Then Gaborn’s horse raced past, leapt a fallen tree, and became a blur in the starlight. Gaborn pulled himself upright in the saddle, dizzy with pain, feeling blood flow liberally from the gash on his arm. Three inches to the left, and the arrow would have punched into a lung.

Behind him, his attacker howled like a wolf and began his pursuit. The answering howls of dogs came from off to Gaborn’s right—war dogs that would catch his scent.

For a long hour he rode over hills, not stopping to stanch his wound. He’d been at the rear of the army, trying to circle behind their scouts. Now he sought to evade pursuit by rushing ahead of the hosts to the west, striking deep into the heart of the wood. As he got farther away, the stars dimmed, as if high clouds obscured their light, and he found it hard to keep to any trail.

So, hoping his pursuers would think he’d fled, Gaborn veered back toward the main force of the army, directly into danger. For he still had not been able to learn the number and types of their forces.

When the starlight suddenly came bright, he heard the sounds of the army in the woods below—branchés snapping, iron-shod feet tramping in the night. His horse rested near the crest of a ridge, in a sheltered grotto that let him look down over a long bed of ferns.

Dogs began baying in the distance behind him. They’d discovered his ruse.

Gaborn sat tall in his saddle, looking down into the dark. He’d veered in front of the army. A mile ahead’ he could see a break in the woods—a wide swale that would have been a frozen lake in the winter. But the waters had receded over the summer, leaving only tall grasses.

There, in the grasses, Gaborn saw a sudden light as Raj Ahten’s flameweavers stepped from beneath the shelter of the pines—five people, naked but for the red flames that licked their hairless skins, strode boldly across the swale. Behind and around them Gaborn saw something else—creatures that loped over the grass, black shadows darker than those thrown by the pines. They were roughly man-shaped, but often seemed to fall to all fours, running on their knuckles.

Apes? Gaborn wondered. He’d seen such creatures brought north as curiosities. Raj Ahten had frowth giants and flameweavers in his retinue, along with Invincibles and war dogs. Gaborn thought it might be possible to grant endowments to apes, turn them into warriors.

But instinctively Gaborn knew that these creatures were nothing he’d ever seen. Larger than apes. Nomen, perhaps—creatures recalled only in ancient tales. Or maybe some new horror in the earth. Thousands of them issued from the woods, a dark tide of bodies.

Frowth giants waded among them, and Raj Ahten’s Invincibles rode behind in armor that flashed in the starlight.