As the sun was setting, she was woken from her half-conscious reverie by calls from the scouts.

“Riders! Cavalry ahead!”

Awake at once, Winter blinked away the fog in her head and reined Edgar to a halt, the other officers clustering around her. Her hand went to her sword, for all the good it would do. If the cavalry were Hamveltai, they would face little opposition from the exhausted Third Regiment.

But no. When the approaching horsemen became visible, they wore blue jackets and trousers, along with the gleaming steel cuirasses that were the pride of Vordan’s elite heavy cavalry. Each man carried a carbine, a shortened musket that could be used from horseback, along with his cavalry saber. In the lead was a diminutive figure standing tall in his stirrups, wearing a tall, plumed hat. He waved excitedly.

“Oh Lord,” Winter said.

“You know him?” Jane said.

“He was our cavalry commander in Khandar. Captain Henry Stokes,” she said. “We called him Give-Em-Hell.”

“Why?” Cyte said.

“You’ll see.”

Chapter Fifteen

MARCUS

In spite of the fact that his only physical pain was the aching of his arms from rowing, Marcus felt bruised.

Again. Once again, he’d led men into a nightmare, a confrontation with forces they couldn’t hope to match. He remembered the sick lurch of his stomach as the dead had risen in the Desoltai temple, the feeling that everything he knew about the world was coming apart. The screams of the soldiers the walking corpses had torn to pieces. What good are ordinary people against creatures like that?

For a moment, he damned Janus, the Thousand Names, and everything that had happened since the day Colonel Vhalnich stepped off the boat onto the rocky shore of Khandar. Maybe it would be better if the Redeemers had slaughtered us all.

Except, of course, it wasn’t Janus’ fault. The Priests of the Black were real, working under the surface, still manipulating events a hundred years after they’d supposedly been abolished. Raesinia was proof enough of that. Janus only opened my eyes. But he never asked if I’d rather have kept them closed.

“Marcus?” Raesinia said.

“Hmm?” Marcus blinked. They were sitting in the dining room of Twin Turrets, with the map still laid out on the table. It had gone four in the morning, and exhaustion was settling over him like a cloak. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“How long will it take your message to reach Janus?”

“If we’re lucky, by tomorrow night.” Marcus silently cursed the elaborate security measures that kept him ignorant of the location of Willowbrook. He understood the necessity, but he wanted to sit by the flik-flik line until new instructions came through, not wait for a signal and a courier handoff that might be flubbed. “And if he’s prompt, we could have a response by the day after tomorrow.”