In the center were the feudal hosts of Brogat and the northern Albin. There was Edward Daispainsay, Lord of Bain, commanding the dismounted knights in the center of the line although his wounds from Gilson’s Hole were not yet fully healed, and Lord Gregario with the mounted knights in reserve. The feudal levies were well armed with spears and armour; they had withstood days of attacks by bogglins without much loss, and they were more confident than most militia. They were beginning to be soldiers.
Tapio commanded the left of the line. There, the ridge was lowest and most vulnerable, and there were the Jacks and rangers; there also were the irk knights, and every irk regardless of gender who could be spared from N’gara. There, too, was Ser Ricar Fitzroy, with the knights of the northern Albin and Albinkirk, as well as fifty or so knights-errant from Jarsay, the Grand Seigneur Estaban du Born with another two hundred belted knights of Occitan, and there stood 1Exrech, his chitonous white armour spotless, at the head of his phalanx of spear-armed bogglins; they held the lowest ground, almost two thousand strong.
All told, they had almost eighteen thousand to face Ash’s million or so creatures. Or odds of roughly fifty to one. Gavin told his allies and his own more human officers that they were fighting for ancient N’gara, to show the irks that men and women could be trusted. But in his heart, Gavin was fighting because his brother had laid out a strategy and expected him to implement it, part of a plan so vast that Gavin could not imagine it would succeed. And yet, despite everything, he trusted his brother.
Gavin trotted his riding horse back up the central ride, the Serpent’s Hill, and dismounted. His page took his riding horse while his squire brought up his charger. A young man he’d never seen before handed him a cup of hippocras and he drank it while he considered the odds. They had to fight; that much had been made clear by his brother Gabriel all spring and summer. Every fight would bleed Ash, and only by fighting for every member of the alliance; the irks, the Jacks, the people of Alba and Morea; only by showing all of them that they could be defended would the alliance be preserved. This was not a war that could be won in an afternoon; Gilson’s Hole proved that. It was a war that might continue for generations.
In Gavin’s ear, Lord Kerak said, “Ready.”
While Gavin had reviewed his dispositions, the battle had begun. The tide of bogglins had rolled across the swamps and the dyke and causeway; had come forward like a seeping tide and splashed against the carefully sited earthen walls, the coppiced trees and “natural” stone features of the Dykesdale ridge.
The tide came in for an hour. Gavin watched, issuing no orders. There was nothing he could do but watch, but he stood as Ser Edward launched a counterattack that cleared the lower line of the center when the Brogat levies wavered. Tens of thousands of bogglins were used as filler by the creatures behind them, trampled to death and then walked over in the swamps.
The fog began to burn off. Off to the north, some low-level workings began to flay the waves of bogglins.
They broke. The tide flowed back; the waves receded into the swamps and ten thousand more bogglins drowned.
Gavin considered a second cup of hippocras and wondered what the hell his brother was doing, wherever he was.
Kerak spoke again from the aether. “Now he sets his will on the bogglins. Now they come again.”
This time the bogglins raced in, heedless of losses or terrain. They skittered over the carpet of their own dead and straight onto the spear points of the Brogat Levy. Below Gavin’s position, men and irks were dying again. His exhausted troops, manning the barriers and thickets, lofted clouds of arrows and stood their ground with sword and axe in hand. A hundred bogglins had fallen for every man; in some parts of the line, a thousand bogglins had fallen for every irk. But the second attack was pressed with more enthusiasm, and the drowned bodies in the swamp were now so thick that the next wave could cross dry-shod.
Off to the right, Mogon’s wardens and Golden Bears had lost less than a hand of their creatures, but even there every bear’s fur was matted and the wardens’ crests already deflated with fatigue. Along the first defence line on the ridge, the stacks of dead bogglins were already so high that the line had to be abandoned.
Out in the marshes, the dead were so thick that the course of the stream had been altered.
The Army of the Alliance was unrolling every scroll on war, and playing them out—ambushes, incendiaries, raids, dashing charges, destructive volleys.
