Gabriel was staring east.
“Gabriel,” Mortirmir said with a familiarity no one else used anymore except Sauce and Bad Tom. “You don’t think it’s all about Ash? It won’t end. That was Master Smythe’s great point, and he made it well. Even if we win here, there will be another and another and another. To the last syllable of recorded time.”
“Thanks for that cheerful thought. You are right. Let’s just squash the ones we can see.” Gabriel sighed. “Jehan once asked me if I could fight all the time, every day. And today I find the answer to be: no. I’m tired.”
Morgon looked raised an eyebrow. “My point about the Fell Swords …” he said.
“Yes?” Gabriel asked, mystified. Perhaps even annoyed, because Mortirmir, once launched on a topic, was as tough as one of his own shields to dislodge.
“I could make them.” Mortirmir smiled.
“Really?” Gabriel asked.
“It is really just an exercise in linking points in the real to points in the aethereal. Mortirmir entered Gabriel’s memory palace and showed him.
“That’s incredibly power intensive,” Gabriel said. The process took his breath away; it was, to a startling degree, beautiful.
“I could do a few a day, when I was safe and didn’t need the ops.” Mortirmir raised his eyebrows.
“A few a day?” Gabriel said. “It would take me all day to make one.”
“Do not,” Mortirmir said. “I feel in you that same transcendence we saw in Sister Amicia …”
“Yes, I know. Thanks so very much.”
“You are welcome, of course. You should restrict your casting to the bare essentials. Yes, I think I could manage three to five a day at first; more later.” Mortirmir’s velvet-clad avatar gestured grandly.
“Arm the casa?” Gabriel smiled.
“Yes. Although I will note that there is a direct relation between the mass of the matter and the difficulty of the transference. So that a long sword is a masterwork; an arrowhead is a mere bagatelle.” Mortirmir pursed his lips. “Do I mean bagatelle?” He frowned. “I have been circuitous, I find. Listen, then … I want to say that we will be fighting increasingly … hermetical opponents.”
“I certainly hope so,” Gabriel said.
“Well, a little interface between the hermetical and the real would spare us some effort.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Gabriel stretched.
“You are truly growing tired of war?” Morgon asked.
“Never mind,” Gabriel said. “It was years ago.” He paused, and a look of confusion passed over his face, and he grimaced. “Like, two years ago,” he admitted.
Adrian Goldsmith stood a few yards away, sketching them.
They marched before dawn, following Count Zac’s guides through the woods, heading north and west. The easterner had a new weapon, which he demonstrated for Gabriel and Bad Tom; a tube which fit to his bow, so that he could shoot very short, heavy darts from his powerful horn bow.
“So?” asked Tom.
“Watch,” Zakje said. He put the half-tube against the lacquered bow and used it to draw a slim arrow with a long steel head. He loosed it through the moonlight at a small ash, and the arrow went through the tree.
“It turns your bow into a crossbow,” Bad Tom said.
“It will help us kill the big monsters,” Zakje said. “And knights, too,” he added with a wicked grin at Tom Lachlan.
Forest of Northern Arles—Cully
The stars were bright and seemed very close, and the comet was so brilliant that its light created shadows that crossed the shadows cast by the equally brilliant moon. The trees seemed almost infinite, their branches silver in the starlight, rolling away to east and west in a mysterious majesty of leaf and branch.
Urk of Mogon looked into the vastness and nodded at Cully, breaking open his mandibles. “Want to walk away,” he said. “Want to walk into cool dark and green and never come out.”
Cully frowned. “All I see is standing firewood.”
Urk looked at him, his all-too-human eyes registering revulsion. “Here is beauty,” he said.
Cully put an arm around the thing’s wing cases. It had taken an act of will once, to embrace the bug, but that was weeks and many shared dangers ago. “If’n you say so, mate,” he said. “In the dark, I see danger, spiders, wet, cold, and hunger.” He shrugged apologetically. “No pay, no wine, no women, and no fuckin’ song.”
Urk smiled, his four jaws yawning in a particularly loathsome way. “You make war,” he said. “And this war is nothing but cold, damp, and danger.”
“True for you, mate,” Cully muttered. “But there’s pay.”
