“On target,” one of the crews announced. They paused their efforts, while the other crew continued to work. They fired off a couple more shells, before announcing that they too were on target.
“Load penetrator rounds,” Demetrios ordered. “Fire for effect.”
He’d had fun picking my brains about the proper way to operate all my weapons, and my rambling lecture on what I knew of American military procedures seemed to have given him a lot of ideas.
The crews immediately began dropping a flurry of rounds into their tubes. They quickly ate through the stacked ammunition, but laborers were already rolling in handcarts loaded with more rounds. They got in each other’s way a bit, but the evolution seemed to be going as smoothly as one could hope without extensive drills. I turned to observe the enemy camp.
A brilliant flash erupted in the sky, followed a moment later by a thunderous crash. The wards over the camp flared into visibility, a translucent dome of crimson light. When the flash faded I saw a visible dent, where a glowing mass of molten iron was running down the side of the barrier.
Then there was a second explosion, and a third. Another shell landed every couple of seconds, and after half a dozen hits the crimson dome abruptly collapsed. The wards against spells and scrying and other non-physical threats were unaffected, of course, and the shells continued to detonate outside the ward instead of sailing through it and possibly getting their enchantments broken.
But with the physical barrier gone, each blast now sent five hundred pounds of high-velocity liquid iron raining down on the encampment. Tents and awnings were blown down by the blast, and flames leaped up from where they had stood. Dinosaurs roared in pain, and tried to stampede in all directions. Soldiers milled around in panicked confusion, and while I couldn’t quite make out individual people at this distance it sure looked like some of them were on fire.
The dome reformed, and promptly collapsed again as the second mortar battery got its fire on target. Flames spread across the camp, and the few wooden structures the andregi had erected went down one by one. Then the remaining wards died.
With that barrier out of the way the falling rounds went off when their proximity fuse detected the ground. The result was a series of airbursts around forty yards up, with a weapon that had an effective blast radius of about two hundred yards. Dirt, snow and bodies flew through the air with every explosion, and all other movement quickly ceased. But I’d wanted to make sure we got the job done, so the mortars continued to pound the spot where the encampment had stood for another minute.
“Check fire,” Demetrios finally ordered.
The mortar crews stopped their frantic loading. A few moments later the volume of fire hitting the camp abruptly dropped, but it took another thirty seconds or so for the crews in the other position to notice and check their own fire.
Where the enemy camp had once stood, there was now a wide swath of blackened dirt dotted with fires. I knew there were bound to be survivors, but I couldn’t see any sign of them from here.
Good.
“Target destroyed,” I said. “Keep up the good work.”
“Will do, milord,” Demetrios replied. “Battery A, new target, next encampment to the right of previous target. Load normal rounds. Commence ranging fire.”
I kept expecting the enemy to pull out some countermeasure, but they never did. In a matter of minutes we destroyed a second encampment, and then the third and fourth.
By then ape men were boiling out of the last encampment. Squadrons of dinosaur riders went lumbering back towards the road to the east, while a few companies of infantry formed up around the perimeter. But organizing large bodies of troops takes time, and the andregi weren’t an especially disciplined army. Most of them were still milling around inside the camp when our ranging shots closed in on it.
When the first air burst went off atop the warding dome half the mustered infantry broke and ran. The rest took heavy casualties from the liquid shrapnel that sprayed off the dome, and their formations quickly dissolved into chaos. Two minutes after that there was nothing left of them.
“That will do,” I told Demetrios.
“Cease fire!” He ordered. The mortar crew stopped loading shells, and we waited for the bombs to stop falling. The other battery was a little quicker on the uptake this time, but it still took a good while.
“We need to work on our coordination,” I observed.
“Yes. I’ll have to set up training, once we have enough ammunition that we can afford to expend some. Assuming I can find a way to do it without sending half the city into a panic.”
“If nothing else, I’m sure the enemy will volunteer to give us plenty of targets,” I said.
Down in the city horns blew. One of the surviving gates in the Military District opened, and cavalry began to ride out. At the same time a flight of griffons rose from the middle of the district, and soared towards the fleeing survivors.
“Think it’s okay for me to go out and do some hunting?” Cerise asked.
“Better not,” Demetrios advised. “The way you look when you fly, someone is bound to mistake you for an enemy.”
She gave a put-upon sigh. “Seriously?”
“He’s right,” I said. “Besides, didn’t you want to visit the Fangs this morning? Something about checking out how the extra mana is affecting them?”
“Oh, yeah. Dryads are supposed to be pretty malleable, so I tried to bleed lots of shadow and succubus magic into their power source. I bet they turn into a real hot bunch of murder sluts. Want to come see?”
“Nut. Are you ever going to stop trying to seduce every girl you see?”
“Fuck, no. What’s the point of being a badass bitch if I don’t get to bang all the hot chicks? But seriously, it’s not like I haven’t already had all of the Fangs. Dryads aren’t exactly hard to crack, and Corinna’s girls are big believers in the whole ‘fight hard, play hard’ thing. I just want them to be strong enough to survive the life they’ve chosen.”
I gave her a skeptical look.
