The earl shook his head in ill-tempered wonder. “In place of me. In my God-damned place.”
“Sweet, it is a compliment to have your firstborn appointed to a high command.” She rolled to face him. Many fifty-year-old women might have hesitated to discuss high politics while naked. Ghause was not one of them. “Don’t be a child.”
He laughed. “Me? You want him as your captain because he’ll do your bidding. But when the Wild comes over the border, I’ll not be following the orders of your effeminate son.”
She smiled. “Mine. Not yours?”
The earl shook his head. “My seed, perhaps, but none of my blood, I swear. That one is all eldritch potions and cobwebs.”
“Parthenogenesis,” she said quietly.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“An Archaic word for a maiden making a child all by herself,” Ghause said. “What do you think my brother is doing with his Queen?”
“Christ only knows,” the earl said. He had his shirt on and his hose, and was buckling his garters. He didn’t have access to her sorcerous arts and he was five years older than she, but he still carried himself like a king, had solid muscles front and back, and when he buckled the garters below his knees, his calves were as good as any young gallant’s. “I had a messenger bird from a friend in Harndon who says he’s going to try her for adultery.”
Just for a moment, despite all her plans and all her vows and her desire for revenge, she felt for the Queen in Harndon. She felt something like kinship with her.
Not that her feeling of kinship would keep her from killing the Queen and her unborn child. Merely that she knew what he was, and that he was now, in a more elaborate way, doing to his young Queen what he had once done to his sister.
“Weak fool,” she said. “Weak, stupid, vicious and indecisive.”
The earl nodded. “But a damned fine jouster,” he said. “You hate him. You always have.” He narrowed his eyes for a moment. “We could have him killed.”
Ghause leapt from the bed and kissed him. “Sometimes, I actually love you. But no. By all the dark powers, husband—do you know what would happen if he were to die now?”
The earl shrugged. “War? Chaos? Nothing to us. In fact, it would be a better environment to build our own kingdom. If Gabriel is to be trusted.” His tone suggested that he was unlikely to trust the younger man with anything.
She frowned.
“Just because it doesn’t fit with your fiendish plots doesn’t mean that we can’t use it,” he said. “Listen, my lady. All our lives together, we’ve gone hand in hand—and kept our own secrets. I am content with that. In this instance, he’s a fool, and he’s threatening me with war. If he were dead—”
“The Galles would take his place. They’d use the girl-Queen as their pawn, and suddenly we’d be crawling with them.” She pulled a heavy wool-velvet robe over her naked body and rang for more wine.
“The Galles, my spies tell me, have troubles of their own,” he said. “Let’s just kill him.”
Ghause grew annoyed. “No,” she said.
“Because you have some plot already in motion,” her husband said.
“Yes!” she spat.
He laughed. “And all I get to do is fight the fucking sorcerer,” he said.
She shrugged. “Not even that, I fear,” she said. “His sorcery is too much for your army. And now he has an army of his own. Bide. Hold the castle and he will have other problems. He’s made two great enemies, and his time is running out fast.”
The earl sighed. “Woman, I am no more your tool than you are mine. ‘Bide’ is not a companionable word. Spring is coming—”
“And so is the sorcerer,” she said. “He is coming, and we will need all our strength to hold here until our son comes.”
The earl pursed his lips, rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Ah. Like that, eh? So we’ll have the fight here?”
She smiled delicately.
“Christ, woman, I’m your husband and your partner in a hundred crimes. You might tell me what you have planned!”
She leaned over, her eyes fixed on his. She leaned closer and closer, and then her pointed tongue flicked out like a cat’s and licked his lips.
“I might,” she whispered. “But that would spoil the surprise.”
Later, while forty knights pounded the pells in the courtyard and while the foot soldiers did their spear drill, she watched the Queen in a ball of rock crystal that was, to her certain knowledge, more than three thousand years old—perhaps as many as fifteen thousand. Some things were beyond her range of skills or belief. She suspected that it had been made by something truly alien, because when her concentration slipped, she could hear its makers haunting, a-rhythmic songs. And see them slipping like wraiths of slime through the caverns beneath the earth.
