Boots stamped up the steps, and Captain Tira appeared. Her gaze swept the chamber. She said, “Excellent. Remove the bodies. This will serve as a good command post for the general. Cat Barahal. Are you injured?” She looked me up and down. “Wasn’t that fabric green?”

The Amazons chortled. “Did a quick dye job, she did!”

Their laughter seemed discordant to me, although they found themselves amusing enough with their voices pitched loud, for they, too, had been deafened by the constant thunder of gunfire. I wiped another thread of blood off my chin, flicked a wet drop out of my eye, and glanced around the tower chamber. A spray of blood cut a line across the map on the table. The officer lay slumped, his head caught on the back of the chair. The five soldiers sprawled at all angles across the room, throats slashed and bellies opened, their blood a spreading stain. Its smell rose like flies, stinging and noxious. A drop of blood seeping from the ceiling dripped onto my hand.

I staggered, bumped into a wall next to Drake, and sank to my knees.

He shoved me away. “Cruel Diana! You reek of blood! Get away from me.”

Trembling, I could neither speak nor stand.

He rolled over the other magister and studied the two cold mages with a flat, emotionless expression. “With a strong enough cold mage, I can do anything,” he murmured to himself, so quietly that I knew he did not mean for me to hear. “I don’t need him. He’s kept me caged all this time because he’s afraid I will figure that out.”

He stepped over to the table where Captain Tira was carefully wiping blood off the map and examined the topography, then snagged a spyglass that was lying across one corner.

“Where are you going, Lord Drake?” asked Captain Tira as he walked to the stairs. “The general is already calling the advance against the Coalition center. He’ll need you soon enough.”

“He does need me, doesn’t he? Far more than I need him. I only need fire banes.” The sting of his presence faded as he vanished down the stairs.

Captain Tira watched him go, but she said nothing and did nothing. I needed to follow him, but a heavy exhaustion pinned me down. A fog of oblivion hazed my vision. How long I knelt there, shaking, I did not know. The chamber was cleared of the dead. An orderly scattered buckets of dirt over the floor to absorb the blood. People left and arrived while I watched the wall go nowhere.

Captain Tira said, “She’s been in a stupor since we took the tower, General.”