Most of the survivors from the first army joined the second, already starting to gather at Outer Light by the time they returned. Within a month, the second army at Outer Light had already reached three thousand.

Despite continued claims that the military command of the Lord’s House were all idiots, the army at Outer Light had already developed a counter for Haven’s stationary crossbows: mobile walls made from thick planks reinforced with rubber, chain, and thick padding, with wheels on the inside so that they could be more easily transported.

The second army took two months to leave Outer Light. By the time it did, it was nearly four thousand strong, divided into columns of ninety surrounded with these heavy, mobile walls.

It was no surprise that the stationary crossbows couldn’t get a quarrel through the walls, but it was worth the test. A volley of arrows could make it into the open top of the formation, but was slow enough that the soldiers inside had ample time to raise their shields.

When the army stopped to camp in the late afternoon, the mobile walls provided an extremely solid perimeter, though there weren’t enough to completely encircle the camp. The camp was laid out to make shooting anything through the gaps in the walls largely fruitless.

Whatever the padding on the walls was made from proved to be fairly fire resistant. When a fire was started on one, blankets soaked in water were thrown over it rather than any soldiers actually coming outside to put the fires out.

Though the trebuchets were far too big to be covered by the walls, the skirmishers from Lookout decided not to use the chain shot while the army was en route in case they found some counter measure.

Volleys fired over the walls into the camp were ineffective, mostly getting caught in the fabric of the tents or blocked by shields. Fire launched over the walls was just as ineffective as fire launched at the walls.

While the stationary crossbows conducted their final test to find out just how much work was needed to break one of these mobile walls, most of the skirmishers headed back to Lookout. So far, the only upside of the walls was how much slower the army was moving.

So far, Haven had not utilised environmental traps to any great extent. In part, this was because the loose sand of the wastes didn’t lend itself to the tactic. Another part was that a lot of those people freed from the Lord’s House had absorbed their beliefs to some degree and thought of it as dishonourable.

Many of the freed slave soldiers from Wasolan had been sappers to some extent, at the very least expected to dig toilets. Out west, where most of the fighting between Wasolan and Kzara was, the ground was much firmer and lent itself much better to the use of traps.

People worried a lot less about dishonour when the alternatives were re-enslavement or death.

It took nearly a full day of discussion to formulate a plan for how to set out the traps in the first place. It was a very good bet that the army would take the same route from Outer Light to Lookout, and there were a couple of likely spots to set traps. But given how slow the army was moving, and Haven’s general shortage of iron, coming up with the right sorts of traps proved to be an issue unto itself.

The trouble was that if a soldier stepped onto a pit trap covered with a net, he would fall in given normal circumstances. If one of several soldiers holding onto a mobile wall that was wider than the pit stepped onto a pit trap, he might just dangle from the wall until pulled free.

A hinged board, covered in sand, could be made wide enough to engulf an entire mobile wall, but took a lot longer to make. On the other hand, reinforcing the pits with wooden frames meant that they could be dug just about anywhere without fear of the sand flooding them.

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On the fourth day of the army’s march, one of the mobile walls at the front of the army collapsed, very suddenly, into a hole in the ground. With it went eight soldiers. The spikes at the bottom of the pit killed one of the soldiers, and injured the rest.

Under a hail of arrows, the army stopped to drag the wall back out of the pit. They hadn’t brought extras. The trap and ambush combined managed to kill four soldiers and wound nearly seventy.

The second pit trap didn’t manage to engulf an entire wall, but did tip it far enough that the process could be repeated. Another platoon hurried over to block the attackers’ arrows and quarrels with their own walls, and the fallen mobile wall was recovered much more quickly.

After the two traps, the army stopped in the early afternoon to take stock of the situation. They couldn’t have people range ahead to look for traps, for fear of all the archers. They couldn’t open up the view ports in the walls for the same reason, and the traps were nigh impossible to spot with the limited visibility.

Some clever sorts came up with a solution to their soldiers falling into the traps, their neighbours would just have to rush over to protect them from the resulting ambush. On the fifth day out of Outer Light, the columns at the front of the army pushed their front walls with long planks.

It worked exactly as intended and, when a wall did fall into a pit trap, none of the soldiers pushing it went with it. When the neighbouring columns rushed over to protect them, quite a lot of them followed their side walls into a series of pits that they had somehow had the good luck to miss as they marched.

Nearly two hundred soldiers were killed during the chaotic half hour it took to retrieve all of the fallen walls, nearly triple that were wounded. The army stopped early again to reconsider their plan.

It was a deeply difficult decision to make. But the army’s commanders had to put their faith in the filthy heretics to continue to not target the retreating wounded. Extra walls were needed.

The army moved off course, naturally. And rather than soldiers push the frontmost walls with planks, they affixed them very lightly to and extra set of front walls so that they would still be protected from an ambush if their lost their walls to traps.

Somewhere, Ato made the assertion that a wall being pushed with planks was lighter than a wall being pushed by soldiers. Very nearby, a man called Massi pointed out that confidence can make people do foolish things.

The army’s chanting increased significantly in volume when one of the frontmost shields fell into a pit and no soldiers went with it. A flurry of arrows and even a huge quarrel from a stationary crossbow hit the wall behind the one that had fallen and the chanting managed to get even louder.

It was much harder to retrieve the sunken wall while everyone stayed behind their defences, but they managed it. In the meantime, careful shifting and stamping revealed another trap to the side that would have claimed even more soldiers, and the chanting stayed strong for nearly three hours.

On the seventh day out of Outer Light, the army finally reached the edge of the wastes. They were a day slower than expected, but still on schedule. Barely half an hour later, four pits opened within the columns, engulfing nearly forty soldiers.

It was barely past noon, but the army pulled back and set up camp for the day.

Over the sixteen days it took the army to march from Outer Light to Lookout it shrank by nearly a thousand soldiers. They were not deterred. Every time the traps were changed, so too were the methods of dealing with them.

On the sixteenth day, as the army approached trebuchet range of the bigger, thicker walls of Lookout, over two hundred kilograms of iron were launched from slightly modified stationary crossbows and, in extremely rapid succession, eighty trebuchets were destroyed.

Confidence makes people do foolish things, after all.

In the two and a half months since the first army had departed from Outer Light, Lookout had swelled, if not grown. The walls were thicker, the tower was taller, more trebuchets were ready to launch debris at anyone who got too close. The whole town was encircled, now, and a great deal of food and water had been stockpiled for the expected siege.

A siege is what they got.

The army stayed out of range of the trebuchets, but could get close enough behind their walls to almost completely encircle Lookout. There were gaps, of course, and the soldiers were spread thin. But Lookout was cut off from the rest of Haven.

Thankfully, the Lord’s House had yet to hear of telegraphs, or the buried wires wouldn’t have been all too hard to find.

More soldiers and more walls were already on their way to Lookout. They would be significantly delayed by the hundred-odd skirmishers and Sand Crawlers who had not retreated into the town. But for now, Lookout was in a stalemate.

And the Lord’s House wasn’t the only threat to Haven.