"Soldiers turning on one another," Domingo gasped through the pain in his leg. "Killing each other. Worse. Eating each other alive. Worse. Like... like they're doing out there."

"Oh," said Wan, disappointed. "Well, this time it's going to work-we have lit the beacons and prepared the offerings, and back in Diadem the Holy See will have worked stronger rites yet. She will bestow us with her bounty. The Day of Becoming is upon us, oh wretched doubter, and I'll even allow you to bear witness. She cares about you that much, Domingo-even after all your childish blasphemies, even though you refused her mark, you still get to be a martyr for the Burnished Chain. Saint or sinner, pureborn or anathema, the Fallen Mother loves us all!"

Despite her training, despite her youth, despite her skill, despite even her devil, Ji-hyeon was a dead woman, dead as her horse, dead as her bodyguards-the only time she found one of them in the churning flood of clashing metal was when she tripped over a familiar corpse. She could barely raise the one sword she'd managed to hold on to, and though Fellwing could eat well in such a place, the devil was exhausted, too, reeling drunkenly just above the melee. If not for whatever trick Hoartrap must have pulled to drive the Crimson soldiers mad she would have already fallen, but even with the wild-eyed infantry murdering one another as readily as they attacked her, there were too many of them.

The mob had thinned out substantially, but she was still surrounded by the enemy on all sides, and as she cut down one woman, a second looked up from where she squatted over a fallen comrade. Blood ran down this woman's chin, and from the gory chunk she clutched in her hand-Ji-hyeon staggered backward, realizing what the woman was doing but unable to accept it.

A hand knotted in the hair that flowed down from the back of her helm, yanking her off balance. She tried turning, stabbing behind her, but the hand held her too tight, and then something heavy slammed into the small of her back, popping links in her hauberk, a clump of her hair coming out by the roots as she fell facedown in the trodden turf. All her friends were gone, and if Fellwing could no longer protect her, that could only mean she had lost her devil, too... and it was entirely her fault.

She wanted to roll away and spring to her feet, to put her sword between her and her foes, but her body seemed done with the whole affair, scalp burning, ears ringing, head swimming, the world reduced to a tiny window between the steel jaws of her helm. Two men locked in an embrace tripped over her back and went down beside her, mouths snapping at one another's faces. From the black, bloodied soil between her and the wrestling soldiers, steam began to rise... no, black smoke, curling into phantasmal shapes as it rose, the earth warming the metal of her armor, and Ji-hyeon watched the fumes thicken, knowing she had to get up but wanting to stay down just a little longer.

This was why Fennec and all her other advisors save Zosia had tried to talk her out of leading a charge. What in all the Isles had she been thinking, ignoring everyone but a notorious madwoman? The front wasn't where you went to give orders, or intimidate your enemies, or rally your army. The front was where you went to die. A screaming wildborn war nun fell to the smoking earth just in front of her, and then the woman's bestial face exploded as a mace muted her forever. Ji-hyeon closed her eyes, just needing to rest, just needing to muster her moxie, and then, and then she would go back to the war...

She felt herself begin to melt into the black earth, and it made her skin prickle and her mouth water just like when she'd gone through the Gate, her body coming alive in a way it never had before nor since.

Then someone pulled her glove off her left hand, the chill air feeling so refreshing on her skin after being baked in her armor that Ji-hyeon moaned. She tried to look and see who was helping her out of her gear, but the helm was so heavy she couldn't lift her neck. Then a mouth closed lovingly around her middle and index fingers, sucking on the sweaty digits. It felt nice, letting her know the dream she was embarking on was shaping up to be a good one. Then the teeth closed, hard, crushing the bones as they chewed her fingers. Ji-hyeon screamed, rolling over and surprising the Imperial cannibal into scrambling to her feet. She took both of Ji-hyeon's fingers with her. That fucking settled it; Ji-hyeon tightened her grip on her sword and jabbed it up through the woman's groin, into her belly. The cannibal fell and Ji-hyeon rose, her heavy boots now feeling light as silk slippers as she kicked in the woman's horrible, thieving face.

"Take my fingers?" She shook the throbbing wet wreckage of her hand at the cannibal as she stomped her. "Take my fucking fingers! I'll give you my fucking toes, too!"

A man burst from the miasma at her side like an eagle diving at a trout, and Ji-hyeon pivoted out of his path, her backhanded swipe opening his throat as he passed.

