«It's begun,» Calot breathed.
Silence answered Tayschrenn's first attack, save for the faint scatter of rubble on the city's tiled rooftops and the distant cries of wounded soldiers on the plain. Everyone's eyes were trained upward.
The reply was not what anyone expected.
A black cloud enshrouded Moon's Spawn, followed by faint shrieking.
A moment later the cloud spread out, fragmenting, and Tattersail realized what she was seeing.
Ravens.
Thousands upon thousands of Great Ravens. They must have nested among the crags and pocks in the Moon's surface. Their shrieks grew more defined, a caterwaul of outrage. They wheeled out from the Moon, their fifteen-foot wingspans catching the wind and lifting them high above the city and plain.
Fear lurched into terror in Tattersail's heart.
Hairlock barked a laugh and whirled to them. «These are the Moon's messengers, colleagues!» Madness glittered in his eyes. «These carrion birds!» He flung back his cloak and raised his arms. «Imagine a lord who's kept thirty thousand Great Ravens well fed!»
A figure had appeared on the ledge before the portal, its arms upraised, long silver hair blowing from its head.
Mane of Chaos. Anomander Rake. Lord of the black-skinned Tiste And? who has looked down on a hundred thousand winters, who has tasted the blood of dragons, who leads the last of his kind, seated in the Throne of Sorrow and a kingdom tragic and fey-a kingdom with no land to call its own.
Anomander Rake looked tiny against the backdrop of his edifice, almost insubstantial at this distance. The illusion was about to be shattered. She gasped as the aura of his power bloomed outward-to see it at such a distance: «Channel your Warrens,» Tattersail commanded, her voice cracking. «Now!»
Even as Rake gathered his power, twin balls of blue fire raced upward from the centre hill. They struck the Moon near its base and rocked it.
Tayschrenn launched another wave of gilden flames, crashing with amber spume and red-tongued smoke.
The Moon's lord responded. A black, writhing wave rolled down to the first hill. The High Mage was buffeted to his knees deflecting it, the hilltop around him blighted as the necrous power rolled down the slopes, engulfing nearby ranks of soldiers. Tattersail watched as a midnight flash swallowed the hapless men, followed by a thump that thundered through the earth. When the flash dissipated, the soldiers lay in rotting heaps, mown down like stalks of grain.
Kurald Galain sorcery. Elder magic, the Breath of Chaos.
Her breaths coming fast and tight in her chest, Tattersail felt her Thyr Warren flow into her. She shaped it, muttering chain-words under her breath, then unleashed the power. Calot followed, drawing from his Mockra Warren. Hairlock surrounded himself in his own mysterious source, and the cadre entered the fray.
Everything narrowed down for Tattersail from then on, yet a part of her mind remained distant, held on a leash of terror, observing with a kind of muffled vision all that happened around her.
The world became a living nightmare, as sorcery flew upward to batter Moon's Spawn, and sorcery rained downward, indiscriminate and devastating. Earth rose skyward in thundering columns. Rocks ripped through men like hot stones through snow. A downpour of ash descended to cover the living and dead alike. The sky dimmed to pallid rose, the sun a coppery disc behind the haze.
She saw a wave sweep past Hairlock's defences, cutting him in half.
His howl was more rage than pain, instantly muted as virulent power washed over Tattersail and she found her own defences assailed by the sorcery's cold, screaming will as it sought to destroy her. She reeled back, brought up short by Calot as he added his Mockra power to bolster her faltering parries. Then the assault passed, sweeping on and down the hill to their left.
Tattersail had fallen to her knees. Calot stood over her, chaining words of power around her, his face turned away from Moon's Spawn, fixed on something or someone down below on the plain. His eyes were wide with terror.
Too late Tattersail understood what was happening. Calot was defending her at his own expense. A final act, even as he watched his own death erupt around him. A blast of bright fire engulfed him. Abruptly the net of protection over Tattersail vanished. A wash of crackling heat from where Calot had stood sent her tumbling to one side. She felt more than heard her own shriek, and her sense of distance closed in then, a layer of mental defence obliterated.
Spitting dirt and ashes, Tattersail climbed to her feet and fought on, no longer launching attacks just struggling to remain alive. Somewhere in the back of her head a voice was screaming, urgent, panicked. Calot had faced the plain not Moon's Spawn-he'd faced right! Hairlock had been struck from the plain!
She watched as a Kenryll'ah demon arose beneath Nightchill.
Laughing shrilly, the towering, gaunt creature tore Nightchill limb from limb. It had begun feeding by the time Bellurdan arrived. The Thelomen bellowed as the demon raked its knife-like talons against his chest.
Ignoring the wounds and the blood that sprayed from them, he closed his hands around the demon's head and crushed it.
NKaronys unleashed gouts of flame from the staff in his hands until Moon's Spawn almost disappeared inside a ball of fire. Then ethereal wings of ice closed around the short, fat wizard, freezing him where he stood. An instant later he was crushed to dust.
Magic rained in an endless storm around Tayschrenn, where he still knelt on the withered, blackened hilltop. But every wave directed his way he shunted aside, wreaking devastation among the soldiers cowering on the plain. Through the carnage filling the air, through the ash and shrill tongued ravens, through the raining rocks and the screams of the wounded and dying, through the blood-chilling shrieks of demons flinging themselves into ranks of soldiery-through it all sounded the steady thunder of the High Mage's onslaught. Enormous cliffs, sheared from the Moon's face and raging with flame and trailing columns of black smoke, fell down into the city of Pale, transforming the city into its own cauldron of death and chaos.
Her ears numbed and body throbbing as if her flesh itself gasped for breath, Tattersail was slow to grasp that the sorcery had ceased. Even the voice shrieking in the back of her mind had fallen silent. She raised bleary eyes to see Moon's Spawn, billowing smoke and ablaze in a dozen places on its ravaged mien, moving away, pulling back. Then it was past the city, unsteady in its revolutions and leaning to one side. Moon's Spawn headed south, towards the distant Tahlyn Mountains.
She looked around, vaguely recalling that a company of soldiers had sought refuge on the blasted summit. Then something had hit her, taking all she had left to resist it. Now, nothing was left of the company but their armour. Always an even trade, Sorceress. She fought against a sob, then swung her attention to the first hill.
Tayschrenn was down, but alive. A half-dozen marines scampered up the hillside to gather around the High Mage. A minute later they carried him away.
Bellurdan, most of his clothing burned away and his flesh scorched red, remained on the centre hill, collecting Nightchill's scattered limbs and raising his voice in a mournful wail. The sight, in all its horror and pathos, struck Tattersail's heart like a hammer on an anvil. Quickly she turned away. «Damn you, Tayschrenn.»
Pale had fallen. The price was Onearm's Host and four mages. Only now were the Black Moranth legions moving in. Tattersail's jaw clenched, her lips drawing from their fullness into a thin white line.