'I said the men were not yet at their full strength,' Qeran said, 'nor me. But my hundred and I are still more fit than nine-tenths of the warriors out there.'

'Your hundred?' Abban asked.

Qeran looked at him, and Abban remembered how brutally the man had treated him in sharaj. He waited patiently, and savoured the slight nod Qeran gave him. 'Abban's hundred.'

Abban nodded, turning his gaze back to look out from the walls one last time before leaving the drillmaster to command as he limped back to the safety of the underpalace growing beneath the squat building in the centre of his compound.

Inevera found Asome and Asukaji in their private chambers in Ahmann's underpalace. The two were playing with Asome's infant son, Kaji.

'What is it now, Mother?' Asome glared at her as she entered, Ashia at her back. 'Has not humiliation enough been heaped upon me?'

Inevera looked sadly at her son.

The only thing that exceeds his potential is his ambition the dice had said when she cast them eighteen years ago, bathed in his birthing blood. It told her he would be powerful, but spoke a warning as well.

'Your wife and I will walk the walls during the battle, my son,' she said. 'I invite you to come with us.'

Asome looked at her as if sensing a trap. 'Hasn't Father ordered his wives and the dama'ting into the underpalace as well?'

Inevera shrugged. 'Perhaps, but who will dare stop us?'

'I might,' Asome said.

Inevera nodded. 'Or you might follow me ... for my own safety. Surely your father would forgive you that.'

Asome turned to Asukaji. 'Just you, my son,' Inevera said.

The two men looked back at her, mistrust in their eyes once more.

'Ahmann has not dissolved your marriage, Asome. At least, not yet. I would walk with my son and daughter-in-law at my side as Alagai Ka walks the night.' She looked to Asukaji and infant Kaji. 'Surely while we are gone, my nephew will protect my grandson as if he were his own.'

Asome darkened a bit at that, but Asukaji laid a hand on his arm. 'It is all right, cousin. Go.' His voice dropped to a whisper, but Inevera, her senses sharpened by magic, heard him. 'I will keep our son until your return.' He kissed Asome with such tenderness that Inevera's heart ached for them both, but Ashia's shifting behind her was a reminder that there was a third side in the triangle.

She looked to her grandson. And poor Kaji in the middle.

They walked in silence to the wall of the inner city. Inevera wore opaque robes of white silk, looking much like her dama'ting robes of old, but she wore her hood back, and her veil was gossamer. The warded gold coins were warm at her forehead, and she wore considerable jewellery, not all of it decorative. Her robes shimmered with wards of unsight stitched in electrum thread. The wards were Mistress Leesha's, stolen from Ahmann's Cloak of Unsight, but even knowing the Skull Throne would hold the alagai from the wall, she could not deny the comfort they gave her in the naked night.

Take her power and make it your own, Manvah had said, and Inevera silently thanked her mother once more for the lesson. She would have been a fool to turn away such magics simply because she despised the source.

But even without the protections of her robes and the Skull Throne, Inevera felt safe so long as Ashia was at her side. Enkido had told Inevera he could not be prouder of the girl's fighting skill if she had been his own daughter.

Born to sharusahk, his nimble hands had said.

Ashia had a short, stabbing spear over her right shoulder, along with a small quiver of arrows. In her left hand, the same arm where she strapped her round shield, she gripped a short bow. The weapons were banded with warded gold and strips of hora. The armour beneath her black robes was indestructible warded glass, moulded to accent her feminine figure rather than mask it. Asome's expression was unreadable as he regarded his wife.

The Mehnding Sharum guarding the gatehouse began buzzing among themselves as the trio approached. A moment later a kai'Sharum appeared, blocking their path with a deep bow. 'Apologies, Damajah, but ...'

Asome was moving before the man could straighten, taking his chin firmly in hand as he threw. There was an audible snap, and the man hit the ground, dead. 'Does anyone else wish to hinder the Damajah?'

