Venka had fallen for Collin’s feigned stupidity, and he’d sent a great mass of his forces to attack the centre. Doubtless, he had believed his enemy to be a fool, believed that there would be a hundred Rangers awaiting the assault with long knives and shortswords. He had been wrong of course, because awaiting them there had been only one thing. Silenos Shaiagrazni’s new weapon.

Collin would have been a liar if he’d claimed to understand what it was or how it worked, but he understood the results. He understood the results very, very fucking well, and he was rather fond of them.

Weird things, they were big, bony. Like they’d been carved from the skeleton of some great creature long dead and rotten. The main structure was cylindrical, maybe a half-foot wide and stretching as long from arse to face as a tall man lying down. The back end of it curved down into a thickly built platform welded into the bone surface of the walls, built onto a platform designed to shift forwards when pushed. That was the part that made it possible to keep them hidden from the outside, just a few feet, just a few degrees, but it ensured the enemy’s scouts wouldn’t be getting a clear line of sight to them.

Not that they’d have been likely to recognise the weapons, no more than Collin had. Far as he knew they were something new, something unheard of. Something more sudden and unprecedented in the ugly art of killing than anything else since one man had first taken a rock to the skull of another.

The enemy found that much out the hard way.

Orcs, mostly. Made sense, Venka had been sending them against Rangers in his own mind, against death itself. He’d want savagery, and he’d expect death. Orcs were always the most replaceable and expendable for that bastard.

It was orcs he sent, and it was orcs the weapons- Shaiagrazni had called them “cannons”- spat their burning death out into.

Collin didn’t understand what they were, or how they worked. But he understood the results, and the results were a wave of falling bodies running deep along the horde of charging enemies, a flight and rain of shredded meat and severed limbs, then a twist of blasted dirt and bloody mist. Too many died at once to be counted, entire chunks simply disappearing from the thousands-strong mass of bodies that came surging for Collin’s wall. Their ladders disappeared as panicking orcs dropped them, then crushed them to splinters in retreat. It took only three volleys of the weapons to send the enemy scurrying away.

Another minute had passed before the air was clear enough to let the ground look back up at them once more, and Collin almost puked when it did. He couldn’t see the dirt, not really. It was covered in that many bodies. Pooled with that much blood, carpeted with that many smashed and discarded weapons.

Collin didn’t understand what they were, or how they worked. But he understood the cannons’ results. He understood them enough to hope with every fibre of his being that House Shaiagrazni remained absent from his world.

***

Crossbows weren’t complicated, most men could learn to use them. Henri had learned enough, over the years, to use them fast. But it was the fear more than the knowledge that had his fingers dancing along the weapon, it was his desperation more than the experience that kept his muscles dragging the winch back tight.

An orc came on with a ladder, a big, bastard orc with a big, bastard of a ladder. No human could have carried such a tall thing, no five humans, but it barely seemed to slow this bugger. The quarrel did a better job of that.

Orcs were tough, and this one was well armoured, but the bolt was well aimed. It found that magic spot between heavy iron plates, cutting through the ringmail that protected its joint and digging a few inches into the meat below. Henri was already cocking another one by the time the blood was visible, and his next quarrel hit within a finger of the first. This time the mail was already weakened, and he saw half a hand less of the projectile as it embedded itself. The orc stumbled, gasped, fell. Its ladder took some of its bulk, left propped against the ground where one end bit into mud, and the thick wooden frame snapped. Henri turned his focus to the next enemy.

Bolts, that was his work. There were men around him with spears, axes, swords. Rangers, the odd hedge Knight, some mercenaries with Vigour and vinegar in their balls, but they were the desert. He was the main course. Every siege started with bolts, and he’d fought in more than a few sieges in his days. Twelve years of soldiering, all under a Baird, and he’d be fucked if he outlived the old one by less than a decade.

He drew, fired. Drew, fired. Drew and fucking fired. Snarled as he saw bolts bounce from thick iron, grinned as he watched them bite into the mail-wrapped gaps, laughed and whooped and bit back the urge to dance in satisfaction as one of them sank right through a helmet’s eye slit and mashed up the soft brains beneath.

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A veteran was a reaper of souls in any fight, and none so much as a siege. Henri felt the snap of string in his weapon, the jitter of wood as it threw another murderous splinter out, and he reloaded again just as the first orc reached the walls. He nailed it in the spot where pauldron and gorget parted ways, and the angle was such that he nicked an artery deep enough to leave half its body painted red in seconds. The orc wasn’t dead for even a moment before yet more came onto the wall, and a ladder with them. It was up in seconds, enemies scaling it in seconds more, angry iron flashing about in the dawn light.