She huffed. “Okay, so maybe I’m trying to get them all bigger boobs too. Honeydew kinda spoils me in that department, you know? Anyway, we’re all having fun so don’t worry about it. I guess you’re going to be locked in the lab all day again?”
“Yeah, once I’m sure nothing is going to go wrong out here. I can’t afford to slack off until I figure out a way to get rid of these guys for good.”
“If I could offer a suggestion?” Demetrios said. “Unless you’re confident of pulling off some kind of miracle in the next two days, you might want to go ahead and rework the keep before the andregi come back. That’s the biggest weakness in our defenses right now, and if you rebuild it as a gatehouse on the same scale as the rest of the Black Citadel I’ll be a lot more confident of holding out if the worst happens.”
Damn it, I didn’t need any more items on my list. But he was probably right. I sighed.
“I suppose you’re right. It isn’t part of the same enchantment as the rest of the island, though. I’ll have to pull down the keep and grow the island out to cover that space, and then we’ll have a giant hole in our defenses for most of the day while I rebuild.”
“I’ll have Captain Rain set up his force to guard the entrance to the causeway, and station a Nethwillin war band with you to guard the breach while you work,” he suggested.
I took another look out over the city. The surviving andregi were still in full retreat, and the Griffon Knights were harrying those dinosaur cavalry with firebombs. Not much chance of an enemy attack today, and Prince Caspar would be marching through the Dark Portal any minute now. This was the best opportunity I was likely to get.
“Alright,” I decided. “Get that organized, and check with Tavrin to make sure there’s nothing left in the keep that we’ll need to move. If we start in the next couple of hours I can have this done by sundown. Cerise, warn the coven we’re going to need to re-check the wards and make sure everything is still solid tonigh
t.”
She grinned. “Sweet. It’s about time we got this shit locked down.”
Luckily Avilla had pulled everyone out of the keep a week ago, so it wasn’t hard to verify that it was clear. Turning off the building’s power source took only a minute. Draining the power reserve was more work, but it had to be done before I could accomplish anything else. The enchantments on the old keep didn’t include any way to modify the structure, so I’d have to tear it down with brute force.
The fact that it was even possible for me to do that was a good indication of why it was necessary, of course. I’d built the keep before I figured out how to properly ward an enchantment against tampering, and the simple curse barrier it relied on couldn’t stop me from crippling it. With the power cut off and the energy reserve drained there was nothing to stop me from blasting away the curse ward with dispels, and then I could banish the underlying stone.
I started at the top and worked my way down, trying to make sure I didn’t destabilize the structure or drop chunks of stone on anyone. It was kind of sad to take down my own work like this. Sadder that it went so fast. In a couple of hours most of the keep was down, and that was with several pauses to have laborers haul off various forgotten items of furniture that had been left behind.
It was in one of those breaks that I received an unexpected visitor. I’d just sent a crew off with a stack of cloth that had turned up in an otherwise empty storeroom, when a towering figure stepped out of the stairwell.
“Making holes in your own walls, Daniel? Most men would leave that for the enemy,” Brand said.
He was here alone. That seemed a little odd.
“This is probably the best chance I’m going to get to put in a gatehouse that’s actually built to the same scale as the rest of the defenses,” I pointed out.
He looked up at the walls towering high above us. I saw the moment when he realized how thick they were.
“You know, Daniel, your walls may not be as high as the ones around the Golden City but I think they may actually be thicker. What kind of weapons are you expecting to get attacked by?”
“Earthquakes. Tidal Waves. Great Beasts. This is Ragnarok. Anything could happen.”
He gazed up at the walls in silence for a long moment.
“So you truly intend for your fortress to stand through the Twilight of the Gods?” He asked. “You will hide behind your walls, rather than fight on the Golden Field?”
I shrugged. “It’s not my war, Brand. I’m just here to save as many people as I can. Besides, I’ve got a family to take care of. Is that what you came out here for? To ask if I’d take the field?”
“No, I didn’t expect that you would. I just wanted a private word. I’ve been hearing stories about your supposed harem of nymphs and dryads, and of course the way Pelagia is recruiting fighting men hasn’t escaped my notice. The nobles are scandalized, but I see a different pattern. You’ve found some way to grow food in there, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I said carefully. “The dryads are for fertility blessings. I can’t feed the whole city, though.”
“Of course not. We both know Kozalin is doomed, Daniel. The only question is how much we can make the enemy bleed before they take it. I’ve irons in the fire that may drag things out longer than you’d expect, but whether we slaughter five more armies or fifty won’t change the outcome in the end. The Iron Citadel will hold out a little longer than the rest of the city, but the Conclave doesn’t have the manpower or the depth of magic to defend its walls against a serious assault. You, on the other hand…”
He walked over to the exposed face of the wall, and laid his hand on it. His eyes closed in concentration for a moment. Then he nodded approvingly, and turned to face me.
“That enchantment would resist even the greatest of blows. No beast is going to break those walls, and every time I look you’ve raised another ward. You’ve clearly been planning this move for a long time, Daniel. I think your citadel will actually stand, as long as the enemy makes no great effort to strike at you.”
“That’s my intention,” I replied. “Where are you going with this?”
