Kurkas flinched as her bare flesh touched his bloody skin.

“Madam, I must protest,” he gasped weakly. “You’re not even my type.”

“Oh shut up.”

She threw herself into the task of saving a life she’d twice tried to take.

Viktor awoke in a suffocating, sweltering world. One swamped in darkness, stinking of sweat, blood and ordure. He tried to move. The oppressive weight on his chest shifted with a scrape of metal. It slipped a hair’s breadth closer to his nose, feeding sudden fear that whatever lay atop him would crush him entirely.

He twisted his head. Dead eyes stared back from an Immortal’s helm. Without the Hadari’s corpse to bear some of the weight, he’d have been crushed.

Scattered memories reformed. Saran. The white flame, and his shadow’s scream. The falling kraikon. Trapped beneath a kraikon? It was only dumb luck that he wasn’t dead.

Sights and sound trudged into shape. The distant sounds of sword on sword. The screams.

He was needed.

Slowly, carefully so as to not invite further collapse, Viktor braced hands against the kraikon. It barely shifted. He tried again, arching his back and kicking his heels against the ground.

The kraikon moved. Viktor roared as it gave. The kraikon slipped to his left, tilting as it did so. Daylight streamed in above Viktor’s head, giving shape to the mangled bronze torso.

Another muscle-wrenching heave and his right arm came free. From there, an undignified wriggle freed his right leg. His chest followed, though at the cost of a torn surcoat. Viktor didn’t care. He was free.

He lurched upright on rubbery legs and drank in sunlight and clean air. Or nearly so, for the stench of death lay thick on the wind. The Raven had feasted well that day. There, barely four hundred yards north, a new banquet awaited. A mishmash of wolf’s-heads, militia and Lumestra alone knew what else buckling beneath the remorseless Hadari advance.

“Em’shal rae, Ashanal!”

The pale-witch came for him at a dead run, healer’s tools spilling from an abandoned haversack. A shard-spear flashed to life, the blade under her hand, and the shaft running parallel to a back-flung arm.

She leapt, slashing at his face from mid-air. Viktor caught her by wrist and throat. A wrench. A snap. The woman went limp. The man the pale-witch had sought to treat crawled desperately away across the dead on his elbows. Viktor let him go and stared northwards once more.

For the first time since its cowardice before the white flame, his shadow demanded freedom.