Gram stepped forward, lifted his hand, and casually held it out, palm up. Fire kindled in his cupped fingers, until a moment later a tiny form hovered there, just above the surface of his hand—a little feathered figure, its wings blurred into invisibility with their speed. The hot wind washing from them stirred Amara’s hair. Gram whispered something to the little fire fury, and flicked his wrist. The fiery hummingbird shot off into the night, gathering speed and brightening in intensity as it flew.

It swept over the battlefield, a globe of white daylight several hundred yards across. It zipped over countless mantis warriors, and at one point blew entirely through the torso of a vordknight that had flown down to intercept it, not even slowing down.

“Bad idea,” Gram said, shaking his head, “getting in Phyllis’s way like that.”

“Phyllis?” Bernard asked.

“Keep those teeth together, Calderon,” Gram said testily. “Named her for my first wife. Hotter than any torch, couldn’t sit still, and you didn’t want to get in her way, either.”

Amara smiled at the exchange and tracked Phyllis’s progress—and within moments, she spotted the oncoming special units, exactly where Invidia had said they would be.

“Bloody blighted crows,” Gram breathed, as if barely able to summon enough wind to speak.

Amara understood the feeling.

The oncoming vord were huge.

They weren’t huge on the same order as a gargant. They were huge on the same order as buildings. There were half a dozen of them, each the size of three or four of the largest merchant ships. They moved on four legs, each thicker than the trunk of any tree Amara had ever seen. Their vaguely triangular heads ended in a jagged, black chitin beak that rather reminded her of that of an octopus, except large enough to hold three or four hogshead barrels. The creatures had no eyes that she could see, and their beaks simply seemed to flow up into their skulls, and from there into enormous arching fans of the same material, spreading around the titans’ heads like shields. Every stride carried them a good twenty feet, and though they looked ponderous, their pace was, like a gargant’s, swifter than one would expect. Dozens of mantis warriors could run beneath them at a time, and though a mantis could run faster than some horses, they passed the enormous bulks of moving black chitin only slowly.

A word from Gram halted Phyllis above the nearest bulk, and everyone on the walls who could be spared from fighting could only stare. Centurion Giraldi stepped up to the battlements beside Bernard and Gram. He stared at the bulks for a moment, and breathed, “Sir? I’d like a bigger wall now.”