B3Ch75-The ants (Patreon)

Honestly, this took a lot of time to write, and I still need another edit pass. Not completely happy with how it turned out. Writing juices got exhausted on this. Still hope y'all like it. Let me know if you dont so I can fix the damn thing lol .___________________________________________________

Margaret pinned the ledger flat against the wind with one gloved hand and finished the line she was writing before she looked up. She'd frozen to the bone up here twice already, and she was not about to be caught with untidy columns for it.

The hill gave them an eagle's-eye view of the coming battle. The ground fell away to the east in a long cold slope, frost still sitting in the hollows the sun hadn't reached, and at the bottom of it the Legion was drawn up in blocks — dark squares on the white, shifting a little at the edges as the maniples dressed their lines. Behind her a signal century stood ready, flags furled, breath smoking. Runners came up the back of the hill and went down it again in a steady traffic, boots breaking the frozen crust. The Captain held the telescope to his eye and scanned the field without pause, the way another man might worry a coin.

Out past the Legion, six hundred meters or so, the ground turned a snow grey. A low, formless spread of ants that never held still. Margaret had learned not to look at it too long. Her eye kept trying to find order in it, and there was none.

The artillery was working the near edge. She could hear the ballista crews down the slope, the flat crack of the throw and, a beat behind it, a small dark eruption out in the sprawl where the bolt came down. The Captain watched each one land and said nothing. On the crest beside him, a signaller named Wick stood with the horn against his chest and blew warmth into his cupped hands between calls.

"Reckon they know we're up here, sir?" Wick said, to no one in particular.

"They know," the Captain said, not lowering the glass.

"Just, they've not written ahead. Bad manners, that."

"Blow the calls I give you, Wick, and keep your manners to yourself."

Margaret allowed herself the smallest breath of amusement and reached for the tin the signal century had produced at dawn. Somewhere in the Landing a quartermaster was going to notice a whole tin of biscuits had marched off to war, and God help him when he did. She took one. It was, against every reasonable expectation, excellent. It was a small comfort but she revelled in it.

She closed the ledger on one finger.

"Lord Henri has decided to sally from his town and engage the orc pirates at sea," she said, "as they come around the islands toward our coast. He means to draw them back onto the fort Lord Harold built at the mouth of the river."

The Captain didn't take his eye from the telescope. Down the slope a horn sounded twice, and a block of the Legion wheeled a quarter-turn, and he watched it move before he answered.

"Why would Lord Henri not send a small squadron to do that, rather than risk his entire force?" His voice stayed even, more puzzled than critical. "If he could engage and hold the orc fleet outside the fort, his chance of keeping them off our coast would be very high."

"Because he's Henri," Margaret said, "he has his own way of learning and I suspect he wants to make a name for himself." Her finger tapped once against the ledger's cover. She glanced at Bethel.

Bethel stood a little apart, wrapped to the chin, both hands folded on the head of her cane, watching the ants with an expression even she didn't seem to understand. She felt Margaret's look and only smiled — a small grim thing that reassured Margaret not one bit.

"Our information suggests he means to do both," Margaret went on. "Destroy as many ships as he can before they reach the fort, then engage what's left outside it." She was silent for a moment. "It will be up to him whether he can manage it. Rather a lot of eggs in the one basket, if you ask me."

The Captain came off the telescope at last and looked at her. He was younger than Colonel Hale, but he had been the tribune for a maniple in the trial and had performed well.

"Then we will be forced to win this fight," he said, "and possibly march south." He looked back down the slope. "That is a complicated maneuver for a junior commander to pull off."

"That was my assessment as well." Margaret nodded slowly. She opened the ledger again, though there was nothing in it she needed; it simply gave her hands something to do that wasn't wringing themselves. "The Templars in the south are arming and preparing his town for a fight."

She didn't look at Bethel when she said it, but she knew she was there.

Bethel's thumb moved once along the head of the cane. "They are encouraging people to fight. I maintained a heavier presence there to watch over my previous misguided Lord." Her eyes stayed on the ants working the adventurers at the near edge.

The Captain inclined his head to her, a small courtesy, and turned back to the field.Bethel left her place and came to Margaret's shoulder, the cane feeling out the frozen ground ahead of her.

"I was down among the soldiers earlier, as they formed up," she said. "They are good young men. Near all of them frightened though but I believe they will stand firm. They know what cost of losing this battle is." Her gaze stayed on the ants. "If we lose here, the Basin will be under siege, and the Landing likely lost. Everything we have all built the last year." She turned her head toward Margaret. "What do we have present for the battle? This does not seem like enough men."

Margaret sighed and told her.

"What the good Captain has to fight this with is not a great deal. Two cohorts of the Landing garrison — those are his good troops, near enough all tier one. A century apiece out of Three Rivers, Haven, and Veridia, marched in over the last three days. The cohort from Dalen's Hold, and Lord Dalen's household troops with it, who are rather better than the rest. Averaging around tier low tier 2. A cohort of trainees fast-marched from the training camp in the north. They are all very green though and dont know how to integrate into the Legion. And two batteries of ballista." She turned the cup a quarter-turn on the rock and did not drink from it. "Something over two thousand of the Legion, all told, and Evan's two thousand adventurers — though they have a different part to play."

She let that sit a moment against the noise from below.The captain glanced back to the two councilors before turning back to the battle.

"Lord Harold took the best of everything north with him. This is what we have left."

Bethel's cane tapped once against the frozen ground. "Hmm, with the integrity of the Landing at stake," she said, "I should be here." Her eyes did not leave the forming army. "I would have brought more of my order, had I any to spare. But I will pray for those fighting here today."Margaret looked over the adventurers fighting with the ants as the Legion formed up. The pressure from the ant hill had grown gradually over the last three days. The adventurers had been able to contain the spread but now it was coming to head. Still, she mused, there were a few stand out sections of the adventures down there. That Taylor Vane and his mixed company of Soldiers, Lords, and Crafters were doing very well fighting the ants. The thornwalkers were a menace down there and a few of the other organized adventurer orders down there were also doing very well. 

Boots came up the back of the hill faster than the runners' — someone taking the slope at a dead run. Councilor Evan came over the crest with his sword still in his hand and pulled up short of the signal century, chest heaving.

The blade was dark with something thicker than blood, the color of an old bruise, and it steamed faintly in the cold. There was more of it up his forearm, and a streak of it dried along his jaw. Whatever the adventurers had been doing down at the near edge of the horde, Evan had been in the thick of it. His eyes were flat and steady as he came. Margaret took his measure the way she took everyone's. She had been hesitant, at the start, about handing Caldwell's former bodyguards the running of the adventurers — muscle rarely made for good management — and she had to admit now she'd been wrong. The men had excelled at it.

"Captain." He got the word out and took another breath for the rest of it. "The adventurers are ready to pull back at your signal."

The Captain held his eye a moment. "Losses?"

"Enough." Evan didn't soften it. "We held the pressure the last day. We can't go much longer without taking heavy losses. We need to go."

The Captain nodded once and turned to the signal century. The flags loosened in the ready hands. Wick came off the crest a half-step, lifting the horn to his mouth, his eyes on the Captain's raised hand.

The Captain's hand dropped.

