Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 81: Artillery Training

Two to three hours of cannon drills every day, and then back to the wall.

Van’er ran through the sequence until the sequence stopped requiring thought: stop, pin, hook, clear, push, set, load, fire, clean, reload, reverse. He ran it until Jop could anticipate when to step without being told, until Cat’s Claw stopped hesitating at the hook release, until all five of them moved through the steps with the particular economy of people who have done something past the point of comfort and out the other side into reflex.

Back at the dormitory, one of his bunkmates had taken to walking with his flintlock slung across his back at all available opportunities. Van’er, whose team had not yet been authorized for live fire, watched this without visible reaction.

He had also noticed something the bunkmate had not noticed: the cannon wheels were wider than the entire wall-walk. Not by a little — by enough that the geometry was simply impossible. Moving a cannon onto the wall would require dismantling the walk first. Which meant the artillery had never been intended for the defensive work of winter. The cannon was for something else. He filed that away and said nothing about it.

On the fourth day, Iron Axe brought all four teams to the river.

Little Town sat at the bank, wide and grey, riding the current with the composure of something that had always belonged there. Van’er stood on the bank and studied it for several seconds. The shell was the same grey material as the town wall — concrete, he had heard it called — and its proportions were wrong for any vessel he had ever seen: too wide, too short, barely taller than a man at the hull sides. Two bare masts. A covered section amidships. A rudder at the stern.

“This is clearly a pontoon bridge,” Jop announced. Jop, who had traveled as far as Longsong Stronghold on ore-carrier barges and considered himself therefore knowledgeable about watercraft. “The wide deck is for stability. I’ve seen plenty of these in the south. If this is actually a ship, how is it moved? By wind? Look at it.”

“The furthest you’ve traveled is Longsong Stronghold,” Rodney said, “and you’re calling yourself an expert.”

“If it were a pontoon,” Nelson added, supporting his brother in the ongoing project of deflating Jop, “why does it need two masts? A pontoon bridge anchored by masts would blow away in a decent wind. And look — a steering wheel at the stern. Pontoons don’t steer.”

“There’s a cabin between the masts,” Rodney said. “Partially finished, but a cabin. This is a ship.”

Jop looked at the steering wheel and then looked at the masts and then stopped talking. His expression did not suggest he had changed his mind so much as that he had run out of available counterarguments.

Van’er had been paying attention to Iron Axe during this exchange, and when Iron Axe finished his introductory description — this was Little Town, the Prince had named it, and they were going to load the cannon onto it — he watched Jop absorb the new information and the brothers absorb the confirmation, and then he went back to thinking about what it meant.

The cannon was going onto a ship. The ship moved on the river. The Chishui ran north to south. There was no river in the demonic beast territory to the north — the forest didn’t have one large enough for navigation.

The cannon was for the south.

He kept this to himself as well.

Two sets of anchor poles on the deck. Two cannon positions. Only two.

Van’er told his group about this quietly, after the loading exercise, while Iron Axe was still noting times. Their collective performance improved by approximately ten percent the following morning.

On the seventh day, with Roland present, Van’er’s team fired their first live shot.

He had expected the sound to be loud. He had not expected it to be loud the way a lightning strike was loud — not just in his ears but in his chest, his back teeth, the space behind his eyes. The iron ball left the muzzle and was gone before he could properly track it, and he was still looking for it when the snow erupted five hundred meters away in a column of white and mud, and then the ball bounced and threw another column, and then it was out of sight entirely.

He stood there for a moment with the understanding arriving in stages.

If you were at that distance and in its path. No armor addressed that problem. No formation. Nothing a soldier could carry or wear or stand behind that would change the outcome.

Each team fired and Roland had someone mark the landing with a flag, then measured the distance from muzzle to marker. After four rounds, the angle changed — the barrel elevated to a new notch on the scale at the rear connection. The sequence began again.

Van’er had noticed the scale on day one: marks at 0, 5, 10, 25, 30. He had not understood it until now. Higher angle, longer flight. Lower angle, faster and flatter with a more damaging bounce. Roland was building a table — distance against angle, shot by shot — and once the table was complete, the cannon could be aimed at any point within its range using only arithmetic.

It was exactly what he knew from archery, scaled past anything archery could reach.

The thought that followed arrived before he could stop it: if you made the ball go faster and faster, would there ever be a speed at which it simply never came back down?

He turned the idea over. Everything fell — there was no reason a cannonball would be different from any other thrown object. And yet the logic of it wouldn’t quite close: faster means farther, and farther means more time before impact, and if you kept increasing the speed—

He let it go. The next group was loading.

Van’er had finished second-fastest on the day’s timing sheet. Tomorrow he intended to be first.

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