Elgart paused long enough to ask, “Without collapsing the tunnel?” At once, he answered himself. “Perhaps. Magister Pillion used his Decimate like a shovel in his garden.”

Grimacing for his dead friend, Elgart jogged away.

The workman took another moment to catch his breath. Then he followed the King’s friend.

King Bifalt looked around, counted at least twenty riflemen listening to Jaspid’s orders. More were on the stairs. They might not be the last, if the rest did not fall to Rile’s men.

Leaving Jeck and Malder to keep watch, Bifalt went to see Set Ungabwey’s condition for himself.

The caravan-master had lost much of his bulk. His wealth of flesh was melting off him by the hour. Perhaps that loss had sustained him somehow. He would not endure much longer.

In his crippled left hand, he held a knot of fuses. Any flame there would light them all. On the floor by his right hand waited a striker with an oil wick. When the time came, he would have to press the striker hard enough to make a spark. If the wick caught the spark and burned, his last task would be to lift the striker and touch fire to the fuses. Whatever happened then, he would be done.

From the knot in his hand, fuses snaked in all directions. Each of them led to kegs of gunpowder set against the base of a column. King Bifalt had selected twelve targets: more than enough, he judged, to accomplish his purpose. The timing of the fuses he had left to Prince Jaspid.

Once the fuses were lit, the enemy would see them burning, smoking. If they were too long, Rile’s infantrymen might have time to stamp them out. For that reason, Jaspid had cut each fuse as short as possible. The result would be a staggered series of detonations. Their accumulating force might achieve as much as a single concussion. And if the enemy managed to extinguish one or more of the fuses, the others would still do their work. They might be enough.

The moment was near. King Bifalt could have wasted his time worrying it. Instead, he concentrated on Set Ungabwey.

In the flickering torchlight, the dying man looked like a figure carved in wax, an effigy of himself. Bifalt could not see him breathe. For a few heartbeats, the King scrambled to make new decisions. Send Jaspid to light the fuses? Do it himself? The last man to leave might be caught by the shock of the first blast—or by shattered stones flying like bullets.

Surely, that burden belonged to Belleger’s King.

More riflemen were running down the stairs. Sure of himself, Prince Jaspid positioned them to protect the fuses as well as each other and Master Ungabwey.

Then a fresh bead of blood bubbled out of the tube in Set Ungabwey’s chest that enabled him to breathe.