The horn sounded from the crest, one long note that rolled downhill, and Margaret watched the call travel. A century-horn caught it down the slope and passed it on, and then another past that, the note going hand to hand along the line until it reached the maniples nearest the ants and turned them. The block it belonged to drew back on itself, a dark square folding in.

Out at the near edge, the adventurers broke contact.

Small glass fell into the horde and burst, and where each one burst the ants came apart from the center of the blast outward — thrown back, flipped, scattered off their line. Margaret had wondered all morning, watching the ants, whether the potions would do more than annoy something that size. They did. Rather better than she'd expected, if she was honest, though she suspected it was only because the things were light and their legs came off easily. She doubted the potions would outright kill any of them. But each blast opened a hole, and in that confusion the adventurers pulled clear.

They came off in order. Men who could not walk were dragged. Men who could half-walk were carried anyway, and carried faster. They ran back through the lines of the Legion to a row of tents pitched below the ridge — the rest stations, laid in that morning, where healers and water waited. There were phases of this operation still to come, and she would need every one of these people for them.

The Captain watched the whole withdrawal without the telescope.

"Clean break," he said, more to himself than to her. "I'm not a great admirer of the adventurers. Most of the ones I've worked with couldn't dress a line if you paid them." A pause. "But that was good work."

"High praise," Margaret murmured. "Do try not to strain yourself."

He turned. Evan was still on the crest, sword still in his hand, breathing easier now but no cleaner, the bruise-dark stain drying stiff on his forearm.

"Councilor. Your losses." The Captain did not soften it. "And what fraction of your force is still fit to fight?"

Evan wiped the blade against his thigh. His fingers had already found the pommel and started their small drumming against it.

"Fit to fight, most of them. Willing to fight, all of them." He grimaced. "As eager as my people are to farm these things, Captain, the fights don't always go our way. These ants are no pushovers."

"How many dead?"

"Around a hundred and forty permanent dead." He let it sit. "Most of them didn't die to the ordinary ants. They died to the variants. Which are, of course, the ones that drop the perks worth having."

Margaret's pen had stopped. "For good?" she said. "Why not respawn?"

Evan looked at her. "You know how it works. On a quest, you die, you come back. Off a quest, you die, you're gone. Fine — so put everyone on a quest. Except a town can only hand out so many quests. A village fewer. We've spent every quest we can scrape together keeping people covered, and it covers about half the adventurers out here. The other half are fighting without one." He rubbed his jaw as he talked, as if it were sore. "Worst part is, it's proved the adventurers earn better perks when they don't have a quest."

"You said perks worth having." The Captain nodded at Evan's arm. "Is there anything else we should be aware of?"

Evan handed his sword off to a runner and stepped to a boulder sitting half-sunk in the frost at the edge of the crest. It was waist-high, the sort of stone two men would need a lever to shift. He set both hands on it. Nothing moved in his face, but Margaret felt the pull of it, the mana gathering, as he channeled. He lifted the stone off the ground, held it at his hip with ease, and set it back down.

"That's the uncommon perk most of them are getting. Run-of-the-mill ant, plain strength perk. Even passively it gives us nearly a quarter more strength in our frames. But when we channel it—" he looked at the stone, almost fond, "—closer to five times. A very good perk. Mana efficient, and about half of us have earned it now. I swear, this one's a game changer for all of us."

"Useful," the Captain allowed. "Though I'll tell you plainly, that much strength across their common ants is a bad business."

"There's a motion one that's gotten popular too — it lets people who earn it track fast things a lot better. Worth its weight against quick monsters. But that's not what's killing us." Evan straightened. "This is."

His outline shivered. Margaret was looking straight at him and still lost the moment — he was there, and then he was a step to the left, and the space where he had stood was empty. No blur. No stride between the two.

"Before you ask, it's not stealth," Evan said, before either of them could. "I didn't hide. That assassin ant does something to the space itself. It's why Josh didn't see the one that took him." He waved his hand and set his fingers drumming again on his reclaimed sword. "More than half of everyone I've lost, I've lost to those. My team put one down together, and the mana it took to do this once nearly emptied me. I can't do it more than a handful of times, and only in short bursts."

"What about the other variants?" the Captain said.

"There's a rage one the Orders are all chasing — the more it's hurt, the harder it hits. Beautiful perk to own. Miserable ant to kill." He waved the sword-hand, taking in the horde. "There are others, but those are the ones you really need to watch for. The ranged ones aren't too bad, but they spit acid. There's always more. I won't stand here reciting a bestiary at you." He looked at the Captain squarely. "I've watched your Legion drill. I believe you have the tools for every one of them." The corner of his mouth pulled up into a grim smile. "Though my people would dearly love to be the ones who get the kills. For the perks. And, honestly, for the bragging."

The Captain grunted.

"They'll get their kills. There's more than enough to go around, and the later phases of this belong to you — strike teams, tunnels, whatever ritual is down there calling them up." He looked back down the slope, to where the maniples stood dressed and waiting on the white. "Right now we need to contain the nest."

He turned to his staff.

"Sound the advance," the Captain said.

Wick wet his lips and blew a different call this time — three notes, quick, then a fourth held long, nothing like the two flat blasts of the withdrawal. It rolled down the slope, the century-horns caught it and threw it along the line, and Margaret watched the whole front of the Legion lean forward at once.

They did not go in a wall. That was the first thing she noticed. The blocks came off their marks in a pattern, every second one a half-step ahead of its neighbors, so that the line advancing toward the ants was not a line at all but a field of squares with cold white ground standing open between them. A checkerboard walking downhill.

"You've left gaps," she said. It was not quite a question.

"On purpose, Councilor." The Captain didn't look over. "They'll come through them. They were going to break out our lines anyway — it's the shortest path to what they want. So we let them, and the blocks on either side close on them once they're inside, and the second line covers the gaps behind." He nodded down at the field. "It's a complicated maneuver for the sub-tribunes down there. But it's the most efficient method of mass murder I know."

Margaret lifted her cup and drank. The tea had gone lukewarm in the wind. She drank it anyway and watched the ants come. She had never had cause to admire a formation before. She rather approved of anything built around efficiency, and she noted, dryly, that perhaps Marcus wasn't such a brute after all.

From six hundred meters they were not creatures. They were a grey tide with no front to it, and the dead were already thick on the ground — she could see that much, a darker crust laid over the frost where the artillery and the adventurers had worked all morning — and the horde came on over the top of their own dead without a pause. She could not decide which was worse. That there was no mind in it, only hunger walking forward on a hundred thousand legs. Or that there was a mind in it somewhere, down under the ground, directing them. Whatever intellect ran a thing this size must be formidable. She thought she disliked the second more.

And they screamed. That was the part she couldn't get used to. Even at this distance the sound came up the slope thin and layered and wrong, a high scraping shriek out of thousands of throats at once, rising and never quite falling. It got in behind her teeth and rattled them.

The lines met. Down at the near edge a legionary set his shoulder into his shield and braced, and the man beside him leaned across the rim and drove his spear straight into the open maw of an ant as its mandibles were already reaching for him. The ant folded around the shaft. Another came over it.

"Signal the earth crafters," the Captain said. "Now's the time."

