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Chapter 73: Artillery Test

West of Border Town, the Chishui River a grey line through white ground.

They had spent half the morning dragging the carriage to the artillery field — the snow made the wheels useless, so it came down to ropes and shoulders and the particular profanity of men moving something heavy in the cold. By the time they arrived, Roland could see the exertion in every face.

Carter studied the covered shape on the cart the way he studied most of Roland’s inventions: with the resigned patience of someone who had long since accepted that the surprises would keep arriving.

“Is this just a larger gun?”

“Almost exactly right,” Roland said. He directed the soldiers to pull the cover clear, then crouched to adjust the elevation himself — barrel parallel to the ground, pointed at a snow berm fifty meters distant. The principles were identical to a musket’s. Scaled up. Considerably.

The cannon was a twelve-pounder: cast to fire iron balls that weighed as much as a thick-legged child. The design Roland had sketched was drawn from his memory of historical illustrations — wheels half a man’s height in diameter, a carriage reinforced with iron fittings wherever the original drawings had called for wood, because wood would split under the recoil and he only had one of these. Three carpenters had spent a full week on the carriage alone, most of it on the wheels: four square bars of equal length, softened in fire, bent, pared down, and bound in iron cladding. Four days just for that.

He was, if he was honest, unreasonably attached to it.

“Standard procedure first,” Roland said, for the benefit of the militia and guards spread in a rough arc behind him. Carter, Iron Axe, his personal guard, twenty militiamen acting as sappers and observers — and Nightingale, somewhere in her fog, and Lightning, who had already seized the cleaning mop with both hands and the expression of someone who had been waiting for this moment.

Her contract with Roland was simple: she got to personally operate every new invention before anyone else. He had found this arrangement quite economical. She found it sufficient.

She swabbed the barrel twice — the mop tracing circles through the bore until the residue came up clean — then set the mop aside and looked at Roland.

“Has everyone watched?” he asked the group. Nods, from the militia. “Remember the sequence. You’ll be doing this yourselves soon enough.”

Lightning reached into the supply bag and removed a paper cartridge — a small, tight cylinder packed with gunpowder — then seated it in the muzzle and drove it down with the ramrod. The iron ball followed, ram-seated behind the charge. She moved to the rear of the cannon and drew the lead fuse through the vent, puncturing the cartridge paper.

Preparation complete.

Everyone stepped back to fifteen meters. Roland held up one hand, looked at Lightning. She nodded, touched spark to fuse.

The lead burned in less than a second. He had time to see it, briefly — the small bright thread of it racing toward the breach — and then the cannon fired.

The sound was a physical thing, a compression against the chest. The muzzle threw a white spume of powder-snow from the ground in a six-foot arc. The iron ball crossed a hundred meters to the plate armor they had staked into the snow as a target, and the sound it made on impact was not a clang but something flatter and harder — a full stop.

When the smoke thinned Roland walked forward with Carter and Iron Axe. The armor had been a breastplate of moderate quality, the kind a wealthy footsoldier might carry. The front face and the back face were now touching each other. A hole the size of a palm occupied the center. Beyond it, the ball had continued for another hundred meters, bouncing twice and throwing up fans of snow on each landing.

“What penetrating power,” Carter said, with the tone of a man who was trying to be professional about something deeply unsettling. He was already looking past the target — measuring it against rows of men, against castle gates, against everything a cannon was not supposed to be able to do to.

Iron Axe said nothing. He had pressed his fist against his sternum and was looking at the cannon with something between reverence and dread. To the desert people, Roland knew, fire was the Mother’s oldest anger — the color of volcanic stone, the presence that remade everything it touched. Roland must be a messenger, he had said once, with complete seriousness. Roland had not known what to say to that.

The test result matched what he’d expected from a classical twelve-pounder: functional at range, devastating against formed infantry or fortification, exactly the weapon that had defined the Napoleonic era and made itself essential through the American Civil War. He ran three additional loads at increasing powder weights, watching the barrel for stress deformation after each shot. None appeared. The steel was good — better than he’d dared assume.

He settled on a standard charge of one point two times the test quantity and began selecting gunners from among the militia, reading their steadiness under each report.

“Your Highness.” Carter had been doing his own arithmetic. “This is a formidable weapon. But it is also very heavy. One pothole deep enough and the cart won’t move. The barrel must be cleaned with a wet mop after every shot. The powder, the balls, the cannon, the cleaning equipment — you’ll need five or six men to operate one gun.”

“Correct on all counts,” Roland agreed.

“Then—”

“Two or three of these,” Roland said, “and the giant tortoises can’t break through the wall.” He caught himself — he had almost said the Duke’s name, which would have been a harder conversation. The demonic beasts. Like the tortoises at the winter battle. “The logistical disadvantages I mean to solve with shipping. The river is the answer.”

He had already bought a two-masted sailing boat from Willow Town — that was what the brig correspondence had actually been about, and if Barov had read the letter as a strange request, that was because Barov hadn’t yet learned to read between Roland’s lines. With Wendy’s ability to command wind, they could move artillery by water, arrive behind an enemy’s landward position, and fire from the direction no defensive formation expected.

Carter looked at the cannon. He looked at the river. He was working through the geometry of it — Roland could see him doing it, the slow methodical process of a man who had built his career on never being caught without a plan.

“I see,” Carter said, finally.

He did not look entirely reassured. But he did not object.

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