besa (n.) a cultural precept meaning "to keep the promise" and "an oath of honor"; someone who keeps their word, someone to whom one can trust one's life and the lives of one's family.

God, Schovajsa had the worst ideas sometimes.

All the time.

Had he ever had a good idea?

No. Not in all his days. Not in all his years. Not a single good idea – and he always insisted on making that fact everyone else's problem

Kinga occupied herself with that singular resentment as she ripped herself free of the monster that she had been, only moments ago.

Fucking Schovajsa.

Blind… crippled… her wings hanging off her back… She hadn't known pain like that before. She hadn't known that you could survive pain like that. They hadn't killed her, as Ilja had told her they wouldn't, and she had – stupidly – placed her trust in him. Every cell in her body had shrieked at her not to do it… not from fear, but from exhaustion.

The first time that she had transformed, it had been like something sleeping within her had woken up and clawed its way out of her skin; she had been unable to contain it, clinging desperately to the fibres of her own being to try and keep it at bay. And she had managed – she had done it. She had kept a tight shackle upon the beast within, until she had heard that Pekka had died and had, for that brief and awful moment, loosened her grip. She had only had enough time to warn Ghjuvan…

In that moment, she had felt totally, utterly, alone – as never before. Trapped within her own body, her own mind, lost to the curse….

This time, it had been like trying to turn her skin inside out through sheer willpower alone. She had forced the monster out; it had been agony, singularly suffered. Her bones had broken from the sheer effort of chasing out the curse, but the others were depending on her – and she had made a promise. She had ripped muscle and ligament and tendon to forge the beast, and she had felt her flesh rotting from within as she expended every inch of energy she had remaining to her to hold it together for as long as she could.

So soon after transforming back, only the night before… she had not been able to summon the energy to emulate the size and strength she had possessed upon her first change. The beast she had become had been a pale emulation of the true power of the Moon of Kur – smaller, weaker, slower. It had rather reflected how Kinga had felt, and it had been taken down with an ease that would have made Pekka turn away to hide his smile, if they were still in training.

Kinga had a lone comfort – she had been ordered to lose.

This thought was not, it turned out, very comforting, because she knew she was lying to herself.

She ripped her hand out of the mass of flesh within which it had been trapped, and abruptly felt a part of her die away. It was the strangest sensation, growing limbs you had never used before, feeling your body expand beyond the confines of what it had once been. Stranger again when that connection was broken, those limbs lost, and you found yourself trapped anew with just this: two eyes, a spine, two legs. Wingless. Tethered to the earth, Jaga might have said. Poor, dead Jaga. Gone wherever it was dead Szymańskas went – gone where Dagmara and Agata and Magda had gone, when their turn had come.

How did that old poem go, the one that Krzysiek had repeated to her night after night as though to lull her to sleep from repetition alone when he could reach for no words with meanings more comforting: when is a monster not a monster? And the answer, whispered, before she knew what it meant, before she knew what it was to be a Szymańska daughter: oh, when you used to sing it to sleep. Before dying, Jaga had given her a different answer, a later stanza, a piece of the poem that settled more jaggedly beneath the ribs: oh, when you are the reason it is so mangled.

She had to move quickly. They had left her unattended; perhaps they had sensed the exhaustion lingering in her lone good eye. They had put her in a cage, and they had left her. They would not live to regret that decision.

They had left her – but for how long? They would be back soon… her hands and legs were shaking from sheer exhaustion as she felt the feathers slowly retreat back under her skin, leaving it smooth and brown once again. How long would she have? They would be back soon – that maniac with the sword, the one who had blinded her. They had been so fast, so clinical…these had been expert druj-killers.

But they had left her alive. For what?

Some strange panic gripped her at that thought; she thrashed herself out of the monster she had been, gasping. Her head pounded; her chest felt tight; her vision swam before her. It hurt – everything hurt. Every cell, every iota, every inch of her body. She felt like she hadn't reformed her human body correctly; she felt like maybe she had forgotten some of her bones, or misplaced a vein, like some part of her had stayed behind in the carcass of the monster that she had been. How had Jaga always done it? She had never left corpses in her wake like this; she had always drawn the monsters back into herself totally. Was that how she had mastered her gift, reining back in the beast once it was free? Kinga couldn't imagine. This time and last, she had cut her way out of the beast once it was a carcass. She couldn't keep going like this, could she?

