“Lord Gavin will drive them out in a few hours. His whole army, with that of the Count of the Borders, is just over the next ridge. We need to be ready to open the gate on the bridge.” She looked at Sister Anne.

Anne nodded. “Give me the key, my lady. I’ll see it done.”

Rannulfson sent six of his best men with the Prioress of Abbington, as Sister Anne was more formally known. The loss of Abbington’s priory had not yet been made official within the Order. And Anne was, after Miriam, the most potent worker of ops in the choir.

Sister Anne rode down the long ramp, even as workmen were taking down the stone bridges that eased wagon access to the great fortress and the garrison women were heating vats of oil. In the chapel, the choir was practicing both music and their defence.

“I miss Amicia,” Miriam told the air.

They should have been ready for this.

A little after the bells rang for nonnes, there was a flash in the aethereal that gave Miriam a heartbeat of warning, and the defences of Lissen Carak sprang erect.

The flash had been a deception. The real attack went in farther south.

The great fortified bridge that linked the south bank to the north, the vital link . . .

. . . exploded in a torrent of red fire.

In the real, the detonation was apocalyptic. The central tower and all four central spans vanished, and a vast cloud of steam rose to hide the wreckage. Massive stones began to fall to earth, some crushing hapless militia, some plunging into the already chaotic maelstrom of the river. Sister Anne was killed instantly, as were her knights.

Lissen Carak—Ash

Ash sighed with pleasure.

Attack! he ordered.

A mile away, at the top of the great ridge that dominated the valley of the Cohocton on the south bank, Ser Gavin watched his link with the fortress vanish in a single, cataclysmic detonation whose echoes rumbled along the Adnacrags for many heartbeats.

Gavin closed his eyes in disbelief.

“I thought that they had massive magical protections?” he asked Tamsin.

She shook her head. “They did,” she said. “We need to run.”

Lissen Carak

Immediately after the assault in the aethereal came the first real assault in the real. A wave of bogglins threw themselves at the entrenchments, and died; and a second. By the third assault, the garrisons of the little redoubts were aware that they were islanders in a rising tide of enemies, and most of them panicked; they were not professional soldiers, and there were not twenty knights among the whole host, and they were outnumbered by many hundreds to one.