Ato’s plan for Lord’s Shield was both extremely simple and completely absurd. It started with her, Tengu, Jules, Ora, Ryoko, Emen, and Heft and Pest sneaking into the fortress. How exactly they would do that, she wasn’t clear about, but she seemed confident that they could.

Lord’s Shield was shut tight enough that there was no plan to try to free slaves from the fields within the walls or wives from their domestic slavery. They would simply find the right people to kill.

They would have to blend in, which was a large part of why Ato needed Heft and Pest, rather than some of the younger siege breakers who knew the Lord’s House better. They were into their late thirties, still distinctly younger than Jules and probably Tengu, but close enough that it wouldn’t seem too odd for a young man to have such old wives.

Jules found the idea of being a wife absolutely hilarious.

Ato didn’t know exactly how long they would need to stay, but the outcome she was seeking was to turn Lord’s Shield against itself. To sow suspicion and doubt. To make people look at each other with fear.

Once that outcome was achieved, they would rejoin the besieging forces and wait a while. The fortress wouldn’t destroy itself, certainly not, but the longer they had to stew in their fear, the less effective they would be at mounting a defence.

Ora wasn’t the only person who wasn’t sold that it would work. The Lord’s House was bound together by faith, and wouldn’t tolerate that faith being threatened. They were adept at sweeping things under the rug and ignoring problems to keep the peace within.

Ato shrugged. ‘In that case, we just need to kill more. Make them fear the Mistress ever more.’

Ora was satisfied with that answer.

The other seventy-five siege breakers were tasked with making the walls feel unsafe. Narmen’s stationary crossbows had been just about useless from the start, since the Lord’s House had already set up much sturdier versions of their portable walls atop their battlements. Trebuchets could fire over them, in the case that the besieging troops got too close.

‘There’s no need to be too aggressive,’ Ato said. ‘And do take note of Beep’s eyes, when you act.’

Beep had tried to make herself small, Ato had put an arm around her.

The trouble with the portable walls was still the way they limited visibility. Arrow slits may have been difficult to fire into, but it could be done. So what holes there were through the walls were disguised such as to be just about invisible. Staring out through a layer of camouflage was difficult.

The armies from Oszrath and Narmen assured Ato that they had already tried many of the tactics she intended to use top open up the top of the wall. Ato told them that they hadn’t tried hard enough.

Ato’s plan started with making the walls unsafe, there was no other way to get into Lord’s Shield. The gates, destroyed more than two years ago, had been built over until they were just another part of the wall.

Beep wasn’t the only one with good eyes, or the only one guiding the siege breakers. But Ato had been working on Beep in particular for well over a year, and her efforts were paying off. Not only was Beep adept at spotting small breaks in the patterns of the defence, she had become very good at communicating what she saw.

Jules and Ato were both exceptional at maintaining morale. As the siege breakers’ efforts dragged into a second week without any noticeable success, they were not discouraged. It was not fruitless if they gained experience.

Each night, the siege breakers picked a spot on the walls to focus on. They had developed a kind of shorthand to quickly get across hazards, targets and weak points. Each evening, Beep sketched the area of the wall that they had picked, and the group went through and labelled everything, to make sure they all knew what they were talking about.

Beep was surprised by how well she took to this whole thing. Ato was not.

In sixteen nights, the siege breakers had managed to would, or hopefully kill, one man, up on the walls. He had been incautious, and had caught an arrow in the upper chest for it.

On the seventeenth night, they had their first proper success.

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‘Ballista, five-six,’ Beep muttered to the stationary crossbows. The observation rapidly made it through the archers.

‘Shot four,’ Tengu muttered.

The heavy, mobile walls labelled five and six on Beep’s evening sketch turned just enough to expose the front of a ballista. The stationary crossbow labelled four hit the side of the ballista’s frame, shunting it off target and forcing it to fire early. The shot hit the wall marked five just high enough to shove it suddenly off balance.

It wasn’t much. The crenulations stopped the wall from tipping all the way over. But it was a wall out of place. Arrows and quarrels crowded into the gap and, high on the wall, Skin hurled a burning pot into the gap and let go of the bricks.

Eight people caught Skin before he hit the ground and just managed to get out of the way before flames spilled down the outside of the wall. More of the stuff had made it inside, though, and shouts were turning to screams.

