Shouts had been ringing from the outer walls for a while, but now they reached the rampart. The seneschal ceased her translation and stepped to the wall, peering out over the plateau in alarm.

‘They are coming again.’

Movement at the back of the plateau, ripples in the ranks through belching smoke. The red formations were moving.

‘Fuck’s going on, little man? Sounds like a fuck-up wrapped in a fiasco.’

Rennic was behind them, Lemon and Foss at his back, gazing out over the battlefield with practised eyes.

‘Where have you been? How did you get up here?’

‘The boys and I weren’t considered noble enough to warrant an invitation to the premium gatehouse.’ Lemon nudged Foss. ‘Had to let the big fella charm us in.’

Foss coughed, shook his head. ‘Truth is, they’re a little short on guards right now.’

More shouts from beyond, and a sense of something moving through the air, dropping toward them, a swooping flock. Something pinged off the stone beside them, hard and dark, bouncing away with an alchemical hiss.

‘Fucken hells!’

Lemon swept downward, scooping up the object with one hand and hurling it out over the wall. It soared away into the pure sky, then exploded in a sickly flash and a savage burst of caustic smoke.

‘You all see that, eh? I just—’

The other demon eggs detonated, and the first gatehouse erupted in fire. Great gouts of flame roared upwards from the battlements, from inside the courtyard, from along the walls. Chunks of stone blasted out over the gorge, great cracks tearing through the shaking structure. House guards and staff alike were thrown and shattered, slammed against rock or shredded by hurtling debris. Shouts and screams rang out amidst the bells and futile horns, cries of pain and panic, pleas and entreaties and calls for absent mothers. One cry went up after another.

‘The gate is burning,’ Mira the seneschal said, her voice small in the bedlam. ‘The gate is burning. The gate is lost.’

Chel could see it, the changed light in the courtyard below, the bright flare of flame beneath the outer gatehouse. The first of the three barriers was breached.

‘Come on.’ Matil was somehow looming over them, stone dust in her hair and a single trickle of blood at one temple. ‘We are falling back to the next gate.’

With a crumbling sigh, the outer gatehouse tipped, then collapsed in on itself, sending another great plume of dust into the wind. It dropped from solid blocks of desert stone to a steaming pile of rubble in seconds, taking all remaining souls on the battlements along with it, pulverized amidst the crush of tumbling rock. Over its ruin, the cracked span of the bridge was revealed, chipped and smoking from two dozen charred impacts. Beyond it, on the plateau, on came the lines of red-robed infantry, the stomping ranks, and at their centre, the second great engine, the launcher of demon eggs.