Cully watched Anne and Toby begin to dig, and he took a drink of water from his almost empty canteen and walked back to where the captain and the banner were. Young Mortirmir was casting; he had that look, and he already had shields up. The captain was watching his griffon eat.
The captain was just speaking. “I’ve never found my cowardice so useful,” he was just saying, and Morgon wore a rare smile.
“My lord, I honour you for essaying it, and the result is remarkable.” The magister gave a terrible smile. “I cannot wait to try myself,” he admitted.
“Sorry to interrupt, Cap’n,” Cully said. “You want me wi’ ye, or wi’ Toby?”
“I’ll be in the air soon enough,” Gabriel said. “Don’t let Toby die. Or Anne.”
Cully smiled. “Lads would like it if you’d dig,” he said softly.
Gabriel met his eye. His sigh was heavy.
“Fine,” he said. “I know you’re right. I just don’t like it. I’m already tired.” He walked forward, still wearing only his arming clothes. Two pages had his flying armour on a ground sheet.
He walked up to the line and wordlessly took a pick from Anne Woodstock. “Go make sure my harness is ready,” he said. She wiped sweat off her brow in the chilly autumn air and managed a bow before heading back.
Gabriel began to work the ground with the pick. Anne had found a rock about the size of two men’s heads. He worked around it, loosening the soil, and then when the pick used as a crowbar moved the whole thing, he summoned Tom Lachlan, and the two of them lifted the rock and threw it on the upcast.
Cully stepped in with a small shovel and cleared all the loose soil onto the upcast.
“I’ve got them,” Mortirmir said. “Him. Them. Coming this way.” He looked down. “I don’t suppose I should ask you why you, the Emperor of Man, are wasting your time digging? When you should be preparing your workings?”
Gabriel began to work away at the ground again. The first blow hit yet another rock, the blow almost numbing his hands. “Because I need these men and women, Morgon,” he said. “I need them alive. And to survive the next hours, I need them in trenches.”
“Yes,” Morgon agreed.
“They will dig better if they see me dig,” Gabriel said.
“Why?” Morgon asked.
Tom Lachlan slapped Morgon Mortirmir lightly on the head, and Mortirmir flinched. “You ha’e blood an’ bone in there, warlock?” he asked. “Or gears?”
“And yet,” Gabriel said, loosening his second rock, “He’s right. I need to prepare.”
Mortirmir looked at the sweating men and women. “If every one of them had a Fell Sword …”
Tom Lachlan paused. “Ye can do that, laddie? I’d stop givin’ ye shite if ye did.” He grinned.
Then he grunted, dismounted again from his warhorse that was as tall and black as the emperor’s Ataelus, and armoured head to foot, took the pick from his captain. He threw one blow, even as the captain muscled his way out of the rapidly forming trench, and his pick-blow split the rock Gabriel had been working at.
He looked up.
“Brawly fechit,” Gabriel said.
“Ye sound like a wee fool when you try and sound like a Hillman,” Lachlan said with a grin.
“You should hear what you sound like to us,” Gabriel said. “Right. I’ve faced the dirt. Let’s face the Necromancer.”
In the center of the line, a wagon, one of only four left with them, dropped four huge wicker baskets, as tall as a man and as big around as a tree in the Adnacrags. Immediately, every man in the guilds began to fill them with dirt. The dirt came from in front; they were in the middle of the valley, with the deepest soil, and the work went quickly, the more so as every stone they found could also go into the huge baskets.
Horses came up, and the falconets were dropped into position between the baskets. Their crews began to tend to them. The rest of the guildsmen kept digging.
The sun was halfway up into the sky and the more pious had just finished saying their hurried devotions when trumpets sounded. In most places the trench was four feet deep and the upcast at least two feet high. Most of the archers and all the guildsmen had carried long wooden stakes for the last six days; now they planted them as deep as the soil allowed, leaning slightly out, in the top of the upcast, driven in at least three feet. The wicker baskets or gabions in the center were full to overflowing, the long bronze falconets gleaming in the morning sun.
Gabriel’s hands were shaking.
