.
That had been five minutes ago, and he was still on the wall.
Carter had tried twice to get him to sleep. Harold had said yes both times and not moved — his legs had forgotten to listen to whatever was supposed to make them go, and his mana pool ached the way a bruise aches the second day. He just had to last until the third wave died, and then he could have a rest.
He heard them before he saw them — a deep rhythmic percussion that wasn't drums, something very heavy moving over uneven ground at pace, and he was on his feet and at the parapet edge before he consciously decided to stand.
The Rampbacks came bursting through the trees first.
Six of them this time, and bigger than the last batch, their shoulder ridges standing a full head above the tree canopy as they emerged. They would reach the walls easily. The lead one had a mottled red-gold sheen on its carapace that the previous ones hadn't worn. They moved in a deliberate spread formation with spacing someone had thought through, and behind them, the army flowed out of the trees in organized columns and formed up, and Harold watched, his stomach settling into something cold.
Four thousand, give or take. He was straining to read their mana density before the front ranks fully cleared the tree cover, and he didn't like what he was finding. Rank and file dense, not tier one but close, sitting in the upper range of what his best legionaries could handle on a good day, and there were a lot of them. Their unit leaders were worse — seven were already visible, heavily armored, tier one at a minimum.
"Can you sense them from here?" Hale asked, not looking away from the tree line.
Harold exhaled through his nose. "Yeah."
"And?"
"Rank and file are almost tier one. Unit leaders are there." He paused. "Seven visible. Could be more in the back columns."
Hale's arms didn't move from the parapet. "The Rampbacks?"
"You don't want to know."
"That bad?"
"I stopped trying after that big red bastard." Harold picked up Caswell's mug and found it empty. "So. Yes."
"Fuck," said Parker, somewhere behind him.
"Eloquent," Harold said.
"I'm going to put that on my headstone. I’m a poetic man."
"Column's not advancing," Hale said, which was when Harold noticed it too. The formation was fanning out laterally, well beyond ballista range, and the Rampbacks had stopped moving and stood in a line while smaller figures swarmed around their feet. Wagons being unloaded. Harold tracked movement at the back of the column and found the source of the percussion — six massive scaled things, broader and lower than the Rampbacks, hauling wagons roughly the size of a small house loaded with timber, stone, and canvas-covered shapes he couldn't identify at this range.
"They're building a camp," Caswell said, arriving at the parapet with a mug in each hand. He offered one to Harold, who took it and drank before checking what was in it. Warm beer. He sighed and kept drinking.
"Buggers didn't bring ladders."
"They've got a tree line fifty yards away," Hale said. "They'll cut their own."
"Sure. But they didn't bring them."
Parker stepped up beside Hale and looked out. "First wave came in stupid. Second wave came in with a plan." He crossed his arms. "This one brought fucking logistics."
It did. Workers moved in coordinated streams, material flowing from the wagons to the construction points with choreographed efficiency. The draft animals stood anchored and patient while their loads were stripped around them. The commander — one of the tier one leaders — walked a wide circuit of the open ground in front of the gate, studying the wall, studying the ground with unhurried confidence.
It stopped at roughly three hundred yards from the gate, pointed at the dirt, and two workers dropped what they were carrying and started pacing distances.
Harold's gaze moved thirty yards closer, slightly left of center, where the ground looked exactly like every other patch of ground.
"I hope you're right about their eyesight in daylight," Hale said, quieter.
Harold found the mannequins on the wall with his eyes, without turning his head — five hundred of them distributed across the parapet, straw and wood and salvaged armor propped up at garrison-spacing intervals, real soldiers mixed through at a ratio of roughly two to five. The commander's circuit brought it across the wall's face, and its gaze moved along the line of defenders, and its head angled, assessing.
Don't look at the ground.
It looked at the wall, gestured to the workers, and walked back toward its lines.
Finn arrived behind him, breathing hard, with mud on his boots and a smear of mana pen potion residue on his forearm.
