I knew where Balthazar would be.

  He was not a man who had led from the back. As Lord Supreme he could hardly be expected, or allowed, to lead the charge. He, however, would not relegate himself to the lofty security of the Tower when there was a real battle to be had. He would want to be closer to the action. He would want to be where he could hear the explosions, smell the smoke, and see action.

  I stepped through my DOOR to the fortifications above the gates of the second wall of the city. As I stepped through I saw a wonderful and rare thing: the whites of Balthazar’s widened eyes. It seemed even the Lord Supreme could be startled by the sudden emergence of a door composed of pure light right beside him.

  I stepped through, feeling all the wear and damage of the battle I had only just survived. My armor was intact, but the body beneath it was very much the worse for what it had experienced.

  The scene at Boston was dire. From the elevated position above the second gate I could see the outer gate. Without control of the Order of our own city the outer wall had been manned by archers and spearmen rather than riflemen. The main gate was a burning wreck, columns of Boston spearmen were arrayed inside the gate. Even as they stood, huddled maybe, off to the side of the opening, the wall above them shuddered with a booming explosion. Chips of stone and large chunks of masonry flew from the impact. A man died screaming beneath one slab. Others scattered as the stone fell around them.

  The source of the explosion could be seen clearly beyond. The battle tanks were arrayed in rows. The rows were too ordered for me to believe that the tanks were manned by green men. Buffalo regulars must have been employed to pilot the hulking weapons. The tanks burped and bolts of death streaked towards my city. The outer walls shook, crumbled, and broke. Shots went above the walls and landed in the city, exploding homes and starting fires.

  The sole answering fire came from Alya, wielding BEAM from the lofty heights of the Tower. The tight pillars of light lanced out, reducing tanks to burning slag and men to vapor. She was alone, and potent as she was, made little difference.

  Balthazar gasped, veritably gasped, “Tiberius! You… Did you…”

  In answer, I turned to one of the rifleman sergeants who stood nearby. “Take your men and move up, man the outer wall wherever you can.”

  Balthazar’s eyes narrowed, his lips thinning with a kind of wicked pleasure. The sergeant looked at him and he nodded, “Send the first, second and fourth rifles. Spread the word, quickly.”

  The man fled from us.

  I said, “Where’s Lance?”

  Balthazar gestured and I saw him, and his knights. They had their horses but were unmounted. They’d arranged themselves down the street from the second wall in a position where they could charge in support of the gate’s defense if it was deemed worthwhile.

  I said, “I have instructions for him.”

  The turrets of the tanks belched more fire. A section of the outer wall collapsed with dust billowing like ink in water. Boston soldiers rushed to fill the gaps, standing bravely in the line of fire. A roar rose from the horde of green men beyond the wall. It seemed, in that moment, that they came off their leashes and the mass of frenzied humanity surged forward.

  Balthazar watched it all, his impassive visage returned to him. Almost casually, he said, “How long then?”

  I shrugged, feeling pain everywhere, “Seconds.”

  I leapt from the wall and moved to Lance’s formation of knights. I was weakened and injured, and by my standards it was a hobbling approach. By mortal standards it was champion sprinting.

  Lance stood by his steed, at the head of the column. He watched me coming. There was nothing about him that implied concern at the burning and madness that was unfurling around him. He just watched me with obvious distaste and casual hatred. I saw again the dark rings beneath his eyes and wondered that they hadn’t grown darker. Darker and deeper. His skin was more pallid than it had been before.

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  “Move up,” I said.

  He laughed at me, an unnatural sound. “Don’t make me guilty of mutiny, shopkeeper. I won’t ride out in front of those tanks. It might suit you, but I won’t see myself or the knights of Boston wasted like that.”

  I said, “If you ride now, you’ll see glory. You’ll kill more men in the next hours than you’ve killed in the rest of your life put together.”

  That seemed to interest him. He responded only with raised eyebrows.

  I said, “We took the Tower in Buffalo. In seconds we’ll have control of the Order again.”

  A scream rose, the scream of thousands, as the Green Man horde crashed against the walls, against Boston spears. They were impaled by the hundred. The first drug-crazed waves were fodder. They had more than enough to overwhelm the defenders. I imagined the riflemen mounting the ramparts even as I spoke. In this moment their weapons were little more than clubs. But in the next moment…

  The last blast of the last tank to fire was a wild shot. It arced over the walls and drifted on like an errant shooting star, descending into the inner sector, the crack of its impact shaking the air.

