He threw the hilt, and took his steel mace off his pommel. Ataelus reared; there was a flash of red fire, and he was falling, falling . . .

He hit hard, and they were on him, and he’d lost the mace. Ataelus thrashed, but luck, or fate, had thrown him clear, and he got his left leg under him, free of the saddle and the stirrups and he got his metal hand up and triggered the working he kept there; the hand went dead, but every salamander around him fell, blind; several went down and never rose, and he stepped back to raise Ataelus, but the horse was spasming, and then there were dozens of the dark red things and he put his dead hand into every incoming blow, as if the magnificent work of a master craftsman were a cheap iron buckler. He covered and punched with his dagger, covered and punched; grappled close against a tall monster with a sucker mouth and turned the thing to the right, holding him into the way of his brother’s bolt of red lighting, throwing the broken corpse into a third, and then the dagger, hot now to the touch; he left it in a bulging-eyed face, kicked with his pointed sabatons, and struck with his gauntleted fists—one, two. He was taller and stronger than any of them; he overrotated arms, and felt the alien musculature tear under his hands, dislocated shoulders, and slammed the dead hand into another, and another, and they pressed closer . . .

Ataelus was his undoing. Ataelus the loyal, who, dying, dragged himself by three scraping hooves to his master; Ataelus, whose teeth continued to rip salamanders from their feet, until a dozen of the red-brown things carved him with axes, and Gabriel fell backward over the stallion’s outthrust neck.

He’d already used his reserve. He had nothing, even to save himself.

Luckily, he had Anne Woodstock.

Her blade was everywhere for five beats of his heart, and he got one foot on Ataelus’s head and pushed himself away; got the other foot under and turned his own weary body over, so that he was on his hands and knees and a great blow struck him in the back, and he went flat on his face. His left hand was dead; his right was not strong enough for the duty, and he rose a few inches and fell.

He never saw the ten more human heartbeats during which Woodstock covered him and dealt death.

He only knew that he took a breath, and then another, and then another, and in between them, he was not dead. The terror was impenetrable; facedown and unable to see or rise. He had no ops. He considered adventuring the black potentia, but his own panic was too strong for such an endeavour.

He tried to pray, and nothing came.

Perhaps he screamed into his visor.

Perhaps not.

The earth was shaking. Even through terror and fatalism and fatigue and sorrow, he felt the earth shake.