"Fucking eating people?" Ji-hyeon demanded of the crowd. "Fucking eating me? Do you want to die?"

A woman glanced up from feeding to catch Ji-hyeon's blade across the temple, her skull splitting like a dropped pumpkin.

"Come on, then! Come take a bite!"

Two screaming soldiers covered in so much blood Ji-hyeon couldn't tell which side they fought for ran past her, flailing their weapons around but failing to cut more than the haze around her head. She sheared through one's ankle as they fled back into the chaos, then poked him through the back as he fell. Poked him again, harder, black ooze welling out of the holes she'd punched in his thin leather jack as she looked up for the next challenger, the world at last beginning to make sense again through the jagged mouth of her wolfish helm.

"I'll! Kill! You! All!"

Forms shimmied all around her in the cloud of smoke, the incense-rich fumes condensing, and then a dark silhouette came low at her. She brought her blade down, a wild cry on her lips- Then twisted her sword away at the last moment when she recognized Keun-ju. In the dimness she had almost hacked his head off when he stumbled out of the haze. He was drenched in blood, a spear broken off in his left shoulder, but he still held the four-tiger sword she had given him: Keun-ju was alive, and he was here... And then Choi appeared through the smoke after him, the wildborn looking even worse off than Keun-ju, bleeding from every limb. In the crook of her arm she carried Fellwing, the owlbat shivering.

Ji-hyeon tried to greet them, but only a horrible laugh emerged from the canine mask of her helm.

"We have to go!" Keun-ju shouted in her face, as though Ji-hyeon were deaf, but then that was a sentiment that deserved an emphatic delivery. Her feet warming through the soles of her boots, Ji-hyeon, her Virtue Guard, and her Martial Guard cut their way through smoke and flesh as if they were the same.

"You see it?" Sullen asked Grandfather as they reached the upper edge of camp, the column of devils still hovering over the battlefield. He hoped they were just wild devils, anyway, and not something more material... an angry god, for example. Smoke was rising to join the swarm, but as they entered the maze of tents Sullen lost sight of the valley altogether, and couldn't tell if the black vapors were caused by a fire or something even less welcome.

"What?" said Grandfather, which was answer enough. "The smoke?"

"Nah, Fa, I-" Sullen began, but as they rounded a tent they nearly ran over a boy in a blue headband. The kid yelped, stumbling backward and firing his crossbow at them. The bolt went high, praise Rakehell for the luck he stole for his descendants, and Sullen skidded to a stop in front of the lad. "Ruddy hell, child, we're on your side! You could put a real hurt on someone, shooting off weakbows willy-nilly!"

The boy was still staring up in dread, and, following the kid's eye back over his shoulder, Sullen saw the line of Myuran prisoners coming down the mountain. That explained it, then; this runt thought the camp was being ambushed and had jumped at the first big shadow. "We captured them, kid, we took..."

But the kid wasn't looking at the hill behind them. The kid was looking up at Grandfather, who'd been too silent in the face of such bullshit, and then the first warm drops soaked through Sullen's hair, tickling his scalp.

"Ah, no, no, no," Sullen moaned, fumbling with the straps of the harness, but he knew before he even got them loose that Grandfather was too limp, an arm flopping against Sullen's face as he swung the old man down. Sullen had known it was coming for as long as he'd known what death was, but it wasn't supposed to happen this way, not for the man who'd taught him everything worth knowing, and a few more things besides. "Oh, Fa."

A few feathers jutted out of Grandfather's open mouth, the rest of the quarrel lodged in his palate and skull, the glistening arrowhead punched through the top of his head. Already he smelled like he'd been dead for weeks.

Brought down by one of the weakbows he so despised. Brought down by a boy whose life they had just bought back on the plateau, before Grandfather had even had the chance to sing for his son.

"I'm sorry," the kid squeaked, and, looking up, Sullen saw the boy was crying almost as hard as he was. He dropped the bow as Sullen rose to his full height, then turned to run, but not fast enough. Sullen pounced on the boy, whipped him to the ground, and crouched over him, hand tight around his throat. He squeezed, the kid pissing his pants, and Sullen wanted to stop, wanted to let the kid go, was even more scared of what he was doing to him than he was heartsick about Grandfather, but his hand just tightened as he whispered: "I'm sorry, too."

