Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1030: Key to the war(1)

Sixty-five thousand silverii in cold coin. Two years of back-breaking, relentless toil. Three thousand five hundred forced laborers, one hundred and twenty-five engineers, fifteen hundred paid craftsmen, three hundred fifty supply carts, and eight hundred workhorses.

The numbers lived in the back of Alpheo’s mind like a persistent headache. And that was merely the material cost. To even break ground, he had been forced to endure a grueling political siege against Lord Damaris, bartering away lands and duty-exemptions on several of his most lucrative holdings, he had been forced for example to give away the city of Thyma that held the crossing all Yarzat merchant had to go unless they wanted to go the Oizenian route if they wanted to reach Malshut.

The man had even possessed the audacity to ask the hand of Lysandra, Jasmine’s sister, for his eldest son. Alpheo had crushed that request as swiftly as it was uttered; he was many things, but he was not a fool who would hand the key to his son’s future opposition to a two-faced player like Damaris.

All that posturing, all that meat-carving, and all those diplomatic smiles had been for the right to birth the behemoth that now stood before him. It loomed unyielding against the horizon, a mountain of stone and geometric spite that seemed to mock the very idea of an invasion.

It was a colossal expense, a drain on the treasury that would have bankrupted a lesser prince, but as Alpheo surveyed his "giant-child," he felt the sharp, cold satisfaction of a gambler who had finally seen his cards come up aces. In truth, he was merely the co-parent, or perhaps the uncle; the only man who could truly claim paternity over this monstrosity was the loquacious, soot-stained figure standing to his right.

Alpheo’s service was filled with competent commanders, brave infantry, and arrogant officers who treated their commissions as personal purses. He was also plagued by a special class of stupid soldier, the kind who genuinely believed the Crown was deaf to their illicit dealings that most of the time were of the same broth as the arrogant officers. Yet, in the midst of this sea of mediocrity, he had found a genius.

He had handed Pontus Virilio a collection of crude sketches and a vision of an impregnable hell, and the man had delivered a masterpiece. In the hands of a lesser engineer, Alpheo’s designs would have been little better than paper for the ass, but Pontus was not just any man.

The Prince roved the perimeter of one of the four "teeth" of the Bastion, as Pontus had taken to calling it. Alpheo had initially favored a more poetic name, Yarzat’s Bane. However, he had met unexpected resistance.

Pontus was a creature of strange oxymorons; he would grovel in the mud and kiss the Prince’s hem if it meant securing a project that would immortalize his name, yet he became a stubborn, immovable mule when it came to the "aesthetic integrity" of his work.

The frantic state of agitation that had consumed Pontus whenever Alpheo threatened to slash the budget was now entirely gone, replaced by a feverish, manic pride. The architect moved with a renewed, twitchy energy, his hands dancing through the air as he launched into an exhaustive technical sermon.

Alpheo, for his part, was hopelessly lost by the time Pontus reached the second minute of his monologue. He caught perhaps a quarter of the jargon, terms like revetment, glacis, and scarp flying over his head, and he spent the rest of the walk attempting to piece the meaning together through context.

"The bastions are diagonal, exactly as your Grace’s sketches demanded," Pontus droned, gesturing toward the sharp, protruding angles of the stone. "The foundations are, of necessity, a compromise of the highest order. The core is packed earth and rubble, with only the outer layers bricked in dressed stone. It is a shoddy choice, a vulgar one, but to meet the impossible timetable you set upon my neck, we had to bleed the integrity of the structure to buy time. Do not expect this mountain to be a legacy for your grandchildren, Your Grace. Within that terrain beats a heart of timber and wet dirt, and wood has a stubborn, traitorous tendency to rot."

Pontus wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, his eyes twitching toward the grey clouds on the horizon. "I cannot, for the love of my own name, tell you how long the internal supports will hold. But I can promise you this: a truly heavy, relentless rain will turn the insides of your fortress into porridge. If the moisture soaks through the brickwork, the pressure will cause the base to burst like a bloated corpse."

"Well," Alpheo muttered, looking up at the sky with a weary hope, "luckily for us, the sun usually favors Yarzat."

"Your Grace should pray it continues its patronage," Pontus replied with much lesser jest. "We can likely guarantee its stability for three years, perhaps four if the gods are kind. But because we had to cut corners to finish the extended base, the majority of the outer slope is naked earth. We didn’t even bother masking it with stone; there simply wasn’t the time or the coin."

Alpheo walked to the edge of the rampart, looking up at the dramatic, sloping incline of the wall. It was a trade-off, a devil’s bargain, as most of the time things in war are.

A sloped wall meant that an enemy’s scaling ladder would sit at a much more stable, comfortable angle. It would be nearly impossible for a single man with a fork to push them off once the weight of the infantry was upon them. To counter this, Alpheo had ordered specialized, heavy-headed axes, designed to cleave through seasoned wood like toothpicks, to be deposited at every fourth indentation so that the men could go nuts on the hands and rungs of the ladders and those above it.

Yet, the advantage they gained against siege towers was immense. Because the wall’s base extended so far forward, any tower rolled against the Bastion would find its drop-bridge woefully short. To reach the ramparts, the enemy engineers would be forced to construct bridges of impossible length and weight. It turned the simple act of boarding a wall into a nightmare of complex physics; a few inches of miscalculation in height or a shoddy bit of carpentry under pressure would see the attack stall, the bridge snapping or falling short, leaving the assault troops trapped in a wooden box while Alpheo’s archers took their time. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

"It is a fragile giant," Alpheo muttered when Pontus repeated the part about not knowing when it will fail for the third time. "But it only needs to stand long enough to break the first wave.That is all we need it for"

Unfortunately, Pontus did not take the cue.

"The real genius, of course, isn’t in the stone you see, but what you don’t!" Pontus exclaimed, his hands sketching frantic geometric shapes in the dusty air. "I’ve utilized a series of internal and external buttresses to distribute the lateral force of the earthen fill. If we had used a standard vertical load-bearing model, the sheer weight of the glacis would have pushed the outer revetment into the ditch by the second moon, gods above if a small earth-shake suddendly happen, I of course pray each night it won’t!

But by angling the counterforts at precisely twenty-two degrees, I’ve created a structural weight loop!

And don’t even get me started on the drainage conduits; I’ve designed a capillary system of porous gravel layers that should, in theory, divert the water away from the timber skeletons, provided the silt doesn’t clog the primary—"

"Pontus," Alpheo said, his voice cutting through the engineer’s frantic monologue

"—arteries of the lower foundation. Of course, the fattening of the brickwork in the summer heat is a variable I’m still monitoring, but if the lime-wash holds—"

"Pontus." He repeated trying his very best to ignore the small perch that he was seeing in the man’s pants.

’’Pontus!’’

Alpheo placed a heavy hand on the man’s shoulder, physically arresting his momentum. The architect stopped mid-word, his mouth hanging open as he blinked rapidly, his eyes finally focusing on the prince’s face.

"Your genius is undisputed," Alpheo said, his tone dry yet firm. "But I have heard enough of the skin and the bones. Enough of the geometry for fuck’s sake. I wish to see the insides.This is not a teaching lessons for your pupils, it is the patron of your works, that wishes to see if it will fucking work or not!

I swear I am a fucking hair away from taking your tongue so that I have not hear incessant words of things I do not wish to hear. You will answer the question I give you for at least the next hour. After that you can puke as much as you want about the gravel, lime, or whatever the hell those are called. I am working on a timeline here. Do you understand I have two other places I need to go by day’s end? Are we clear with one another? "

Pontus nodded suddenly, aware of how firm the ground under his feet was.