The thunk woke him, every 40 seconds or so, before it happened again. Then the smell hit: someone was making coffee.
He opened his eyes to a canvas ceiling, and it was obviously daylight. The last thing he remembered was passing out on the wall. He must be in the wagon, and it wasn't moving.
He sat up and immediately regretted it. His body felt like it had been taken apart and reassembled slightly wrong; every joint was stiff, and his mouth tasted like dried blood.
He looked at his hands. His mana burn had faded to a dull discoloration along his channels, some of the deep channels still faintly visible if he turned them in the light.
"Two days," Jack called from outside.
Harold pushed the canvas flap aside and climbed out of the wagon. His legs held. That was something. “Where’s that coffee?” He said as he exited.
Jack was leaning against the wagon's side with his arms crossed, watching a ballista crew two hundred yards out work through a reload drill. He looked like he'd slept maybe half as much as Harold.
"Morning," Harold said.
"Afternoon, actually."
"Which day?"
"Second one." Jack glanced at him sideways. "Place bout fell apart without you."
Harold smiled up at him. "Bet you had fun keeping them away."
"Don’t you start too. I already lost money to the second century." He pushed off the wagon. "Parker's at the command tent. Colonel Hale wants to brief you when you're ready."
"Meaning he told you to make sure I ate and drank something first."
"Something like that."
"Well. Where's that coffee I smell? They're close to burning it."
Harold looked past him toward the camp. It was a proper siege camp — dug in, organized, with deliberate fortifications. Canvas lean-tos, fire pits in shielded cuts in the earth, equipment racks. Beyond the camp, through a gap between two ridgelines, Harold could see the shelf.
It was worse than he'd imagined.
The nest sat maybe two hundred meters up on a natural stone shelf, sheer-sided and ugly. A single road cut up the face at a slope. It was stone-paved, wide enough for a cart, and blocked at two visible points by fortifications that even from here looked thick and thought-out. The shelf itself was broad enough that Harold couldn't see the back wall of it from ground level.
The thunk came again. One of the dug-in ballista to his left, firing upward at a high arc toward something on the shelf wall. He watched the bolt climb, slow at the top, drop.
A second later: a distant crack of impact.
"How long have they been at it?" Harold asked.
"Most of yesterday," Jack said. "They've knocked some material off the upper fortification. Not enough though."
"And the blood magic?"
Jack's smile dropped. "Come on, I'll show you while we walk."
Parker was outside the command tent with a steaming mug and a shit-eating grin on his face as he saw Harold approaching.
"You look like shit," Parker said.
"If you don't give me your coffee right now, I’m going to kill you."
He smiled and replied. "You looked worse two days ago." He fell in beside Harold and handed him the mug. Harold drank half of it in one go and felt something in his psyche working again. "Hale's been running the show. Everyone has been extremely, professionally fine." Parker's tone was completely neutral. "The lords have been very helpful."
"Have they?" He murmured back.
"Renna's been exploring around looking for a different way up the shelf. Fitch ran a team around the base yesterday looking for alternate routes up." He paused. "Didn't find any."
"And the others?"
"Caswell's been on the ballista line all morning. He’s made of something different- boundless energy, that one. Maren's had her battery at the edge of effective range, working on the upper fortification." Another pause. "Brennig's been lying in a hammock and staring at the road, while Dalen has been drilling the with centuries from his town."
Harold looked at him.
"He says he's thinking," Parker said. "Hale says that's fine. I say it looks like a man who got his first real taste of what this fight is and didn’t like it."
"He probably is thinking."
"Sure. I'm just saying he's doing it very comfortably on that hammock he's got constructed over there."
The thunk of a ballista came again, and then, from the direction of the shelf, something answered — a sound like a struck bell stretched long resonating down off the stone face of the shelf wall, and a dark streak came off the upper fortification fast and low. It hit thirty yards short of the nearest ballista position, detonated against the dug-in earthwork shield, and threw a burst of something dark and wet in a six-foot spread across the berm.
The crew ducked. Came back up and started cheering. One of them swiped something off his cheek and went back to the reload.
Harold stopped walking.
"Blood bolt," Jack said. "They've got a big dam ritual circle up there — we spotted the glow last night. The range is inconsistent, like they're feeding it on a timer. Fire, reload, fire. Mostly they're overshooting the ballista positions, but they've caught two crews in the last day."
"Casualties?"
"Not many from that circle, though that will change when we have to assault it. We got our teeth kicked in assaulting their circles on the way here. They were defended by some kind of defender shield type that most of our men couldn't handle. And they were backed up by some nasty blood magic from the lizards. We had no way to combat it." Jack watched the crew finish their reload. "The crews have started timing it. Forty seconds between bolts, give or take. They fire, and everybody gets behind the berm. If the shot misses — which it usually does — they're back up. But that Maren. Shes got a good head for tactics. Hale has started pulling her into planning sessions, and I bet he offers her a commission."
Harold studied the angle of the last bolt's trajectory, working backward to the source. The ritual circle had to be at or near the upper fortification — which meant it was what was protecting the hardest point on the approach road. Suppressing the ballista to keep them from hitting the fortification while the fortification held the road.
"Where'd they learn to do that?" Harold said, not really asking.
