The teamster on the cart fumbled with his bullhorn for a moment, then lifted it to his mouth and blew three long, surprisingly mellifluous notes, before pausing and repeating the process. The wagons immediately began hurrying to catch up with Ehren, forming into a double column to compact them into as little space as possible as the First Phrygian went by. Once they were clear, Ehren and his driver completed the maneuver, the carts peeling off from the road and forming an enormous circle, a makeshift fortress of dubious wooden walls.

Refugees had been repeatedly instructed how to react to a given horn signal, in the event of a moment just such as this. It had probably done a minimal amount of good. Even perfectly simple tasks were sometimes difficult or impossible under the conditions of an actual life-threatening situation. It was why soldiers trained and drilled endlessly—so that when they were numb with terror, they could, nonetheless, do everything they needed to do.

Once the wagons had stopped, the teamster sounded the rally call again on his horn. Some of the nearest refugees cried out and ran for the dubious shelter of the circled wagons. Others saw them and followed. Ehren supposed it was even possible that some of them had understood the signal. He saw dozens of the refugees who had run for the trees come running back. Some, but not all of them. Ehren shivered. Anyone who believed that the forest would provide any haven from the vord was going to be rudely surprised. He had already seen at least a dozen mantis warriors go gliding into the trees.

The Legions and the vord hammered at one another, while Citizens and vordknights streaked back and forth overhead in the rain. Drums rumbled, and men died. The Aleran order of battle had been swallowed by pure chaos, but the vord seemed to have no such difficulty. In absolute terms, the number of warriors they’d slipped through the gap in the Legion lines was not sizeable—but those vord, rushing wildly up and down through the column, had an effect on the Aleran troops entirely disproportionate to their numbers. They shrieked and rushed around, striking randomly as targets presented themselves, panicking men and animals alike.

So many horn signals were blowing that Ehren could not possibly tell one from another, the net result being a meaningless cacophony.

And then Ehren heard the drums.

He had never heard their like before—big, basso, ocean-deep drums whose voices rumbled so low that they were more felt than heard. But if the drums’ voices were strange to him, their tone and rhythm were perfectly clear: Their voices were angry.