He looked down at his people: five thousand Morean veterans, the very last of Livia’s ancient legions, armoured in long shirts of maille and armed with heavy spears and round shields. Some had fought all the way to N’gara and back; others had guarded Liviapolis until a few days before.

A man grinned at him. “Lead us, Alcaeus,” he said.

And Syr Christos nodded. “We can save this,” he said.

Alcaeus pointed at the very center. “Christos, go. All the way down the hill, and restore the center. I will go to the right . . .” He was looking at the base of the ridge, where 1Exrech and his legions still held. “I will go to the right and attempt to . . . do . . .” He smiled. “Something. Damn it, Christos. I’ll try and do something.”

“And so will I,” Christos said. He saluted. “For the emperor.”

“Wherever the hell he is,” Alcaeus said.

Ser Gavin Muriens

The bolt struck Gavin’s flaming sword, or perhaps he parried with it; the bolt was split into two, and each went into the ground, churned to mud by the blood and intestinal fluids of a thousand dead sentient creatures and a hundred horses’ hooves, and he leaned forward, pressing Bess to do her best, and she responded, her stride opening.

The antlerless demon slammed a fist into Bess’s armoured head; he crumpled the great spike, and her great strength was no match for its malevolence. Gavin went back over his crupper like he was practicing in the tiltyard.

He hit hard; the ground here was almost frozen, and he had a flare of pain in his shoulder, and then he was up, moving, and the realization that he had lost Hartmut’s sword was almost perfectly twinned with the sight of it pinned neatly under the demon’s outstretched foot.

But it was an ungainly position for a monster with legs so long.

“Now,” the thing said. “Now I will eat your soul. . . .”

It was bigger than he was, but not immeasurably bigger, and its posture was ridiculous, and Gavin used the whole spiked peak of his bassinet on its abundant testicles as it pounded a fist into his armoured back, but it was toppling, its weight overextended, and Gavin, despite the crunching of his ribs from the blow, stumbled back and got his hand on the hilt of Hartmut’s sword, and it burst into flame.

He cut at the nearest part, a flailing near-human hand, already missing a few black talons, and he severed it, and black blood began to come in great gouts, as if being pumped out by a strong boy at a summer well.

It pointed the bleeding stump at him and he was showered in its terrible blood, but he cut again, this time blind, but still a good cut, a simple fendente that caught something. Gavin stumbled back, threw up his visor, and saw it clutching his face.