Chapter 62 – The Battle for Torrviol

At noon on the last day of Solem, the Baracueli scouts reported the advance of the Akana Praediar army through the old growth forest to the northwest. General Hanaran had gone back and forth about the best tactics for delaying the army, but in the end, decided an ambush was best. With bog lions and other nasty myrvites roaming the woods, sending regiments out to skirmish and retreat was too risky. The Akanan army was also better mechanized, whereas the Baracuel force had few wagons. A harassing force might be easily encircled, and Hanaran knew they could ill afford to lose anyone. Torrviol settled down to wait.

As evening approached, it was as if the whole town held its breath. Even the birds seemed like they’d been intimidated into silence.

Mirian found herself atop Bainrose castle, on the southwest tower. Lily, not knowing what else to do, had joined her, and was pacing about the tower.

Valen had joined one of the militia squads, even after Mirian told her it was a stupid idea. They’d argued, but Valen had insisted on being in the midst of the fighting and told her it didn’t matter in the end anyways, to which Mirian had to grudgingly admit she was right. Still, she was feeling annoyed about the whole thing, and a bit of regret. Didn’t she want to stick together at the end, like Selesia had? As it turned out, the answer was no.

Respected Jei was helping Professor Torres calculate range tables for her special artillery gun. From their vantage, Mirian could just make the two out down by the plaza. Mirian looked at the position of the sun, and felt something was wrong. Her gaze shifted to the belltower clock.

She frowned, and looked to the militia member at her side. “Tell General Hanaran the Akanans have new information. Either they did reconnaissance, or spotted the scouts, or got information some other way, because they’re not proceeding on their normal timetable.”

The militia member started down the stairs. Hanaran would be in the center of Bainrose, orchestrating the defense. Mirian hadn’t realized just how involved a battle was. The Akanans had made it look effortless when they moved through Torrviol, but then again, they’d done months of preparation and faced no real resistance. Now she saw the ridiculous amount of coordination it all took. The battle lines were stretched out over several miles, from the south hills around Torrviol and all the way to the lake, though the largest concentration of force was at Bainrose and the arc around it.

Torrviol was tensed like a muscle, ready to move. On the parapets, spotters were peering through lenses or busy controlling magical eye spells to reveal enemy positions. Operators stood by, listening in on magical cables. Artillery teams were standing by at the ready, ammunition piled by their guns. Spell engine wagons stood idle, ready to ferry about reinforcements.

In the distance, she heard the first sounds of gunfire. A few minutes passed, then she heard one of the nearby battle magi using a magical eye say, “Contact, grid fifteen. They’re out of cover, at least a dozen moving.” A nearby operator relayed the message.

There was a delay of a minute, then two, then one of the guns down on the ground roared out. Another moment passed, and then Mirian saw the bloom of fire in the forest.

A few hundred feet away, another gun, this one pointing west, opened fire. Then another. Then another, the distant thundering coming from maybe a mile off. Soon enough, Mirian lost track of which spotters were providing information for which guns.

It took some time for the Akanan guns to respond. She heard them, at first thinking they were one of the Baracueli guns off in the distance, then the shells hit. Lightning erupted in the plaza, but it stayed contained to a small area as the battle magi nullified the triggered spell. Across the battlements, Mirian saw shields go up. Magical eye spotters retreated into the towers, since they didn’t need strict line of sight to move their spells about.

“We should go down,” one of the militia members said to Mirian.

“No. I need to watch,” she replied. “You can if you’d like.”

Nearby, one of the observers said, “They’re setting up beyond our pre-sights. I don’t think we have anything in range of grids three or four.” A pause, as the observer listened in to a message. “Well, worth a try. I see three guns being set up. Big ones.”

The next shot that came was from the plaza—from Torres’s gun. Getting shot at in the basement at point blank range hadn’t been so loud as that gun going off two hundred feet away. Red lightning crackled along the barrel as the excess magic discharged off it. Whatever Torres had cooked up, it had incredible power. I need some earplugs next time, she thought. Of all the spells she had scribed down, sound-dampening wasn’t one of them.

“Hit! Hit!” cried the observer.

After that, there was too much going on for Mirian to pick out individual events. Every observer and operator was talking at once. Artillery boomed from town, from the forest, and everywhere shells fell. Fires broke out in the woods, only to be put out by enemy arcanists, while in town buildings crumbled apart as shells erupted within them. The initial volleys weren’t so bad though; with sorcerers and spell engines both putting up defensive shields, the shells’ damage was limited. The counter-battery fire, as Hanaran had called it, was also doing its job. Enemy guns were either silenced by destruction or being forced to reposition.

Between the low clouds and the forest, Mirian spotted two colossal shapes moving in the distance. “There!” she said, running over to get the attention of one of the observers.

His eyes went wide. “Those can’t be airships. They’re too big to be airships!”

The conversation moved along the ramparts. Mirian couldn’t hear it, but she could see the soldiers gesturing and pointing at those incoming behemoths.

A few minutes later, General Hanaran emerged from the stairs to see for herself. She gaped at the spectacle, then looked at Mirian. “How?” the general asked.

“Last time I tried to ask, Marshal Cearsia threw me overboard,” she replied.

“Gods’ blood. Alright, airburst shells might make them hesitate, but we need to get through that armor. Arm guns seven through fourteen with magnetic ripper shells…” Hanaran retreated back down into the castle, barking orders as she went. Across the rooftops of the castle and the town, soldiers ran about, unloading and reloading guns, with cranes moving new boxes of ammunition up.

Mirian opened up her spellbook and turned to the remote whisper spell. Casting it, she said, “Torres, can your cannon hit those airships?”

