The smell of ozone and singed marsh mud hung heavy over the south breastwork, sharp enough to curdle the cider in a man’s gullet.
Down in the shallows, the slaughter was not the clean, surgical butcher’s work of imperial chronicles. It was an ugly, churning tangle of thrashing gray tails, ruptured bellies, and men drowning in four inches of water because their limbs were locked rigid by electrical spasms. Two of the great shock beasts lay stranded on the gravel bank, their white undersides heaving like bellows, yellow fluid weeping from their scorched sensory pits. Every few seconds, a dying convulsion sent an involuntary blue pulse snapping through the reeds, igniting small tongues of sulfurous fire in the dry autumn brush.
The retreating infantrymen of the Ash Host did not maintain their disciplined ranks. They scrambled up the mud bluffs on all fours, clawing at exposed roots, slipping on the slick river clay while town arrows pegged their boiled-leather coats to the alder trunks.
“Look at the bastards scramble!” shouted Peter Galt, a young tanner from the lower ward, as he hauled another gray-fletched shaft from his quiver. “They run like sheep from a wolf!”
“Save your arrows, Peter!” Captain Dain barked from the parapet walk. “Don’t loose into the timber! You can’t pierce four inches of birch bark, and the smith hasn’t got iron to forge fresh broadheads before noon!”
