'There's Borduke and his squad, dammit. First into the breach. Come on, on their heels!'

They sprinted forward across the uneven, rock-littered ground.

Moonlight struggled through the dust haze. Bottle quested with his senses, seeking life somewhere ahead, but what he found was in pain, dying, trickling away beneath mounds of rubble, or stunned insensate by the concussions. 'We have to get past the blast area,' he said to Strings.

'Right,' the sergeant replied over a shoulder. 'That's the idea.'

They reached the edge of the vast, sculpted crater created by Crump's munitions. Borduke and his squad were scrambling up the other side, and Bottle saw that the wall they climbed was tiered with once-buried city ruins, ceilings and floors compressed, cracked, collapsed, sections of wall that had slid out and down into the pit itself, taking with them older layers of floor tiles. He saw that both Balgrid and Maybe had survived the explosion, but wondered how many sappers and squad mages they had lost. Some gut instinct told him Crump had survived.

Borduke and his squad were having a hard time of it.

'To the right,' Strings said. 'We can skirt it and get through before them!'

Borduke heard and twisted round from where he clung to the wall, three quarters of the way up. 'Bastards! Balgrid, get that fat butt of yours moving, damn you!'

Koryk found a way round the crater, clambering over the rubble, and Bottle and the others followed. Too distracted for the moment by the effort of staying on his feet, Bottle did not attempt to sense the myriad, minuscule life beyond the blast area, in the city itself. Time for that later, he hoped.

The half-blood Seti's progress halted suddenly, and the mage looked up to see that Koryk had encountered an obstacle, a broad crack in a sharply angled, subterranean floor, a man's height below ground-level.

Dust-smeared tiles revealed the painted images of yellow birds in flight, all seeming to be heading deep underground with the slanting pitch of the floor.

Koryk glanced back at Strings. 'Saw the whole slab move, Sergeant. Not sure how solid our footing will be.'

'Hood take us! All right, get the ropes out, Smiles-'

'I tossed 'em,' she said, scowling. 'On the run in here. Too damned heavy-'

'And I picked them up,' Cuttle interjected, tugging the coils from his left shoulder and flinging them forward.

Strings reached out and rapped a knuckle against Smiles's chin – her head snapped back, eyes widening in shock, then fury. 'You carry what I tell you to carry, soldier,' the sergeant said.

Koyrk collected one end of the rope, backed up a few paces, then bolted forward and leapt over the fissure. He landed clean, although with very little room to spare. There was no way Tarr or Cuttle could manage such a long jump.

Strings cursed, then said, 'Those who can do what Koryk just did, go to it. And nobody leave gear behind, either.'

Moments later both Bottle and Smiles crouched at Koryk's side, helping anchor the rope as the sergeant, twin sacks of munitions dangling from him, crossed hand over hand, the bags swinging wild but positioned so that they never collided with one another. Bottle released the rope and moved forward to help, once Strings found footing on the edge.

Cuttle followed. Then Tarr, with the rope wrapped about himself, made his way down onto the slanted floor and was dragged quickly across as it shifted then slid away beneath his weight. Armour and weapons clanking, the rest of the squad pulled the corporal onto level ground.

'Gods,' Cuttle gasped. 'The man weighs as much as a damned bhederin!'

Koryk re-coiled the rope and handed it, grinning, to Smiles.

They set off once more, up over a ridge of wreckage from some kind of stall or lean-to that had abutted the inner wall, then more rubble, beyond which was a street.

And Borduke and his squad were just entering it, spread out, crossbows at the ready. The bearded sergeant was in the lead, Corporal Hubb on his right and two steps behind. Ibb was opposite the corporal, and two paces behind the pair were Tavos Pond and Balgrid, followed by Lutes, with the rear drawn up by the sapper Maybe. Classic marine advance formation.

The buildings to the sides were dark, silent. Something odd about them, Bottle thought, trying to work out what it might be… no shutters on the windows – they're all open. So are the doors… every door, in fact- 'Sergeant-'

The arrows that suddenly sped down from flanking windows, high up, were loosed at the precise moment that a score of figures rushed out from nearby buildings, screaming, spears, scimitars and shields at the ready. Those arrows had been fired without regard to the charging warriors, and two cried out as iron-barbed points tore into them.