A staff officer turned, a hand went up, and a moment later something hissed off the crest behind them and climbed into the blue sky and burst — a wide green flower of light hanging over the whole line, bright even against the snow-glare.

Down at the front the ground answered.

It came up all along the Legion's face at once — a long ditch opening in the frozen earth, the spoil of it rising into a berm in the same motion, faster than any digging, a wall of packed dirt heaving up out of the white. Margaret found the crafters by looking for the men standing over them: each one worked in a crouch with a legionary planted at his back and shield up, and here and there among them were the broad shapes of the dwarves who'd stayed at the Landing to teach. The earth was frozen a foot down and they hauled it up anyway, groaning, in great frost-shot slabs. The Legion rushed the new wall and took it, up and onto the berm, spears coming down over the lip into the ants below.

Then the berm itself opened.

Margaret leaned forward before she could stop herself. Small dark slots showed along the outer face of the wall, low down, and through them spear-points began to jab out and up as the ants swarmed the slope and started to climb — men inside the packed earth, stabbing out through slits at things they could barely see.

"There." The Captain almost smiled. She hadn't seen him do it yet today. "Their shell's thickest on top and thinnest underneath. Climbing that face they show us the soft side, and even where a man can't punch through, he can lever them off and send them back down into the ditch. And down in the ditch—" he tipped his head at a spot where a potion burst threw a knot of ants against the dirt walls, "—the potions do ten times the work they do in open ground. Nowhere for the blast to go but into them."

"Very efficient, Captain," she murmured. "You'll turn my head yet."

She watched a stretch of the berm long enough to see it become a rhythm. The ants climbed, the slits took them from beneath, the ones that crested the top met the spears on the wall, and the ditch below filled with their carcasses. The potions did to that fill exactly what the Captain had promised. It settled into something steady and mechanical, a mill turning, and the ant tide broke against it and did not carry it away.

Margaret let out a breath she'd been holding at the top of her lungs, and drank off the rest of the cold tea. The plan was working. For now, and rather better than she'd let herself hope.

Evan pushed off the boulder he'd been leaning on. He had a fresh sword now, and he sheathed it.

"That's my cue," he said. "I'll get my people sorted into their strike teams. We'll be ready when the signal comes."

The Captain turned to face him fully. He brought his fist up and thumped it against his chest — the Legion's own salute.

"Councilor Evan."

Evan blinked, caught for half a second, then returned it as best a man could who'd never been taught the form. He went down the back of the hill at a jog.

Margaret was reaching to refill the cup and collect another of the excellent biscuits when the horde on the right rose higher against the berm than anywhere else on the line, piling up faster than the slits could take it down — and as she found the spot, a piece of it came over. A knot of ants boiling across the top and down the inner face and out onto open ground behind the wall. Not many. Fifty, perhaps. But they were behind the line now, on the Legion's flank, and a flank did not need many things behind it to come apart.

"Right flank's pressed," a staff officer said.

"I see it." The Captain's voice hadn't changed at all. "Signal the reserve cohort. The trainees."

The officer hesitated a beat — they were green, that cohort, barely tier one and some of them under it, fast-marched in from the training camp and blooded on nothing — and the Captain read the hesitation off the back of the man's neck.

"They're closest, and they're what we have. They need blooding on something, and that's the smallest element of the horde we can give them. Tell them: hit that breakout on the right, smash it flat, fall back to position. They are not to become decisively engaged. In and out." He turned back to the field. "Send it."

The trainees went in too fast.

Margaret saw it from the first. A seasoned cohort would have crossed the open ground at a walk and hit the breakout together, one edge at a time. These ran. The line frayed on the way, the eager ones pulling out ahead and the nervous ones dragging behind, so that by the time they reached the fifty-odd ants loose on the flank they arrived in a ragged handful instead of the wall the Legion normally fought in.

"Oh, you daft boys," she said under her breath. "Not all at once."

A young legionary near the front got out ahead of his file and put his spear into an ant's flank, where the armor was thickest, and the point skated off and he stumbled and an ant rushed in under the shield before the men beside him closed up and killed it off him. Somewhere in the middle a shield came up too late, and a man went down. But there were more of them than there were ants, and once the first panic burned off they did the work. They boxed the breakout and contained it before it got bad. It was sloppy, and they took losses doing it.

The horn recalled them before they could get greedy. They pulled back to their marks in worse order than they'd left them, dragging their own, and re-dressed the line.

"Sloppy," the Captain said, watching.

"Quite," said Margaret.

"But they held it, and they came off when told. I've seen worse from men who ought to know better."

Margaret marked it in the ledger without looking down. Something was happening on the line.

It hit everywhere at once. The variants — the rage-ants and the acid-spitters and the assassins — all pressed the wall at the same moment, up and down the front.

"That almost seems coordinated," she said.

"The thought crossed my mind." The Captain didn't lower the telescope. "There is something down there running this. There has to be."

To counter it they were using a tactic Harold had taught them: higher-tier legionaries spread through the line, placed there to blunt pushes exactly like this. But even the best of them were only high tier one. Their mana quality wasn't enough to actually break these ants. She watched one of them, a big man with a warhammer wreathed in mana, land a blow square on a rage-ant's back that would have folded a person in half — and the ant staggered and kept coming. They could hold. They could manage a breakout, keep a variant off a man's throat. But they could not dominate. Nobody on this hill could, and that was rather the whole trouble.

Then the wall broke in earnest.

In three, four places along the front the rage-ants hit the packed dirt like battering rams and punched through where the frozen ground hadn't set. The ant horde poured in behind them. And in the confusion the assassins came for the officers. She saw one appear inside the line, right at the shoulder of a sub-tribune, and the necrotoxin spur went in before the man knew it was there.

"Signal the ballista to target those ranged ants," the Captain said. "The spitters on the near breaches first."

He was already onto the next thing, chin tracking down the line. Below, a legionary got low under an ant that had come over the berm and heaved, and the thing went over onto its back, legs working at the blue sky, and another man stepped in and brought a hammer down on the pale seam of its belly. The line closed over the wet where it had been. Two breaches were being contained as centuries reordered their lines.

Two of the tribunes went down to the assassins before their guards could form on them. Margaret saw it happen, and saw the centurions bawling the ranks back into order, shields grinding shut over the gaps.

"Message to the officers," the Captain said. "Every tribune and sub-tribune gets a guard posted at his back. Now." A runner was gone before he finished. "And signal the eagles. Begin the bombardment."

"Yes, sir." Flags ran up the crest behind them. Two runners tore off down the back of the hill.

Margaret set the ledger against her knee.

"If there's a mind down there running this," she said, "it won't go the way we planned it. These things never do."

"No, it will not, Councilor." The Captain lowered the telescope for the first time in a while, and she got a clear look at his face before he raised it again. "We'll take more losses than the plan allows for. Lord Harold took the highest-tier legionaries north with him. The best I have left in the Basin are the Banner Lords' household centuries, and the only ones on this field are Lord Dalen's." He was quiet a beat. "I'd give a great deal to have Lady Aiko's century on this hill. They've fought in the deep dark. They know how to fight monsters like this. And Captain Sato with them — he's one of the best battlefield commanders we've got. I could use him."

