Arcanum

by Simon Morden

  Behind him, Morgenstern opened his books up and made a few practice calculations on his brass wheel calculator. “I’m ready, too, if you’re at all interested.”

  “I had no doubt, Aaron. If you could lay in an angle for the pots, I’d be grateful. Do you think Gunnhilde and her sisters are almost too close?”

  “We’re three stadia from the road. Eighteen hundred feet.”

  “The trajectory is almost flat,” said Thaler.

  “Why don’t we find something more difficult for us to shoot at later? For now, the dwarves are going to parade a series of targets before us that we can barely miss. I know I complain a lot, Frederik, but honestly. This is war.” He huffed at the surface of his calculator and rubbed at it with his sleeve.

  All Thaler could see of it were the little cogs and gears on the back surface. “You’re right, of course.”

  “Yes,” said Morgenstern, peering over the top. “There are an awful lot of them, though.”

  The line of wagons was being added to. Each time one came wholly into view, another started to grow after it. They were twenty, thirty wagons so far, and there seemed to be no end in sight.

  “We could hit them from here.” Thaler picked up the cross-staff from the table and sighted down it, adjusting the crosspiece until he’d found the angle. “Eight stadia. Well within range.”

  “And you’re just as likely to kill Büber and his men hiding in the wood. Sophia gave us our orders and, for once, I’m going to do what the girl tells me.”

  Thaler looked up at the tower, where Agathos was almost hanging off the platform, agog at the sight of so many enemies. “Careful, boy. Especially careful with the distance-pipe.”

  The boy glanced down and grinned.

  “He thinks it’s all a game,” said Thaler sadly. “For him, it probably is. He’s used to being part of the spoils rather than one of the victims. I’ve tried, the gods know I’ve tried, to explain he’s not a slave any more. He seems to think apprentice is just another word for it. We are ready, aren’t we?”

  “We’re ready. This is what you wanted, yes? To make a difference? Then stop kvetching and light some fuses, or something.” Morgenstern put down the brass disc and flexed his fingers. “They’re almost where they need to be.”

  They were. The road cut off the bend in the river and ran right next to the water opposite their position, raised on an embankment to lift it clear of the marshy ground, which meant that they could see everything: sides, wheels, even the shadows of feet underneath.

  “Thank you for talking to Sophia for me. I … well, none of us behaved perfectly last night.” He fetched out the library seal and placed it on the table in front of Morgenstern. “I’ll just put this here for safe keeping.”

  Morgenstern waved him away. “Light the fuses, Frederik. The horns will sound soon enough.”

  With one last anxious eye on Agathos, Thaler collected the lengths of slow fuse from the back of one of the now-oxless carts and opened the door on the single, lit lantern. He held the cut end of a fuse against the flame, and it began to smoke. He did the same with the other fuses, and then walked to each widely spaced position in turn and handed one over to the crew’s leader.

  Last of all, he passed one to Tuomanen.

  “Mistress,” he said, presenting it to her.

  “Master Thaler.” She took it from him and turned to watch proceedings on the far bank. “This will work, won’t it?”

  “The dwarves are irresistible as one horde. Divide them in two, and they are less than half as effective. The more we split them into parts, the weaker they become and the stronger, relatively speaking, we grow. The logic is quite sound, not just in theory but in practice. Did you hear that Simbach sent us two centuries of spears this morning?”

  “But nothing else from Bavaria?” She looped the slow fuse around her neck and shoulders, the lit end leaving a white trail in the cool morning air.

  “We have two centuries we didn’t have last night. Then we have the Frankish horse, and there’s still time for more. München’s not that far away.” He patted himself down. “Now where did I put my walking-stick?”

  “You left it in Mr Morgenstern’s cart when we were setting up the calculating table.” She blew on the fuse, not in case it might go out, but because she loved to see it spark. “You don’t really need it, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be without it when I do need it.” He checked across the river. “I wonder what they’re thinking?”

  “Most likely? That we can’t hit them from over here.” Tuomanen moved slightly to her right. “The first wagon is passing in front of the Gunnhilde.”

