Gabriel met Tom in the hall, cloaked in artificial anonymity to save time. “Straight to bed, gentles,” he said. “We ride at dawn.”
“I thought we was riding all night,” Tom said. “And that’s a party or I’m a blind leper.”
Gabriel shrugged. “I’m running behind. We just crowned George as Caesar. Emperor-heir-apparent.”
Tom laughed. “I’ll just toast the wee man before I totter off to my mattress, then,” Tom said. “Or ye could get yer wee arse mounted and we’d be away.”
“I’d rather leave in the morning, and I’m the emperor,” Gabriel said. He was very slightly drunk.
“You just want Blanche another time,” Tom said. “Who’s to blame ye?”
But regardless of any further endearments, the sun had not risen when he was fully dressed and mostly armed.
He kissed his wife. “I’ll be back. Two weeks, I hope.”
She sighed. “I’m really about to be empress,” she said. “By myself.”
“You have George and Clarissa and Michael and Kaitlin and Nicodemus,” he said. “And Master Julius. But yes, my love.”
“A year ago I was a laundress,” she said. “In point of fact, as you like to say, I was a laundress four months ago.” They had reached the point in their relationship where each had adopted a legion of the other’s speaking ticks; point of fact was one of them.
He kissed her again. “That was then. This is now,” he said, and dry-eyed, went out.
Jock MacGilly was ironing. Badly. Blanche was tempted, but she did not fall. Instead, despite the hour, she passed into the scriptorium, went into the aviary and checked and fed all the messengers herself, then sat down with the night’s dispatches and began to read.
Down in the courtyard, Gabriel stood, now fully armoured, as Anne brought Ataelus, his tall black warhorse, to the mounting stool. Michael held the reins.
“I can’t believe you are leaving me,” he said.
“You are the Megas Dukas now,” Gabriel said. “Your time as an apprentice is over. You and Blanche are the helm.”
“Why don’t you take the helm and I’ll go hunt the Necromancer?” Michael asked.
“Because I am probably the third or fourth best human mage in the circle of the world, and this is an exercise in magistery,” Gabriel said. He got a leg over his gigantic horse, who grunted.
“Then why is Tom going?” Michael said. He knew he sounded like he was whining. He was whining.
“Because he’s the best killer I’ve ever met.” Gabriel moved his hips back and forth, establishing his seat. “And since you and Tom are equally unhappy, I must have done something right.”
“Tom’s just mad you chose Sauce,” Michael said.
“Advise Blanche,” Gabriel said, taking a white staff of command from Toby. Ser Tobias. “Pray for victory. Make sure—”
“That you get a digest of incoming messages. I know!” Michael patted Gabriel’s armoured knee.
Both men smiled.
Across the yard, Tom Lachlan vaulted onto the back of his eighteen-hand-high warhorse in his full blue-black armour. Men cheered.
Bad Tom snapped an order, and the casa, Gabriel’s personal retinue of knights and archers, fell in, a neat column of twos, every man leading a spare horse. The casa had once been four lances; now it was twenty: twenty belted knights, twenty armoured squires, twenty of the most expert archers, twenty veteran pages, all of whom wore turbaned bassinets and maille shirts and carried light crossbows. Adrian Goldsmith, the artist and Atcourt’s squire, carried the banner of three lacs d’amours on a field all sable. It rippled and snapped in the dawn breeze. Anne Woodstock waited by Ser Gabriel with the casa’s new trumpeter, an Etruscan: Alessio Monteverdi. He was tall, gangly, and ludicrously well read; Gabriel barely knew him, as he’d been recruited by Sauce in Berona. Behind him was the new page, an Islander, Jon Gang; short-legged and cheerful, he had signed on to the company after the coronation and had served two other knights and was ready to be a squire. He wore the scarlet jupon as if unaccustomed to so much finery, and alone of all the men and women in the yard, he wore his black bycocket backward on his head.
The casa filed out of the gates. Down on the plain below, Count Zac had his Vardariotes formed in a column of fours—almost three hundred easterners.
