given to thumbing his nose at tradition, in this at least he was forged on the ancient anvil. Trae, like any scion of Vanbert's aristocracy worthy of the name, would earn his spear. And since, for his own purposes, Demansk had insisted on keeping him out of the army proper . . .
"Besides," Helga added, "I'm certainly happy to have him along. Especially since he's the only one who really knows how to use those gadgets."
Gadgets. Most of the troopers had now filed aboard the ship, and the handcarts were halfway down the pier. Close enough that Demansk could see their contents clearly.
The lead carts were filled with heavy two-man arquebuses and their tripods. The trailing carts, with ammunition for the weapons. Trae had wanted to bring one of the bombards along also, but the experienced seaman Sharlz Thicelt had convinced the eager young nobleman that the thin planks and lightly-built hull of the ship wouldn't be able to withstand the recoil.
The strange new weapons had been designed by Adrian Gellert and used by the King of the Isles against the Confederacy the year before. Some of the weapons in the cart below, Demansk imagined, had been captured during the fighting. But most of them—perhaps all of them—had been built by Trae's artisans in his workshop, using Gellert's design as the model. If no Vanbert natural philosopher would have ever dreamed of inventing the things in the first place, Vanbert's metalworkers and apothecaries were perfectly capable of duplicating them once shown how they worked.
In fact, Trae claimed that his own arquebuses and firepowder were superior to the originals. Demansk didn't doubt the claim. Trae had destroyed more than a few workbenches in his experiments to improve the weapons' performance. Fortunately,