Just when Maroto thought the worms were wearing off, the shit got all intense and crazy again, the Crimson infantry looking a mite more human now, but behaving even more devilish. As Purna wrenched her kakuri knife out of a soldier's collarbone and Maroto deflected a thrust from another who would have stabbed his ward, he saw that the soldiers farther in had stopped fighting and started eating the dead. Of all the lousy times for a Windhand flashback... Nothing seemed funny anymore, not the good kind of funny, anyway, and Maroto told himself he'd never sting again. Just like he usually did at this point in a bug-out, when things turned scary. Smoke seemed to be pouring from the ground wherever he took a step, the smell like burning hair and pungent semen, and he barely got his shield up in time to block a pike that would've plugged Purna.

"Gotta fall back," she panted. "We'll never find General Ji-hyeon in this mist. You see the others?"

"Nah," said Maroto, his tongue working normal again now that he'd sweated out some of the scorpion. Three furious Imperials blasted out of the smoke at them, and Maroto performed the trickiest dance of his life; it would've been easy enough, if he could brain them with a shield in clear conscience, but he didn't want to push his oath any more than he already had. So instead he put himself between Purna and the raging soldiers, shield up, shield over, shield down, the girl darting through his openings and tagging the soldiers. In all the excitement he caught a few shallow slashes and scrapes, but credit where due, when he rolled out of the way and Purna leaped forward to hack into the last man's face with her curved blade, he saw she didn't have a scratch on her. Then he started snickering again, kept laughing as he clambered back up and they shuffled through the curtains of smoke to take the stage, because he had finally figured out what role he was playing in this strange new drama.

He was Purna's devil.

Zosia wheezed along after Hoartrap through the camp, a stitch in her side the size of the Agrimonia Trench. Even the camp followers who usually laid low during the fighting lest they catch a stray arrow had come out to watch the baffling scene below, and a few had loaded heavy packs and were fleeing away up the slope, cutting out before things got any weirder. Zosia sympathized; she'd never seen Choplicker so happy, or Hoartrap so anxious. As the tents thinned out on the lower end of camp and they squeezed past the pickets, she saw that the black column of smoke rising from the battlefield was perfectly cylindrical, and extended as high as her eye could follow. Ripples of light began to appear in the heart of the pillar, and Zosia pinpointed the scent in the air she'd been trying to place the whole way down from the plateau: camping with Leib a dozen years before, they'd been caught out in the high country by a thunderstorm, and a bolt of lightning had blasted the stones close enough they could feel its energy tingling on their tongues and smell its hot tang.

The cylindrical cloud covered most of the valley, extending far enough outward to envelop the front lines, and Zosia saw that the Cobalt infantry in the rear were staring up at the black pillar in awe, weapons held limp when they were held at all. Hoartrap was cursing to wake the devils, and Zosia would have, too, if she'd had the breath-this was the worst deviltry she'd ever seen in thirty years of raising hell, the Chainwitches of the Imperial army calling up something that no mortal could hope to put down again... and she was running straight for it.

Then Hoartrap stopped so abruptly she almost bowled into him, the sorcerer drawing up short just at the base of the Lark's Tongue. The slack shoulders of the rear guard and barber surgeons and officers and the rest of the remaining Cobalt Company were lined up between them and the swirling column. Choplicker sat back and howled for all he was worth, tail beating the dust around them, and...

Pop. Not a loud one, either, like some firearms made, but more like the sound and sensation Zosia felt when she came down to the lowlands after a long spell in the mountains. And just like that, the wavering pillar of inky darkness and flickering light sucked down into the battlefield, like smoke drawn through a pipe. As the crown of the column plummeted down from the heavens, though, something must have changed upon the field, for instead of being pulled back into the earth with the rest of it, the remaining smoke billowed out across the valley, stinging Zosia's eyes and making Hoartrap cough.

"That's gone and done it," the sorcerer managed. "There's not a devil in my bag that's going to escape my wrath for this oversight. Someone in there knew this was coming, mark my words, someone smelled it on the wind but kept quiet."

"What was that?" Zosia asked, Choplicker barking happily in response, headbutting her bottom to get her moving.

"I've got a pretty good idea," said Hoartrap. "But let's find out."

"Fucking devils," said Zosia, looking down at Choplicker. "First let's go find our friends. You willing to take me to Maroto and the rest?"