But she was many times the mistress of the stone, and she drove it south and east until she had the Queen, deep in her dungeon under the earth.
She missed her youngest son, Aneas. Without him she had no one with whom to discuss her plots. He was still near Albinkirk, serving with the field army. A knight on errantry. She’d watched him in the stone—fighting, flirting with a girl. The girl and her mother both looked familiar. She was pretty—
Ghause put a hand over the stone, and moved it and her will.
She watched the woman, whose hair was lank and whose lips moved constantly. Ghause watched her for a long time, trying to decide whether the woman had lost her wits or was acting. It was hard to know.
If her brother was going to kill his own wife, there was no need for Ghause to use the massive working on which she had laboured for eight months. The young Queen’s hermetical defences were formidable—doubly so, as she had clearly been trained by Harmodius. Ghause knew that to kill her unborn baby, she would have to strike massively and accurately and all at once. There would be no second chance.
But it would be delicious if, instead, he killed her himself. Deluded by evil gossip into believing his wife untrue—what a fool.
She smiled at the purity of her revenge. And how it dovetailed into her other plans.
After all, what had the prophecy said?
“The son of the King will rule all the spheres.” She smiled, and her heart raced with anticipation. She would turn his actions against him, rob him of a legitimate son and make her own sacrifice worth… everything.
But she still felt something for his Queen. When she had been green and beautiful, she had felt nothing but jealousy and malice for her—but now, watching her hang her head and mumble, seeing her soiled kirtle and the weight of oppression and betrayal on her young shoulders…
“I’m sorry for your baby,” Ghause said aloud. “But I’ll avenge you, too.”
Babies reminded her of how they were made, and she moved the stone’s view—moved it back and forth over the fields, adding first one guiding spell and then another.
She saw things that surprised her. She saw the Queen’s brother riding across the fields of the Albin. She thought it odd that he should be north of Harndon.
She followed her guiding spell north, and further north, and found her target. She glanced at her sons—Gavin was a handsome devil, and Gabriel looked like an archangel on a binge. She smiled.
And moved on to the nun. Sister Amicia.
Ghause had planted suggestions on the nun since the first time they’d met. She approved of the woman—liked her good sense and the width of her hips and her sense of humour. Gabriel needed a noble wife to bear him a son—to be, in time, Queen.
The little nun was not that woman.
But she would be the right ally, and the right mistress. And the right tool of control.
And she had power—deep, strong, well-trained power that grew and evolved almost before her eyes.
“You remind me of me,” she said aloud. And knowing that link between them, she made a very subtle working—the sort of working, in fact, that she might cast on herself. She had done it once before, to render the distasteful more
acceptable.
And now she passed her working carefully through the stone. She watched it strike home on its intended victim the way an archer watched a shaft shot high and far.
She smiled.
A hundred leagues north and west of Ticondaga, Thorn stood in his place of power, watching Ghause in the space between his raised hands. He was not wearing his human form, but a new stone form—a carefully evolved form of discs and whorls and stone coils that were laced together with cartilage and muscle taken from many sources. Thorn had all the bestiary of the earth at his disposal, now. He used it with brilliance and imagination and a certain dark elegance.
His new level of understanding the shifts of being that could be contained in his concept of reality—to put it loosely—included the knowledge that he could build into his power a subordinate working of enormous complexity that would continuously monitor and alter his form as circumstance required, even as he moved and shifted and had different requirements. So he could make his form of stone, and make the stone move. While this required a constant expenditure of ops, it also rendered him nearly invulnerable.
He had another form—he was already working on generations of them—in which he was almost entirely energy and smoke. But it was still too vulnerable to use except in special circumstances.
