Yet for the moment the preparation for battle stood at a standstill. The soldiers and giants and dogs of Raj Ahten all kept beyond bowshot. For several more long minutes, only the flameweavers worked, dancing, twisting, gyrating in the heart of their bonfire, one with the flames; and the glowing salamanders took clearer form, becoming worms of white light, adding their own magical powers to those of the flameweavers.

Now, in the center of the great fire, the flameweavers stopped their wild dance and raised their hands to the sky as one.

The skies went black as onyx as the flameweavers began drawing ropes of energy from the heavens. Time and again, the flameweavers reached into the sky and caught the light. Time and again, they gathered it into their hands and merely held it, so that their hands became green blazing lights of their own that glowed brighter and brighter.

The hedge wizard muttered and cursed.

The flameweavers’ magics took more than the mere light from heaven. For minutes now, the air had been growing colder. Tempest saw that a rime of frost began to cover the castle walls, and the haft of the warhammer in his hand had gradually become stinging cold.

Frost formed along the ground—heaviest near the bonfire, and fanning out over the fields and all around the army, as if this otherworldly fire drew heat, rather than gave it off. The flameweavers were drawing the energy from the fire so efficiently now that Tempest imagined that even he could have stood in those emerald flames, walked through them unburned.

Tempest’s teeth chattered. It seemed that the very heat of his body was beginning to be sucked from him. Indeed, he could see the salamanders more clearly in the flames now—ethereal beings with tails of flame, leaping and dancing about, staring at the men on the castle walls.

“Beware the salamander’s eyes. Don’t look into the flames!” the hedge wizard began to shout. Tempest recognized the danger. For when his eyes met those pinpricks of flame that formed the orbs of a salamander, though for only a flickering instant, the salamander grew more solid in form while Tempest’s blood ran all the colder. Men averted their gaze, studied the frowth giants or the mastiffs or the Invincibles in Raj Ahten’s army—anything but the salamanders.

In the foreboding gloom, the bonfire grew surreal—became a green flaming world of its own, its walls decorated in fierce runes, the creatures at its heart growing in power with each passing moment.

The clouds above had become so cold that a thunderous hail now began to fall lightly, bouncing like gravel from the battlements, pinging against the helms and armor of the castle’s defenders.