Gunther subsided into the muted fury that was almost perpetual with him when he was not quivering in awe and fear of his angry god.

“What the hell,” said the Barbarian.

“Look, Rik, a dragon,” said Leon. Somehow despite his veneer of streetwise sophistication, something in Leon’s voice made it sound as if the dragon was something wonderful he was seeing for the first time.

“I see it, Leon,” said Rik. He was a little annoyed. Like most of the Foragers he preferred his nickname to his real name. The other one brought back far too many bad memories.

The whole unit looked up as a dragon passed overhead, silhouetted against the greyish clouds. The wind of its passage ruffled their jackets. Its vast wings, massive as the sails of a caravel, cast a huge shadow on the land below. Its long serpentine neck stretched forward at full extension and the great triangular head briefly gave it the look of a spear in flight. Its rider’s polished armour glittered in the dim sunlight. It was moving at quite a pace as it spiralled in to land within the massive stone walls surrounding the Redoubt.

A mutter passed up the line of Foragers. It had been a long time since any of them had seen a dragon, since before they had been dispatched to this benighted strip of borderland, and Rik wondered what message its courier brought. He knew they were all thinking the same thing: war.

The Sergeant just shrugged and said; “We’ll know soon enough.”

They passed the camp followers washing linen in the stream and carrying buckets of water back to the patched tents and hastily built hovels that were home. Small dogs and spine-backed wyrmhounds romped in the muck. Mud clung to the women’s bare feet, and dirty-faced urchins to their shawls. Most looked hungry. It was not much fun being a soldier’s brat. Still, Rik thought, most of them had it better than he did at their age. The streets of Shadzar, the Place of Sorrow, had been hard on orphan boys, particularly on one thought to be the bastard get of a Terrarch.

Shoulders straightened and even Weasel stopped whistling as they reached the village around the Redoubt. Most of the regiment’s officers were quartered in the Inn or the low stone built houses and the Terrarchs were always sticklers for discipline. The ten storey fortress loomed above them, rising from a walled promontory that added thirty feet to its height.

Atop its tower the huge black banner from which the regiment took its name flew proudly beside the Red Dragon of Talorea. The regimental flag showed a beautiful naked woman with the wings of a dragon and a rune-encrusted scythe in her hand; Arazaela, the Angel of Death. Beneath her were inscribed the words Death’s Angels All Are We in the high tongue of the Exalted. Rik could not make out all the details at this distance but he could picture it well enough. Its replica fluttered on the standards of all nine companies.

Those banners had flown over a thousand battlefields in the five centuries since the regiments founding and would doubtless fly over a thousand more but Rik’s heart did not lift at the sight. In this he knew he was among the minority of the men. He took no great pride in walking among the Angels.

Tall scarlet-jacketed officers strode back and forth, stick-lean, their narrow ageless triangular faces covered in that expression of bored haughtiness that seemed moulded onto their features at birth. Their long pigtails of fine hair swung like the tails of stalking cats as they walked. He fought down old hatred and old fear at the sight. His own face bore a resemblance to theirs, the same finely sculpted features, the same cold purple eyes, the same ash-blonde hair, the same narrow chin; a gift from his unknown father, the only patrimony he ever got from him.

He was not sure whether the frosty looks directed at him were a product of his imagination or simple reality. Perhaps it was merely in his mind. The Terrarchs looked that way at everybody. They were the lords of creation, and had been since they conquered Gaeia a thousand years ago.

The acrid smell of wyrm filled the village air. As the men passed, ferocious hunting ripjacks lashed their long tails and slammed themselves against the bars of their iron cages, each a wingless, blood-mad, bi-pedal dragon in miniature. Hunger and hate burned in their tiny snake eyes.