The wind turned from the west just as the sun slid behind the Black Crags, driving a wall of choking pine smoke across the high ramparts.
Noll Vey stood by the north watchturret, his stone shoulders dusted with white ash that fell like warm snow from the burning ridge. A mile along the western crest, the ancient stand of mountain timber—resin-heavy lodgepole pine and dry hemlock that had shielded the border watch fort from winter gales for three generations—was crowned in continuous sheets of red flame.
Every few seconds, an old pine exploded with a sound like a small mortar shot, tossing geysers of yellow sparks fifty feet into the dusk.
“They’re throwing pitch barrels into the ravine,” Sella Rusk said, adjusting the wet linen cloth she had tied across her nose and mouth. Her eyes were red-rimmed from the resin fumes, but her hands on the stone parapet were steady. “Vane’s light cavalry rode the boundary trench an hour ago, driving back any carters trying to haul water from the river. He doesn’t want to burn the fort down. He wants the smoke to choke our intake flues, and he wants the camp to see a mountain burning.”
Beside her, Sergeant Berr leaned his skeletal forearms on the merlon. The old undead soldier wore a stained wool tunic over his bare ribs, his yellowed skull turned toward the valley floor where thousands of tiny campfires were winking in the gloom.
