“That is impossible.”

“If we don’t, the gold will be lost with the sun. I’m not asking you to give it up—just take it out and mount guard over it. You’ll have your weapons, and if any human bearing arms comes close to you, you can kill him. I’ll be with you, unarmed. You can kill me too.”

It took a great deal more talking, but eventually they did it. I got the wounded who had been watching the Ascians to lay down their conti and harness eight of our destriers to the coach, and got the Ascians positioned to pull on the harness and heave at the wheels. Then the door in the side of the steel coach swung open and the man-beasts carried out small metal chests, two working while the one I had spoken to stood guard. They were taller than I had expected and had fusils, with pistols in their belts to supplement them—the first pistols I had seen since I had watched the Hierodules use them to turn Baldsnders’s charges in the gardens of the House Absolute.

When all the chests were out and the three man-beasts were standing around them with their weapons at the ready, I shouted. The wounded troopers lashed every destrier in the new team, the Ascians heaved until their eyes started from their straining faces ... and just when we all thought it would not, the steel coach lifted itself from the mud and lumbered half a chain before the wounded could bring it to a halt. Guasacht nearly got us both killed by running down from the perimeter waving my contus, but the man-beasts had just sense enough to see that he was merely excited and not dangerous.

He got a great deal more excited when he saw the manbeasts carry their gold inside again, and when he heard what I had promised the Ascians. I reminded him that he had given me leave to act in his name.

“When I act,” he sputtered, “it’s with the idea of winning.”

I confessed I lacked his military experience, but told him I had found that in some situations winning consisted of disentangling oneself.

“Just the same, I had hoped you would work out something better.”

Rising inexorably while we remained unaware of their motion, the mountain peaks to the west were already clawing for the lower edge of the sun; I pointed to it.

Suddenly, Guasacht smiled. “After all, these are the same Ascians we took it from before.”

He called the Ascian officer over and told him our mounted troopers would lead the attack, and that his soldiers could follow the steel coach on foot. The Ascian agreed, but when his soldiers had rearmed themselves, he insisted on placing half a dozen on top of the coach and leading the attack himself with the rest. Guasacht agreed with an apparent bad grace that seemed to me entirely assumed. We put an armed trooper astride each of the eight-destriers of the new team, and I saw Guasacht conversing earnestly with their cornet.

I had promised the Ascian we would break through the cordon of deserters to the north, but the ground in that direction proved to be unsuited to the steel coach, and in the end a route north by northwest was agreed upon. The Ascian infantry advanced at a pace not much short of a full run, firing as they came. The coach followed. The narrow, enduring bolts of the troopers’ conti stabbed at the ragged mob who tried to close about it, and the Ascian arquebuses on its roof sent gouts of violet energy crashing among them. The man-beasts fired their fusils from the barred windows, slaughtering half a dozen with a single blast.

The remainder of our troops (I among them) followed the coach, having maintained our perimeter until it was gone. To save precious charges, many put their conti through the saddle rings, drew their swords, and rode down the straggling remnant the Ascians and the coach had left behind.

Then the enemy was past, and the ground clearer. At once the troopers whose mounts pulled the coach dapped spurs to them, and Guasacht, Erblon, and several others who were riding just behind it swept the Ascians from its top in a cloud of crimson flame and reeking smoke. Those on foot scattered, then turned to fire.

It was a fight I did not feel I could take part in. I reined up, and so saw—I believe, before any of the others—the first of the anpiels who dropped, like the angel in Melito’s fable, from the sun-dyed clouds.

They were fair to look upon, naked and having the slender bodies of young women; but their rainbow wings spread wider than any teratornis’s, and each anpiel held a pistol in either hand. Late that night, when we were back in camp and the wounded had been cared for, I asked Guasacht if he would do as he had again.

He thought for a moment. “I hadn’t any way of knowing those flying girls would come. Looking at it from this end, it’s natural enough—there must have been enough in that coach to pay half the army, and they wouldn’t hesitate to send elite troops looking for it. But before it happened, would you have guessed it?”

I shook my head.

“Listen, Severian, I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. But you did what you could, and you’re the best leech I ever saw. Anyway, it came out all right in the end, didn’t it? You saw how friendly their seraph was. What did she see, after all? Plucky lads trying to save the coach from the Ascians. We’ll get a commendation, I should think. Maybe a reward.”