Chapter 783: Testing The Cannons

Pillars of golden light burst up out of the ground all along the base of the wall, one after another, racing away from them in both directions and around the whole edge of the territory.

The light swallowed the black steel whole, and every plate and every rivet in the Steel-Weave Palisade lit up with a blinding glow then the wall began to grow.

The steel plates groaned and slid apart, and new ones forged themselves in the gaps between them out of pure light.

The whole wall surged upward with a deafening grinding roar, climbing past sixty feet, then seventy, until the battlements crested a full eighty feet above the ground outside.

Snow blasted off the walkway in thick sheets.

The girls grabbed for the edges of the battlements as the steel under their boots climbed with them, rising like the deck of a ship riding a huge wave, and Lupina let out a startled yelp as her ears were blown flat against her head by the rush of wind.

Down below, the ground outside the wall dropped farther and farther away, and the jagged ridges of the Umbral Basin seemed to sink lower on the horizon with every heartbeat.

All along the wall, the old blue runes flared so brightly that they turned the falling snow blue, and new lines of silver light came racing out of them and spread across the plates like frost creeping over glass.

GRRRRRRRRRNNNNN!

The light snapped away with a shockwave that blasted the falling snow outward in a wide ring.

KRAAAACK!

The Steel-Weave Palisade was gone.

...In its place stood the Runeforged Bulwark, an unbroken curtain of thick black steel layered three plates deep, the seams between them fused so cleanly that it looked like it had been poured from one piece.

Lines of silver runes now ran through the steel alongside the old blue ones, weaving into each other in dense patterns that pulsed slowly together.

The walkway under their feet doubled in width until six armored girls could march side by side without brushing shoulders.

Along the outer edge, tall merlons rose like serrated fangs with each one angled outward with a sweeping slope, while heavy black iron hoods covered every gap in the battlements from above.

Down at the base facing the Umbral Basin, the steel flared outward into a steep sloped skirt bristling with long iron spikes that hummed with warding runes.

Right beside them, the watchtower was rising too.

The Blood-Iron Watchtower groaned under the flood of golden light, and its dark red iron frame stretched upward like a living thing.

The old roof split apart into glowing motes, and the tower climbed higher and higher into the freezing clouds until it towered well over a hundred feet above the gate.

KRRRRNNNNNG!

Up on top of it, the archers who’d been standing watch grabbed onto anything they could reach as the deck under them shot up into the sky.

One of them lost her grip on her bow and caught it by the string a hair before it went over the side, and her shriek came drifting down from way up high

The top of it opened into a wide eight-sided platform circled by low red iron walls, fitted with heavy iron pivot rings for weapons and covered by a thick slate roof.

Deep firing slits opened up on every level of the tower, and along its corner columns, narrow channels began to glow with a soft amber light as warmth flowed up through them.

At the very top, held in an ornate bronze cradle, a crystal the size of a carriage wheel lit up with a bright steady white glow that cut through the gray winter mist and threw a long spear of light deep into the shadowy crags of the Umbral Basin.

VMMMMMMM!

The deep humming slowly faded, leaving behind a silence so complete that the only sound was the soft crackle of the new beacon.

Thora stood frozen with her jaw hanging slack and her eyes bulging at the dark steel under her boots.

She slowly bent down and scraped the tip of a steel pry bar against the face of one of the new merlons.

SKREEEE!

The tool sparked against the steel without leaving so much as a scratch.

"By the mountain’s veins..." Thora muttered, her voice trembling with real shock. "You could throw a whole siege army at this wall, pound it with twenty catapults for a month, and all you’d do is knock the snow off it!"

"Look at all this room!" Lupina barked, bounding back and forth across the wide walkway with her bushy silver tail whipping the air. "We could have a whole pack sparring up here and nobody would fall off! It doesn’t even feel drafty anymore..."

Aurelia had both hands pressed over her mouth, and Rowenna was staring at the silver runes running through the steel with her lips parted and her notebook forgotten against her chest.

Solenne’s nine tails had puffed up to twice their size and were only now starting to settle back down.

’He just rewrote it,’ Rowenna thought, her heart pounding. ’Every single rune on this wall. All at once. Again,how does he do it...?’

Down the new stairway of the tower, the sound of hurried boots broke the silence.

THUD-THUD-THUD!

A group of archers from the Bow-Splitter division came pouring out onto the wall with their bows in their hands, their eyes wide as they stared at the new battlements in total disbelief.

At the front of them was Fenna.

Her sharp eyes scanned the towering wall, the widened gaps and the new spire looming overhead with stunned breathless wonder.

Her face was flushed from running all the way down the stairs, and she was still breathing hard.

She stopped right in front of Silas with one hand resting on the grip of her bow, and her mouth opened and closed twice before she could find her voice.

"Lord Silas..." Fenna breathed, waving her bow helplessly toward the drop. "W-what did you just do to our wall? I only went down to the armory for more arrows!"

Silas chuckled, resting his hands on his belt. "I just felt like our archers deserved a better view. What do you think?"

"What do I think?" Fenna let out a short incredulous laugh and walked over to the nearest merlon, running her palm along the smooth angled steel. "My Lord, look at these! On the old wall, if something spat acid at us or shot up from the tree line, we had to duck down and hope it went over... Now the steel slopes right out. Anything coming up from below is going to skip right over our heads! And look at the floor."

She kicked the edge of an iron ring set right into the walkway.

