Thymur exhaled. "We keep this between us."
"Agreed," Renher said. It wasn't fear. It was good practice: a small story is easier to steer than a rumor turned stampede.
Thymur lifted the ward with a flick. The tent breathed again. "I'll move the leaders."
Renher buckled his sword and set the weight where it belonged. Mystery could ride his shoulder with the falcon. Duty got the legs.
Outside, the camp had the taut quiet of a bow string. Thymur cut through it, a blade moving from tent to tent: lancers to check straps and spearheads, archers to count bundles and strings, the mage encampment to ready protective matrices instead of flashy showpieces. In the mages' pavilion, the team leader stood among his robed unit, talking in low, precise directives. Conversation died the instant Thymur's shadow crossed the threshold.
"We march at a moment's notice," Thymur said, voice even, eyes sweeping. "Essentials only."
He left before questions could root. The Mage Leader watched him go, expression smooth, thoughts hidden, hands already moving to tighten his lines.
Renher sat in his tent a moment longer and used the breath as a whetstone. He gathered mana and circulated it the way his masters had beaten into him: clean cycles, no waste, mind and muscle married until the sword felt like a third lung. He did not fear dying. He despised the idea of dying for nothing.
There is no valor in dying for nothing.
He pushed to his feet. Horus hopped up and took his shoulder like a throne. The bird's weight was familiar as a gauntlet. When Renher stepped out into the day, the army stood waiting—lines straight, weapons catching the noon-edging light, faces set in that quiet curve between fear and readiness.
Renher took his place at the head with lancers forming the teeth of the spear and swordsmen sheathing the heart, mages and archers in careful, flexible layers. The sky had the clear, pale look of a window. Wisps of cloud drifted as if the world were making a show of innocence.
They reached the shallow valley by midday. Hills rolled up on either side like lips drawn back. Old trenches scarred the slopes. The ghosts of barricades watched them come.
Horus went up in a flare of wings. Renher tracked the falcon as it cut the air in clean, purposeful loops. One loop shifted into a frantic circle.
Danger.
"Shields!" Renher's voice cracked down the line. "Defensive formation!"
The order ran like gunpowder. Shields locked with the practiced clack of a thousand drills. Men ducked as the sky turned black with incoming death. Arrows descended in a thick hiss, so many they dimmed the sun.
The ground heaved.
A wall of mud surged up from the earth like a waking giant and shouldered itself between men and storm. The first wave of arrows thudded into wet clay and vanished. The second wave bit into nothing.
A cheer rose—shocked, giddy, brief.
Behind the wall, Renher saw mages drop staffs and splay fingers, faces cut with effort, the earth responding to their will in a broad, flexing plane. The mud wall settled into a packed, shield-high bulwark.
On the ridge, orcs froze. They had built something to make this moment a certainty—a contraption designed by crude genius to loose volleys by the dozen. A secret. A pride. The humans had swallowed it whole without choking.
"Nice wall," a lancer muttered from Renher's right, eyes bright.
"Try not to hide behind it the entire war," the archer captain murmured back.
"Wouldn't rob you of your chance to trip over your own quiver," the lancer said.
Renher didn't turn. "Save the romance for your funeral pyres."
A ripple of laughter burned off some of the panic.
"Advance," Renher said, and the army began to climb, the hill's grass flattening under boots and greaves. Lancers lowered points like a single forest bending in wind. Mages fanned to support: some shaping earth to blunt charges, others layering vapor shields that would shear incoming shafts, the rest holding fire and lightning in tight fists for when the range closed. Swordsmen stretched on the flanks, ready to catch anything that slipped the spear's bite.
At the rear, Renher watched everything: the timing, the posture of the archers, the way the orcs moved along the ridge—disciplined for once, which meant orders from higher than a warband captain. He was ready to go where the line needed a hammer.
The orcs did not break at the sight of the wall. They planted feet and fed their contraption. Another wave of arrows arced high, but this time the mages had already raised angled planes of air that made the shafts change their minds midflight and skitter off to either side. The few that threaded through found wood and iron waiting.
Renher's mind kept its ledger even as his blood warmed. If the ambush had succeeded, the valley would have become a butcher's ditch. The mages had bought them breath. Breath had to be turned into blade.
