Flisk heard Pillion, but the words explained nothing. “No,” he countered. He was too weak to shout. “You must not. King Bifalt needs the road. It is a killing zone. When the enemy starts to climb, riflemen will—”

He intended to say, Riflemen will slaughter them. A sudden tilting under his boots interrupted him. The unexpected shift snatched his hand free, cast him aside. He fell until his back hit the opposite rope. Then he managed to grip the line.

Staggered by the ease with which Magister Pillion had dismissed him, Heren Flisk needed a moment to realize that King Bifalt was wrong. He himself was mistaken. There would be no killing zone. When Rile’s forces were ready to climb the road, his sorcerers would do what they had done to the third terrace: they would wipe the rim of the cliff with lightning until every soldier able to aim a gun was reduced to charred meat.

Pillion faced the ships. “Do you want me to believe I can be mighty?” he panted. “The mightiest of my kind? I will show you what a lesser man who loves his family can do.”

With a sweep of one arm, he summoned his Decimate.

At the last instant, Ennis Forguile scrambled up from the fifth terrace; got his hands on the rope.

A heartbeat later, the cliff itself shuddered. With a crack like the sundering of the world, the whole length of the lowest level broke away from those above it. A gap that could have swallowed Forguile ran from north to south along the shelf where he had been standing. The force of the rupture flung loose rocks like gravel into the air. Clouds of dust gusted along the winds.

For a moment, the cleft slope stayed where it was, unmooring the siege-guns from their emplacements. Then Magister Pillion shouted at it, and it leaned wider.

Flisk thought that the massive stretch of stone would simply lean until it fell, knocking itself apart on the boulders of the strand. But Pillion’s Decimate did more. Another sweep of his arm brought up the bedrock base of the long section he had broken loose. Stone that had endured the unremitting violence of the seas for uncounted centuries was torn apart. From Flisk’s horrified vantage, Magister Pillion appeared to raise the very foundations of the lower cliff and the strand.

Raise them and heave—

The shattering of that incomprehensible weight was louder than the wild waves, more full of anguish than the shrill winds. It extinguished every conscious scrap of Flisk’s mind. Only his instincts saved him from letting go of the rope and sliding over the edge onto the bay’s jagged new barricade.

When Commander Forguile came to shake his moaning shoulder, Heren Flisk lifted his head. Seeing his friend, the only question Flisk could manage was: “How?”