It began early in the morning, the sun starting to rise above a dark mass of figures spread across the plain in front of the south wall of the City of the Goddess. Except that there was no longer a true wall. The Emperor's whale guns had done their work and now only a line of rubble and a few hundred paces of grass separated the streets and houses from the massed warriors outside. The colours of the eastern army brightened as shadows retreated before the fresh sunlight sweeping the field. Lions with their red banners hoisted high, Tigers resplendent in yellow and crimson, Viper archers and masked Raven swordsmen clad head to toe in black. Even the Hawks were there - what remained of them leastways. And as a single entity, to the sound of great drums, this huge army, a massive multi-coloured sea of humanity, began first walking and then running towards the rubble of the south wall. And not an arrow or a missile fell on them as the fastest reached the piles of stones and began to scramble over them, eyes adjusting in the shadows cast by the City, straining to see what lay beyond. And soon enough they saw, with horror, the muzzles of cannon lined before them. Dozens of cannon. No, hundreds of them! Cannon that - so the Emperor had claimed - did not exist in the lands of the Goddess or in the realm of the northern barbarians. And yet, nevertheless, there they were.
At first, the guns did not speak and the Emperor's warriors - never let it be said that they were cowards - charged at them determined to strike down the men around them. And many a City Guardsman or Son of the North trembled at the sight before him as he stood by his gun. But nevertheless they waited, for Archimedes himself had visited each gun in the days before and said, "Shall we be content to kill one hundred of them? Or one thousand? No! Let many thousands come to us across the stones before we begin! Only this way can we teach the Emperor the lesson he so richly deserves! Only this way can we rid our lands of him!"
And so they waited until at last, under the command of Fris himself, the first gun discharged into a cohort of Ravens, less than fifty paces before it. And then others joined, with a crescendo that, so they say, reached the ears of Kailyn and her Eagle Legion that had left camp the day before and was now several leagues away from the City on its eastward journey.
The cannon were not loaded with large round balls that day. Fris, in his ingenuity, had found a means by which many hundreds of small pieces of metal and stone - even nails, clasps and hinges - could be placed within the muzzles bound together with canvas and sawdust. Watching from above, it seemed to Taneric that a wave from each gun swept over the ranks of invaders, like a ripple from a stone thrown into a pond, but propagating one thousand times faster and leaving only death in its wake. Those closest to the guns almost disappeared, as if they had never existed, or had been somehow imagined. Further away, arms, legs and heads were lost. Further yet, men went down screaming, covered in gore, and even the injuries to a single man would be too numerous to count.
Fris had angled the cannon so that they did not fire directly at the approaching army. Instead they covered a longer distance to the rubble of the wall, the hypotenuse of a deadly triangle, maximising the area over which slaughter would be inflicted. And their distance from the ruins of the wall had been carefully calculated so that each could be reloaded in less than the time it took for an enemy to reach them, running over the broken ground in between, slowed by the stones and, eventually, the bodies of fallen comrades. Even so, some of the Emperor's warriors did indeed reach the guns, miraculously escaping the spray of death across their paths. But these brave souls were few in number, and they were easily cut down by Sons of The North wielding broadswords and battle axes in defence of the artillerymen.
And this - although, reader, I know it can barely be believed - continued until almost the first hour of the morning was over. Fris, watching from his elevated position behind the guns, clenched his fists and looked skyward, and was heard to cry out, "Goddess! Make them stop coming!" But only when the mounds of dead and dying had grown so high that they could barely be traversed, did the Emperor's army fall into retreat, scampering back across the plain to the trees in the distance.
This time there were no shouts from the walls of the City, no chants in praise of Archimedes or Prince Taneric. There was only silence as the dense smoke from the guns dispersed across the rooftops and the full horror, the full scale of what had befallen, was revealed to those watching. Ashala, standing beside Tak at the ruins of the south gate, was overcome and fell bodily into him, so that he had to gather up his former mistress and cradle her in his arms. It was left to Hanja to call her sisters to action, ignoring Tak's cry for restraint just as Ashala had done in the aftermath of the Emperor's first assault.
This time there were fewer survivors, or at least fewer that could be helped.
The Chronicle of The Temple says only this of the battle; 'On the second day of the boar, in the fifteenth year of the Republic, the Emperor's armies were repelled at the south wall. May the Goddess have mercy on us all!''
It seems likely that Priestess Shallie, returning from the field where she and her sisters once again tended to the wounded, could not bring herself to write more.
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