Incidentally, there was no way I could replicate the same feat. The amount I could lift with magical telekinesis was really nothing worth mentioning—probably because I couldn’t overcome my expectation that heavy things should be heavy. Full disclosure, I couldn’t even understand how Vera-Sylvie was managing it.
Vice versa, though, she couldn’t use my Flamma Lux either. I supposed it all came down to imagination, in the end. No wonder magical research was a slow-moving field.
That aside, when I’d said that Nadine was one of the only women present, I hadn’t meant it was only her and Vera-Sylvie. There were a number of female battle mages in Salomon’s unit too. While this world trended toward patriarchal systems, magical supremacy was king. Not every mage was a noble, but it was generally safe to assume that a noble was a mage.
That was pretty much how society worked here; no one cared if a woman set out onto the battlefield if she could use magic. And powerful mages commanded respect regardless of their gender. A powerful male commoner mage, for example, would like as not be adopted into a noble family and find it relatively easy to raise his station in the world, while a powerful female commoner mage would be inundated with marriage proposals from the lesser nobility.
Also, not to go off on too much of a tangent, but I’d heard that the women in the Belvérian mage unit had been coming to view Vera-Sylvie with something akin to admiration. Since they’d known about her true talents for a while now, it was my understanding that the magical prodigy was already quite popular among them.
Their admiration definitely wasn’t unwarranted; Vera-Sylvie was simply that much of an outlier. For all that she was cowering away from the roar of the cannon, she was also maintaining a magical barrier to ward off all the dust and dirt being kicked up. She only managed to go around in that dress all the time because she had the means to render herself immaculately clean with a fire-and-forget spell.
Though, that did make me wonder why she wasn’t just soundproofing the barrier instead. I was pretty sure I’d taught her that sound was vibration, at some point...
There was another thunderous roar, followed by a crack as the massive stone projectile slammed into the city’s walls. This time, it broke open a hole—which wasn’t to say it’d fully pierced through. One didn’t erect city walls by heaping up a pile of stone and calling it a day; in most cases, they were double-layered, with enough space in between for the defending soldiers to attack back through various apertures, such as arrow slits. The cannon shot just now had only breached the outer layer.
Still, it seemed to have been sufficient to give the city guard cause to panic. I could see a lot of hurried movement. I also noted that the cannon—a carver—seemed accurate enough at this range. The second shot’s impact point was close enough to the first that I would’ve thought it the same, if I hadn’t been paying close attention.
“So this is the might of a carver cannon,” Salomon muttered. He was standing to my side, also observing the proceedings.
“It would have been able to blow straight through, had we been closer,” Nadine said. She seemed to think that Salomon hadn’t sounded sufficiently impressed. “And ordinarily, one would aim higher.”
I wondered for a moment why she was giving me that discontented look, since it wasn’t as if the cannon belonged to Duke Warren’s army, but it was her unit—which was five hundred strong, by the way—firing it at the moment. I supposed that was reason enough to want to defend them.
“My apologies,” I said. “But the city’s residents have committed no crime. We’d rather avoid causing them any undue harm.”
City walls, being subject to the same laws of physics that governed all structures, were less durable near the top than they were at their foundations. The parapets in particular would easily shatter if struck by a cannon projectile. For the record, Reydra’s city walls had battlements—crenellated protrusions that resembled a rook from chess, from which archers could fire from the gaps.
However, aiming higher would’ve increased the risk of the projectiles missing the wall and landing in the city. Maybe that would be forgivable if we’d been at war with another country, but this war was a civil one. I wanted to keep the casualty count as low as I possibly could.
The thing was, the nobility didn’t share my mentality in that regard. Or at least, it was close but ever so slightly out of sync. Reydra was imperial land, and thus deserving of my protection. But the nobility were only concerned with their own holdings. Those of another noble might as well be a foreign country to them.
“No, I truly am surprised,” Salomon said, shrugging. “The Kingdom of Belvére doesn’t have the spare resources to acquire siege cannons.”
It seemed this was Salomon’s first time seeing cannon fire. Well, from this side of things, anyway. I suspected he had plenty of experience on the receiving end.
