The cloud of sulphur smoke lingered like a collection of old farts and rotten eggs.

Something rippled past them from behind, a liquid vortex of colour that passed them at ankle height and made the hissing of a vast tribe of serpents or the fall of heavy rain as it passed. It went through the stakes, out into the smoke. Whatever it was, it seemed to sever the not-dead at their ankles, leaving them writhing in horrible deformity on the ground. The grim working passed over some, and seemed to lose coherence in the mass, but it was terrible in effect.

A stag, its antlers broken, leapt the low wall. It struck clumsily against the angled stake to Edmund’s left and turned on him, and Edmund swung his massive bronze pole-mace with all his strength and fear.

The creature was struck, and struck again; its backbone and pelvis broken, and it fell and writhed until Duke severed its head. The worm erupted and Duke cut it on the back stroke.

Nothing else came out of the smoke.

“Load,” Edmund said. He was amazed at the sound of his voice. He sounded so sure of himself.

A dog came out of the smoke, already short a leg, hobbling. It was struck down, its skull pulped. No worms emerged.

The smoke began to clear. A wind came up, blowing from behind them, and tore the smoke away in gouts, and there were the ancient not-dead mastodons towering over them, or so it seemed, although in fact they were two hundred paces away at the most distant red flags planted only that morning by the guild and the master archers.

A wave of hopelessness, of sheer, unwavering despair, the end of all joy, the extinguishing of the fires of intention, swept over the casa. But no one ran.

No one believed that there was anywhere to run.

It was the end of the world. The end of plans, the end of victory, the end of saving the world.

Edmund’s heart skipped a beat. Or perhaps it beat too fast for him to comprehend. They were an embodiment of terror, and they came on, hundreds of them. They stretched across the field, as far as his eye could see, and the stench was terrible.

Sorcery played in the air in front of him; a rolling barrage of fireballs struck a black shield like a translucent storm front and either vanished or burst without apparent effect.

“Sweet Christ,” Duke, former apprentice and now veteran, said.

The hand gonners froze.

Smoke’s voice rose over the evil silence. “And that’s just another crowd of fewkin’ monsters,” he said.

Mark my words, said a voice.

Duke found his hands moving of their own accord even as his mind failed to really accept or comprehend all the horror he was seeing.