"Push the right," he said, and runners darted with the order. The rightmost lancers shifted their line on a slant, aiming to hook the orc formation's edge and roll it like a door off its hinge.
On the ridge, an orc beat a drum and their line answered with a rough, purposeful roar. These were not the scattered raiders of ten winters ago. Renher's mouth thinned. Better to assume a brain and be wrong than assume stupidity and bury friends.
A figure in robes moved along the orc rear like a shadow dreaming of shape. Renher's eye fixed on it. The man's staff—no, the orc's staff—carried metal instead of bone at its top. A shaman, then. Or something trying to be one.
The hill crested closer. The first clatter of spear on axe rang out bright and shocking as glass. Lancers met orcs with a thud that traveled through men and into earth. The hook on the right bit, the line flexed, the orcs folded, then shoved back. For a long breath the world became hands and teeth and iron.
Renher did not enter the crush yet. He moved where eyes were missing, pointing, correcting, the smallest adjustments saving the most lives. A lancer's stance corrected buys a heartbeat; a heartbeat keeps a man alive; a man alive keeps the line.
"Mages, brace the center," he called. "Archers, bleed their left."
Orders rippled. The mud wall parted in places to let arrows out and then sealed again, the earth obeying with the compliance of a well-trained hound. The orc left sagged under the rain and tried to swell again; the center held; the right ate ground, inch by stubborn inch.
Above it all, Horus wheeled and cried. Renher followed the falcon's point: a knotted clutch of orcs huddled behind the contraption, hands moving in rough unison. Not loading. Praying, almost—no, working. A shimmer crawled over them like heat above a forge.
"Thymur," Renher said, and the man appeared at his shoulder as if the name summoned him. "Their rear. Something building."
Thymur's eyes narrowed. "See it."
"Break it."
"I'll borrow a few of your magi," Thymur said, dry as old wine.
"Return them cleaner than you found them," Renher replied.
"Unlikely," Thymur said, and was gone.
The Mage Leader glanced back once from his place among his own, caught Renher's eye, and held it a beat too long, as if to say: talk to me. Renher looked away first, which was its own message.
The fight writhed forward. On the right, a lancer Renher knew by his laugh tripped, and the orc in front of him seized the moment, axe rising. Renher moved before he thought about moving. His blade flashed in a single edge-on arc that kissed the axe aside and laid the orc open from shoulder to gut. He shoved the lancer back upright with the flat of his hand.
"Eyes on your feet after the battle," Renher said.
"Yes, sire."
"Don't call me that here."
"Yes, Ren," the lancer said, and grinned despite the blood on his face.
A pulse rolled across the hill then—subtle, but wrong in a way that made teeth hurt. Men flinched. Orcs shouted. Renher's skin prickled. The place beneath the world shifted, and for a heartbeat he smelled the dry, empty cold of the temple corridor.
Not here, he thought. Not now.
On the orc rear, the robed figure thrust its staff down and darkness skittered out along the dirt like spilled ink. Where it touched, grass curled and blackened. Thymur's answer was light, clean and sharp, a lattice thrown low that turned the spread aside. The dark sought cracks. Thymur sealed them with ruthless economy.
"Forgotten gods," Renher murmured, and a soldier near him made a sign against evil because he thought the emperor was praying. Renher was merely naming a thing so it could not pretend to be nameless.
"Center, forward three," he called. "Right, hold and chew. Left, feint retreat, then bite."
They obeyed. They trusted him because he did not waste them for glory or for story. The center took three steps and did not step back. The right planted and ground. The left turned and ran a dozen paces, then spun and shot into the orc line like an arrow returning to the bow that loosed it. For a heartbeat everything tilted their way.
Another pulse. Closer. The world shivered as if something far away inhaled.
Renher's jaw clenched. The corridor was not done with him. It reached across waking like a hand through canvas. He refused the pull.
"Hold," he said softly—not to the army, to himself.
Horus screamed above. Renher looked up and saw the falcon stoop, then flare, wings braking hard as if he would tear the sky with his claws. The bird fixed Renher with one eye and for an absurd instant Renher thought he saw an accusation there: you should have looked sooner. A thin cord glinted against Horus's leg. There had been a message once, somewhere between the capital and here. There would be time to regret that later. Now there was only this hill.