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On the valley floor, three quickly built towers began to roll slowly and inexorably toward the gates of Uwelt City. Constructing them was one of the first steps in breaking a walled town, and Isabell had refined their design again and again over the course of the civil war.

Convention held that siege towers should be heavy, ponderous weapons that were sturdy enough to allow men to climb safely within the tower before emerging from a ramp at the top, allowing them to storm the walls and clear them of defending soldiers.

The towers had to be sturdy enough not to collapse under their own weight while they rolled ponderously forward, and the sides of the towers had to be thick enough to offer protection from the siege weapons of the opposing side.

Isabell’s towers, however, were nothing like the towers used to break most fortresses.

She never intended for men to climb her towers to engage in bloody battle on the narrow walkway atop the city walls.

Neither did she intend for her towers to endure the withering fire of powerful siege weapons.

The country lords under Grandee Duke Pasqual’s command had no engineers capable of constructing powerful and accurate siege weapons, and even if they possessed such weapons, they would struggle to bring them to bear against her fast-moving towers.

Isabell’s towers were built on wooden frames with walls made of oil-soaked canvas before they were stuffed with straw. The result was a tower that, while still slow and ponderous compared to a soldier on foot or a man on horseback, moved with twice the speed of a conventional siege tower.

The men who pushed the towers into position would light the straw ablaze as soon as they’d anchored the tower to the enemy’s gates, spilling buckets of oil in the process and creating a conflagration that would prevent anyone from escaping the city once her bombardment from the ridge began.

Of course, as things within the walls grew worse, she was certain that some brave souls would attempt to break through the inferno... There were always a few who did, but the number who succeeded was always very low.

Seeing the towers beginning to roll in the valley below, Isabell turned away from Sir Rafael, taking her position next to a machine that resembled a giant crossbow.

Like the siege towers, it had only been constructed when the army reached the City of Umwelt, though unlike the siege towers, some of the metal parts of each of the ten ballistae were carefully removed from their wooden frames each time Isabell brought her company of craftsmen to a new city.

The heavy ash timbers that formed the frames and limbs of the weapons were far too cumbersome to transport, but in order to perform the role Isabell had given to these mighty weapons, certain parts couldn’t be crafted from wood.

Kneeling beside each of the powerful siege weapons, well-trained soldiers knelt in prayer, many of them pleading that the Holy Lord of Light forgive them for the indiscriminate destruction they were about to rain down on a city full of innocent people.

Isabell left them to their prayers but she had stopped praying to the Holy Lord of Light long ago.

After too many days like the one she was about to begin, she struggled to see anything holy or purifying about fire, no matter what the priests said about the mercy offered in the next life to the people who were consumed by flames in this one.

"Begin heating the shot," Isabell commanded as she retrieved her sextant and inspected the flags drifting lazily on the faint breeze.

"Wind on the ridge is slow from the east," she called out, noting that the flag was only barely unfurled in the breeze.

"Ranging shots will begin in fifteen minutes.

Crank balastae by five full turns to start and be ready to quarter crank once we find the range," she rattled off.

In brick furnaces behind her, a team of men began to work at huge bellows while another team of men loaded canisters filled with round balls of iron into the furnaces, heating them until they glowed a dark, cherry red.

By the time they were ready to be used, they would glow and even brighter yellow but Isabell wouldn’t waste heated shot until she had properly found the range.

Conventional wisdom said that weapons like the ballistae along the ridge and the more powerful trebuchet behind them could only fling projectiles for a thousand paces at most, but Isabell had learned long ago that smaller, lighter projectiles could fly much further if they didn’t have to impact with lethal force when they arrived at their target.

The experiment had started with the notion of raining down triangular-shaped iron spikes that would rain across cavalry’s line of advance, injuring horses when they rode across the quickly deployed trap and breaking their charge.

The idea turned out to be impractical. It was impossible to deploy enough of the spikes quickly enough to break a charge.

Without enough density, too few of the sharp traps wasted themselves, and even if a horse did step on one, if the ground was too soft, then the trap was shoved down into the soil instead of causing any damage to the horse or its rider.

It did, however, teach Isabell about the power of working with canisters filled with smaller pieces of iron. It had taken months of experiments to refine that idea into a weapon suitable to use against a town under siege, but in the end, Isebell had produced a terror like no other.

Finally, the lumbering towers reached their position by the city gates and began to smoke and smolder, revealing that the wind in the valley was even calmer than it was on the ridge.

That revelation set Isabell’s mind in motion as she made her final calculations before passing orders to the men working on the ballista next to her.

"Load cold shot for range finding and fire," she commanded coldly. Moments later, a mighty -THUMP- sounded beside her as the crew struck the release with a wooden mallet, releasing the tension held in the arms of the ballista and hurling a canister’s worth of iron shot toward the unsuspecting town. The ’cold’ iron shot, solid balls of cast iron roughly the size of a hen’s egg, had been painted bright red to make them easier to track as they soared through the air before raining down uselessly on the bare earth outside the city walls.

"Increase the elevation by three turns of the screw," Isabell comanded without taking her eyes off the city in the valley. "Crank the arms to five plus one-half turns. Load the cold and fire again."

Her commands were just as cold as the painted iron she flung, and her mind was filled with even colder math as she calculated the range.

Power, angle, wind, each of these variables and others were precisely calculated and adjusted as she ’walked’ her bombardment closer and closer to her targets until, at last, a rain of iron shot fell onto the thatched roofs beyond the city walls.

"All crews," she said, closing her eyes as she passed her orders, preparing herself to unleash what may have been the most unholy fire ever created by man.

"Increase elevation by six turns of the screw, crank the arms six times plus one quarter turn. Bring the hot shot and fire as soon as you’re loaded. "

Standing next to her, Sir Rafael clutched his hand into a tight fist over his heart, as if he was trying to shield it from what was about to happen.

"May the Holy Lord of Light have mercy on their souls," he said solemnly. "And may these flames light their way to the Heavenly Shores in the west."

What happened next was something that no one who witnessed it would ever forget.

Moving with the precision of soldiers on the march, the ballistae under Isabell’s command began to fire glowing yellow shot, raining it down on Umwelt City like a rain of the sun’s burning tears.

Beside her, the steady -THUMP- -THUMP- -THUMP- of ballistae releasing their deadly munitions filled the air like a drummer beating the time of a funeral march.

It took more than ten minutes of sustained bombardment for the first buildings to catch fire, but Isabell’s men were prepared to sustain this bombardment for hours.

Of course, the ballistae weren’t the only weapons she’d brought to bear.

Now that the buildings had begun to smoke and smolder, it was time to pour oil on the fire, and for that, she would need to aim her trebuchet. ..