A dark sleet and a horrible lavender mist rose from the phalanx of mammoths and came back. Duke was praying; Tom dropped his round lead ball into the sand and had to find it. Sam got his load down and his face was white.

“Load!” Edmund roared. “There’s nothing out there we can’t crush with alchemy and muscle and craft. Five! Four!”

Most of the gonnes were upright, their poles set in the sand, the sign a man or woman was loaded. A few were still struggling. Tom had his ball on the soft leather patch and was pressing it in with his thumb, his eyes on the terrible line of monsters.

Off to his right, a falconet fired. It was a gonner’s triumph; the round iron ball struck an Umroth full on. There was a flair of violet lightning, and the thing unmade.

The guild cheered. It was thin, and unplanned, but the strike heartened them tremendously.

“Three!” Edmund roared. “Two! Make ready!”

The second falconet spat. Its ball missed.

“Present!”

Two hundred gonnes went from vertical to horizontal. Abby Crom, all five foot ten of her, put her cheek down on the shaft of her weapon and put the muzzle ring just under the center of a monster’s forehead, just as if she were practicing in the fields of Berona. Then she put her tongue between her teeth and raised the muzzle the width of two fingers for the range.

“Fire!” Edmund called.

This time, he made the word into one sound, and all the gonnes crashed out together. The smoke billowed.

A hermetical breeze came up from behind them and swept the smoke away, and there were two of the monsters unmaking in a brilliant display of blacklit fireworks.

Gabriel was almost out of ops, and all he’d done was defend himself. Morgon had landed one major blow; a rippling plane of dissolution that had broken the back of the assault of the animals.

The line of Umroth came out of the woods when Gabriel threw a simple wind working to give his people a line of sight.

And then he threw a leg over Ariosto’s back. The griffon launched them in two strides.

A levin bolt rose out of the Umroth; he deflected it easily enough, and it was followed immediately by a hundred levin bolts. They came from a broad field and cleverly eliminated his favourite tactic learned from Harmodius: the use of small, light shields far distant to block emanations at the caster’s end of the aethereal. The wide volley forced Gabriel to expend energy at a prodigious rate.

A second volley rose from the Umroth even as they rolled forward against his line. But in the real, the falconets and the guildsmen were hurting them, and Gabriel had enough entanglement with his enemy to understand that every Umroth down was a little of its self lost.