Sixty yards from the ditch of the camp’s back wall, there was a deep hollow, almost a long bowshot from end to end, fully covered from the firing positions on the camp wall. All along that hollow, there were clay jars buried deep in the soft earth, each sealed with wax and with a piece of the very same char cloth—linen woven on the same bolt—in the midst of the jar.

And bits of rusty metal and old nails and the like.

And several pounds of Master Smythe’s powder.

Mag’s tiny working produced six prodigious explosions.

Immediately, the back gate of the camp opened and a mounted sortie went out—first a dozen Vardariots under Zac who spread like a magick curtain in front of the knights, and then forty knights armed cap-à-pied. Behind them came another forty men-at-arms who shook out into a loose line with two paces between armoured men.

The mounted men cleared the road by torchlight, and the dismounted men-at-arms did most of the killing. In the dark, a man in armour was very hard to injure, and anything without armour—especially stunned, wounded cave bears and irks—were easily dispatched.

The smell of hell come to earth—sulphur and saltpeter—hung in the damp night air.

In the night, Mag exchanged workings with something out in the darkness. She left two great golden shields over the whole of the camp when she went to her blanket roll. The golden shields caused as much lost sleep and consternation among the newer men and women as irks and boglins might have done.

Mag awoke to find the young Mortirmir was releasing fireballs from a tower—one working that loosed one small ball from each fingertip, where they hurried out into the darkness like malignant glow flies. By the time she climbed the tower to him, he was showing off, casting complex arcs of light and tiny focused beams of red.

“You could save some of that for when it matters,” Mag said.

With a dramatic swoosh, Morgon produced a magnificent, gurgling bundle of focused ops like a tiny sun, complete to straying arms of white-hot gas. He flung it so far that it simply vanished.

“What was that for?” Mag asked. There was a precision to the way he used ops and the way he focused that she admired—more as a seamstress than as a magicker.

He turned and smiled his ingenuous smile. “Just because I can,” he said. “Ser Milus says by now the woods are full a mile or more deep around us.”

Off to the north and east, there was a sudden glow—then a deep, pulsing red burning, and then a hollow thum followed by a sharp crack.

“I wanted to see how far I could throw something really powerful. Bet someone’s surprised.”

Mag sighed. “I’m going back to bed. Please don’t be such a small boy.”