Phillip de Beause flinched at the thought of death and then leaned forward the fraction that told his destrier to go and he passed the first two beasts unopposed and followed Lachlan through the dust, his lance still held high. He saw Lachlan smash another beast with his hammer and ride on, and in a flick of his arm and hand, his lance came down, stooping like a falcon to strike the thing. His lance shivered; the skull cracked, but his horse was brought up at a stand, and one of the great ivory tusks slammed into his horse’s breast and threw them down.

De Beause went down hard, falling on his side, but his armour and its padding held and his horse, terrified but still game, rolled away without crushing him. Another not-dead mastodon impaled the horse on its tusk; there was an explosion of deadly amber light and the horse rained blood and gristle across the field, but de Beause was up again, on foot in a horde of giants, and there was no place for the terror he felt. His sword was gone, and he plucked out his dagger from habit, ran under the next creature and stabbed up into its dangling rotting guts with no effect, gagged on the stench, and struck again.

And then he was struck down. Something was broken in his chest, and a worm head was coming for him.

Tom Lachlan appeared in the dust and threw blows with his war hammer so fast that de Beause couldn’t count them, and then Lachlan’s mount stood up on its hind feet and its steel-clad forefeet struck like a boxer’s fists. De Beause watched in distant admiration; the pain from his broken body left him above the fray, an observer, as Tom’s superb warhorse pivoted on its back feet, standing like an angry cat, to slam one more blow into the Umroth’s head as Tom rolled his hammer through a long arc and leaned between the tusks so that his blow had all the weight of his arm and the gliding step of his heavy mount as well.

This blow smashed through the heavy bone. And even as the thing shifted weight, trying to put a foot down on de Beause, it unmade. The pain increased, and de Beause went away.

And then he was back, buried in a fortune of Umroth ivory.

And alive.

The Umroth’s worms came for him a few terrified heartbeats later. They were old, and huge, like malevolent pythons, but their very size saved him for a moment. They battered against his armour, their snake-sized jaws trying to get through his steel visor.

Every man and woman of the company had been exhaustively briefed on the worms, but de Beause, wounded and pinned to the ground, could do nothing but lie still and scream while the things sought unguarded flesh and battered at his armour.