The first strikes fell on the outskirts.

  Raxel brought his column in from the north of the Westerweald-Gobrin border, across low fields and ditches that had been carved in neat angles by Hybrid hands – defensive measures that meant nothing to Greycloak warriors.

  Smoke already hung over the farms that had been rebuilt and resettled by hybrids and the human traitors who joined their Mandate. It thinned in the night air, then thickened again as Greycloaks and volunteers pushed torches into thatch and hay.

  “Columns of three,” Raxel said. “Fire first. Steel after. Magi—chaos flame on the roofs and beams. Keep moving. We are not here to occupy; we are here to wake them.”

  The men answered with short acknowledgements. No speeches. They knew what this was.

  The first cottage took at once. Violet fire clawed up a beam and ran across a ridgepole. The glow lit faces—startled, angry, afraid. Hybrid levy spilled out of a barn in half-done gear. A Lycae man braced a shield at a bad angle; a Minxit with a mason’s belt tried to wedge himself into armor that wasn’t his. A human woman dragged two sleeping children by the wrists toward the well.

  Raxel walked past them, eyes on the cross lanes.

  “Drive them toward Triant,” he said. “Let them think the forest is safety.”

  Chaos flame took a second roof. A third. Greycloaks used spear-butts to break shutters and threw fire through them. A cluster of volunteers—twenty men and women from Eastmarch who’d followed the Greys west in spite of the stories—went house to house with oily rags. They did not stay to watch anything fall. Neither did Raxel. They had one purpose tonight and it was not to count bodies.

  Show yourselves, his mind raced, thoughts turning to the targets he had been ordained to slay. You can’t let this slight upon your lands go, can you? Or have your people grown soft in peacetime?

  “Commander,” his captain said, pointing with two fingers as a pair broke from the far yard—a Lycae and a human woman, hands locked. The woman looked back once, then pulled harder. The Lycae limped but kept pace.

  Raxel’s fists clenched of their own accord. Already these beasts were polluting their gene pool.

  “Those two,” he said. “Run them down.”

  His force obeyed. They gave chase through smoke and low fences. Dogs barked and then went quiet. A cart blocked one lane; they vaulted it and landed on potato tops. The pair ahead cleared a ditch and ran for the dark tree line where the farms ended and Triant began. They did not slow when the grass turned to needles underfoot.

  The Greycloaks followed into the fringe, boots taking the path that should have been obvious to anyone who’d farmed this ground. The trees stood close here. The trunks were thick and damp. Small ground plants crushed easily and gave off a mint odor the Hybrid foresters had taught into them to keep pests down. Raxel took that in with a single breath and filed it away. Detail mattered. Detail kept you alive.

  Mist formed between the trunks. It did not roll in from the marsh. It appeared, whole, in a single breath. The backs of the fleeing pair vanished into it and then reappeared in a gap, closer to the center of the first stand of old oaks. They were running toward a place they knew. That was fine. Raxel had followed men to altars before.

  “Slow it,” he said. “Shields up. Magi—hold until I give the signal.”

  The mist thickened. Sound became strange—muffled and then suddenly near. A crow called from somewhere too close. A twig snapped where no foot ought to be. Raxel raised one hand.

  “Three forward!” he said. “Touch shoulders. Don’t break the line.”

  The line stepped and the trees moved.

  At first it could have been wind. Then the roots lifted off the top layer of loam and curled. Bark flexed. Knots became eyes, not glowing, not magical, just present—brown and blind-looking until they were not.

  “Drytchlings,” his captain said, not loud.

  Oaken limbs slid from trunks and hardened to points. One punched straight through the breast of a militia man who had been trying to keep his shield over his head. Another caught a volunteer in the hip and carried him sideways into a trunk like a butcher hanging meat. A Minxit struck at a Drytchling limb with a hatchet and the hatchet stuck. The limb kept moving. He let go just in time to keep his hand.

  He drove his staff into wet soil. The rune on its head flared once and then guttered like a coal. That was enough. The veil pulled off their eyes. The mist stayed, but the men saw through it as if it were a thin curtain. Drytchlings took on edges—tall, crooked, wrong. The limbs were not illusions. They were wood, long and heavy, and they were moving fast enough to break a man in half.

  “Hold!” Raxel said, measuring the distance to the fallen cedar ahead where a man stood in a robe the color of leaves.

  And he knew it it was - the Druid traitor himself.

  “Now!” Raxel ordered, and the mages answered. Five Greycloak magi raised their hands. Raxel brought his staff across, scything the air. The fire they called up did not bloom prettily; it came low and nasty, crawling across needles and leaves, catching where sap was thick, finding the dry rot inside trunks and feeding there. Drytchlings shrieked. Their limbs jerked, then recoiled. The front of the wood went to smoke. The smell was sap and meat and something old and sour that lived in wood too long left alone.