He said it grudgingly. But Margaret had spent a lifetime reading men, and there was a thread of alarm under the words. He knew exactly how thin the margin was. He simply wasn't going to let the staff hear it, and she thought rather better of him for the both of it.

A whoosh went over their heads.

She looked up in time to see the eagle stoop out of the sky— down at a slant, maybe forty-five degrees, wings half-folded, the rider low against its neck. Something dropped away from beneath the bird. A long thin tube, tumbling as it fell, turning end over end instead of coming down straight. It speared into the horde at an angle, punched clean through an ant on the way, buried its nose in the frozen ground —

— and the world went white and orange in that stretch of the field. A wave of alchemical fire went out from the crater, and ants were flung up and back, thrown across the snow. Where they'd been was a scorched hole. Down the line the legion cheered it, and somewhere a soldier whooped.

And more came up out of the nest to fill it.

Margaret watched the horde close over the burn like water over a dropped stone. "Remind me why we're bombing them now," she said. Down the line the breach was still open, legionaries fighting the variants in the gap, giving ground and taking it back.

"We need whatever's running their fight to look at us," the Captain said. "So the next phase can commence."

The eagle wheeled off south, back toward the Landing, laboring a little. To rearm. Margaret watched it go. The eagles left to her were the small ones, the young birds still growing, without the stamina for a long flight — and the riders had been in the saddle a month. Not for the first time, she wished Harold had left her something with a proper bird under it.

And she still didn't know what Plan Charlie was.

That frustrated her more than she liked to admit. Harold had laid a contingency inside her own Basin and never breathed a word of it to her. She was the one who was supposed to know things — it was, quite literally, her entire job. Since when did Harold move that subtly? It had been gnawing at her since the words crossed the message three days ago, and it gnawed harder now, as she watched the front buckle and understood they were going to need whatever the wretched man had hidden.

A second eagle came in.

This one flew worse, the bird jinking on the approach, the rider fighting to hold the line. But when the release came, the tube fell away clean and true. It didn't tumble. It went down nose-first in a long, spearing plunge, and it drove meters into the dirt before it blew.

The ground jumped. A whole section of the horde came apart, ants and frozen earth thrown together in a black column that hung and fell. Where it had stood, the ground was left cratered and ragged, pounded flat for twenty feet in every direction.

Margaret let out a slow breath.

It was a lovely idea, the berm with its slits, and against the ordinary ants it did everything they needed. She'd watched it break the ant tide all morning. But the variants were another matter, and she could see it plainly now — the rage-ants shrugging off a hammer, the assassins stepping through the space between one shield and the next, the acid burning men off the berm faster than they could be replaced. The legionaries simply did not have the mana quality to hurt the things. They could hold. They were holding.

They could not win it standing there, and every man on the hill knew it.

The ground by the nest exploded.

Margaret felt it before she saw it — a thud that came up through the frozen hill and into the soles of her boots. Then a mound of dirt heaved up where the anthill had stood, and something levered itself out of the earth. It got a foreleg over the lip of the hole. The leg alone was longer than a horse. Then a second, and it dragged the rest of itself up into the light, shedding frozen clods, an ant the size of a troll.

"Fuckin hell," she murmured.

Bethel's cane came around and rapped her once on the hip.

Margaret turned. Bethel had not opened her eyes. But her mouth had gone thin.

"Language," Bethel said.

"Look at that monster, Beth."

Down the slope, the Captain had already turned to his staff.

"Message to the ballista. Now." His voice hadn't lifted, but the words came faster. "Explosive bolts. The joint between the legs and the carapace. They have to keep it off our lines." Two runners were gone down the back of the hill before he finished.

"That's a big one, sir," Wick offered, horn dropping from his lips.

"I can see that, Wick."

The goliath got its footing. It came up out of the hole and stood, and it kept standing — fifteen feet of it, higher than the berm the crafters had raised. Its mandibles worked once against nothing, and Margaret saw a rank of legionaries behind the wall flinch back, and she did not blame them one bit. Those jaws could take a whole section off the wall in a single bite. Slice through half a century in one pass and not slow down for it.

"It's in pain," Bethel said.

Margaret glanced at her. "In pain? What do you mean?"

Bethel's eyes stayed closed. Her cane lifted off the ground and wavered out toward the thing, unsteady, the way a person points at a sound in the dark.

"Its pain is intense." She said it gently, as though the ant might hear her be unkind. "I don't think it can breathe. It is suffering."

Margaret looked at the old woman a moment longer. Six hundred meters of open field and uncountable ants between them, and Bethel had reached out across all of it and found the one creature's agony. Since when could she do that?

Then she looked back at the goliath, and it came together in her head.

It was in the message Harold had sent back. They lived deep in the deep dark, where the mana ran thick. This one had no business on the surface at all. Up here the mana was thin to it, thin as height air to a diver hauled up too fast, and the thing simply wasn't breathing. It was drowning in the open field.

Something had dragged it up here to be spent, knowing full well it would die.

"Be ready, Commander," she said. "I think they're making a larger move here. Whatever's down there just put a creature on the board it can't keep alive. There is a larger play in this."

The Captain didn't answer. He was watching the ballista.

The light engines threw their payloads. She heard the flat crack of them down the slope, four in a ragged sequence, and out on the field the bolts came down against the goliath and burst — small hard flowers of fire against the great dark shell. Two shattered off the carapace and did nothing but scorch it black. But one caught the thing low on a foreleg, at the joint, and the joint came apart in fire. The leg fell away onto the earth dripping ichor, and the goliath lurched, caught itself on the others, and screamed. Even Margaret heard that one clear over all the rest, and the fury in it sent a few legionaries retreating a step from their own wall.

Down the slope the crews were already cranking, hauling the cords back, faces red with the work of it.

The air behind the ballista line tore open.

Margaret saw it happen — the space above the frozen ground rippled, folded, and assassin ants were simply there. Four of them. Five. Behind the ballista, where nothing on this earth should have been able to reach.

The Captain's mouth pulled back off his teeth. It was the first real expression she'd seen on him all day, and it was not a nice one.

"I knew it," he said.

The ground erupted up to meet them.

Slabs of frozen earth shot up around the ballista, walls of it slamming shut over the crews, and among them a dwarf went to work with a hammer. Margaret found him by the way the field moved around him. He'd been posted there since dawn, and the last time she'd marked him he'd looked half asleep. She was fairly sure she'd seen him at one point with a mug of something that was almost certainly beer. Now he drove the haft of the hammer down, and a row of earthen spikes ran up out of the dirt and punched through three assassins at once, lifting them off their legs as the stone tore through their bodies. Before she could stop the old-world part of her brain from reaching for it, the move put her in mind of an earthbender out of that show her nephews used to watch on a loop. Avatar the fastest airbender, or something of the sort.

One assassin blinked sideways out of the spikes, folding the air, and reappeared clear of them.

The dwarf turned his hand over. A fist of earth shot up under the ant, closed around it, and squeezed until it popped.

"You were right to have him placed there," the Captain said. He hadn't looked away from the goliath. "This would go bad very quickly without our artillery."

"I knew crafters could get powerful. I didn't know they could do things like that." Margaret watched the dwarf settle back on his heels, unhurried, and reach for something at his belt that she strongly suspected was the mug. "Josh and Beth don't have the control to do that."

