The Copper of Orban

Your boots sink into the viscous Adrianople mud, a foul slurry of spring rain and churned earth that has turned the encampment into a treacherous bog. You stand paralyzed before the maw of the Basilisk. The bronze leviathan rests upon a bed of massive oak trunks, a sleeping giant waiting for the spark. Under the flickering torchlight, lashed by a biting wind, the cannon takes on the hue of congealed blood. Its twenty-seven-foot length casts a jagged shadow across the faces of the exhausted crew, looming like a forgotten deity demanding a sacrifice of fire. Beside you stands Orban, a man who looks as though he were hewn from the very rock he intends to shatter. He wipes sweat from his brow with a grease-stained rag, leaving streaks of soot that deepen the furrows of his face. His eyes, reddened by sleeplessness and the glare of the smelting furnaces, are fixed on the clay mold peeling away like dead skin. 'The angle, boy,' he rasps. His voice is the sound of stone grinding against stone, a throat scorched by metallic vapors. 'Mathematics does not lie; only men do. Calculation is the only language the universe respects. If we miss by a single digit, this copper becomes our shroud.' …