Solya was casting another spell. He held his hands up into the air at an angle, all the fingers pointed with his eyes looking straight along them, and silver lines lanced out from each finger and split into three. The arcing lines came down over the wall, each one landing on a different target—a man’s eye, a chink in his armor at the throat, the elbow of his sword-hand, the place directly over his heart.

The lines didn’t seem to do anything, as far as I could see. They just hung in the air, only barely visible in the dark. Then dozens of bows twanged at once: Marek had three lines of archers ranged up behind his foot-soldiers. The arrows caught onto the silver lines and followed them straight home.

I put out a hand, a useless gesture of protest. The arrows flew on. Thirty men fell at once, cut down at a stroke, all of them defenders at the breach. Marek’s soldiers shoved into the gap, spilling into the trench, and the rest of his army crowded in behind them. They began to try and push the baron’s soldiers back towards the first passageway.

Every inch was hard-fought. The baron’s men had put up a bristling thicket of spears and swords pointing out ahead of them, and in the narrow space, Marek’s men couldn’t come at them without driving themselves onto the blades. But Solya sent another flight of arrows going over the walls towards the defenders. Sarkan had turned away: he was shoving through his papers, looking for a spell to answer this new one, but he wasn’t going to find it in time.

I put my hand out again, but this time I tried the spell the Dragon had used, to bring Kasia in from the mountainside. “Tual, tual, tual,” I called to the strings, reaching, and they caught on my fingers, thrumming. I leaned out and threw them away, down towards the top of the wall. The arrows followed them and struck against stone, clattering away in a heap.

For a moment, I thought the silver light was just lingering on my hands, reflecting into my face. Then Sarkan shouted a warning. A dozen new silver threads were pointing through the window—right at me, leading to my throat, my breast, my eyes. I only had one moment to grab up the ends in a bunch and blindly heave them away from me. Then the flight of arrows rushed buzzing in through the window and struck wherever I had thrown the lines: into the bookcase and the floor and the chair, sunk deep with the fletched ends quivering.

I stared at them all, too startled to be afraid at first, not really understanding that I’d nearly been struck by a dozen arrows. Outside, the cannon roared. I’d already begun to be used to the noise; I flinched automatically, without looking, still half-fascinated by how close the arrows were. But Sarkan was suddenly heaving the entire table over, papers flying as it smashed to the floor, heavy enough to shake the chairs. He pulled me down behind it. The high-whistling song of a cannon-ball was coming closer and closer.

We had plenty of time to know what was going to happen, and not enough to do anything about it. I crouched under Sarkan’s arm, staring at the underside of the table, chinks of light showing through the heavy wooden beams. Then the cannon-ball smashed through the window-sill, the opened glass panes shattering into fragments with a crash. The ball itself rolled on until the stone wall stopped it with a heavy thud, then it burst into pieces, and a creeping grey smoke came boiling out.

Sarkan clapped his hand over my mouth and nose. I held my breath; I recognized the stone spell. As the grey fog rolled gently towards us, Sarkan made a hooking gesture to the ceiling, and one of the sentinel-spheres floated down to his hand. He pinched open its skin, made a hole, and with another wordless, peremptory gesture waved the grey smoke into the sphere, until all of it was enclosed, churning like a cloud.

My lungs were bursting before he finished. Wind was whistling noisily in through the gaping wall, books scattered, torn pages riffling noisily. We pushed the table up against the open gap, to help keep us from falling out of the window. Sarkan picked up a piece of the hot cannon-ball with a cloth and held the sentinel next to it, like giving a scent to a hound. “Menya kaizha, stonnan olit,” he told the sentinel, and gave it a push out into the night sky. It drifted away, the grey of it fading into just a scrap of fog.

All that couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes—no longer than I could hold my breath. But more of Marek’s army had already crammed into the trench, and pushed the baron’s men back towards the first tunnel. Solya had flung another arrow-flight and opened more room for them, but more than that, Marek and his knights were riding just outside the wall behind them, spurring the men onward: I saw them using their horse-whips and spears against their own soldiers, driving them through the breach.

The ones in the front ranks were almost being pushed onto the defenders’ blades, horribly. Other soldiers were pressing up behind them, and little by little the baron’s soldiers were having to give way, a cork being forced out of a bottle. The trench was already littered with corpses—so many of them, piled on one another. Marek’s soldiers were even climbing up on top of the heaps to shoot arrows down at the baron’s men, as if they didn’t care that they were standing on the bodies of their own dead comrades.

From the second trench, the baron’s men began flinging Sarkan’s potion-spheres over the wall. They landed in blue bursts, clouds that spread through the soldiers; the men caught inside the mist sank to their knees or toppled over in heaps, faces dazed and sinking into slumber. But more soldiers came on after them, climbing over them, trampling them like ants.

I felt a wild horror, looking at it, unreal.

“We’ve misjudged the situation,” Sarkan said.

“How can he do this?” I said, my voice shaking. It seemed as if Marek was so determined to win he didn’t care how expensive we made the walls; he’d pay anything, anything at all, and the soldiers would follow him to their deaths, endlessly. “He must be corrupted—” I couldn’t imagine anything else that would let him spend his own men’s lives like this, like water.

“No,” Sarkan said. “Marek’s not fighting to win the tower. He’s fighting to win the throne. If he loses to us here, now, we’ll have made him look weak before the Magnati. He’s backed into a corner.”

I understood without wanting to. Marek really would spend everything he had. No price would be too high. All the men and magic he’d used already would only make it worse, like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn’t stand to lose what he’d already spent. We couldn’t just hold him off. We’d have to fight him to the last man, and he had thousands of them left to pour into the battle.