The ballista fired again. Another leg came off the goliath in a burst of fire — but it was not enough, and the thing came on, dragging itself down the slope on the legs it had left, straight at the berm.

"Signal pattern red," the Captain said.

The horn dropped down into the line — one note, low and flat, held. All along the front, hands came back and threw at once. The glass fell into the horde in a single wave, the whole width of the Legion's face lighting up in one long ripple of bursts, and the tide at the wall came apart, ants flipped and flung and stunned in a band hundreds of meters wide. For a breath the pressure on the berm simply stopped. The legionaries got their feet back under them, dressed the line, dragged the wounded off the wall. A breath. That was all it bought.

An eagle passed over.

Margaret heard the whoosh and looked up, and the payload was already falling, tumbling as they mostly did — but this one fell true, or lucky, and it came down not into the horde but into the anthill itself, into the very mouth of the nest where the goliath had climbed out. It went in, and it stopped, and then the ground where the nest had been came up in a column of fire that hung there, white at the heart of it and going orange at the edges, higher and hotter than anything they'd thrown all morning.

"Yes," she said quickly. "That was good."

The goliath reached the killing ground before the wall.

And spears came in from behind the Legion's own lines.

They rocketed in low over the legionaries' heads, a dozen of them, and cracked against the goliath's flank, and where they hit, pieces of the shell chipped away. Margaret followed the throw back and found them — a knot of adventurers who'd worked their way up behind the line and were hurling everything they had at the thing.

"Of course they're getting involved," she said. "They want the perks."

The Captain frowned. "They should be readying their strike teams."

"You didn't seriously expect all of them to sit that one out. A monster like that, come up fresh out of the ground, with good perks hanging off it." She lifted the cold tea and did not drink it. She kept meaning to. "You'd have better luck telling the tide to stay off the beach."

A team inside the line wasn't content merely to throw. As the goliath ground into the hedge of spears at the wall, two of them took a third man between them and heaved him up onto it — up onto the thing's back. The goliath's head came around and swiped, almost lazy, and caught him in the air. He sailed off past the shell and into the horde, useless, and landed among the ants and came up swinging at them, then turned to run. They took him down before he'd gone three steps.

"Useless," the Captain spat.

But they threw another.

This one landed. He hit the carapace above a shattered leg and got both arms around a ridge of shell and held on. And the ballista — Margaret's breath caught, because it was madness, it was too close — the ballista fired low along the goliath's flank, right past the man clinging to it, and two more legs came apart at the joints.

The legs on that side were nearly all gone now. The goliath's weight came down where the legs weren't, and it toppled — slowly, then all at once — onto the berm. The packed earth shattered under it. It came down across the wall and onto the legionaries fighting there, and then the Legion was on it, and two adventurers with them, everyone climbing the dying thing at once, every last one of them racing to be the blade that landed the kill.

"Ten silver says one of ours gets it," Wick said, low.

"Blow your horn, Wick," the Captain said, not turning.

Margaret set the ledger against her knee and watched the man who'd held on drive a spear down into a seam over and over again.

"Now," she said quietly.

The Captain had already turned to his staff. His face went blank again. The bait was taken, and whatever was driving the ants was spending itself against them, and it was time to move.

"Signal Councilor Josh," the Captain said. "He is approved to start."

"Yes, sir."

The flags ran up the crest behind them, and Margaret watched the call go out across the field, and under her feet, somewhere down in the frozen dark, the real fight began.

Margaret turned her back on the battle.

The other side of the hill had its own war, and it was nearly ready to start. The ground fell away gentler here, back toward the Landing, and since dawn the snow had been churned to brown slush by ten thousand boots. The adventurers were forming up in the churn. They stood in loose knots of a hundred or so, each one clustered around the two or three earth crafters who would open the way for it down into the nest. Evan moved between them with a slate, counting heads, sorting the stragglers — sending one runner off, pulling another in, never once still.

Each team would go down at a different point. Separate angles, spread wide around the nest. Underground, in the dark, they would hunt for the ritual that brought the ants up, and end this whole fight at its root. That was the job.

Every team held a short pole up above the crush of helmets, and on the end of each one sat a pale flower in a glass bell, glowing faint blue-white against the afternoon. Elia's work. The flower drank ambient mana and glowed brighter where the mana ran thick. Down in the tunnels, where a ritual that size would pour off mana like heat off a forge, the flower was their compass. Follow the brightening. Fight to the light. Every adventurer down there had drunk a dark-vision potion brewed from the ingredients they'd hauled out of the Lords' trial — made from the lizardmen's eyes. Margaret had approved the requisition herself and tried, at the time, not to think too hard about the eyes.

Every powerful adventurer the Basin had was in those knots. The whole plan rested on them.

Bethel was down among the teams.

Margaret hadn't seen her go. The old woman had worked her way off the hill on her cane and into the churn, and now she stood in the middle of a team that had gone still around her, one hand on the head of the cane and the other laid flat on some adventurer's bowed head. Her mouth was moving. Margaret couldn't hear the words at this distance, and she didn't need to.

She'd watched this with some suspicion at first. Bethel was as devout as anyone Margaret had met on either world, and Margaret had spent a good part of her life keeping a wary eye on the devout. But Bethel had made Harold a promise, and she kept it. She did not preach a god to them. She taught principles — from the Bible, from Earth's own philosophers — and she kept her own faith and returned it to the people around her, and she always seemed to know the one right thing to say to unknot a person's heart. It was closer to Stoicism than sermon, most days. Whatever it was, it worked. The Templars were the most popular thing in the Landing that wasn't a tavern. Across the Basin they were doing real good — feeding people, teaching them, preparing them, and remembering the ones who didn't come home. The reports that came up from her order were well organized and told Margaret more about the true state of the Basin than half her official channels.

Two of her own guards had drifted over. The men were supposed to be on her, and instead they'd edged to the near side of the crest, heads down, one of them moving his lips along with Bethel's. She let them. Margaret didn't believe in much. But they were about to send a great many people down into dark tunnels, and she'd take help from any quarter that offered it.

She hoped it helped. God knew they needed every scrap of help going.

She picked Josh out of the crush by the color of him — too much of it, a bright coat among the browns and greys. He and Beth stood at the head of one of the teams near the center, close together, and even from the crest Margaret could see he wasn't right. He wasn't fully recovered. The necrotoxin had very nearly killed him, and he didn't joke the way he used to. She hoped he'd get it back. They needed all the silliness and humanity they could get their hands on these days.

He'd joined Taylor Vane's company — the adventurer Harold had put on her list to recruit. Last time round, Josh had built one of the most famous and effective companies in all of humanity, and even she had to admit he'd been very effective since arriving. The difference was that his company held all the roles. Soldiers, crafters, a couple of Lords, and that wind crafter Harold had told her specifically to fetch. She hoped it would be enough to keep Josh and Beth safe.

And Beth was still pregnant, and had insisted on going anyway.

Margaret had been in the room for that argument. They were short of earth crafters — badly short — and Josh could open ground and fight both. And if Josh was going, so was Beth. That was the whole of the discussion, near enough. Margaret respected the choice. She didn't like it one bit.

Tunnels appeared in the ground.

