Jean-Claude lunged through the collapsing flap and bowled over a guard outside. The other guard cocked his musket and took aim. Hasdrubal erupted from the ground as a monstrous six-legged, mole-blind thing with scales like a crackback and rat teeth the size of garden shears.

The marine screamed in fright and tried to bring his gun around, but Hasdrubal bit down hard, severed his arm, and flung his body away.

Jean-Claude lengthened his stride. Hasdrubal paced him easily.

Jean-Claude shouted, “You want the ring. Aria wants Dok!”

The pavilion’s canvas ripped like sailcloth in a storm, torn to bits by Travers’s bloodshadow. Jean-Claude darted down a tent alley before the enraged Sanguinaire could draw sight to him. Hasdrubal leapt into the air and took wing as a falcon, racing ahead.

Travers’s shouts woke the camp to danger, horns sounded, and marines mustered. Jean-Claude huffed into the torment square with a stitch in his side. Hasdrubal landed next to Hailer Dok and switched into something huge and hairy with arms like an ape and tusks like a loxidont. He ripped the chains from the post, scooped up Dok and Jean-Claude, and bounded toward the ramparts, breaking the perimeter faster than the circle could close. It was all Jean-Claude could do to hang on and not be torn limb from limb like a rag doll in the mouth of a terrier. Sentries on the outer wall fired at them. Guns barked. Bullets thunked into the soil and scattered off rocks, but Hasdrubal was moving too quickly and erratically to make a good target.

Just as they crested the first ridgeline, Hasdrubal dropped Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude bounced and tumbled through the alien foliage until he fetched up against the bole of a very thick but stunted tree.

Hasdrubal’s chest heaved with his exertion and the inside of his flaring, horse-sized nostrils burned pink with his effort. Through a mouth full of great flat teeth, he said, “You tell the Windcaller I have her husband and will meet her at the wreck of the Conquest.”

Jean-Claude fought for breath and said, “I can take you to her,” but Hasdrubal had already turned and loped away.

Horns from the camp strongly suggested pursuit being organized.

Jean-Claude levered himself up and hurried to find the cache where he’d left his weapons. He rooted them up and, with the dagger braced on a rock, cut the bonds that held his hands. His fingers ached and burned as blood flowed back into them, but he managed to assemble his kit and lurch over the next ridge into thicker brush just as the first hunters poured from the gates of the palisade.