  “Forward,” Raxel said, and they went, stepping through char and black ash that stuck to the soles. A Drytchling swayed in front of him, half burning, half trying to drive a limb into someone’s stomach. Raxel knocked the limb aside with the ferrule of his staff, then leveled the head and let out a pulse of force. The trunk split up the middle as if a wedge had been driven into it. The thing folded.

  Raxel kept moving. The fallen cedar was no longer far. Malak stood where he had stood, shoulders square, staff down. Smoke wrapped around him and then fell off in sheets. He did not cough. He watched.

  Raxel raised the staff and set his mouth to a word he rarely used—one of the old Greycloak workings meant to break a man’s veins from the inside.

  But he didn’t get to speak it.

  Instead, the earth opened.

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  No crack. No warning. Just a drop. The ground under the forward ranks gave way three paces deep and as wide as the lane. Raxel fell with the men he had brought forward and hit packed soil and timber bracing. Lanterns flared to life in niches.

  Here, the Hybrids were waiting.

  “Up!” a voice snarled from the forward gallery. “Cut them before they plant!”

  The voice that spoke those words was rough-hewn - belonging to a beast who was used to dust in his lungs. Raxel recognized the gutteral intonation as Dixit-Speech. Somewhere in this dust-caked hell, the blacksmith of the Archon was commanding his troops.

  The Hybrids came in tight. The tunnel wasn’t high; it was enough. A Dixit drove a spear at Raxel’s chest while he was still on one knee. Raxel turned the point with the bottom cap of his staff and slid along the shaft. The butt of the staff met the Dixit’s jaw. The man went down and his friend appeared in his place with a short blade and steady eyes. Raxel stepped, pivoted, and felt air move close to his ribs instead of steel. He put the man away with a hook of the staff behind the knee.

  All along the line, Greycloaks tried to stand with the peasant warriors they'd brought with them. A Minxit came in low and cut the tendon above a Greycloak’s heel. A Lycae drove a shoulder into a volunteer’s chest and pinned him against a brace, then finished him with a quick stab between ribs. No wasted motion. This was well-drilled.

  “Hold this cross!” Borlor called again, unseen. “Don’t give up the mouths. Take them in the angles.”

  Raxel could feel the layout without seeing it. A main run ahead. Two narrower galleries crossing it. Tunnels like this ate numbers. The Greycloaks were packed. Each time one stepped out, a Hybrids spear cut a path across him. He smelled oil, leather, iron, sweat. He heard a man choking. He heard one of his magi trying to finish a long syllable while someone drove a stake at his thigh. The syllable failed.

  He needed space.

  Raxel slammed the head of his staff into the wall to his right and barked a two-part word. Packed soil bulged and blew. The side of the gallery gave way in a cough of dirt and splinters, throwing three Hybrids backward and producing a new mess of earth in the passage beyond. It bought a beat. He took it.

  “Through!” he shouted. “Right then left. Don’t stop.”

  They forced the angle. Men rammed shoulders against shoulders and got beyond the place where the first ambush had been set. The tunnel opened enough to let four move abreast. Raxel cut left, then right again, trusting the air. The bracing had a pattern; Borlor had built it. The man liked his triangles. That meant the next support came where the soil smelled damp.

  They came out into a longer run where the lanterns were hung higher. Raxel saw a shape at the far end in silhouette—a broad back and a hammer in one hand. He pointed and started forward. The shape turned and was gone before he made three paces. A set of planks fell in a hinge and closed the view like a lid.

  “Bring it down,” Raxel said, and two of his magi threw a bolt at the planks. The bolt hit, splintered the top rail, and did nothing useful. Raxel got ready to do it himself—

  —and the wall behind him moved.

  Not collapsed. Moved. Something pushed through it and tore the bracing out with a sound that was all scrape and snap. A mandible punched through the soil, then another. An insect head the size of a barrel shoved into the corridor, then wriggled further until plates scraped packed dirt. It was not alone. A second head pressed behind it. A third tried to come through a brace that was not meant to carry it.

  “Back!” someone shouted.

  There was nowhere to go back to. The corridor accepted what came into it.

  The first of the beasts forced its way into the tunnel, turned sideways, and began to run because running was what it did. It didn’t choose targets. It didn’t think. Its forelimbs scythed because that was their shape. The second followed and crushed the bracing the first had offended. The third found itself halfway into the breach and made the space by breaking a post with its chest.