“You know you are glowing?” Mortirmir asked him. “You are visibly golden.”
Gabriel closed his eyes.
“Are you transcendent, then?” Mortirmir asked. “Interesting. Why you and not me?”
“Maturity?” Gabriel asked. He opened his eyes.
Mortirmir raised an eyebrow. “I suppose that I deserved that.”
“Can we hide it?” Gabriel asked.
Mortirmir frowned. “Ask me when we’re done today,” he said. “For all my bluster, I want to keep every iota of ops.”
“It almost pleases me to hear you speak thus,” Gabriel said.
“Here it comes,” Mortirmir nodded. “It? They?”
Down the valley, a cloud of dust rose.
Trumpets sounded.
Gabriel walked to Ariosto and put a hand on his hide.
Ready?
Sure, boss. A-hunting we will go.
“My lord?” Anne Woodstock was standing at his elbow. “There’s a herald.”
Gabriel walked back to the line of trenches and watched with Bad Tom and Mortirmir and Francis Atcourt as a man on a skeletal horse came forward.
“Well, well,” Mortirmir said.
“Ye’r not goin’ to ha’e speech wi’ yon?” Bad Tom asked, his irritation increasing his Hillman accent.
Gabriel pursed his lips. “I am minded to speak to it,” he said.
“Send me,” Mortirmir said.
Gabriel looked at the young magister. “Let me pander to your pride, Morgon Mortirmir. Right now, if one of us is taken by surprise and killed, I’d rather it was me. For the good of all.” He waved at Anne, but she’d already brought up Ataelus, who was restive at being left out, as had become usual, and delighted to be ridden.
Tom Lachlan unsheathed his great magical sword, what men called The Dragon’s Blade, and held it in the air like a man holds a torch. “I’ll just ride out wi’ thee, eh?”
Gabriel nodded. “Yes,” he agreed.
They rode a little outside the new earthworks. The sun was high, and the last damp in the newly dug ground gave a flavor to the air. It was cool and pleasant, and easy to love life.
The herald was a not-dead. He was not carefully dressed; he had a shirt, and braes that were badly soiled, and no shoes. He was tall and very thin, and his eyes didn’t move. The horse he rode was as thin as he was himself.
He stopped about two horse lengths from Gabriel and Tom Lachlan. He didn’t pull his reins or make a noise; rather, man and horse simply stopped.
“Greetings,” sang a choir within the man’s throat.
Gabriel took a breath with a little effort. The thing in front of him was terrifying in its similarity to a man, and its alienness. He had never been so close to an animated not-dead, and he found the experience deeply unsettling.
“Do I address the being commonly known as the Necromancer?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes.” The voice was not even the half of the effect. “I was a man once.” After a pause. “Or were we? Some of us were.”
Tom’s sword tip twitched like the tale of an agitated cat.
“You are not dragons?” the disharmonious voice said.
“No,” Gabriel said.
“Like and not like,” said the voice. “We thought dragons.”
“What is the basis of this parley?” Gabriel asked.
“I would surrender,” the thing said. “If that is even possible.”
Gabriel’s heart beat very hard.
“It’s a trick,” Tom sai
d, his eyes hard.
“Listen, oh man. Lord of men and Killer of men. I wish nothing but to leave. I have lost. I know it. I have reached deep into my memories and I remember this thing; that I may be allowed to surrender. Perhaps you will exterminate me. Or perhaps you will let me go. My so-called allies have abandoned me and I have nowhere else to go.”
“Even if I could imagine a way to keep you a prisoner,” Gabriel said, trying to find words to cover his shock, “I have allies who require your … end.”
“You have regard for your fellows? Then I have something to offer you. First, if we struggle, I will end many. Perhaps more than you imagine. I have the counter for the dragon’s fire.” The choir was discordant, and the words dragon’s fire were like the knell of a church bell. “You will not surprise me today.”
Bad Tom smiled. “Bring it,” he said.
“Killer of men. You are afraid of nothing. I have lived too long for courage. I have none left, or I would not be attempting surrender.” The not-dead’s head didn’t move, nor did its eyes. The whole horse had to move so that he could address Bad Tom.