All across the back slope at once, mouths opened in the frozen earth — dark throats slanting down into the hill, edged in raw dirt, breathing a little steam where the warm underground met the cold. The lead teams filed into them without ceremony. Margaret watched Josh go, and Beth a step behind him, and then the dark took them and they were gone. The crafters closed the ground half-shut behind them.

Before she could stop herself, Margaret said a small prayer for them.

She was not a praying woman. She'd never been sure there was anyone to pray to, on Earth or here, and everything Gravesend had shown her argued hard against it. But the words came anyway, meant for no one — keep them safe, bring them back up — and the fervor of them surprised her. All of her new loved ones were down there in the dark. This world sucked. It was endless violence and endless death, and people were dying by the hundreds beneath her feet even as she stood here keeping tidy columns about it. She choked the sob down before it got out and made herself put the facade back up, one piece at a time, the way she'd learned to.

She just wished Marcus was here.

When she looked up, the Captain was watching her. He'd caught her at it. His face was bleak, all the wolf gone out of it, and he said nothing. He only nodded, once — understanding the impulse, or sharing it — and turned back to the battle.

The horde kept coming.

It crashed against the berm and died there and was replaced, over and over, the ant tide breaking on the packed dirt and the slits taking it apart from beneath. The Legion was holding it well. Better than well. Healing potions came up the line by the crate, and a legionary who'd have died got dragged back, drank one, and was set on his feet again — so the Legion's dead stayed low. Ordinary ants weren't killing them. It was the variants that did that.

But the prepared ground did its work. Behind the berm, in the ditch, at the slits, the Legion was trading at a rate no open field would ever have given them. One of theirs, near as she could count it, for five or six of the ants.

Margaret did the arithmetic. Five or six to one was a fine rate, and still a losing one against a nest this size. There was no bottom to the horde. It would spend six ants for every legionary all day and all night and into tomorrow, and it would still have more to give.

The Captain knew it too. He'd known it before she had, she suspected. He stood at the crest with the telescope down at his side for once, watching and waiting — the same as she was — on a dozen lights moving through the dark under his feet.

"They're taking their time down there, sir," Wick said, quiet, horn resting against his chest.

"They've a nest to find in the dark," the Captain said. "Let them take it."

Margaret picked up the cold tea and sipped it. For some reason she kept forgetting to drink it. Sacrilege.

She found the purple by accident, her eye moving along the ants for something to fix on and snagging where the color changed.

A knot of them, out past the near breach, maybe forty across. They held together in the churn where nothing else did, and they were the wrong color — not the flat slate of the rest of the horde, but purple, deep and wet-looking, like a bruise walking on legs. The ants flowed around them and left them a clear pocket.

Down the slope a ballista crew had seen it too. She heard the change in them before she saw it — a shout passing down the gun line, a chief hauling his piece around by the trail. Four of the engines came off the near edge and swung to bear on the knot.

"They've spotted your purple friends," she said.

The Captain was already looking.

The engines threw. Four flat cracks, and four explosive bolts went out low and fast across the field toward the pocket of purple —

— and stopped.

Margaret leaned forward before she knew she'd done it. The bolts hung in the air a spear's length short of the knot, dead still, caught against nothing she could see. A tear in the air. A wall of it, curved and faintly wrong where the light bent through it.

Then the wall pushed back.

The four bolts turned in place and screamed back the way they'd come, faster than they'd gone out, straight down the throat of the gun line that had thrown them.

"Down," the Captain said, not loud, to no one who could hear him.

The ground answered first. All along the front of the ballista the earth came up in slabs and spikes, a wall of frost-shot dirt heaving into the path of the returning bolts, and the bolts burst against it — four hard flowers of fire blooming twenty feet short of the crews, throwing up dirt and light and nothing worse. When the smoke pulled off in the wind, the guns were still there. So was the dwarf, hammer down, both hands flat to the wall he'd raised.

Margaret let the breath out slowly. "Well," she said. "That's new."

"Yes." The Captain had already turned to his staff, and his voice came faster now, the words stacking. "Message to the Legion. They're setting up a large push — that knot is the head of it. All maniples ready to maneuver independent of the horn on my mark. Move the reserve crafters up, closer to the line, now. And the eagles—" he cut a hand at the officer holding the signal slate, "—the eagles do not touch that knot. Nothing thrown at it."

"Sir—"

"Not one bolt. Pass it twice so no crew gets clever." He didn't stop. "Prepare a force to sally. Our best legionaries. Tribune Casas leads it." The staff was writing. "We break that knot by hand, before it can force a breach. Go."

"Yes, sir!" Three runners went over the back of the crest at a dead run, boots skidding on the frozen slope, and the flags came up behind them.

Margaret watched them go, then turned back to the Captain. "By hand," she said. "You've spent all morning avoiding exactly that."

He nodded at the pocket of purple. "You saw what it did to four bolts. If it can stop a bomb and send it back into our own line, that's a hundred men gone and me stood here unable to do a thing about it." He said it with a great weariness, watching the knot. "Some kind of telekinetic. Moves force at range." Quieter, more to himself: "We're going to have to spend lives to kill them."

"How reassuringly direct of you," Margaret murmured, and marked nothing in the ledger, because there was nothing tidy to be said about it.

Down the slope the horde was already answering the guns. The ants behind the purple knot was thickening, drawing in, the loose sprawl pulling itself into something with a shape and a direction. The Legion felt it too — she could see the near maniples adjusting on their marks, files sliding, shields coming up a degree.

"It shouldn't be up here," the Captain said. "Same as the big one. Those things have no business on the surface, in mana this thin." He didn't look away from it.

The ballista opened again — but low this time, and wide of the knot, hammering the ordinary ants packed around it. The bolts came down into the horde and threw it apart in gouts, clearing the churned ground on the near side of the pocket, opening a stretch of dead space between the Legion's line and the purple.

Then the crafters went to work.

A section of them stepped up behind the near maniple, and the ground rose in two low walls, waist-high, running out from the line toward the knot — a lane cut straight across the killing field, dirt heaved up to either side faster than the ants could pour back into it. And down that lane the sally came, a picked body of legionaries at a hard run, throwing glass to either side as they went. The potions burst against the inner faces of the walls and out over the lips of them, and the ants that tried to spill into the lane came apart before they could stop the sally.

Margaret watched them run. Every one of them was flushed and lit from the inside with channeled mana, bright at the joints of their armor. They carried mauls, a pair of short axes, spears — one man swinging something that had plainly been a farm tool in a former life. Six months ago the Legion would have made them knights. Now they were high tier one at best. It didn't slow them down. They moved fast, and they hit fast.

"Go on, then," Wick said under his breath, leaning on the horn, and for once the Captain let it stand.

The knot let them come. Then it hit back.

One of the sally men — near the front, mid-stride — left the ground. Snatched off his feet by nothing, he flew twenty feet through the air, over the near wall, and down into the horde where the ants were thickest. He didn't come up.

The rest didn't slow. They planted, all together, and every man who had a javelin brought it up and threw at once — a dozen shafts, more, each one sheathed in mana so it went out trailing light. Some struck the force in the air and turned, flicked aside the way the bolts had been, spinning off into the horde. But some got through. She saw them hit — cracking against the purple carapace, some shattering, some biting deep and staying. The pocket shuddered.

