Desiderata sat back. She frowned, and then, in a moment, her face changed. She smiled, and a shaft of autumn sun fell across her and she seemed to light the room, and the warm honey brown of her hair was like a pool of gold, lit by the star that was the emerald in her plain coronet, and the light of her face poured on them.
“So be it,” she said. “But if outward piety leads to inward sanctity, I will have the same in my hall.” She summoned power, and in a single wave of her puissance banished roaches and rats, and the tawdry decorations of a lost Holy Week vanished in little puffs of incense-scented smoke.
“I should have done that when first I arrived,” she said.
Harmodius bowed again. “Your Grace remains mistress in her own house,” he said. “I still feel I am needed in the north.”
“Go. Go well, my dear. Send us word. At a word from you, I will come with my little army and all my talents.” She smiled and held out her hand, and he kissed it. “But first, let me offer counsel and receive it, too.”
Harmodius bowed.
As he leaned close, she said, low and urgent, “He will try to kill you when you are alone, and outside our defences.”
Harmodius looked up into the warmth of her eyes. “Madam, the dragons have begun to fall. I have wiles enough to save my hide, and if I have not”—he smiled grimly—“perhaps it is time to have it over.”
“Master Smythe was ever our friend,” she said.
“No,” Harmodius said. “Just a foe in a friend’s guise. But if I make my guess, all the disguises will come off now.”
She turned pale.
“And you wish my counsel, ma’am?” he asked.
“Lady Jane,” Desiderata spat. “My husband’s paramour. Is pregnant.”
Harmodius shrugged.
Desiderata narrowed her eyes. “I cured him of his sister’s curse so that he could …” She paused.
Harmodius nodded. “It is nothing to you, my lady. Give her gifts and send her home to her family and offer to have her son or daughter at court when of age.”
Desiderata looked at him. “Just that?”
Harmodius looked over at Random, who looked away, and at Rebecca Almspend, soon to be Rebecca Lachlan, who raised an eyebrow as if to say, She’s all yours.
Harmodius knelt and put his hands between hers, like any man swearing his allegiance. “Most High Lady,” he said in Archaic. “You feel that she attacked you. But this is a child or a very young woman, who only did as any young person is inclined. Let her go; give her reason to thank you for it.” He lowered his voice so that she heard him only in the aethereal.
You are no common woman. Revenge is for the weak. This is unlike you.
And she cried out, I am alone! And what if they raise this bastard against my Constantine?
Harmodius shrugged. Take the advice of an old fool. She is no threat. Make her your friend, and her son your son’s friend.
In the real, she leaned forward. “You were ever the best of counselors,” she said, and kissed his brow.
Harmodius came down from the old corner tower that lurked over the moat, leaning slightly as if it was ready to fall. He came down the long widening steps in the turret, and in the courtyard, a pair of grooms held a superb riding horse, a magnificent bay already saddled and bridled, with a pair of leather satchels tied behind.
He had a strong feeling of déjà vu; a sense that he was not acting entirely on his own volition; a surprisingly strong memory of walking down these same stairs and out this same door to what seemed like the same horse. Had that been two years ago, or twenty? And since he had subsumed Richard Plangere, he had all the dead man’s memories; a dozen other days of going out from this very gate to ride.
He paused to ponder whether, if he had all the man’s memories, the man was actually dead. What life and death actually meant.
Very little.
Perhaps the religious had it right, after all.
Life and death. Gold and green. Names men gave to things they didn’t really understand.
He needed to spend the time to unpack Plangere. The memories hung there, the side product of his sublimation. Or perhaps the memories were the point and the accession of power was the side product.
Harmodius considered these things while a groom put a mounting block in front of him and while the magister bowed, thanked the men, and mounted. He had a six-day ride in front of him; time to work through many things he had ignored.