Gavin looked out over the infinite fabric of his foes, and tried to wall off the rising tide of despair.
“Millions,” he said aloud. “But we are slaying mere thousands.”
Tapio smiled grimly, showing his fangs. “Millionsss are made of thousssandsss,” he said. “Hisss lossses are ssstaggering.”
Gavin shook his head. The tide had risen high; the sea of bogglins had swamped the first line entirely and were now facing the second, two hundred paces higher on the hillside. The sound was loud and constant; screams, war-cries, the despair of men wounded and eaten by bogglins, the equal despair of a bogglin whose carapace was penetrated; a week to die or a month, the creature was nonetheless already dead.
And then, like the changing of the light or the dissipating of the morning mist, the great assault failed. It did not fail suddenly; but inch by inch, bogglin by bogglin. Ash could take their minds and conquer their wills, but there came a point when flesh and blood conquered sorcery. Even bogglins had a scent sign for self-preservation.
The sky was turning blue overhead, and smell of bogglin blood was everywhere.
And so the tide went out for a second time.
“Blessed Saint Michael,” Gavin said. Across a nine-mile-wide battlefield, his people had held.
Far away to the west, almost lost in the mist, something rose into the air.
“Here he comesss,” Tapio said. “Pray to your godsss, or whatever else ssseemsss bessst to you, friendsss.” But Tapio was grinning. “We have hurt him.”
In all the other days of combat, Ash had never shown himself; not since Gilson’s Hole had his red-black form risen over a battlefield. His minions, most of them bogglins armed only with their natural claws, had flung themselves forward under compulsion, and Ash had not shown himself, nor, until two days before, had he committed a single wight, troll, or great hastenoch from the deep swamps of the north, not a single wyvern or irk.
These creatures were somewhere far off to the west; so far that no amount of sorcery or scouting could locate them. They were in reserve.
The black speck grew.
Gavin sighed. The real battle was about to begin. And his army was already so far beyond fatigue that the moment the tide of bogglins receded, the knights of the Brogat fell to their knees like monks witnessing a miracle.
The Vale of Dykesdale—Ash
Ash surveyed his foes with an impatience and annoyance that had become his constant state since being “embodied” in this, his chosen avatar. Annoyance, and fatigue. He had forgotten fatigue in the aethereal.
“Stupid children,” he said aloud.
He’d flung his almost limitless supply of animated chiton at their battle line in hopes that someone among his “foes” was bright enough to get the message and surrender, or skitter off into the woods. Time was growing short; the stars were moving, and his timetable was actually endangered. His “allies” in the sea required an enormous investment in will and time and immaterial power; but he needed them in place to wall off his competitors in Antica Terra.
That left him alone in Nova Terra; alone except for one rival of his own race and a host of smaller foes. Since none of these foes could possibly know what the game was, and how great the prize, except just possibly the old irk Tapio, he was annoyed that they even played at resisting him.
It is Lot, he told himself. Lot is using them as I use the bogglins, and to the same end. Stupid boy. He is far too late entering the game, and all his allies are too self-willed and too independent. But I still need to finish him, and quick
ly.
Ash had long since decided to have no allies at all—only slaves. It saved time and explanations. Even Thorn …
For a moment, the mighty Ash allowed himself to miss Thorn. But Thorn had not been loyal; Thorn had wanted too much of his own power. Like Orley.
Ash pondered the problems of metaphysical logistics; he had in his own right an enormous reservoir of power; his connection to the immaterium was nearly perfect, although never as perfect as it had been before he had made himself corporeal. And he had a strong connection to Thorn’s fortress at Lake-on-the-Mountain. Beneath it was one of the purest fountains of ops anywhere in the real, an out-welling that amounted to a tear in reality’s fabric; a tear someone had made in a war ten thousand years ago. He sucked at it like a baby on a teat, and used it to power the binding of millions of wills. Those bindings required two things he now had in short supply—his own will, and his time.
