Chapter 14: Witch Thunder

"Ring the bell," I said.

Gerd limped to the edge of the tower roof and pulled the rope, and the chapel bell started up behind us.

Velde came out of its houses in the gray light with whatever it had.

Men climbed the wall with pitchforks, and the alewife came with her ladle and a basket of stones.

The gate warden came with a boar spear and his ring of keys.

The ram came across slowly.

Forty finders pushed it on its runners, and the hide roof kept the stones off their heads.

Behind it, at the edge of the far bank, a second crew was rolling a tower out of the trees.

It was a box of rough timber three storeys high, with a ladder up the inside and a bridge folded flat against the top.

"They'll put that against the wall by noon," Gerd said. "And the ram on the gate before that."

"I know."

On the tower roof, under two sacks and a frozen tarpaulin, lay the last thing Anke had made.

I had stopped myself lifting the sacks for eleven days.

Now I pulled them off.

It was a gray steel tube as long as a man, thick as a tree limb at the back.

I could have put my fist in its mouth.

It sat in a timber cradle bolted to the stones of the roof, pointed down at the river.

Gerd looked at it, and then at me.

"What in God's name is that?"

"Something nobody in Aldmark has heard yet."

I had loaded it the night before, by lantern, with the powder and the ball and the rag.

I had explained none of it to anyone, because I didn't want to explain it later in a court.

Down on the ice the ram had reached the middle of the river.

On the far bank, Kranz sat his horse at the water's edge in his black coat, watching it go.

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