The irk woman’s exhausted mount got its forefeet onto the bank, but its eyes were glazing.

Two Albin militiamen jumped forward, reached down, and plucked the armoured irk out of the water even as her brave mount seemed to slump and grow smaller.

“Now, Albinkirk!” Redmede roared. “On your feet!”

The crossbows stood. They made two packed ranks, and their captain called orders, and the steel bows leveled at the hastenoch and the foremost Rukh, just a few yards away.

“Shoot!” called Captain Stark.

The heavy arbalests didn’t miss. Their bows were very powerful indeed; the bolts short, squat, and heavy, with broad steel heads like chisels.

The rangers on either flank stood again and began loosing at close range; no more ordered volleys, but every archer loosing as fast as she could nock and draw and find a target.

The Moreans had stopped throwing lead bullets. At this range, every slinger picked up stones the size of a dog’s head. A sling stone that heavy, thrown by a Morean mountaineer, could knock a Rukh dead in a single cast, break a hastenoch’s leg or hip, shatter the limbs of a stone troll.

For a moment, in the bestial mathematics of war, it was all a perfect balance among the speed of the hastenoch, the fears of the rangers, the resilience of the Rukh, the power of the bows, and the weight of the arrows and bolts and stones.

The Rukh pressed forward; the hastenoch filled the marsh with their cries, tentacles flapping. A Morean magister died in fire, and a levin bolt struck the Albin militiamen, killing a dozen outright.

And then a Rukh fell; a hastenoch flinched; a militiaman from the south Brogat spanned his crossbow a little faster than he might have despite the burns on his hands, got a bolt in the groove, and loosed at a range of ten inches in the very face of a monster’s fangs, and his mates, emboldened, held their bank another moment, and another . . .

. . . and then the balance was shattered. The fall of the arrows was unrelenting, and there were not enough monsters. Between one beat of a terrified heart and the next, everything changed, and desperate battle gave way to heartless, ruthless massacre. The hastenoch and the Rukh were trapped in the swamp as ducks are trapped by hunters, and they cried and trumpeted and squawked and bled and died. The survivors broke back out of the water to the north, and found the irk knights waiting; they’d ridden at no great speed along the old dam, and now they were like figures of myth, rising in their saddles to throw lances of gold into the tight-packed and despairing creatures.