There was a pause, with more guns thundering. Then Mirian heard the reply in her ear: “Probably not, but it might give them a scare.”

Tension on the battlements grew as the airships approached. Mirian watched as the portholes in the hull opened and the guns bristled out.

Across Torrviol, the gun crews were scrambling to come up with firing solutions. Mirian ran over to one of the nearby guns to help out. It was, after all, just math. She argued briefly about the angle needed with one of the crew. The soldier relented, cranking the wheel that controlled the gun elevation up a few notches.

“Fire!” cried the corporal.

Guns lit up all over town. The sky flashed with airburst spells as lightning crackled out and flames like flowers blossomed in the air. Most of the shells burst too far away to do much damage to the airships, but some exploded above the decks, which must have sent the crews atop them scrambling for cover. A few well-placed shots impacted the armored hulls, though most of the power was absorbed by magical shielding, which Mirian watched crackle across the airship bottoms. The shot from Torres’s gun in the plaza went wide, streaking past one of the wings like a little angry meteor.

The volley did its job, though. Both airships veered aside, turning so their broadside was facing Torrviol, but far further out than they usually did. When the airship guns replied, and a shot slammed into one of the nearby towers of Bainrose, sending stone crumbling, even as a spell engine shield flashed.

“Gods!” Lily cried out. “I can’t take this, Mirian, I’m going below. Stay safe, please?”

It was a ridiculous thing to ask, and just as ridiculous to promise, but Mirian did.

Over the next few hours as night fell, the battle became even more confused. Firefights between infantry erupted across the defensive line, with fireballs and lightning bolts arching through the night. The artillery duels continued, while the two airships above circled like vultures. They’d climbed in elevation and were keeping their distance, but were still peppering the town with plunging fire that even the spell engine shields were struggling to stop.

Then, another shot landed near Bainrose, but instead of exploding into lightning or fire, the shell seemed to disappear into the earth.

Then the earth shook, sending Mirian staggering.

“Damn! They’ve swapped to earth-shaker shells,” one of the soldiers cried out.

That can’t be good, Mirian thought.

Another shot hit the northern wall, and when the shell exploded, it sent fissures through the stone, sending a piece of the battlement sliding off the wall in a slide of jagged rock.

“Evacuate the walls!” one of the captains shouted.

The southwest tower practically exploded, rock cascading down as the artillery piece atop it tumbled down, crew included. There was a reason castles had fallen out of favor.

Mirian headed down the ladder, then down the spiral staircase. Stopping at the second floor, she went to the balcony and looked down. One of the priests was healing a man with a bleeding leg, while the other sat meditative, perhaps trying to recover his power. Another point for Xipuatl, Mirian thought. If the power was purely divine, one wouldn’t need to recover like an exhausted arcanist. She wondered if there was a soul-equivalent to a mana potion.

More injured were sat along the walls on cots, some in agony, some asleep. In the middle of the room, General Hanaran loomed over the battlemap as her staff moved pieces about, adjusting them back as another earthquake jostled everyone. People circled her like a locust cloud, relaying orders or bringing in the newest reports.

“Get me inertial wards around the keep!” one of the staff snapped.

“Can we set off the spellbombs?” another was saying.

“Not yet,” a woman by the operators shouted. “They’re still not moving to the edge of the woods. Right now it would hit a few infantry at most.”

Mirian took note of the positions on the map as best she could. A pity; she’d thought the spellbombs were a great idea.

“They’re hitting the northern positions hard,” another said, while Mirian heard another man say, “Hold the southern guns until they’re out from behind those hills. We can’t waste ammunition on suppression.”

She made her way down to the basement next, where Professor Cassius sat on one of the study chairs, eyes hollow and face gaunt. She didn’t need to measure his aura to know he was nearing total depletion of his mana. If he continued, he might start getting soul abrasion, and that would take far longer than a few days to recover from. Not that it mattered much.

Here the bookshelves also had been scattered to the walls. Mirian could hear spells and gunfire echoing down the open catacomb passages, while soldiers milled about or rested.

“How’s the defense?” Mirian asked.

“Not good,” Cassius rasped. “They’ve been pushing harder here than anywhere. They have perfect knowledge of the areas here. Akanan earth specialists broke down several walls to flank our defensive positions. We’ve retreated to the fourth defensive line. After that, the last line we can hold is here.”

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“Can Hanaran send more troops?”

“The line is stretched thin as it is. We simply don’t have enough people or firepower. The other infantry are fighting war wagons with small arms and a handful of arcanists. Drawing down their numbers risks a breakthrough.”

Mirian didn’t know what a breakthrough entailed, but it sounded bad.

Another earthquake shook Bainrose. Plaster dust scattered into the air, and more books fell off their shelves. More gunfire echoed through the catacombs.

“Can you collapse the catacombs?”

“We don’t have the spell power. It’s too stable. There’s too much solid rock to move.”

The idea had been to hold Bainrose as the center of the defense, but the castle was the primary objective of the Akanans. What if we retreated, and let them have the castle? No one knows how the Divine Monument down there works, anyways. They can’t do much with it in four days.

Mirian moved back to the central hall. It still looked strange with all the shelves out of place. She found Lily crouched down in a corner. “Hey,” she said. “You doing okay?”

Lily shook her head. “I know there will be another me that wakes up after this, but… but this is me. And I don’t… I don’t want to die.”

Mirian hugged her, but that was all she could do. There were no words that could comfort her, and even the sweetest lie felt too bitter to tell.

Respected Jei found her next, spotting her from across the room. “You have taken note of the new positions? And how long it took them to shift ammunition?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s just… it’s a lot to remember. Gods I wish there were memory spells, or I could take just one notebook back with me.” She kept her arm around Lily.