Chapter 143: Day One (2)

The oilcloth came off at last.

One section after another, the massive machines were revealed along the Wall.

There were sixty of them in total, spread across the two hundred kilometers of stone.

There were three types.

The Fifth Bastion had two of each.

The first two were familiar.

Most men on the Wall had seen a ballista before.

They had simply never seen one this large.

It stood nearly twelve feet tall, its great arms mounted on a heavy wooden frame that had been bolted directly into the bed the Works had built for it. Six men were needed to span it, working two large windlasses at the rear until the thick bowstring was dragged back into position.

Its bolt was almost as long as a man.

It weighed roughly as much as a full grain sack, and its head had been forged from Cavel iron. Three iron fins had been fixed behind the head to keep it stable in flight.

It was a weapon designed for one purpose.

Killing something enormous.

The sort of thing that could put a bolt through a massive Roamer from a distance where an ordinary spear would barely reach.

The second machine was a catapult.

It was simpler in principle, although there was nothing simple about its size.

A huge wooden arm rested against a thick bundle of twisted rope, with a broad throwing cup fixed to its end. Teams of men hauled the arm down using ropes and winches, locking it into place before loading the cup with a heavy stone or an iron-bound projectile.

Once released, the stored tension snapped the arm upward.

The projectile would leave the cup in a high arc and travel hundreds of paces before crashing down.

It was another weapon meant for large targets and dense formations.

Neither the ballista nor the catapult was being used yet.

The horde was still too far away.

The third machine, however, had already been loaded.

Most of the men on the Wall did not know what to call it.

Eventually, they had simply started calling it the Box.

The Works had built it from a drawing that had come out of the Watcher’s Office, and the crews had called it that for nine days because, from a distance, that was exactly what it looked like.

A large frame sat on a reinforced carriage.

Inside the frame were one hundred and twenty tubes arranged in rows.

Each tube pointed slightly upward and toward the north.

Each contained an arrow.

The Wall’s smiths had spent days making the tubes to exact measurements. Each arrow sat in its own groove, allowing it to move forward without striking the walls of the tube.

Behind the entire assembly was the part that had taken the Works the longest to understand.

The firing mechanism.

A massive set of drawn springs and tensioned limbs held the arrows in place. Cold iron had proved unusually useful for the work. It could hold tremendous tension without deforming easily, allowing the smiths to build springs strong enough to store the force required.

The mechanism was crude.

It was also enormous.

One release would free the entire array at once.

One hundred and twenty arrows.

All fired together.

The first smith who had helped build the tubes had asked Ansel Corr twice whether the Strategist was certain about the design.

Corr had given him the same answer both times.

"Yes."

The smith had looked at the drawing again.

Then he had looked at the machine.

Then he had apparently decided that Strategists were strange people.

Now the machine stood ready.

Encrid walked past it.

He stopped beside the Box and looked over the northern horizon.

The horde was closer.

Much closer.

The dust had grown into a vast brown wall, and beneath it thousands upon thousands of bodies were moving south.

The reevers were already near the foot of the wall.

Encrid looked at the machine.

He had spent weeks trying to solve the problem of how to create something like this without gunpowder.

In another world, the answer would have been simple.

Here, it had required smiths, engineers, endless failed attempts, carefully measured springs, specialized iron, and a considerable amount of explaining.

Cold iron had solved one of the largest problems.

The rest had been solved by the Works.

Encrid looked back toward the horde.

There was no reason to wait any longer.

He raised one hand.

The men around the Box became silent.

Encrid lowered his hand.

"Fire."

The soldier standing beside the release mechanism pulled the lever.

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the Wall erupted.

Twenty Boxes fired together by the cue of one another.

One hundred and twenty arrows from each machine.

Two thousand four hundred arrows left the Wall at once.

The sound was unlike anything most of the soldiers had ever heard.

It was not one explosion.

It was not one weapon.

It was thousands of mechanisms releasing their stored force together, followed by the violent crack of arrows leaving their tubes and the roar of the charges burning behind them.

Across two hundred kilometers of Wall, the volley rose into the sky.

Thousands of arrows climbed together.

For a moment, they seemed to hang there above the Wall, black against the pale northern sky.

Then they began to fall.

The men watching from the parapets did not speak.

Some had forgotten to breathe.

The arrows descended toward the approaching horde in a vast, widening sheet.

They disappeared into the dust.

A moment later, flashes of movement could be seen within it.

The entire Wall had witnessed the volley.

Men on the western towers stopped what they were doing to watch.

Archers leaned over the parapets.

Officers stood frozen beside their men.

Even the men operating the machines stared after the arrows they had just released.

Nobody had seen anything like it.

For a few seconds, there was complete silence.

Then someone near the Fifth Bastion said quietly,

"Gods."

Nobody corrected him.

Nobody laughed.

Nobody made another joke about the Watcher or the hours he had stolen from their sleep.

They simply looked north.

Then they looked at the Wall.

Then they looked at the enormous machines standing behind them.

And, almost universally, they arrived at the same thought.

They were very glad they were not standing on the other side of the Wall.

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