Raphael raised his right hand and called upon the storm. As he did this, thunder was heard and black clouds formed in the west. For a moment silence brooded over the plain, broken only by the deep roar of the machine city. The light failed rapidly and a saffron glare shadowed the hills and turned the fields to yellow-green. Great thunder-clouds rolled up like monstrous sulphur ships and advanced on the city of the Sorcerer. At first a gentle wind rustled the still leaves of the forest and bent the grass in rippling waves as it swept forward in gusts across the plain. All the animals crept away in terror to their lairs and forms in the thickets until the boy was left alone with the eagles. A blue-white flash of lightning forked across the sky and split into shreds of thunder, as the storm burst over the city. The trees that skirted the fields in a thin fringe bent like tassels in the wind. Lightning flashed in swift, stabbing spasms, ripping the clouds apart, while the noise of thunder deafened Raphael with the weight of crackling, tumbling sound. Although the clouds hid the sun, the whole plain was lit by the shivering glare of lightning. Rain fell in slanting, driven sheets. But the Sorcerer had not planned idly. At the first thunderbolt the whole city awoke to swarming activity. The skyscrapers suddenly bristled with metal spines. From where he stood, Raphael could make out armies of mechanicos swarming like black ants over the roofs, covering them with twisted metal nets, which caught the lightning and wove it into baskets of fire. Lightning crackled up and down the sides of the great buildings in great loops and whorls, while molten metal splashed through the air in white-hot showers as it fell hissing to the ground below. The wind howled in angry gusts, sweeping the great skyscrapers clean of their mechanical men, uprooting trees, tearing down steel sign-boards like scraps of paper, while the river rose and swept foaming and yellow across the plain, bearing on its surface trees and stumps and broken branches. The whole city will be swept away, thought Raphael, and the Sorcerer will surrender. I hope Cassie is safe. But he was frightened for all that and shivered where he stood. Would the river wash away the garden walls? So be it. Then Raphael saw an army of mechanicos appear upon the banks of the river, followed by tractors towing strange engines. Plows and steam shovels seemed to rise out of the tortured earth in companies. To Raphael watching on the hill, ditches and canals formed as though dug by magic. Through the rain, the boy could see a huge wall rising slowly, pushing back the river from the city, which loomed up like a craggy island in a yellow sea.