  “A few of them have to go past before we fire.” He patted his pockets again. “The speaking-trumpet?”

  “In the wagon with the quick fuses,” she said, and Thaler hurried off to find it. He moved a crate or two, and there it was, a great brass funnel with a little mouthpiece at its apex.

  He heaved it up by its handle and pressed it against his face.

  “Testing, testing.” He swung it around. “Can you hear me, Aaron?”

  Morgenstern clapped his hands over his ears and feigned violent death.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Right, everyone.” He swung it back to point towards the five pots and the four Gunnhildes. “Gunnhilde One?”

  Tuomanen waved back.

  “On my mark.”

  Gods, the speaking-trumpet was heavy. He ought to have a little pole, or better still, a tripod to balance it on. Thaler let it fall by his side while he waited. It had to be soon. More than a few dwarvish wagons had already passed, and they were still emerging from the forest to the south. He quickly counted them: fifty, sixty, seventy at least. How many did they have?

  The horns set up on the Roman tower called, a single vibrating rasp echoing across the plain. The lead wagon was no more than a stadia from it, and too close to Carinthian troops to target. They had their arc of fire. They were going to stick to it.

  “One,” he called, then again, through the speaking-trumpet. “Sorry. One.”

  The crew around the first Gunnhilde swung into action, using crowbars to adjust the weapon’s horizontal angle, and wooden wedges to change its vertical. They stepped back when the aimer was satisfied, and Tuomanen ran forward to poke the slow fuse into the touch-hole.

  The powder smoked, and everyone held their breath.

  There was a great crack of thunder and a billow of dirty white smoke. Almost instantaneously, the rear of one of the dwarvish wagons lifted up and slewed sideways. A cloud of splinters burst into the air behind it, and, on Thaler’s side, one plank, then another, dropped away. As the wagon fell back to the road, its rear axle snapped, and the wheels pointed upward.

  “Gods. It works.” Thaler raised the trumpet. “Two, fire when ready.”

  Tuomanen’s team were already busy dousing the barrel with water, scraping the soot from the inside, preparing a new charge and shot, when the second Gunnhilde spasmed. The shot punched through the side of a wagon three down from the first that they’d hit. It stopped instantly.

  “Three! Fire!”

  The third Gunnhilde was aimed too low, or the charge too light, or it had burnt too slow. The ball hit the marshland before the road, sending two sheets of mud and water flying into the sky. But before Thaler could even raise his foot to stamp in frustration, the ball bounced. It caught another wagon just under the roof, and the roof panel spun away in two pieces. The wagon itself was rocked on its wheels, lifting up, then crashing back down.

  This was better than he’d hoped.

  “Four.”

  The old iron Gunnhilde boomed. It had a lower muzzle velocity than the newer brass ones, but it was still at point-blank range. The wagon it was aimed at shattered – disintegrating into chunks and sheets and boards and fixings – with the pieces pinwheeling away.

  Each firing position had a flag they’d raise while they were preparing for the next shot. He had four red pennants, but the pots were
still ready. He turned the speaking trumpet towards them, a line of five emplacements fifty feet behind the Gunnhildes.

  “A ranging shot from each of you, please.”

  They fired in quick succession, a series of short, sharp concussions that made Thaler’s clothes stiffen. Five black specks rose out of the smoke, trailing vapour behind them, marking the arc of their flight. Each soared up into the blue sky, and froze for a moment at their highest point.

  Then they fell.

  One exploded in the air in a flash of flame that transformed itself instantly into a blossom of sharp smoke. The others buried themselves in the soft ground on the far side of the via, and great gouts of steam and soil vomited upwards.

  The pots were more affected by windage than the Gunnhildes, and had clearly overshot for one reason or another. When Thaler looked around, Morgenstern was already spinning his calculator and reading off values in his books. A runner from each pot crew was hurrying towards him, and they’d receive a thin slip of paper with the new angle scribbled on it.