"The Legion is ready," Finn said.
Harold's head came up.
"We saw the scouts coming in from the east and figured if they swept the area before the main column arrived and found the housing—" Finn was already talking faster. "He'd rather it be armed than not. I know, I told him to wait for your signal, but his reasoning—"
"When did he pull it?"
"About eleven minutes ago."
Harold did the math. Nineteen minutes left on the fuse, assuming it worked correctly. He turned and looked at the lizardman camp, where a probable tier-two commander was making decisions inside the blast radius of a cabinet-sized iron bomb buried in the dirt between here and the gate.
"Hmph," Harold said. "Good man."
Finn's mouth closed.
Parker let out a breath. "Nineteen minutes."
"Give or take."
"And a tier-two standing on top of it."
"Hopefully, he stays there."
Parker was quiet for a moment. "You know, you say the sweetest things."
"It gets better," Harold said. "Probably."
Harold turned to find Hale already three feet away, watching Harold's face. He didn't need to say anything.
"Get everyone staged on the inner face of the wall," Harold said. "Centuries stacked up behind the gate, knights ready to move the second the bar comes off. Nobody on the upper parapet once this goes — I want everyone below the wall line. Mannequins hold the parapet."
Hale looked at him with the flat amusement he reserved for occasions when Harold was being told things he'd already done. "That order has already been given. Let us do our jobs, Count."
Harold sat back down on the bench.
It was busy in the way a construction site is busy — coordinated, quiet, purposeful, nothing wasted. The lizardmen worked without the noise that human construction usually generated, no shouting, no hammer cadences, the rhythmic communication happening at frequencies Harold couldn't parse. Workers moved in streams. Prefabricated palisade sections were going up on the northern edge of the camp footprint, joints already cut and fitted, slotting together with the efficiency of assembly.
"Smart," Caswell said, watching the framing rise.
"Too smart," Harold said. "This whole trial stinks of interference."
He watched the commander make another pass of the open ground at 24 minutes, getting closer to the housing, close enough that his left hand tightened on the stone parapet, but he didnt notice, and the circuit took the lizardman past and back toward camp.
At 27 minutes, Harold stood up.
The commander was doing a third pass. It was moving more slowly this time, circuit tightening, and Harold had been watching it long enough to recognize when its movement changed — the head dropped, the pace lost half a step. It was looking at the ground.
Harold braced both hands on the parapet and opened his mouth—
The ground lifted.
The earth bulged upward in a circle roughly twenty yards across, the surface fracturing along stress lines, and then the air split with a sound Harold felt in his sternum and his back teeth simultaneously. The greymantle-imbuement let go all at once and the pressure wave came out as a rolling concussive ring moving at chest height across the camp, and it flattened everything it touched.
The draft animals went down first. The timber framing vanished. The palisade section became component pieces exploding in multiple directions. Workers in the inner camp were thrown back, and the ones at the edge were still standing but not usefully — staggering, orientations gone — and the tier-one commander had disappeared into the smoke and churned earth.
Three of the six Rampbacks had been inside the circle.
The pressure wave caught them broadside and all three stumbled and went over, ridge scales and tons of armored muscle dumped sideways into the dirt. The impacts sent their own shockwaves through the churned ground. One tried to get up immediately, neck extended and head thrashing, and then it stopped and didn't start again. The other two lay in the smoke without moving.
The three outside the blast radius were still up, still standing, but their orientation was gone — heads swinging in the wrong directions, responding to nothing.
Three seconds of silence, just debris settling, and then the screaming started.
Below him, through the smoke: Hale's voice cutting clean. "Knights — go. Infantry, on my mark."
The gate bar came off with a crack, Harold felt through the stone under his feet, and both doors swung wide on greased hinges, and the knights came out.
Fitch was first through with Brennig and Caswell flanking him and Dalen three lengths back, all of them at a dead sprint before the gate was fully open, the knight century spreading wide behind them in a line covering all three standing Rampbacks at once.