The remaining Sharum fell to their knees, pressing foreheads to the cobbled street. After a moment, a red-veiled drillmaster rose with a bow and escorted them up to the wall.

The Mehnding tribe was third largest of the twelve tribes of Krasia, due in no small part to the mastery of war engines and ranged weapons that kept them from the close combat other Sharum engaged in. They were more engineers and marksmen than warriors, but they manned the walls of the inner and outer city with the steel-eyed vigilance of trained killers.

Everam's Bounty was built on a hill, with the inner city at its peak. Ahmann's palace was its highest point, but even the low wall of the inner city offered an impressive vantage of the countryside. Wardlight dotted the terrain as the sun set, and mirrored bonfires sprang up to help the Sharum see the enemy.

And as feared, the enemy came in force. The Skull Throne protected a large section of ground past the walls, but in the unwarded patches of the outer city, massive rock demons larger than anything Inevera had ever seen rose to tower over the warriors assembled to contain them. At their heels clustered field and flame demons, filling the open patches in seething scales and gouts of bright flame.

The Mehnding kai'Sharum signalled the attack. Keen-eyed spotters with distance lenses mounted on tripods called calculations to the stinger and sling teams, who adjusted their tensions accordingly and began to fire. Giant stinger spears arced into the air, their powerful warding blasting through even rock demon armour. The sling teams, careful to give no ammunition to the rocks, fired payloads of small warded stones that scattered demons with hundreds of tiny explosions of magic.

They did heavy damage, as did the teams of Mehnding bowmen bolstering the infantry. The alagai screamed, and for a moment, men had the advantage.

But then the rocks began to dig, heedless of the smaller demons they brushed aside. Several of them had large stingers jutting from their armour, but none had been brought down. They were quickly underground, safe from missile fire, even as the stinger and sling teams hurried to reload.

The teams had time to fire again, killing dozens of the smaller demons, but then the first rock reappeared holding a sizable boulder. Arrows fell on it like rain, but seemed to hinder it no more than insect bites as it cocked its arm and threw, blasting the stone through the nearest wardpillar, breaking a portion of the net. Immediately the field demons charged the breach, moving with terrifying speed. The Sharum locked their shields, but were not fully in position to hold the breach. The demons fell on them, tearing and biting as others circled around, some harrying their flanks and yet more escaping unhindered into the night to stalk the unwary. Firespit scattered off shields, starting blazes that quickly grew on their own.

The rock bent, digging again, as several more of its fellows rose with boulders of their own.

Inevera had never seen fighting on such a scale. The Sharum acquitted themselves well, but even she could see the alagai acted with unusual cunning, striking in unexpected places and steadily weakening the wardnet of the outer city, slowly working their way up the hill towards the inner walls. They would not enter, but the demons could easily smash the walls and rain destruction on the city. Fires and collapsing buildings could kill as easily as alagai talons.

Out in the city, the Sharum were fighting for their lives. Rock demons occasionally lobbed stones into clusters of warriors, breaking them apart long enough for the field and flame demons to swarm the openings. Most of the men were armoured, but that meant little against boulders and firespit. Wind demons began to circle in the sky above the wardnet, dropping stones carried in their hind talons. Their aim was less precise than the rocks, but the havoc they created did more damage than the stones themselves.

With the Sharum fighting spear-to-claw, the Mehnding on the wall could not risk firing on the demons harrying them, focusing instead on the rocks. Whenever one appeared with a stone, it was hit with several stingers or a sling of warded stones. A few of the giant demons were killed outright, and more missed their marks entirely.

But one mammoth rock managed to get within range of the city gates, carrying a boulder big enough to shatter them wide. It would not allow demons ingress, but it would kill many warriors guarding the gatehouse, and strike fear into the hearts of men who needed to be brave. Stingers stuck from the demon's thick carapace, but it moved with focus, hurling its stone.

'Everam's beard,' Asome breathed.

