Lenora screamed as she parried a sword blow from a big Noreelan, ducked down and hacked at his stomach. Coils of gray guts spilled out and he looked at her in surprise. “Help,” he whispered. She buried her blade in his face and wrenched, hearing bone crack as he fell. Another took his place, a woman already bearing terrible wounds to her neck and chest. Lenora gave her some more, then stamped her face into the sand and smothered her while fighting off a young boy. The lad was vicious and determined, but even when he buried a knife in Lenora’s side she merely shrugged him off and hacked him across the throat. It was just another wound, one more step nearer death, and the closer death came the more she was ready to welcome it in. The rage was good and pure. The fury at the unfairness of things—the Mages and their followers had gained and lost so much, in such a short time—drove her on, into the embrace of this new Noreelan attack. She hacked left and right, screaming, her bloody face terrifying her attackers. The day before an arrow had sliced off some of her scalp, and she had shaved her head so that the terrible gash would be on view. Several times her foes’ eyes drifted up to her weeping wound, giving her the opportunity to gut them with a simple thrust of her blade. The more wounds she took, the closer death loomed, but it became easier to mete out death as well.

Behind her, farther along the beach, the Mages were hunkered down behind a protective cordon of Krotes. Again and again the Noreelan machines sprang from the forest, strode or slid across the dunes and down the beach. And again and again the Krote warriors drove them back, at terrible expense. Hundreds lay dead, their slippery wet bodies offering added protection against the machines. Those left alive all bore injuries, some with simple cuts and bruises, others missing limbs or holding in their insides. Several machines lay across the beach. Their former Noreelan riders were little more than smudges in the sand—when they did manage to bring a machine down, the Krotes expended their fury upon its rider—and all but one of the machines now lay still, shattered and burned and melted by dregs of the Mages’ magic.

Because dregs were all they had left. Earlier that day Lenora had seen them rise from within the circle and direct a sustained attack of shadowy fire at an advancing machine. It had taken all their strength and concentration to bring it down, and even then their warriors had to advance to finish the job. A week earlier they had been blasting troop ships from Lake Denyah and scything down a hundred Noreelan attackers with a wave of their hand. Now the Mages could barely summon fire. Magic had given, and so it took away.