Greg’s muscles protested when he struggled to follow Thoko. He was starting to detest new moon almost as much as full moon. He felt tired down to his bones, and they had been walking for barely an hour. True, all their rests had been short, ever since they had left the mountains, but still. Any other day of the month he would have made it further before starting to flag.

The only good thing was that they should reach Eoforwic this night, and hopefully, they’d be allowed to use the railway to get to the coast fast.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were already too late.

His worst fears were confirmed when he walked into the company headquarters. Despite the fact that he showed up at three in the morning, there was a clerk waiting in the large main hall, someone who looked terribly excited to see him. Greg would have preferred to be treated like a stray dog over the look of relief on the clerk’s face.

“You need to keep going,” the man said. “The Valoise landed a few hours ago just west of Oldstone Castle. You need to hurry to get across the Savre and get on the train to Breachpoint.”

“The line to Breachpoint is finished?” Greg asked, confused. He’d planned to take the line to Deva, and from there to Deggan.

And where the hell was Oldstone Castle?

“No, no, the bridge isn’t done yet. You need to take the footbridge across and make haste for the end of the line on the other side, there’ll be a carriage waiting for you, I’ll send a telegram right away. You need to hurry!”

Greg nodded, but he could barely turn around and walk out again. They were too late. No matter how much they hurried, they would never get to Breachpoint before sunrise, and even if they did get there – what difference would it make? It was new moon.

To his surprise, the other four werewolves didn’t seem as concerned.

“The Morgulon is there,” Rust said. “If I thought there was no way they can win, I’d be turning back to the mountains right now, Greg. But you shouldn’t underestimate the Morgulon. Let’s keep going.”

He clapped Greg on the shoulder, and Greg stumbled forwards. Only Thoko seemed to share his fears, but she didn’t say anything. So they kept walking, out of the New Quarter, towards the harbour of Eoforwic and over the bridge that crossed the Savre. The Alchemy the company had used on the eastern shore to drive away the Rot made his eyes water and his nose burn, and Ragna lengthened her strides until they had left that smell far behind.

“Must be some kind of silver salt,” Neville muttered to himself.

“Disgusting,” Rust said. “I thought you said all the work was done by werewolves?”

“Most of the work,” Greg amended. “The work on this bridge started before the company knew what we can do.”

“We’re not going to have to travel on a railway carriage that was treated in this way, are we?” Ragna asked.

Greg shook his head quickly. “They don’t treat the carriages at all, as far as I know,” he said. “I think it’s not needed, not with the fire in the engine? I never thought about it. But no, no alchemy. At least, I never noticed any. Did you ever notice any, Thoko?”

He was babbling, grateful for anything to think about other than what might be happening just outside Breachpoint right now.

But there was the thought again.

The clerk had said, before pushing him out of headquarters, that every available werewolf was at the coast right now. Greg tried to cling to that thought, but it didn’t help much. Most of those werewolves were younger than him. And if Neville couldn’t fight a human sacrifice, how could they?

Except, maybe, with sheer numbers. If they had that – numbers superiority...

But the Valoise would kill men by the score. How much difference could the Morgulon make on a battlefield?

He felt a short moment of relief when they reached the end of the line. There was, indeed, a train waiting for them, if one could even call it a train. It had two locomotives, one at each end, because there was no turntable to turn the engines around. Between them stood two carriages, one for coal, and one for them to travel in.

Here, too, people were waiting for them. The elder werewolves were visibly hesitant to enter the waggon, but the impatient driver had them up before they could really start to argue. There was food inside for them, and some bales of straw to sit on.

And then there was nothing to do but stare out of the narrow window and watch the landscape go by while the morning dawned, while everyone else took a rest. Hoping against hope that Morgulon could really perform miracles.

The roar of the cannons outside woke Lane just before the corporal came sprinting into the large room, yelling something unintelligible and wildly banging a hammer against a small gong. She blinked slowly, feeling almost more tired than before she had rested. Every muscle ached when she struggled to her feet, slower than she wanted to. Her body wasn’t moving as it should, and her mind was even slower.

The smell of the swamp had made it into the keep at last, and with that realization came a wave of terror.

“This is it, gentlemen!” David’s voice cut through the stink and the confusion, and somehow he managed to sound like he wasn’t scared as shitless as everyone else. “It’s the human sacrifices. We kill them, we win! So move! Grab your spears, grab your torches, be ready to light them! Time to show the High Inquisitor who he’s up against!”

