Orden woke in pain, unable to tell how long ago he had passed out. The blood around his mouth was still wet, tasted coppery on his tongue. Any moment, Mendellas Orden thought, Raj Ahten will kick me again, begin pummeling me to death.

But nothing happened. Orden lay weak, at the edge of consciousness, waiting for a killing blow that never came.

With his many endowments of stamina, Orden could sustain tremendous damage. His wounds, as extensive as they were now, would not lead to his death. Weeks of convalescence, perhaps, but not death.

That is what he feared.

He opened his good eye, tried to see. The sun high above shone very dim through clouds; then the sky went black.

The glade nearby was empty.

He swallowed, struggled to think. He’d heard the faint ching of ring mail as he passed out. Realized numbly that it could have been the sound of Raj Ahten lunging away.

Orden looked around the field at the edge of the knoll. The wind faintly swayed the pines; the grass sat as if bent in a stiff gale. A flock of starlings hung in the air like thistledown, not five spans from him. But Orden was living so quickly, the wind seemed to blow slowly in comparison.

Raj Ahten had fled.

He’s left me, Orden realized, because he suspects I’m part of a serpent. He’s left me so he can attack the castle. Dimly, he heard a roar like the sound of the sea. Loud sounds, as if tides surged and churned. In his quickened state, the world of sound had vastly changed.

Now he recognized that these must be loud noises, must be cries of war. With one hand, he pushed himself up, gazed over the rolling slope of Tor Loman to Castle Longmot.

What he saw horrified him.

Beyond a curtain of rain or sleet, a huge fire raged on the hillside above Longmot. From that otherworldly fire, flameweavers and salamanders had drawn terrible energies, sending a green wave of flame screaming across the downs to the castle. Frowth giants lumbered over the fields carrying great scaling ladders. The mastiffs of war, with their iron collars and fierce masks, boiled like a dark tide toward the castle gates.

Everywhere in the blackness Raj Ahten’s Invincibles raced like dark roaches for the castle, shields high to deflect arrows, weapons drawn.

Raj Ahten’s forces were storming Longmot. The sky above the castle was black, ropes of twisted fire funneling from the sky.

King Orden watched from Tor Loman. With his endowments of metabolism, it seemed the skies had gone black for long minutes; one could only discern the dim ropes of flame winding down from heaven—coiled and churning like the winds within a tornado.

He could do nothing to help. He could not charge into battle, could barely crawl.