"Same place, anything learns anything in Gravesend," Parker said. "The hard way." He drained his mug. "Circle looks like it's tied to a caster — we think a juiced-up ritualist of some kind, up inside the fortification." He glanced at Harold. "Finn is dying to get his hands on him."
"Of course he is."
They rounded the edge of the command tent, and Harold saw the lords. Fitch was sitting on a supply crate, going over a map with Renna, both of them pointing at something on the shelf approach. Caswell was walking back from the ballista line with a dark smear across one shoulder, and he hadn't cleaned it off. Brennig was, in fact, lying in a hammock.
They all saw Harold at approximately the same moment.
There was a brief beat where they hesitated before straightening up. Harold let it happen and kept walking.
"Good to see you all, grab Dalen for me please," he said, and kept walking toward the tent.
Hale was inside with a field table covered in a survey sketch of the shelf and approach road. He looked up when Harold came in and grunted.
"Bout time you woke up." He handed him a second mug from the table.
"Colonel." Harold took it and looked at the map. "Men looked rough on the walk over. We take casualties?"
He snorted. “Yeah, those fucking ritualists can kill almost a whole squad of men at a time. We lost almost 50 men destroying the three circles.”
Hale pointed at the sketch, “and then we get here and find this. Single approach road, switchbacks twice before the shelf. First fortification here —" his finger moved, "— about sixty meters up. Gatehouse, thick stone. Second one at a hundred and forty. The ritual circle lives at the upper wall."
"Can we reduce them in order? Take the first gate, use it to push on the second?"
"We can. First gate's manageable — ballista can get direct line-of-sight if we push forward another eighty meters. The problem is the second gate sits inside the circle's range, and the circle's been ranging on movement up the road." Hale tapped the sketch. "Anything that holds still for more than twenty seconds draws a bolt. They've also got archers on the shelf wall with short bows — can fire down onto both fortifications."
"So a direct assault is out."
"A couple of knights have ran up twice without drawing fire. A formation can't move fast enough." He straightened. "The gap between shots has been widening. Circle's draining something to fire — probably their own troops. But it'd still have no trouble picking us apart on the road."
Harold studied the sketch and drank the coffee at the same time. "Time between shots depends on the blood stored. They drain their own men, fire, reload the ritual, repeat."
"That was my read."
"So to hit the circle, we need the upper fortification, to take the upper fortification, we need the road, and to use the road, we need the first fortification take and circle suppressed."
Hale looked at him. "Rough but correct."
Harold set the mug down. He went over the sketch once more, then turned and looked through the tent flap at the camp outside. Parker was leaning on the tent pole. Jack had taken up a position six feet out, facing away. The lords were clustered near the crates, not quite close enough to overhear.
"Bring them in," Harold said.
Hale put his head out and said something short. Boots on dirt, and then the lords were filing in — Caswell, Renna, Maren, Fitch, Brennig, Dalen just behind them. Henri came last and stopped just inside the entrance, close enough to be present, far enough back that he wasn't inserting himself.
Harold looked at the group. They looked back. Caswell still had the dark smear on his shoulder. Brennig was moving carefully, one hand hovering near his ribs without quite touching them.
He turned back to the sketch. "The system creates an impossible problem for us. It also creates an impossible solution — probably more than one." He looked around at them. "Your job is to find it."
"Lady Renna — I know you were out scouting. I need those maps, and I need you back out, another couple of kilometers in every direction. There's something here we can use. Find it."
She opened her mouth.
"Lord Fitch." Harold kept moving. "You ran the shelf base yesterday. Do it again — this time look for cracks running the length of the face, anything that goes deep, any caves that might punch into the shelf itself, and any point that looks scalable. Don't guess. If it looks wrong, mark it anyway."
"You got it, sir."
Renna gave Fitch a look that could have curdled milk. He didn't notice.
"Lady Maren — keep working those defenses and push the ballista forward into better-protected positions. I want them fixated on the front. Don't give them a reason to look sideways."
Maren was already writing. She nodded once without looking up.
"Lord Brennig." Harold glanced at him. "We haven't had word from the Gemheart Delving century, which means it's been too long. Take Lord Caswell and a couple of squads and go find out what's keeping them. I need that second knight century back here."
Caswell clapped Brennig on the shoulder hard enough to shift him sideways. "Road trip."
Brennig exhaled through his nose. "Fantastic."
"Any questions?" Harold said.
Lord Dalen raised his chin. "You didn't give me a task, my lord. Permission to go with Caswell and Brennig?"
"No." Harold picked his mug back up. "There are more ritual circles out there — that's what's driving the waves. Since we haven't had word from the city, I have to assume they're still active. I need you to take the century and start hunting them down. There's a pattern to the placement. Figure it out, and it'll lead you to the next one and the next. You keep destroying them; the waves slow. Enough of them go down, the waves stop."
Dalen straightened a little.
"Lord Henri will go with you." Harold looked at Henri briefly. "I need this done. It's the only way we end this farce of a trial." He said angrily.
"It'll get done," Dalen said.
Harold drained the last of the mug and set it on the table. "Gravesend doesn't play fair. It also doesn't play fair in both directions, so keep your eyes open for anything that looks like an opportunity — especially if it looks too good. That's usually the system making an offer." He looked at each of them in turn. "Let's get moving."