  Raxel pressed flat to the side and felt a limb pass where he had been a breath earlier. He struck down with the head of his staff onto a plate between ridges and burned it with a short, ugly word. The plate blistered white. The thing skittered, tried to correct, struck a brace with its flailing limb and sheared the brace off. The roof dropped three inches and then held.

  Above, dirt shivered. Roots shook. A new sound came down through seams and joints—the sound of vines being pulled, then released. They dropped into the tunnel mouths and down through gaps—green cords as thick as wrists. They wrapped ankles and arms and necks. A Greycloak hacked at one and freed himself, then took a second across the face. A militia woman had both legs jerked together and fell. Two Hybrids used the opening to jam spears into ribs in quick, practiced thrusts.

  “Cut those vines!” Raxel yelled, even as he knew it was a poor order. Men did. They also cut each other. The tunnel had become three problems at once: the moving plates behind, the Hybrids in front, the ropes from above.

  “Drive them down!” Malak’s voice came again. "For the Archon! FOR A FREE WESTERWEALD!"

  The Druid's voice reverberated in the timber, and each time a vine hit dirt it found something to anchor to. A vault overhead opened and Drytchlings peered down—their mouths shapeless, their eyes steady. They fed more vines into the mess.

  Raxel took stock in two breaths. The men around him were dwindling. His captain was still up—blood down one side of his face, teeth clenched. One of the magi had his hand against the wall and was praying into the soil, trying to harden it. That would help later, not now.

  “Break into twos,” Raxel said. “Use the seams. Up if you can. Don't hesitate!”

  He meant it. This wasn’t a stance to hold. It was a grinder. Staying here would only give the enemy more bodies to step over. He led by example, slamming the staff into a bad join and opening a shoulder-wide space. He shoved the wounded mage through, then the captain. He followed, turning sideways, scraping skin from his cheek. On the other side the tunnel was narrower but clean. No insects yet. No Hybrids in front. He took a breath that wasn’t full of dust and old sap.

  “Forward,” he said again, quiet now, conserving voice and air.

  The seam became a set of cut steps. Steps became a short shaft. He went up, shouldered a hatch, and came out into a cellar that had been a cellar since yesterday and a trap since this afternoon. Shelves. Pickle jars. A ladder.

  They have their little tunnels set up right underneath our old homes, he realized. Damned clever little beasts…

  He and what remained of his men pushed through the house and ended up outside, smelling flame and ash. Triant stood behind him, lit in strips where fires still ate, then went out where wet and green did their work. The line of farms ran down to the left, smoke in every yard. To the right, the ground fell toward a pasture and a ditch. The air carried that sharp, sour tang of burnt resin and the dead sweetness beneath it where sap had cooked.

  “Commander,” the captain said, hauling himself out and looking around with the rigid calm of a man whose nerves had decided to file a complaint later. “We’re scattering.”

  “We have to,” Raxel said. “That’s the only way we get what we came here for.”

  The confusion in his remaining men’s faces was palpable until they saw where he was looking. Silhouetted against the pale moon was the old tower of Lucent – rebuilt and restyled at hybrid hands.

  And within that tower was his destiny. He remembered the moment old Mobius had spirited him away, knowing that their defeat was certain and that he would fail. The old gatekeeper had given him the chance to carry the torch.

  And he wasn’t about to waste it groveling in the mud.

  He turned to his men and told them, in plain words, that he was going to cut the heads from these snakes. He would return to the great tower and destroy their precious council even if he had to take half of the world with him.

  To his mages, he gave a solemn nod. They all knew the spells they had prepared for this moment.

  “For Artorious,” he told them all. “For the fallen.”

  ***

  On the perimeter of Triant forest, Malak attended to his injured Drytchlings, staff blazing with the emerald energies of his natural magic.

  Borlor came up to stand beside him, armor scuffed, fur matted with earth. He looked down at the dark corridor mouths and then up at the smoke above the farm line.

  “Counts?” Borlor asked.

  “Bad for them,” Malak said. “For us, I would say the losses are manageable.”

  Borlor eyed the human.

  Manageable, he says.

  “The leader?” he then asked, scanning the ditches. He could not see the Greycloak Magister out there in the dark. The lines of flight read clear, though—trampled grass, bent weed, the obvious route of a mind that had chosen speed over cover.

  “Gone,” Malak said simply.

  Borlor grunted, ash and blood mingled in his throat.

  “Well then, we’ll need someone ta track him and the rest of his goons down then, won’t we?”

  Malak met the eyes of the Dixit in the darkness of their now shared home.

  And in spite of all the chaos of the last five hours, they smiled.

  “Time to call in the big guns.”