“What else do you offer?” Gabriel asked. He was unprepared for surrender. He couldn’t imagine a path from here so his temptation was to refuse, and get it over with. Couldn’t imagine how he could keep an entity as alien and powerful as this to any bargain; couldn’t even imagine that such an entity would understand surrender. Wasn’t even sure to whom he was talking.
“This is interesting, and in keeping with my memories of men. You have this much power and you are merely men? We/I were once men/man. Some of us.” It paused. “We had no idea humans could be so puissant.”
The silence was ruthless.
Gabriel could smell the Umroth in the woods beyond the little plain of dirt and scrub, and his nose wrinkled.
“You hold the gates?” it asked.
“Let’s say I do,” Gabriel said, even as Tom’s sword point twitched again.
“Some part of me has been on the other side,” it said. “We could be your guide. You intend to conquer? Perhaps we could be your ‘ally.’ And we know many things.” There was a pause. “You are merely men and women, and you are to be the victors? Have you killed all the dragons? How do you escape slavery?”
The sentences were patched together. Gabriel had to wait and read them back. The delivery was both flat and discordant, the emphasis inhuman.
Gabriel took another breath. It was curiously hard to breathe, and he glad for the comfort of Ataelus, who was solid between his legs; alive, willing, able. “I could make no agreement without my allies,” Gabriel said. He was tempted to babble; to explain that when they arrived, the being had no chance at all.
Why? he asked.
He went into his palace and looked at the mirror. And saw the encroaching envelopment as a cloak of mist, a mantle of smoke.
“Pru?” he asked.
Her white marble face looked in the mirror. “Coercion,” she said. “A masterwork.”
In a moment of insight, Gabriel saw that the Necromancer, who had once been a mighty magister, had at his command not just the unearthly powers of the Odine, but human hermetical magistery as well.
“You cannot merely accept my surrender?” it asked.
“Serpent!” Tom Lachlan said. “Don’t trust it.”
Unerring, like a bolt of lightning, the dragon’s blade shot out and swept through the space between them.
In the aethereal, the wisps of coercive fog vanished like morning mist in August sun.
The horse and rider flinched. That is a very powerful weapon, the voice said. I thought I knew where all of them were. Wait! Who made that? Come, who is your master?
Gabriel looked at Tom, and then at the herald, even as he backed Ataelus. He rose in his stirrups, looking at the forest below, where the Umroth were waiting. “I cannot see any way that I could secure your surrender and then trust you, or work with you,” Gabriel said. “I cannot imagine how I could chain you and not fear you too much to leave you … alive.” He sighed. “Or whatever you are.”
“We feared this.” The herald’s horse moved, backing a few steps; not like a real horse, but without a weight change. “Action is consequence. But man, I am Patchwork. I am not like the shadow fire, not like Ash, and the will is my inveterate foe. You have brought low my tame dragon and subsumed my puppets. I could bend my back. To live.”
“You just tried to steal my mind,” Gabriel said tersely.
“We are not one! We are many, and there is disharmony.”
He’s casting again, said Morgon Mortirmir, who appeared suddenly inside Gabriel’s memory palace.
Gabriel raised a shield.
The necromancer’s chorus unleashed a wind; on it were studded the sorcerous roots of the Odine’s control, but vastly enhanced by the ars magika. It was a vast, potent working, harnessing gold and green and darkest black with an intricacy that rivaled Rashidi’s magnificent working.
Gabriel was staggered. But the remnants of his wave front of fear seemed to split the working like an ancient rock splits a river, for a while. Gabriel had plenty of fear; he focused it.
The terrible working, demanding submission, flowed over Gabriel’s shields and then struck Morgon’s just behind him in the aethereal.
The spell pooled like water meeting a dam, but whether it was a fragile dam of twigs or a mighty dam of stone remained metaphorically unsure, and the dark waters rose. And flowed over it like water over a rock. And Gabriel’s fear was not enough to stem the rising flood around him. He was, alone, the target …
In a moment of panic that almost cost him his concentration, he realized that he was not alone; that Tom Lachlan was beside him. In the aethereal, Tom’s armour shone like the sun, and Master Petrarcha’s sigils burned like white-hot metal.
