Omega point

CHAPTER 14

Early the next day, Richards' regiment marched to the south gate.

The streets were packed with soldiers. For much of the way Richards could see little but the helmets and spears of the men around him, until the tops of the walls came into sight. Guards walked their circuit. Many watched the horizon for Lord Penumbra's armies, but more than a few had their weapons turned inwards, a spur to patriotic zeal.

The south gate was bigger than the north, five railway lines running through tunnels either side of it. Off to the west of it was a giant goods yard, and here Richards' regiment trooped in and lined up, waiting to be loaded onto waiting trains. Small locomotives doubled up at the front of each, baroque smokestacks wisping smoke to join the sulphurous fug over the yard. Twenty or so trucks were behind each engine, low-sided and open to the elements, many already crammed with soldiers. There were divisions of foundrymen armed with sledgehammers and wearing thick leather aprons, units of the city guard in enclosing armour, hordes of animals, crews of bobbleheaded sailors, weird blobs and cute robots. Officers, animal, man and otherwise, boarded the few passenger coaches attached to each train. Richards' unit's turn came and they were directed up onto the freight wagons, helping hands grasping and pulling them up, for there were no ladders.

The yard was deafening. Engines coughed and whistled. Trucks clattered and banged. Everybody was shouting. The ground was restless under the tread of the army. Men came down the trains' sides, passing up rations and canteens of water, hallooing as they went. Railway workers followed, slamming up the trucks' sides and locking them with rattling pins. They did not meet the eyes of those who stood within.

With a lusty hoot the first train pulled away in a cloud of steam and smoke. A cheer went up from the men and beasts aboard and they struck up a song. This one contained the vanguard of the army, a forward corps of city lancemen and scouts who stood in their trucks with their thogs, soothing them as they mooed and stamped their six hoofs.

"Look at those poor things," said Tarquin as the thog cars rumbled by. "Eyes rolling all over the place. Someone really should do something about that."

Another train pulled out, long trucks racked with light artillery, its attendant guards and units of the larger animals riding behind. Then the foundrymen. Time passed, and Richards' mind drifted.

His train's departure took him by surprise. His legs ached from standing still for so long, and he started when the engine took up the slack and dragged his train forward inch by squealing inch. A paw took the crook of his elbow, preventing him from falling.

"Steady there, friend!"

Richards looked up into the face of a hare. "Thanks," he said. "I didn't expect that."

"I know what you mean!" said the hare. "Exciting, isn't it? Oh, how I have long longed to march to war! Imagine! A hare like me smashing Penumbra's evil forces! I am lame and cannot run." He patted a crooked leg. "My brothers and sisters are swift as the wind, and have joined with the scouts. I thought a life of adventure beyond me. But here I am, here I am! The opportunity for glory at last, here I am!"

Several of the other soldiers had faint smiles, half-daring to imagine victory. A forlorn hope; any division with minimal armour and lame hares as part of its set-up probably did not rate highly in strategic planning, thought Richards.

"Yeah," said Richards. "Great."

"Friend! You seem to be uninspired. Think! Here you stand, taking the fight to our enemies, allies at your side. Oh, I shall write a poem about this! Yea, a paean to glory." With this he scribbled down some notes in a book he produced from a pocket.

"Sorry," said Richards. "I've a lot on my mind."

"Indeed?" said the hare genially, glancing up from his book. "Pray tell me your troubles. We have a long journey. A burden shared is a burden halved. And it may make a good poem." The train went into the tunnel, a dark world lit by skirling sparks. Richards exited the tunnel with ears ringing and stinging eyes. The hare was not put off. "Is it some young lady? Some darling you have left behind?" He waggled his eyebrows. "Maybe a leveret or two back home in the hedgerow? We all have worries, my friend. But fear not, we are to be victorious! Mr Spink told us. It is assured by the stars themselves. And what has a brave warrior like you to fear? I see from your lion-cloak you already have some skill at arms. Tell me how you vanquished such a ferocious beast. I shall pen you a rhyme to memorialise your deed."