He hated time. He wasn’t used to it; it wasn’t “natural.” But he understood it well enough, and it ticked away with the movement of the stars only he could see, and pressed against him like an infinitely powerful phalanx of foes, and the onward press of time forced his talons.
And his tiny, contemptible foes had hurt him. He bore wounds on his immortal hide; signs of failure, signs that wrenched at his vanity as much as they caused physical pain. Pain. Another aspect of the material that he had forgotten.
Yet there was power—power to work his will—not through shallow intermediaries and foolish acolytes, but directly, as it had been in the beginning. He rose slowly over the battlefield on the cool autumn air and prepared a mighty working; something beyond the comprehension of most of the mortals below him. Not just a blow in the physical, but a message.
Surrender. Despair. Leave and let me have my way.
As a creature to whom the aethereal was a natural state, he merely willed and his will made manifest, and the world was affected.
But his thoughts, especially those of Lot, moved him and he twinned his consciousness so that a second Ash could, with only a slight diminution of his main effort, begin casting a delicate web, a tracery of aethereal strands to locate Lot wherever he moved in the real. And such was the dichotomy of Ash’s innermost mind that he didn’t admit to himself that he’d learned the technique from combatting the human mage, Harmodius. Even as he was aware that his failed assault on Desiderata had armed his enemies against him, and that he had, himself, betrayed Thorn, and not the other way around. A mighty mind has many holes and many traps and many concealments.
And self-knowledge had never been Ash’s strongest trait.
Instead, Ash balanced his expenditure on his Eeeague allies, strengthened the bonds that held the Orley and his creatures to his will, caressed the winds of scent and power that made a million bogglins his slaves, and relished the unfolding of a human betrayal he had motivated in the south, where, despite his own contempt for all men, Ash sought to destroy the magister Harmodius before he could reunite with his other allies. Because Harmodius was a foe. As was the human Morgon; so much potential there, but duped into the pit of Antica Terra. Let the mighty Morgon face Ash’s foes. That was a delicious victory. Perhaps he would defeat the elusive shadow; Ash allowed himself to laugh aloud. Or shadow would defeat him. Or rebel.
Shadow, rebel, will, Lot. Ash had played them all; all the rivals who mattered. Of them, he only feared the will.
Ash thought all these things and a hundred more while simultaneously plotting and commanding both his physical and his sorcerous assaults on the immediate battlefield. The bogglins flowed forward to their necessary deaths and his real troops, the troops he would need for the true contest when the gates aligned, came from their staging areas and began to move to the battlefield. With a beautiful economy that won Ash a bit of grudging self-admiration, he used the energy of the deaths of his first bogglins to power the Wyrm’s way working that moved a whole century of black-stone cave trolls straight into the center of the enemy, wreaking havoc. He’d never shown this tactic before; the result was immediate and spectacular, as a generation of Brogat knights were winnowed like ripe wheat.
But they died where they stood, and a dozen of his precious tolls became splintered rock.
What annoyed Ash most was this constant waste of resources. His were enormous but limited; his time was running like blood from a gaping wound, and his awareness of time was like pain; so very different from the way time molded itself when he had been outside it. He had things to do, and fighting bloody Tapio for this useless ridge was annoying. Annoying was the perfect word.
It was time to use his powers, because he was in a hurry and his beautiful trolls were dying.
Gavin watched the gradual defeat of his center with weary fear. In his ears, the two available great sorcerers and dozens of Morean and Irkish and Alban mages conversed rapidly, and he ignored them, watching instead as Ser Edward Daispainsay pounded a troll to the ground with a set of flawless strokes of his great hammer and then led another countercharge; farther north along the ridge, Ser Gregario, Lord Weyland, charged into the flank of the trolls with the mounted chivalry of the Albin, and the trolls were annihilated. But the damage was done; the whole second line would be lost, because subtle tactics were of no use against a million bogglins.
“Christ, he almost broke us in one assault!” Gavin said. “Where did the trolls come from?”