“Feed his bones to the fish!” somebody yelled, and the battle cry echoed throughout the keep. There was no magic to it, but it still broke through whatever binds the Rot had over the soldiers inside the keep and gave them the strength and fortitude to sprint up onto the walls. They were desperately needed. The human sacrifices were coming towards the castle from all sides, towering and terrifying shadows in the morning fog. They weren’t moving fast, but they didn’t need to. Half the cannon crews were just cowering at their stations, or even curled up in the foetal position, unable to move.

“Lane.” David grabbed her shoulder. “Lane, go and see if Morgulon will come up. She doesn’t have to fight. She just needs to be in the courtyard, so we can.”

“Right,” Lane said. “Right.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

She turned around again and hurried towards the cellars.

“Hurry,” David whispered, as he looked after her. “And you too, Greg,” he added.

He couldn’t move. In fact, he could barely stand, barely even breathe, with the weight of the Rot’s corrupted magic all around and the terror inside his bones. But people were staring at him uncertainly, scared. The men who had stormed out of the keep and onto the walls had lost their momentum. Humans and werewolves alike were looking towards him, looking for someone to lead, to give them the courage to fight the devils coming for them.

“Damn it, George,” David cursed, still speaking only to himself. “This is your job.”

But the duke was nowhere in sight. Neither was the keep’s Captain.

There were tears streaming down more than one ghostly white face.

David wasn’t sure how he did it, but he managed to straighten up, to grab a soldier frozen in his tracks and shake him till the man’s gaze focused. Moving helped him, too. Moving reminded him that he was still alive, that the Rot hadn’t gotten him yet, and he raised his voice once more:

“Move, people! One elder werewolf to each side! Bernadette, take the eastern wall, Dale, towards the coast! Fenn, southern wall, Calder take the west!”

South and west would be worst, and sending Bernadette east meant she had to walk all along that southern parapet. Just having the elder push through the mass of paralyzed soldiers helped to shake some of them out of it.

“Move, gentlemen!” David repeated, walking forwards and slapping more soldiers across the back with all the force he could muster. “Man your cannons!”

He grabbed a spear and forced it into a werewolf’s hand.

“This is the last push! Werewolves, if there ever was a moment to grab a silver spear, this is it! And why are these bloody fires extinguished? I see plenty of wood in the courtyard, get it up on the walls! Burn them back to hell! Move!”

And finally, people did move. The huge, towering Rot-giants were already dangerously close, but the cannons started to roar again. It was a wonderful sound in David’s ears, almost as good as the yelling of the sergeants, who had gathered their wits and were driving their men, cursing and cajoling in turns. When the heat of the rekindled fires washed over the men, it seemed to thaw more of the paralysis out of them.

David stepped up to the balustrade, silver spear in hands, stepping from one foot onto the other. The trick was not to stop, not to let stillness set in. Half of the power of the Rot was in his mind; as long as he moved, he could hide how flatly he was breathing, and how weak his limbs still were, could ignore how sick he felt.

Even when a young recruit next to him threw up, hardly more than a boy, he managed not to gag himself.

“Straighten up, soldier,” David ordered when the kid remained crouched next to him, staring at the puddle of his last meal. He held out his hand. After a few seconds, the recruit grabbed it, and David pulled him to his feet again.

“Sir?” the kid muttered after a moment. “Sir, what if we have to last another night?”

David bared his teeth at him. “Another night? The nights are nothing to be afraid of anymore! New moon is over. Soon as it gets dark, we’ll have an army of werewolves surrounding us!”

The werewolves didn’t look half as relieved at his words as the soldiers, but none of them contradicted him, so David didn’t care.

From what he was seeing, there was no way this battle would stretch into another night. Either they would kill the host of demons coming at them, and kill them quickly, or they’d all be dead by noon.

The first round of this fight was entirely in the hands of the cannoneers. The faster they could load and fire, and the more precise their aim was, the better. It was still hard to look at the huge, lumbering colossi. If one stared too long and too hard, they would start to see double, or things that weren’t actually there, so the crews circled out men after every shot.

The constant roar of the cannons everywhere was so loud it was painful in itself, but even louder were the furious bellows of the Rot-giants that got hit with the incendiaries.