"I do beg your pardon," said Tarquin smoothly, his amber eyes rolling open. "It's not quite the stuff of saga. He had a lot of help."

"Ah," said the hare fearfully, "I see."

"Now leave us alone," said the lion, "I don't like to be reminded of it and your chatter does grate on the nerves. I ate a few poets in my time. They didn't agree with me."

The hare pounded the truck with his good foot. Quivering, he turned to the others. "How about a rousing song?" he said nervously. He started to sing, but it fell flat. No one joined in. All of them looked at Richards warily.

"Nice," he muttered, turning to look out of the truck.

"He was extremely annoying," said Tarquin, loud enough so all could hear it. "And I do so hate being annoyed. Almost as much as I hate poets."

Richards pulled his helmet onto his head. "You're a great help."

The train proceeded onto a viaduct leading down from the city. A hundred metres of clear air were between Richards and the ground where the bridge piers rooted themselves in the minedout plateau. The track ran close to the valley that divided Pylon City's domains from the Magic Wood. Dense brush cloaked the chasm to the bottom. The river looked like a ribbon of steel, hammered into perfect loops and laid into a model world.

"Bloody hell, that's a long way down." Richards was feeling a sensation he thought might be vertigo. He didn't like it much.

"Relax," purred Tarquin. "We'll be fine, provided there isn't another earthquake."

"Oh, thank you," said Richards. "Thank you ever so much. That makes me feel so much better." The viaduct went down in a long curve, bringing them closer to the valley edge until it straightened out as the track hit the ground. The railway ran on the very edge of the canyon, but if Richards looked to the front of the train or off to the west up to the moors, he could pretend it wasn't there.

The men and animals of the train made themselves comfortable, sitting on the sides of their trucks or on their knapsacks. Conversations started up.

By the time they had left Pylon City it had been past midday, and the landscape they travelled through was one of afternoon. Bright light diffused through clouds like wire wool, a glare that picked out every pockmark on the plateau. Slagheaps and open pits ringed with cranes rushed by. Spurs to the railway ran to quarries cut into the moor, an industrial moonscape, where only tufts of colourless grass, lank and sparse as hag's hair, thrived.

"It is horrible, is it not?" said the hare.

"It is," agreed Richards, tapping his fingers on the truck. The hare glanced concernedly at the lion.

"Don't worry about him. He's mostly all mouth now. The most biting thing about him is his wit, and that's not very sharp."

Tarquin bared his teeth.

"It appears we are heading south, off the plateau," said the hare, "to bring Lord Penumbra to battle where the land slopes into the Broken Lands, a fine defensible position. It will prevent any advance by Penumbra up The Rift, and ensure that Jotenlend, the source of much of Pylon City's food, is protected."

"Sounds good."

"Ah, you know a little military theory?" asked the hare eagerly.

"No, not really," admitted Richards. There was so much he did not know while the Grid was denied to him. "My partner does all that."

"Well," said the hare, "this is of course only my supposition, but it is the most sensible course of action. I have studied many of the great generals of Pylon City and the long war poems," it said shyly.

"Odd hobby for a hare," said Richards.

"Many of my brothers and sisters revel in the wild chase and the feel of the wind in their whiskers, but this pleasure is denied me. So I developed interests outside of the ordinary." It paused. "Like poetry!" It looked at Richards expectantly with that "ask me to read you one of my poems" type expression that poets get. Richards stared blankly back at him. The hare became bashful and turned away.

The ruined world changed piece by piece to a landscape of scrubby fields and the clouds cleared. The train passed close by rough dwellings, hugely tall with doors three times bigger than a man, their walls made of enormous boulders. Of the Jotens, there was no sign.

The sun set. The sky above the train remained a pure lightblue for a time, and the men gambled at knucklebones until it was dark.

Richards tried as best he could to get comfortable. He watched the alien sky. Away from the glare of Pylon City's sodium lamps, the stars twinkled brightly, competing with the sparks the train pumped into the night with its smoke.

"A river of fire," said Tarquin sleepily. "It is a river of fire, and it is consuming the world."

"That old hare's not the only poet on board, eh?" said Richards.