Inevera ignored the comment, reaching into her robe and producing the slender forearm bone she had taken from the mind demon Ahmann had killed. Dipped in electrum, it shone bright with power to her wardsight. She pointed the item at the stone, her fingers skilfully manipulating the wards etched at the gripping end. She uncovered heat and impact wards, sending the power hurtling at the stone.

The spell looked like a greenland firefly as it flew to its target, but when it struck, there was an explosion that lit the night and heated the faces of the observers, smashing the stone into a cloud of dust.

Amazed eyes turned to Inevera as she next pointed her hora wand at the rock demon itself. Again a sizzling speck of light that exploded on impact, throwing down the demon and driving the stingers already embedded in its armour through to the more vulnerable flesh beneath. It landed on its back, chest smoking, and did not rise.

'Mother ...' Asome began, but his words trailed off as he stared at her. Inevera smiled. It was good to remind her ambitious son that she commanded power he should fear. Ashia and the Mehnding looked no less awestruck, and that, too, was well.

Out on the field, warriors took heart at the display, redoubling their efforts to contain the demons even as reinforcements came.

But there was reaction from the alagai as well. A flight of wind demons dived out of the sky, heading directly for Inevera, each carrying a heavy stone in its talons. Ashia had her bow in hand and plucked one from the sky like a fattened goose. The Mehnding bowmen took down others, but not before a number of stones hurtled their way. Inevera felt herself grabbed and thrown to the rampart as one of the battlements exploded right next to her. Rubble fell like rain, but Asome remained atop her, taking the brunt of the impact.

When it was over, half his face was covered in blood, and she could see his arm was broken, twisted at an impossible angle. She reached out for him, but her son rose smoothly to his feet. He took the wrist of his broken arm in his good hand, pulling the limb straight and letting it hang loosely at his side. The pain was no doubt incredible, but Asome kept control, showing no sign of it as he reached down to her, offering his good hand to help her to her feet. 'It is nothing that cannot wait, Mother.' He thrust his chin out beyond the wall. 'You have greater concerns.'

Inevera accepted the hand, but put no weight on it as she sprang to her feet. She looked out in the direction her son had indicated, eyes widening. Fighting was fierce in the outer city, and fiercer still beyond the outer wall, but it was all a distraction.

From her vantage, Inevera could see what Ahmann could not, though even she had been so occupied by the battle she might have missed it until it was too late. Out in the teeming wheat beyond the city, flame demons were burning with precision, forming wards the size of entire fields. Soon the symbols would activate, giving the alagai a terrifying advantage.

Asome saw it, too. 'They are truly the agents of Nie, stealing our ability to feed our people and using it to power their dark magics. We have no choice but to burn the rest of the fields to destroy the wardnet.'

'Perhaps,' Inevera said, remembering her prophecy. She looked to Ashia. 'Your uncle must hear of this.'

The kai'Sharum'ting did not hesitate, leaping from the wall and redirecting the impact of her landing into a tight roll that threw her right back onto her feet. She sprinted down the hill into the outer city, quickly disappearing into the darkness.

Asome looked at her. 'Bad enough you defy the Deliverer by bringing her out onto the wall, but now you send my jiwah out into the naked night? If the alagai don't get her, surely Father will kill her for her disobedience.'

'What do you care?' Inevera asked. 'If she dies in the night or is killed for her disobedience, your problems are solved, are they not?'

'I asked for divorce, not her death,' Asome said.

'You will get neither, my son,' Inevera said. 'No demon will touch her, and you do not know your father as well as you think. His first duty is to Sharak Ka. Ashia's information may mean the difference between victory and defeat. He will thank her for her service and forget it until Waning is past, and then offer her a token reprimand, followed by a public honouring. No longer will Sharum'ting be confined to the Undercity on Wanings.'

'Your goal all along,' Asome said. There was no bitterness in his tone, but she sensed it nevertheless.

'What is more important to you,' Inevera asked, 'winning Sharak Ka, or keeping your wife beneath your sandal? The heroism of your jiwah can boost your power, if you let it. I know you do not feel for her as you do Asukaji, but she is the sister of your lover, the mother of your son, and you made oaths to her before Everam. Those ties bind an honest man as tightly as love.'

