The wizard sighed, watching dead women calmly picking up the bloodless remnants of their felled sisters, and asked the cold blue sky above him, "Now, where were my thoughts, before this unpleasant little distraction?"

For the first time ever, it seemed the sky had an answer for such a query. A flight of falcons came pouring down out of it, swooping out from among the line of peaks in the north that had hidden their approach from Sornspire until the proverbial last moment. Gray falcons about thrice the size of the largest falcon Galath had ever seen.

Which meant, of course, they weren't falcons at all.

The tall blue man cursed, spun around, and raced back to the stair, raising his staff in both hands and awakening it to snarl with surging blue tongues of fire.

He hurled his first fire-bolts before he sprang onto the steps-which was about the time the foremost lorn had started to take their real shapes, and come swooping right at him.

Horned, mouthless skull-faces are poorly suited for triumphant laughter or the bellowing of battle cries, but lorn eyes are very good at conveying hunger and glee.

They were doing that now, as he blasted a lorn to ashes and another lorn swerved out and around the tumbling remains to come swooping in, batlike wings folded back, slate-gray head looming, barbed tail cracking as it swerved again at the last instant to rake blue-scaled hands and face with razor-sharp talons.

A second lorn didn't bother to swerve. Even as the blue man silently lost his grip on his staff, mouth open but no cry of pain roaring out, it crashed right into him, plucking the wizard off his feet and dashing him back against the stone steps with spine-shattering force.

Then all the lorn were swooping and tearing, the thin black staff tumbling forgotten down the stair as the slate-gray, struggling cloud tightened around those few steps at the top.