"Mmf," said Tarquin.

In the morning they woke to war.

"Troopers!" A shout roused Richards from where he sat, bored, staring out over the plains. "Prepare to disembark!"

"Now there's a man who enjoys his job," said Tarquin.

"Jesus, he's worse than Otto," Richards said. His limbs cracked with unpleasant organic noises as he stood. He'd barely moved since he'd woken, and now felt as brittle as a straw doll. There was more to a human's constant, twitchy motion than staying upright, he was learning, like not letting their irritating meat outsides seize up.

The soldiers hauled themselves from the trucks to join a stream of troops marching beside the tracks.

"Right, my sleeping beauties," said the sergeant. "We are going to go for a walk. Word has come down to me that the line has been blown ahead by Penumbra's saboteurs. All you lot should think on how nice and healthy you'll be once you've walked. Who knows, there might even be time for a spot of breakfast before the war starts."

"Really, sarge?" said an eager trooper.

"No!" roared the sergeant. "Now get a bleedin' move on, or I'll shoot you myself and save Penumbra and his monsters the bother."

Richards fell into step with something like a rat. It gave him a filthy look.

"Charming," said Richards.

The day was the kind autumn shares with summer: a cold morning with the promise of a hot afternoon. The sky was a uniform grey, its light joyless. Ahead it turned to an angry black, a thick band of deeper cloud foreshortening the horizon. Bursts of lightning lit it from within, thunder answered by tremors from below.

"Look!" said the rat. "A storm!"

"That's not a storm," said the hare with some amount of awe. "That is the death of the world. The Great Terror. I must record it in my poem."

"Quiet in the ranks there! You can all have a natter after you've had a battle," bawled the sergeant. "Until then, keep your cakeholes shut."

They walked five abreast alongside the railway embankment on a plain of grass that was almost completely flat. No farms, nor mines, only one small building, after the railway line curved west, red-brick, about a mile from the route of their march.

"Last Station," said the hare. "From there the railway heads out to cross The Rift."

A familiar odour percolated into the air. Burnt ground. The army took in the wasted land before them with a chorus of mutters and shouts.

"Will this be the fortune of the Magic Wood?"

"And the city?"

There was an abrupt change in scenery, the plateau ending in a thick scar where two world fragments clumsily joined. Beyond it lay a plain criss-crossed with ravines and gullies, giving the landscape the look of an angular brain.

It was scorched black. Charcoalled trees clawed at the sky, the gullies steamed, the grass was burnt down to the roots.

"The broken lands, twice broken!" said the hare.

The army marched onto the brow of the hill and fanned out, directed in columns to their positions. The centre of their battleline was a low blister in the slope. Commander Hedgehog and his best warriors had taken up station there. A mix of large forest animals armoured head to toe surrounded him and his staff. Behind this position were the army's artillery pieces, globular balls of crystal sporting long brass barrels. They looked spectacularly dangerous.

"See!" whispered the hare from behind Richards. "Hedgehog has the men of the city at the heart of the army. He is guarded by the Big Animal Division and the City Guard. They have lightning lances, terrible weapons. I should expect we will be stationed out on one of the flanks, behind a skirmish line of lancers. When the enemy breaks through them, range will no longer matter, and we will be able to put our swords and spears to deadly use at close quarters!"

The hare was mostly right. The Pylon Guard were few in number, so Richards' regiment was stationed behind a line of arbalesteers. These crossbowmen were not of Pylon City and wore colourful clothes at odds with the Pylonites' sober garb. Their forms were not so well rendered, their language a musical tongue he did not recognise. Protecting their right flank was a detachment of foundrymen. Further out roamed groups of skirmishers backed up by squadrons of light thog cavalry.

"They'll stop anything getting round the back," the hare explained enthusiastically. "Or, when we break the enemy's line, force it apart like a wedge."

"He's enjoying this far too much," muttered Richards to Tarquin.

From behind came a rhythmic clatter: armoured weasels, well over a thousand of them, marching to fill the gap in the allied lines to Richards' left. They wore scale and plate, articulated to accommodate their sinuous bodies. Each carried a pike and a steel buckler with a spiked boss. Blood-red pennants fluttered from helmets and shields and streamed from the ends of their pikes.

"Aren't they glorious?" whispered the hare in awe.

Richards raised an eyebrow. "Don't weasels eat hares?"

"They do indeed," said the hare, nodding, not rising to the bait. "And I know I should not admire them, for a pack of them did devour a sister of mine. But still, all that is behind us now, now we are part of the League of Humans and Small but Brave Animals!"

"Snappy," said Richards.

"How could we fail to lose with such ferocious beings at our sides? A thousand armoured weasels, each a born killer. Glorious!"

"Yeah," said Richards slowly, remembering their behaviour in the bar. "And each a born weasel."

Richards had time to re-experience the boredom part of the boredom and terror warfare combination. They stood in their position for several hours, and once again he became uncomfortable. He was debating taking a piss right there when the hare spoke again.

"Oh my!" said the hare. "Here they come!"

The sky went dark. A hush came over the army of men and beasts. The enemy approached. Shadow preceded it, and darkness followed.

The horde of creatures came from the south, appearing over a ridge three miles away, drawing toward them with unnatural speed.

"Oh my," said the hare with a tinge of fear. "There are rather a lot of them."

In the main the army was composed of vile-looking humanoids. Like the alliance, monsters brought from all manner of places on the Grid.

"Every hero needs his mob," said Richards grimly, doing a quick calculation on the balance between heroic human players and system-controlled monsters in your average game. The odds he came up with were unfavourable. Not for the first time he wondered how the hell he'd ended up in this mess, and decided to blame Hughie.

Steam curled from haemites. Immense war-beasts studded the horde like rocks on a polluted beach. Steam-powered towers, bristling with cannon, crawled across the broken lands on caterpillar tracks. Around these marched monstrous trollmen, swishing tree-trunk clubs as they walked.

"Look!" said the hare, his lips wobbling with fear. "Morblins! There… there must be over five thousand of them! And daibeasts. And, by lord Frith, that is a low-dweller. A low-dweller!" An unpleasant chant filled the air, a droning that made Richards' skin crawl. An oily reek descended across the battlefield, the exhaust of engines, steam, the stink of unwashed bodies.

Nearby, one of the soldiers began to cry.

"Shut it, you," said the sergeant. There was a tremor in his voice.

The front rank of what Richards took to be morblins, small, pot-bellied, grey-skinned creatures, had a great many armoured hounds amidst it. The largest morblins held onto the leashes of these dogs, who half-dragged them towards the allied lines.

The enemy stopped, facing off against the league.

Silence fell. Thunder rumbled. Pennants cracked in the wind.

Then a howl as the dogs were set loose. They rushed across the plains, baying.

"Steady, Richards, steady," Richards told himself. The rush of fear his human facsimile provided him was powerful.

"Keep your spear up, Richards, don't lose your head. Should anything get through I'll shift to stone," said Tarquin urgently. "Just remember you won't be quite so nimble when I do. Keep that in mind, dear boy, and it'll all be tickety-boo. You'll see."

"I don't see why we can't just fuck off," Richards said.

The commander of the arbalesteers shouted, and the first rank readied themselves. Two hundred heavy crossbows clicked into place on their tripods. They waited, their arms steady, their gaze unwavering. The commander held his arm. The hounds came on.

"Company!" called Richards' sergeant. "Present pikes!" Richards cursed his quaking limbs as he fumbled his spear into place.

"This is where it all begins my friend," said the hare behind Richards. "Wish me luck."

The arbalesteer captain dropped his arm, and the world dissolved into violence.

Two hundred barbed quarrels sped unerringly. The yelps of two hundred dogs filled the air.

A shout went up from the morblins, and they broke into a run towards the allied lines, the trollmen beside them, the ground thundering as they came. The air crackled with electricity as the lancers of Pylon City discharged their weaponry into the front of the horde. Hundreds fell, burnt and writhing, but there were thousands behind. The lancemen parted ranks, and with a mighty squeak a horde of vole mercenaries, the vanguard of the League of Brave but Small Animals, hurled themselves through the gap towards the approaching morblins. There was a crash as the lines connected.

The lancemen reformed smoothly and pumped bolt after bolt of cerulean energy into the rear ranks of the horde, picking out the larger creatures as the valiant voles held back the enemy. By Richards the foreign crossbowmen fired by rank an endless rain of quarrels. The dead of the enemy tumbled in heaps.

The enemy artillery opened up. Shells whistled overhead from the tracked towers of Penumbra. Dozens of shells slammed into the packed lines of men and animals. Screams filled the air. Earth and blood fountained skywards and body parts rained down. Groups of the more timid animals looked close to dissolving into panic.

"Eyes front, soldier!" shouted the sergeant at Richards.

The allied guns replied. Heavy lightning burned through the air, leaving glowing after-images and a sharp smell. Iron towers burst into flame and stopped in their tracks. One carried on moving forward, a track blown clean off. It heeled over ponderously, and crashed down, crushing hundreds of its own side. The allied lightning cannon raked bloody furrows in the horde, but their numbers seemed inexhaustible.

The arbalesteers kept firing as the enemy closed, ignoring the desperate fights of their comrades with the surviving warhounds. The corpses of morblins and trollmen lay five deep. The enemy were so numerous that they kept on coming, fifty metres away, then thirty, then twenty. The arbalesteers shot until they were on top of them. Richards saw one go down screaming under a haemite, his body sucked dry. More haemites followed, and the sounds of blades on metal bodies rang out across the field as the arbalesteers abandoned their crossbows and drew their short swords.

"Steady, lads!" barked the sergeant. "Here they come!"

The earth shook under the weight of charging trollmen. The line of arbalesteers bent backwards, wavered and broke. The enemy surged through in one and twos and then by the dozen. They flung themselves at the line of men, flattening many. Richards' arm juddered as a bellowing creature impaled itself on his spear.

"Watch out!" roared the lion. Richards jumped back as another trollman swung at him, leaving his spear in the guts of his toppling foe. He ducked a hammer blow, narrowly keeping his footing. The trollman readied his weapon for another strike. Richards had nowhere to go, hemmed in by the dead and those desperate not to be. A blast of lightning felled the trollman, leaving Richards gasping. Limbs and blades whirled around him.

A morblin cannoned into him, clawing and biting. He wrestled with it a while, but it was as weak as its fat body suggested, and he managed to snatch out his sword and despatch it. Richards looked at his sword, slick and treacherous in his hands, then at the creatures from innumerable virt-games warring in deadly earnest all around him, the violent deaths of scores of talking animals and gaming cliches.

"This is fucking ridiculous!" shouted Richards.

The world disappeared behind a sheet of white. Richards stumbled, blood in his eyes, hearing gone. He blinked and found himself in a lull in the fighting.

Bodies lay all about. A ruddy crater garnished with the limbs of friend and foe occupied the space where the centre of his regiment had been. A lucky few stood blinking, covered in blood. They stared at one another, shocked, lost between surprise and relief.

Richards staggered in a rough circle, his head spinning. Shouting, loud and frantic, impinged on the ringing in his ears. Away to his right, a knot of surprised troops yelled as the weasels attacked them from behind.

Richards wiped the blood of his comrades from his face. His head cleared. "I've got to get out of here," he said, and cast about for a means of escape.

A paw grabbed him from behind, spinning him round. The lame hare, one of his ears a tatter.

"Where are you going? Fleeing is the blackest treason…"

"I…" said Richards.

The hare held up a hand to remonstrate. It was the last thing it ever did. A cannonball whistled by, a gust of hard wind stirring Richards' hair. It removed the hare's head neatly. Blood fountained from its neck, splattering Richards, and the hare folded onto its lame leg like a collapsible chair.

Richards stumbled back, caught sight of a stray thog and ran for it. He grabbed its reins and swung atop. It lowed angrily and stamped its six legs, but held fast. He tugged on its reins, dragging its head around, and the animal performed a tight circle.

Fighting raged all about. There was no way out.

"Dammit! What do we do now?"

"Let's get to the centre, tell the hedgehog. We'll better be able to be on our way if they win," said Tarquin.

Richards debated the lion's suggestion with himself. He spun the mount round again. There was little chance he'd get off the field intact, not with the weasels butchering their way through their own side all around him. "OK," he said, "OK." He kicked with his heels, and the thog took off.

Shells exploded to the left of Richards, to the right of him, reducing the battle to a series of violent tableaux, surging into view and then lost in veils of gunsmoke and sheets of earth.

Three half-naked anime heroines tackled a trollman, baiting it with spears. A band of otters in lab coats tackled a purple octopus covered in smilies. Men rolled in the dirt with morblins, dodging the thrusts of filthy knives. Haemites fed on friend and foe alike, their whistles an industrial dirge. Here and there disciplined pockets of men and beasts formed tight groups, spearpoint and blade keeping the Penumbra's minions at bay. But every enemy felled was replaced by four more. Gone were the proud ranks; the field writhed with small and personal wars, all thoughts of strategy obscured by blood and sweat and terror. Creatures came at Richards to fall to his sword or bounce from the flanks of the six-legged cow, their cries snatched away by speed and steel.

"Nearly there!" yelled Richards.

Tarquin turned to stone and saved Richards from a spearpoint. "We're not out of the woods yet."

Richards hammered toward the centre, where the disciplined corps of hedgehogs stood firm. Heavily armoured in burnished steel, they surrounded the Lord High Commander's command post, an enormous tortoise with "Roger" written in childish script on its shell.

Atop Roger was a howdah of metal. Telescopes and small lightning cannon were fixed to the rails. One gunner lay dead in the harness of his shattered weapon, but the others trained theirs still upon the enemy, spikes of electricity writhing periodically through the air. In front of the howdah, on a seat on the lip of Roger's shell, sat another hedgehog holding a set of metal reins. It flicked a whip about the tortoise's head. Roger seemed unperturbed. Through his helm's eye-slits, he pondered the bloodbath with the slow bemusement with which tortoises regard the world.

"Lord High Commander Hedgehog!" yelled Richards, leaping off the thog. He bounded up the low steps to the howdah, and was promptly accosted by two burly hedgehogs.

"Who are you?" growled one.

"Some kind of assassin," said the other. Blades scraped as they drew out their daggers.

"I have urgent news for the Lord High Commander," insisted Richards.

"No one allowed up here but general staff," yelled the hedgehog over the noise of an exploding shell. "Push off!"

"Let him through, let him through," said the diffident voice of Hedgehog. "I will see him." The bodyguards stepped aside, and Richards was afforded a view of the Lord High Commander. His visor was up, since he had been conferring with his aides, and as Richards approached he snapped shut an elegant telescope. "Well?" said Hedgehog. "What is it, human? Speak, then be gone."

"The weasels, the weasels have turned!"

"I see," said Hedgehog, his voice several degrees cooler. "They are rolling up the right flank?"

"Right now."

"No doubt you think I should act. But I won't," said Lord High Commander Hedgehog. "The weasels, you see, work for me."

"Ah."

"'Ah' indeed. Those short-sighted fools in Pylon City could not see the advantage to be had from forming an alliance with Penumbra. Though we argued the case with them, they would not favour the idea. Penumbra was more than happy to entertain our unilateral offer. The Pylonites will die. Our aeons-long struggle with Pylon City will be over, and the Magic Wood will survive the Great Terror, forever free of the tyranny of men and their machines!"

"That's cold," said Richards. "Your people are dying in droves."

"Rather unfortunate, that. Still, means there won't be much opposition when I take over the Wood, will there? With Lord Penumbra's blessing, of course."

"You stupid rodent," said Richards. "He's tricked you into fighting his war for him."

Hedgehog smiled. "I have never lost a battle. As long as there has been an army of the Magic Wood there has been a Lord High Commander Hedgehog, and as long as that has been so, there have been no defeats. This battle tortoise, Roger, he was my father's mount, before that my grandfather's, my great great-grandfather's. He has never witnessed a battle in which he was not upon the winning side. How else do you think he can remain so phlegmatic, eh? I have two hundred years of victory at my back and you, some man, tell me I am wrong? Pfah! Let the whole of the Earth thunder to the tramping of iron-shod paws, for I will rule it all!" Hedgehog cackled maniacally. Two hedgehogs stepped forward. "Now I'm going to kill you. Make him kneel." The hedgehogs forced Richards down. The Lord High Commander stepped forward and loomed over Richards. "Any last words?" He unhitched his lightning-pistol.

"I'm not going to beg," said Richards.

"I am not so crass as to expect begging!" scoffed the hedgehog. "I was rather hoping for some brave witticism. Stiff upper lip and all, wot? Pity."

"You're making a terrible mistake."

"Yes, yes," said the hedgehog. "Goodbye."

Richards stared down the crystal at the end of the gun.

"Balls," he said, and screwed his eyes tight. No shot came. Roger let out a croak of fear like tearing paper and reared up. There was a sound of the snapping of chain and the wrenching of metal. The howdah broke into pieces as it came free of Roger's shell, scattering hedgehogs and pitching Richards to the blackened ground. He rolled to avoid the tortoise's foot as Roger ran at some speed away from the source of his horror, squashing two of Hedgehog's bodyguards flat and leaving them oozing in the dust. The rest of Hedgehog's guard picked themselves up, faltered and followed the tortoise.

Richards looked behind him, and his own heart froze. Over the prone body of Lord High Commander Hedgehog was Lord Penumbra.

Penumbra sat atop a beast that was half-horse, half-dragon. It pawed at the earth with clawed hoofs. Its skin was a coat of scales, its face a snarl of night-black violence, its eyes those of a cat, its tail a serpent's head. It radiated a deep chill, pinning Richards' breath to the air in clouds of frost. Black vapours curled around it, stealing the light away. Penumbra himself was nebulous and black, his form clad in shadow and armour of jet.

The battlefield grew quiet, sound stymied in Penumbra's presence. The sky roiled with the storm of the world-death.

"Hedgehog!" rang out a sepulchral voice. "Hedgehog! I come with your reward! Rule in my name! Death shall be thy kingdom!"

Richards could not look directly at Penumbra, try as he might. His bright darkness blinded him.

"N-no, my lord!" said Hedgehog. "We have an arrangement!" He shook. No longer the proud warlord, he was now just a big fat rodent in a complicated tin suit.

"Death!" bellowed Penumbra. His mount reared, its whinnying the end of flowers. "Death! Low field-beast, you would seek to deal with me? Where is your honour, where is your side of the bargain? Where is Queen Isabella?" He roared, a long sound of discordant ferocity. "Fool!"

"No, no!" squealed Hedgehog, falling to his knees. "Please! I looked, I tried!"

Penumbra drew a pillar of black flame as he would a sword. His arm extended, distorted like a shadow, the weapon stretching impossibly towards the hedgehog. A shaft of blackness struck out from it, piercing Hedgehog's chest.

Hedgehog ceased to be. Shadow became light and light shadow. He became a negative of sooty grains. Hedgehog dissipated, pulled into the sword, his thin scream remaining in the air, the scream all small animals make in pain, nothing more.

Richards felt his stomach turn to water as Penumbra's faceplate swivelled toward him. "And now you. You and your ilk are a blight on this land."

The shadow-blade extended out, its tip burning Richards with its cold. As it came, reality warped around it, and Richards was struck by a thought. Well, two thoughts.

The first was that reality was warping around the blade, turning glassy and spinning off sub-universes that popped like soap bubbles on the charred grass.

Secondly, Richards could not hear k52's Gridsignature at all.

His eyes narrowed.

Something came swiftly from the left. There was a roar, the sound of metal hitting metal. The ground heaved. Richards' chest went tight as Tarquin turned to stone. He fell up into the air, and came back down. He found himself lying in a smoking crater, soil pattering off him. His vision swam. An iron monster reached down with long claws to pluck the last of his life from him.

That was all his facsimiled mind could take.