“I see. So that’s how it’s done,” he muttered to himself. He’d produced a device resembling a spyglass—presumably a magic item—from somewhere and was watching the cannon crew. “They use oil to cool it between shots.”
His calm running commentary reminded me of a birdwatcher having a good time. Its sheer contrast against the deafening roar of the cannon was surreal enough that I had to fight back a chuckle. “That seems to be common practice these days,” I remarked. “It’s less damaging to the barrel over time than water.”
I was fairly sure that water would’ve cooled it faster, though. I remembered learning somewhere that as insulators went, it was tough to beat water’s specific heat capacity. Not that I would’ve bet any money on my own engineering knowledge. I’d been a humanities guy back on Earth. And cooling objects rapidly could create fractures, or something like that, right? Maybe that was why they preferred to use oil.
Incidentally, all the cannons of this age were bombards, which used gunpowder to fire stone projectiles. This was because iron cannonballs were both expensive and difficult to manufacture. Then there was the fact that mass production didn’t exist yet, meaning the caliber of the cannon and the size of the worked stone cannonballs were inconsistent. That was why the barrels narrowed toward the rear and contained a number of linear protrusions within: to ensure they could discharge any stone that was caught on them.
Nadine’s unit operated the cannon with practiced familiarity, probably because Duke Warren’s army possessed cannons of the same model.
That said, we were already in the eighth month of the year, which meant it was hot enough that standing still in a helmet and armor would get you sweating like a pig in short order. The cannon crew were all naked from the waist up.
Incidentally, unlike the main host of Duke Warren’s forces—the three thousand men led by Hervé de Cédolin—the plan for Nadine’s five hundred man unit was for it to garrison and defend Keighamer. Given the scale of the city, that would most likely prove more than feasible if they combined their numbers with the existing guard force.
Their unit would only continue to operate alongside us until the arrival of Marquess Mardrusa and Count Ethaiq’s forces, which would be happening soon. That meant this was Nadine’s first and last chance to demonstrate her leadership skills in front of the emperor. I suspected that was why she seemed so motivated.
A cannon roared, easily the loudest report yet.
“Eek!”
Vera-Sylvie looked like she might keel over, so I reached out and pulled her to her feet. It seemed she’d had the physical strength to stand all along, and had been curled up purely out of fear. I wouldn’t have blamed her for going weak at the knees, though; it had sounded like a bolt of lightning crashing down right next to us.
“Was that...?” I began.
“The flock cannon’s first shot,” Nadine confirmed.
The massive projectile it had fired, as wide as a man’s shoulders, had opened up another hole in the city walls. However, like the carver, it had only managed to smash through the outer layer.
“The sheer heat it gives off is impressive,” I remarked.
“I can’t believe...it reaches...all the way here,” Vera-Sylvie added.
For all its heat and sound, though, its efficacy seemed a touch lacking in comparison.
“The barrel’s too large to cool with oil, no matter how much we use,” Nadine said. “So we’ll allow it to air-cool. Is that acceptable?”
I nodded. “When will it be ready to fire again?”
“In an hour.”
One shot an hour, huh? That just wasn’t worth the effort. I supposed it was no surprise that the flocks had gone out of style. Carvers would more than suffice for siege purposes.
“Still, the sound lends it a certain intimidation factor that could be useful,” Salomon noted. “One that offensive spellwork usually lacks.”
As he pondered the flock cannon’s uses, I issued an order to Nadine. “Reduce the amount of gunpowder for the next shot.”
“We can’t—it won’t reach the wall.”
Our troops were positioned in front of the cannons, to protect them against the enemy if they rushed out of their gates and tried to catch us off guard. Evidently, Nadine was worried that weakening the shots might result in the projectiles falling on our own men.
“We don’t suppose you could fine-tune the...” I began, before reconsidering. “No, we suppose not.”
“Impossible!” she said firmly. “We can’t risk even the slightest chance of friendly fire!”
That was unfortunate. I’d have to ask Vera-Sylvie to move it before we fired it again later, then.