Once a man is convinced to believe the impossible, it’s impossible to make him disbelieve it.

The pagan army was spread red and black across the floodplain to Kip’s sub-red vision. Only its commanders held torches. General Amrit Kamal, the Lord of the Air who led the enemy, had lined up his people in what had become a standard battle formation for the Blood Robes: centuries—each literally one hundred men—arrayed in lines. Battalions comprised of six centuries were deployed one hundred men wide and six lines deep. Between each two battalions was a century of drafters.

These, being so much more rare, were deployed in four lines of twenty-four men each. But only half of each drafting platoon was made up of drafters. Each drafter was paired with a shield bearer whose main duty was defending his drafter with a massive tower shield that took both hands to hold. Each shield bearer also carried a pistol, a knife, and a bich’hwa or a punch dagger that could be mounted on the wrist without interfering with their grip. The tower shields had a spiked bottom so they could be stabbed into the ground to provide cover.

Sometimes wights led the drafter centuries, blues or superviolets or yellows predominantly. Like the greens, orange and red and sub-red wights were generally uncontrollable and were instead unleashed to fight alone where they willed.

Kip’s army was facing Kamal’s six battalions and six drafter centuries. Probably an elite battalion was being held in reserve back at the camp where the blurriness of sub-red vision couldn’t even make it out against the darkness. So, just as reported, Kamal had more than four thousand men.

Against Kip’s two thousand. But Kip had the Ghosts.

Tallach came out of the woods behind Kip, wearing his special howdah harness. Cruxer floated up into his place with that infuriating grace of his. He’d decided Kip didn’t get to ride into battle alone ever again. Tallach didn’t seem to even notice the additional weight.

Putting on spectacles, Kip looked a question at Tallach—‘You ready?’—and the giant grizzly woofed. He was. Kip mounted the howdah beside Cruxer, and motioned for the bonfires behind him to be lit. Then Tallach stood on his hind legs, lifting Kip and Cruxer high in the air. The bonfire behind them made a huge silhouette for the enemy to see. Then Kip threw fire into the air from his own hands, and his forces advanced.

Kip and Tallach advanced more slowly than the rest. No need to put himself at risk too early. They were supposed to be a distraction. He didn’t want to arrive in musket or bow range before the battle was joined. That was the problem with arriving in battle on the back of a huge-ass bear: you made a huge-ass target.

His own soldiers were deployed in Kip’s modification of General Danavis’s model. The modifications had not been made because Kip thought he was an equal of the legend, but because he had an embarrassment of riches in having so many drafters. Danavis’s armies had maybe one warrior-drafter for every fifty soldiers. Kip had one for every ten, and that wasn’t counting the night mares.

A trumpet blew amid the enemy lines, and Kip saw the back two lines of each of Kamal’s battalions peel off to march to either side of the Blood Robes’ already-wide lines. They meant their wider lines to curl around Kip’s lines and crush them from the sides.

It was a pretty standard maneuver when you had twice as many men as your enemy did.

So the officers hadn’t been fooled. It meant the Blood Robes were sticking with their own battle plan, despite Kip’s gambit with the torches.

If Kip wanted his lines to be as wide as theirs, he’d have to literally stretch his men thin and meet Kamal’s four-man-deep lines with his own lines only two men deep. Their going only four deep was risky. His going two deep would be insanity.

It was a trap, but not the obvious one. No sane commander in his position would try to fight only two men deep.

Instead, a sane commander would try to punch through the Blood Robe lines, hoping to break through the four lines in a sharp move.

What else could he do? He couldn’t match the width of their lines, and couldn’t allow them to turn his flank, so instead he would draw his men in to hit their center hard and try to break their lines fast before the encircling maneuver killed them all.

Not today.

When his Nightbringers reached the appointed places, their commanders bellowed, and they stopped dead, as they’d planned.

Except that not all of Kip’s men stopped as they’d been commanded. Because glory is to young idiots as a mountain of poppy is to the lotus eater.

Ignoring the screams of their commanders, several dozen men tore away from Kip’s lines and ran forward, screaming.

Because war is a fat whore who rolls over on her babies in the night.

“What the hell are those idiots doing?” Cruxer asked.

“Weeding themselves out of my army,” Kip said, furious.

The Turtle-Bear tattoo on his arm lighting up in angry red, Kip hurled out his signals, but now in fire: HOLD. HOLD!

The men who’d broken away ran, heedless, and all Kip could do was pray that they died quickly so that their friends didn’t follow them, trying to save them.

He could sense others on the verge of breaking. Everyone knew that if they didn’t follow those young fools, the fools would die.

Kip’s commanders were screaming, even firing their muskets in the air to try to draw their men’s eyes to them, lest they break.

Then an explosion rocked the field, and one of the charging idiots simply disappeared in fire as if he’d stood on the barrel of a musket aimed at the heavens. An instant later, another hit another of the buried charges and was flung skyward. Only half of him landed.

Not even the war dogs had smelled the charges; the Cwn y Wawr’s dogs were bred to fight, and while they could smell more acutely than any man by far, their abilities were wan compared to those of the two scent hounds the will-casters had brought.

It was two hounds who would save Kip’s entire army.

The charges had been buried weeks before, the smell of their luxin covered so well that they had been noticed only when the hounds’ human partners reported that a certain area of ground had no scent of human passage at all. That had led their commanders—Kip hadn’t even known about it until the deed was done—to scour the ground three nights in a row, dodging patrols and (unknowing at the time) the buried charges in order to discern the trap.

Kip watched the twenty men die with cold command. He had no pity for men who were willing to trade their friends’ deaths and their commanders’ plans for their own glory. He watched them die in blood and fire, men screaming with blown-off feet and partial faces. Mostly he noted which charges had been exploded. He had a partial map of them, not a full one, so it was probably wasted effort, but you never knew.