“Michael,” Gabriel said. He reached into his breastplate and handed a roll of parchment to his former squire. “A letter for Blanche in the event of my death,” he said. He took a chain from around his neck. “And the key.”
It didn’t look like much.
“If we fall, you take Sauce and go. Leave Clarissa to hold here; this place has sorcerous protections as good or better than those at Lissen Carak. Understand me? This isn’t just an order; it is the only hope we’ll have.”
“I understand. What if you and Sauce both fail?” he asked.
“You really want to know?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes,” Michael answered.
“Then you have a choice. Stay here until everything else falls, or go and die at Lissen Carak. Hope for a miracle. Ash can be a fool; Gavin and the alliance may have a fighting chance even without us.” Gabriel shrugged. “There may be miracles in store. But to me, nothing has changed, and we need to win and win and win to even get a place at the table. Oh, and read everything in the yellow tab. Every word.”
Michael nodded. “Yellow tab?” he asked. “Yellow tab …”
“Until now you didn’t know there was a yellow tab,” Gabriel said. “Read it.”
Michael nodded. “I will. You go win.”
Gabriel smiled. “Generally, we do,” he agreed. “That’s why I’m so popular.”
He smiled.
Michael turned his head and saw Morgon Mortirmir in a passionate embrace with his young wife.
It went on and on.
People began to laugh.
Mortirmir surfaced. And spluttered. He turned bright red, and a little flame licked at the ends of his fingers.
Tancreda smiled beatifically.
“Let’s ride,” Gabriel said. But as the words left his mouth, Kronmir appeared at the top of the great hall steps, and Blanche was behind him. The iron-clad clip-clop of the heavy horses going out under the portcullis sounded like the footsteps of some approaching doom.
Kronmir came out to the emperor’s horse and handed him a flimsy straight from a messenger bird. Gabriel read it while Blanche came down the steps. She climbed the mounting block and waited.
Master Smythe dead.
Gabriel found that he had tears in his eyes. He looked down at Blanche. She looked up at him.
“Go quickly, and win,” she said. “Oh, Gabriel!”
Oh, Gabriel. Someday, perhaps tomorrow, I will receive a bird, and it will be you who is dead, and you will expect us to march on.
And we will, by God.
She kissed him.
“And I almost forgot,” she said, and gave him a sleeve of sheer silk, cunningly removed from a sheer wedding-night shift and embroidered with his motto.
As soon as he saw it, he knew where it had come from, and he smiled. He extended his left hand, and she pulled the loose sleeve over his golden armour and tied it by points to his red surcoat. It matched perfectly; she was a seamstress, after all.
He kissed her again. “You are my heart,” he said.
He raised his white wand and pointed it at the gate. “March,” he said. He waved to her, and she waved once, and then he was gone.
At noon he changed from Ataelus to Ariosto, and he rode above the plains of Arles. He could already see the high ridge where the King of Galle had failed to make his last stand; he could see the Royal Army of Galle’s last camp, the defensive lines full of weeds but stark and clear. Most of the Gallish army had died; the Odine hadn’t needed them. But it was still possible that one of the naked, starving survivors of the not-dead was the King of Galle. Michael had his orders.
It was odd to do his own scouting, but he had the magical mount and the s
kills to defend himself, and he located the Huscarls and the Harndoners, jogging along at a fast trot, commanded by Harald Derkensun. He descended in a lazy spiral and waved, and they cheered, and he flew on, chose them a campsite, and landed to tell Derkensun. It was very late when the first of Count Zac’s outriders approached, but the fires were lit and the food was cooked, the wagons laagered. The weather was cool and dry, and not a tent had been pitched. They had no tents; not even a pavilion for the emperor.
Nor did they dig in.
Gabriel slept between Anne and Jon Gang, and awoke in the darkness to find frost on his blanket. It was coming to autumn in Arles. He rose and stretched, told Anne he was not going to shave, and began to arm with Gang.
The man was incredibly competent, but then, he’d been chosen to serve the emperor. Anne appeared with hot cider. The sun was rising as they set off into it.
“Twenty-one days,” Mortirmir said as they crested their first ridge of the day.
They rode together for a while. Behind them, Ariosto gave a bark of annoyance and then a short scream; he was hungry.