At his side, Tapio shrugged. “He hasss begun to ussse hisss actual army,” he said. “He moved the trollsss by sssorcssery.” He sounded smug. “Thisss tellsss me he mussst hurry,” Tapio added.
Gavin took a deep breath and wished his brother were there. “I hope you are right.”
“Here he comes,” Kerak said in his ear.
“He’s casting,” said Master Nikos, the former master grammarian of the university. He sounded satisfied.
“Now we will see something,” Kerak said.
Miles away and high above the battlefield, Ash detected the emanations of a dozen casters in the aethereal. Even as he knit his heavy magic, a massive working even for him, he lashed out against all twelve in a single pulse like a leven bolt the colour of dried blood that left patterns in the cloudless sky.
Tamsin hummed to herself as the brown bolts rolled across the sky. Her emanations were all constructs; in fact, they were reflector-beacons for actual casters located elsewhere. Before the lightning, almost as fast as thought, burst in pinpoint explosions of wood splinters and sulphur and raw ops, Tamsin had tracked each of them back to their point of origin and passed that vector to Kerak, who wove a diagram and passed it back—all in aethereal time.
As the sound of the explosions rolled along Dykesdale, Lord Kerak and the choir of mages of the allied army cast.
Even as they cast, Ash recognized both their method of observation and their method of detection and reacted, shed any working that he no longer needed and protected himself so that their mighty attack detonated in empty air.
But he clung to his enormous working, reaching far out into the aether itself for the ancient stones that rode there, moving along the star paths beyond the ken of any alive in the world of Alba. In the nigh infinite lore stored in his huge brain, Ash knew that the hollow rocks had been made by the Rhank aeons before, in an attempt to evade the gates and attack through the aethereal into reality. Perhaps fifty thousand years ago.
He took eight of them and started them on their way.
Kerak left the choir. There it was. Exactly as Harmodius had predicted; when pushed, Ash was going for the largest, heaviest, most spectacular magik. And fortunately, Thorn had used this one repeatedly, although its power and details were beyond any mortal caster.
Casting was beyond them. Interfering was not.
Kerak entered his memory cave, and was bathed in the warmth of a queen-mother’s love in his memory, and standing there, strong, secure, amid his own kind, he pulled from their nest a selection of memory larvae and swallowed them; and then plucked a single great albino bat that hung fro
m the roof. This he patted, murmuring endearments, and then, tying symbolism to intent, he threw the little mammal, favoured pet of his kind, into the aethereal, and it flew.
Under the cover of a phalanx of attacks and a barrage of aggressive workings, Kerak’s subtle working of will climbed away into the aether, following the broad path of potentia left by Ash’s massive spell, homing in on the heavy scent of power.
Kerak watched it climb away and then went back to the choir.
“Done?” Nikos asked.
“Away,” Kerak said.
In the aethereal, the bat rose, faster than a real bat, and its white shape smoothed out as it rose; from bat to owl, and from owl to arrow. And once it was an arrow, it flew like an arrow, but the head was heavy with design and art and the tail powered itself with constant emissions into the real.
It was Kerak’s most extensive adventure into the world of the human ars magika as discovered by young Mortirmir and Master Nikos and the university, and it was the most complex single working any mortal, human, irk, or Saurian had attempted since the empire fell. But the Saurian mind excelled at holding layered, complex images, and this one was so complex that it seemed possible it would simply fail because he’d dropped a stitch.
“Break,” he whispered into the Green Earl’s ear. “This is the time.”
“Break,” Gavin ordered. He’d prepared all his commanders for this; the moment would come when they would run. They all knew.
His trumpeter blew a single, long call, and as one, thousands of men, irks, bears, wardens, and bogglins turned and began to run back over the ridge. The knights of Brogat took losses breaking contact; in the center, brave pages pushed forward with their master’s horses so that the knights could mount and run, and some of them died. All across the ridge, the Allies turned tail, and slipped east, over the ridge, abandoning the best defensive position in all of Nova Terra.