But Ser Berengar and Ser Angelo, their own lances shivered, saw the worms and came to his aid, dismounting with poleaxes in a melee of mammoths and warhorses.

Philip de Beause saw a worm turned to an aethereal mist before his very visor.

Ser Angelo started heaving Umroth bones off de Beause while Ser Berengar covered him, and de Beause began to breathe again.

“Buried in Umroth ivory,” Ser Danved shouted down from atop his warhorse. “What a way to go!”

De Beause managed to get his visor open before he vomited.

Ser Danved laughed. “Lucky you have friends,” he said, and rode back into the melee.

Gabriel had gone forward to buy Mortirmir time to cast, but at some point he realized that he had passed from deception to main attack; he’d lost count of the great beasts he’d sent to dissolution, or that Ariosto had; the griffon’s talons had a strength as great as any monster in the wild, and Gabriel had a shard of memory of an ancient mastodon, its backbone severed, falling away beneath them.

And then, in one instant in the aethereal, the conglomerate being known as the Necromancer gave a cry of despair and pain and loss, agony, sorrow, even regret.

And Mortirmir’s voice slapped through the fog of possibility, ops, potentia, and violence.

Got him.

In the real, every remaining Umroth unmade and the huge worms that knitted the beasts together began to writhe, screaming in thin voices until a horde of terrified men and women pounded them to mush and mist.

The dust swirled. Wounded men continued to scream.

Gabriel rose above the battlefield, watching under his mount’s flashing wings. In three places, the titans had penetrated his wall; the Nordikaans had let them cross, and four of the beasts were there, battered to undeath by the axes of the northerners. They’d made it into the gonnes and killed a dozen men and women. And they’d passed the line of stakes where the Vardariotes had stood, but the Vardariotes had never planned to stand their ground; they simply mounted and rode back, flaying the great beasts from a few horse lengths away.

They still had a butcher’s bill.

So did the casa, and the guildsmen.

And there stood Morgon Mortirmir, beneath the banner. The nearest Umroth had fallen so that its long, curved tusks almost seemed to touch him. The light hadn’t changed; the whole fight had lasted mere minutes.

Gabriel looked down with a sinking heart.

I hate killing stuff I can’t eat, Ariosto said.

“It had no hope,” Mortirmir said. “It never thought it would win.”

“Morgon,” Gabriel said gently. “I’m not really of a mind to have this discussion just now.”

“And yet,” Mortirmir said. “It defeated my working. That was bad.” He shrugged. “I found the way it linked together and I broke that link.”