"Fire! Keep firing! Don't let them find their rhythm!"
Lando's voice, amplified by the crudely fashioned tin megaphone, tore through the cacophony of the battlefield. He stood atop the central gatehouse, his face red from shouting, his eyes darting between the four massive Tarly shield-wedges and the swarms of skirmishers darting toward the water.
For a fleeting second, he missed the booming, gravelly roar of the old veteran McKen. If the grey-haired commander were here, Lando wouldn't have to turn his lungs inside out just to be heard over the screaming. He looked down at the King's Road and cursed. The Reachmen were relentless. They didn't care about the mud or the rising river; they moved with the mechanical indifference of a tidal wave.
THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.
The sixteen ballistas on the battlements released another staggered volley. The iron-tipped bolts, thicker than a man's wrist, hissed through the air and slammed into the lead shield carts. One bolt caught a Tarly sergeant square in the chest, the force carrying him backward through two of his own men before pinning the trio to the wooden frame of a wagon.
In response, the Reach archers, nearly a thousand of them split into three disciplined blocks. They didn't aim for individuals. At the sharp command of their officers, they raised their longbows to the sky.
"LOOSE!"
A dark, whispering cloud rose from the southern bank, momentarily blotting out the sun. A rain of arrows descended on the city walls, thousands of steel heads clattering against the stone and thudding into the wooden scaffolding.
"TAKE COVER!" Eddard's roar echoed Lando's.
Eddard knew he couldn't afford an exchange of fire. He had less than a hundred skilled archers; the Reach had ten times that. Every Karstark man lost was a crack in the foundation of his defense.
The soldiers scrambled into the shadows of the towers and the low-slung arrow shelters Eddard had wisely commissioned. Those who remained to fight did so through the murder holes, narrow vertical slits in the stone. From the outside, a Reach archer saw only a dark blur; from the inside, the Karstarks had a perfect view of the target-rich environment below.
Inside the shelters, the sound was deafening. Thousands of arrows hammered against the mud-coated timber roofs like a hail of iron. The militiamen operating the ballistas, men who only weeks ago had been farmers or tanners turned pale with terror. One young man, his hands shaking so violently he couldn't grip the crank, simply froze, his eyes wide as a bolt shattered a nearby beam.
Harwin, the former Stark guard now serving the Brotherhood, grabbed the boy by the collar and shook him. "DAMN IT, LOOK AT ME! If you don't turn that crank, those shields get to the wall, and we all die! GET THE BOLT ON THE GROOVE!"
Fear is a powerful motivator, but the raw, unfiltered profanity of a veteran is often more effective. The boy snapped out of his trance, his muscles working on pure instinct as he slammed a fresh bolt into the groove. Harwin aimed at a shield-wall that had reached the shallow edge of the moat, kicked the trigger, and watched with a grim satisfaction as the bolt tore a hole in the "turtle's" shell.
"Again!" Harwin shouted. "String it! Faster!"
On the battlements, the cost of the siege began to mount. THUD. An arrow found a gap in an arrow shelter, catching a militiaman in the shoulder.
"I'M HIT! HELP ME!" the man wailed, clutching the shaft. His comrades stared at the blood soaking his tunic, their resolve wavering.
"GET HIM DOWN! REPLACE HIM!" Lando shouted.
Within minutes, two of Scholar Bennett's "Medical Corps", a group of nimble women and older men rushed up the scaffolding with a stretcher. They dragged the wounded man down to the safety of the lower courtyard where the Maester had established a triage center.
Another man, his face set in a mask of desperate greed, ran to take the empty spot at the ballista. Eddard had promised a gold dragon to any man who served on the wall today. In the Riverlands, a gold dragon was worth a limb, or a life.
Below, the Tarly heavy infantry had sacrificed over a hundred lives just to reach the water's edge. Their shield carts, now looking like hedgehogs with all the Karstark bolts embedded in them, were being pushed into the stagnant water of the moat. Behind them, the skirmishers surged forward. They didn't have armor; they had speed. They carried sacks of dirt and heavy stones, sprinting from the shield-walls to the water, dumping their loads, and darting back.
