Near the top, they were caught and flayed by archery and deadly small war machines—springals on carts and small mangonels throwing buckets of gravel. Closer in and sorcery began to play a part as the Empire’s sorcerers loosed their powers point blank into the boglins.

As soon as they commenced, Thorn began to kill them. The first was a pretty second-year university student with a solid knowledge of fire—her fire wind laid waste to hundreds of boglins and no few irks before he reached out for her and subsumed her without even bothering to use his powers. She screamed as her soul was destroyed—the utter despair of the young choked off without hope.

Then he struck again, and again. And again. In the time it took a thousand boglins to die, a generation of imperial mages was swept away, and he took their powers and their knowledge for his own.

Too late, the survivors shielded themselves, having never experienced anything like Thorn. Too late they attempted to find him and isolate him.

He began to rain fire on the forward walls.

Ser Hartmut watched it—and for a moment he thought the boglins were going to carry the earthworks. But they could not—they had enough feeling to experience dread, and their losses were hideous.

At a nod from Thorn—a better ally than he’d expected—Ser Hartmut sent the second line into motion. The top of the hill was a smoking ruin—no grass grew, and eldritch fire had swept the summit of the earthworks and the grass in front of it, defining the killing ground so well that some of the Outwallers flinched on getting to the edge of the charred ground.

But Hartmut’s sailors went forward, and the brigans. A sheet of black fire passed over the crest and into the earthworks, the only sign of its passing a slight disturbance in the ground—and the screams began. This time, few of the springals and the mangonels managed to get off a rock or a bucket of gravel—but most of their crews were messily dead, sliced in half by Thorn’s latest effort.

Now the enemy released their cavalry, and there was a sudden sortie. The earthworks were cunningly built, with careful angles and many hidden passages, and armoured men came from the front even as light horse poured into the flanks at both ends, riding recklessly through the high grass and loosing arrows as they came. The Outwallers at the far left took the brunt of the charge of the Vardariotes, and they died, cut down like ripe wheat.

Hartmut smiled. He had put the least reliable there, the useless mouths, and they served to cushion the blow of the Emperor’s finest light horse. They took time to run and die.