Valden lost his third rider on the twenty-fifth night.
The dive was clean. The approach was textbook. The high-altitude release from fifteen hundred feet, the adaptation that the shamans' atmospheric compression had forced, placed the frost bolt on the trajectory that fifteen hundred feet of descent and the compressed air layer's deflection combined to produce. The bolt struck the ammunition wagon behind the battery position at the angle that the high-altitude release dictated. The thermal detonation began. The wagon cracked.
The boomstick fire that rose to meet the climbing griffon after the release was the boomstick fire that twenty-five nights of attacks had trained the barbarian anti-air defense to produce: sixty weapons aimed at the climbing beast's trajectory, the balls rising in the converging pattern that sixty boomsticks' spread produced when sixty shooters aimed at the same target.
Sir Corwyn's griffon took seven balls.