None of this crossed his conscious mind. Instead, he held his stone arms aloft effortlessly and watched Ghause practise her art. He watched her watch the Queen with growing frustration, having watched her prepare her spell for a hundred days and nights.
He had prepared his own working. Indeed, all his own plans now hinged on hers, an ironic twist that delighted him and annoyed his mentor immensely.
That, too, was good. Thorn was tiring of being Ash’s tool. He had probed the black space in his head thoroughly. He had spent considerable time rebuilding what he felt might be missing of his own thoughts and perceptions. He made some slight experiments in hiding things from the black space.
He had re-discovered how much he detested moths. And he had doubts.
Irony was not something that the master sorcerer could share either with his tools or his allies. An inconvenient impasse had been reached.
Thorn’s ally had gathered his army of unwilling slaves and his professional soldiers and the thin trickle of reinforcements he had received from Galle and moved them to the head of the lake above Ticondaga. Thorn’s own servants—Kevin Orley not least among them—had joined the Black Knight’s army.
Thorn took himself to them, his preparations complete. He crossed seventy leagues of virgin wilderness in the blink of an eye. He had learned to make the Wyrm’s way—to make a hole in his reality, and to travel through it.
He had learned so many things that sometimes he feared that at the moment of truth, he would not be able to find all his powers and employ them.
Nonetheless, he appeared in the camp of the Gallish army on the day he had planned.
If Ser Hartmut was appalled to have a giant stone golem of interlocking helixes appear in front of his great black silk tent, he gave no sign. Instead, he nodded to a squire. “Wine,” he said. “And a long spoon.”
Thorn might once have laughed, but almost all of the human had been burned out of him, leaving little beyond ambition and a thirst for knowledge. “I am here,” he said. His voice was deep, menacing, and alien, and his accent sounded curiously like the northern Huran.
Ser Hartmut nodded. “Then we can march on Ticondaga. It is only a matter of time before the earl’s patrols find us.”
Thorn did not move a pebble. “He will not find you.”
Ser Hartmut looked around. He motioned for De La Marche to join them. He took wine from his squire, and waved the boy away. “Find Ser Kevin,” he said.
Thorn might once have chuckled. “Ser Kevin.”
Ser Hartmut did smile. “I took the liberty of knighting him,” he said. “And providing him with some of the items of harness you had neglected to provide.”
Thorn considered a variety of responses, and Ser Hartmut’s desire to manipulate the Orley heir was transparent. But as he was finding more and more often, he didn’t care enough to make a response.
Ser Hartmut didn’t pretend to have a command council any more than Thorn himself. Having summoned the leaders, he now shrugged. “When do we march?” he asked.
“When I say,” Thorn answered.
“I have reconnoitered Ticondaga twice,” Ser Hartmut said. “Even with trebuchets and all the power of your ops, it will be a hard nut to crack. It will take all summer, unless I miss my guess.” His outthrust jaw suggested an uneasiness that Ser Hartmut seldom displayed.
He fears the reports he hears from Galle, Thorn thought. Well he might. But his power and his soldiers and his talent will all be here, serving me. Irony piled on irony. Thorn had begun to see deeply into Ash’s intricate plotting, and he had begun to be able to detect the malice—the deadly humour—of his vast mind.
Thorn thought that malice and humour might be his master’s very weakness, too. But he tried never to let such a thought lie outermost in the many layers of his own thoughts, and when he could not help but think such, he whirled it away into a labyrinth of deceptive analysis.
“No,” Thorn said over the multi-voiced conflict of his own divided mind. “No. The siege will not be that long.”
Ser Hartmut bowed cordially to Kevin Orley, who bent his knee in return like a Galle. Thorn frowned inwardly to see his creature subservient to a mere man.
Ser Hartmut shook his head very slightly. He was in full harness, the rich black of his armour shining with oil and careful maintenance. Kevin Orley was his complement, in a plain harness of unmatched, very plain steel which had been carefully oiled.
