Ariosto purred. Always.

Gabriel nodded. He leaned on his mount’s saddle and watched the camp. The landing ground was also the parade ground; he was at the head of the camp. He saw a tall, lanky woman kissing No Head where she thought no one could see them. He saw two archers in a fight, both men throwing heavy, angry blows. They didn’t seem serious. Oak Pew was talking to Heron. There were people walking to the latrines, people washing clothes, people eating, people shooting bows or swinging swords. Two farriers worked on horseshoes.

And yet, even as he watched, things began to change. A whistle trilled; in the center of camp, near the command tents, a whole lance’s worth of wedge tents came down, one, two, three. The pavilion of the Primus Pilus rocked back and forth, and then suddenly it was being stripped, the outer walls removed.

A trumpet sounded. They had a new trumpeter—from Harndon. Gabriel had never met the lad, and he had an irrational temptation to go and introduce himself.

The new trumpeter was damned good. His call, “Break Camp,” rang across the grass, and tents came down. Some of the veterans had seen the emperor arrive and drawn the correct conclusion.

Harald Derkensun, wearing a long red tunic and not much else, ran to the head of a street of linen tents and blew a golden whistle. Big men boiled out of the tents.

Gabriel watched it all with a sense of heartbreak, of loss. His eyes filled with tears.

I will never have this again, he thought. I will have love and lordship. But not this.

Why so sad, boss? Ariosto asked. Gabriel had forgotten that the big beast could read his emotions, if not his thoughts.

I love these people, Gabriel said. He hadn’t ever really allowed himself the thought.

Of course you do, boss! Ariosto beamed approval.

Gabriel laughed. His eyes were hurting, and he wiped his cheeks and felt a fool.

They launched without fanfare, and as Ariosto patiently climbed, Gabriel looked down at a long line of wagons that had come through the pass just to the south. A single heavy wagon had lost a wheel and the whole train was stopped, high up, but there was a knot of men around the wagon.

He couldn’t see over the pass into Etrusca, but he knew that a hundred and fifty leagues to the south, the new Patriarch of Rhum, Lucius di Bicci, was marching north as fast as he could. Trying to join with the army of the Duke of Mitla, currently huddled behind four long leagues of earthwork entrenchments and bastions at the head of a long valley by Lake Darda. Their combined force would have twenty thousand men.

The duchess and Sauce together might have eight thousand.

But behind him, on the plains of Galle, the ancient sorcerer whom men called the Necromancer was trapped, or at least, he was on parchment. No one knew exactly what he could do on a battlefield. Convert an army of men to not-dead?