She knew she couldn't. She knew it. How could she hope to?

How, indeed.

They had shackled the thing-that-had-been, tethered it by steel and iron to the concrete floor of this strange vaulted room. And they would have held her – if she had not been able to change back, then she would have been trapped here. So weak, so small… yes, she thought it was very likely that these chains could have bound her. But now she was weaker and smaller again, and she could leave behind the thing that she had been. The one advantage of small size, of drained strength, of aspiring vainly to a degree big-ness and bad-ness that she was starting to think she might never achieve: it made it so easy to run when the time came.

It was easier now, and she fell to the stone tiles as she had fallen to the forest floor the night before. Start here, you must always start here: start by pulling yourself from the fire and hope that you will forget the smell, forget what it is to be hungry, forget to forget what your hands are for when they aren't shaking. Don't succumb to the desire to fall asleep and dream of the place where nothing is red. Here was her humble offering: the back of her humanity had been broken. The first steps had been taken now, and it was a rapid downward slope into beastliness from here. If she hadn't picked the Moon, what would she have been? A Tower, she thought, putting her hands flat on the floor and pushing herself upright, she liked to believe she could have been a Tower, liked to think she was good enough and upright enough and reliable enough, like...

She would have let the whole world break its own neck if it had meant keeping him. How were they meant to do this without him? His absence was a numbness: if you leave me alone with them, comrade, I will kill you. First and second, they had been first and second, but she had been first out of sheer bloody-mindedness – a refusal to ever be lesser, even when that meant flaying away strips of the girl that she had been, day-by-day-by-day. He had always been second and deserving of first, but too kind to contest it, too busy with more important matters to quibble over something as petty as rankings...

Oh god. She was exhausted – bone-deep, settled among her veins, stomach-sunk. Everything hurt: dully, when she considered her lower extremities, and then more sharply, radiating upwards through her body. She thought it was likely her face had been destroyed; she put a hand to her cheek, and found it came away slick with her own black blood, and chunks of flesh that might have been human or beast sticking to her fingers. One of her eyes were swollen shut, if her narrowed field of vision was any indication, and her fingers cracked in protest as she flexed them slowly, painfully, practising a fist as she rotated her wrist carefully.

She was tired, so tired, but she was within the walls of the city now and that meant she had a job to do. For Kinga Szymańska, it was as simple as that: she was here, and that meant she had orders to follow.

She retreated from herself – the thing that she had been – the Moon of Kur – the not-quite-druj not-quite-animal definitely-not-human carcass – which was now emitting that characteristic low hiss as it collapsed into so much black smoke and dust. So much more dramatic than Jaga's elegant bodily transformations, Kinga thought resentfully, and retreated beside the door in preparation for the next inspection.

They had brought her here, and they had left her here. They had known she was alive – insofar as any druj could be said to be alive – and they had sent guards to check on her. Blinded and mutilated, she had struggled to ascertain anything but this measure: it had been all she could do to retain consciousness in both senses as she had been transported back to the city.

That druj-killer, the one who had taken her eye, had sat in the cart next to her carcass the whole way back, and he had watched her slowly die with something like fascination and fear mixing in his eyes.

She would have to return the favour sometime soon.

As she waited, Kinga stripped off her outer layer. Her clothes were ruined by now, truly ruined in a manner none of Konrad's devised tortures had ever succeeded in emulating – druj blood and soil and her own viscera was soaked deep into the fabric. Here, at the wrists and the collars, Jaga's blood had soaked in and dried, brown-gold. Beneath this shirt, she wore a thin vest… insufficient at repelling the cold of this strange stone dungeon, she thought ruefully, but it would do. She twisted her shirt into a thick length, like rope, and wound it around her hands. She was so tired. Everything hurt.

She didn't have to wait long – it couldn't have been longer than a quarter-hour when she heard the bolts racking back on the door, and the enormous stone slab that made up the entryway was slowly, tortuously slowly, moved from the threshold. She held herself as long as she could muster, which wasn't very long at all – had Schovajsa expected her to give them a chance to raise the alarm? Idiotic.

