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sky.
    ‘Yggur has no idea what he’s doing, has he?’ said Nish to
Flydd.
    ‘Not a clue,’ said Flydd. ‘Yet if he can gain us a breathing
space –’
    The sky turned yellow, darkened to the purple of a bruise
and slowly went black. Had it not been for the uncanny red radiance coming from
the caduceus, Nish would not have been able to see at all. The whirling wind
was chilly now and blowing right through his sodden clothing, but it suddenly
died and the moisture in the saturated air condensed into fog so thick that he
could not see his silver-scarred hand on the hilt of the sabre.
    The clash of weapons stopped again, for no one could see to
fight. The groans of the wounded rose in pitch. A woman was crying, ‘Don’t
leave me,’ over and over; a man sobbed, ‘Please, please, put me out of my
misery.’
    As Nish groped through the dark, he could not help
remembering other battlefields littered with the dead, and the maimed comrades
who, too badly injured to walk, had been left to die because nothing could be
done for them. One war ended and another began. Would there ever be peace? And
what was the point of fighting when there was no hope of victory?
    His sodden shirt flapped as the whirlwind picked up again,
and momentarily the bright caduceus pierced the fog like a lighthouse beacon
– but was it offering shelter, or luring them to destruction?
    The fog had thinned fractionally; he could just make out his
feet now. Time to retreat. ‘Chief Signaller?’ he yelled. ‘Midge?’
    She did not reply, and he was cursing her for not staying
close, as he’d ordered, when he trod on her shoulder. Midge lay face up in the
mud with a broken spear through her chest. She was not yet eighteen.
    Shaking his head at the waste, Nish heaved the signal horn
out from under her, shook the bloodstained mud from it and blew three ringing
blasts followed by two short ones – the signal to retreat to the lowest
point of the clearing.
    Was there really any chance? Wherever he led them, the enemy
would follow once the fog cleared. And yet, while they lived, while they were
free, a tiny hope remained, and Nish had fanned the embers of such meagre hopes
into flame before today.
    Another clap of inverted thunder echoed forth and he heard
the air-sled whistling across the sky.
    ‘Come down, you treacherous little flea!’ Yggur roared.
    The air-sled made a grinding sound; Nish heard a monstrous splat , the sound of mud spattering in
all directions and steam belching up. The dwarf cried out, ‘The tears, the
tears!’
    He must have dropped them during the crash but there was no
chance of seizing them – Nish would never find them in the fog. Besides,
even without them, Klarm was a powerful mancer who still had his knoblaggie.
    After blowing the signal again, Nish moved down the slope.
Distantly, other horns repeated the message. The fog was slowly thinning
– he could see two paces now – and he made out several of his
militia moving in the same direction.
    ‘Get a move on,’ he said, afraid that the fog would clear
suddenly and the enemy would resume the attack.
    One of Klarm’s soldiers appeared in front of Nish, staring
the other way. He stabbed him in the back and pushed him aside. It was kill or
be killed now.
    He had not gone far when lightning flashed from the
direction of the caduceus, turning the fog orange. Flydd bellowed in pain, his
cry oddly muffled, and then the rain Klarm had held back could be restrained no
longer. Tulitine the seer had seen truly.
    The skies opened in a deluge like nothing Nish had ever felt
before – not in Gendrigore, the wettest place he had ever lived, nor on
the Range of Ruin, which was even wetter. This was solid rain, so heavy that
his knees bent under the weight of it, rain that hissed and steamed away from
the red-hot caduceus and flowed ankle-deep down the slope, tugging at his feet.
    Even if the fog cleared, no one could fight in such weather.
The enemy would put their shields over their