Flisk watched until Whimper and the others crept cautiously past the lip of the road and down the ropes. Then he let the Bay of Lights claim his attention.

For a time, most of the onlookers retreated to the heat of the stoves, leaving the Captain and his riflemen alone. But as daylight spread past the strand and out over the rock-bitten turbulence of the waters, more people came to estimate the Great God’s progress.

The ships were visible now despite the distance. Men and women who understood what they saw gasped and swore. Relentless sorcery had reduced the wide jaw of the reef to a few solitary teeth. Gaps big enough to admit three or even five ships now gaped in the barrier, letting the full weight of the ocean’s pounding rush inward. And inside the bay, out at the farthest reach of the long guns, were twelve—sixteen—no, twenty black vessels like the ones that had come before.

Their sails were furled. The winds would have torn the canvas to shreds, sunk the vessels. In pools of some unknown theurgy, the ships sat motionless, as still and stable as if they rested on iron platforms fixed to the bay’s bottom. Sure of themselves despite the scouring seas, the raw power of waves that should have shattered them and swallowed the debris, those ships worked to clear the bay of its many obstacles: the jutting towers and plinths and fists of the coast’s oldest stone; the boulders and scowling menhirs that would otherwise have made the approach to Belleger impassable despite the ruin of the reef.

Lurid with lightnings, and shivering at the force of the earthquakes unleashed from their decks, those ships were making the first stage of their Great God’s invasion possible.

And beyond them, beyond where the reef had been, were more ships, too many to count. Despite the distance, and the dark shadow cast by the storm, it was clear that those vessels were larger than the ones in the bay. Far larger. They were not floating forts: they were castles made to ride the seas. Within them, they carried Rile’s host. Heren Flisk would not have been surprised to learn that each of them held a thousand men.

If they achieved a landing—

If they could fight their way up the bottleneck of the road—

Captain Flisk did not believe that General Klamath would arrive in time.

Crunching through the hardened snow, Commander Forguile came to his comrade’s side at last.