Tornado’s voice peals out again, ‘Jant!’ I look up to see the giant man standing on the far bank beset by seven Insects, five on the slope in front of him and one on his either side. Yet more Insects are running up out of the crater. Tornado backs himself against an empty ambulance cart. It has 1ST DIVISION LOWESPASS SELECT roughly stencilled on the side, and its spoked wheels have curved boards nailed to the rims, to widen them and prevent them sinking in the mud.

Tornado’s breeches are slashed and blood wells up from red cuts underneath. It flows down his leg from a deep wound in his thigh. His denim shirt is unbuttoned; his big hands curl around the shaft of his double-headed axe. Every second he is taking wounds that would kill me outright.

An Insect below him darts forward but Tornado swings the axe under its mandibles with such force that he decapitates it. He hews down the ones on left and right with a fluid movement. At his feet a mound of carcasses bleeds thick pale yellow haemolymph down the widening pit. Two more Insects run up the slope and over its rim. He deals one a massive blow, cleaving its thorax through. The other seems to brush past him with a movement of its head but it opens a huge streaming gash in the roll of fat over his unfastened belt buckle. Tornado bellows.

He starts to droop forward. He clutches at the cart for support; it rocks on its curved boards. His knees sag and his skin is pallid. He kneels, one knee then the other, head bowed. I can’t see his face.

I watch as an Insect climbs the cart from behind, crests the top, appears above Tornado’s head as a spiked silhouette, with actions like a jointed puppet. It reaches down to Tornado’s rounded shoulders. It starts to feed.

Under their weight, the edge of the pit gives way and they tumble. Tornado rolls, unconscious and arms loose, down the slope. He hits the edge of the mass of debris and lies still, near the bottom. Soil continues to crumble away; the cart’s front wheels jolt over the edge. It teeters and then runs straight down the slope. Its wheels’ boards slap and leave footprints, its dragging hafts plough furrows. It runs over Tornado’s outstretched arm and fractures it, impacts into the duckboards and broken tents, and comes to rest upright on top of him, its four wheels caging him in.

Tornado’s down. What chance do I have? The oil is burning off Laverock’s Insect and its light is dying down. The shadows shift and I see the base of the pit, where soil has been swept aside from the pale grey bedrock. It has been brushed clean. A wide crack runs across it, separating it into two slabs like deeply buried gravestones. The gap transfixes me-it is pure black-so black that as an illusion it seems to jump and shimmer. I stare at it as arrows still whicker and thud around my feet.

A flash of movement on my left, and an Insect’s head with open mandibles lunges at my waist. My elbow’s levered up, and before I can stop it, the head is under my shield. I flinch away inside its jaws, with a fast reaction but I can’t dodge far enough: it turns and plunges its open left mandible into my stomach like a dagger. I go rigid with the shock of it penetrating. It tosses its head like a bull goring and I feel the razor mandible gouge upwards. My skin parts before it. My loose hauberk rucks up over its head with a metallic rasp. Its cold jaw slits all the way up and hooks under my lowest rib. It tries to continue its carving slice and pulls me onto the tips of my toes. By luck, I stumble backwards and slip off the point.

With my hand clawed I rake over the bastard thing’s eye but my nails have no effect and I hate myself for reverting to act like a Rhydanne and scratching, while my ice axe drags on the ground.

My strength fails quickly. I raise the axe and bring it down between its eyes, into its forehead plate studded with three smaller eyes and dimpled antennae sockets. The frons plate cracks across like a nutshell and one side lifts up: I glimpse the base of its compound eye rooted in a damp membrane underneath.

The Insect rears up and shoves me. I topple backwards and fall. I brace myself but I’m surprised to find I’m still falling. My wings open instinctively. The pit’s edge tilts up into the sky above me. I hit the slope hard with my left wing under me and-crack!-its bone breaks.

This isn’t my camp bed. Where the fuck-? No: I’m lying on my back on the slope with my wing buckled underneath me and I had better not faint again. My right arm is outstretched, the strap around my wrist is holding me attached to the axe pick still embedded in the Insect’s head.

It lies flat; its head moving left and right in its death throes tugs at my arm. Its mandibles open and close. Its flattened forelegs kick back and forth, scooping soil off the top of the slope. Turf chunks and grainy dirt sift down on top of me, covering me lightly all over.

I clutch one hand instinctively across my stomach but the gash is too long to hold together and my fingers sink under the edge of the flap of skin. It is warm and very slick. I feel a loop of gut spill out over my arm. I look down and see it adhering to the ground, picking up pieces of soil and grass blades. Unable to stop it, I watch it uncoil out of my midriff from under the mail shirt. The guts slither over each other; they are different shades of grey and firm to the touch.

All I can see of my wing is the bicep and a sharp shard of broken bone sticking out of the muscle close to my body between the black feathers. As I breathe out, air rushes out of the hollow bone. The air sac inside it inflates slightly out of its pointed end. It is a very thin, moist and silvery membrane. I know that Awians have two air sacs deep in their backs and in their limbs’ long bones nearest the body; humerus and femur, but I’d never seen one balloon out before. I breathe in, dizzy from shock and lack of air, and it inflates. I exhale and it flutters where it’s ruptured and the air flutes out. Under the feathery skin around it, a blister starts to grow as escaping air is trapped there. Oh, fuck. That’s me fucked then if I’m breathing through the bone.

The ground shakes but I don’t roll further down the slope because I’m anchored to the dead Insect at the top. I can’t muster the energy to turn myself over and crawl. I can’t move. I’m going to die here. I have to do something, anything, not just give up. The wind gets under my broken wing and blows it around, grinding as it twirls on the bone. Between gusts it settles down slowly on top of me, then the wind picks it up again. I take my hand from my ripped stomach and reach out to flatten it against the ground but the feather tips still curl up.

The agony begins. It is fiery and sharp, a white-hot blade the length of my side. I lie with my cheek in the cold, uneven soil like a toad’s back and scream. Mud grains get into my mouth and coat the back of my tongue. I grit my teeth and they grate against the surfaces. I feel soil filling my nostrils, I retch with the earthworm smell of loam and cut roots. I scream wordlessly with all my strength, trying to relieve the pain. A human or Awian would scream for help, but Rhydanne don’t because Rhydanne know there is no help to be had.

I can feel the sweat trickling out of my hairline and a stream of blood running freely out of my side, into the ground. I didn’t know I had this much blood.

The uneven piles of dirt close beside me, that I know are tiny, now seem as impassable as mountain ranges, and dark with the organic matter of rotting soldiers…whom I will soon join.

The black sky rains arrows. The wind’s noise is a great distance above me; it doesn’t affect me any more. I feel a warm patch spreading between my legs: I have wet myself. I begin to suffer from an over-bearing sense of shame. What will people say when they find out I’ve wet myself and my trousers are sticking to my crotch? But I will be long dead by the time they find me, if they find me at all.