Ptosphes looked around him at the battle-strained faces on the keep's roof. At dawn they would face the twenty-first day of the siege; almost certainly they would face the second storming attempt. The first storming attempt ten days ago had gained the enemy the north tower, but shellfire from the keep had kept them from mounting guns there.
The first had cost the garrison of Tarr-Hostigos a hundred men, the Styphoni three thousand. Another prisoner raid had yielded them that intelligence. To strike back and take Styphoni prisoners had helped boost sagging morale.
The second storming would be more dangerous. The enemy would certainly have some tactics devised to meet shells. Those rifles would come into play against the Hostigi marksmen who had butchered the mercenaries' captains. He would have to order his riflemen to the upper floors where they could fire behind the protection of arrow slits and battlements.
Worst of all, this time Styphon's Red Hand would be clutching at Tarr-Hostigos. The Temple Bands had been gathering in Hostigos Town all day. Would they lead the assault, or bring up the rear to remind the vanguard that there was something to be feared more than Hostigi shells?
Two men carrying Captain-General Harmakros' chair set it down with a thump. The two men carrying Harmakros himself gently lowered him into the chair, arranged the cushions behind him and stepped back.
Even in the twilight, Ptosphes could see that Harmakros' cheeks were too flushed for a man who was supposed to be healing well.
"Did you have wine at dinner?"
"Why not, Prince? It will take more wine than we have in Tarr-Hostigos to kill me before Styphon's House does."
Ptosphes sighed. With variations, he'd heard this at least twenty times today, since it had become obvious that the Styphoni were gathering again. No one expected to see tomorrow's sunset. Nobody appeared to care, either, so long as they could take a proper escort to Galzar's Great Hall with them. To be sure of doing that, everybody had worked all day as if demons would pounce on them the moment they dropped their tools or even stopped to take a deep breath.
Ptosphes looked the length of what was, for another night at least, his castle. The work done to protect the mortars showed most clearly. The four small ones now had stones banked around them, so that the shells bursting outside wouldn't do so much damage. The three larger mortars were back on their field carriages. They could move to prepared positions all over the courtyard as fast as the men on the ropes could pull them, then fire again almost as soon as they stopped.
The four biggest mortars were still in the pit in the outer courtyard. They were really just an old twelve-pounder and three eight-pounders, with their breeches sunk into the earth and their muzzles raised. They were too heavy to move or mount anywhere else, and in any case they could reach everywhere around Tarr-Hostigos from the inner courtyard. Their crews were finishing a magazine of timbers covered with stones, to protect their shells and fireseed.
"Prince Ptosphes!" One of the riflemen on sentry duty was pointing toward the siege lines on the west side of the castle. "They're starting to move around before the light goes. Think they'll come tonight?" He sounded almost eager.
Ptosphes stared into the dusk through his farseer, wishing for the hundredth time in the last four years that he had one of the far-seeing glasses of Great King Truman's army that his son-in-law talked about. They were like Kalvan's old pistol-the Great King couldn't even teach his friends how to make the tools to make the tools to make the glasses!
Yet those skills would be learned. Ermut had made six or seven of the long farseer tubes that brought far away closer. Kalvan had praised Ermut, but truth they were only two or three times better than the naked eye-not like the far-seers Kalvan talked about. Yet, what the gods had taught once, they could teach again-and more easily, because they would be teaching men who were trying to learn and knew what power the new knowledge might give them.
If Kalvan's luck continued to hold, his children might live to look at a battlefield through farseers, or even ride into battle aboard one of those armored wagons that moved without horses and carried guns that fired many times while a man was drawing a deep breath.
Ptosphes put aside thoughts of the future he wouldn't live to see and looked to where the rifleman was pointing. The man was right. Things that looked vaguely like enormous carts were rolling slowly along behind the trenches. It was too dark to make out more, but they must be heavy. The wheels of the carts looked to be solid wood and as high as a man.
"Should we try a few ranging shots, just to remind them that we're awake?" Harmakros asked.
"Not with the mortars. We want to save their shells."
"That little rifled bronze three-pounder on the inner gate, though it might not have the range."
"Kalvan said we shouldn't use case shot with rifled guns," Ptosphes said. "It damages the rifling. With solid shot, that three-pounder will do more good up here."
Harmakros' face asked what he was too tactful to put into words: 'how likely is it that any gun in Tarr-Hostigos will last long enough to damage itself, once the Grand Host advances?' Perhaps he was chafing at having to wait like a bear tethered in a pit, as the dogs circled just of reach.
The hoisting tackle on the keep easily hauled the three-pounder up to the roof, but not before darkness fell. Half a dozen shots produced a satisfactory outburst of shouts and curses from the Styphoni, but otherwise they seemed to have fallen off the edge of the world. After the half dozen failed to start a fire, Ptosphes ordered the gun to cease.
He made a final inspection, counting with special care the torches and tarpots laid ready, in case the Styphoni came at night. It wasn't likely; the chance of hitting friends in a night attack would not please the mercenary captains. It wasn't impossible either, and Ptosphes was determined to follow Kalvan's teachings to the end (not far away now): prepare for everything that isn't impossible.
At last Ptosphes returned to the Great Hall, to find Harmakros asleep in the chair of state and snoring like volley fire from a company of musketeers. Ptosphes rolled himself in his cloak without taking off his armor, on a pallet as far from Harmakros as he could find.
He'd thought he might be too tired or uneasy to sleep, but instead he drifted off into oblivion almost as soon as he stretched out his legs and lowered his head onto the dirt-stiffened cloth.