He paused, still inside the incredibly puissant wards of the walls of the castle, and raised his own defences. In the fastness of his mind, he checked the construction and colour of every great golden stone in his mind-shield; a talent he’d practiced every day with the queen, whose mind was indeed impregnable. But over that he layered screens that would deceive and a series of illusions and even a pair of surprises for an attacker, Harmodius’s first serious dabbling in the ars magika that the university was suddenly peddling.
It is like a rebirth, Harmodius thought. A renaissance of hermeticism in my lifetime, coincidentally timed when we, the mortals, most need it.
Then he checked the sword at his side and the buckler at his saddle bow. Because one indisputable difference from his last riding forth from this gate was that he was in a different body, a younger, stronger body that craved sex and exercise.
Bold enough, he thought, but not bold enough to tell the queen that I need to leave before I throw myself on her. He smiled at himself, and the force of his lust, and her kiss burning on his brow, and shook his head, because his head was old enough to mock the pretensions of his young body, and also to be amused at its ability to overpower the wise old head.
He thought of a love-spell of his youth. My pleasure is my power to please my love. My power is my pleasure in my power.
“Idiot,” he said fondly. And put his heels to his mount’s well-trained flanks.
He rode down the castle mount and into the East Cheaping, past the ruins of the Episcopal Palace and the neighborhoods devastated by fire. Because of his work with the poor, especially on healing the plague, men and women knew him, and so, unlike his solitary riding forth two years before, he rode slowly, his way clogged by many friends.
Because of this, and by coincidence, he was crossing the open market before First Bridge when the first of the antlered men sprinted into the market.
There were perhaps two thousand men and women in the market, and a hundred farmers had wagons or carts; sometimes merely a boy with a sack of onions or a young girl with ten round cabbages on her head. There were no merchants in the river; every hulk that could shoulder the seas had been pressed for military service.
He felt the darkness, and the antlered men found him utterly prepared.
They knew him, as well. Two of them sprinted straight at him.
He was confident enough in his layers of defences, active and passive, to spend a timeless interval looking at them.
And he saw.
He breathed, and in breathing he summoned power, and there he was in his palace, and he made himself ten magisters; and each Harmodius went to a different task and target. Two made bottles of hermetical power, drawing ops from his breathing and spinning off the containers like magikal glass-blowers, and a third took the constructs in hermetical claws and arranged them; three more did exactly the same task, arranging ops and making it to be fire. Because all things are fire and from fire cometh all things, Harmodius thought in the sanctity of his mind, and watched his ten twinned selves process a flow of ops that even a year before he could not have found, much less made real.
A ruddy, stag-headed man, his oversized genitals and massive pectoral muscles a caricature of power, pushed past a farmer’s wife and she drew breath to scream.
There were seventeen of them.
Harmodius raised his right hand, although the gesture was scarcely necessary anymore, and he felt the power run down his arm, although this, too, was really a symbol. His eyes widened a fraction and he cast … no words, no rising tide of song,
no passion. The power passed through him and out, and every one of the seventeen stag men was encapsulated in a hermetical bottle, and in each one, a fireball as hot as the surface of white-hot steel fresh from the blast furnace flared and burned for as long as each had fuel—a fraction of a second.
Air flew into vacuum, as any alchemist knew, and seventeen thunderclaps sounded as one, the sound ringing from the front of the cathedral and pulsing off the walls of the castle above them to frighten thousands of gulls and ravens into sudden flight.
Harmodius stood alone on the wide plane of the aethereal, searching.
Ash? he called.
But no one answered.
He was ready to fight, even alone, and as he searched the aethereal landscape of the city, which was nothing like the real because it had gradients, hills and valleys and cesspools that had nothing to do with physical geography and everything to do with realities like pain and love and lust and death …
“Shit,” Harmodius said out loud. Elsewhere in the city there were people screaming.
He could see them. He reached through the aethereal, reckless now, burning them where he found them, but some had already set themselves off to burst like summer puffballs, and the spores of the new contagion hung in the air.
He turned his horse and rode back to the gates, to find Ranald Lachlan. And the queen.