Just as the first guard stepped into the room, Kinga lunged towards him and yanked her shirt around his wrist, jerking his whole arm towards her body and, in the same motion, wrenched his sword out of his hand. It skidded across the floor, and came to rest against her corpse… how strange, she had time to think, to have a corpse lying there while you fought for your life over here, and she had time to think only this much before she was striking the guard, as hard as she could, with her free hand: throat, mouth, solar plexus – anywhere vulnerable, using her makeshift shirt-garrotte to keep him contorted over to avoid breaking his own arm by trying to resist. She could almost hear the other cadets in her ear: I think she's picturing Nez right now, don't you? Her fist came away bloodied from his nose, and then from his eyes, and then from his mouth, and she was still going, a quick and desperate flurry of get-me-out-of-here-now violence, a shrieking volley of let-me-keep-my-promise.

Then he did try to resist, and Kinga answered him by placing a knee against his elbow and forcing the two parts of his arms in different directions – her knee away, her hands towards, his elbow away, his wrist towards. There was an awful splintering sound, like when you butchered a deer and separated leg from torso, like when Astaroth had gone after Kaasik, like when Kinga's own bones had broken only hours earlier. They seemed, she thought, almost ruefully, a little better now.

She answered his final, feeble attempt at fighting with two hands placed flat against his chest, a firm push that had the poor guard toppling to the ground. He went for his sword, and Kinga answered him with a kick to the head: not one, not two, not three, but until there was blood on her boots and running across the tiles, mixing with the black that was her own.

When she was satisfied that he would not move, she knelt to relieve him of his coat and his keys. It was a deep, rich blue colour, fretted with black and gold details; she pulled it on, and noted the emblem on the sleeve. She had been taken by soldiers wearing green – was there a significance? She hoisted the sword in her hand, and frowned, almost reflexively: a sword? They were killing druj with swords. Did that mean that they didn't have guns here, or that they had found guns to be inefficient?

And why was the king of Illéa killing his own druj? Setting up an army to thin one's own guard was… an unorthodox method of policing. But Kinga knew she wasn't smart enough to come up with the answers which lurked below the surface here. That would be a matter for… well, who, who indeed? Estlebourgh, if she had lived; Nirari, if she still lived; Schovajsa, if Kinga didn't kill him first for this whole gambit.

She slipped from the strange stone cell, and locked it behind her; she found herself in an enormously broad corridor, aesthetically resemblant to the aisle of a stable-barn, with five other similar stone doors spaced at occasional distances throughout the space. Moving quickly, Kinga moved across the hallway to unlock the door nearest to her and peered within. She was cautious as she leaned across the threshold and – yes! – no… what?

Another living druj lay within this great stone space – at least what she could make out of it, for this space was larger and darker than the one in which she had been confined, and with the light that spilled from the corridor she could only make up one enormous skeletal hand lying, braced, against the tiles.

It was human – or human-esque, at least, with four long thick finger-bones and a slightly stubbier thumb, bound together with thin blackish ligaments and wreathed with something dark and damp like hanging moss. And it was enormous – Kinga wasn't sure she had the means to estimate its size more precisely, but this hand could have closed over a full-grown horse or three. She could not see the thing to which it was connected; she could not help but feel like perhaps this might be a blessing of some sort, for glimpsing the hand alone was setting her teeth and bones and every other part of her entirely on edge.

This druj was bound to the wall as well, with a similar chain to that which had held Kinga; she moved, swiftly, to the wall and examined the chain, finding the fault-line along the wall where it was affixed. She could not force it open; this called for many men, and stronger than she was. She brought up her sword instead, and broke it open. In two slashes? With just a sword? Well, these were good swords, she mused, keenly honed and hefty. A sophisticated design – the devilry of the Illéans clearly knew no bounds. But to break chains?

She felt less bad about losing, now.

She retreated, leaving the door open, and moved to the next cell. Within, another druj – similarly huge, although this one was very differently shaped: serpentine and octopodal, a mass of writhing talons with six long limbs ending in bone-beaked mouths that snapped desperately at nothing, swallowing only air. Kinga was starting to feel a little bit inadequate, truth be told: why had they taken her tiny, diminutive monster form when these eldritch behemoths already lay in their grasp? Perhaps these were druj newly formed; perhaps the king had created these with the intent of releasing them into those cursed woods later in the week. Here's some I made earlier.

