The orcs came shortly after nightfall, approaching the wall with ladders they carried easily over muscled shoulders. Escalade, it was called. A hasty sort of besiegement where sheer numbers and speed was used to pry a foothold onto the defender’s walls before they could rack up enough casualties to turn the attackers away. Deadly.

  And often effective.

  I was given good news just a few hours before it, whisked out of the rooms by Morlo and dragged to stand in an armor smithy. Therein I gazed upon a set of armour. Full plate armour, not the single cuirass and helm I’d been using so far. It seemed to me a statue of steel, looking at it up close, with almost no chinks or gaps to be seen. The idea that I might move in it was hard to grasp. Then I put it on, and it all became real.

  Plate armour isn’t magical or Thaumaturgical by the strictest definitions, but let me tell you it’s hard to remember that fact when you’re actually wearing a suit. Movement is harder in it, of course, naturally resisted by the extra mass, but the stuff is much lighter than it looks and the mobility people have in it is…Well, you’d need to wear some yourself to really understand.

  Now for me, I got an even more pronounced feeling. My growing strength left the thick steel almost weightless by comparison and saw me sprinting, cartwheeling and leaping around after a brief period of adjusting. While I trained with the stuff, got used to moving in it, I found myself actually forgetting about the upcoming attack.

  “This doesn’t make you indestructible,” Morlo warned, “I’m working on making you a set of Thaumaturgical Plate, but it won’t be done for months now.”

  “What is that?” I asked, uncharacteristically curious. My first taste of the world’s finest technological protection had inspired a newfound appreciation for learning, and the thought that I might get to wear something greater still seemed very appealing now that I was staring down combat with a whole army of orcs.

  Morlo sighed, never one to enjoy explaining anything, then paused. Smiled.

  “Why don’t you tell me, Kyvaine?” I swore, and tried to scrounge up an answer. From what I knew of the stuff, it was just tougher than regular steel. Something about the metal?

  No, hang on…

  “You use Thaumaturgy to move the strength from another piece of metal kept somewhere else,” I guessed. Morlo looked mildly impressed.

  “No, but that’s actually a good guess. Thaumaturgical armour is made with something called a sympathetic link, which is something I’ve told you about, but not taught yet.”

  “So I couldn’t have gotten the answer right,” I snapped. Morlo shrugged.

  “Vara guessed what sympathetic links were just through intuition, I thought you might manage it.”

  “Well I’m not some bloody intuitive woman, am I?” I growled.

  Note from the future: womanly intuition doesn’t exist, that’s just what men call it when a woman uses logic and reasoning to work out something that we can’t.

  ++”This is correct.”++

  “Shut up,” Morlo told me, “now listen. Sympathetic links are the art of binding one thing to a similar thing. Done perfectly, which you’ll never manage, they cause a complete transference of energy, momentum, or any other effects you want to select for making the jump. With care, you can make a link that only transfers particular types of energy and force. For instance, one linking two suits of plate armour so that any impacts striking either of them are split between both, but not causing applied motion to make the transfer either.”

  I didn’t take long to piece the obvious together from that. “So…you could have a suit of armour basically be twice as durable, and it wouldn’t involve the second suit getting jerked around offering resistance to the motions of whoever wore the first?”

  Morlo smiled. “You’re not half bad when you focus, you know.”

  It was the closest thing to a compliment I’d gotten in a while, but didn’t distract me from thinking.

  “Wait, so can you sympathetically link ten suits of armour to one? Or a hundred?” Plate armour was thick stuff, looking at the suit I was wearing now I pictured the resilience of something boasting a hundred times its depth. Surely cannons would bounce right off that, let alone hand-held weapons.

  “You can,” Morlo nodded, “but there’s a drop in efficiency with each one. Even if it’s done ideally, you’d need four extra suits just to give the one you wear equivalent strength to three. Nine extras makes it weaker than a perfectly combined four.”

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Well there went my plans for marching up to artillery batteries and slaughtering the hapless gunners single-handed. Still, just having a full set of plate was good enough on its own for now.

  “That won’t stop everything,” Morlo warned me, “even a suit of sympathetically linked armour won’t stop everything.”

  “Will it halt bullets?” I asked him, remembering how many guns had been abandoned on the field of our defeat.

  “From pistols, yes. Heavy arquebuses, though, you’d be hoping for a glancing hit or a very long-ranged shot to have a chance. Cannon balls will rip you in half regardless.”

  Well there went my second plans for marching up to handgunner formations and slaughtering them. Regardless, however much it stung to have everything grounded in reality, I was still in bloody plate armour.

  That feeling of almost manic invincibility sustained me until nightfall was approaching, where the light died and the calls warning of an oncoming assault were sent out. Dark. Low visibility, difficult shooting. Safer approach for the orcs beyond the walls.

