Ato was right yet again. Lord’s Shield did not tear itself apart in pursuit of purification. People scrutinised each other, more than they had before. They saw something they may have otherwise ignored and thought ‘will you be next?’

Outside, the besieging forces could only hope that Ato’s plan was working. They wouldn’t find out for another two months. Beep was not the only siege breaker who had faith that it was working.

What was clearly working was the siege breakers campaign against the mobile walls atop Lord’s Shield. They had grown overhangs to combat the chain hooks, and they were bolted down by default, no longer mobile.

Even Ato wasn’t totally sure how to proceed.

‘The Lord’s House is willing to blind and fetter themselves in pursuit of safety,’ Ato said. ‘Obscured as they are, the fortress still has eyes.’

Beep had been thinking about it. ‘Do you think we could get some gum, or lacquer?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have much with me.’

Ato looked at her for several seconds. A few of the other people involved in the discussion assumed that Ato was thinking what they were thinking: why are you talking about paint at a time like this?

‘Oh, artist, your mind is as sharp as your eyes.’ Ato said, and interrupted the meeting briefly to make almost everyone distinctly uncomfortable.

There was no ingenious method the Lord’s House used to keep fire off their walls. The combination of pitch and tallow that Haven, Narmen, and Oszrath used simply tended to slide off of wet cloth and the mobile walls were set up in such a way as to maximise the amount that slid down the outside of the fortress.

What would not struggle to stick to wet cloth was black ink.

Both gum and lacquer were easy to come by. Black ink or paint would have been almost just as easy for the siege breakers to get their hands on. The artist in Beep preferred to mix her own pigments, and the scientist in Ato wanted to do experiments.

The first problem with the plan was that black cloth is at least as easy to see through as white or undyed cloth, often easier. Beep had known that black dye wouldn’t be good for much, but she found that ordinary black ink wasn’t much better.

The next problem was logistical. Haven wasn’t the only place in the region that produced rubber from guayule, but it was by far the largest producer of that particular type of rubber. Rubber from trees, which was generally more common outside the desert, didn’t work as well.

Two weeks after Beep had proposed the idea, she and Ato declared a huge vat of black latex glue to be ready for actual use. They had tested it as extensively as they could without launching it up at the walls.

‘It’s a bit like portable night, if you think about it too much,’ Ora said.

‘If there’s anyone who’s going to think about it too much,’ Beep nodded.

While she had proven massively more useful than a lot of the siege breakers had expected, Beep still perplexed a lot of them. She was a peculiar combination of severely focused and eminently distractable. Outside of fighting, she almost never spoke in full sentences. And the way she talked about Ato made even some of her biggest admirers vaguely uncomfortable.

The final test before use took only five minutes. Ato wanted to double check that a clay globe full of their black glue wouldn’t be too heavy or too light. That had been the trouble with the original incendiary shot for the stationary crossbows, getting the weight right.

Pouring water on burning tallow and pitch was, if anything, counterproductive. That was well known. There was plenty of water up on the battlements to keep the walls damp, but it wasn’t anyone’s first impulse when a quarrel shattered against their wall and blotted out one of the view ports.

Pouring water on a latex-based glue wasn’t completely useless, but it wasn’t spectacularly useful either. What might have worked, and been an absolutely terrible idea, was high-proof alcohol. Not only was it flammable, but a continuing series of horrifying deaths had quite convinced most of the populus of the evils of alcohol.

The only real disappointment about this rubber paint was that it was quite distinctly fire resistant.

From the outside, it was impossible to see the viewports in the increasingly stationary mobile walls. They had long been placed irregularly to avoid someone armed with a stationary crossbow being able to predict their location.

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That first shot had been quite lucky. The quarrels couldn’t be loaded down with so much of the paint as to guarantee covering a view port. But it only took about six shots to completely coat one of the portable walls.

Only six, careful shots were fired that first day. The final test to make sure that the stuff would work.

And work it did. Even once it had dried, the glue blinded the soldiers behind that wall. When they managed to cycle the wall away from the battlements, they couldn’t get the stuff off without destroying the padding.

While the walls’ construction could be changed, so that the padding was no longer the outer layer, the rubber layer had to be cut away around the view ports, and they would be vastly more obvious targets. It might be difficult to aim a quarrel well enough to hit the view port, but it was far from impossible.

The Lord’s House didn’t need to know that the latex glue would barely stick to rubber, it didn’t matter. Rubber was much harder to keep fire off of, since it turned quite dark after vulcanisation and dried out far too quickly. They had found that out during the tail end of the siege at Lookout.

That left Lord’s Shield with two options: constantly repair their walls and hope they didn’t miss anything while their were blinded; or find some other way to see past the walls.

A periscope is not a difficult thing to make. It’s just a box with a couple of mirrors, after all. It’s not a difficult thing to replace, either, when a periscope is hit by an arrow from the besieging camps.

The Lord’s House knew that attrition was the manner of sieges, they could simply think of no other solution as, over the next week, every single portable wall around the battlements was coated with black, latex glue.

‘One eye is better than two,’ Ato said with a shrug.

‘I think it’s the other way round,’ Skin said.

‘Not when it’s your enemy’s eyes.’

A tactic that was made substantially easier by the portable walls being mostly bolted down, and a periscope being quite insufficient to look down, was climbing up the outside of Lord’s Shield, all the way to the top of a portable wall, and dropping in a burning pot full of pitch and tallow.

A woman called Vara, an enthusiastic sort from Narmen, was killed when, rather than having a pot of fire dropped on their heads, a dozen soldiers unbolted their wall and tipped it over the battlements as she climbed the face of it. Only two of those dozen soldiers made it to cover, but it was a tragedy non-the-less.

This was not the approved method for dealing with someone climbing the outside of your wall. There was a limited supply of wood, rubber, and cloth to make replacements from.

Unfortunately for the limited resources of Lord’s Shield, someone down below had a brilliant idea. Hadn’t they, more or less, just coated all those walls with rubber, a basically flammable material?

The latex glue didn’t burn quickly. The wool-stuffed padding didn’t burn quickly. The rubber cladding didn’t burn quickly. The mixture of pitch and tallow didn’t burn quickly. The combination of rubber, damp wool, pitch, tallow and wood produces quite thick smoke.

Some three thousand soldiers in Lord’s Shield were quite upset when, all of a sudden, one of the portable walls was smashed open by a catapult. That catapult was crushed by a trebuchet, for its crimes. The very next night, a catapult on the other side of the fortress launched the first massive, burning globe of pitch and tallow over the walls.

The night after that, forty-six people climbed over the walls and, rather than dropping in fire, conducted a quick raid that ended when they pushed a wall over the battlements and jumped after it,

Two trebuchets, ready to fire on any more criminal catapults, collapsed after unexpected encounters with Haven’s weighted cords.

Ato and the siege breakers escalated attrition to the level of wanton violence. Night after night, siege engines and soldiers burned, walls dropped over the battlements, and periscopes were broken.

In open daylight, under the scrutiny of dozens of watchful periscopes, a battering ram made from lead and steel meandered its lazy way to where there had once been a gate into Lord’s Shield.

The gate, and the series of murder holes above it, had been destroyed nearly three years ago in the early days of the siege. What walls were left above the battlements stayed precisely where they were, for fear of what would come through any gaps that opened.

Dust trickled out of the pack of the reinforced stone wall that filled the archway, and the first strike reverberated through Lord’s Shield. The solid bricks cracked with a loud crunch, more dust trickled, the second strike reverberated through Lord’s Shield.

The white flag was not raised in time to stop the third strike from the battering ram. More dust, more cracking, more reverberations. The wall did not come down.

A priest and a commander had to be lowered from the walls to parlay with the forces from Narmen, Oszrath, and Haven. The battering ram was ready to strike again. Ato’s tattoo was starting to creep up her neck, out of her collar.

It was only after the stone wall in the gateway had been torn down that the besieging forces learned the killings had continued for two weeks since the infiltrators had escaped. In the end, seventeen people had been executed for the murders, and more than three hundred priests, commanders, officials, and soldiers had publicly repented for their various sins.

‘We’re still not convinced it was necessary,’ Heft said.

‘Seems that we could have done all this without it,’ Pest said.

‘Ora with thank me, mark my words.’ Ato shrugged.

‘I will?’ This was the first Ora was hearing about it.

‘Yes you will, public servant.’