'The very words Lord Styrax spoke to me,' whispered Hain beside Amber, 'the day he gave me the assignment.'

'The idea was yours?'

Hain gave a small shake of the head. T wish I could claim it, but he led me to it by his words. Only a fool wouldn't have worked it out.'

And so begin the lessons on how to think like more than a soldier, Amber thought wryly. I remember them well! Sadly, you won't enjoy all of them quite so much.

And further conversation was precluded by a new sound coming from the city. There were faint stirrings of movement on each of the hills. This far away it was hard to make out any detail, but because of what he had heard of Tor Salan's defences, Amber had a good idea what was happening.

Curled up on the ground was an enormous hinged arm of steel, stone and brass, fifty feet long. The 'shoulder' of this arm was connected to a rampart of reinforced stonework, from which ran four narrow passages, like gutters. A throne-like seat of stone was set into the front, where the lead mage would sit facing the plain beyond. There were a dozen more mages in each of the channels, all feeding their power into the lead man, who focused it and used it to animate the arm. As blistering trails of magic ran up and down the arm's brass rods, so the gigantic fingers would begin to twitch, then rise and flex as the arm itself rose up into the air. Within moments it would be ready to start grabbing rocks from the piles stacked untidily around the position and lob them with uncanny accuracy into any approaching army. The Giants' hands would quickly decimate the troops; total destruction would not be far behind.

'Look; there's the first, far right,' Hain whispered.

Amber saw the jerk of movement as one of the arms lifted into the air. From where they stood it looked like a stalk of corn shooting up in a field. No, Amber corrected himself, nothing so meek; a dog raising its hackles, perhaps, or a porcupine its spines.

In quick succession the other Hands rose jerkily into position. Amber couldn't begin to estimate the amount of magic required to lift such weights; he guessed every one of the mages would be stretched to their utmost limits.

As the cavalry regiments cantered towards the Giants' Hands in neat formation, the men in grey bearing their banner of negotiation had reached the halfway point. They were riding hard, as if desperate to keep ahead of the soldiers.

Let's hope the dog doesn't get nervous and snap at the first hand it sees, Amber thought.

The enormous weapons twitched as the grey men passed the range markers and continued. Several dipped, moving with remarkable speed and grace to grasp boulders and twist back into a throwing position, knuckles resting on the ground so the mages didn't have to hold the weight indefinitely.

'Come on, you bastards,' breathed Hain, craning forward, 'wait for your orders before firing, I don't want to have to explain that to Lord Styrax.'

Despite himself, Amber grinned. Seconds passed and Hain's prayers were answered as the group in grey passed unharmed, no hail of enormous bits of rubble filling the sky.

The Bloodsworn and the cavalrymen were still well short of the thousand-yard marker, and they would stop before they reached it, for they were only a feint. The battle – and the siege – would be won by that handful of men in grey cloaks. Amber found himself holding his breath as the delegation reached a safe point and stopped, supposedly waiting for emissaries from the city to come out and negotiate with them one final time.

But before Tor Salan's mercenary captains could organise an official reception, the men in grey produced horns from under their cloaks and began to sound a crisp series of notes. Amber was too far away to hear the tune clearly, but he didn't need to: he'd heard the same notes as they'd marched on Thotel: Chetse army orders, played on the long horns that curled around a man's body.

The call to arms was played twice in quick succession, and in the silence that followed the men threw off their cloaks. For a moment nothing happened, then the horsemen turned and advanced on the nearest Hand. The Land held its breath with Amber, waiting for the tipping point – which came in the form of a sudden flurry of activity around the Giants' Hands as the ranks of infantry defending the mages formed up in protective wedges.

'You have agents in place?' mused Emissary Jerrer, a look of dispassionate curiosity on his face. 'But how to deal with so many mages? And what about the defending soldiers? You surely cannot have an army of agents.'

'A handful, no more,' Lord Styrax replied, riever taking his eyes off the city. It was clear that there was fighting going on. In no more than a minute the main gate of Tor Salan was opening and more troops were flooding out.

'I confess you have me perplexed, my Lord,' the emissary said. Amber could hear a hint of admiration in Jerrer's voice.

'It's simple, Emissary, the defenders of Tor Salan quite rightly considered their newly recruited Chetse mercenaries to be ideal for the job of defending their most important weapons.'

'And they were wrong to do so?'

'Under normal circumstances, no. However, these are not normal circumstances, are they? The advance group I sent were not messengers, Emissary, but the tachrenn of the Ten Thousand, led by General Dev himself.'

'The Ten Thousand?' gasped Jerrer, suddenly realising what was going on. 'You allowed those Chetse soldiers to travel north to become mercenaries, ensuring enough of the Ten Thousand were among them to carry opinion? And once they see their generals under your banner, they will turn on the remaining troops, their erstwhile comrades, and slaughter the mages? But there are hundreds of mages out there! Lord Styrax, surely your losses will be vast?'

'Captain Hain?'

Hain flinched; he hadn't been expected to be called upon to explain the plan, but when all faces turned to him he rallied and took up the explanation.

'Lord Styrax suggested to me that such an expenditure of energy as would be required for the Giants' Hands would require many rituals, and a careful bonding of power. Investigations showed that the mages are linked to each other, and thus cannot break those links quickly or easily.' He cleared his throat noisily, his discomfort evident.

Amber felt a certain sympathy for the man: he'd been trained to combat; he'd not been taught how to lecture an audience of dignitaries in front of the tribe's heroes. No one was looking at him, so he gave his captain a thumb's-up sign.

Hain nodded very slightly, gave himself a metaphorical shake and continued, 'The magical energy is largely contained within the arm itself. It flows from the linked mages and is stored within the brass rods. With sufficient troops on the field the mages can be neutralised before they have started any significant defence.'

'Neutralised.' Jerrer looked startled by the word, as though 'slaughtered' would have sounded more acceptable.

'This is war,' said General Gaur in his deep, growling voice. 'Unless the Patriarch of the Mosaic Council is more of a fool than our intelligence suggests, he will surrender the city and it will cost only a few hundred lives.'

'But still, Tor Salan is a haven for mages – they are crucial to the city at all levels of society…' Jerrer's voice tailed off.

Mages were the backbone of many societies. The rest of the Land would take note of what happened in Tor Salan.

'This will serve as a lesson,' Gaur replied. 'To oppose Lord Styrax is folly; the extent of damage done to any city-state will be dependent on how long it takes them to accept that.'

The beast-man was impassive as always. Amber had shared more than a few skins of wine with the general, but he had never been able to guess Gaur's mood from his demeanour. You could tell when the half-human was thinking, because his jaw worked constantly, pushing his long lower canines through the tangled fur on his cheeks, but beyond that Gaur surpassed even the Dharai, the Menin warrior-monks, for impassiveness.