She repeated her ritual here also, breaking open the three thin chains which had kept this thing in its cell. As before, she tensed enormously; surely, once freed, it would try to attack on the first human upon which it set its gaze? But, though it began to stretch its limbs, undulating back and forth as it tested its new freedom, it made no movement towards the Warrior, and the Warrior was not slow in moving back out of the cell, leaving the door hanging open. She was so tired. Everything hurt.

Maybe they hadn't yet programmed these druj with bloodlust; maybe they were as badly injured as Kinga had been. If either of those things were true, then Kinga was… well, no, Kinga knew that she would be fine, but the others? Outside the walls was not a good place to be.

The next cell, and another chain broken, and then the other cells were empty and as Kinga emerged back onto the corridor she saw that the serpentine thing with the snapping mouths was emerging, slowly, from its cage.

That was good, Kinga thought, precisely because it was bad.

She ran.

She was so tired. Everything hurt. She pushed herself to run nevertheless. Konrad probably wished he had ever imagined up a sprint this desperate. From what she could hear, it was not following her, but her nights loose in that damned forest had taught her this much: that when it came to the druj, one could rarely trust one's senses.

There were stairs here; she climbed them. She felt her mind slipping from her, exhaustion attempting to restrain it where it was, as she placed herself into that familiar mindset of action and motion, where she focused only on the task at hand, seeming to perceive only that which is useful – and there was so much that was useful that she was not sure she could perceive it all. The stairs bled out into another stone corridor, and then, following the stairs further, into a dark stone tunnel, like one of the many in Opona where the tram cut underground to traverse a particularly busy part of the city.

There were no tracks here, so this was not part of a similar system; it was only a long dark tunnel, and with monsters at her heels, Kinga was happy to run. She was so tired. Everything hurt. But she ran. Sprinted. God, she still could barely see.

More stairs. Joy.

When she looked over her shoulder, she saw that the druj were close behind.

She sprinted out of the tunnel into sunlight – blessed sunlight, damned sunlight – and found herself almost immediately in shadow once again. It was short-lived; the enormous wall of the city rose before her, impassive and immense: Kinga didn't think she'd ever seen a man-made structure so massive. It was almost entirely featureless; its material was some strange smooth grey stone, without fracture or fault line to indicate where structures had been joined together. At its base, very near to her, a set of wooden stairs rose a few feet before being swallowed into the narrow column which protected them from the outside. These long tube-like towers were apparent at intervals across the walls as shell-like structures to guide soldiers to the top of the wall; there, but distinctly apart from the actual shell of the wall.

She ran for it. There were a pair of soldiers emerging from the stairs, red-coated and stoic, whose expressions transformed into something that resembled shock and disgust as their eyes fell upon her ruined face. Kinga kept her voice low, her words spilling from her mouth in a voice that didn't sound much like her own at all: "druj, there are druj, they got out….!"

Oh, and then their eyes were filled with – was that horror?

Immediately, one of the soldiers sprinted for a nearby building – it looked just like one of the ancient residential buildings in Old Kur, where Kinga had grown up, half-timbered with bright red marking its post and beams so that it looked like a house bracketed in a crimson net. The other soldier turned towards the wall and began to shout something to those holding vigil on its face; Kinga did not wait to hear what he was saying, only sprinted for the stairs and ran the first dozen stairs as quickly as the pain in her heart and the lead in her legs would allow.

When the time came that her foot missed a step for the first time, her vision wavering before her, she caught herself on the step with a quiet curse. And into the darkness, she whispered, as she had been instructed to. "Ghjuvan."

For a moment she thought it had not worked, and then he spoke from over her shoulder, like he had always been there. His voice was deep – reassuring. "You've looked better."

She could barely force out the words; her throat felt raw, like she had spent the past four days swallowing broken glass. Truth be told, she hadn't eaten since…. oh, god, Jaga. "Take it up with Schovajsa."

"He really," Ghjuvan said tiredly, "has the worst ideas."

He offered her a hand. She took it. He hauled her to her feet, and patted her on the shoulder cautiously, like he thought she might try to take his head if he did otherwise.

"How's that distraction going?"

Kinga winced. "I might have done too good a job."

