Ser Gavin Muriens sat heavily on his destrier, feet out of his stirrups to ease his back, great helm and gauntlets on his squire’s saddle-bow, idly picking something wet and grisly out of the spike of his little axe.

He was looking out over the valley that the irks called Dykesdale, watching his vanguard (in this case acting as his rear guard) toil down the far ridge like a line of ants slipping along to a food source.

At his feet, the Vale of Dykesdale stretched for some miles below a long ridge whose top was dominated by old maple and beech trees in the full colour of late summer growth. Many of them had lost their tops, as if a winter ice-storm had swept along the ridge, and there were gaps where men and irks had hewed away patches of wood.

Below, in Dykesdale itself, a crisscross of streams and beaver dams funneled all approaches to the ridge into two main routes: the Dyke, an ancient dam built by long-vanished Giant Beavers, and the Causeway, a stone and earth tribute to the Empress Livia’s failed attempt to wrest N’gara from the irks fifteen hundred years before.

Ser Gavin had chosen it as the ideal battlefield, with Tapio, the Faery Knight, and Mogon, Duchess of the West, and Kerak, her mage, after the two defeats farther west. They had stood here, on the same bare, round crest that the Outwallers called “The Serpent’s Rest,” and looked out over the magnificent country.

“It’s like an impregnable fortress, built by nature,” Gavin had said.

Tapio smiled so that his fangs showed. “It isss an impregnable fortress, oh man. But it wasss built by my kind, to defeat all comersss.”

And Mogon had lowered her great crested head. “Armies founder here, as the wardens know all too well. But our enemy comes in numbers that this place has never withstood.”

“Aye.” Tapio nodded.

Lord Kerak smiled. “You see only defeat. But we have discussed this, Lords of the East. We have slowed him, and made him show us his real warriors, his broken wardens, his hastenoch, his trolls. All I ask is that we make him use his power. Harmodius and Morgon and I have . . . a surprise.”

“Will it work?” Ser Gavin asked.

“That depends on the depth of his arrogance and some fortune,” the scholar-daemon said. His heavily inlaid beak opened to reveal the purple-pink tongue within—the Warden’s equivalent of a smile.

Gavin was still coming to grips with the idea that the battlefield had been built. “It is all apurpose?” he asked, somewhat awed.

“Every tree, every branch,” Tapio said. “We didn’t build the ssstone caussseway.” His fangs showed. “We jussst left it asss a monument to the ssstupidity of men.”

Tonight, with the sun setting in a ball of fire beyond Ash’s legions, Tapio’s confidence seemed empty vanity. So did Kerak’s.