Desert had arrived.

***

Patrick had a simple job, jobs tended to be simple for him. As complex as the actual study of magic was, as tasking and demanding as attaining true mastery had always been, there was an invariable lack of contrivance to the things one was generally asked to do with it.

Focus, destroy things. That was about the gist of it, ninety nine times out of a hundred, and this was certainly not the hundredth. Today his target was incoming catapult stones. Patrick focused well.

His power was one over flame, as potent a war magic as could be hoped for. He threw it out in great jets, concentrating the power such as to leave it forceful and kinetic as it struck the incoming projectiles, smashing rock into shrapnel, leaving chips of smouldering stone to rain down on attackers en masse. Each success was a dozen men saved behind the walls, if he’d stopped a lucky shot. Each failure was a dozen deaths allowed. Patrick didn’t feel any particular weight to either fact.

They were people he held in his hands, but there was no time for that sort of consideration. He could ponder the philosophy of what he did when he had the wits to spare, for now they were all needed. Focus and destruction.

Something scraped just a few feet to Patrick’s left, and he looked down in time to see an axe. A great big axe with a great big orc on the other side of it, closing fast, swinging faster. He gasped, screamed, just about pissed himself and took a full step back all before thinking to do the one thing a man of his talents ought always to think of doing first. Using his magic. The flames wrapped around the orc like burning oil about a figure of wax, and he just barely caught its silhouette through the eye-stinging light. One step, two. By the third it was losing shape, iron armour running off its body in molten streams, pooling to form a hissing, spitting puddle on the battlements at its feet. The orc fell in that puddle before taking a fourth step.

Patrick never got to laugh, globules of metal splashed out from the impact, and a few caught his face. He fell just as the orc had, screaming louder than ever, and more clambered over their burning comrade’s corpse to crush his underfoot.

***

Gyvain hadn’t run out of arrows, but he’d run out of time. The orcs were on the wall, and that meant that in a few more moments the humans wouldn’t be. Unless he was quick.

He was always quick, though. That was what it meant to be a Ranger. Not shiny and proud, not grinning and smug, not strong and tough. All that was Knight’s business- fool’s business. Rangers were quick, careful, nasty. Baird had been teaching that lesson for decades, and Gyvain reckoned he’d learned it before anyone else.

His knives were quick, too. And they were most certainly nasty. Each one found a different eyehole as the orcs stormed on, plucked back out of helmeted skulls with a twist and a jerk to leave the newly-made corpses thrashing on the floor. Some idiot splashed himself with molten metal a few yards to the right, and Gyvain saw more orcs glance over at the heat and light. By the time they’d focused again, he’d cut another dozen arteries and cleared the section of wall up nicely.

That was when the easy part stopped, because it was an elite that came up next. One of Venka’s favourites. It towered a full stride over Gyvain’s height and probably a war horse’s weight over his mass, coming at him like some giant statue had gained the power of movement. He feinted low, then darted left, knives flashing, scraping uselessly along iron plate and iron mail. Armour that thick, he might have pissed on it and done more. At least piss-soaked metal might rust.

A hammer was this orc’s weapon of choice, its shaft as long as Gyvain was tall, its head as big as a brick and seemingly solid iron all the way through. It whipped for him fast, almost catching him, sending a few hand-long cracks along the bony shell of the wall as it impacted it. Gyvain swung his own weapons, felt steel scrape off mail, swore and backed up. He’d spun his way around the orc’s body, kept his back to the side the rest were coming in from. If another one cleared the ladder while he fought, he was fucked. But that was combat, risks. Sometimes the best you could do was work out which one measured the smallest, then take that instead of the others.

The hammer came again, again, Gyvain kept on backing up. He was two yards from the wall’s edge, then one, then barely a foot. The orc closed just as he found his arse kissing the fringe, its hammer forgotten in favour of a single, grasping hand.

Gyvain’s knives bounced off its visor, blinding the orc for a precious moment and letting him move with his newly freed hands. He grabbed the outstretched wrist with both hands, hopped back to plant his heels on the wall, then kicked out. He and the orc both fell back, bodies tumbling over the edge inexorably, and Gyvain moved fast.

Rangers were quicker than men, and quicker than warriors. They couldn’t cut through armour, not even with Gyvain’s talent and experience, but train enough, fight enough, grow enough, and even gravity felt slow to a person. Slow enough for him to climb the orc’s body even as it slowly accelerated downwards, and leave himself rolling back onto the wall just as it fully fell off.

A ton of meat and metal landed hard just moments later, audible even over the snarling fight occurring at every place around. Gyvain stood, grunting, and readied his spare blades. Another orc was up just as he was, this one barely smaller than the last.