Dickon Tarly was forcing a causeway. He didn't have time for trenches or siege towers. He was going to fill the moat with earth and the bodies of his own men if he had to.
"IGNORE THE ARCHERS!" Eddard shouted, grabbing a heavy crossbow from a nearby rack. "TARGET THE SKIRMISHERS! IF THE MOAT FILLS, WE LOSE!"
Eddard didn't have the range of a longbowman, but he had the strength to cock a heavy arbalest with one hand. He aimed through a murder hole, leading a target carrying a massive sack of mud. TWANG. The bolt caught the man in the throat. He fell headlong into the water, his sack sinking beside him to become another inch of the rising causeway.
But for every skirmisher that fell, three more emerged. The Reach commanders were heartless with their numbers. They even pushed the bodies of their fallen into the river to act as fill.
WHOOOO--OOOSH!
The Reach horns blared again - louder, more piercing. And then, Eddard saw them.
Taller men. Men with the rugged, weathered faces of the North. They wore cloaks of wolf and bear fur, and on their boiled leather breastplates was the gruesome, crimson sigil of the Flayed Man.
The Boltons had joined the assault.
"Dreadfort scum!" Harwin spat, his eyes burning with a hatred that went deeper than his fear. As a man who had served Ned Stark, seeing the Boltons fighting alongside the Tyrells against a Northern fortress was a betrayal he felt in his very marrow.
"ABEL! SOUND THE ALARM!" Eddard commanded. "KARAS! MATTHEW! BRING UP THE RESERVES! THE PROBING IS OVER!"
The intense, piercing bells of the Twins began to ring, a frantic, rhythmic iron tolling that signaled a full-scale assault.
From the southern bank, the Reachmen launched thirty rafts into the water. Two hundred men, including a vanguard of savage-looking Dreadfort soldiers, began to paddle across the moat using their shields as oars.
"Die, you bastards!" Harwin roared, kicking the trigger of his ballista. The massive bolt skipped across the water before punching through a raft, splintering the wood and sending four Bolton soldiers into the freezing, muddy water.
They tried to swim, but the weight of their mail and the numbness of the cold dragged them down. Red plumes of blood bloomed on the surface as crossbow bolts from the walls picked off the survivors.
But it wasn't enough. At least a hundred men reached the base of the East Wall, huddling in the "dead zone" where the ballistas couldn't reach. They raised their shields, creating a small canopy of steel against the parapet.
Suddenly, five scaling ladders, each ten meters long and reinforced with iron hooks were hoisted against the stone.
"STONES! POUR THE PITCH!" Lando screamed into his megaphone.
Freya and her Karstark veterans dropped their bows and grabbed heavy boulders and iron battering rams. They leaned over the crenellations, ignoring the arrows whistling past their ears.
CRUNCH.
A massive stone smashed through a shield, shattering the arms of the man holding it. Then came the battering rams, heavy logs tipped with iron which were dropped vertically. They crushed helmets and split skulls, sending men tumbling off the ladders to be trampled by the next wave.
In just minutes, the base of the wall was a charnel house of twisted limbs and broken wood.
Eddard moved like a blur of black steel along the battlements. He reached a ladder that had just hooked onto the stone, and with a single, massive swing of Heartbreaker, he sheared through the thick oak uprights and the iron hooks. The ladder disintegrated, falling backward into the crowd of Dreadfort men below.
TWANG.
A bolt from a Reach skirmisher struck Eddard's shield, the impact jarring his arm. He didn't flinch. He rushed to the next ladder, the 3x strength from his system making him feel like a titan among men.
"TAKE COVER!" Lando roared again as another volley of arrows arrived from the southern bank.
The rain of arrows resumed, providing cover for the next wave of rafts and ladders. Karas Snow and Matthew led the reserves onto the wall, their axes gleaming as they prepared to meet the first enemies who managed to clear the parapet.
The first day of the siege was only hours old, and already the Twins were drowning in blood.
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