Choplicker strutted into the heavy clouds of smoke puffing up from the valley, and Zosia followed him down. No better guide for a tour of some new hell than your own personal devil.

"Look. At. That," breathed Brother Wan, still straddling Domingo but staring back at where the tower of blackness had collapsed to earth.

Domingo smelled it even before the wave of smoke rolling up the side of the valley reached them, his eyes watering as his nose recognized the orange sage oil Concilia had added to Efrain's bathwater when he was a child, when Domingo could still look at his wife with something other than desperation and his son with something more than disappointment. The grey shroud muffled the world, even the anathema atop him seeming remote and harmless as a memory of past failures.

"And the war's over," Wan said softly. "That which was prophesied in the Canticles has come to pass."

"What did you do?" Domingo asked just as softly, and because the hour was far too late for self-deception, he amended himself. "What did we do?"

"We've saved the Star, Domingo." Milky tears ran off Wan's chin and landed on Domingo's red uniform. "You saved the Star, by putting your faith in the Chain. Her Grace called it a weapon, because that was the only way you could understand it, but it was never a weapon. It was a gift, a gift to all mortals."

"I asked you what the fuck I did, you wretched monster!" Domingo's voice broke. "Stop talking Chainite madness and tell me. Please. What did I do?"

"Madness?" The fleeting softness of Wan's face set and his cheeks dried. "You still doubt her, even after all you've seen. All you've done."

"I just want to know," said Domingo, slumping back into his sweaty pillows, the monster that straddled him gazing down in scorn. "I just want to know."

"No you don't," said Wan. "You've never wanted to know. You've spent your whole existence denying the truth with one breath and demanding answers with the next. I was going to show you, I was going to take you through with me... But you're not worthy."

"You don't know, do you?" Domingo must be as mad as Wan, because it was so hard not to burst out laughing at this crazy, sad little monster who thought he had the whole game figured out. "You won't tell me because you don't even know what it is you've done!"

"I've saved the world, and now I'm going to pass through to my reward," said Wan. "But first I'm going to spare you from further pain. It will be... unpleasant, for the sinners left behind, and I think you have suffered enough in this life. You may despise me, Domingo, but I have nothing but pity for you."

Domingo groaned as the gaunt witchborn shifted his weight, sending more currents of grief through the colonel's broken leg. From his cassock Brother Wan had drawn the black knife Domingo had declined back on the Azgarothian border, when he'd dispatched the Immaculate prince. What a long time ago that seemed, back when the Immaculates' conquest of Linkensterne had seemed a crime worth killing over, back when Domingo still had ambitions beyond dying better than he was probably going to, now that his time was up. He wondered if the foreign prince's family would respond to the news of their child's cruel death the same way Domingo had, with fury instead of grief...

"Safe roads guide you to her breast," said Brother Wan, clumsy enough with his dagger that Domingo didn't hold much hope for a quick end to this. "Time to let the angels take you, Colonel."

"I doubt either of us will be seeing any angels," said Domingo, tensing every fiber of his broken body as Brother Wan leaned down to slit his throat.

The witchborn came in, close as a lover, and Domingo clobbered his soft temple with the brass hawkglass. Wan reeled to the side, lashing blindly with the dagger and clipping Domingo's cheek. The blade ran back along the bone and nicked his ear. That was just the bit of extra incentive Domingo needed, and he cracked the anathema a second time, harder still, the glass set in the brass tube exploding out in a bloom of crystals, and Brother Wan slumped on top of him, their foreheads knocking painfully together.

"A wise general never leaves the battlefield," Domingo told the limp monk. "And I never gave the boy anything he couldn't use as a weapon."

Brother Wan had dropped his knife over the edge of the wagon when he blacked out, and so it required a bit more time and commitment for the broken-legged, lame-armed colonel to do what needed doing, especially with the crick in his neck. One wouldn't think it, but that was the worst, like a thousand thorns jabbing into his spine as he rolled the anathema off him and then dragged himself upright in the wagon bed. The fumes were thicker now, like he'd snuck into the steamy bathhouse to steal a kiss from Concilia while Efrain splashed around the tub, laughing the bright, sharp laughter of children, a sound that had never agreed with Domingo.