“Do you ever think about how powerful we are?” Mortirmir asked, apropos of nothing.
“All the time,” Gabriel said.
“Really?” Mortirmir said, in his most annoying, I’m-so-much-smarter-than-you voice.
“Well, I am emperor, and while an emperor can be powerless, the current situation has given me almost unlimited—”
Mortirmir waved a hand to interrupt. “Oh, temporal power,” he said, as if the ability to command nations and armies were a thing of no consequence. “I mean magery. Real power.”
Gabriel managed half a smile. “I have been known to give it a thought,” he said.
“Lot is dead,” Morgon said.
“I told you that,” Gabriel managed. Mortirmir was never easy to talk to.
“You and I are inarguably the most puissant mages alive. Well, and Harmodius.” Mortirmir spoke of the royal mage as if he were an afterthought.
“You think you are more puissant than Harmodius?” Gabriel asked.
Mortirmir frowned at his emperor. “By an order of magnitude,” he said. “Have you tested your powers since we flayed the souls off the Necromancer?” He laughed. “I am like a god. I can be anywhere, do anything. I assume you are the same.”
Gabriel hid a smile. “There are limitations,” he said.
“Really?” Mortirmir said. “Beyond our own ideas of ethics? Really?” He smiled. “I begin to think there are no limitations to mastery, Gabriel. I think that you reach a point at which the horizon is infinite, and there is nothing but will. A place at which we … I … you … become the only defining points in reality.”
“I have had those thoughts since I was thirteen,” Gabriel said. “It’s a fine point of view if you want to justify doing something really excessive.”
Mortirmir slumped. “You mean this is not original?” he asked.
Gabriel thought a moment. “No. It’s just more terrifying from the most puissant mage in the world than it is from most seventeen-year-olds.”
There was a loud snort from behind them, and Bad Tom loomed over them; even on horseback he was bigger than life.
“Any loon can take what he wants,” Tom said. “But then he has to hold it. An’ he has to watch his back. Take a man’s woman; take his land; kill his mother. Aye. See what crop you reap.”
“I’m not talking about force of arms,” Mortirmir said dismissively. “I’m talking about altering reality.”
“I’d hate to think you were takin’ me for a fool, Ser Morgon. Because mayhap I ain’t one, for all my Hillman way of speakin’. And force of arms alters reality. Ask any dead man.” Bad Tom raised both eyebrows.
Mortirmir narrowed his eyes. “Are you threatening me?”
Tom grinned. “Never, lad. Because the difference between us is that if I want you dead, I won’t mention it. I’ll just make you dead.”
“Gentlemen,” Gabriel said brightly.
Mortirmir wasn’t offended. “I wonder,” he said. “Could you kill me?” He raised a hand. “Not a challenge!” he said, and smiled. “Very well. Force of arms alters reality as well. I accept it.”
“So what Tom is saying is that your philosophic revelation is pretty much the reason that chivalry exists,” Gabriel said. “Because every thug with a sword has the ability to alter reality to his own will.”
“Fascinating,” Mortirmir said. He thought for as long as it took them to ride down the eastern face of the ridge, while scouts reported and they watered their horses at a river and waited their turns to cross at the ford. Adrian Goldsmith was drawing the watering spot in charcoal, and Gabriel went and watched him sketch the look of intense concentration on Mortirmir’s face.
Gabriel smiled. “When this is over, you can put a whole series of mosaics into the imperial palace,” he said.
Goldsmith chewed on his charcoal, with the result of making him look like a monster. “I’m thinking fresco,” he said. “I’ve seen quite a lot of it in Etrusca. More subtle. And cheaper.”
Gabriel nodded. “Well, if we win all this, we will be poor.”
Goldsmith frowned. “Not too poor for art, I hope,” he said. “Majesty,” he added as an afterthought.
Gabriel walked back to where Mortirmir was standing with his reins in his hand. Mortirmir glanced at a bird, then at a rock by his feet, and finally at Ser Gabriel. He made a face. Then he nodded. “It’s good that I’m a knight, then,” he said finally.