  It had finally arrived, the fight. And it was dragging me right into it like always.

  Cannons were already firing off into the night as I reached the walls, a constant, low rhythm like drums beaten by God himself. Every shot was a brief explosion of light as powder burned and spat out from the barrel, each one another glimpse at the frightened faces waiting for another struggle of life and death. I didn’t hear or see much of the impacts they were making, didn’t get to soak in the sight of bloody holes opening up in orcish ranks and bodies coming apart. All I could do was stand there and hope that the shooting was bringing us closer to victory, doing some damage, bleeding away the enemy’s strength.

  Maybe it was. Looking back on things with more knowledge, reading how they were later recorded in the history books, I’m actually certain it was. But whatever differences came from those volleys of iron, I was in no position to appreciate them when the first assault came to the section of wall I’d been shoved over to hold.

  This time, Morlo wasn’t fighting anywhere near me either.

  I saw periodic bursts of light along a far section of the wall where he was putting his strength, illuminating a great mass of screaming orcs below. Some of the light stuck around, as bodies were ignited outright and turned into writhing torches. Not for the first time, I wished I’d gotten an earlier start on my magic.

  Then again, Vara had and she was hardly combat-suitable yet either. The only reason I could even risk using my Thaumaturgy in battle was because I had a good deal of mundane martial skill to keep me alive while I did. That and the plate armour, which I was particularly glad to own as I saw orcs begin their escalade of my section too.

  Ladders smacked against stone, big bodies almost ran up over them. The orcs were charging us from half a dozen sections at once, then more. Swarming with sheer numbers and not seeming to be bothered one bit that oil was hissing on their skin and fallen stones smashing against their helms.

  Entirely against my will, I was in one of the front rows first engaged by the orcs when they reached the top and started swarming us. My armour rattled in my ears as I moved and my limbs felt like they’d burst with their own strength as my sword flew out for the nearest of the creatures. Surprisingly enough, it managed to parry me.

  Of course, I’d been in enough fights by now that the very act of finding a skilled opponent before me wasn’t unbalancing enough to give him an advantage. I fell back long before his counter-stroke came and saw the heavy cleaver whip ahead of my face, then brought my sword up again to twist it into the orc. Steel scraped along iron, sliding right off his breastplate.

  Armour, thick armour. Thick, full-body plate armour that covered almost as much of my opponent as mine did me. It was just my luck that I’d run into this fight of all things so soon after finally getting a set of my own. We hacked away at each other, landing plenty of hits but never biting down into the meat beneath the metal. Sparks and metal shavings flew as the fight intensified around us, every other combatant seeming to give us both a wide berth. Apparently this was some sort of champion I now went up against.

  But that was nothing new. I’d gone up against plenty of champions, or at least people good enough to become champions, in that tourney. And the more I fought, the more I realised it.

  I was better at single-man-duelling than this orc was, better by far. I started landing more blows, taking less. Adjusted to the feeling of moving with plate armour, compensating for all the little ways it threw off my balance, and soon enough I got lucky enough to send my sword biting down through the joint of one elbow and bringing up blood. It wasn’t a deep cut, not by the continued use of the arm, but it was deep enough to change things.

  My enemy panicked, and went for a tackle.

  This was where the limits of my experience reared its head, because there was no tackling in tourneys and I wasn’t used to fighting in armour heavy enough to make bloody grappling an ideal strategy. Before I could adjust booted feet to keep my balance, it broke and I went down in a mess of flailing limbs and grunting. The sword had left my hand somewhere along the way, and I’d not even noticed when it did.

  My enemy was much larger in sheer muscle mass, but somehow not greater in strength. That didn’t do me much good, though, because he had a far superior mastery over grappling. In only moments I was shifting around flailing for a grip that wouldn’t come while he moved me into some lock.

  That, I knew, would be the end of me, so I rolled over and managed to haul his weight with me—armour and all. We kept moving, writing around until I ended up atop him out of sheer, confused luck.

  For one second I froze, not sure what to do. Then I saw the knife. The orc almost drove it right up my armpit, into all the soft chainmail beneath. Maybe I’d have died if he managed. Instead I moved, felt it slide off steel and smashed a steel gauntlet down hard into his visored face. The orc stopped resisting for just a moment, a precious second of stillness as dazed pain and disorientation became the ruling body within his brain.

  I took that second and held it in a tight grip. Almost as tight as the one I had on his knife. With a roar that was more animal than man, and a thrust that was less human still, I drove that dagger right down into his visor and watched it pass neatly between the iron plates. Blood fountained up from the flesh below like a volcanic eruption, steaming in the air.

  A few moments of jerky spasming later, and my enemy was dead.

  Explore more of our books — begin your journey here: