The cracking sound did not stop at the wood. It ripped through the front file with the violent, splintering speed of green timber bursting in an open furnace.
Private Hald, a veteran of twelve years whose broad face was scarred from a siege hook at Dunsmore, felt his eight-foot ash spear shudder so violently in his leather palms that the butt-socket jumped from his hip. He looked down in disbelief. The seasoned grey wood between his hands was swelling, turning a pale, glossy celery-green as the straight grain knotted itself into fleshy, ribbed fibers.
At the business end of Hald’s weapon, where three pounds of case-hardened border iron had pointed toward Noll’s archway a heartbeat before, the metal flared outward like molten pewter. It did not melt into liquid; it softened, thinned, and peeled back in three translucent white curls. Within two paces of the threshold line, the iron point was gone entirely. In its place swayed a massive, trumpet-shaped white lily, its petals four feet across, dusting Hald’s steel kettle-hat with a heavy shower of bitter yellow pollen.
Beside him, Corporal Vess cursed, stumbling sideways into the ditch as his own weapon underwent the same grotesque transformation. The ash haft in Vess’s grip erupted in a cascade of broad, waxy leaves that slapped against his cheek pieces. The spearhead blossomed into a cluster of three pale, nodding water-lilies, their heavy, milky cups drooping under their own moisture, dripping clear, swampy sap onto his woolen greaves.