And the horde around the sally lost its mind. It came at the men from every side at once, frantic, climbing over itself to reach the ones who'd hurt the knot, and the sally spent potions by the dozen just to keep a circle of open ground around their own feet. The bursts came so fast the whole pocket flickered.

Margaret picked one man out of it. She couldn't help it — he was built like a siege engine, huge in heavy plate that no one else out there was wearing, swinging a warhammer with a head the size of a keg.

"Is that Kers?"

The hammer came down, and an ant shattered — burst under the blow, carapace and everything inside it flung out across the churn. And behind him the air folded and an assassin was there, spur out, driving the necrotoxin point straight at the small of his back.

It hit the plate and skidded off.

Kers turned inside his own armor, unhurried, caught the assassin by two of its legs in one gauntleted fist, and swung it up off the ground. He put his whole body into it and slammed the thing down into the frozen dirt hard enough that Margaret saw the ground crater. The hammer came down. It was paste.

"Damn," Margaret said, and meant it. "He's a monster."

The Captain grunted. "I bet on him in the tournament." He didn't lower the telescope. "Lost a lot of silver on him losing."

The tea never reached her mouth.

Out at the ends of the line, the flanks were turning. On the right, where the forest came down close to the field, the treeline spilled fresh ants — a whole wave of them, pouring out of the dark between the trunks and turning down the slope toward the end of the Legion. And out on the left, across the open plain where there'd been nothing but churned snow a breath before, a second wave rose up over the low ground and came on, wider than the first.

There it is, Margaret thought, and set the cup down on the rock without looking at it. The morning had been going too well to last. She'd said as much to herself twice already and been rather hoping to be wrong.

"There." For once the Captain said it out loud. He had the telescope on the right, swung it left, brought it back. "Both ends at once. The wall was to hold our eyes forward. This is the push."

Down at the ends, the flank maniples were already wheeling. Nobody had signaled them — the tribunes out there had seen it coming up their own flanks and turned to meet it on their own, the end blocks swinging out of the line, shields coming around, spears dropping level against the new charge. Margaret marked that in the ledger. Whatever else the Legion was, it did not wait to be told twice.

"Can they hold it?" she asked.

"Depends how many." He didn't come off the glass. "If that's the last the nest has, we break them on the ends, and it's done by dark. If it isn't—" He left it there and turned to his staff, and the words came faster now. "Message the ballista. Retarget the flanks, both ends. The berm holds the center without them. And the eagles make their runs on the flanks, not the wall — I want the pressure off the ends. Go."

Flags ran up the crest. Two runners went over the back of the hill.

Out on the field the ballista swung. She watched the near engines come off the center and haul around on their trails, and then the bolts went out long, all the way to the ends, bursting in the ants where it met the flank blocks. An eagle stooped down the length of the right flank and let its tube fall into the treeline, and a stand of the forest went up in fire and thrown ants. But the waves kept coming, and at the ends the Legion became a hedge — a bristling clot of men and spears bent back on itself, the ranks shoving forward into the crush and the crush shoving back, the ants climbing over the top of one another to get at the men. Too many of them to count, and none of them slowing.

The ground behind the ballista line tore open.

Margaret saw the dirt heave first — a low mound bulging up out of the frozen ground well behind the guns, where nothing should have been able to dig. Then it split, and ants boiled up out of the hole and straight onto the nearest crew. A flood of common ants, coming up under the artillery from below.

"That's not fair," Wick said, to no one, horn dropping from his lips. "Coming up under a man's feet. There ought to be rules."

"Write and complain, Wick."

The dwarf was already on them. He came around off his heels with the hammer up, and the ground rose with him — a ring of frozen earth slamming shut around the breach, spikes running up out of it and taking ants off their legs, the dwarf driving the haft down and swinging between the strokes at anything that cleared the wall. But there were too many, and more coming up out of the hole, and the crews were falling back off their guns.

Margaret turned to her guards.

"Get down there and help."

The four of them had been at her back all day, quiet, watching the crest and not the field. The oldest of them, the one with the burned jaw, shifted his weight.

"Councilor. Our job is to keep you safe."

"You keep me safe by helping us win this." She barked it at him, and did not soften it after. "We need those ballistae. If the guns go, the flanks go, and if the flanks go, this whole hill goes with them, and me on it. You're all tier three." She jabbed a finger down the slope at the breach. "There is nothing down there you can't handle. You can turn the tide at that hole. So go turn it."

The burned man's eyes went to the others. He didn't like it — she could see he didn't — and for a breath none of them moved.

Then a younger one, broad through the shoulders, spat into the slush and made the call.

"Two of us. That breach is nothing; we can shut it." He was already pulling the axe off his back. "You two stay on the Councilor. Anything comes up this hill, you're on it." He clapped the burned man on the arm. "We've got the hole."

Two of them went down the back of the hill at a dead run, boots skidding on the frozen slope, toward the guns and the dwarf. Two stayed, and closed a half-step in toward Margaret without being told.

Down on the field the line was coming apart everywhere at once.

It was no longer one wall with breaches in it. The rage-ants were through in a dozen places, the acid-spitters burning men off the berm, the assassins folding the air behind the ranks, and the whole front of the Legion had broken into a hundred separate fights — knots of men standing back to back with horde pressing in from every side. She could no longer find the line. There was a field of small brawls stitched together with dead ants, and she made herself look at all of it, because someone up here had to.

"Message the reserves," the Captain said. "Send them to the right flank, against the forest. Have them link with the tribune in charge out there and turn it. Go." A runner tore off.

She found the sally in the churn, out past the near breach — the picked men, Casas's men, still grinding at the pocket of purple. It was not going well. The telekinetic knot still stood in its clear pocket, whole, snatching men off their feet and throwing them into the horde, and she watched Kers hammer at the skin in the air and not get through it, and Casas beside him drive his men in the circle. They were spending glass by the fistful just to keep the ground around their own boots clear. Potions like water. And the knot held.

The flanks were folding. The center was a hundred separate fights. The sally was stuck on a wall it couldn't break. If the strike teams down in the dark didn't take the pressure off the surface soon — if the adventurers below didn't do their thing — they would lose the Basin. They were that close to being overwhelmed.

She prayed. For a woman who wasn't sure there was anyone to hear it, she'd done rather a lot of that today.

Then the ground spoke.

A series of deep, muffled whumps came up through the frozen hill and into the soles of her boots — felt more than heard, spaced out, one after another from different quarters under the field. She knew what they were. The strike teams. Breaching the nest in a dozen places at once, driving for the thing at the center of it.

The horde on the surface went mad.

She watched it happen from end to end. Whatever order the horde had came apart at once. The ants went bloody crazy. They flung themselves at the Legion with no care for the men killing them, and worse, they turned on each other, climbing over and tearing at their own to reach the legionaries a half-second faster. Something under the ground had felt the knife go in, and the whole horde had spasmed with it.

"Well," Margaret murmured. "Somebody down there has their attention."

Down at the guns, her two men reached the breach.