  Then the guns of the attackers were silent.

  The priests in the Buffalo Tower had finished their task. I smiled. I held Lance’s gaze. I held it and cocked my head to the side, showing him that I was listening. A few seconds later the sounds of gunfire, the rattle of automatics, the cadenced booming of bolted rifles, rippled through the air to us.

  He didn’t give me the satisfaction of looking surprised, but the eagerness that took his face said enough.

  I said, “Go. Take the knights, gather any cavalry you can, have your night of murder. Leave the Buffalo men. Kill the Green bastards.”

  I didn’t wait for his response. I went back to the second wall and leapt to the rampart. The effort hurt me, but I wouldn’t miss this opportunity to bear witness. This was to be the destruction of the green men. I had killed their leader with Katya’s knife. Now I would watch the undoing of them that I had made so.

  Where only a minute before the lines of Boston spearmen had been bowing under the weight of the barbarian horde, I stepped forward to witness the reversal. In the darkness the muzzle flashes of our rifles were sparks from the fires of hell. The guns roared, firing without pause, a sea of soft targets laid out beneath them. The horde shredded like wet paper, dissolving under the fire, losing its cohesion. The weight lessened, the spearmen pushed back, devouring their poorly armored bodies like hungry beasts. Individual horses rode behind the lines of our soldiers, no doubt conveying the order to counterattack, Balthazar’s message.

  It had been a night of unparalleled chaos but Balthazar showed his magnificence as the battle turned. From the chaos he built a machine of perfect cohesion. More units of riflemen dashed to take position behind the lines of spears, their guns blazing and deleting lives by the hundred. What wall-mounted cannons that had survived the fire from the tanks came to life, their barrels swinging to face the horde, roaring their dissatisfaction at having been held impotent so long. Explosions blossomed in the mass of the horde, turning men to mist and chunks.

  The horde might have been fueled by drugs, blinded to danger and frenzied to violence, but a horde was a living thing in its own right. Individually they may have been deadened to their own mortality, but the horde reacted with its own awareness. The waves of reckless attackers faltered, charged again, died by the hundreds and thousands, then wavered again.

  I couldn’t say if it was the next wave of cannon fire or the appearance of the charging horses that broke them. What mattered was that they broke. The horde came apart, a single living thing disintegrating into a hundred thousand cells, each of them fleeing in different directions. I had the fleeting impression of an army becoming thousands of bubbles in a glass of sparkling wine, flowing and scattering in the same principal direction, but each on their own moving at the whims of nature’s own chaos.

  Balthazar came to stand beside me, watching what had been certain defeat turn into unrestrained carnage. He spoke distantly, absorbed by the violence of this finely crafted machine, “The orders have gone out to spare the Buffalo regulars if they surrender.”

  I nodded. It was as we’d planned. “None of their Griidlords died in the battle. The ones they’d gathered from other cities were slain, but I think we managed to only incapacitate the Buffalo Griidlords.”

  Balthazar dipped his head, “Well done. Does that include Perdinger?”

  The charging knights hit the fringes of the disintegrating horde. They were red-hot steel melting cracked ice. SIGHT showed me the endless mist of blood. HEARING would have brought me the screams, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  I said, “He’s alive. I’ve promised him to Katya. But… he’ll never fight again.”

  Balthazar nodded solemnly. “Then it’s done.”

  I answered his nod with one of my own. “I’ll ride to Buffalo with you. I’ve used my DOOR up coming here, I’ll return with you.”

  Balthazar said, “That’s for the best. The people will respond better if you’re there. You freed them from him.”

  I said, “If they see it like that. They need to see it like that or none of this will work.”

  Balthazar’s eyes never shifted from the melting horde, the carnage, the complete and total and utterly unexpected victory. “If I’ve learned anything from what you’ve done here then you can be assured that they will.”

  I smiled thinly. I took a dark pleasure in the countless murders I set in motion. I took enough time to drag my eyes from the carnage and destruction we were dealing to the horde as it broke and scattered and glanced at him. I spoke, my mind distant to larger plans.

  “It’s up to Dirk and the Blood now.”