Guy’s hair blew wildly as they looked out over the plain beyond the city. “I’ve inspected every inch of this wall, and I still don’t believe the quality of engineering.”
Arutha could only agree. The stones used had been cut to a precision undreamed of by the Masterbuilders and stonemasons of the Kingdom. Running his hand over a joint, he could barely feel where one stone ended and another began. “It is a wall that might have defied Segersen’s engineers had they come.”
“We had some good engineers in our armies, Arutha. I can’t see how this wall could be brought down short of a miracle.” He took out his sword and struck hard enough to make the blade ring, then pointed to the merlon where he had struck. Arutha inspected the place and saw only a slight lighter-colour scratch. “It seems a blue granite, like ironstone, but even harder. It’s a stone common enough to these mountains, but harder to work than anything I’ve seen. How it was worked is unknown. And the footings below the plinth are twenty feet into the earth, thirty feet from front to back. I can’t even guess how the blocks were moved from the quarries in the mountains. If you could tunnel under it, the best that might happen is the entire wall section might sink down and crush you. And you can’t even do that, because the wall sits atop bedrock.”
Arutha leaned back against the wall, looking at the city and the citadel beyond. “This is easily the most defensible city I have ever heard of. You should be able to handle up to twenty-to-one odds.”
“Ten-to-one’s the conventional figure for overrunning a castle, but I’m inclined to agree. Except for one thing: Murmandamus’s damn magic. He may not be able to bring these walls down, but I’ll warrant he’s got a means to get past them. Somehow. Else he wouldn’t be coming.”
“You’re certain? Why not bottle you up with a small harrying force and move his army south?”
“He can’t leave us at his back. He had his way with us for a year before I took command, and could have bled us to death by now if I hadn’t changed the rules of the game. Over the last two years I’ve taught our soldiers everything I know. With Armand and Amos helping them learn, they now have the advantages of modern warcraft. No, Murmandamus knows he has an army of seven thousand Armengarians ready to jump on his rear if he turns his back. He can’t leave us behind his lines. We’d hamstring him.”
“So he must rid himself of you first, then turn to the Kingdom.”
“Yes. And he must do it soon, or he loses another season. It turns to winter quickly up here. We see snow weeks before the Kingdom. The passes become blocked in days, sometimes in only hours. Once he has moved south, he must be victorious, for he cannot move his army north again until spring. He is on a timetable. He must come within the next two weeks.”
“So we must get word out soon.”
Guy nodded. “Come, let me show you some more.”
Arutha followed the man, feeling a strange sense of divided loyalties. He knew he must help the Armengarians, but he still was not comfortable with Guy. Arutha had come to understand why Guy had done what he did, and in a strange way he even grudgingly admired him, but he didn’t like him. And he knew why he didn’t like him: Guy had made him see a similarity of nature common to them, a willingness to do what must be done regardless of cost. So far, Arutha had never gone to the lengths Guy had, but he now understood he might have acted in much the same way had he been in Guy’s place. It was a discovery about himself he didn’t particularly like.
They moved through the city, and Arutha asked about those details observed when they had first entered Armengar. “Yes,” said Guy. “There are no clear lines of fire, so that every turn can hide an ambush. I’ve a city map in the citadel, and the city is as it is by design rather than chance. Once you see the pattern, it’s easy to know which directions to choose to reach any given point in the city, but without knowing what the pattern is, it’s easy to get turned about, to be led back toward the outer wall.” He pointed at a building. “Every house lacks windows on the street, and every roof is an archery platform. This city was built to cost any attackers dearly.”
Soon they were inside the citadel, and saw the boys coming across the courtyard. “Where are the girls?” Arutha asked.
Locklear looked disappointed. “They had to go do some things before they reported back for duty.”