Orley stood differently. Thorn watched him carefully. Time passed differently for a hermetical master than for a mere ephemeral, yet Thorn thought perhaps Kevin Orley had experienced more than he.
“You have learned something new,” he said.
Orley met his eye. “I am beginning to learn discipline,” he said.
Ser Hartmut permitted himself a smile.
“As a captain?” Thorn asked.
“I can only discipline others if I have discipline myself,” Orley said.
“And you are a knight now,” Thorn said.
“I have that honour,” Kevin Orley said, his voice even.
“I was not asked,” Thorn said.
Ser Hartmut frowned. “It is traditional, when launching a great endeavour, to make knights.” He didn’t move or touch his face or wriggle or blink like lesser men. Thorn found him fascinating—a man who had voluntarily expunged so much of his humanity, yet had no access to Power. An enigma. With a magical sword of incredible power.
Thorn turned his body, the stones protesting as his unconscious hermetical working powered the stone into shape after shape, a smooth transition in many dimensions. “And you, De La Marche?” he asked. “Are you now a knight?”
De La Marche had begun life as a sailor, and risen to command. He was a merchant, a ship-owner, and a trusted servant of his king. But not a knight.
The merchant-adventurer looked away.
“De La Marche has declined the honour of knighthood at my hand. He holds himself unworthy,” Ser Hartmut said. Ser Hartmut’s feelings were naked for a second, and Thorn could see the man’s rage.
Even Thorn, at the apogee of his power and very close indeed to his goal, felt something closely akin to relief to see that Ser Hartmut was human enough to be enraged. And that De La Marche’s refusal had hurt him.
Thorn would have expected De La Marche’s refusal to cost the man everything—his life, reputation, honour, family. Ser Hartmut did not seem like the type to take a small revenge. But this sort of petty interaction was beneath Thorn now. He understood the great Powers better every day. As they evolved and developed, they lacked the time—or the potentia—to delve into petty matters. Great power required intense absorption. It left little time for revenge.
Petty revenge, anyway.
“Tell me when we will march,” Ser Hartmut said again.
“In two days, we will have the whole of our strength,” Thorn said. “Perhaps the Sossag will send their hundreds, or perhaps they will not. Either way, two days or perhaps three will see the last of our human soldiers. But I have other allies and other slaves—aye, and other avenues of attack.”
“And other enemies,” Ser Hartmut said.
Thorn swivelled back to face the Black Knight. “Other enemies?” he asked.
“The bears,” Ser Hartmut said. “I am told by Ser Kevin that the bears will stand against you.”
Thorn would have shrugged. “We will have twenty thousand boglins,” he said. “And ten thousand men. And hundreds of other creatures.” His black stone eyes swept over them. “We will crush the bears if they are foolish enough to fall under our claws. Otherwise, we will ignore them and take their vassalage later.”
“You avoid the question,” Ser Hartmut said.
Eventually, I will have to dispose of you. You, and Orley and the rest. All so greedy. Perhaps I should make De La Marche my ally.
“In two days, we will march. We will collect our allies from the north as we move—they will catch us up.” Thorn nodded. “I will cover us in a cloud of unknowing, and we will move as close to Ticondaga as my powers will allow.”
“And when will we strike?” Ser Hartmut insisted. “We’re one day from Easter.”
De La Marche spoke for the first time. “The ice isn’t off the lakes yet, and the woods are still full of snow.” He did not look fully at Thorn. “None of our men wish to march in this.” His voice all but begged. “Let the men celebrate Easter in peace.”
Ser Hartmut laughed. “I did not learn to win wars by doing what is easy.”
“Men will die in those woods,” De La Marche said.
Ser Hartmut shrugged. “None of them are any consequence to you or me or Master Thorn,” he said.
“We don’t have enough raquettes for all the sailors and the men-at-arms,” De La Marche said.
Ser Hartmut nodded. “Only the scouts will need them,” he said.