I follow the duckboard raised above the grass that’s bruised and pasted down into the mud. The mud is becoming more slimy with blood. Under the boards I see a boot with a lower leg protruding. No sign of the rest of the body. Further on, dismembered limbs scatter the tussocks and track.

The wind batters against me and, somewhere within it, I catch the rasp of an Insect’s leg against its shell. I shrink back and stare around. I can’t see anything!

Behind me, something the size of a pony but with thin long legs skitters across the track. I glimpse a flash of red-brown shell. They’re everywhere! My scalp tingles: at any moment one will lunge out of the night and grab me before I even see it.

Far on the other side of camp, lights are clustering and moving away. I’ll try to reach them. If I can trust what I’ve heard, the palisade’s still upright over there.

The wind gusts from every direction carrying the brief sound of mandibles chopping closed, like a whetstone on a scythe blade. Closer to the centre now, the tents on either side are nothing but shreds. Inside one, I hear the sound of bone splintering. In each pavilion, ten men are dispatched by bites before they wake up, their bodies twisted into different postures. Ten men fused together into a slaughterhouse heap so unrecognisable I’ll have to use their dog tags to identify them.

The next tent stores the armour consignment that arrived yesterday. I hear crashes as clawed feet skid over the steel, knocking against piles of plate, jostling sheaves of pikes. I smell whiffs and hear scraping from the latrine shack. Insects are in there too, turning over the earth and eating the shit.

The path begins to zigzag. The earthquake has shaken some of its joined sections apart. Then I see it folded into peaks; the boards are still connected but standing on their ends.

Grey eye facets glitter. I glimpse an Insect face-on. It pulls back into the darkness between two pavilions. Its triangular antlike head moves up and down; it is tangled among crossed tent ropes, severing them with bites. Pieces of paper and torn pennons fly through the night, brushing the ground and catching against buckled ridge poles.

I see angular shapes of Insects standing, feeding on the corpses. A brush of air, something rears. Instantly I see jaws like stag beetle mandibles, then it crashes into the shield. Its jaws slide off the curved edge. I yell and swing my axe, feel it connect. I free the axe and bring it down again. It’s dead. It’s dead! Calm down! Short breaths rush in and out as I feel not think-how many more? I have to get away. I plunge down the track, running blindly. I’m on the verge of completely losing control, then I stop.

The track has ended. There are no more planks.

At the same moment a heavy gust blusters against my face carrying the unmistakable firm burnt copper scent of Insects. When as a child I lost my milk teeth, pulling at a tooth and turning it rushed a salty blood taste into my mouth, and I had a strange sore pleasure from turning a tooth on a flesh thread or biting down the sharp underside onto my gum. That’s what Insects smell like, and it’s so intense there must be hundreds. How have they appeared inside the camp? My jaw prickles as if I’m about to vomit. I gulp down saliva and I let out a scream to release the fear.

‘Jant!’ a voice answers, faint on the wind. It is Tornado, bellowing but I think I hear an edge to it as if he’s in pain. ‘Jant, where are you? Hayl, is that you?’

‘Tornado!’ I yell with all my strength.

‘Jant! Jant!’ Tornado sounds desperate. ‘Fuck-’

The wind’s noise rises higher and higher. If I open my wings, it will smash me into the ground.

Something whizzes past my face, with the gale, and thuds into the duckboard behind me. I crouch down to investigate. An arrow is sticking in the plank at a steep angle, its bodkin point embedded deeply. Its shaft and white fletchings are still quivering. I start to hear, but not see, more arrows hissing down. They pelt from the sky, from somewhere ahead of me, not spent, striking with force.

I raise my shield in front of my face and feel it jar. Arrows come down like hailstones sweeping across the track, thudding into the corpses, into the soldiers who are still alive but wounded, lying on the ground sweating and twitching. All the ground I can see is filling with arrows. Our archers must be a couple of hundred metres away. Why are they shooting at us?

I yell into the night, ‘Stop!’ and the wind tatters my voice.

Invisible arrows strike the board in front of my toes; one deflects off my shield and drops at my side. They catch in tent fabric. I hear them tap on an Insect shell and the clicking of articulated claws as it scuffles under fallen canvas.

The arrows buzz in well-timed flights, but I can’t hear any voice ordering the loosing. Who’s out there? Lightning-if it is Lightning-must have concluded that everybody is dead or beyond help. The archers will be terrified. They’re protecting themselves and they’re never going to stop. I hurry away from them, stumble over a shaft embedded in the track, and break it.

I catch a glimpse of a single flickering light ahead. It illuminates a white tent from inside. All around is dark so the tent, rectangular because it’s side-on to me, looks as if it is hanging in the air. The light moves slowly, in jerks, along at floor level. It inches towards the entrance; closer and closer. A sense of dread weighs on me because I know what I am going to witness next will be even worse. Whatever comes out of that tent is the last thing alive this side of camp and I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to have to deal with wounds so awful. It will be mutilated and driven so insane by agony it won’t even be human any more. I fervently hope that it dies before it emerges.

A lean hand clutching a lantern pushes out from the flap and Laverock crawls out on his hands and knees-head, shoulders, chest. I know him as a minsourai captain, a local with vital knowledge of Lowespass. Digging ramparts made him sinewy, with shorn hair and a face like a weathered leather bag. He was raised with the constant pressures of the Insect threat and Awian ambition.

An arrow snicks into the grass beside him, its flights upright.

‘Laverock!’ I cry.

He looks in my direction, not recognising me. As he draws his legs from the tent flap I see he doesn’t have feet. His feet have been bitten off above the ankle, though not cleanly because sharp tubes of white bone stick out from the severed ends: they look like uncooked macaroni.

Insect antennae flicker after him. Bulbous, faceted eyes follow and the thing strikes forward. Laverock’s eyes widen in terror. He pushes himself upright and tries to run on the stumps but his bones sink into the ground like hollow pegs. The Insect seizes his hips low down; its jaws saw over his belly. Laverock knows this is his last second. He snarls in fury as he falls and swings round the iron lantern dangling from his hand. He smashes it over the Insect’s head. Yellow-flaming liquid spreads over its brown carapace. I smell scorching chitin, then Laverock’s shirt and wings catch fire. His long primary feathers drip and shrink as they burn, as if they’re drawing back into his wings. The Insect bites through his body and with a shake of its head throws the top half towards me. The Insect and Laverock’s remains sink to the ground, welded together in the fire, vivid against the line of wrecked tents.

By their light I can suddenly see I’m standing at the edge of a vast pit. The flames jump up and shadow its far side, twenty metres away. I stare at it, uncomprehending: this should be the centre of camp. The conical hole gradually, steadily, widens. Turf breaks off under my feet and rolls into it. I step back, seeing that the slope is covered with debris. On the other side, the Sun Pavilion, collapsed down the incline, lies plastered to it like a gigantic wet sheet, trailing ropes still attached at their ends to dirty uprooted pegs. The brass sun bosses that top its main poles glint among its folds. Dead men are splayed out around and underneath it, pale and naked or half-dressed, some still in sleeping bags. As soil rolls down, they slide towards the base of the cone. Their limbs shift position with jerky marionette motions-they look as if they’re waving. Swords and broken camp bed frames rattle off stones in the soil as they slide; kitbags spill their contents.