  Everything was decidedly hazy. Smoke hung low over the river and drifted out over the far bank. The broken wagons had halted the rest of the column behind them. The dwarves had to emerge to try and clear them out of the way. They did so, slowly, fearfully, staggering and reeling with shock. Some were dragging the dead and injured out, and some were injured themselves.

  Thaler pursed his lips. This was like being a hexmaster, being able to reach out and kill your enemy at a distance, without them being able to strike back. Killing with impunity. Never mind the maimed and crushed and the torn-asunder: the Order had never minded. They’d turned whole battlefields to molten glass that had swallowed up entire armies, leaving no trace of them but whitened stains on an obsidian floor.

  Except he hadn’t trained as a hexmaster. He didn’t have that level of disdain for others or hatred of his fellows. If anything, he felt sorry for the dwarves, so very far from home, lost under the shield of the sky, desperate to find their place in this new world. Desperation led men to desperate measures, and he had no reason to assume that dwarves were exempt.

  The flags were going down, one by one. The Gunnhildes were primed and ready to fire again.

  Gods, why didn’t they surrender? They had to know they were beaten, despite their vastly superior numbers. Fighting Carinthia was like fighting … Carinthia. It had always been that way. When they’d had the Order, they’d won every battle. Now they had the library, they’d win this one too.

  The dwarves were frantically wrestling with the first disabled wagon, the others ahead of it still rumbling uncertainly on towards the tower. They didn’t look like an army on the brink of surrender. They still looked like they wanted to roll all the way to Juvavum, and drive everyone out before them.

  He lifted the speaking-trumpet. “Number one. Fire when ready.”

  And his sound and his fury were very great indeed.

  98

  Sophia watched from the tower, open-mouthed. The wagons they’d struggled to overcome were being smashed to kindling by Thaler’s toys. There was smoke like clouds drifting across the battlefield, and a strange scent of cleaved slate hung in the air, giving the scene a dream-like quality, indistinct and distant.

  “My lady,” said Aelinn, “how is that even possible?”

  “It’s not magic.” Sophia let her distance-pipe hang by her fingers. She needed to see the whole picture, not just parts of it. “It’s not.”

  The devices Thaler called Gunnhildes barked again, and the dwarves lost another three wagons: one left a splintered ruin, one fallen apart, and one seemingly undamaged but for two holes punched through the fore and aft of it. She couldn’t see inside, but could only wonder at the devastation it contained.

  The dwarves were trying to clear the road: they’d managed to push one wheel-less wagon off the via and into the river, and another group was heaving debris – which included bodies – into the ditch, but Thaler was creating chaos faster than they could restore order.

  The pots – their sound different to that of the Gunnhildes – erupted in gouts of flame, and their projectiles streaked into the sky. They slowed, and started to fall. Loud reports, flowers of smoke, and the dwarves under the blooms shuddered and collapsed.

  Only half got up again.

  “Gods,” said Aelinn, clinging to what was left of the battlements, “it’s bloody murder.”

  “Yes.” Sophia pushed the two halves of the distance-pipe together and handed it to Aelinn. She looked down at the wagons almost at the walls of the tower. “Sound the horns,” she said to the man with the carnyx. “We’re attacking.”

  The via ran between the tower and the bridge, the tower sitting on a rise in the ground made taller by a man-made motte. She had five centuries of spears behind it.

  She limped and scuffed her way down the ladders they’d put up between the floors. Her ankle, bound tight with strips of cloth, protested all the way. Tomorrow, Kuppenheim could chop the damned thing off, as long as it held out long enough to keep her standing today.

  The horn blew again as she descended: the first blast had been for Thaler, the second was for her. She hurried, and emerged from the gap where there’d once been a door. She adjusted her skirts – she should have cut them short like Aelinn had, but shame had stopped her – and drew her sword.

  Her centuries were there, ready, waiting. She bowed deeply to them all, and turned. They all ran forward, with what armour they’d been able to muster rattling as they passed, and formed up along the edge of the motte and out across the via. They lowered their spears and braced them.

