The bludgeoning began the next day. Torun was right; this was by far the worst part. Long before they even saw the Earthbreaker army, missile after missile came screaming out of the sky to plummet into the heart of the caldera or onto the ridges that should have protected Shadow Ridge.
There were great stones that could not have been flung by a bender, but only by a bender-enhanced siege weapon. There were great clay shafts with iron points, that drove through stone to collapse house and cave alike. There were bales of oil slick fire that Yaosen and Rook scrambled around town putting out, until Torun physically restrained them and dragged them back to their assigned waiting place in the peak.
In the end, Torun convinced the shadowbender and would-be lightbender that the best way they could save lives was by circling the town on the ashraven. The villagers would not have to man the walls awaiting the real assault if Gama could act as the ultimate sentry, sharp-eyed and immune to the fuselage so long as they stayed high enough.
“Anything?” Rook shouted. The high altitude flying was cold enough that they had to take turns keeping an eye on the Earthbreaker formation, and burying their face and hands in Gama’s feathers.
“No movement!” Yaosen yelled back. No movement except for the ceaseless thwack and thrum of catapults and ballistae raining their deadly onslaught. No movement except for the horrible earthshaking impacts and the occasional secondary collapsing of a home or cave system.
There was nothing the villagers could do except take it… take it and hope to endure because they had no recourse to the barrage.
At least there were no screams in response, as there had been to that first volley. Torun had warned them of what an earthbreaker siege would entail, but there were the few families who had refused to leave their homes, or those who had selected caves thought safe that were, in fact, not deep enough to avoid the metal-tipped penetrating bolts.
“I hate this!” Rook shouted from behind him. You had to shout everything up here over the wind, but Yaosen could still detect the note of sullenness, rather than anguish or fury.
Fury had been yesterday. Anguish the day before. Now, on the third day of the barrage, Rook could have been talking about the gray weather of late winter, or a rainstorm that had ruined a garden party.
“These Earthbreakers come from a nation of cowards,” Rook continued, “Where you come from, do you not look each other in the eye when you fight?”
Yaosen thought a long while before responding. They had been up here for hours each day since the siege began, and they likely had a lot more time to kill.
“There are many forms of power. Lu Gun is employing the 25th jing in this case, the power to strike from a greater range than your opponent.”
“Twenty-fifth?! How many are there?”
“Eighty-five. Some say more.”
“Eighty-five?! You can list that many ways to fight?”
Yaosen sighed, “The Four Nations have had a lot of time to get good at fighting.”
“Prove it.”
“Prove what?”
“Prove that there are eighty-five ways to fight. I can only name three. Maybe a dozen if I really thought about it.”
“Now?”
“You have something better to do up here?”
Yaosen looked around, shrugged, then set about the task of listing the eighty-five jings from memory, complete with typical uses, examples, and explanations.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
***
Duu sat atop the ridge in the dark, her back to a crag of rock, eyes closed. No one knew she was up here, and if Torun and Yaosen weren’t so busy, they would probably object to her being above ground at all. Missiles screamed over her head and impacted the rock below, but she didn’t even flinch at them anymore.
Grandfather would have been so impressed. She had sat still for so long! She wasn’t exactly meditating, since she was actually doing something while she sat there, and she wasn’t exactly still as she moved a few inches every hour.
No one else could do what she did. No one else could even see what she was doing. Yet in the darkness of the mountain earth, Duu was bending.
Bending. Burrowing. Creeping.
***
Fenri sat in the darkness across the tunnel from Halvard. Neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke. But every once in a while, Fenri would look over and swear that he saw the whites of Halvard’s eyes flick away, as if he had been trying to study Fenri in the darkness.
Halvard coughed once or twice.
Fenri shifted, trying to think of something more to say, trying to decide if they should talk, even if they could.
There were more than a dozen tunnels leading from the southern and eastern approaches to Shadow Ridge, each small enough to be held by two fighters shoulder to shoulder, each as likely as the next to be a boneshifter point of attack.
Some tunnels led to the main thoroughfare or the great meeting hall Fenri had been tried in, some led directly into homes, some led out to the tundra, or the glacial valleys east of the cladera and then eventually to an unprotected approach to the ridge.
All of them needed to be plugged up so the others could focus on defending the main assault.
Fenri didn’t know how he had gotten paired up with Halvard, or if there was someone else in the village that Halvard might have more experience fighting beside. Maybe a wife, or…
Fenri cleared his throat and he saw Halvard’s eyes flick toward him in the darkness.
“So…” said Fenri, “Is there someone-”
There was a snapping twang and a surprised shriek from somewhere deeper into the caves. The first snare had been tripped.
Snarls, hoots, and whoops echoed throughout the cave system in reply.
The boneshifters were coming.
Halvard hefted his axe and Fenri’s fingers tingled as he bared his claws.
***
Three days and nights the forges of Shadow Ridge had burned hot. The smiths in Rook’s village were perhaps the best – or only – metalworkers in the Farwilds, but they were a far cry from the masters of the Fire Nation forges.
Torun inspected the balance of the double edge blade, like a double edge jian of the Four Nations, though it was wider, more of a hacking, slashing weapon. It was well enough balanced for his purposes, not that he had much of a choice.
The meteorite ore of his old sword and armor still lay in useless, melted lumps, the state in which they had recovered them, since Yaosen had unleashed his wildfire in the meadow in a last ditch effort to rid the world of Lu Gun. The smiths and smelters of Shadow Ridge had no idea what to do with it and couldn’t even get it hot enough to start shaping, much less return it to a functional state.
He hefted one of the breastplates he had requested. It was made of a crude dark iron, overly heavy and prone to malforming under a hard enough blow, but it could stop a barb or a blow from a rock at distance, and save more lives than padded hides alone.
More importantly, it only had one shoulder guard, leaving the other arm completely free of metal.
Torun moved to the next wrap, leather belts and bandoliers from the village's tanners, each brimming with half dozen wooden kunai from their carpenters and whittlers. Together, they looked like a simpler version of Lu Gun’s bandolier of metal bullets, yet the projectile in Torun’s hand was longer and had a wider blade, so as to be deadly when thrown without bending. Again, the operative component was that the setup was completely without earth or metal.
Torun rubbed absently at the scar on his chest.
The first howls echoed throughout the mountain, reverberating through the rock and audible from any one of the deep dwellings where the villagers clustered for safety.
There were roars and animal snarls, and Torun knew the first boneshifter skirmishers had encountered the fighting pairs in the small tunnels. The first front had been joined. Wouldn’t be long now before the Earthbreakers attacked in earnest.
Torun’s fist closed around one of the many breastplates.
“Armor up!” he growled, throwing it over his head and letting its reassuring weight settle upon his shoulders with a clink.
The large, mostly caved-in tunnel pointing west – the grand entranceway – reverberated with the sounds of two hundred other Farwilders doing the same.