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His head snaps back For an exultant h his brain But then his head co the side, his mouth a wild rictus as he lowers himself to his horse and it explodes forward, faster than all the rest Two more rounds spark off his armor

I tre nostrils, frothinghooves A dozen horses filland toward the frailer wings

In the age of starships, you forget what anies forty thousand kilogras of my line The sudden acceleration of horseflesh into hu forces as the ans Men are literally pulverized froe Blood vessels rupture Spines collapse backward

Even as the friction of the corpses slows the horses, they do not stop their killing Hooves flatten skulls Teeth of racehorses trained for the conflict of the Hippodroles as e to crawl free, only to have their backs broken by the next steed

The horses bear down on the center of my line

“Flat!”

I fall backward before the onrushing wave, razor held in both hands, its poh ten centi a meter and a half into the air Fifty-three other armored men do the same a bare second before the horses trample us

Incandescent explosions of lights in my head

Unreal weight and sound Hooves sla into my armor, my helmet Underbellies, tails, bottoms of bare feet, of boots as I’ stampede But even horses made of one ton of h arh a field of razor blades undaunted We shred them

Gore like I’ve never seen pours down on us The screa horses are worse by far than those of ht over the blades so thin that in the darkness they cannot see them as they sever bones in half and open bellies and muscled chests so cleanly that the horses’ momentu and dying into the back of their felloho crushed our wings

Any Roround co the velocity fro it

With the Via Triu men, I stumble to my feet Blood obscuresout kicks lass eyeholes finally crack and I go down Try to stand My neck is sprained Maybe fractured So at allop I throw myself to the side just as a Gold rider leans sideways off her saddle, nearly parallel with the ground, and swings her razor down The blade peels a chunk of h, then skips sideways, and she’s past I hack blindly at the back legs of the horse but don’t see if I connect

That was Kalindora The Love Knight herself Out of respect for her treatment of our prisoners, I kept her with her men Now I pay for it

Someone hauls me up A horse chest hits me from the side and I’m lifted off my feet, kicked under several others and spun around and around until I crawl free and find a wall to guard ency release and rip off my helmet

The sound is unreal Indescribable Like an aniht in a blender Except it’s thousands of us in here Horses shattering men as they kick in their death throes Riders crushed underneath or thrown clean, to be sed by ht