He should rip up this bedding, use it to bind Brother Wan before he woke up. Interrogate him when he came to, using methods reserved only for traitors to the Crown. Get a straight answer out of the crooked man. But there was an awful lot of blood running off Domingo's flayed face, and who knew how long he'd be able to stay awake. Who knew how long he'd be alive. So Colonel Domingo Hjortt did the only judicious thing he could think of, and bashed away at the back of Brother Wan's head until he had no more strength to lift the broken hawkglass. Then he slumped back in the bloodied, befouled wagon bed, hissing at the songs his ruined body sang for him, and stared up into the hazy sky, hoping the smoke would clear and he could see the sun one final time before he went into what the superstitious called the First Dark, but what Domingo knew was nothing more nor less than the cold, cold ground.

CHAPTER.

26.

Sullen held a boy of less than a dozen thaws to the ground, and choked him to death with one hand. Sullen smelled piss and shit, blood and old age, but that last was growing fainter by the breath, and as it faded he squeezed harder. The kid's eyes were bugging out, his legs flopping, feeble fingers latched onto Sullen's wrist. It was a dark task, but it needed doing, with Grandfather killed for no reason at all, murdered in a way to shame the ancestors. Vengeance had to be paid, and Sullen tightened his grip and looked away, for he took no pleasure in it.

"No." He dropped the boy as though he'd seized a snake and sat back on his haunches in the dusty lane between tents. The boy gasped, a dry, ugly noise that sounded like it hurt. And Sullen said it again, louder, trying to make it stick. "No!"

The whole reason they'd left the Savannahs was to find something better than the old ways, wasn't it? When you killed someone back home, you paid their family or you fought whoever came looking for revenge. Simple... but nothing seemed simple anymore. What good would come of killing this fool boy? What good would come of any of it?

"Sorry," the boy said it again, coughing on the word as he crawled backward on his arse, trying to get away, and, hearing that worthless word, Sullen wanted to jam it back down his neck. Hopping to his feet and advancing on him, he said: "You think I give a fuck if you're sorry? You killed my grandfather! I drag him all the way here, talk him into helping you, your people, and that's how you repay him? Fucking weakbow?" He raised his foot to stomp the cowering boy before he caught himself again, stamped the earth instead. "What the fuck do I do now, huh? Leave him here, after all he did for me? Let you run away, after what you did for him?"

"Plee... plee... please," the kid stammered.

"I'm asking you a fucking question!" Sullen bellowed, feeling like his brain was going to boil out of his ears. He had been mad, once or twice, and always to bad result, but he'd never had the devils in him like this. "I don't have anyone else to ask! 'Cause you killed him! So what do I do now?"

"Ca-ca-crimson, or... Immmmmaculate?" said the kid, and Sullen realized he'd been ranting in the true tongue, and wherever this child came from, it wasn't the Noreast Arm. That was just as well, Sullen could rage in other languages than his own, though fishing around for the right words made him lose some of his momentum.

"You murdered my grandfather," he said in Immaculate. "You murdered him because... because you're a stupid fucking arsehole. So what do I do now? How can I let you go, when you did that to him? How can I face him, my other ancestors, when I stand at the door of Old Black's Meadhall? How?"

"Please," was all the kid managed, making Sullen wonder if the barrier hadn't been language, if this boy was just simpleminded. He looked back at Grandfather's limp form in the dust, hoping that even in death he could provide wisdom, but all he offered was an appetizing meal to the flies buzzing around his bloody mouth.

"All right," said Sullen, closing his eyes, telling himself he knew this hour would come... But predicting something and being ready for it aren't the same, not by a stretch. He'd always imagined Grandfather dying to save him, or some worthier person still, the old man sacrificing himself to great honor. Taking on a hundred enemies and making them pay dearly for one grey wolf that couldn't even stand on his own legs. Using his last breath to boast or crack a joke or maybe just say farewell to his grandson. That's how it would have happened in the sagas. Not like this. What kind of sad, disappointing song would this make?

The thing was, there was more going on right now than just what had happened to Grandfather. A lot more. This wasn't a fucking song, with Grandfather's death the dramatic end to a night's entertainment; wars didn't stop for one old man... Or did they? All that ruckus down in the valley had gone quiet, now that he pricked his ears that way, and the faint whiff of charcoal mixed with sweet rice reached his nose just before a grey cloud of smoke flooded up through the camp on the breeze. Craning his neck, he couldn't see any of the ghostly devils that had gathered over the battlefield, couldn't see the valley at all. Ji-hyeon was down there somewhere, and so was Uncle Maroto, and while his motives for wanting them alive couldn't be more different, want them alive Sullen surely did.