Asome looked ready to argue the words, but then deflated, considering. Inevera reached out, touching his good arm. 'A great man does not fear his wife will steal his glory, Asome. He uses her support to reach even higher.'

28.

Early Harvest

333 AR Autumn

Waning

The alagai massed outside the city walls in a horde that cut fear into even the bravest Sharum. Thousands of demons, field and flame, rock and wood. The night sky teemed with wind demons, shrieking as they circled.

One of the rocks stomped over to a tree, its footfalls shaking the very ground. It pulled the thirty-foot trunk out by the roots, effortlessly snapping away the excess branches. Club in hand, it strode towards the nearest wardpost, a full reap of field demons at its flanks. Stinger teams took aim and fired, but even at this range it took many of the giant bolts to bring down a single rock. They would not stop it before the demon smashed the post, and there were dozens of the mammoth demons.

Jardir raised his spear, drawing a heat ward in the air. The tree in the demon's hands exploded in flames, and the creature dropped it in shock.

'Lock shields and advance,' Jardir shouted, using the power of his crown to magically enhance his voice. 'Strike on my command. We will fight our way to the rocks and bring them down!'

A line of interlocked shields formed, their wards glowing with power as they forced the alagai back. 'Strike!' Jardir called when the demons were clustered too tightly for a single thrust to miss. The Sharum took a unified step back, opening their shields enough to thrust warded weapons into the press. There was a flash of magic and a spray of ichor to accompany each point, but the disciplined warriors did not pause to savour it, snapping their shields closed again, continuing to press forward until Jardir called the next strike. A second line of warriors finished off the demons trampled into the ground by the front line's advance.

Their first real test came when a copse of wood demons approached, carrying huge clubs. While not the massive trees the rocks were carrying, the weapons were larger than men, and the simple wood did what alagai talons could not, smashing into the shields of his warriors and scattering them in wide swathes.

Jardir concentrated before the demons could take advantage of the breaches, extending the power of his crown out beyond his warriors and stopping the demons short. He raised his spear and drew heat wards in the air, incinerating the wood demons, and then charged forward, his magic throwing the lesser alagai aside until he came up to the nearest rock. He pulled the protective field in tight, letting him get close enough to leap ten feet into the air and thrust the Spear of Kaji into the demon's chest. Magic refilled the spear's well as it pulsed up his arm, suffusing him with energy.

He kicked off from the falling demon, landing in a clear spot twenty feet away. Demons leapt at him from all sides, but their attacks skittered off his warding field, even as he attacked with impunity. Several demons fell to thrusts of his spear, but as many were destroyed by wards he drew in the air. Flame demons shattered as he froze the firespit in their bellies, and wood demons ran about frantically, immolated in flame. Impact wards threw field demons aside by the half dozen.

Still they closed in, their numbers undiminished. Every demon on the field was focused on him now. He extended the crown's power again, driving them back until he could rejoin his men, but that only made him a clearer target as a rock demon threw a heavy boulder his way.

Jardir leapt aside, but was struck even as he landed by another stone dropped from above. He rolled with the impact, keeping hold of his spear and drawing on its magic to heal himself. He was given no respite, as rocks the size of melons began to fall like rain around him.

But as fast as the stones fell, Jardir was faster, dodging them like lazily drifting bubbles of soap. Even as he dodged the barrage from above, the rock and wood demons on the ground continued to hurl whatever they could grasp in their talons at him: rocks, trees, even a few of his own men. Wind demons bounced off his warding field, falling from the sky where his men quickly dispatched them before they could recover and take off again. One wind demon pulled up short just outside the limit of his protection and roared at him, a bolt of lightning leaping from its long toothed beak.

With a thunderous boom, the energy pierced the warding, going right for him, but Jardir could see the power for what it was, and did not fear. He raised his spear crosswise, absorbing the energy. The weapon tingled and burned with the power, but he threw it right back at the creature, blasting it from the sky.

