The horde’s vanguard, glittering with weapons, looking like the iron-fanged maw of a giant snake, was three-quarters across. The historian could make out individual faces, the expressions of fear and murderous intent that make up the faces of battle. A glance behind him showed rising columns of smoke and the flash of sorcery, concentrated on the right flank of the Seventh’s defensive positions. The faint screeching Semk war cry drifted from that flank, a sound like claws scraping taut skin. A fierce melee was underway at the first earthworks.

‘All right, Cuttle,’ the big man drawled. ‘Yank the hair.’

Duiker swung back to see the sapper in the pit raise both hands, gripping a long, black cord that trailed down into the water. Cuttle’s dirt-smeared face twisted into a fierce grimace, his eyes squeezing shut. Then he pulled. The cord went slack.

Nothing happened.

The historian chanced to look the big man’s way. He had a finger stuck in each ear, though his eyes remained open and fixed on the river. Realization struck Duiker even as List cried, ‘Sir!’

The ground seemed to drop an inch under them. The water on the ford rose up, humped, blurred, the hump seeming to roll with lightning swiftness down the submerged road’s length. The peasants on the river simply vanished. Then reappeared a heartbeat later – even as the concussion struck everyone on shore with a wind like a god’s fist – in blossoms of red and pink and yellow, fragments of flesh and bone, limbs, hair, tufts of cloth, all lifting higher and higher as the water exploded up and out in a muddy, ghastly mist.

Duiker’s mare backstepped, head tossing. The sound had been deafening. The world shivered on all sides. A Wickan rider had tumbled from his saddle and now writhed on the ground, hands held to his ears.

The river began to fall back, horridly churned with bodies and pieces of bodies, steam twisting away on sudden gusts of wind. The giant snake’s head was gone. Obliterated. As was another third of its length – all who had been in the water were gone.

Though he now stood close by, the big man’s words sounded faint and distant to Duiker’s ringing ears as he said, ‘Fifty-five cussers – what the Seventh’s been hoarding for years. That ford’s now a trench. Ha.’ Then his satisfied expression drained away. ‘Hood’s toes, we’re back to digging with shovels.’

A hand plucked the historian’s sleeve. List leaned close and whispered, ‘Where to now, sir?’

The historian looked downstream at the twisting eddies, red-stained and full of human flotsam. For a moment he could not comprehend the corporal’s question. Where to? Nowhere that’s good, no place where giving pause to slaughter will yield some’ thing other than despair.

‘Sir?’

‘To the melee, Corporal. We see this through.’