“And?” the bug asked.
“Oh aye, yer fewkin’ point is made.” Cully looked out into the dark and threatening woods, trying to see a shred of beauty.
Adrian Goldsmith watched the captain, which was to say the emperor, mount his griffon. He sketched rapidly in the book he now carried all the time. Ariosto stretched, a particular motion he made before his wings began their beat, and in that moment he was perfectly caught by the rising sun; the fractal complexity of his feathered wings, before he blazed into a single glory of ruddy gold; the scarlet of his saddle and reins and holding strap, the brilliant scarlet and steel of his rider.
The captain launched into the morning air, and Tom Lachlan was suddenly everywhere, bellowing orders, and Edmund went down the guild line, stopped to look at Duke, and the two mocked each other for a moment, as usual.
Adrian Goldsmith felt a pang of homesickness. He was, after all, guild born and bred.
Lachlan was right behind Edmund, and he stopped to talk to two apprentices from the Cutlers’ Guild. He leaned forward a little, his darkly burnished armour somehow one with the last of the night, the gold edges glowing with the rising sun. Adrian switched targets, flipped his palette, and began to sketch the Primus Pilus.
Lachlan was hefting one of the heavy bronze tubes on a long spear pole. “Hard to carry?” he asked.
Donald Leary, Cutler’s apprentice, was the kind of Harndoner who was not ever abashed. “Heavy as sin, mate,” he said as if he and the giant knight were old friends.
“Aye,” Lachlan agreed. “An’ how many rounds do ye ha’e?”
Leary smiled. “Forty,” he said.
Bad Tom looked at the thing, like a mace on a pole. “Sweet Christ,” he said. “Well, Gabriel thinks the world o’ yon. I ha’e me doubts.” He shrugged and looked at the crews of the two long bronze falconets on their wheeled carriages.
Francis Atcourt, who was nominally in charge of the casa and liked to divert Tom’s attention if he could, spoke up. “We’ve hauled these blessed things over hill and dale for a year,” he agreed. “And never used a one.”
Tom nodded at Edmund. “They work?” he asked.
Edmund nodded. “I promise you they do, Ser Knight. Show us a dragon.”
Bad Tom Laughed. “Aye, that’s the spirit,” he said, his tone indicating that he didn’t believe the things could harm a house cat. The head of the column was long gone, and Tom realized he was slowing his own march. “Off wi’ ye,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll see what yer smelly de’il’s powder is worth.”
Forty leagues later, and again the force made camp with few fires and no tents. Men were hungry; the dash across the Massif had taken a toll in men and horses. The food wagons were mostly empty, and Gabriel ordered them unloaded and sent back. But he ordered a dozen kept, and gave no reason.
“I wish you could ride Ariosto,” he said as an aside to Morgon.
“I don’t,” Morgon admitted. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. That beast mislikes me.”
“Beast my arse,” Gabriel said. There was a silence; both men had their own thoughts. Finally Gabriel said, “Sometimes I suspect I am the junior partner.”
“I am sure your temporal power more than balances my superiority of hermetical talent,” Mortirmir said graciously.
“I meant to Ariosto,
” Gabriel said.
There was a little more silence.
Gabriel smiled to himself, and was saved from further insulting his most vital asset by the arrival of his officers. Toby hovered, no longer a squire but eager to help Anne; Anne laid out a folding table, and two pages placed the top across the sawhorse-like folding legs. Another of Kronmir’s carefully drawn maps was laid down and the curling corners tacked with eating knives.
Kronmir’s beautiful calligraphy, each place name carefully labeled, stood as a monument to the man. Gabriel felt a lump in his throat; had more than a passing qualm about the bodies he was leaving behind. He paused.
“I assume we’re out of wine?” he asked Anne. She looked startled, and blinked, then waved to one of the pages.
Gabriel sighed. He took a breath, steadied himself, and pointed at the map. “Here’s where the Necromancer is. He must know what’s coming for him. Today he tried to slip south and ran into Pavalo’s pickets, so now he’s coming for us. Du Corse is hard on his heels, here.” He drew them out. “Pavalo cut up most of his not-dead people and trapped two of the Umroth, the way they do it, in pit traps.” He shrugged. “We don’t have any soft soil to dig pits in, so we’ll need a little luck.”
