Page 116 (1/1)

The courier wilted visibly

Bernard nodded "Return to Captain Miles, give him my compliments, and inforent has been placed to support hi man "Dismissed"

The courier sed, saluted, then dived off the side of the tower He round, then raced away to the north

Amara looked at Bernard, and said, "Couldn't you have told him more?"

"The feho know, the better" He rested his hands on a an to nal the ive the coin"

Giraldi's voice bellowed down the wall as the ground began to rue The order was picked up and relayed down the line

Bernard lifted his hand over his head and watched the oncoain, as the vord closed to within a few yards, they let out a vast shriek that shook the walls, and once again, their cries clashed with those of the legionares upon the battleionares intently as they lifted their javelins, and when the first of them threw, he snapped his arm forward, and screamed, "Loose!"

The mules went to work

Each of the contraptions was built around a boxlike fra wooden arm with a shallol at its end Amara wasn't familiar with the details of the devices, but each arth and veryto pull the arm all the way to a horizontal position A pin, placed in the device, locked the arm back - and when it was reetic violence When it did, it carried so much poith it that the entire fraround at one end, like a cantankerous s

When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred round, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of s 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!" screaionare

The fire seeroup 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 fla and running in circles,that moved

Amara stared in purest shock as she realized that she had just watched the world change, radically and forever

That overwhel hamh 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 creere si ions The spheres, intended only for a single use, rather than the long-ter coldstones, had beenperhaps an hour's effort by so - and ift

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 freeree, but they were clearly made to protect the interests of Citizens first and foreh Lords had faced rebellions frory 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 freeed the instant the holders of the Calderon Valley dealt the eneh Lords theain

The vord warriors ca their brassy cries and ha at the base of the wall Their scythes slashed down onto the sranite, but unlike the stone of the first wall, this wall's ionares upon the walls took ruthless advantage of the enemy's inability to scale it to -hot sand were poured down onto the mantis warriors Where such containers were not available, the legionares resulted to a e rocks onto the enean lighter work Their loads were smaller, and they threw less often It was the only way they couldattacks were s 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 th of nuainst the wall again, and if they could not easily create footholds in the wall, their own dead began to pile up into rarew closer and closer to the rao 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 hen he sent ain?" Amara asked

Bernard scratched at his chin, then leaned his forear over a stone fence The pose was intentional, A 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 theain 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