Hell's Foundations Quiver (2015) by David Weber

Author:David Weber [Weber, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781429949835
Google: lFizBgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0765321874
Goodreads: 23847910
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2015-10-12T11:00:00+00:00

.VII.

Fairkyn, New Northland Province, Republic of Siddarmark

Bishop Gorthyk Nybar rode out the sally port and headed down the steeply sloping road, accompanied by Colonel Bahrtalymu Hansylman, the officer who would have been called his chief of staff in the Imperial Charisian Army, and Captain Teagmahn Fhrancys, his youthful aide. A cold wind whipped into their faces from the northeast, but it wasn’t cold enough, he thought grimly. Snow still lingered, piled deep in places, where it was shadowed by the sun, but elsewhere it had melted. In a normal year, the Guarnak-Ice Ash Canal would have overspread its banks by now, despite the many and ingenious provisions for flood control on mainland canals. This year, the canal bed was barely half full, and all of that was snowmelt, for the locks between Guarnak and Fairkyn had yet to be repaired.

The Ice Ash River, on the other hand, swirled brown and angry below the bluffs upon which what was left of Fairkyn perched. The city’s location had been dictated by terrain considerations; it lay at the head of a valley running northwest into the rugged foothills that penetrated into the higher tableland west of the Ohlarn Gap. That valley offered a natural canal route into the central Republic which required the minimum number of locks to reach the New Northland Plateau, but the Fairkyn bluffs had presented the canal builders with a formidable challenge. They formed a barrier, almost a natural escarpment, almost eight miles wide between the valley and the Ice Ash River. Getting through it had been an arduous task, yet the shortest alternative route would have added over a hundred miles to the length of the canal and required almost as many locks in the end, anyway.

Fairkyn itself lay on the narrow spine at the center of the high ground where the locks themselves were located. Because of that, it had been built on two levels, with High Town’s canalfront docks, at the head of the valley above the locks, serving the barge traffic moving through the canal proper. Low Town, below the locks to the southeast, backed up against the bluffs, but most of it was barely above or actually below the river’s flood plain, built there to serve the traffic headed into or arriving from the river, despite the perennial risk of flooding. The ground broke sharply away from High Town to both southeast and northwest—the locks raised barges over a hundred and eighty feet from the Ice Ash and then lowered them sixty feet to the level of the canal—because gunpowder had been unavailable for blasting away the intervening bedrock when the canal was first constructed. As a result, High Town formed a natural strongpoint, close to two hundred feet higher than the approaches from the river and almost half that far above its western and northern approaches.

Nybar had always known Low Town couldn’t be held against a serious overland attack, however, so he’d never intended to try. Instead, he’d withdrawn his entire defensive force

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