“That was twelve years of Torment,” Marie said. “Worse than that airless void we were just in, because I couldn’t even die. But if I had avoided that fate, what then? I was due to be married to a man I’d never met, far from friends or family or anyone who cared. Who knows, maybe I would have made a decent life. Maybe I would have been happier, but I wouldn’t be Fellhand Marie of the Tall Clouds clan. I wouldn’t be here, now, where it just might matter.”

Before Jean-Claude could respond, one of the scouts hurried in. “They’re coming, a whole parade of ’em, at least a hundred, and they’ve captured our baggage train.”

Jean-Claude cursed and wondered if he would live to see a day when he was not wrong-footed from the start. He sent the scout back to make sure the parade didn’t have a wing of scouts to catch his band from behind.

They waited as Travers’s parade trudged into view. It was a ragged affair on the uneven ground, with rank upon rank of aeronauts leading the way, followed by squads of marines and a flotilla of sedan chairs, because of course Travers and his scrawny kin couldn’t be arsed to hack through the rough.

Some of the porters from the Saint Asne had been tied together and trudged alongside the sedan chairs as human shields.

Behind the sedan chairs came a string of wagons, with teams of the rest of the Saint Asne’s crew hitched up to them like mules.

“Take out the Sanguinaires first?” asked Marie. “The rest won’t do well without leaders.”

Jean-Claude was about to give her the nod when it occurred to him that, aside from the lieutenants leading the marines, he hadn’t actually seen any bloodshadows. He scanned the sedan chairs with his clockwork eye. The draperies were all but invisible to his sight. The people inside were clayborn, tied up. The one in the fanciest of the chairs was the Skaladin capitaine Similce.

“Decoys,” he said, and swept his penetrative gaze over the rest of the caravan. The wagons … At least three of those wagons were rolling bunkers lined with metal that he could not see through. They’d added metal slats to the wheels to make them wider so they wouldn’t sink into the mud.

“The Sanguinaire are in those wagons,” he said. “They’re armored, bulletproof.”

“So we have to get them to come out.”

Jean-Claude chewed on the problem. “No. We need to get them to stay in. Marie, you’re going to start the show. I need you to take out those marine lieutenants. Malgiers, you’re the moat, keep they clayborn off of us.” That left him with a double handful of marines. He assigned two sharpshooters to each wagon. “Shoot anything that shows its head. The rest of you come with me, cutlasses and pistols.”