Chapter 167: The Fire from Heaven
The silence that followed the first assault was a heavy, oppressive thing. The men of the Devota stood on the walls of Castra Umbrarum, the adrenaline of the slaughter slowly draining away, leaving behind a sour, metallic taste of exhaustion. They had re-armed, their crossbow magazines refilled from the fort's ample stores. They had eaten their rations of hard bread and dried meat, but the food tasted like ash in their mouths. The image of the carnage below, the sheer scale of it, was burned into their minds. It was a victory, their officers told them, a victory of unprecedented magnitude. But it did not feel like one.
Hours later, as the pale sun began its descent, they saw the horde moving again. From their vantage point on the walls, they watched as the enemy regrouped. There was no panic in their ranks, no sign of demoralization. They moved with the same eerie, silent purpose as before, like a colony of ants rebuilding a disturbed nest. The thousands of bodies they had left behind in the ditch were simply ignored, treated as meaningless debris. A new wave, its numbers seemingly undiminished, began to advance toward the fort.
The legionaries gripped their crossbows, their knuckles white. The tension on the wall was different now. Before, it had been the tense excitement of testing a new weapon. Now, it was the grim, soul-weary resolve of men preparing to do a terrible, necessary job.
As the second wave advanced, Pullo noticed a change in their tactics. They were learning. The front ranks now carried massive, crude shields made of thick timber planks and layers of stretched ox-hide. They advanced under this makeshift roof, a slow-moving testudo of wood and leather, attempting to protect the ladder-bearers from the worst of the crossbow fire. It was a simple, brutish adaptation, but it was an adaptation nonetheless. The enemy was not entirely mindless.
"Archers of the second rank!" Pullo bellowed, his voice cutting through the tension. "Aim high! A plunging arc! Drop your bolts behind their shields! First rank, pick your targets! Aim for the gaps! Let them feel the Emperor's wrath!"
The horde reached the ditch. The crossbows roared to life again, the now-familiar mechanical thunder rolling across the landscape. The plunging fire from the second rank was effective, bolts raining down on the less-protected warriors behind the shield wall, but the crude shields did their job. Many of the ladder-bearers were protected from the direct, horizontal fire. They reached the base of the walls. Ladders scraped against the concrete. The first of the enemy began to climb.
This was the moment Alex had planned for. This was the second phase of his brutal symphony.
"The pots!" Pullo roared. "Bring the fire from heaven!"
Along the parapet, legionaries rushed to crates filled with simple, unglazed clay pots, each one sealed with a plug of beeswax. They were surprisingly heavy. Inside was a thick, black, viscous liquid—the distilled coal tar from Celer's coking ovens. A short, treated cloth fuse was stuck into each wax plug.
"Light them! Throw them!"