The skud was coming in low now. A treetop brushed against the bottom of the hull. Halahan peered over the side with anticipation surging in his veins.

One minute, the lookout signalled.

Halahan’s Greyjackets gathered by the rails next to the furled rope-ladders. The nose levelled off and the skud began to slow. Still the breeze carried them sideways. Halahan spotted a few faces looking up at him, but their shouts of alarm were lost in all the confusion. The skyboat passed over a frozen stream, and then the snow on the ground became broken and uneven, and white pools of ice stood amongst fronds of marshgrass that ran all the way to the base of the bluff. The area here was clear of men.

Something flashed on top of the bluff. A shot skittered against the hull, then another.

The lookout turned back to the men on the deck, her eyes hidden by the Owls. She jabbed downwards with her thumb.

At once the Greyjackets cast the rope-ladders over the sides and began to clamber down them. Sergeant Jay was first off the boat. Halahan adjusted his hat and climbed down after him, the ladder swaying beneath his boots.

He landed ankle-deep in water as his feet broke through a thin crust of ice.

Wonderful, he thought. Now I’ll have wet feet all night.

It was darker here with the moons hidden by the rise of ground. Shots were slapping into the water all around them. Halahan crouched down amongst the marshgrasses as his men spread out into a skirmishing line and began to return fire.

The skud rose sharply as it shed the weight of its load. A few Greyjackets had to jump from the ends of the ladders. A second boat was coming in now, more Greyjackets climbing down from the ladders. Halahan saw the third skyboat crossing the stream. Shots were racing towards the drifting skuds from the top of the bluff, the odd one leaving a brief fiery trail like an afterimage in the eye.

‘Riflemen!’ Sergeant Jay shouted with a hand on his helm. ‘I was hoping they’d all be archers!’

The first skuds had ignited their thrusters on full and were climbing away to the right, their swivel-cannons spitting flames and grapeshot through the defenders on the ridge. Halahan saw pieces of wood flying; a scraggly yellowpine on the slope topple in half. He waited until the third skyboat had unloaded, knowing there was no time to wait for the others, and signalled for the second and third squad to advance on the bluff, while the first maintained fire to cover their approach.

He glanced back across the stream. Imperials were gathering and moving on their position. The remaining skyboats were coming in hot, with their thrusters trailing fire, the Greyjackets on board shooting down from the rails at the approaching men.

Sergeant Jay looked to Halahan as the assault squads jingled past them, their rifles on their backs and their shortswords naked in their hands, a few armed with pistols or miniature crossbows. Under gunfire they splashed forwards towards the slope.

Jay nodded to him. ‘I’ll see you at the top,’ he said, and the man drew his sword and set off after them.

Halahan wished him luck.

‘Hurry up, man,’ snarled Sparus as his aide rushed from the Archgeneral’s tent with two slaves dashing after him, each one bearing pieces of his armour.

Sparus stood in his underclothing, barely noticing the cold as he studied the chaos unfolding in the camp below.

The Khosian cavalry was rampaging through the baggage train now. Moments earlier they had rolled in out of the night like a ghostly host, while most of the men of the Expeditionary Force slept in their pup tents or climbed to their feet too stunned to act. If they’d stopped there it would have been bad enough. But instead they raised hell as they carried on through the camp that stretched long and thin between the lake and the far ridgeline, so that now, in the exposed circle of the baggage train, flames were rising from blazing wagons.

Khosian skirmishers had followed in the wake of the cavalry, fighting within the camp itself. They were good, whoever they were, and Sparus watched groups of figures fighting amongst his surprised troops, avoiding those islands of order where his officers bellowed at their men and roused them into some kind of formation.

‘Is it a raid?’ asked the young priest who stopped by his side, his eyes bleary with sleep. It was Che, Sasheen’s personal Diplomat.

‘No,’ Sparus told him, and looked to the west along the valley floor, where a bristle of spear-points glistened in the moonlight. The Diplomat followed his gaze, and stared at the sight without comment.

‘The Matriarch, is she up yet?’ Sparus asked of one of his aides as they helped fit his armour.

‘Barely,’ the harried aide replied. ‘She took a sleeping draught to help her sleep. A heavy one, they say.’

‘Romano?’

The aide was about to reply when a roar sounded from Romano’s tent, and they all turned in time to see an Acolyte being flung out into the snow with Romano emerging after him, naked and wild-eyed and gripping a shortsword in his hand. The young general staggered in the snow and righted himself. He saw Sparus strapping on his cuirass.

‘Tonight?’ he shouted across at him. ‘Tell me I’m dreaming, for pity’s sake!’

‘You are,’ drawled Sparus. ‘We all are.’

Romano rubbed at one of his eyes and swore.

‘Where is my armour?’ he hollered, stumbling back inside his tent.

General Sparus pulled tight on the last strap of his cuirass and grabbed one of his greaves from the hand of a slave. He checked the camp again, the flames bright in his eye.

They attack us, and at night, he mused silently.

Beside him, the Diplomat spoke without looking from the approaching chartassa.

‘These Khosians have balls,’ he declared, as though reading the general’s mind.

It was a desperate sight that faced Colonel Halahan as he made it to the top of the bluff. Imperial infantry and riflemen had been posted there to guard the mortar crews, and they were making a fight of it.

Out of the darkness an imperial soldier ran at him, hollering with spirit. Halahan tugged a pistol from his bandolier, pulled back the primer that would pierce the cartridge of water and blackpowder, and aimed it between the man’s eyes. He pulled the trigger and watched through a blossom of smoke as the man fell back to the ground, half his skull missing.

Absently he reloaded the pistol, breaking it open to pull out the spent cartridge, replacing it with another, closing the piece again.

He spotted another soldier running in from his left where the Greyjackets were locked in hand-to-hand melee. Halahan fired again, and didn’t miss.

The colonel took in the progress of the fight, and decided it was still too close to call. Behind him, down at the base of the slope, the rearguard squads fired at the Imperials rushing across the stream at them. Unconcerned, he gazed out over the snowy plain to the west. He could see glints of steel massed around a thin core of flickering torches, the Khosian chartassa, moving to engage the Imperials.

Again he reloaded the same pistol, though four other pieces lay snug in his bandolier. He stood there and waited, and had time enough to feel pride for these men under his command even amongst the ugliness of the fighting. Their anger could be seen in the way that they fought. This was personal to them. They had scores to settle, families to be avenged, memories to be released through the sharp end of a blade.

The tide was beginning to turn in their favour now. He saw the moment in which it happened, and it was neither relief nor surprise that occupied him while he waited for it to be over. Instead it was simple impatience.

As the remaining few Imperials were dispensed with, he strode out amongst his Greyjackets, watching the medicos move in to do their work on the wounded. A man swore and scrabbled at his blinded eyes while his comrades tried to hold him down. Another had lost a hand; he stared balefully at the severed appendage lying in the trampled snow as though it was a wife who’d left him for another.

In one spot, two Pathian brothers worked with their knives on a wounded imperial soldier. They were making sport of him, drawing sobs from his lips. Halahan didn’t stop them.

Instead he took out a match and fired up his pipe.

The ridge was theirs.

Now, all they had to do was hold it.

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