He felt suffused with power, unstoppable, and yet he saw he was being slowly cut off from his men and surrounded. Rock demons were hurling more and larger missiles at him, and sooner or later one would connect.

I have made a target of myself, he realized.

With that thought, he pulled his protective field in close, throwing up his hood and wrapping himself in Leesha's Cloak of Unsight as he quickstepped several yards to the side. To his warriors nothing had changed, but he could see confusion in the auras of the alagai. To their senses, he had simply vanished.

Calmly, he walked back to the re-formed lines of the Sharum as the warriors took advantage of the demons' confusion, striking hard as the alagai vainly searched for sign of him.

'Uncle!' a voice cried, and he saw Ashia running towards him. His niece was wrapped in her Sharum blacks, but in the darkness he recognized her aura more clearly than he ever might her face. A field demon leapt at her, but she turned to catch it on her shield, throwing it aside without slowing. A flame demon stopped in her path and hawked firespit, but she sidestepped smoothly as the creature closed its eyes to spew, skewering it.

Next, a pair of wood demons barred her path. Charged now with demon magic, Ashia only increased the speed of her advance, using the edge of her shield to stab at the joints of their long, spindly limbs, keeping them off balance and unable to attack. To an untrained eye, every move was as if practised by rote, but Jardir could see that she was in fact probing, applying dama'ting sharusahk as she searched for pressure points. At last she found one in a demon's thigh, collapsing the limb with a relatively gentle blow. Only then did she plunge her spear in for the kill.

She spun to meet the next attack from the other wood demon, slapping it aside with a casual thrust of her shield's edge into its spindly armpit as it lashed its talons at her. The demon stumbled back, and she advanced calmly. Her aura confirmed what he already knew: that she was utterly confident in her ability to kill it at will, and was using the opportunity to learn her enemy better.

No two demons were precisely alike. Each was shaped by its preferred hunting terrain, and Everam's Ala was vast and varied. It took her two blows to find the same pressure point on the next wood demon, but after a moment she collapsed its leg. She filed the information away, finishing the demon quickly and closing the space between herself and Jardir in two great bounds.

Jardir frowned. His pride in his beloved sister Imisandre's daughter was overwhelming. He had commanded she be twice the warrior of her male zahven, but she had surpassed them by far, and her own father, as well. Watching the graceful and precise movements of her art, so confident and in control, was like reading a poem.

But for all his pride, her defiance of his will in coming out into the night was unacceptable. No doubt Inevera had a hand in it, but he could not allow even the Damajah to flaunt his decrees so openly. Poor Ashia would be caught in the middle when he was forced to make an example of her.

He grabbed her arm hard when she reached his side, extending his crown's protection just enough to envelop, but hopefully not enough to alert the alagai princes who even now sought him through the eyes of their drones. 'Are you begging to have your new blacks stripped from you, girl, to defy my command?'

'Forgive me, Uncle,' Ashia said, falling to one knee and baring her neck. 'The Damajah bade me to inform you that the alagai are burning great wards into the crops outside the city, creating a net.'

Jardir felt a chill run down his spine as he looked up, seeing the magic gathering off in the distance and sensing its purpose. The demons were constructing wards to repel men. If they succeeded in creating a circle around Everam's Bounty, they could kill every man, woman, and child within. The Skull Throne was no protection against this.

'Did she tell you anything else?' he asked.

'No,' Ashia said. 'But when my honoured husband told her the only way to stop them would be to burn our harvest, the Damajah suggested there might be alternatives.'

Jardir nodded. How could he forget the words he had pondered day and night since Inevera's foretelling?

The Deliverer must go into the night alone to hunt the centre of the web, or all will be lost when the Alagai Ka comes- He looked back at his niece. She had as much as told him that his wife and son also defied his will, but that seemed an insignificant thing now. 'Tell the Damajah I understand, and will follow the path Everam has set before me.' Ashia bowed and turned to go, but he caught her arm once more. 'I am proud of you, niece.'