The scouts had been gone for six hours, and the silence that followed was heavier than the roar of the blast furnace. Kaelen was right, pikes could hold a bridge, but they couldn't stop a catapult from a mile away. To survive the Duke's inevitable escalation, Alaric needed to leapfrog five centuries of military evolution.
He needed Black Powder.
"Sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter," Alaric whispered to himself, pacing the damp, dark floor of the castle's lowest cellar. "The unholy trinity."
Charcoal was easy, the forest provided plenty. Sulfur was harder, but he had already identified the yellow-crusted vents in the nearby volcanic marshes. But Saltpeter (Potassium Nitrate)? That was the bottleneck of history. In the 21st century, you bought it by the ton for fertilizer. In 1042, you had to harvest it from the breath of the dead.
"Martha," Alaric called into the stairwell. "Gather the oldest men in the village. I need them to scrape the white 'frost' off the stones in the stables and the cellar walls. Every scrap of it."
---
For three days, the castle smelled of ammonia and wet earth. While Kaelen drilled the pikemen in the "Square Formation," Alaric was refining the white crystals. He used the wood ash from the kitchens to convert calcium nitrate into potassium nitrate, filtering the brine through layers of sand and charcoal.
"Is this the sorcery the scouts whispered of?" Count Valerius asked, covering his nose as he stepped into the cellar. Alaric was hunched over a copper basin, grinding a grey-black mixture with a wooden pestle.
"It's not sorcery, Father. It's a rapid expansion of gases," Alaric replied without looking up. "In a confined space, this 'dust' creates a pressure that no stone or plate armor can withstand."
To demonstrate, Alaric took a tiny pinch of the finished powder and laid it on a stone slab. He touched it with a glowing ember.
Fwhish!
A brilliant flash of white light and a cloud of acrid smoke filled the room. The Count stepped back, his hand instinctively flying to his sword. "Gods! It's like a trapped lightning bolt."
"Precisely," Alaric said, his eyes gleaming through the smoke. "Now, I need Old Tom to cast me something specific. Not a pike. A cylinder. Thick-walled, reinforced with bronze hoops, and bored through the center."
---
The first "cannon" was less a weapon of war and more an industrial accident waiting to happen. It was a "Pot-de-fer", a vase-shaped iron casting designed to fire a large, metal-fletched bolt. Alaric had insisted on a heavy reinforcement at the breech, he knew the metallurgical limits of medieval cast iron better than anyone.
By the fourth day, they hauled the beast to the North Tower.
"Target that rotted oak tree," Alaric commanded, pointing to a dead trunk three hundred yards down the valley.
The pikemen stopped their drills. The masons dropped their hammers. The entire County of Oakhaven held its breath as Alaric stepped forward with a linstock, a long pole with a smoldering slow-match.
"Cover your ears!" Alaric shouted.
He touched the match to the touchhole.
BOOM.
The sound didn't just ring in their ears, it hit them in the chest like a physical blow. A spear of orange flame leaped from the tower, and a split second later, the dead oak tree disintegrated into a spray of splinters.
The silence that followed was absolute. The pikemen fell to their knees, crossing themselves. Kaelen's horse reared, nearly throwing the veteran knight.
"That... that wasn't a catapult," Kaelen whispered, staring at the smoking iron tube. "That was the voice of a god."
"No, Kaelen," Alaric said, his voice cold and steady. "That was the sound of the Middle Ages ending. And we only have three more days to cast four more of them before the Duke arrives."
Alaric looked at the horizon. He could see a faint cloud of dust rising from the Duke's highway. The "Blackhawks" were coming. They were bringing knights, trebuchets, and the old-world order.
But Alaric Vance was waiting with the 21st century in his pocket.