Rise of the Horde

Chapter 850 - 849

Zul’jinn held the presentation in the forge district’s testing yard because there was nowhere else in the city large enough for the demonstration and because Zul’jinn would not have held it anywhere else regardless.

He had built a mock wall section at the yard’s eastern end: twenty feet of stone blocks salvaged from construction surplus, mortared and dressed, sitting at the same height as Yohan’s current defensive perimeter. At the opposite end he had mounted his device on a rotating iron platform that was itself bolted to a four-foot stone base sunk eighteen inches into the testing yard’s ground.

The device looked, at first examination, like a crossbow that had been rebuilt by someone who found the original design philosophically insufficient.

Khao’khen had brought Arka’garr. He had also brought Droktagar, because any installation project of this scale would fall on Droktagar’s construction crews and Droktagar had opinions about learning that information secondhand. Drakk had been in the city for two days at this point and Khao’khen had invited him on the grounds that what the highland chieftain took back to the mountains should include some understanding of what Yohan’s walls could do.

Zul’jinn did not begin with context. He began with the device.

"The anti-air crossbow platform we built for the capital campaign was a field solution," the master smith said. He moved to the device’s loading mechanism, hands already checking the traverse tension. "It could be broken down and transported. That was necessary then. What I’ve been working on is a different problem: a wall installation that doesn’t need to move because the wall doesn’t move."

He walked them through the specifications the way he always walked people through specifications: quickly, with the assumption that his audience was capable of following and would ask questions if they weren’t.

The traverse arc was one hundred and twenty degrees. Two operators: one on the traverse handle, one on the loading track. Reload time in training was forty-two seconds; his best test operator had hit thirty-six. The bolt was three feet long, triple-shafted from laminated hardwood, iron-tipped, with sheet-iron stabilizer fins machined from the forge’s third-grade production, the grade that didn’t meet weapons-quality tolerance but exceeded the tolerance that a bolt’s fins required.

"What does it do that a Roarer doesn’t do from the wall?" Arka’garr asked. He had his arms crossed in the posture he used when he was preparing to be either impressed or critical and had not yet determined which.

"A Roarer is a warrior’s weapon. It needs a warrior holding it. What I’m building doesn’t need a warrior. It needs two trained operators and a forty-second window between shots." Zul’jinn loaded the device as he spoke, cranking the mechanism along the bolt track with the economical efficiency of someone who had performed this action enough times to stop thinking about it. "Six approaches to Yohan’s walls, primary vectors. Mount two of these per vector, twelve installations total, positioned so each approach is covered from both flanks. Any force advancing toward the walls enters combined coverage at four hundred paces, inside both installations’ arcs simultaneously." He adjusted the elevation with small careful turns. "Their assault elements are at effective killing range before they reach their own weapons’ distance from the walls."

"What about Sixth Realm warriors?" Arka’garr asked. The question that was always the question.

"Fifth Realm plate: one bolt, clean penetration. Sixth Realm plate: two bolts to the same location, or one bolt with an enhanced charge. I’m still working on the charge calibration." Zul’jinn stepped back from the device. "I’m not promising it kills a Sixth Realm warrior on its own. I’m promising it makes the approach to Yohan’s walls expensive enough that an assault requires either overwhelming numbers or a prepared counter-solution, and preparing a counter-solution requires intelligence about the installation system that the system’s placement is designed to prevent."

He moved to the traverse handle. "Stand behind the line."

The test target was a double-thickness iron breastplate bolted to a timber frame at the mock wall section’s base. Two hundred and thirty paces. Zul’jinn had the yard’s distance markers paced out with rope lines so everyone present could see the numbers.

He aligned the sight. He fired.

The sound was harder and flatter than a Roarer: less spread, more concentrated. The bolt crossed the yard in the fraction of a second that left no time to track it visually. The impact noise was the sound of iron entering iron at speed, not the crack of surface damage but the deeper percussive thud of penetration.

The breastplate had a hole in it.

Arka’garr walked the two hundred and thirty paces to the target, which he did without being asked and without commenting on the distance. He examined the breastplate, then the timber frame behind it. The bolt had punched through both iron plates of the double thickness and buried five inches into the hardwood.

He picked up the frame and looked at the bolt’s entry point. He looked at it for a long time.

"Reload time," he said.

Zul’jinn was already at the device, running the reload. He called out the seconds as he went. The whole process took thirty-eight seconds from the shot’s completion to ready-to-fire.

Arka’garr set the breastplate down carefully. "Against a standard infantry assault at that approach distance, a two-operator installation fires approximately six bolts before the assault reaches the walls. At the penetration rate I just observed." He paused. "Combined crossfire from the flanking installation adds another six bolts on a different angle. That’s twelve impacts per assault unit from two installations before they reach the wall base." He looked at Zul’jinn. "How long to build one complete installation?"

"Three weeks with current forge capacity. Six installations is eighteen weeks. But the anchor work slows the timeline if it’s retrofit." Zul’jinn met Droktagar’s eyes. "I need the trolls for the anchor fabrication. The recoil force on each shot is significant and the anchor points need to be set into the wall’s existing structure in a way that doesn’t compromise the wall’s structural integrity. That requires the precision work that the trolls do."

Droktagar was already doing the mental calculation. "If we incorporate the anchor points into the wall renovation that’s scheduled for the south face this season, the structural integration is clean and we save the retrofit time and material. But the south face renovation starts in six weeks and the anchor design needs to be finalized before it starts."

"The anchor design is finalized," Zul’jinn said. He produced a document from inside his work apron. He produced it the way smiths produced things: as if he had been waiting for the exact moment it was needed and had carried it in preparation. "I drew these three months ago. I was waiting for the forge capacity to clear before raising it."

Droktagar took the document and unrolled it. He studied the anchor specifications with the focused attention of a man who was reading engineering and translating it into labor, material, and time.

"Trolls will need a week to prep the anchor hardware," he said. "Another week to set them into the wall renovation. The installation mounts after that." He looked at Khao’khen. "It’s achievable in the renovation window if we start the anchor preparation now."

Drakk had been watching all of this from the yard’s edge without speaking. When Khao’khen turned to him, the highland chieftain was looking at the hole in the breastplate with an expression that was not quite the expression of a warrior assessing a threat. More the expression of a man thinking about the difference between having stone in your mountains and having decided to do something with it.

"Build it," Khao’khen said to Zul’jinn. To Droktagar: "Start the anchor preparation this week." To Arka’garr: "Identify the twelve operators for the first installation. Reload training begins when the first unit is mounted." He looked at the breastplate one more time. "Twelve installations in eighteen weeks. The first four in eight weeks. Priority on the northern approach vectors."