Leodin raised a hand to shade his eyes, letting out a whistle as he looked across the open fields towards Artelby in the distance, the walls monoliths of black in the backlight, towers, turrets, and the spindly arms of unloaded catapults rising above them like skeletal fingers.
“That’s a big ’un. I’m starting to think we may have bitten off more than we can chew this time.”
“It does look imposing,” Edwin agreed, his augmented eyes itching with mana as he studied the foremost Marradi fortification in the eastern Wastelands, red banners hanging limp in the calm evening air and helmets glinting between crenellations.
“You’ll have plenty of time to look at it later,” Bordan grunted, then brought two fingers to his lips and let out a sharp whistle. “Stop gawking you lot! It’s just a wall. Banner officers, grab your people and spread out! And make sure you don’t all look in the same bloody direction, if there ever is a prime opportunity for the red bastards to attack us, it’s right now before the camp is up! Let’s make sure nobody sneaks up on the boys while they dig us a nice bit of cover of our own, shall we?”
His words pulled the rubbernecking adventurers to order, and within a minute they had begun to disperse into the surroundings, finding what sparse cover and vantage points were available in the lush but empty fields of the south-eastern Wastelands. Artelby was located on the shore of lake Latimer and surrounded by flat plains in all other directions, up to the foot of the Anvil to the south and the rolling, forested hills toward the north. Once a thriving farming community, it had been the first town to fall to the Marradi invasion at the beginning of the war. During the next few years it changed hands regularly, but nobody was mad enough to live in the shadow of war for long. Soon, Artelby’s inhabitants had fled, leaving none to tend the few fields that hadn’t yet been trampled by boots or torched by retreating armies.
Finally, Duke Marrad accepted that he would be unable to reap the fruits of his conquest until the war was over and ordered the town converted into an impressive fortification. The original settlement was surrounded by a second, much sturdier wall made of stone, with ballistae on every turret and catapults pointing in all directions. Since then, Harvand armies had tried retaking Artelby once every decade or so but had always been forced to retreat after a few months of siege at most. Conquering it with just two thousand men seemed like an impossibility at first, until one realized that Artelby’s regular defenders were far away, camped outside yet another fortress that had never been taken, while the former town was protected almost exclusively by the much-diminished Lindvar division.
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Three days earlier
“What do you think, captain?” General Asher asked, leaning forward in his chair in the command wagon. “Can you deliver their weapon?”
It was the evening of a long day of marching, and Edwin was attending yet another meeting. This one was almost a private affair. Aside from the general and division lord there were only the battalion commanders, Master Gregory, as well as Journeyman Archibald who had just finished explaining their plan for the wall to the gathered leaders.
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“With these measurements here, I don’t see why not,” the captain answered, scratching his beard. While the lowest rank in the room, the commander of 3-4, 5th division’s cohort of combat engineers, was arguably the most important person in attendance. The whole plan was dependent on his catapults delivering the payload accurately and without fail, as they wouldn’t have a spare projectile, nor a realistic backup plan. “The only thing I’m worried about is the ritual getting damaged when the catapult goes off. The force of the swing will press down on it quite severely.”
“We’ll take that into account,” Archibald nodded, his usual cheerful demeanor replaced by serious professionalism. “We can recess the channels into the rock so they don’t get bent by the paddle. It’ll be a little more work, but it should make it much safer.”
“Sounds good to me,” the captain shrugged. “My boys will need some time to range the catapults, at least a day. That level of precision is possible, but not easy to achieve. Especially if we don’t want to give away our plan.”
“We will want to wait a while before we deploy it anyway,” Bordan offered. “We need to observe how the defenders react and wait until they get used to the rocks flying. They have mages, they might decide to block the catapult projectiles.”
“A shield would be disastrous,” Archibald agreed. “Even if they try to block the catapult shots though, I doubt they’ll keep it up for long. As I understand it, they won’t do much damage to the walls, so constantly casting and recasting shields just for that would be a major commitment for little gain.”
“Correct,” the engineer officer nodded. “The catapults aren’t fit to breach a wall, especially not one like this, so they will mostly be aimed at what is behind the walls to cause casualties and destroy buildings. We should be able to play off the ranging shots as one of the engines firing short, or its crew trying to sweep defenders off the wall.”
“That sounds promising,” Asher said with a smile. “What about the positioning?”
“I’ve drawn up a plan,” the captain offered, unrolling a map. “The main camp will be here, outside of Artelby’s catapult and fireball range. With the limited access to lumber, we’ll be unable to have it be protected by a palisade, but on this flat ground a two-meter trench on the outside with an earthen wall right behind it is a formidable defense. The siege outpost will be here, roughly halfway between us and them…”
--- ----- ---
Nobody in the Harvand camp slept soundly that first night, but thankfully the Marradi chose not to leave the safety of their walls. The fact that they let a golden opportunity for a sally pass them by made Bordan more than a little nervous, but in the short term it benefitted them quite nicely. The next morning saw the soldiers continue their work on fortifying the camp, while the engineers, protected by the adventurers, bravely marched into range of the defenders’ siege weapons to erect the outpost where their own catapults would be built. For once, Master Gregory and his small gaggle of materialism students had left the confines of their wagons, the design and construction of siege camps tickling the professional fancy of the magical architects.
Artelby greeted them with a few volleys of rocks and fireballs, but quickly stopped when their efforts unimpressively faltered in the face of a pane of magic shielding supplied by one of the most powerful mages of the continent. Edwin couldn’t help but mentally tip his hat to the usually grouchy master mage who barely glanced at the deluge of rock and magical fire that sloughed off his shield, not letting the ineffectual barrage interrupt his shop talk with the engineers, their conversation about the quality of the ground and the static of the planned structures as strange and arcane to Edwin as he imagined magical theory was to a mundane. With the massive siege camp taking shape behind him and the fortification’s mighty walls towering ahead of him, Edwin felt like a very small cog in a very large machine. While the battles of 5th division had so far been significant mostly for their small slice of front line, the events of the next days and weeks had the potential to change the course of the war.
The siege of Artelby had begun.