  Sophia walked out behind them to assess how they’d do this. The dwarves in the vanguard stopped their wagon. Twenty-five wagons in all had been separated from the head of the column. Büber’s men had reported twenty in each: five hundred dwarves, five hundred Carinthians.

  The lead wagon started again. Her troops lacked the ability to turn the wagons over – they should have had poles and the time to train with them, but they did have alternatives. Thaler had offered up two of his crew who’d try something different.

  The wagon started to bull through the spears, and there was nothing they could do save jab ineffectively through the narrow slits either side of the prow. It looked like it could simply break through the Carinthian line, and to stop it, they’d have to try and push it aside with their bare hands.

  Hidden from view behind the crowd of jostling spearmen, Thaler’s smock-clad laundrywoman held an old stoneware beer bottle. A quick fuse had been hammered into the neck. She crouched down and waited for the nose of the wagon to push aside the yelling men who stood hammering on the green wood sides with the butts of their spears.

  Here it came, and she touched the slow match to the fuse. Timing was everything.

  The powder caught with a hiss and a flare, and she rolled the bottle under the wagon with a banshee shriek that warned the spearmen to scatter.

  The bottle ticked and tacked under the dwarves’ feet.

  Then the wagon seemed to stretch upwards. Fire squirted from its skirts and out of the viewing ports, to be quickly replaced by grey smoke as thick as water. Even a dwarf’s scream was high-pitched and penetrating, and there were enough of them to carry on making that noise long after the crack of concussion had trailed away.

  The front opened, the back doors swung wide. White smoke billowed out. The few dwarves to stagger out were blind and deaf, and their legs were burnt and bleeding. It was, as Aelinn had rightly called it, bloody murder, but the spears still went about their task with grim efficiency before closing ranks across the via again.

  There seemed to be a paralysis of mind infecting the dwarvish column. As the spears advanced on the next wagon, Thaler’s other volunteer dug around in his satchel for a second bottle. Again, the spear butts pounded against the wagon, creating a disorientating cacophony inside, while the charge was lit and slipped under the wagon’s base.

  This time, it burst almost immediately, and ca
ught several Carinthians in the blast. They reeled away, and the bottle-thrower stumbled back, dazed and bleeding. A short fuse, or he’d held on to it for too long. The wagon doors broke open: the dwarves near the back were choking on the fumes, their mail smoking with still-burning fragments, but they did at least look like they could fight.

  The spear wall closed around them just the same. No matter that they hacked and hammered, severing leaf-shaped spear points from their shafts, they didn’t last more than a few moments.

  The pattern that had been set on the banks of the Weissach repeated itself: the wagons that hadn’t been directly attacked emptied backwards, and a hundred, two hundred, three hundred dwarves collected at the rear of the severed column, ready to strike forward. But, unlike at Büber’s battle, they had no forests to retreat to, no hills to climb up.

  “Form up,” shouted Sophia. “Ready to receive a charge.” Once the smoke had cleared, her wounded numbered only three, and the injured bottle-thrower, breeks black and shiny with blood, was intent on carrying on. This was the test, then: for every Carinthian or ally on the field – they had allies, HaShem be praised – there were ten dwarves. If Ironmaker managed to concentrate his forces, hers would be crushed like a nut.

  The balance was so fine. They could win every encounter except the last one, and still lose.

  Then the dwarves came, swarming forward to throw themselves on the spears, bared white teeth framed in black beards, hammers and axes raised above their iron-covered heads.

  Sophia cupped her hands around her mouth. “Aelinn, the third horn.”

  The lines met with a shout. The Carinthian spears shuddered with the impact. They held and started to push back, and Thaler’s laundry maid bent over her bag of bottles again.

  The carnyx sounded again, part of its call lost in among another volley from the east bank of the Enn.

  Her centre was starting to bend. The flanks, bounded by the marshy ground and the river on one side, and the tower motte on the other, were unengaged. It was like Kufstein, and she wouldn’t make the same mistake as Reinhardt had.