"That sounds like you." They were moving again. Beyond the darkness of these shrouded stairs, they could hear shouts and yells. Had the druj made it to daylight yet? They had carved her up so quickly with such a small team – did Kinga really expect three to keep an entire garrison busy for the time it would take? Well, she wasn't intending to take long. "An explosion?"

"No," Kinga replied, slowly. "Not an explosion."

With Ghjuvan with her, she felt almost buoyed – nothing hurt so much when she knew that another Warrior had made it behind the walls, that she was not alone, that she had done this much right. And yes, she was following Schovajsa's orders, but there was honour in that, wasn't there? She moved a little more freely now. Her bones didn't feel so heavy anymore.

They emerged onto the wall, and into chaos. Soldiers were sprinting to positions by the cannons that lined the parapet, their red coats whipping about them in the wind which had seemed so non-existent closer to the ground. All around them, grim-faced Illéans prepared to go to war against their own monstrous creations, and Ghjuvan and Kinga could easily slip by, totally unnoticed. Kinga had worried that their coats might call attention – his green, hers blue – but it was obvious that people were too busy to care much about why they were there.

As they moved from the thick of the crowd, Ghjuvan glanced to his left and let out a low whistle – of admiration or shock, Kinga couldn't tell. "That's your idea of a distraction, Szymańska?"

Kinga followed his gaze. The first thing that hit her was the idea that they were on the wall, they were on the wall, they were in Illéa, in the fortress of the Schreave king, and so much further than any other Warrior had made it in the years that had preceded them. The portion of the city that they could see could have been lifted wholesale from the Old Kur portions of Opona – small and vaguely parochial, all timber-framed and wattled, with cobbles and uneven streets, the buildings packed tightly together and pitching forward over the roads as though attempting to lean drunkenly on their neighbours.

The second thing that hit her was, oh, so that's how big it was.

The first druj, the one of which she had glimpsed only a skeletal hand, had broken from beneath the ground, buckling the stone slabs like so much ice cracking under the weight of a skating child. It had arrived ribs-first, but though its hand had been human, it was apparent to Kinga now that the rest of it bore no such resemblance that could be discerned. It looked like a motley array of bones had been assembled from a range of different gargantuan animals, and twisted into the shape of something that was just human enough to cause concern – hunched over on all fours, with extended, twisted limbs ending in human hands, the size of a cathedral when it began to move now. It had a skull-face riddled with broken cracks where hooks had pinned it.

Hooks.

And it was rampaging; all of the druj were. Three might not have been enough to keep the garrison in a fight for long, but the monsters had immediately dispersed into the city to cause chaos and seek blood, and the devil-Illéans had been similarly divided in a desperate attempt to recapture them before the death toll grew too high. The skeletal thing had crushed houses; the thing with the snapping mouths had painted the gable of a house all red; the leather-scaled canine druj was tearing through civilians like a scythe through wheat.

Ghjuvan's presence at Kinga's shoulder was silently approving. This was an opening volley; the start of the war the Illéans would not know was waging until it was entirely too late. They were Warriors and they had been made for little else.

And they needed their comrades.

"I did say," Kinga said, lowly. "I might have done too good a job."

They turned again, and looked out in the other direction – towards the wilderness, towards the forest, towards the real world. Somewhere beyond those green hills, Kinga thought narrowly, Irij was waiting for them to come home with the Radiance. Somewhere in Old Kur, Krzysiek was expecting her back. Somewhere out there, they had buried Jaga and prepared a grave next to her for her sister, successor, slayer….

She focused on this as she moved towards the edge of the wall, focusing on it with a single-mindedness that had all other strength leaving her limbs. If she put all her strength into such a thought, as she had before, perhaps she could once again force out the monster from within her own body, let her limbs contort into grotesque approximations of themselves, lose her face and eyes and self into the skull-fang-maw of the thing she had been… oh, when you are the reason it is so mangled.

Ghjuvan's hand clamped over her shoulder like a vice. "No."

She bit out her words from between her teeth, trying to ignore the agony which had wracked her skull and gut at the mere thought of another transformation so soon. Somewhere within her, the soft thing which lay behind her ribs whispered for freedom and fresh air. "No?"

"You're not strong enough."

"Of course I'm not," she said. "But why should that stop me?"

