The timber under his hand creaked as he leaned his weight upon it. His breath frosted out in the moonlight. “Wait,” he said in a low voice. “The cloud’s coming again.” The wind high up above his head tumbled a broken fretwork of black cloud about the sky. Through rents in the cloud, pale Phobos leered down, and Haukos glowed red and low on the horizon, almost set. He gripped the rough-hewn wood of the ladder on his left and turned his head this way and that, nodding as he caught the bright feral glow of Ardashir’s eyes beside him. The tall Kufr smiled, a gleam of teeth in the flickering moonlight. Rictus’s vision was heavily circumscribed by the bronze shell of his helm. He longed to take it off, but knew he would need it for the work ahead. To his right, Druze crouched with a line of men along another ladder. For hundreds of paces, a host of men were kneeling in the frozen mud, formed along the siege ladders like legs on a centipede. Half a pasang to their front, the walls of Machran loomed up huge and black in the night, as solid as a cliff-face.
