Twenty strong men rolled the two machines back up. The Umroth were forty paces away; close enough to see the damage a thousand years had wrought; close enough to see the gleam of the hermetical bones and smell the unsealie stench of corruption.

They weren’t fast.

They bristled with arrows that didn’t seem to harm them.

“Fire!” called Edmund, and his hand gonners vanished in another ripple of fire and smoke.

The left-hand falconet had its target; the porte-fire came down and the piece leapt back with a sharp crack.

The right-hand piece was covered in powder smoke.

The gonner stood his ground and waited, duty at war with terror. And a sinuous and ancient trunk took him and tore him, screaming, to shreds. But another journeyman picked up the fallen porte-fire and slapped it on the touch hole, scattering the powder in the quill, but after a delay that cost the brave journeyman his life, too, the falconet barked, and the ball smacked home in the same heartbeat, its impact inaudible in the roar and the screams.

Forty paces behind the gonnes, Bad Tom stood in his stirrups.

“Steady!” he roared.

All along the front of the valley, the monsters were against the trench and the stockade; all along the wall, brave men and women slammed heavy axes and long swords and spears into the towering, stinking things, and died. Or stood their ground. The monsters had real trouble with the trench and more with the stakes. The bravest of the archers emulated the Nordikaans, and went in under the things, cutting their legs.

Edmund’s guildsmen held their last volley until the monsters were at the very lip of the trench, and fired.

The creatures bunched up at the center, and went in over the dead gonners, right at the banner and Morgon Mortirmir. They were silent. Their stench panicked horses and rendered men uneasy.

The household knights were mounted on the best destriers in the whole of the Antica Terra, and none of them wanted to face the stinking monsters.

Morgon Mortirmir, ten paces to Bad Tom’s left under the household banner, spared a single instant of concentration from the labyrinth he was balancing to toss a calm on the horses. Then the monsters burst through, and Mortirmir had no working to strike them with. He was fighting on another plane, and he watched his doom approach.

“Ready!” Tom bellowed.

Forty knights held their lances upright in one hand, like jousters ready for the lists.

Tom used his knees and his left hand to keep his horse in check. The black behemoth between his knees had no more fear than the man on its back.