Beep estimated five dead, but it was impossible to be sure.

For more than four years, since Lookout’s skirmishers had dug traps lengthways, so that a troop that rushed to their comrades’ aid would wall in, Ato had proven adept at making the Lord’s House do what she wanted them to do. They wouldn’t make exactly the same mistake again, they would make the mistake that Ato wanted them to make.

In broad daylight, the siege breakers dragged a loaded catapult within range of the trebuchets inside Lord’s Shield. The burning ceramic globe exploded in a gout of flame harmlessly against the base of the walls, just before the catapult was pulverised by a huge stone.

Someone from Oszrath asked what the point of that had been.

Ato shrugged. ‘Fire’s not so scary, is it?’

On the eighteenth night, Ato convinced a good chunk of the besieging forces to join in pelting the walls with the incendiary shot they had used to end the siege at Lookout. The Lord’s House had had three years to find ways to deal with fire. A lot of it simply slid off the mobile walls and down the heavy stones of Lord’s Shield. Some shots went over the walls and down into the town below.

Someone else from Oszrath said that had been a waste of time and energy, and they wouldn’t help again. Beep had to restrain herself from getting into a fight.

On the nineteenth night, the siege breakers tried something that Oszrath and Narmen had already tried, years ago. They tied ropes to the stationary crossbow quarrels and lodged them into the walls. The quarrels couldn’t get deep enough to not just come back out when the ropes were pulled.

Some people from Narmen were starting to worry that Haven wouldn’t be as useful as they’d thought.

The twentieth night was quiet, and slow. Those troops from Oszrath and Narmen who were awake didn’t see Haven’s siege breakers doing anything. It seemed like they must have given up. Oszrath wasn’t surprised, the standstill had been going so long, there hadn’t been much hope for change.

About two hours before dawn, the morning shift started getting up and getting ready to take over from the night shift. They were a little surprised, a little disappointed, to hear that the siege breakers hadn’t been up to anything during the night. But they supposed it made sense.

The siege breakers picked their moment: the morning shift change. It was gradual, incremental, to make sure that the walls were never short of troops. But it was just a little bit of distraction.

The horizon was turning purple with the approaching sun when, quite without warning, nearly a third of the mobile walls atop Lord’s Shield burst into flames. Not even the besieging forces had noticed the two dozen siege breakers very slowly climbing the walls.

A shout into the morning light was only more confusing. ‘Beetle!’

Beetle, clinging to the walls and feeling like she might be getting old, scrambled up, into the fire, and slung three heavy, barbed hooks over the top of the portable wall. The hooks caught, sinking deep into the frame behind as Beetle rappelled down to the pulley that had been sunk into the base of the wall, where it was still burned from the previous few nights of fire.

As more of the siege breakers emerged from the sand to pull on the rope, Beep shouted again. ‘Skin.’

More hooks, another pulley.

‘Owl. Casm. Tarry.’

The trouble with mobile walls is that they’re mobile. Meaning that they’re not fixed in place. If they were fixed, the defenders of Lord’s Shield wouldn’t be able to fire their ballistae or catapults down on any attempts to reach the walls that got too close for the Trebuchets.

A pulley is, of course, a force multiplier. A wall leaning against crenulations can be imagined as a lever. The crenulations were less than half as tall as the walls.

Having your feet set on fire is very distracting, and may cause you to fail to notice when a series of steel hooks wedge themselves into a portable wall half a metre above your head.

Five of the portable walls tipped over the battlements, exposing nearly sixty soldiers and a dozen or so siege engines to incoming arrows and stationary crossbow quarrels.

That was why Ato had waited for the shift change, to have as many allies as possible available to fire on the Lord’s House. All of the siege breakers were occupied pulling the walls down.

As much as the Lord’s House spurned the most modern conveniences of technology, like electricity and plumbing, they weren’t idiots. The portable walls could be bolted into place very quickly, if the soldiers who were supposed to do it weren’t distracted by being set on fire.

Exposed soldiers ran for cover. More fires burst around the undefended spaces. Beep shouted more names and, while more hooks were flung over the stationary walls, none more were pulled down.

In the chaos of the dawn, almost no one noticed eight people dashing through the roaring flames and over the walls.