In the gray light, the cleared ground between wall and outer city was dotted with immense bulks, giant animals of some unknown species that had crawled there to die. That one must have shed a wheel or broken an axle on a bit of uneven ground, maybe an old cesspit. The one beyond them; the Hebridean one, seemed to have reached the wall successfully. The drawbridge was still in place from tower to battlements, and as he watched, another group of men trotted over it. Another, not as successful. They had cut the rope and then the drawbridge had fallen just feet short of the wall. It hung limply, like an enormous tongue from an eyeless face. Mailed bodies lay at the base of the wall beneath it.

Shef stepped off the drawbridge to let another wave of stormers pass by, then began to count. Three towers had not reached the wall, two had failed to get their men over the wall once they had reached it. That meant at most, five successful breaches. That had been enough. But they would have lost more if they had been slower, Shef thought. Or if they had not all come at once.

There must be a rule there. How would you say it? Maybe, in Norse, “Höggva ekki hyggiask.” Hit ’em, don’t think about it. One heavy blow, not a string of little ones. Brand would think that a good rule, once it was explained to him.

He looked up and saw in the sky what for weeks he had seen in his dreams, in his nightmares: the gigantic boulder rising with superhuman ease, still rising after all sense demanded that it must stop, reaching a peak. Starting to come down. Not on him. On the tower.

Shef cringed in terror—not for his own skin but for the appalling crash that must come, the ripping and rending as all the timbers and wheels and axles he had sweated over sprang apart. The Viking on the bridge cringed too and threw up a useless shield.

A thud, a ripple of loose earth. Hardly believing, Shef gaped at the boulder now embedded in the earth twenty feet from the side of his tower, looking as if it had been there since the dawn of creation. They had missed. Missed by yards. He had not thought they could.

The man in front of him, a burly figure in mail, was hurled aside.

Blood in the air, a thrum like the bottom note of a giant’s harp, a line in the air that came too fast to be seen and drove in and through the warrior’s body.

The bolt-machine as well as the boulder-machine. Shef stepped to the edge of the wall and looked down at the broken body now sprawled at its foot. Well, they might be in action now—but one had missed and both were too late. They must still be captured.