She had never seen their best Legionaries unleash violence like that. Their blades sheared through the mana-dense carapace as if it weren't there, one man opening an ant from head to abdomen on a backswing while the other took two more off their legs and was already moving to the third. She had not truly understood what Tier 3 meant until she watched the two of them cut a lane clear to the dwarf, set their backs to his, and hold it. Spartans, she thought, before she could stop the old-world part of her brain reaching for it. That was the word. That was how they'd moved.

The reserves hit the right flank.

She saw them come in off the slope against the forest, and where they hit, the folding end steadied — the fresh cohort linking onto the tribune's line, the two of them together grinding the flood back toward the trees. The right end held.

The left was another matter.

Out on the plain the flood was heavier, and there was no forest to pen it, no ground to lean the line against — just open white in every direction and ants pouring across all of it. The end centuries out there had stopped trying to hold a line at all. They'd drawn up into blocks, each century a tight square bristling on every face, fighting off attacks from all sides at once, and the horde had closed over the ground between them so the blocks stood alone in it like stones in a flood.

The Captain turned to his staff with the next order already in his mouth, and stopped.

Margaret heard it a beat behind him. Under the screaming and the clash at the wall, under the flat crack of the ballista down the slope, there was a new sound coming up the back of the field — a low, steady drumming in the frozen ground. Hooves. A great many of them, and getting louder.

The Captain came off the telescope. "What is that?" His voice climbed for the first time all day. "Where are our scouts? How in the hells is a cavalry force getting around behind us?"

Out past the left of the Legion, a couple of kilometers back, a stand of trees stood black against the plain. A haze was rising off it — thrown snow and dust — and the haze was moving, pouring out from the treeline and turning onto the open ground, coming in toward the field.

Margaret found it and could make nothing of it. "No one out here has a cavalry force," she said. "There isn't a Lord left standing between here and the coast with horses to spare. What is that?"

The Captain swung the telescope onto it. Margaret watched the blood go out of his face. He'd been calm the entire fight, and he looked panicked now.

"Those aren't cavalry," he said. Then, lower and worse: "Those are a few hundred centaurs."

He turned, and the orders came fast. "Message to the eagles. Every bird we have in the air — drop on those centaurs, now. Rake them if you have to. They cannot be allowed to charge our lines. Go."

"Sir." The signal officer had already lifted the slate, and hesitated over it half a heartbeat. "The birds are half-spent. If they go against the centaurs —"

"Send them anyway." The Captain didn't look at him. "A few hundred cavalry into that flank finishes us." A runner was already gone down the back of the hill. Flags ran up the crest in a hurry, and the young officer's jaw worked once before he passed the call.

Margaret set the ledger down on the rock.

Months of nothing out of them. The armored, disciplined herd that had bled every Lord in the Basin had been silent since Henri's attack, and here they came at the precise hour the left flank was folding. The charge frightened her less than the timing did. A herd that had scattered should not arrive like that — dressed, wedged, aimed. Someone had told them when. Someone had told them where.

"Wait." The Captain hadn't lowered the glass. He held very still on it, the way he did when the field stopped making sense to him. "There are humans in it. Two of them — riding horses, among the centaurs. Keeping station off the flank of the charge as if they belonged there." He came off the telescope half an inch and looked at nothing. "The centaurs aren't touching them. What the fuck is going on?"

It hit Margaret all at once.

"Bloody hell," she murmured.

Plan Charlie. He did it. She'd been chewing on it for three days, and of course it was this. Of course the wretched man had worked out how to bring them onto his side. She was the one who was supposed to know things — it was, quite literally, her entire job — and Harold had planted an army in her own Basin and never breathed a word. The annoyance came first, hot and clean. Then, under it, relief flooded through her, and something close to awe, which she liked even less.

"Call your eagles off," she said. There was override in it. "Those centaurs are here to help us."

The Captain's head came around. "Councilor—"

"Do it, Captain." She didn't let him finish. "They're here to help, and we need it. Now."

He held her eye for half a second. Then he turned. "Belay the eagles. Nothing touches the centaurs — pass it twice, before some crew gets clever." The flags on the crest dropped and went back up reversed, and one of the young birds already stooping toward the plain wobbled, caught the recall, and hauled off wide.

Then the charge crossed the ground, and Margaret understood what Harold had meant.

He'd told her once that no man on a horse would ever run down a centaur in open country, and she'd filed it away as the sort of thing men said. Now she watched the couple of kilometers close in minutes — the drumming rising until she felt it behind her teeth and the tea shivered in the pot at her elbow — and the haze resolved into a wedge of bodies at a dead run, low and armored, throwing a long white wake of snow behind them across the plain. They were massive, and they carried weapons just as large.

They hit the left flank where it was breaking.

The plain had been reduced to those isolated squares by now, each one an island with the horde closing in on the ground between. The centaur wedge came into the horde at a full gallop, and the frozen hill shook under Margaret's boots, and the ants were simply gone — thrown, trampled, flung up and out to either side in a spray of carapace and legs, a furrow opening through the horde the whole width of the charge. Half a ton of armored horse-body at a run did not get bogged down in ants.

One of them she couldn't look away from.

He ran at the head of the wedge, bigger than the rest, wrapped in chainmail over the long body and plated across the chest and shoulders, and he carried a greatsword she'd have called too heavy for two men to lift. He swung it flat into the horde, and it went through three ants in the stroke — four — and he never broke stride, and it came back the other way and did it again. A rage-ant came off the churn straight at his flank, the kind of thing that had shrugged a legionary's warhammer all afternoon, and he took its head off without slowing and trampled the rest of it under. Where he passed, the organized resistance on that flank came apart. The pockets that had held their shape all day — he carved them down to nothing, cut a lane clear to the failing square and past it, and ran on into the open ground beyond to wheel and come back through the other way.

Margaret had watched a great deal of killing since dawn. She had not watched anything move through a horde as though it were only terrain to be crossed.

"Bloody hell," she said again, quietly, and this time it was nothing but awe.

The plains centuries had been a breath from being overrun. Now the grey around them was scattering off the wedge, breaking and streaming away, ants trampled into the churned snow by the hundred and the rest bolting. The men in the squares had ground under their feet again, and Margaret watched one square unclench from its knot and start to move — cautiously, then not, spears leveling as they came off the defensive and back onto the attack.

Behind her, the younger of her two remaining guards let out a breath. "Are those—"

"Yep," she said, and took a dainty bite of the fabulous biscuit she barely tasted.

"Weren't they trying to kill us? Last I—"

"Also yes."

He shut up. She didn't blame him for asking; she'd have liked an answer to that one herself, and she was fairly sure the only man who had it was two hundred miles north.

Margaret let her own breath out slowly, and did not reach for the tea. The Captain was already using it.

The face was back — the color in it, the wolf she'd seen all day. He turned to his staff, and the orders came fast and clean, one on top of the next.

"Left flank's clearing. Reform the line — fold those blocks back in before the horde remembers where it was going." He was pointing down the slope now, his hand cutting the air. "Every century that can dress on its neighbor dresses and locks. Move the reserve crafters left to hold the new ground behind them." The staff was writing; runners were peeling off. "And then we push. All along the front. Push!"

The horns caught it off the crest and sounded it down the line, and Margaret watched the near maniples lean forward again on the snow as the centaurs came back around for a second pass.