The doors opened to a crowded hallway.

  Immediately a score of knights streamed past me, fanning out to secure the chamber, guns shouldered and power weapons in hand.

  The knights swept from the corridor, parting like a curtain to reveal the other figures. Balthazar marched forward, eyes scanning the devastation. He assessed, his voice flat. “That’s every priest in the Tower.”

  Alarmed, I said, “Every one? Someone needs to perform the rituals, return Order to Albany.” I didn’t know if Order had truly been turned down there, but it seemed impossible that it hadn’t.

  I said, “Ra! He can—”

  Balthazar shook his head. “He’s out. Not dead, but unconscious. The medics have their doubts that he’ll live to see morning.”

  I scrambled to think. This couldn’t be happening. How could this be happening? “How long until the church can send replacements?”

  Balthazar shrugged, eyes raking the screens and consoles, never stopping the process of evaluating options. “Hours. Probably a day or more. The Archon in Chicago will need to be consulted. They don’t send out replacement priests like waiting reinforcements. There’s a process. Even with the urgency, the church will evaluate.”

  “They can’t! We’ll be overrun.”

  Balthazar shook his head.

  I barked, “Jacob! My Chaplain!”

  Balthazar nodded, turning to a knight. “Go, fetch him! Carry him if you have to. NOW!”

  The soldier dashed down the hall and Balthazar came to stand by me. He stared at the consoles, thinking. It was anticlimactic, frustrating, to have won the chamber and yet still be powerless to act.

  He said, “It’s nearly midnight.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He said, “You can step through to Albany at midnight.”

  I nodded. “I intend to.”

  He exhaled slowly. “Tiberius, if the fort is lost, get the men out. Lance and his knights are irreplaceable. I know you’ll want to fight for Albany, but it might be too late. If it’s too late for the fort then we’ll have bitter fighting before us. We’ll need those knights worse than I can possibly say.”

  I stood with him. The tension was incredible in me. I trembled with a need to Door to Albany and see what had happened, see what I could do. But I could only stand and watch the minutes ticking off the clock on my HUD.

  Shuffling behind us.

  I turned to watch Jacob shuffling toward us, pulling his elbow free of the grasp of the knight at his side. His ancient face was a tapestry of irritation. “I’m here, I’m here. Leave me be, you overgrown child…”

  He looked past Balthazar and me toward the consoles. I had expected action. The old man had come here expecting to leap into action himself. Instead he stopped, his jaw falling open.

  “By the Oracle… no…”

  I said, “What? What is it, Jacob?”

  He shook his wizened head slowly. “There’s… my boy, there’s nothing I can do…”

  I grasped his shoulders, turning him toward me, pulling his vacant gaze from the arcane machines. “What do you mean there’s nothing you can do? You’re a priest! A genius?”

  His fingers flailed as he spoke. “They’ve slaved it… I can’t… I’m a scholar, not a Singer… I don’t know the rituals… basic ones, yes, but to un-slave? I never learned… if I did it’s long forgotten…”

  I shook him gently, trying to keep his fractal focus on me. “Shit, Jacob! Slaved? What do you mean slaved? To where?”

  I didn’t need to ask. I knew the answer.

  He twisted and I let my hands fall away. He shuffled forward, milky eyes darting over the displays. “To Buffalo… I can’t undo this… You’ll need Singers to undo this, and they’re bound by oath to check for treaty…”

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  “What does that mean?”

  He said, “They’re bound to make sure a treaty wasn’t signed to slave. I know… I know… it’s clear this was treachery, but the tenets are ironclad. It will be days before this can be undone.”

  I felt my eyes bugging in my head. “Days! We don’t have days!”

  Balthazar asserted himself. “We can control what we can control. Go now, Tiberius, to Albany. Do what you can, save what you can. Jacob can see what there’s to be done here…”

  The old priest kept shaking his head. “Nothing… nothing to be done… nothing can be done…”

  Balthazar ignored him. “Now, Tiberius! For the love of Boston! Go!”

  I used Door to bring me to the hills above the fort. With my Footfield, especially enhanced by the cape of Joel, the hills were only seconds from the fort itself. And the hills would give me vantage, a chance to assess what the situation was.

  It was worse than I’d feared.

  In some ways it was worse than I might have imagined.

  The guns were silent. The cannons and rifles that had sung their song to keep the fort free sang no more. Order had indeed been lowered in Fort Albany. In the place of Order came fire, smoke, blood, and screams.

  The darkness meant nothing to me as I peered across the scene with SIGHT.