Gabriel wagered his life and Tom’s on a hunch, and in the real he put his spurs into Ataelus’s sides. His right hand went to his long sword hilt; Ataelus crashed into the herald’s horse, and even as the horse began to fall, Gabriel’s sword rose from the scabbard, missing Ataelus’s left ear by the width of a hair, sweeping over the warhorse’s head in a flat cut that caught the not-dead herald where his jaw met his neck and cut diagonally through the falling man’s skull, exiting through his left eye and left temple.
The titanic compulsion ceased as if a door had been closed.
“Sweet fewkin’ Christ,” Bad Tom spat.
Mortirmir didn’t pause to assess. He countercast, the huge working they’d used together just days before, and the tiny lines of light leapt away from his fingertips like thousands of illuminated bees.
They were swallowed by the darkness to the north.
“Damn,” Morgon said. “That should not have happened.”
“Run,” Gabriel said to Bad Tom, and together they turned their horses as a veritable tide of wild animals came up the valley, thousands, tens of thousands of deer, wolves, dogs, sheep, oxen … some cadaverous, some newly taken, all in a mindless stampede.
All along the line, men and women nocked their bows.
“Not-dead animals,” Gabriel shouted.
But Bad Tom had chosen his ground well, and the tide of creatures had two hundred paces of open scrub and arid dirt to cover before they could reach the ditch.
The first falconet rolled forward, its muzzle just two feet above the dirt, well dug in.
It fired over their heads.
A cloud of scrap metal flayed the center of the charging mass.
The second falconet rolled into place between its gabions and also fired, its muzzle rocking back like a barking dog.
The charge of the not-dead animals came on in almost complete silence, broken only by the sound of Cully’s orders to the archers of the casa; Count Zac’s orders to his Vardariotes; Edmund Chevins’s orders to his guildsmen.
The guildsmen stepped up onto the back of the upcast dirt, leveled their tubes between the tall stakes …
“Fire,” Edmund said.
Two hundr
ed hand gonnes went off in a long ripple; no two went off exactly together.
“Loose,” Cully called in his singsong command voice. The heavy arrows leapt off heavier bows, and smashed into the not-dead, falling at a steep angle like a wicked sleet.
Harald Derkensun raised his axe.
The falconets fired again. Their crews had practiced for months; they were more afraid of censure than of not-dead. Where their loads struck, the not-dead went down as if a scythe had cut through them.
Any mortal charge would have faltered. This one had huge tears in it, like an old rug pulled between angry children, and yet the not-dead came on, and any one of them knocked down by round shot or scrap metal that was not destroyed would rise and run, or hobble. Creatures missing two legs would drag themselves forward.
The not-dead came on. And there were still thousands of them.
Men in the line began to consider options. Running was not really one of them, but the archers knew that the time for archery was ending. One more arrow? Two?
The guildsmen stepped up to the wall again. The wave front was less than a hundred paces away. Every man was deeply afraid.
“Present!” Edmund Chevins called. Every tube came smartly down from vertical to horizontal. Men and women squinted down their short bronze tubes, slow match burning in their hands.
“Fire!” Edmund roared. He pushed the match into the touch hole of his own piece and felt the welcome tug of the recoil, and then he reversed it, up and over his shoulder. The stave that held the hand gonne was stout oak with a steel tip; the gonne itself made a lethal mace.
The cloud of sulphur smoke lingered like a collection of old farts and rotten eggs.
Something rippled past them from behind, a liquid vortex of colour that passed them at ankle height and made the hissing of a vast tribe of serpents or the fall of heavy rain as it passed. It went through the stakes, out into the smoke. Whatever it was, it seemed to sever the not-dead at their ankles, leaving them writhing in horrible deformity on the ground. The grim working passed over some, and seemed to lose coherence in the mass, but it was terrible in effect.
A stag, its antlers broken, leapt the low wall. It struck clumsily against the angled stake to Edmund’s left and turned on him, and Edmund swung his massive bronze pole-mace with all his strength and fear.