Rise of the Horde - Chapter 784 - 783

The bombardment’s opening volley was the sound of one hundred and twenty-one thundermakers firing simultaneously.

The sound was not the sound that fifty thundermakers had produced. The sound that fifty thundermakers produced was the sound that shook buildings and rattled windows and caused the capital’s civilian population to pause in their daily routines and look toward the walls where the sound originated. The sound that one hundred and twenty-one thundermakers produced was the sound that ended daily routines.

The sound was the sound of the world’s ceiling descending, the compression wave traveling through the capital’s streets and alleys and buildings with the physical pressure that compressed air produced when the air was compressed by the collective discharge of one hundred and twenty-one dwarven-forged weapons firing iron balls at the same target at the same moment.

Windows shattered. Not from fragments. From the pressure wave. The sound’s physical force exceeded the structural tolerance of glass panes whose construction had been designed for weather and whose construction’s design parameters did not include the specific consideration of what one hundred and twenty-one simultaneous thundermaker discharges produced in the atmospheric pressure within a walled city’s enclosed space.

The first volley struck the western wall.

One hundred and twenty-one balls. Each one forty pounds of dwarven-forged iron traveling at the velocity that the thundermakers’ powder charges produced. Each ball striking the wall’s stone facing at the points that the battery arc’s geometry targeted. The western wall received one hundred and twenty-one simultaneous impacts and the wall’s response was the response that three-century-old stone produced when three-century-old stone encountered forces that three-century-old stone had not been built to resist.

The wall cracked. Not at one point. Across its entire width. The one hundred and twenty-one impacts’ combined concussive force propagated through the wall’s stone mass in the compression wave that the impacts’ simultaneity produced, the wave traveling through the stone’s structure at the speed that compression waves traveled through dense material, the wave’s passage stressing every mortar joint and every stone face and every structural element that the wall’s construction contained.

Mortar dust erupted from the wall’s surface across a three-hundred-pace section. The dust was the dust that mortar joints produced when the joints’ adhesion was stressed beyond the adhesion’s tolerance, the dust the visual indicator of the structural damage that the impacts’ compression wave had produced in the wall’s internal construction.

“The wall is cracking across its width,” an engineer reported from the wall-walk’s inspection position. “The mortar joints are failing in a pattern consistent with compression wave propagation. The wave’s damage is internal. The wall’s facing stones are intact but the mortar behind them is failing.”

The second volley struck sixty seconds later. One hundred and twenty-one balls into the same three-hundred-pace section. The impacts’ compression wave traveled through stone whose mortar joints had been weakened by the first wave, the second wave’s propagation finding the paths that the first wave had opened and widening them. Mortar dust became mortar fragments. The fragments fell from the wall’s surface in the cascading pattern that progressive structural failure produced.

The third volley. The fourth. Each volley sixty seconds apart. Each volley one hundred and twenty-one balls into a wall whose structural integrity decreased with each volley because each volley’s compression wave propagated through stone whose previous waves’ damage had reduced the stone’s ability to resist subsequent waves.

“The northwestern corner,” Fairfax said, at the fourteenth hour. “The corner’s foundation settlement has accelerated under the bombardment. The hairline cracks are now finger-width cracks. The facing stones are shifting. The breach will open at the northwestern corner within twenty-four hours at the current bombardment rate.”

* * * * *

Inside the capital, the bombardment’s effect was the effect that sustained artillery bombardment produced on a civilian population that had never experienced sustained artillery bombardment: the specific, progressive degradation of the normalcy that the population’s daily routines sustained.

The first hour’s bombardment produced fear. The fear was the response that the unknown produced in populations whose experience did not include the specific stimulus of their city’s walls being struck by one hundred and twenty-one thundermaker balls every sixty seconds. The fear was visible in the streets’ emptying, the shops’ closing, the specific compression of the population into the buildings’ interiors where the walls’ and roofs’ additional layers provided the psychological protection that the physical protection’s inadequacy demanded the psychological protection compensate for.

The second hour’s bombardment produced adaptation. The adaptation was the response that sustained stimulus produced in populations whose fear’s initial intensity could not be maintained at the initial intensity’s level because the body’s fear response was designed for brief episodes rather than sustained duration. The population adapted. The shops reopened. The streets repopulated. The daily routines resumed in the modified form that the bombardment’s presence imposed: routines conducted indoors rather than outdoors, routines that included the periodic pause when the volley’s impact shook the buildings’ foundations and the pause’s duration was the duration that the population needed to confirm that the building was still standing.

The third day’s bombardment produced the specific acceptance that sustained threat produced in populations whose adaptation had processed the fear and whose acceptance was the state that followed adaptation: the state of living inside the threat’s presence and conducting life’s requirements in the awareness that the threat was constant and the awareness’s effect on the requirements was the effect that constant threat produced, which was the effect of urgency. Everything was done faster. Everything was done with the specific efficiency that the awareness of potential interruption imposed on the activities that the interruption might interrupt.

The walls held through the third day. The walls held through the fourth day. The northwestern corner’s cracks widened. The facing stones shifted. The mortar behind the stones failed in the progressive pattern that three days of sustained bombardment produced.

The breach opened on the fifth day.

The northwestern corner’s wall section collapsed at the seventh hour of the fifth day’s bombardment, the collapse the specific structural failure that the bombardment’s cumulative damage had been building toward since the first volley’s compression wave had found the foundation’s settlement cracks and begun the progressive weakening that five days of sustained bombardment completed.

The collapse was not dramatic. The collapse was the measured, incremental process that structural failure produced in stone construction whose failure was the result of progressive weakening rather than sudden catastrophe. The wall section leaned outward. The lean increased. The mortar joints at the lean’s base opened. The facing stones at the lean’s base slid. The lean became the tilt and the tilt became the fall and the fall deposited the wall section’s stone mass in the rubble pile that the fall’s geometry produced: a sloping ramp of broken stone that extended from the wall’s base to the wall-walk’s height, the ramp the specific feature that breach assaults used as the approach route from the exterior to the interior.

The breach was forty feet wide. The rubble ramp’s slope was the slope that armored warriors could climb without the climbing aids that steeper slopes required.

“Breach,” the engineer reported. The word carried the specific weight that the word carried when the word was spoken about the walls that protected a kingdom’s capital and the word’s speaking meant the walls no longer provided the protection that the capital required.

The barbarian assault force formed at the breach’s base within the hour. Three thousand warriors in dwarven armor, their boomsticks loaded, their hand axes sheathed at their hips, their formation the assault formation that breach doctrine prescribed: a compressed column whose width matched the breach’s width and whose depth provided the sustained pressure that breach assaults required to push through the defense that the breach’s defenders would mount inside the gap.

“FORWARD!” Garrok’s command carried across the assault force with the Sixth Realm authority that the warchief’s voice projected. The command was the command that began the assault that would determine whether the capital’s walls’ failure became the capital’s failure.

The assault force surged toward the breach.