Francis Atcourt handed his emperor a heavy glass flask with a densely woven net covering of linen to protect the precious glass. It sloshed.
Gabriel grinned and took a mouthful. “Ahh,” he said.
Morgon Mortirmir leaned over.
Atcourt tapped the map wordlessly and Bad Tom took the wine. “It’s more like hunting than like fuckin’ war,” he said.
“And so, when we move, we move from cover to cover,” Gabriel said. “Right here. Mouth of this valley. And we hold there until Pavalo or Du Corse comes.”
Mortirmir shrugged. “We can just finish the Necromancer ourselves,” he said. “No need for all this elaborate preparation.”
“Why don’t ye fewkin’ go fight the thing in yer hosen and the rest o’ we will ha’e a nice day off an’ wash our fewkin’ clothes?” Tom spat. “Ye talk a mickle stream of shite fer a boy wi’ ten hairs on his wee face.”
“Tom?” Gabriel said. “He probably can take the Necromancer one to one. I certainly hope he can. The rest of us are here to avert various alternatives. And disasters.”
“Thank you,” Mortirmir said icily.
“I ha’e said it before and, nae doot, I’ll ha’e to say it agin. Ye’r takin’ all the joy out o’ war.” Bad Tom took another swig from the bottle and left the group.
“That oaf thinks we are here to amuse ourselves,” Mortirmir said.
Bad Tom reappeared. “Oaf?” he asked. He was smiling ear to ear.
“Tom,” Gabriel said.
“Oh aye. I’ll beat the fuck oot o’ him tomorrow after he cooks the Necromancer,” Lachlan said. “I promise ye that, boy.”
“It’s a band of brothers,” Gabriel said wearily to Francis Atcourt, who handed him the empty bottle.
Morning dawned and the company was awake, hungry, surly, and moving very fast over the hills. Their riding horses were done in, their bellies were grumbling, and even water was in short supply.
Gabriel was aloft as soon as it was light, feeling his way north and west, flying very low and inhabiting the aethereal, leaving Ariosto to handle the real. But the Necromancer was invisible, and Morgon’s passive location technique was no help.
And Gabriel felt alone, exposed, and foolish.
When the sky was merely pink, he overflew the Ifriquy’an columns to the west. They were all mounted, moving quickly with a herd of remounts, and a line of dust like surf on a beach marked the front of their skirmish line. He could feel the power of at least four casters, all pupils of the great Al Rashidi, and he was reassured.
He landed. He tried to ignore the signs of looting; the Gallish women in the tents. Galle and Ifriquy’a had known war for centuries. But it still rankled.
A slave led him to a circle of horsemen; Pavalo Payam sat in the middle. Something had changed in him; the slight subservience he had always showed in Alba was gone, as if burnished off as a flaw; now he was a warrior among warriors, the paramount warrior.
He did not bend so much as a muscle of his neck.
“Ser Pavalo,” Gabriel said.
“Ser Gabriel. Your beast makes our horses uneasy.” Then he allowed his old, easy smile to cross his grave face. “We have him, I think. Salim al-Raisouli brushed his screens less than half an hour ago. He flinched away from us.”
Gabriel unrolled one of Kronmir’s maps, and the mamluk officer dismounted—grudgingly. Gabriel gathered that most of them viewed war as an exercise in horsemanship, not map reading.
When they were all oriented, Pavalo summoned Salim, and the magister, mounted on a mule, placed coloured symbols of light on the Venike paper of the map.
Gabriel nodded to Pavalo. “I think we’ve got him. I need to hurry.”
Pavalo grinned. “This is a great day. And Du Corse?”
“Close. He has the most men and the worst hermeticals. I don’t want him engaged unless we have no choice.” Gabriel looked up to see one of the mamluks listening to the translation with what could only be described as a wolfish glee.
“A word with you?” Gabriel asked. He walked out of the circle, until he and Pavalo were as alone as they could be in the midst of an army of ten thousand.
“This is delicate,” Gabriel said. “And I have no time. So … please do not consider going for Du Corse when the Necromancer is eliminated.” He smiled with what he thought was good courtesy.
