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“It’s more than rain.” Dylan fell in step beside the queen and Anise. “Something stirs the sky, my queen.”

The Krytan Fanfare faltered.

Dylan halted, drawing his sword and looking to the wall.

Trumpeters quit midsong and turned toward the stairs. They rushed down while warriors rushed up.

The black cloud was spreading with preternatural speed. In heartbeats, it engulfed the sky. Waves of dark magic riled through the belly of the cloud, and red lightning flickered horribly. In the far west, a strange golden beam tore down from the cloud to rake the horizon.

“I’m going up to see,” Dylan told the queen. “Countess Anise, get the queen to the keep, to an inner chamber, and let no one and nothing through to her.”

The countess scowled. “Do not tell me my duty, Captain Thackeray. She will be safe.”

Anise and two other guardians led Queen Jennah toward the keep of Ebonhawke.

Dylan watched them go. Those Shining Blade always surrounded Queen Jennah, pretending to be greater protectors than he. Let them prove it now. The best way for Dylan to guard the queen was to learn what this storm was.

He rushed up the stairs along the curtain wall. The walkway at the top had long since been vacated by trumpeters, but the Ebon Vanguard remained, staring out.

The sky was black, and the storm overhead convulsed like a living thing. All around the ravenous cloud, dust devils ripped up the ground. Sandstorms boiled, and siroccos screamed.

“The charr’ll have a hard time of it,” Dylan muttered with satisfaction.

He looked down on the brutes’ encampment on the northern plain. Their tents were ranked in even rows surrounded by great iron siege engines. The charr had closed off the eastern and western roads, and their sappers had dug zigzag trenches approaching the walls. Though the charr had besieged Ebonhawke for years, they seemed serious about bringing down the fortress this time—serious about shutting down the asura gate. By the look of the earthworks and war wagons, they were only a month from bringing their siege to storm.

But another storm was overtaking them.

Charr stood in the lanes between their tents, horned heads cast back, eyes fixed on the boiling skies. The storm would be hard on them, indeed.

Movement drew Dylan’s gaze. He looked beyond the charr encampment to the dry fields in the far north. Something was advancing there. It looked like a sandstorm—a long line bounding forward across the wastes. But the storm clung to the ground, and it seemed too solid to be sand.

“What is that?” asked a young watchman nearby. He peered intently at the line, his head forward, his hands braced on the battlements.

He looked so like Logan that Dylan had to glance back at the young man to make sure it was not he. But no. Why would Logan ever enlist to fight for humanity?

“That’s another army,” the young watchman said, straightening up.

“Impossible,” Dylan replied. “It’s moving too fast.”

The watchman shook his head. “An army of giants.”

Next moment, Dylan himself could see them—huge ogres running across the plains with jagged hyenas in their midst. Dylan had never seen such massive ogres, and light glinted from them as if their skins were crystal.

“To arms!” shouted a nearby lieutenant. The call was echoed along the wall and throughout the bailey below. Watchers loaded crossbows and lifted longbows, ballista crews readied great bolts, catapulters rolled huge stones into their mechanisms.

A crack of lightning split the sky.

The thunder shook the heavens and didn’t stop.

Dylan gaped in awe at the voracious bolt.

It struck a charr siege tower, setting the wood ablaze, then jagged like a knife through their camp. It didn’t cease, its crackling column ripping open the ground, setting the camp on fire, frying every charr in a hundred feet. The rolling thunder of the bolt solidified the air. Lightning lashed with a will through the charr camp before vaulting to the wall of the fortress itself.

“Look out!” Dylan shouted, but his voice was lost to the thunder.

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