The first Rampback was still trying to find its bearings when Fitch's line arrived — Fitch going left, Caswell driving right, Brennig cutting straight in underneath its neck while it tried to track the split and couldn't commit to a direction, and Dalen coming in from behind with two knights in a wedge that found the gap behind the rear leg joint where the carapace gapped. The thing went down hard and kicking, and Brennig was already past it and moving toward the second.
The second Rampback had recovered; it was the red bastard. It met the charge with its scales braced and front legs planted, and it took the hit and didn't budge, just absorbed it and swung its head in a full arc that caught Caswell across the chest and put him on his back ten feet away. Harold's breath locked — Caswell hit the ground hard, rolled, and was back up with his blade out before the Rampback finished the swing, and then six knights piled onto its flank from the left while Fitch came around its right, and it buckled under the combined weight and went to its knees with a sound like a building settling.
The third had turned to run and made it four strides before Dalen ran it down from behind, driving a mana-blade strike into the joint gap behind its rear leg. It stumbled, and more knights closed in from both sides, and it didn't get back up.
Then Hale's voice from below: "FIRST CENTURY — ADVANCE. DOUBLE TIME — MARCH."
The cohorts' boots hit the ground together.
The surviving lizardmen had recovered enough to organize against a hundred knights standing in the middle of their camp, and the remaining tier-one leaders hit from three sides simultaneously with the fury of a force that had been waiting to respond. The knights ate it badly — Harold watched the line compress from the wall, men going down on both flanks, Fitch's formation pulling tight into a defensive cluster while the tier-one leaders cut through the edges with controlled, methodical brutality.
A knight dropped on the far right. Another on the left. The tier-one leaders on both flanks were coordinating.
And then the first century hit the right side of the encirclement.
It didn't close in a charge. It came in at the double, shields locking before they'd fully closed the distance, the front rank dropping into a wall of iron and timber as the optio's shout rolled down the line — testudo, testudo — and the formation compressed and the rear ranks' javelins were already in the air before the shields locked. Past the knights, into the massed lizardman formations, trying to feed reinforcements into the fight from the eastern edge of the camp.
The volley dropped the front two ranks before they could close the distance. The second volley came while the first was still in the air, the rear century stepping forward to the throwing line while the first reloaded, and the eastern reinforcement stalled in the debris of its own front ranks.
"There we go," Parker said, from somewhere to Harold's left. He had a fist braced on the parapet and his eyes were moving fast. "Left flank, left flank — second century's about to have a problem on the left—"
Harold was already watching it. The tier-one leader on the left had read the shield wall formation and pulled its unit back out of javelin range and was flanking wide to come around the shield wall's exposed end, and the second century hadn't pivoted yet.
But it wheeled.
The Centurion had seen it — or Hale had called it — and the left half of the century wheeled on the pivot man with mechanical precision that looked slow from the wall, shields locking outward to meet the flanking unit and the rear rank rotating to face the new threat before the lizardmen were fully committed. The tier-one leader pulled its unit up short when it realized what it was facing, and in the two seconds it spent recalculating, the wheeled formation absorbed the charge with shields and the front rank dropped to one knee and the second rank drove overhand with iron-tipped pila at the faces of anything that came over the shields.
"They've done this before," Henri said.
"Almost every day," Harold said.
The encirclement on the knights broke when the first century's shield wall drove into the tier-one leaders on the right flank, forcing the choice Harold had wanted them to have — finish the knights and die to the shield wall from behind, or turn to meet the shield wall and give the knights room to breathe. Two of them turned. The other four didn't get the chance to choose because Renna's battery had set up just outside the gate while the knights were fighting, and the first volley came over at flat trajectory and speared through two tier-one leaders in the middle of their reorganization.
The second volley landed in the massed formations beyond them before they had time to scatter.
