Amicia had suddenly had enough. “Don’t mock what you do not understand,” she snapped.

Tom was seldom baulked. But like most very dangerous men, he was not a fool. He bowed his head. “Sister?” he asked quietly.

“Something is wrong,” Ser Gabriel said. He was back in the real. He turned to look north. “Toby—my spear.”

Toby detached himself from a wall and ran for the stables.

“Amicia, get behind us,” Gabriel said. He still had her hand—and something about his instant willingness to believe her, to obey and react—

She turned to look.

Turned back to speak to him. She opened her mouth to say something neither of them would ever be able to forget, and she knew better—fatigue, religion, love, danger—it was a heady potion that transcended day-to-day and common sense, her usual guideposts all thrown down. The sense of wrongness now filled the air around her. Whatever it was, it was aimed for him, not her. She cast a protection, a mirror to confuse whatever the malevolence was; she borrowed his aura and put it on.

She raised a shield of glowing gold with a twitch of her be-ringed hand.

Something black fluttered out of the darkness onto her face, right through her shield.

At its touch, she screamed.

The Red Knight saw the change in her posture. He tossed the first working in his arsenal—

Fiat Lux.

Golden light leapt from a point fifty feet above them.

It revealed a beautiful horror—six magnificent, shimmering black moths, each the size of a great eagle, their wings the purest black satin shot with veins of blue-black that throbbed with ops and thick velvet-black bodies with elaborate black filigree and lace antennae—and probisci of obscene dimensions, long as baselards and swollen with a velvety hardness that made the skin crawl, tipped with adamant that shone like blued steel.

One of them fluttered against Amicia even as the light burgeoned.

Its probiscis throbbed with power and bit—and she screamed.

The Ifriquy’an’s long, curved sword slipped from the scabbard and flowed out and up like liquid metal in the silver-gold of mixed moonlight and mage light. He was a pace behind Amicia and his sword struck at an angle from the scabbard—severed a great, rapidly beating wing and the probiscis at its base in one strike—the sword passed through its target and swept back, was reversed, and swept back up, almost the same line, cutting off a lock of her hair as her knees gave from the poison and opening the velvet body from base to eye-cases in a shower of ops and potentia and black acid blood.

Amicia fell in the loose-limbed sprawl of death.

The Red Knight’s sword snapped from the scabbard and cut into another of the monsters—this one intended for him, wings spread and virulent poison already dripping. His sword slammed into it—and bounced off.