The Vale of Dykesdale—Ser Gavin Muriens
Nikos, master grammarian of the Imperial University, had become, ipso facto, the magister maximus of the army. Wearing his academic robe over a coat of maille made him look not dangerous, but curiously harmless. Only an eating knife and a pen case dangled from his belt. He stood squinting into the unnatural darkness. Beyond him, men were cutting trees at noon by candlelight, and at his back, the retreating army had to be guided with torches as if they were moving at night. The smell of burning rock filled the air.
Master Nikos fiddled with the heavy wooden-rimmed spectacles on his nose. He had Gavin’s squire holding a book, and he wrote a note in neat Gothic letters with hermetical black ink before he looked up like a puzzled owl in his heavy-lensed, ivory-framed glasses. He shook his head and glanced at the Faery Knight. “I don’t know what the hell happened,” he said.
Tapio frowned. “Nor I, magissster. But I will guesss that one of them fell. And I sssee that one was our ally. Sssadly.”
The magister licked his lips as if he could taste the aethereal. He glanced at Tamsin, who appeared, as ever, as fresh as the break of a new dawn.
“To my mind, none of their kind are allies,” he said after a moment.
Gavin Muriens stared west over his latest ambush site. “I hope you are wrong. I liked him, and he’s an ally.” He glared at the grammarian. “I know allies I have trusted less.”
“Harmodius does not trust them, and he is magister maximus,” Master Nikos said. “I met the Wyrm at Dorling. That one is a master at pretending to be a man, and yet he is no man. Charming, devious, and manipulative. As good a candidate for Satan as the one we face now. My order …”
Tapio sighed. “Here they come,” he said, pointing at a veritable wave-front of hastenochs flowing along the meadows that led to the stream crossing. “Let us fight the monster of today.”
The grammarian bent his head in agreement, entering his palace. “Apologies,” he muttered absently.
Gavin watched the first heavy arrows fall on the antlered creatures. “We’re starting to lose more than we win,” he said. “I know this feeling from other fights. You don’t lose in one blow. You take a hit here and a blow there, you get rocked, your balance slips, you don’t have a great grasp on your weapon, and then suddenly you are lying on your back.”
“We are far from beaten,” the grammarian said. “He is absent from the battlefield today.”
Gavin set his face. “I wish I was sure of that. Or that you are wrong, and we didn’t just lose our dragon.”
Out in the reeds at the edge of the river, the hastenoch struck the buried stakes set in the mud, and died, impaled, and the creatures behind the wave front pressed the leaders into the traps. It was Harald Redmede’s idea; the royal foresters were the masters of traps.
Master Nikos took off his spectacles, wiped them, and closed his grimoire with a snap. He pointed out over the massacre. “We are not losing,” he said.
Gavin Muriens fingered his axe. “It is the second day of our retreat from N’gara,” he said. “Every day we use another trick; we’re teaching them to make war. We will run out of tricks before they run out of bodies. And they have no shortage of bodies.”
“Perhaps it is time to take some risks, then,” the Morean grand mage said. He tasted the aethereal once more and frowned as if he misliked something he found. But then, more suddenly than most human mages, Master Nikos gathered potential into ops, spread his fingers, and unleashed a carefully crafted word, a spell that unleashed small spheres of compressed workings, each a ball of lightning. He studded them across the back of the traps, and for an instant, every man and woman on the little ridge could see the words like glowing marbles across the stream.
Tapio glared at him. “That isss a mad risssk. You could draw our enemy to usss!”
Master Nikos watched a thousand creatures reduced to ash in a single heartbeat—one of the most devastating workings he had ever thrown—and smiled. His smile made Gavin flinch.
“Ash is not the only power of this world,” the grammarian said. “And we will not triumph through caution. Today, our enemy is … indisposed.” His old eyes glinted. “Or so I wager.”
“How do you know?” Gavin asked.
“Master Smythe, I must suppose, has handed him a little defeat in the north. I can see it. And he is overspent, and now I will cash his bills.” Magister Nikos was academic and superior; but the power was rolling through him.
