That shock was enough. Without realizing it, Flisk and Forguile both howled, “WITHDRAW!” Their few sorcerers were too precious to lose.

The riflemen among the cannon knew their orders. They dragged at their charges. Trench and the Magisters of wind obeyed without urging. All of the teams on the north left their guns, running for the road. The Magisters there staggered after them.

But on the south—

Hells! Those cannoneers kept firing. Riflemen yelled at them. Commander Forguile shouted again. They ignored him. They resembled soldiers in one of the pitched battles between Belleger and Amika decades ago, transported by fury and fear into a state where only the guns mattered: the next target and the next shot. They could not disengage until their foes did or died.

Magister Brighten’s guards manhandled her away to the road, hauled her by brute force up the ropes. The remaining Magisters stood with the gunners. Magister Lambent—Magister Lambent—shoved his guards away. He must have believed that he was safer where he was, protected by his own theurgy. The other sorcerers were like the gunners around them, lost in the madness of their struggle.

Forguile screamed at the soldiers, “Bring them! You must—!”

A second explosion cut him off. Another lightning-strike pierced the fading Decimates. It hit the cannon closest to him while the gunners rammed gunpowder and wadding down the barrel. Sorcery and lit gunpowder ripped the gun apart. The concussion knocked Forguile off his hold on the rope. In a spray of iron shards and splintered wood, he skidded downward.

Those gunners became mangled meat and bones.

Without hesitation, Flisk started toward his friend. From the crest of the road, he braced himself to slide downward through ash, snow, and patches of ice. Then he stopped. He was too far away to catch the Commander.

Somehow, the sorceress near the explosion still lived. It left her sprawling on the terrace: it did not kill her. One of her riflemen was lost. The other lifted her in his arms, staggered with her toward the road.

Three cannon kept firing. Two Magisters remained to shield them, Lambent and another Amikan, a man Flisk did not know.

When Flisk saw Forguile far below him reach out, catch the nearest rope with one hand, and wrench himself to a stop, the Captain understood that his friend was alive. Reeling inside himself, he howled at any soldiers who could hear him to get everyone else away from the long guns.

They tried to obey. Lambent’s fellow Magister fled his post in a rush. To move the gunners, the riflemen had to clout a couple of stubborn heads. Then they forced that team to flee. But Lambent himself refused. And the gunners on either side supported him. One man from each team grappled with Magister Lambent’s guards. The other three kept working.