Pavalo returned the smile. “I will, in all things, obey the commands of my sultan,” he said. “I am not a servant of the emperor.”
Gabriel looked back over the column. “You have been to Alba. You heard Al Rashidi. You know what’s at stake.”
Pavalo nodded. “I do, Gabriel. But sometimes I think it is … naive … of you to imagine that every man you meet can be trusted to keep his eyes on the main goal and not seize some of the prize for himself.”
Gabriel nodded, relieved that it was in the open. “Ah, Pavalo, I understand; usually I try to find a way to engage self-interest alongside the greater values.” He looked back at the column, letting his eyes rest on a chain of Gallish peasants clearly taken as slaves. “If we fall, he will exterminate us, root and branch,” Gabriel said. “There will be no private triumph. And if we triumph,” Gabriel said quietly, “do you not think that we will be so puissant that it might be better to be our ally than our rival? Because any power that can break the dragons will be a mighty power for many years.”
“This is very like a threat,” Pavalo said, stung.
Gabriel shrugged. “Pavalo, I am in a hurry; I am afraid of the Necromancer, I have to ride the air alone, and your mamluks are clearly posturing. And they are taking slaves.”
Instead of further bridling, Pavalo stepped closer and put an arm on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Ah! That is the sand in the shoe, is it? Yet if I fought them on this, I would have to fight many other battles. My word to them is the same as yours to me. Defeat the Necromancer, and then see what cometh. Yes?”
Alliance was a dangerous process. But he needed Pavalo, and the man had been Rashid’s paladin. He, of all men, knew what was at stake.
“Yes,” he said. But as Ariosto climbed away and the sun peeked over the shoulder of the world, he thought how sad and twisted it was that he found it easier to trust Du Corse, whose ambition he could understand, then Payam, who was a far nobler man, but whose loyalties were almost unfathomable.
Before the red orb of the sun was resting on the eastern horizon, he was standing with Du Corse, twenty leagues to the north.
“No contact at all,” Du Corse said.
“Let’s keep it that way,” Gabriel said, and unleashed a great pulse of ops into the real. He did so again from the back of Ariosto as they rose over the Gallish army, cheered by the knights and the foot soldiers, too.
And then Gabriel attempted the experiment
that he and Morgon had discussed on the ship, what seemed like months before. For the first time, Gabriel attempted to raise a wave front of emotion, as the great creatures of the Wild did. He found it easy enough to raise fear within himself, and once raised, to project it, and he was amused to discover that the waves of fear and terror that creatures projected were mere outward signs of their inward emotions. Of course the wardens were afraid of combat; of course the wyverns feared man. Even as he shaped his projection, he understood what Morgon had suggested—that the great powers had developed these emotional fronts as ways of detecting the presence of their ancient enemy. Somehow that was both sobering and profound.
And there it was. It was so easy that Gabriel might have cursed, if the whole of his attention was not on his projection. But the Necromancer was instantly visible as a vacancy in the emotional world that the aethereal could be, despite the attempts of humans to render it rational.
Finding an object or entity in the aethereal was not always the same as finding them in the real, but in this case, the ranges were short and the resolution surprisingly fine.
In the real, Gabriel laughed again. And fled, diving to the very height of the treetops to put solid earth between his route and the enemy.
He landed in a beautiful dawn, and Ariosto hopped off to eat sheep. His force had moved farther than he had thought possible; they were dismounting in a deep valley between two rocky summits. The ground was sandy and full of glacial rock, and despite that, there were ropes already stretched across the valley.
Forty yards away, Cully groaned.
Adrian Goldsmith groaned.
In fact, almost every soldier groaned, because the stretched ropes on neat wooden pegs meant they were to dig. Most men had a pick, and a few had shovels, and most of them were veterans of other engineering feats, but the shallow soil and rock looked particularly threatening.
Bad Tom rode along the rope line, his great warhorse kicking up dust. “However much ye may hate to dig, lads,” he roared, “that trench and upcast will seem like yer maether’s own hearthside when the Umroth charge ye. Now get it done. And put in yer stakes. Every fewkin’ one.”