CLANG!

"Locking rings," Fenna pointed out, her eyes gleaming. "They’re built right into the wall. If we want to set up anything heavy, we don’t have to drill into the steel... We just drop the pins and lock it in place."

"And the tower!" another archer called from the stairwell, her face glowing with delight as she held her bare hands up to one of the glowing corner channels. "Fenna, the drafts are gone! The whole stairwell’s warm!"

"No more frozen fingers on the dawn watch," Fenna agreed, turning back to Silas with deep respect shining in her eyes. "You’ve turned our wall into a real fortress, Lord Silas... From the top of that spire, we’ll be able to see clear over the ridges."

"Good," Silas said, stepping back toward the middle of the walkway. "Because a real fortress needs real teeth so let’s get these set up."

He reached into his Inventory.

VWOOMP!

With a soft warping hum that bent the cold air, the four star iron cannons appeared on the wide walkway, their dark midnight barrels gleaming in the light of the spire’s new beacon.

The heavy crates of Solenne’s shells settled down beside them with a series of solid thuds.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

"Alright, Bow-Splitters, you heard the Lord!" Fenna barked, waving her girls forward. "Put your backs into it! Hook the ropes to the carriage rings and roll two of these into the gaps over the gate! Mind the wheel locks!"

The archers swarmed the heavy carriages with eager shouts.

Lupina darted in and grabbed the axle of the first one, her strength lifting the iron frame with ease, while Morrighan walked over to the second and calmly nudged the heavy carriage into its notch with one boot.

As the carriage settled into place, Fenna knelt down and drove the heavy iron drop pins through the wheel brackets and into the rings in the floor.

CLACK!

"Look at that fit," Fenna said, rising and patting the dark barrel with open admiration. "It sits right up against the gap, and the barrel clears the slope with two inches to spare... We can aim right down at the base of the wall without having to lean out over the edge."

"And look at the runes around the mounting rings," Rowenna added in a soft eager whisper, pointing a slender finger at the glowing silver lines carved around the floor latch. "They’re connected to the ones in the wall. When this cannon fires, the kick won’t crack the walkway or knock over the archers standing next to it... The wall will soak up most of the shock and send it down into the ground."

"That’s what you get when good iron meets a good wall," Solenne said with a pleased hum, her nine tails swaying as she glided up to the second cannon. "Even the hardest kick turns into nothing but a little shiver under our feet..."

Silas walked up to the cannon in the middle and rested his hand on the cold glass-smooth barrel.

The dark metal didn’t feel the winter cold at all. It hummed faintly against his palm with a slow sleeping strength.

"Everything looks ready," Silas said, glancing back at Thora. "Let’s see what this new ammo can actually do."

Thora grinned like a mischievous imp and scurried over to the open crate.

She hauled out one of the four-foot shells, grunting with satisfaction as she lifted it and pushed it into the open breech of the cannon.

SHHHK!

The copper rings clicked smoothly against the grooves inside the barrel.

Thora followed it with a thick wrapped charge of powder as she gave the barrel two fond pats like it was a horse she’d raised herself.

CLACK!

She slammed the heavy breechblock shut and spun the brass locking wheel until it sealed tight.

Around them, the archers backed up a few steps. Lupina pressed both wolf ears flat against her head with her hands, and Aurelia quietly did the same with her fingers in her own ears.

"Loaded and ready, my Lord!" Thora shouted, stepping back and wiping her brow with her forearm. "Light her up! Show these mountain rats what my iron sounds like!"

Silas stepped up to the brass handles and leaned in to sight down the barrel.

Through the notched iron sights, the frozen landscape of the Umbral Basin lay wide open in front of him.

Four hundred paces out, half-hidden among the petrified black trees of a sunken ravine, a pack of grotesque monsters was creeping through the snow.

They were huge eight-legged things covered in jagged pale plates of chitin, their swollen bellies pulsing with sickly green venom that hissed and melted the snow wherever it dripped from their mandibles.

They were stalking along the edge of the territory, testing the wind, with no idea that the wall they were scouting had just gotten a lot taller... Silas counted six of them.

The biggest one at the front kept stopping to raise its head and sniff toward the wall with its mandibles clicking.

Silas gave the elevation screw a quarter turn and lined the flared muzzle up with the middle of the pack.

He placed his right palm over the glowing red rune carved into the back of the breechblock and fed a smooth pulse of golden mana from his core straight into it.

"Fire," Silas murmured.

The cannon answered with a sound that tore through the mountain air like a falling thunderbolt.

BOOOOOOM!

A blinding tongue of blue-white flame burst from the muzzle, and the roar shook the air across the whole wall.

The walkway under their feet swallowed the kick without any effort at all... The steel glowed with a faint ripple of blue light as the shock sank down into the wall, and the carriage didn’t move a single inch.

Across four hundred paces of frozen wasteland, the shell streaked through the air like a bolt of blue lightning.

It punched straight through the body of the lead monster.

KRRRUNCH!

The star iron nose caved in its armored shell like a dry nut and a heartbeat later, the rune inside the shell went off.

VUUUUUM!

A pitch-black sphere roared to life in the middle of the ravine.

The monsters around it let out shrill chattering shrieks as their huge bodies were ripped off the frozen ground and dragged helplessly toward the middle of the dark ball like pebbles caught in a whirlpool.

...Then the second charge went off.

KA-BOOOOOOOM!