Ser George Brewes bellowed and lashed out with his long spear, and Ser Giovanni Gentile stood by him. One of the younger wyverns took a deep thrust under his neck and powered himself into the air, but the other stayed to fight, and armoured men and women struck it from every side until it crumpled. Tippit and Half-Arse put goose feathers in a third monster, and then the survivors were banking away.

The trailing, wounded beast had trouble getting altitude, and the Vardariotes killed her, riding at breakneck speed under the stricken thing and loosing arrows straight up into her guts until she fell.

The men and women of the company pulled the dead horrors off the baggage wagons, and noted that their talons were smeared in a sticky black mess. Master Mortirmir was summoned, and took samples. It was obviously hermetical, but Morgon couldn’t see what it was for—it wasn’t a poison.

Morgon thought the whole incident a display of the enemy’s foolish vanity—four wyverns was a poor return for two baggage wagons and six dead archers, if considered coldly.

It was hard to consider coldly. They buried the men and the two women who’d died with the baggage, crossbows in hand, and then they drove on. The column marched until noon.

And then, suddenly, horses began to die.

There was no warning. Among the company, it was horses with the baggage that went down first. Almost a dozen in the first minute, black froth coming from their nostrils.

Men went down as their mounts collapsed. The collapses were horrible—well-beloved mounts seemed almost to melt, their skin crawled with some form of death, and then, down they went, never to rise, and as they lay they bloated with terrifying rapidity, their guts stinking as they corrupted.

Morgon was not the only magister with the column, but he was the closest to the first horses to fall. He had the presence of mind to order his own horse—a lithe stallion called Averoes—to run—indeed, he struck Averoes sharply with his scabbard to drive the young horse away. Then he ran towards the nearest rotting animal, already entering into his palace—the palace Harmodius had built.

The checkerboard floor was unchanged, as were many of the other features, but he had changed the chess pieces for statues—thirty-two statues of many of his favourite people from history and his own times, philosophers and rulers and mystics and even musicians.

Again he summoned the black paste that had been on the wyverns’ talons. In the aethereal, it appeared not black but a living purple, like a slime mould. The colour burgeoned with life and hermetical energy.