Urk of Mogon looked into the vastness and nodded at Cully, breaking open his mandibles. “Want to walk away,” he said. “Want to walk into cool dark and green and never come out.”

Cully frowned. “All I see is standing firewood.”

Urk looked at him, his all-too-human eyes registering revulsion. “Here is beauty,” he said.

Cully put an arm around the thing’s wing cases. It had taken an act of will once, to embrace the bug, but that was weeks and many shared dangers ago. “If’n you say so, mate,” he said. “In the dark, I see danger, spiders, wet, cold, and hunger.” He shrugged apologetically. “No pay, no wine, no women, and no fuckin’ song.”

Urk smiled, his four jaws yawning in a particularly loathsome way. “You make war,” he said. “And this war is nothing but cold, damp, and danger.”

“True for you, mate,” Cully muttered. “But there’s pay.”

“And?” the bug asked.

“Oh aye, yer fewkin’ point is made.” Cully looked out into the dark and threatening woods, trying to see a shred of beauty.

Adrian Goldsmith watched the captain, which was to say the emperor, mount his griffon. He sketched rapidly in the book he now carried all the time. Ariosto stretched, a particular motion he made before his wings began their beat, and in that moment he was perfectly caught by the rising sun; the fractal complexity of his feathered wings, before he blazed into a single glory of ruddy gold; the scarlet of his saddle and reins and holding strap, the brilliant scarlet and steel of his rider.

The captain launched into the morning air, and Tom Lachlan was suddenly everywhere, bellowing orders, and Edmund went down the guild line, stopped to look at Duke, and the two mocked each other for a moment, as usual.

Adrian Goldsmith felt a pang of homesickness. He was, after all, guild born and bred.

Lachlan was right behind Edmund, and he stopped to talk to two apprentices from the Cutlers’ Guild. He leaned forward a little, his darkly burnished armour somehow one with the last of the night, the gold edges glowing with the rising sun. Adrian switched targets, flipped his palette, and began to sketch the Primus Pilus.

Lachlan was hefting one of the heavy bronze tubes on a long spear pole. “Hard to carry?” he asked.

Donald Leary, Cutler’s apprentice, was the kind of Harndoner who was not ever abashed. “Heavy as sin, mate,” he said as if he and the giant knight were old friends.

“Aye,” Lachlan agreed. “An’ how many rounds do ye ha’e?”

Leary smiled. “Forty,” he said.

Bad Tom looked at the thing, like a mace on a pole. “Sweet Christ,” he said. “Well, Gabriel thinks the world o’ yon. I ha’e me doubts.” He shrugged and looked at the crews of the two long bronze falconets on their wheeled carriages.