“What does that mean?” Gavin asked.
“I just spelled his name in letters of fire and he didn’t respond,” Master Nikos said.
He cast again. Ash’s vanguard continued to die.
The old grammarian laughed. “By God,” he said. “I have always wanted to do this.”
He raised his arms and poured destruction on his foes.
He only lasted a few minutes, but in those minutes, a generation of cave trolls was annihilated, and no being came to shield them. The hastenochs were roasted alive; the wardens raised their shields and survived, most of them, but the larger creatures were destroyed. Wyverns fell, wings afire, and a rolling wave of white fire flowed over the bogglins, and Ash did not manifest.
For the first time in weeks, the Army of the Alliance held a position for an entire day. And then, wily in victory, Gavin left his fires burning and slipped away into the cover of night, and Tamsin sang her songs of deception, and the alliance vanished into the great North Woods and left Ash with piles of his own dead and his own rage.
Arles—The Red Knight
The griffon’s wings reached out as if to grab the air, and the golden feathers rippled as if each pinion had a mind of its own; the saddle pressed into Gabriel’s gut, and then they were down, the lion’s legs racing along the ground, the dust rising around them.
Gabriel was almost used to it. Almost. Almost, he could look forward to flying, and not feel the pit of his gut flinching, the way he had once felt about hermetical classes with his mother.
Love you, the great monster said.
In answer, as he kicked his legs out in his dismount, he put his arms around the feathered neck and squeezed, and the griffon gave a sign of contentment not unlike a purr.
Ariosto had recovered quickly from the fight with Rhun and the ensuing raid on the Necromancer’s not-dead. But he ate too much, and with half the population of Arles teetering on the edge of starvation, the griffon’s appetite was dangerous.
And Gabriel needed to talk to Tom Lachlan. The hourglass was running, every hour counted, and Gabriel had to do this in person.
Gabriel was greeted with cheers, which, despite war, fame, e
xhaustion, and the exhilaration of flying, he still found delightful. He was met by Bent and by Long Paw, who was officer of the day. Corner, the baillie of the Venikan marines, came, bowed, and received a scrap of parchment with the duchess’s private seal.
“How’s Tom?” the Red Knight asked Long Paw.
“Very much hisself,” Long Paw said. “Your majesty.”
Gabriel smiled. “Are we ready to move?”
“It’s like that, is it?” Long Paw asked. They were passing practice butts, already erected and in use. Twenty archers were shooting and another fifty were waiting and Gabriel had a moment’s crise de coeur as he realized how few of them he actually knew, considering that every one of them wore the red surcoat.
He nodded to No Head, who stood with a bogglin. Both had bows strung, arrows on string, ready to loose at distant butts.
Gabriel paused. “You must be the only bogglin in the whole of the Antica Terra,” he said.
Long Paw put a hand on the thing’s wing cases. “Urk of Mogon. He tied with Cully in the long bowls at the Dragon’s Deed.”
Gabriel, who, despite being emperor, was not immune to guardroom gossip, took the creature’s hand. “I’ve heard about it from Cully,” he said. “So they recruited you?”
The four mandibles cracked open, but almost no sound emerged.
“He’s quite shy,” Long Paw said. Or Ser Roberto Caffelo, as men sometimes called him.
“And this is Heron,” No Head said.
Gabriel had to think for a moment. It annoyed him that there were men in his company whom he’d never met. That men might die in his service and be unknown to him. That was not what he had wanted at all when he started this.
“I … am … honoured …” Urk said.
“We’re lucky to have you,” Gabriel said. “Do we have armour to fit?”
Long Paw nodded as if he’d hit exactly the right question.
No Head grinned. “Sukey has two girls and Gropf sewing and has had since Venike. He’s goin’ to have the nicest arming cote in the company.”
“Fer a bug with six arms, that is,” Tippit said. “How do ye, Cap’n?”