David closed his eyes. The closer the Rot came, the harder it was to keep his stomach down, to breathe. He stepped onto his other foot again, and hoped that he wouldn’t freeze when the moment came. He had never been this scared in his life, this certain that his strength, his abilities wouldn’t make a difference.

How did you even fight a bloody tree? How did you kill a mountain of mud, a mountain that wasn’t even alive in the first place, but still moved around? How had they been this stupid, to challenge the Empire with only werewolves on their side? Why didn’t they have an army of mages raining fire at the Valoise?

This was madness.

They would all die here, and he couldn’t even make himself run away.

Unless. Maybe, if he could just call the retreat. If everyone else around him was running, maybe he could, too?

David looked around in a daze. Why were the cannons still firing? What was even the point?

Frightened men stared back at him, clearly just waiting for him to say the word, to tell them that they could run. David opened his mouth.

A sharp bark behind him made him jump – him and every other living soul in the castle. A cannon belched fire next to him, and David was sure that the man with the wick had lit the fuse entirely by accident as he jerked with surprise before whirling around to stare into the courtyard with everybody else.

Morgulon stood there, with Lane at her side, in the middle of the wide-open place. She barked again, louder than any dog had ever barked, and David managed to shake his head. The cannon crews to either side of him had all guns blazing at the line of Rot giants.

The huge monsters were focused on him as if they knew that he was the one they needed to break.

If he had called the retreat a moment ago...

Why hadn’t he?

David barely managed to clamp his teeth together and glance over his shoulder a second time.

Morgulon was staring straight at him, just like the Rot, head tilted quizzically and regally at the same time, and he could breathe again. When he inhaled, it was a much-needed breeze of fresh air.

David straightened up. He had given his bloody word, hadn’t he? To do everything in his power to protect all the werewolves of Loegrion. Well, here they were, nearly all the werewolves of Loegrion gathered in one place, from the youngest to the oldest.

He turned back towards the line of enemies, a hundred yards away at the most. When he raised his spear, they stepped forwards as one.

They were burning. There wasn’t a single one of them that hadn’t been hit someplace, but they were big, big as giants, big like moving hills, and one hit – even three hits – weren’t enough to slow them. Not now, that they were moving as one unbroken front of black shadows, covered by their own black fog, untouched by the morning sunlight. Like a noose around their necks, they were tightening the line.

“Ugly bastards!” David yelled. “Spears and torches forwards! Have the last of that oil ready! Brace yourselves, gentlemen!”

He wondered if they could even hear him. He could barely hear anything over the rushing of blood in his own ears. They should have axes, he thought, rather than spears, shovels perhaps. How did one fight a mountain, anyway?

But it was too late to try and get another weapon.

Or was it? How did one fight a mountain?

Certainly not with spears. With shovels perhaps, and pickaxes. But the fastest – the smartest way – to fight a mountain was black powder, and they had that right here, for the cannons. Could they use it?

He grabbed the officer from the nearest cannon crew by a shoulder. “Gunpowder! How much is left?”

“Gunpowder? Plenty. We’re nearly out of the burning cannonballs, though.”

“If we throw a barrel of gunpowder across the walls, with a burning fuse attached, how precisely can your men time the explosion?”

The officer caught on at once and he bared all his teeth in a grin. “Precisely enough!” he gave back. “Permission to leave this post?”

“Go!” David said, and shoved him aside. He didn’t have time to watch the man hurry away and grab two soldiers from his crew, and send the others running along the walls.

A few cannons still roared, too, and with the giants all around, it was impossible to miss. The Rot had reached them, distorted trees and heaps of mud stretching out to grab the defenders and swallow them whole. With them came a host of the creepers and brutes, swarming the walls, met by the last of the burning oil.

Any man caught by the giants was surely dead, but the giants weren’t fast, and Morgulon was standing right behind them, and they could all move – move and fight. Where the black fog met whatever power it was that Morgulon possessed, there was a shimmer in the air, and the Rot seemed confused, confused that the tiny, fleshy creatures on the walls didn’t roll over and wait to die.

David shuddered when one of the devils crashed into the wall right in front of him. It wasn’t the stone that stopped the distorted tree, nor the silver it had been covered with – thousands of tiny vines and roots buried into the ancient mortar, finding even the most minuscule weakness. Fenn’s teeth cut through the branch it had extended to grip David. David stepped aside and swung his spear and his torch.