Midwich Valley

  Fourth Day of Siege

  Sara stood between sitting soldiers, peeking out from behind the crenetions with her spygss in hand. The soldiers she'd ended up standing near were pying a game that involved rolling stones into a drawn circle, sitting cross-legged while they waited their way through the morning shift. After four days of staring down the teeming mass of the Royal Army, spying on the horde had lost its luster. Most of the soldiers seemed impatient, befuddled that the Sporatons hadn't unched their assault on the very first day.

  Before the day was out, Sara doubted any of them would be compining about boredom.

  Under the scrutinizing eye of her enchanted spygss, Sara could see the Royal Army camp stirring to life, peasant levies being driven forward at the barked orders of horseback nobility. The process had begun at first light, and wasn't anywhere near done, but Sara felt certain the attack would be today.

  The towers rising from the Sporaton camp told her as much. The past four days had seen the wooden spires steadily growing, brought together under the careful guidance of robed men and women. King Sporatos was not content to rely upon mere dders for taking the walls, it seemed. Instead he had worked his peasants to the bone creating the wheeled siege engines, hollow towers exactly the height of the defenses they were meant to surmount.

  There were six, and she had seen mages working on them in intermittent bursts, yering their wooden skin with what she could only assume to be defensive enchantments. The sight of the mages working their magic had always given her a chill.

  She wasn't sure if her ballistae would be able to pierce them, even now that she'd supplemented them with finely tuned gears and bowstrings of braided steel. The new designs held far more potential energy than their more primitive predecessors; the old ballistae had a range of five hundred yards, while Colonel Shale's new toys could reach over eight hundred. They would be the first of her nasty surprises for the Sporaton army.

  Assuming they do jack against that magic bullshit, Sara thought with a stern frown, lowering her spygss. She handed it off to Evie, who accepted it with an expectantly raised eyebrow. Sara sighed, then turned to one of several runners that always followed her.

  "They're getting ready to march. Sound the arm."

  "Yes ma'am!" The runner barked, snapping a salute before sprinting off.

  Even before the bell began to ring, the wall stirred to life. The soldiers nearest Sara had obviously heard her and scrambled to their feet, grabbing their weapons, and that wasn't missed by their fellows. Even without knowing why, the wave of readiness swept down the wall, each soldier grabbing their gear simply because they'd seen someone else do so.

  As Sara followed Evie down off the wall, the bell began to ring, and that really kicked things into gear. Sergeants began to bellow abuse at their squads, followed quickly behind by Captains giving sharper, steadier commands, and then all hell had broken loose. The drills Sara had enforced kept things from devolving into total chaos, but when people realized this wasn't just for practice, there was bound to be some panic.

  Sara couldn't stay to manage it, unfortunately. She and Evie had other priorities.

  "They finished sooner than I expected, Master," Evie noted as they walked towards their personal tent.

  "They had people working around the clock on them. Gods know how hard the King was driving the carpenters."

  "Hopefully exceptionally hard, Master. Their haste will have created mistakes."

  "And awful working conditions."

  "They are not yours to care for. Take what fortune provides you."

  "Ugh."

  Sara reached her tent with Evie, the armorers having arrived shortly before. She ducked inside with a small cadre of helpers following her, and raised her arms.

  Evie stripped her with clinical professionalism, well practiced at taking off her General's uniform in a handful of seconds. Sara accepted her bck nylon underclothes in its pce and pulled them over her head, uncaring that her body had just been completely bared to the three near-strangers in the tent with them. They'd seen it before, and they'd see it again. It was their job.

  Sara ducked her head, accepting from the foremost man her gambeson, which he slipped over her shoulders. That done, she put her hands back out, so that Evie could begin slipping on her left gauntlet, another man slipping on her right. The vambraces went on next, csped into pce with a metal buckle, and then the man at her front finished adjusting the gambeson, zipping it up the front, rather than wasting the minutes it would have required to tie its many knots. A woman ducked down to hold out a set of chainmail pants, which Sara stepped into, feeling the woman tug them up to her waist, securing them with a belt. Her sabatons were dropped in front of her next, then her chausses, the armorers steadily working their way outward in.

  Her old armor, commissioned to be worn on the road, in battle, and public, had been both beautiful and practical. She'd had it made to harken to her mind something like a succubus valkyrie, the sweep of its bust and curve of its waist evoking beauty without sacrificing much protection. It had been comfortable, and she'd worn it often enough that it was well known to the people of Tulian.

  Among the st to be put on was her chestpte, which was utterly unlike that old, beautiful set. Two of the armorers had to take hold of it as they hefted it off its stand, and Sara went down on a knee so they could slip it over her head. She felt it scrape over her gambeson as it went down, a considerable weight nding on her shoulders with a muffled thud.

