‘I am honoured to fight with you this day,’ General Klovis Plona-Richstar said to Gerent Bianca. ‘Your ancestor’s bier is safe with the Rakallion Grenadiers, I assure you.’

‘Thank you,’ Gerent Bianca said.

She had missed their level of ritual and formality during her time with the Cadians. In the field they were fine warriors, she was sure, but they lacked the social finesse of the nobility of the Gallows Cluster.

The Rakallions snapped to attention as the Cadians marched past, then they took a different tunnel, with the golden bier of the saint leading them to battle.

A mile of emptiness gaped beneath Minka. In the black she could see clearly the trenches and the fires, and the firing parapets below her, and a fortified rock wall before.

Sliding down the wire was easy, but halfway across the gradient of the wire turned upwards, so she had to monkey-bar along, wrapping her arms about the chain link and then swinging herself forward for the next. Arm over arm, she pulled herself up the incline. After a hundred yards her shoulder muscles screamed, her biceps burnt, her breathing was laboured, and sweat dripped through her eyebrows into her eyes. She risked a look forward. She was barely a quarter of the way there.

She could feel Orugi behind her. She had to go faster. She drove her muscles beyond pain until a stream of sweat ran down her neck. She would never have made it with a fully equipped pack. But now she cursed each ounce of equipment she carried.

She was three-quarters of the way across when her hand slipped. She clung on with the other arm and hung there for a moment, pulling in great lungfuls of air, and then started again, concentrating on each single movement so that there was no chance she could slip again.

The lights of the gatehouse grew gradually closer.

Minka kept pumping until she could smell the dry, dusty scent of earth just below her, could feel the gusts coming up off the rockface. Between her boots, fifty feet below her was the octa­gonal roof of a pillbox, and another twenty feet to her left.

Then, very suddenly, the rockcrete footings of the bridge support pillars loomed into view. Minka paused, hanging upside-down, senses straining in the darkness and silence for any sign that she had been discovered.

Nothing. Slowly and gently she unhitched herself from the wire and dropped to the steep rock face. Her arms were almost too tired to tap out the all clear in Cadian battle-glot.

She kept her fingers on the wire and felt the tapped response come back.

Coming.

Minka started to get her bearings. It always took a moment to turn a map in your head into real life, but the gatehouse made it fairly straightforward as an anchor point.