“Horsemen and infantry!” Lugotorix called down to her. “They’re close—a couple of stadia.”

“What banner?” Oresias asked, his entire upper body trembling with the weight of the cage and pole. The lens hung steady and undisturbed, absorbing the cage just as an invisible doorway swallows the top of a magician’s rope.

“No banners,” Jamal Atta said. “They’re Kirghiz! We must leave!”

Oresias pulled the cage from the gate convulsively. Rhita saw a limp blur of red and gray in the cage as Oresias swung the pole out over the stream to the bank. They both peered down at the cony. It was dead; it hardly resembled an animal at all.

“What happened to it?” Rhita asked.

“Looks like it exploded, or something tore it apart,” Oresias said. He fingered the wooden bars; they were intact, their contents dripping a thin fluid of blood onto the grass and dirt. He unhooked the cage and stuffed it hastily into a rubberized sack. Lugotorix came down the decline to grab her arm. “We go now,” he said firmly, machine pistol in hand. She did not resist.

They stood on the edge of the swale for a moment to get their bearings. Soldiers ran through the grass to the beecraft with boxes of supplies. One stumbled and fell, screaming; Rhita thought he had been shot, but he regained his footing and picked up his load. She looked to the north, beyond the beecraft, and saw a line of dark riders moving rapidly toward them, horses up to their withers in grass. Clods of mud flew up behind them, and their voices joined in a heavy, ululating song above the pounding of hooves. Some waved swords and long rifles in the air. Hidden by a low hill until just this moment, a flimsy multiple-winged gullcraft suddenly vaulted into view behind the riders, buzzing like a summer dragonfly. The gullcraft flew over the line, gained more altitude, and passed above them at about fifty arms, wings dipped almost vertical as the kybernetes and one observer in a rear seat tried to see the invaders. She clearly made out a long black telescope in the observer’s hands, and then Lugotorix lifted her by her arms, pinned to her sides by his huge hands, and ran with her to the nearest beecraft. Oresias tried to keep up with them. She turned and saw Jamal Atta scrambling with arms outflung, cape billowing, in the direction of a clump of soldiers bearing yet more boxes of supplies from the cargo gullcraft.

“Drop them! Get to your craft!” he ordered. But it was too late. The horsemen were already riding through the camp, some plunging into the swale, barely missing striking the gate, and up the other side, horses chuffing and flinging ribbons of foam, their nostrils flaring.