Morgon Mortirmir went sword to pole hammer with a salamander banner bearer. He waited for his adversary; crossed the heavy blow, left to right, using his lighter weapon to guide the heavier, off line, rotated his hips, and his left hand reached out, a heavy, unnecessary blow; the turning motion he’d been taught, but as soon as his fingers caught the creature, its water was ripped from it, and it fell lightly, its horrified black eyes the last to lose expression at its awful death, but Mortirmir had already passed forward to his next victim.

He could hear the Te Deum.

But the black fire flooded him, and he didn’t want to stop. It was a joy like sexual release; greater, even, than creation, greater than . . .

Tancreda appeared in his palace.

“Stop!” she screamed.

For the time a mortally wounded being has to scream one last time, the battle balanced on the edge of a Fell Sword.

But that sword was in the hands of Pavalo Payam, and he pointed its gently curving blade across the last low ridge of the fingers and into the flank and rear of the salamander army.

Time had crawled while he marched; while he expanded his magnificently trained horsemen from a thin column to their battle line, while they passed unnoticed through a dozen gullies and a forest for ferns. It had all taken too long.

But now, like the release of healing, they had arrived, and the whole battle was laid out to his right; the scarecrows plunged deep into the enemy ranks like a dagger; the casa, the victorious Vardariotes and Scholae on the right wing; the left, where a tide of mixed militia and Gallish knights tried to force the enemy off the flank of the scarecrows. Red fire fell on the army of men, and they died. But they died with their faces to the enemy, and those who survived went forward. The salamanders were held in place like bugs on a pin.

The Fell Sword descended, cutting only air, but six thousand Mamluks rode forward, sabers on shoulders, lines well dressed, flowing organically around stands of fern trees or piles of stone.

The earth began to shake.

Gabriel was near the spot where the line of Galles met up with the line of Nordikaans. Except that, even in his closed helmet, from the back of Ataelus he could see that the two didn’t meet; that the Nordikaans were a shield-gang, a hundred or fewer in a circle of axes and swords, and that the enemy had begun to turn the flank of the Galles, expertly flowing through the failure of his own line.

A salamander shot him with a red bolt.

His armour turned it, and he cut, his sword shattering on the thing’s stone helmet, and Ataelus punched twice, once with each foot, and the thing’s stone armour cracked and it fell, and Ataelus trampled it.