CHAPTER 32: THE FIRST BATTLE

The city watch of Dawnhaven marched in formation.

Three ranks, two files per column, rifles shouldered, bayonets fixed.

They moved with a steadiness that did not belong to levies. Each man carried two bandoliers of .410 shells across his chest.

Issued that morning from Baelius’ spam cans, and a short satchel of spare batteries for the rifle coils.

Runners paced beside every third file with water skins and fresh rounds, swapping tins the moment Captain Jeren’s hand went up.

No drums. No horns. Only the stamp of boots and the murmur of sergeants keeping step.

Ahead, the plain rolled gently toward the Ignarion encampment, ditches, fascines, and siege engines black against the late light.

Behind them and the enemy, the shimmering dome of the rustlight barrier glowed like captured dawn.

The air boomed and shimmered as explosive spells burst against it, each impact drinking itself into the light and vanishing.

At three hundred meters from the Ignarion forward line, Jeren raised two fingers in the sunlight.

The front rank knelt. The second rank lowered to a half-crouch. The third rank stood.

Tangent sights were already dialed, three hundred, dead flat.

On the far side, Ignarion’s horse was coming on: banners snapping, plumes tossing, armored destriers thundering.

Their shield-wall of levies tramped behind, tower shields overlapping, Pyroclastic Iron faced, runed and re-runed by petty quartermasters until no fresh space remained.

The spellswords, Ignarion blood, eyes lit with Crucible fire, held behind them, hands weaving the beginnings of ward-sign and combustion.

"First rank," Jeren said, almost conversationally. "Front kneelers: fire."

The volley cracked like a single thunderclap. Heat rolled back over the line; flechettes left the muzzles already spinning, sabots peeling in clean petals before they were a stride from the crowns.

Thirty mounts collapsed mid-stride. Riders pitched forward, armor ringing. The gap torn in the charge rippled outward as the wave hit the invisible boulder of death and broke around it.

"Second rank... fire."

Another sheet of sound. The smoke drifted forward in a low fog and then blew aside under the barrier’s constant wind-shear.

Where the flechettes struck, Ignarion plate behaved like wetted parchment, pierced clean, blossoms of dark through brighter metal.

Enchanted shields on the forward pikemen punched backward in their carriers’ hands as if a giant had flicked them; men behind stumbled, then fell, transfixed by the same darts that had shattered the wards.

To either side, the charge tried to widen, skirting the kill zone.

Caedrion watched from afar through his spyglass and said nothing.

Captain Jeren gave the third command

"Third rank... fire!"

The cavalry’s front files ceased to exist in the space of a breath. The ground churned with hooves without riders.

Where a spellsword’s hasty ward flared, a dozen flechettes passed through it like rain through glass and bit something soft beyond.

One Magus felt the snap of the Architect’s engraving against his sternum before he understood why breathing would not obey him.

"Reload by file," called Captain Jeren, voice hard and measured. "Left file first. Right file, at the ready!"

Ferrondel hands worked by reflex: breach, eject, shell, snap, shoulder.

Extractors clicked; spent sabots tinked on stone. Battery-keepers walked the rear, swapping cells with practiced efficiency where coils ran hot.

The cadence was the thing, a living machine, three ranks breathing in a rolling cycle, one always aimed, one always firing, one always reloading.

Across the field, the Ignarion horn blew a frantic stutter. The horse veered, tried to reform.

Behind them, the shield wall lurched forward, then faltered as bodies clogged the intervals.

Spellcrews heaved effigies into place and began to draw on vessels; a line of archers raised, loosed high.

The first arrowfall hissed toward the lines. Bouncing off the rustlight shields that automatically deployed the moment a projectile neared the men wearing them.

"Counter-volley," Jeren snapped. "Hold until crest... mark... fire!"

Three hundred muzzles lifted twelve degrees together. The volley met the black hail not in the air, but inside Ignarion’s ranks, flechettes descending at a shallow angle to rake through archers and the spellcrews mustering behind.

The effigy closest to completion, an ugly iron idol belted with soulglass, jerked as ten shots struck its vessel cradle.

Its runes flared bright and then went black with a sound like a sigh. The crew around it screamed as the backlash cooked the blood in their palms.

On the wall-walks, Dawnhaven’s watchers forgot to cheer.

This was not sword against sword, nor man against man. It was a storm given human hands.

---

Within House Marvik’s upper hall, the gathered Magi leaned into the scrying sphere as if the nearness could change the image.

Lady Caltrisse rose half out of her seat, lips parted, no spell on them, only raw astonishment.

The Viscount of Veylar, who had been smirking minutes before, forgot his goblet on his knee and let red spill over silk without noticing.

"The spears," Lord Seravant managed. "They... are not spears."

"No..." Lady Marvik said, voice flat, eyes cold.

---

On the western ridge, Valerius stood in the open as if the sky itself had nailed him there.

He heard the volleys as waves: first a single blow, then another, then another, each closer than the last.

His finest horse, picked for him by the court master of steeds, went down screaming with a dart through the joint where peytral met chamfron.

Men, he had dined with, gambled with, scorched for insolence, died in strings under him, and he could not find a word to make the dying stop.

"Longer volleys!" he choked at last, voice ragged. "Sustain the fire!"

"Lord," said a spellsword beside him, very carefully neutral, "they are not casting, they are...."

He did not finish. A flechette took him in the chest and knocked him on his back as if for sleep.

Valerius could not respond. His breath caught in his lungs, which threatened to explode with each passing second.

He could not fathom what he was witnessing. It was if the laws of Phyiscs themselves were unraveling around him at this very moment.