“I’m just letting you know I’m not going to stop you, Daniel. Recruit a few hundred men, if you need them. We can spare that many from Valhalla, and the ones who would join you won’t be the best warriors anyway. Take what farmers and craftsmen you need, and complete your citadel. The prince is already loath to ask you for more miracles, so I expect you’ll have a week or more to work undisturbed.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”
He smiled. “Yes, but it isn’t an onerous one. Take in more women. At least two for every man. Three or four if you can feed them. By the time we kill the mad god and his allies there will be few men left in Europe. Repopulating will be an enormous project, and saving a few thousand extra women could make a difference.”
“Do you really think there will be enough Aesir left to end the ice age?” I asked.
“Who can say? Perhaps we are all doomed, and the monsters will be cracking our bones one day soon. Perhaps the prophecy will not be denied, and all the gods and monsters will fall. Or perhaps our victory will be a pyrrhic one, leaving a scant few survivors to eke out a pathetic existence among the ruins of a lost world.
“But I chose to have faith in the Allfather’s wisdom, and in the strong sword arms of my brothers. I believe we will overcome this trial, put down the monsters that howl for our blood, and go on to build a new age of glory for Asgard.
“And if I am wrong? Well, what does it matter? There will be no one left to tell me so.”
Chapter 22
Gates are traditionally a weak spot in the defenses of a castle. Good designs compensate for that with various defensive measures, and if you have enough of them the gates can actually become harder to attack than the walls. I had no intention of leaving weak spots in the defenses that were going to protect my family, so of course I set out to achieve that.
The gatehouse that replaced the old keep was a blocky structure a hundred and forty feet on a side, and the whole thing was a solid mass of iron beams and stone up to the level above the gates. The entryway was a tunnel through that mass, twenty feet wide and twenty feet tall. I figured that was big enough for anything we were ever likely to move, and small enough that the really huge monsters wouldn’t fit through it.
When we were under serious attack the mouth of the tunnel would be filled by a block of conjured stone twenty feet thick. The enchantment that conjured and banished the plug was on an iron spike driven into the roof of the tunnel, where it was unlikely to be noticed by anyone passing by. The plug would just be normal stone, of course, so it wouldn’t be terribly resistant to magic. But it only took a few minutes to banish and re-conjure it, so trying to break through with siege engines would be an exercise in futility.
Behind that was a portcullis made of heavy nickel-iron bars, with a good structural reinforcement spell and an enchantment that would form a force field to protect it when it was down. The whole thing weighed several tons, enough that I had to add an enchantment to raise it out of the way instead of relying on the usual winch arrangement. But the purpose of a portcullis is to give you a solid barrier you can close quickly to block a surprise attack, and I figured it would serve that purpose admirably.
Behind the portcullis was the actual gate. That was even more of an engineering challenge, since there are serious mechanical problems with trying to make a door more than a few inches thick. I wanted something that could stand up to serious attack spells, and the more massive it was the easier that would be. So I ended up going with a sliding door design, instead of traditional hinges.
Of course, in this case each of the two panels was a wall of solid nickel-iron three feet thick. I made them five feet taller than the passage they blocked, set into deep grooves in the floor and ceiling. An extra ten feet of width ensured that the passage would be solidly blocked when they closed, and the edges where they met were designed to mesh t
ogether. Three giant steel latches mounted on the inner face of the left door would drop into sockets on the right door when the gates were locked, just to ensure no one could pry them apart.
With structural reinforcement spells, a force field protecting the outer surface and various wards to protect against the obvious forms of magical attack the gates were just about indestructible. Unfortunately they were also immensely heavy, to the point where moving them without magic would probably have been impossible. I had to add in a powerful force enchantment to levitate them a hair’s breadth above the surface of the stone they rested on, and move them back and forth. Even then they moved pretty slowly, and it took several minutes to open or close them.
On the good side, any attacker who got caught between the leaves of the gate when it closed was going to be crushed by four hundred tons of moving metal.
The whole set of defensive layers only took up forty feet of tunnel, which left plenty of room for the other traditional functions of a gatehouse. Twenty feet back from the gates I put in a large mustering hall, forty feet wide and sixty feet deep, which I figured was big enough to hold any sortie force we might want to send out during a siege. Then came another thirty-foot tunnel, with another portcullis and conjured stone block setup.
There was a little control room off of the mustering chamber, with a set of controls to operate the gates and a panic button that would drop the outer portcullis. With a heavy iron door and thick fused quartz windows looking out on the mustering area it was reasonably secure, but it would be pretty silly to make things so an attacker who managed to storm the gate could keep us from closing it. So the master controls were on the next floor up.
Traditionally the second floor of a gatehouse would have lots of murder holes positioned to let defenders drop nasty stuff on enemies attacking the gate. I put in a fair number of those looking down on the mustering chamber, but I didn’t want any openings connecting to the outer defensive layers. Too much chance of an enemy sending spells or insect swarms through them. Instead I put in a few viewports made of fused quartz, a few inches across and a couple of feet thick. Then I installed some more iron spikes in the ceiling of the entrance tunnel, bearing enchantments that would conjure lava on command.
Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) Page 34