The mules went to work.
Each of the contraptions was built around a boxlike frame. Wooden support struts rose above it, to support a long wooden arm with a shallow bowl at its end. Amara wasn’t familiar with the details of the devices, but each arm was drawn back by a crew of two men, who used raw strength and very minor woodcrafting to pull the arm all the way to a horizontal position. A pin, placed in the device, locked the arm back—and when it was removed, the arm snapped forward with startlingly energetic violence. When it did, it carried so much power with it that the entire framework jumped up off the ground at one end, like a cantankerous mule kicking out with its hind legs.
When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred mules placed in ranks behind the walls kicked up off the ground, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of small glass spheres, soaring up over the walls. They leapt up into the air and spread out into a glittering cloud that caught the light of the lowering sun, throwing back sparkles of scarlet, orange, and gold.
Then the fire-spheres struck the earth and burst into globes of hungry fire, hundreds of them all at once, spread out over a wide swath of land.
“Bloody crows!” screamed a nearby legionare.
The fire seemed to ripple out in a long ribbon as each group of mules unleashed its projectiles. Each mule’s deadly payload devoured scores and scores of the enemy in clouds of sullen flame, spread out over an area fifty yards across. Indeed, if anything, the mules had been spaced too near one another—there were ample areas of overlap, where the spheres from multiple mules detonated in the same area. Thousands of vord died in the flames, and thousands more were scorched and disabled, wailing and running in circles, mad with pain, lashing out at anything that moved.
Amara stared in purest shock as she realized that she had just watched the world change, radically and forever.
That overwhelming hammerblow upon the vord had not been delivered by an exalted High Lord. No group of Citizens or Knights Aeris had unleashed their wrath upon the vord. Crows, it wasn’t even the result of standard Legion battlecrafting. The engines had been shaped here, in the workshops of the holders of the Calderon Valley. Most of the people on their crews were simple holders—nearly half of them were children, young men too young to have served their term in the Legions. The spheres, intended only for a single use, rather than the long-term function of the food-cooling coldstones, had been manufactured in the Valley as well, each of them representing perhaps an hour’s effort by someone gifted with a modest affinity for firecrafting—and much more quickly by someone with a more substantial gift.
Whatever happened, if Alera survived its latest foe, it could not return to what it had been before. Not when the holders had wielded the power of Citizens. Alera’s laws protected freemen to some degree, but they were clearly made to protect the interests of Citizens first and foremost. More than once, Aleran Counts and Lords and even High Lords had faced rebellions from angry freemen—rebellions that were inevitably put down by the superior furycraft of the Citizenry. That was a constant, an immutable fact of Aleran history. The Citizenry ruled precisely because they had access to greater power than any freeman, or any group of freemen.
But that all changed the instant the holders of the Calderon Valley dealt the enemy a blow worthy of the assembled High Lords themselves.
And, less than a minute later, they did it again.
The vord warriors came hurtling forward, shrieking their brassy cries and hammering at the base of the wall. Their scythes slashed down onto the smoothed granite, but unlike the stone of the first wall, this wall’s material resisted their assault tenaciously. Legionares upon the walls took ruthless advantage of the enemy’s inability to scale it to meet them. Great cauldrons of boiling oil, water, or scalding-hot sand were poured down onto the mantis warriors. Where such containers were not available, the legionares resulted to a more primitive and reliable measure: They simply dropped large rocks onto the enemy.
After the first three massive volleys, the mules began lighter work. Their loads were smaller, and they threw less often. It was the only way they could make the limited supply of fire-spheres last. The resulting attacks were smaller, if no less devastating to the vord hit by them.
It took several minutes for the vord to rush over the havoc the mules had caused in the field before the wall. At first, they arrived in scattered, irregular bunches, easily focused on and destroyed by the wall’s defenders. It didn’t last. Though an ongoing slaughter was being wreaked upon the vord by Octavian’s mules, the vord’s strength of numbers seemed undiminished. Soon, they were pressing against the wall again, and if they could not easily create footholds in the wall, their own dead began to pile up into ramps that grew closer and closer to the ramparts.
Bernard watched another flight of fire-spheres go sailing over the wall and nodded his approval. “Great furies, if it didn’t work,” he said. He shot his wife a quick, fierce grin. “Tavi said they would work when he sent me the plans.”
“When was that, again?” Amara asked.
Bernard scratched at his chin, then leaned his forearms on a merlon, casually crossed, like a man gossiping over a stone fence. The pose was intentional, Amara knew. The men around him were looking at him for indications of his state of mind every so often, and he showed them a mask of calm, almost casual confidence. “Three, four months after the Elinarch, I reckon. But I didn’t look at them again until he wrote about his idea to use the fire-spheres as ammunition for the mules. So I had Giraldi build one and test it and…” He spread his hands demonstratively.
“I know you said they’d be effective, but…” Amara shook her head. “I had no idea.”
“I know,” Bernard said.
“This… this is going to change everything.”
“Hope so,” he said fervently. “Means there’s something left standing to change.”
Amara looked steadily at him for a moment while his eyes shifted back to the battlefield. He knew. She could see it in his face. He knew what the mules represented. Not in and of themselves, of course, but as a symbol for the collective strength of the freemen of Alera—strength that could now be given deadly expression, if need be, now that someone had shown them the way.
The battle raged. Gargants fitted with huge baskets shambled up and down the walls, carrying more stones to the legionares. Legionares with spears began to fend off the vord as they came within reach of the longer weapons. Occasionally, a Knight Ignus would melt a corpse-ramp into a bubbling pool of slagged, stinking chitin, or a Knight Terra would simply cause it to sink into the soft earth. But they were holding. By the great furies, they were holding.
Another flight of fire-spheres went whispering overhead to bring down raging fire on the heads of the mantis warriors, when there was a sudden tremor in the ground, and a distant sound, a roar that rose up like some great beast voicing a warning.
Amara turned her face to the north and looked at the enormous, bleak grey mountain that loomed there, like some unimaginably huge bastion positioned to hold the Legions’ flanks. As she watched, she saw clouds of dust billowing forth from the mountain. An entire face of the mountain’s slope had apparently given way, causing a rockslide so enormous that it beggared the imagination.