  When she stood, it was with over a hundred pounds of armor tugging her down. Most mundane sets weighed forty or fifty, and enchanted armor like her old set weighed even less. Sara didn't have the luxury of experienced artificers to create something simir, however, and she'd had to substitute elegance with brute simplicity. Her newfound strength allowed her that much, thankfully.

  A solid block of steel now wrapped her chest, brought to a sharp-edged crease before her sternum. Where her old armor had been a tenth of an inch thick, this was a half-inch, and unlike before, it wasn't pure steel that defended her. Layered atop the metal was a slick bck material, of the same make of her sword, and it was an impossibility that Hurlish believed made her armor unique in all the world.

  Conventional wisdom held that bcksteel could not be used for armor. Even a single weapon of bcksteel cost enough to bankrupt a lesser noble, and even among those wealthy enough to procure enough for armor, the desired effects could be achieved with inordinately less expensive artificery. Further, it was known that bcksteel was a ptonic material, incapable of mixing, binding, or alloying with any other kind of metal. Every attempt to adhere it to pure steel had failed, the joint turning brittle and snapping in a matter of minutes.

  Turns out, it wasn't impossible. You just needed to spot-weld with microsecond temperatures that rivaled the surface of the sun.

  Hurlish and Sara had worked on the armor she now wore for weeks, the full force of Sara's Lightning producing a single bead of metal between the bcksteel and chestpte. The strange orangish alloy that now ran in creased ridges between the seam of steel and bcksteel had no name, and not even Garen's investigative probing could determine the slightest aspect of its properties, but it was strong as all hell. Longbows, crossbows, Hurlish's massive hammer, and even a ballistae had failed to leave a scratch on the front of her new armor.

  After nearly ten minutes of dressing, Sara exited the tent, Evie striding ahead of her. The moment she was in the light, the fort reacted. The Champion of Amarat, after all, was renowned for many things, and if not first among them, beauty was certainly close to the forefront among the minds of her troops.

  Yet what emerged was anything but.

  Sara's armor was, in a word, militant. Jarring. Undecorated and simplistic, it was a uniform of war, built to kill without compromise. Only the chestpte was truly covered in bcksteel, but the rest was painted in midnight tones, rather than the pinks and purples of Amarat. The brow of her bck helmet dipped down in imitation of a furious scowl, the checkerboard slits that guarded her eyes completely obscuring her face from sight. The weight of woman and armor was enough to have her visibly sinking down into the soil, and those closest to her could feel the thump of her footsteps transferred through the earth. The affable, bright-eyed, beautiful Champion of Amarat had emerged dressed in solid bck.

  Sara ignored every reaction, thudding her way up to the wall, taking her spot at the very center of the line. She lifted her visor, held out a hand for her spygss. A mile away, the Royal Sporaton Army still stirred, lines forming beyond the defensive stakes in preparation for the advance.

  The wait began.

  It was four hours ter when the Sporaton Army began to march forward. Limited by the ponderous siege towers, which had long poles sprouting from either side to allow hundreds of sweating peasants to push the behemoths, it would be over an hour before they reached the walls.

  The wait continued.

  When the Sporaton army reached eight hundred yards, the furthest limit of the ballistae, Sara held up a speaking crystal, taking an anticipatory breath. A moment ter, a voice came through.

  "Permission to unch ballistae, General?"

  "Denied," she said, practically before Colonel Shale's request was finished. "The towers are enchanted, and I want to hide our range advantage for as long as we can."

  She waited a beat. A short time ter, Colonel Targ's voice sounded from the same crystal. "What about my archers, ma'am? Should the Irregurs loose as they are able, or hold off to conventional range?"

  "Loose when possible, but remind them that Irregurs should be choosing targets of priority, not random soldiers."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  She lowered the crystal. She was standing among the general soldiery now, and if there were any spies among them, they would have been very interested in what they'd just witnessed. A speaking crystal was a two-way device, linked inextricably linked to a single other crystal. Supposedly, there was no way to make a crystal capable of linking with multiple others. Sara hadn't truly found a way around that, but she had found a dangerous shortcut.

  Somewhere in the Tulian Artificer's Union, there was a room of nervous artificers standing before a wooden sphere, holding tweezers and plucking at complex runes. A dozen speaking crystals were set into the sphere, padded with acoustic material, so that when crystal one spoke, all heard it, and all transmitted it back. Enchanted copper cables were strung across the entire thing, attempting to dampen the feedback loop that could theoretically lead to a catastrophic overload, and still the artificers had to constantly tweak each device. If the crystals were even slightly asynchronous, an echo would begin, growing progressively louder, until eventually the energetically-infused crystals would shatter with the energy of hand grenades. Through the stalwart efforts of the Carrion artificers, Sara now had direct communication with the highest ranking commanders of her army at all times. They had to be incredibly careful about using the crystals, because too many people talking at once was liable to end up with the crystals blowing half her senior command's faces off, but being able to forgo slow-paced runners and signal fgs was worth the risk.