Boom. The watchers on the wall had fired their first cannon. She did not look to see if it had been successful. She didn't think she could. After the first, the second and third and fourth and fifth followed in a volley, like thunder exploding a few feet away. Boomboomboomboom….

Ghjuvan's eyes were narrowed, thinking hard. "We'll figure something else out."

Would they? The Illéans were distracted, the druj were causing destruction, the Warriors had the advantage, but not enough – they needed something bigger. They needed more.

Let me keep my promise.

She said, narrowly, "how's that going for you?"

"Give me a second." He ran a hand over his hair. They couldn't wait much longer, Kinga thought narrowly; a coat was only a disguise for so long, particularly when everyone around you was wearing blue. Even now, she could feel eyes upon them; when she turned, she found that they belonged to a young commander, long-haired, with a pale angular face and brows to rival Kinga's own.

"We might not have a second. Ghjuvan." He turned to look at her then. "I can do it."

"You left once," he replied. "You've used up your trust me quota."

"I came back," Kinga said, but her words were weak even to her own ears. Behind her, she heard the now-familiar hiss of a hook being fired and the shriek of a druj as it met the business end of a sword. It was all around them now, that hissing, that awful hissing.

They were here.

She shuddered, and shook off Ghjuvan's hand. "No more time. I'll distract them to the south – get the others over the wall."

"Szymańska."

Kinga did not listen to him. Every bone in her body shrieked to desist – but she couldn't, she wouldn't, she shouldn't. Somewhere, Krzysiek was waiting for her to come home; somewhere, Jaga and Dagmara and Agata were waiting for her to join them. Somewhere, Schovajsa and Angelo was expecting her to help – to follow orders, to get them into the wall. After they were safe… somewhere out there, Czarnecki and Nirari and Gehortnicht and Zorrico….

The first time she had ever seen Jaga transform, she had been fascinated. It had seemed like something magical rather than monstrous – the way her sister's soft brown skin had given way to black feathers, gently, without resistance; the way her dark eyes had grown larger, and swallowed the whole of her face, and hardened gradually into a black callous that took up what had once been a beautiful visage; the way her wings had unfurled from her spine, what had once been shoulder bones gradually unfolding like a butterfly knife. Kinga harboured no delusions that her transformation was anywhere near as beautiful. It was grotesque and gruesome and… painful. Even now, it felt like she was trying to fight through a brain aneurysm as she reached within herself and fixed a tight-fingered grasp around her curse and tried to pull it to the surface.

She was going to retch. She was going to pass out. Her heart was going to fail. This wasn't going to work.

She set aside those thoughts, or tried, and found she was on her knees, contorted over herself, barely able to force air through her lungs. It felt like a physical exertion to force her heart to beat each second. Transforming wasn't the problem; she had told Ilja that it was, and she had lied, and she had felt no guilt for lying. This was her Curse, and her Curse was desperate to know manifestation; there was nothing the Moon enjoyed more than being the Moon. Oh, it was painful; it had mutilated her in its desperation to reach the air. Trying to keep hold of it – trying to keep hold of herself – had broken bone and torn vein and ripped sinew. But she had done it; she had forced out the beast, regardless of her exhaustion.

It was finding your way back that got so much harder when you felt like this.

But somewhere out there….

Ghjuvan's hand against her head, a whisper. She wanted to shriek at him – get back, get back, run, don't you remember? "Look."

She did look. She could barely see. Her whole vision wavered and twisted and fell away from her. She couldn't make out much – just green, green and grey, and blue sky above them. Blue sky.

Ghjuvan's voice was soft. "Druj."

"...coming this way?"

Ghjuvan said, in a tone of great confusion, "maybe the Schreaves summoned them..."

Kinga wiped the blood from her eyes, and took a deep breath, and stared. Oh, fuck. Druj, indeed.

The one closest to them, and moving closer the entire time, was enormous, its shoulders at the height of this wall. More immense than anything she had seen before, a tall golem-like beast with great limbs of stone and strides that carried it miles in minutes. It had two very small eyes set into what might have been a head, and the light within was a very pale gold; it hurt to look at those eyes. Kinga felt like there were sabres being driven into her, just looking at those eyes.

