Another pause, and another tumbling dot from Preble. As it grew, he could see that it was trailing . . . not flame, but blue smoke. Like . . . like one of the grenades, but so much bigger. Which means . . .
“Down!” he shouted, diving for the ground; his repaired back-and-breast gouged at him as he landed on the paving stones. “Down, you idiot!”
He reached out, grabbed the thick muscular boot-clad ankles of the First Spear and yanked, pulling him level. Then the world went out in thunder and pain.
* * *
“There’s a bloody hole in the causeway where that big iron barrel of hellpowder landed!” Esmond said enthusiastically.
a crater, Center whispered pedantically at the back of Adrian’s mind. There where times when the god-spirit-machine reminded him of a particularly literal-minded instructor of rhetoric he’d studied under in the Grove.
The Gellerts were sitting on chairs brought up to the wall’s parapet, with a table laden with watered wine, olives, fish, ham, bread and fruit. Esmond was tearing into the food with methodical speed, his eyes glued to the shore and the Confederation works.
“Yes, as long as the gunpowder holds out we can batter it to pieces faster than they can rebuild it,” Adrian said.
Esmond nodded, smiling. “It’s a pity we can’t reach their camp that way—perhaps we could mount one of the trebuchets on a ship? A big merchantman, say—take out the mast, put the trebuchet on the center.”
“Accuracy would go to the Shades,” Adrian said, surprised and impressed. Esmond was starting to think in terms of the potential of the new devices.
Weapons technology diffuses faster than anything else, Raj said, his mental voice somehow tired and amused at the same time. Medicine and new ways of growing crops may get ignored as outlandish nonsense, but come up with a better way of cracking skulls and they’ll fall all over themselves to get their hands on it.
“But pretty soon,” Adrian said, “it’s going to occur to the Confeds that nothing we’ve shown them is much good against moving targets—like ships, for instance.”
Esmond’s smile turned to a scowl. “King Casull will support us with the royal fleet,” he said.
The brothers’ eyes met. We hope, went unspoken between them.
* * *
” . . . save the arm,” someone was saying.
Justiciar Demansk’s eyes blinked open. There were two physicians hovering over him, and Helga. He looked down; his left arm was immobilized with bandages and splints, and just beginning to deliver a ferocious ache. For the rest he felt the usual sick headache-nausea you got from being knocked out, and bruises, wrenches and sprains. About like a bad riding accident, he decided, and pushed the body’s complaints away with a trained effort of will. The scents of canvas and the sharp smell of medicine made him want to vomit, but that passed as well.
A few curt questions settled that he wasn’t badly damaged—his First Spear had taken a bad head wound, been trepanned, and they were unsure whether he would live; now, that hurt.
When the doctors were gone at last, Demansk let his daughter raise his head and bring a cup to his lips. A distant sound like thunder made him jerk a little and spill the water on the thin sheet.
“More?” he said.
Helga nodded; the tent was dim, and it made her eyes seem to glow green at him. “More. The causeway is in ruins.”
“Not to mention the reputation of everyone concerned with this fiasco,” he said, laying his hand down on the pillow. “You know, this young man of yours—”
“Scarcely mine, Father!”
“—this Adrian Gellert, he threatens the whole course of things as they are. Starting with the Confederacy.”
She snorted. “Oh, come now, Father. We’ll take Preble, eventually.”
“We may, but it’s going to be very expensive. Why do you think the world is the Confederacy and some outlying regions now, instead of a tangle of little cities and valley kingdoms, the way it used to be?”
“Because we’ve got a better army, of course. And the gods favor us, supposedly.”
“The two often go together,” Demansk said dryly, not returning her smile. For one thing, it hurt too much. “But one reason is that cities don’t hold out for years, the way they did back during the League Wars, or even the wars of the Alliance. The Confederacy can take most towns in a month or less. Your . . . this Freeman Gellert has made sieges a lot more expensive again, all of a sudden. If these innovations—” the word had sinister connotations of decay and evil, in Emerald and the Confederation’s tongue as well “—spread.”