"Ha," Parker said, flat and satisfied.
The centuries didn't stop advancing. The second century had broken the flanking unit and was driving forward into the gap, shield wall compressing the lizardmen toward the blast crater where the ground was churned and treacherous underfoot, and the third century had come through the gate and was spreading wide to the eastern edge to close the exit corridor. The knights were back on their feet and moving, and Fitch was cutting through the space between two shield formations with half the knight century behind him, hitting them in the flanks while they were still trying to reorganize.
“Bastards go down hard, don’t they.” Parker muttered.
It wasn't elegant. Men were going down on both sides, and the surviving tier-one leaders were dangerous even caught between formations — Harold watched one of them tear through the left face of the second century's shield wall for four bodies' worth of damage before it took three javelins in the back from the reserves. But the centuries kept the pressure on, kept the formations maneuvering, kept forcing the lizardmen to react rather than act, and, one by one, the options narrowed until the only option left was to rout or die where they stood.
Harold sat down.
The bench was still there. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands for a moment, and the sounds of it came up from below, and his body felt like wet sand from the jaw down.
Hale arrived while the centuries were still reforming. Harold heard the boot step and didn't look up.
"Rampbacks are down." Hale's voice was the same as always. "Fitch took a cut to the left arm. Brennig's got cracked ribs from the third Rampback, but he's walking. Caswell's fine, bruised chest, says it's nothing — I believe the chest, not the nothing." A pause. "Dalen's uninjured and annoyingly cheerful about it."
"Twenty-three?" Harold said.
"Twenty-three dead on our side. Sixty-something wounded, maybe a third of those serious. Knights cleaned the unit commanders. The wave is dispersed."
Harold stood and looked out at the battlefield. Smoke from two fires in what had been the camp's center, the bomb crater a dark ring in the mud with bodies scattered outward from it in every direction. The centuries were reforming in columns below, the optios moving through the ranks with the practiced efficiency of people doing a job they'd done before. The knights were inside the gate being seen to, and Harold could see Fitch moving through them with his left arm wrapped and his right hand going to men's shoulders as he passed, one man's name in his mouth, then another, and the men's faces changing when he said their names.
Kid was a natural
"Good," Harold said. It came out flatter than he intended.
"We've got the ritual circle locations from the knights' scouting run," Hale said, looking at the tree line. "Three sites within two miles. Nest is six miles northeast. We move now; we hit those circles before they can finish whatever they're setting up, and then we're at the nest. We wait, they recover, and we start from the beginning."
"Who've we got?"
"Everyone we brought." Hale's jaw shifted slightly. "Brennig's moving with the knight century. He says his ribs are fine."
"Are they?"
"No."
"Is he going anyway?"
"Already strapping his kit." A pause. "Fitch, Caswell, and Dalen with them. They hit the ritual circles first, knights screen the infantry advance. The other knight century's still in the Gemheart Hold, and we haven't had word." Hale let the silence sit for one beat. "You know what you need to do?"
Harold looked at him.
"Sleep," Hale said. "In the wagon. Not against a parapet, not sitting on a bench, not 'in a few minutes.' In the wagon, on the cot, while I take the column north."
"Let me just make sure we are all good for the march," Harold said.
Harold got his hand onto Hale's arm for a second. "Get us to the next part. That's all."
He turned from the parapet.
His legs held for three steps, which was more than he expected, and then the wet sand that had replaced everything below his hips went, and the stair rail came toward him faster than he could think. Jack caught him before the stone — an arm across his chest, feet not quite finding the ground — and then his guard closed in around both of them with practiced competence, four men putting themselves between Harold and every sightline on the wall, and nobody saw anything. Just the guard walking close together down the stair.
The wagon at the base was pre-loaded for the march — Harold's kit, Finn's case, two days of rations, canvas pre-tied at both ends. Jack got him onto the cot and Harold's face hit the blanket and he was asleep before the wagon started moving.