Already they were in action. Rina had witnessed endless rehearsals with this team since the casting of the barrel, and she knew that the loading must already be complete, the powdery fire drug itself shovelled into the barrel and rammed home, the muddy loam paste pushed in after it, and then the stone, a rock roughly chipped into shape. And the wick, a tube of paper filled with the drug, would have been pushed into a hole drilled into the eruptor’s metal flank. Now Thux himself approached this wick with a lighted candle.

Arnuwanda and the Hatti stood and stared. ‘What is that?’

‘A thunderbolt from Jupiter,’ snarled Fabius in Latin. ‘Now, Northlander!’

As Thux lowered the candle to the powder tube, Rina screamed to her son. ‘Get down, Nelo! Oh, get down!’

Kassu saw the iron contraption, and the flame, and the scattering Carthaginians. This was a weapon. And he stood right before it. He was nowhere near the prince – Himuili had already dragged Arnuwanda away – but Kassu stood beside Palla. He grabbed the priest and hurled him to the ground.

The eruptor exploded.

That was what it felt like, sounded like. He glimpsed a dark mass flash from its mouth in a plume of fire and smoke, with a noise like thunder – it seemed to brush his foot even as he fell over Palla – and then it plummeted into the Hatti lines, and scattered the men, and he saw a kind of bursting of blood and bone.

When the roaring was over he found himself down on the ground, on top of the priest, Palla’s face below his. Smoke billowed around them. Men were screaming, but it felt as if his ears had been stuffed with cloth. He looked around. The central phalanx had been scattered, men lying smashed and broken. The statue of Jesus was gone too, shattered, only a stump remaining. And high on the walls of Carthage he saw dark mouths, more eruptors, aimed at the Hatti lines.

Then the pain hit him, a great wave from his right leg. He looked down. The leg was gone, from beneath the knee. Oddly no blood spurted. Perhaps the heat of the stone had cauterised it.

The priest beneath him grinned. ‘You’re crippled.’

‘Your god is dead.’ He had to shout to hear himself.

‘You should have killed me while you had the chance.’ And the priest drove a blade into Kassu’s side, under his mail coat.

More pain, exploding in him like the Carthaginian weapon. The priest twisted his blade, and Kassu could feel it pierce his muscle and pull his guts, feel it as it scraped on his backbone.

But Zida was here. He rolled Kassu aside. ‘This story ends now.’ He brought his axe chopping down on the priest’s neck.