Copper and Ash

You press your ear against the cold stone, a surface slick with sea-salt and the damp sweat of a city in panic. The copper disc hanging from your neck—a tarnished relic passed down from the Watchers who came before you—begins to thrum. It is a faint, high-pitched vibration, a ghost of a sound that bypasses the ear to nestle directly in the marrow of your skull. This metallic wail never lies; it is the lithic tongue of the wall sensing the approach of death. Out beyond the hills, the 'Al-Mansur' trebuchet has finished its grisly calibration. You feel the earth shudder in rhythmic pulses, the heavy strain of torsion cables being cranked to their breaking point. The great stone is seated, waiting for the release. 'How long?' Gregory’s voice scrapes against your back, dry and hollow as the wood of a freshly unearthed coffin. You do not turn. You know the leaden rhythm of his gait and the ungreased shriek of his hauberk. You remain fused to the masonry, raising a trembling finger to a hairline fracture that has begun to spider across the white limestone. 'Three more strikes, my Lord. The third will unseat the foundation. The fourth will turn St. Nicholas Tower into a memory of dust bl…