She watched it, and felt the same sense of horror sink over her that she saw in Ghjuvan's eyes now. "It's going to charge the wall," he said, his voice soft, almost in awe.

"It's going to break the wall."

Kinga scrambled to her feet. She didn't understand. She didn't think she wanted to. Druj weren't meant to have any sort of intelligence. They weren't meant to seek anything but easy flesh and blood where they found it. So why….?

Behind the great golem-like thing, many other druj followed in a black mass, thick packs of monsters which superficially resembled apes and jaguars and dragons and… things which had no ordinary analogue. There were hundreds of them – hundreds and hundreds.

Was this the dark magic of the Schreaves, seeking to eliminate the Warriors within the walls before they could achieve their goal…? But the collateral damage would be devastating. Were the Schreaves so cruel?

The Illéans had clearly noticed the new threats approaching on their flanks. There was panic in their voices now. The shouts hanging over the wall were desperate. Ghjuvan and Kinga retreated from the threats as the devil-Illéans raced towards them, their coats whipping.

"This," Kinga said darkly, "seems like an even better distraction, don't you think?"

Ghjuvan did not reply. When she turned her head, she found that he was gone again, the place where he had stood occupied by only wind and dust kicked up by the battles already waging in the city below. Helpful.

She could only hope that he had been recalled by Schovajsa for further instruction. She would have to wait; she would try and get him back in a few minutes, when she was in a more advantageous position. As it was, they were standing on a deserted part of the wall as the Illéans raced towards the druj.

Some of the druj had clambered onto the wall now. It was no longer a battle of cannon-fire and volleying; the Illéans had drawn sword and dagger, and they were being ripped apart as the druj tore their way through the defences and advanced, slowly, into the city below. The Warriors needed to move.

In front of her, there was a low hiss as a hook buried deep into the soft stone of the wall and a green-coated soldier landed in a sprint, a sword in either hand. This was elegant movement – this was violence made poetry. Konrad had tried for years to make the Warriors emulate its like. He separated jaw from head of one advancing druj, burying his sword into the nape of the neck of another to pin it to the wall and wrenching his blade violently to rip head from body and then swinging his sword in the same movement to open up the belly of the first.

When he looked up, Kinga found herself looking into the dark eyes of the soldier who had tried to butcher her – the man who could have so easily succeeded.

She would have to kill him someday. It was a question of pride.

He turned away. She watched him go.

There was another low hiss, and one of the other air-bound soldiers alighted beside Kinga with a shriek of wire. "Scholar," he said, "you should get to your position as quickly as possible. This isn't a safe place for..."

He didn't finish what he had said, because Kinga had driven her sword through his gut and silenced him with a hand over his mouth. This contraption… the hooks and wire with which the green-suited druj-killers navigated the walls… yes, she thought, they needed it.

She relieved him of it; when she removed her hand from his mouth he said, dazedly, "comrade?"

She pulled out her sword. Its face was slick with red. To be expected.

In Irij, sometimes they said Illéans bled black, but Kinga had always known that was not true – she had bled red all her life.

"Comrade," the soldier said again. "I don't understand..."

She kicked him over the wall.

He didn't have too far to fall; by the sounds of it, something malevolent and magic-wrought had snatched him before he hit the ground.

It sounded like a quick death. At least there was that. Hämäläinen would have wanted her to ensure that much.

Kinga whispered again, "Ghjuvan Mannazzu."

"I've located them."

"Fantastic." She threw him the mechanism she had appropriated from the Illéan soldier. He looked pale and stressed; Khalore must have been in bad shape when he had seen her. They'd get her help soon; once they were within the walls, they could care for her properly. She wanted to tell him that, but they had no time to do so. If you let them be burdens to you now, they'll be burdens to you out there. "Reckon we can lift them over with this?"

Ghjuvan admired it briefly. He had lost his green coat between now and then; in such a situation of mass hysteria, he had clearly decided the disguise was better worn by one of their comrades, who were in a more questionable position – outside the wall. Well, they'd change that soon. "Better than the idea I was working on."

Kinga flipped her reddened sword in her hand and watched the golem advance. They had only minutes before he hit the wall. Would he break through? They could only hope. "Let's not wait around. The others are waiting for us."

"God," Ghjuvan murmured. "Schovajsa has the worst ideas sometimes."