“Smoke!” the lookout shouted.

“Down, down!” Perivos Akuanis bellowed as he threw himself to the ground, but there was little need: most of the men were down before him, bellies and faces pressed against the earth. The terrible moment was on them, the long instant of whistling near-silence. Then the massive cannonball hit the citadel wall with a bone-rattling crunch that shook the ground and smashed more stone loose from the wall’s inner side.

After waiting a few moments to be certain the debris had stopped flying, Count Perivos opened his eyes. A new cloud of stone dust hung in the air and had coated everything on the ground; as the count and his workmen began to clamber to their feet he could not help thinking they looked like some sort of ghastly mass rising of the recent dead.

One of his master masons was already on his way back from examining the wall, which had been pounded over these last days by a hundred mighty stone cannonballs or more.

“She’ll take a few more, Kurs, but not many,” the man reported. “We’ll be lucky if it’s still standing tomorrow.”

“Then we must finish this wall today.” The count turned and shouted for the foreman, Irinnis. “What do we have left to do?” he demanded when the man staggered up. “The outwall can only take a few more shots from those monstrous bombards of theirs.” Count Perivos had learned to trust Irinnis, a small, sweaty man from Krace with an excellent head for organization, who had fought—or at least built—for generals on both continents.

Scratching his sagging chin, Irinnis looked around the courtyard—one of the citadel’s finest parks only a tennight ago, now a wreckage of gouged soil and broken stone. The replacement wall being built in a bowl-shaped curve behind the battered outwall was all but finished. “I’d like the time to paint it, Kurs,” he said, squinting.

“Paint it?” Akuanis leaned toward him, uncertain he had heard correctly: his ears were still ringing from the impact of the last thousandweight of stone cannonball. “You didn’t say ‘paint it,’ did you? While the whole citadel is coming down around our ears?”

Irinnis frowned—not the frown of someone taking offense, but more the face of an engineer astonished to discover that civilians, even those gifted and experienced in warfare like Count Perivos, could not understand plain Hierosoline speech. “Of course, Lord, paint it with ashes or black mud. So the Xixies will not see it.”

“So that…” Perivos Akuanis shook his head. All across the park the men who had not been injured in the last blast, and even those whose injuries were only minor, were scrambling back to work. “I confess, you have lost me.”

“What good are our arrow slits, Kurs,” said Irinnis, pointing to the shooting positions built into the curving sides of the new wall, “if the autarch’s landing force does not try to come through the breach their cannon has made? And if they see the new wall too quickly, they will not come through the breach and die like proper Xixian dogs.”