Perhaps he could afford to wait. The enemy’s sorcerers had not attacked the remaining guns. They could have destroyed those cannon, those emplacements. Why did they hold back? Were they unaware of the medium cannon? The siege-guns? Or did they know something that Flisk and Forguile did not?

It was possible that the invaders had not spotted the rest of the guns. They could not see as well as Flisk could. Their relentless lightning made them vivid to him: it must surely leave them half-blind. Light-struck, they might have difficulty distinguishing the details of their own decks. The light of the rising moon was too wan to help them.

The Captain hoped for that. He wanted to sink as many of those ships as he could before they finished clearing the way for Rile’s fleet. To do that, he had to withhold his barrage until the last moment. If the guns fired too soon, they would not do enough damage. If he gave the signal too late, the enemy’s counterattack would kill everyone down on the terraces.

How much time did he have? He had no way of knowing. Later might be better than sooner, but he could only rely on now.

With a private groan, he called a rifleman out of the tense crowd watching the bay. “Full teams for sixteen cannon,” he told the soldier. “Trained men. No boys.

“Then muster your comrades.” He believed that all of them had returned from the search for Father Skurn. “And every Magister we have. I mean to hit those ships hard.”

Even the sorcerers of wind might find a way to affect the battle.

The rifleman saluted as if Flisk were General Klamath; as if Flisk had ever done anything to earn so much respect. Shouting orders, he ran for the encampment.

Muttering to himself, the Captain gathered his courage to give orders that would get men killed.

From the edge of the precipice, he scanned the terraces. The moon had not risen high enough to lift them out of the cliff’s shadow, but the flaring of the enemy’s Decimate lit them in harsh flashes. On the third and fourth levels, debris from the explosions higher up had ruined two of the medium cannon. Rubble made two or three others all but inaccessible. In the confusion of broken stone lay parts of bodies: separated limbs, shredded torsos, fragments that might once have been heads.

Altogether, the defense had lost twenty gunners, five riflemen, five—no, seven—cannon, and two Magisters. One surviving sorceress of lightning might be too weak to fight again. Each of those losses was a heavy blow.