  The Green Men were pouring through the open gates of the fort. Trained soldiers stood their ground, shields locked and spears thrusting. They skewered three or four Green Men to death for every one of their own that was clawed to the ground. But the horde that massed here was the largest we’d seen. It might have been the full force. I struggled to comprehend the sheer vastness of the mass of bodies. It could well have been a hundred thousand, pouring through the gates, across the bridges, spreading across the landscape like a plague of locusts.

  Somehow, this was not the worst sight that met my eyes. The worst lay below me by the dozen, wrapped in tarps and towed by horses, oxen, and donkeys.

  Scores of huge tarped objects were being towed across the bridge, the Green Men flowing past them. Scores more massed at the far side, and dozens were arrayed below the walls of the fort.

  I watched, heart hammering, as the tarp was pulled free of the first.

  A battle tank.

  No. Not this. Not so many.

  Another tarp pulled free to reveal its twin, a hulking, threaded machine of incalculable destructive potential.

  Worse was to follow.

  A moment later the machine rumbled, dark smoke spewing from the exhaust, the machine vibrating and rumbling as it began to roll forward.

  I shook my head, trying to comprehend the magnitude of this disaster.

  Another roared to life. And another. They did not aim for Fort Albany—she was already conquered, all that remained were her death throes. No. The columns of armored machines rumbled east. For Boston.

  Mario must have set a corridor of Order, or the Master Tower of Buffalo, stretching from Boston to Albany. My head spun at the thought of the Flows being burned away in the process. The waste was grand and terrible enough to catch my attention, even as I watched certain doom rumbling east.

  I could do nothing for Boston in that moment. Her defense, and the report of the column of tanks, were the best I could do for our city in that moment.

  Balthazar had told me to bring the soldiers home if all was lost. That was what I intended to do.

  I streaked down to the fort, trying to forget what I had seen—the metal monsters rumbling east and the disaster they foreshadowed. Boston would be defenseless with her Order lowered. How long would it take them to make the journey?

  I leapt and scaled the walls of the fort, dropping down to the streets within. The Green surged, faces lit by the fires of the burning settlement, those faces wild with lust for carnage. SIGHT showed me eyes dilated and mouths frothing. Danefer had fed them something—some chemical aid to overcome their tendency to break. These maddened butchers would only know how to press forward.

  There! Olaf, pounding them to death a dozen at a time. And there! Magneblade, axe searing through them like grass, the ground beneath him a river of gore. And yet every one he killed was replaced by two more. I saw sparks sizzling on the surface of his suit. They might be ants, but enough of them could still bite.

  I raced forward, BEAM raking their lines, trying to make space for the Boston soldiers to fall back. Olaf was sagging as well. I could not know how long they’d fought. The streets were dense with the dead, the blood flowed between the cobbles beneath my feet as I ran. It was charnel.

  To my far right I saw the citizens, hundreds, maybe thousands, huddling. The tide of Green Men grew closer, only slowed by our spearmen and Griidlords. And they couldn’t hold for long.

  A few dozen yards behind our lines the street narrowed. It was an intentional design, a purposeful bottleneck to facilitate defense. There a few men could stave off hundreds. A few men—or perhaps one Griidlord.

  I reached my teammates and blasted BEAM. I was fresh, my power unexhausted. Tens of Green Men melted to ash and shredded meat under the weight of my BEAM.

  “FALL BACK!” I roared.

  Olaf gasped, “We can’t, they’ll overrun…”

  I swept into the gap between the lines, BEAM roaring out of my sword. “I’ll hold them! Take down the back wall and get the men out!”

  If Magneblade and Olaf could get the soldiers out, and I could fight enough to make space or break the whole wave, then I could get the citizens away.

  Olaf shook his head. “Tiberius, no, we—”

  I slapped him. The impact of my armored hand on his helm rang. I fired BEAM like a firehose, burning my reserves, devouring the Green Men, keeping them back. They disintegrated into screaming offal.

  I roared, “NOW! AN ORDER! I AM THE SWORD! GO!”

  He did hesitate a moment more. Magneblade was already gone, his axe carving away the wall at the back of the fort. Then he nodded and swept past me down the street.

  I backed up, BEAM sputtering now, but blasting the closest to charge. I planted myself in the bottleneck. A man alone, as the soldiers and Griidlords formed up behind me.

  The Green Men came, the tip of a wave of a hundred thousand murdering, drug-addled monsters.

  I leveled my sword at them and let CUT whisper into the sword, the light flickering hungrily.

  They said a Griidlord was a match for a thousand fighting men. I guessed I was about to put that theory to the test.