Tom Lachlan nodded. “Aye, lad. Good for everyone. Even you.”
Gabriel tried not to laugh.
Mortirmir raised an eyebrow at the emperor. “Is that why you made Kronmir a knight? To put chains on him?”
Gabriel gave the mage a twisted smile.
That afternoon, he got a messenger bird direct from the Sieur Du Corse. They were fewer than two hundred leagues apart, and Du Corse had just had a brush with the not-dead.
“Get me Ariosto,” he said to Anne.
He launched into the autumn afternoon air. It felt summery until he was half a league above the plains. Below him, his column was trotting; Bad Tom had them moving at alternating walks and trots. Gabriel could see for miles, and he rolled to the left and right, climbed farther into the cool air, and looked to the east and south, hoping to see the rising dust of Pavalo’s cavalry. The men of Dar as Salaam had fought the Necromancer for generations; they were the most eager to see him finished, and yet he’d heard nothing. Gabriel had begun to fear that Pavalo had not made it back to his column.
It was late afternoon when he found the men of Dar. They were far to the east of where he’d hoped to find them, and locating them in the great circle of the world was far more difficult than he’d expected.
He landed, to the intense consternation of a number of the Royal Mamluks, and their horses. But once some reassurances had been made, Ser Pavalo cantered up on a magnificent bay. He looked old.
“I have had no sleep for three days,” he said. “I just caught them myself.”
He and Gabriel drew pictures in the dirt of Galle for a quarter of an hour.
“They turned east to get clear of the Darkness,” Pavalo said. “The people are gone and all the animals. If we can get into inhabited lands, there will be food.”
Gabriel hoped they were right. “But now you are to the east of the Necromancer’s last position. Which is a guess anyway.”
“We are very fast,” Pavalo said. “And as long as there is grass for our horses, we can move. Some sheep would make us all very happy, though. Grass is only good for horses; men need meat.”
He looked at Gabriel’s rough map in the dirt. “Still three days away.”
They both shook their heads. “Three days,” Gabriel said. “And fight him, win, and get back.”
The next day there were twenty days left until the gates were open, or so Gabriel had to believe. He rose and mounted his griffon immediately. He had a brief conversation with Mortirmir and lau
nched, leaving his column to continue racing east and north. They were entering the central hills of Galle and there were deep woods along the crest of every ridge.
They would slow down the column. The imperial force was fast, but it was not faster than rumour and smoke.
And there was nothing to be done about it. Gabriel spiraled up into the morning, caught the sun peeking over the eastern hills, and then rose still farther.
He used Mortirmir’s technique, and located a dozen places of apparent hermetical calm in the first minutes. And hour later he tried again, labeling them in the aethereal. His faith in Mortirmir’s method dwindled, and in the end, he stopped circling and had Ariosto fly north and east to Du Corse. It took him almost three hours to reach the Gallish army.
Du Corse was moving south and west, with a long line of pages moving ahead of his force. Gabriel circled for a while, and finally landed.
Du Corse came to meet him with a dozen men of his retinue. They knelt. Gabriel was still not used to men kneeling, and he smiled.
“What do you have for magisters?” he asked, by way of a greeting.
Du Corse shook his head. “I freed two men who’d been arrested by the church in Lucrece as witches.” He shrugged. “I have the creature who served the Bishop of Lorica. That is, the former bishop.”
“Tell me about the not-dead,” Gabriel said. “I need to be back in the air in an hour.”
“It was not even a fight, my liege,” Du Corse said, as if Gabriel really was his liege. “We stumbled across a … nest … of the things. We slaughtered them.”
“Damn,” Gabriel said. “I wanted you to be in contact with the Necromancer. That sounds …” He shook his head. “No idea. I hate being in a hurry. Is the ground clear behind you?”
“All the way to the coast,” Du Corse said with satisfaction. “The feudal levies are combing the countryside, but I think we’re safe.” He grinned his ferocious grin. He reminded Gabriel a little of Tom Lachlan. “In as much as anything is safe. How far is your army?”
“Three days’ march,” Gabriel said. “The army of Dar is here, at Cattilon. We’re here, at La Forêt d’Aix.”