"All right."

"Alllll right?" The kid tried to get up but was shaking too badly.

"Yeah, all right," said Sullen, settling on his own way, since there was no one here to give him a better idea. "Grandfather there? You carry him up that hill. On your back. To the hump at the top. You make him a bed of tree branches and grass. Lay him on it. Feet toward the plains, head toward the mountain. Then you stay there until I come for you. Do that, I won't kill you."

The kid jerked his head up and down.

"If you don't, if I get up to that hump and find the both of you aren't waiting..." Sullen was going to leave it unsaid, but seeing that this fucking piece of shit was too thick not to murder honest folk volunteering to help out his own army, he spelled it out for him. "If you don't do all that, I'm going to run you down, anywhere you hide, and I'm going to murder you just as dead as Fa there. Only it won't be fast. It won't be easy. You'll be begging your gods for me to finish it, to let you go on and die. Yeah?"

The kid nodded fit to snap his own neck and save Sullen the bother.

"All right then." And because he couldn't help the living if he watched the dead, Sullen launched himself down through camp without sparing a backward glance for the kid or the flesh his grandfather had worn. He tried not to notice how light and free he felt, how nimbly he moved, without the weight of the old man on his back.

"Holy... holy," said Purna, staring agog into the wavering smoke. They had turned to face another snarling Imperial soldier, only to see him pulled wailing into the earth, along with most of the thick cloud. Maroto had hoped this was just the last hurrah of his worms, giving him a few last visuals, but apparently not. "What... what."

"Fucking bugnuts," he said, squinting into the foul mists and seeing that ahead of them there was not a single other person, not upright, not dead on the ground. After the clangor of an epic battle, the eerie silence of the vale fairly roared in his good ear, like he'd put it up to a hermit spider shell. "So that happened, huh?"

"What..." Purna said it again, maybe hoping for a better answer. "What?"

Maroto got a squirmy, cold feeling in his belly, staring at where all those people, living and dead, had just up and vanished, like the whole world had gone to bugs. To either side and behind them there were still corpses aplenty, and he knew from long experience that it was always better to take your chances with the mundane dead than the devilishly mysterious. Tossing away one of his battered shields and wiping the sweat and grime from his face, he said, "Fight's over, one way or another. Let's move."

Booking it away through the thinning waves of smoke, he kept a close watch for their friends, both among the other dazed figures lurching through the haze, and at their feet. Just before they got separated in the press he'd seen Hassan take a bad hammer to the back, but then the man had been swallowed by the blurring clash. He hadn't seen what happened to Din or Diggelby... But speak of the devils and watch them rise, here came Diggelby swaying through the smoke!

"Digs!" called Purna hoarsely. "Did you fucking see that shit?"

"The smoke?"

"No, dummy, the fucking Imperials!" said Purna.

"What about them?"

"They're gone!" Purna's voice had the ragged edge of someone who'd just seen their first true devil. Then again, Maroto had seen a lot of devils in his day, and whatever had happened back there definitely still bugged him right the fuck out. "Like, all of them! Or at least all the ones back there-they just... went, right in front of us, and far as we could see the whole fucking army got took!"

"Sorcery," said Diggelby, in a tone that said it was so passe. He waved them over. "Take a look."

Joining their friend, Maroto saw that Diggelby's armored caftan had lost most of its padding, the garment shredded to the skin in places, but other than a lot of blood caked on his person, he seemed to have come out all right. He held a flask in one shaking hand, and Prince was cupped in his other arm. The spaniel looked even worse than his master, a bloodied foreleg spasming, a cut on his snout, and his collar missing.

"A war monk?" said Purna, looking down at the half-dead man in robes curled at Diggelby's feet, his breath coming in shuddering gasps, a javelin jutting from his abdomen. "What does that prove?"

"We'll put a few questions to him," said Diggelby, passing the flask to a grateful Maroto. "See what's what. They call them 'Chainwitches,' so maybe he knows something about all this obvious witchery."

"Nah," said Maroto, both to Diggelby's suggestion and Purna's snatching the flask from his hand before he could take a second pull. "Why the devils would they do something that wiped out their folk 'stead of ours? Purna and me were right there when the crazy went down, and the Crimsons got the worst of it by a country league."