  Sara watched the siege towers approach. By her best guess, they were traveling a mile an hour. Another thirty minutes until they reached the walls.

  The wait continued.

  When the range closed to five hundred yards, the ballistae readied themselves. Empty defensive turrets suddenly sprouted massive wooden contraptions, drawn forward on their tracks by troops hauling pulleys down below. It took about twenty seconds for a ballistae to be brought into position, exposed to the enemy, and another twenty seconds or so for it to be ready to loose its bolt. As soon as the crews found their aim, they pulled the trigger, and a massive whoosh signaled the release of a four-foot projectile.

  Sara tracked the first ballistae bolt sailing through the air with bated breath. It flew true, smming directly into the middle of the centermost siege tower, and....

  Shattered. The shaft burst to wooden pieces, its iron tip spinning uselessly to the ground. The siege towers weren't made of the thickest wood, and the steel-strung ballistae should have pierced them with ease. The enchantments clearly prevented that.

  Sara watched as more ballistae bolts arced through the sky, almost all of them finding their mark. Each one shattered, no damage done, save for whatever shrapnel managed to shower the nearby spearblocks.

  Sara lifted her speaking crystal. "Colonel Shale, if your crews think they can manage it, try to aim for the siege tower's wheels. If not, focus all ballistae on a single tower, see if you can wear down the enchantments."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  Twenty minutes, Sara guessed. The wait continued.

  At three hundred yards, a different kind of projectile began to rain. Irregur longbows and crossbows opened up, lightning-fast bolts ncing towards horse-riding noble commanders. Several found their mark immediately, but the noble commanders were dressed in the finest of enchanted armor. The greatest effect that Sara saw was on one man that had been turned around to look behind him when a longbow arrow took him in the back of the neck. The force of it had physically thrown him from his saddle, startling his horse, but it hadn't found a gap in the armor. He had picked himself back up and quickly calmed his horse, returning to its saddle in moments.

  "Irregur archers are to switch to commoner commanders, rather than noble targets," Sara said into the speaking crystal. "Take out anyone in charge you can find that's not wearing armor. If you can't find one, start focusing on the troops pushing the siege engines. Also, continue to keep an eye out for hidden enemy mages. If one is found, focus all ranged weapons on the mage. Repeat, all ranged weapons."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  She pocketed the crystal once more. Not long now. Just a few more minutes of waiting. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it should've been making her armor jump off her chest. The sky above was clear, the Tulian sun beating down on her. The artificers had managed to provide her suit a weak cooling enchantment, which worked for now, but she doubted it would st once she really got into the fight.

  She rolled her shoulders, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She'd crossed a threshold, the adrenaline high too strong. She couldn't wait for the enemy to reach her.

  At a hundred yards, the grass between the opposing forces fell into shadow. The murderholes of Fort Midwich began to vomit a fusilde of arrows, pouring Tulian bodkins into the front ranks of the peasant levies. Even though they had to have known it was coming, the peasants were slow to shift their spears to a one-handed grip, pulling wooden shields from their back to cover themselves and their fellows. Sara realized why a moment ter as horse-riding nobles began running up and down the line, shouting and waving swords. The peasant spears began to pull back under the hail of arrows, repced by thousands of archers.

  It seemed the pn had been for the spears to stay out of range while the siege towers advanced, but the peasants, mindlessly driven forward by the orders of their sergeants, hadn't realized how close they were getting to the fort's walls. Sara didn't know how many dead and wounded they suffered in the confused few minutes before they managed to pull back, but it was considerable. Bodies littered the field.

  And then the archers had taken their pce, covering the bodies beneath their spread-out blocks, and unched a counter-barrage.

  "Take cover!" Sara roared, a pointless command. The entire Tulian army was already stepping behind the creneltions, those that couldn't take cover crouching down and covering the exposed gaps of their neck armor with their gauntleted hands. Arrows began to rain among them, but with how heavily armored her troops were, the results were desultory. They barely needed shields to defend themselves.

  Evie was sheltering behind a creneltion with several other soldiers, while Sara still stood in the open, happily letting the arrows bounce off her armor. Though she knew her girlfriend couldn't see it beneath her bck helmet, she fshed a cocky smirk.

  "Having fun yet?"

  "Not yet, Master," Evie replied, matching her grin. "That begins when the enemy arrives."

  "Attagirl."

  The lone soldier on the wall still standing tall, Sara watched the enemy approach. The wait was almost over.

  Almost.