For almost a minute in the real, sparks and bolts crisscrossed the air over the battlefield. A Morean mage died with his blood boiling in his desiccated veins, and Lord Kerak’s second apprentice, Mehghaigh the Black, exploded like a tree struck by lightning, leaving Kwoqwethogan, Mogon’s sorcerous brother, to hold the choir together. It was the heaviest load of ops he had ever carried.
He held.
Well to the east, the choir of Lissen Carak sang, and the potentia they purified passed west into the hands of Lord Kerak, whose golden and green shields rose over the ridge and held, and held, and held.
Ash flew closer; his response time decreased, and the rate of his attacks rose, so that a series of red, green, and brown lines seemed to connect him to the glowing dome over the ridge. His talents showed him the rout of the enemy army, but despite his near infinite puissance, each time he reached into the aethereal to divide and conquer the choir of magisters opposing him, he took wounds. He could reach deep into the maw of the aethereal and find an Alban mage by the fire of his soul, and he could strike, but even for his ferocious intellect and mighty will, such a focus left him blind to the assaults of the myriad casters opposing him. He was balked like a cat who has caught a mouse and cannot kill it. Or to be more accurate, a cat who has found a tribe of mice and cannot kill them all.
The irony was not lost on him. His adversaries were using the same tactic on him in the aethereal that his legions of bogglins were practicing in the real, and for a moment he faltered, appalled at the sheer number and diversity of the hermetical talents displayed against him. Four of them were of considerable power and not to be ignored; but the vast choir of their supporters tore at Ash’s certainty of victory.
Uncertainty fueled his rage, and rage remained Ash’s favourite reaction. Fire flew. His talons glowed, he breathed death, and his assault rose to a climax against the choir’s wards.
Of course, that was a distraction anyway. The real weapons were on the way. Ash loved the levels of his deception and he exhaled death with satisfaction.
Far out where the edge of the real touched the first terrifying wisps of the aethereal eight great rocks, or castles, or ships, remnants of a war fought so long before that only two of the races that had fought the war survived to tell the tales, tipped past the point where they might have slipped back into the ebbs and tides of the aethereal where they were at home and began their long, spinning fall into the real. Long, and not long; as the rocks (if rocks they truly were) teetered on the edge of the real, stars were born and died, and eventualities became impossibilities, and the infinite struggled with the finite.
All overcome by the will of Ash.
And the stones became manifest, and began to fall. Sometimes this could happen naturally; it was where star iron came from, as any smith or magister knew. But there was nothing natural about Ash’s calling. Eight great bodies from beyond the edge of reality began to fall to earth, carefully aimed by Ash’s malevolence.
Yet in the long but finite instant in which they tipped into reality, Kerak’s working opened and burst into effect from the body of an arrow of thought to a becoming like the wings of a flock of very complicated butterflies; from an arrow, his working became a shield, or rather, a set of shields each fluttering subtly at the very edge of the real.
Each of the falling meteors struck one of the butterfly wings, and was altered very, very subtly.
And then they fell like Lucifer’s angels. As they fell through the outer reaches of the real, they gathered contrails that appeared to the mortals below like pointing fingers.
Ash turned away from a new wound that burned deep in his right side. He was only a mile from the enemy ridge, and now his workings were bubbling along Kerak’s glowing shields. He was burning through the shields but they were still holding; indeed, Ash’s last emanation of blue fiery rage had immolated a dozen ancient bears and as many wardens, a terrible blow to the Allies. Flint, oldest of bears, died there, and the eldest of his clan with him.
And still the choir’s layered shields held. Royal foresters lay dead in charred heaps; the northern Brogat would have a thousand new widows; and yet Ash could not pull down the shields.
None of it mattered, because his very presence was a deception.
Ash turned and raised his long head on his sinuous neck to see the glory of his skill. One part of his intellect had counted down to the moment where his meteors would impact; he glanced round to see a distant contrail as a volley of sorcerous attacks forced his focus onto survival; he slew the least of the hermeticists attacking him and turned to see eight lines in the sky.
Something was wrong.
He didn’t even have time to think.
The concussions were titanic. Each meteor struck the earth like a great fist from the heavens, and each, perfectly aimed, burning from a thousand miles of friction, fell along the Vale of Dykesdale and not onto the Dykesdale Ridge as Ash had planned.
Something had altered their paths; some by a few hundred meters, and two of them by miles.
One missed him by the length of one leathery wing, and suddenly Ash was fighting for his life; the near miss created a hurricane of air-currents that tore at his left wing, and then the explosions …
Ash spent all of his hoarded potentia to ride the cyclone winds and not have his vast wings ripped from his suddenly frail body, and even as the titanic blows struck across the sky, he was rolled, and the unhealed wound dealt him by an unsealie weapon months before burst asunder and his hot ichor flowed.
But Ash’s roar of anger was lost in the chaos of a false dawn.
He reached into the aethereal and drew power from the north.
Six meteors struck in a line along the marshes. Every tree on the nine-mile ridge was blown flat; a million years of tree life exterminated in an instant, and the heat of the impact started fires that would burn for days.
Half a million boggles died in a single beat of their collective hearts. Off to the west, Kerak’s redirected meteors missed the very heart of Ash’s real army and still annihilated hundreds of wyverns and trolls, started forest fires, and turned a whole broad lake to a rising column of steam visible from Harndon. A river’s course was forever altered; the crust of the earth was ruptured along the floor of Dykesdale. Red lava flowed, and the bodies of the dead became ash, literal ash, rising into the heavens to choke the sun.
But despite Kerak’s best efforts, none of the meteors struck the dragon.
The two he had directed at Ash’s reserves struck together, so close that they, too, blew a hole in the hard outer shell of the world, and a fiery chaos erupted. A mountain was born from the fire.
Every man or irk who had lingered on the western face of the ridge; trapped in combat, or too brave or foolish to run, or willing to sell their lives as rear guards to save their friends; all died. There fell Ser Edward, holding back the trolls so that his knights could escape, with all his squires, and there fell a dozen wardens, old souls who had roamed the north woods, covering Mogon’s escape.
And the survivors on the reverse slope might, at least in the first moments, have preferred death. The sky went dark; the sun was shadowed, and the air was full of smoke; even the wardens lost their hearing from the cataclysmic concussions, and most men could not hear well for days. Every horse bolted, despite careful precautions. And then the sky began to fall; first dust, and branches of trees, and splinters, and then rocks, and then more dust, and some bits of bogglins. Men were killed right through their armour; a falling rock could kill an armoured horse and his rider in one blow.
Tamsin, who had lived a thousand summers and seen many things, had never imagined the aftermath of the strikes, and she watched in utter horror as the malevolent rain flayed the Allies. She and Kerak raised shields to ward their people in the real—
And then Ash struck.
The choir was in chaos, and unprepared, and for eternal moments Tamsin and Lord Kerak tried to hold their adversary by themselves.
Far away in Liss
en Carak, the choir raised its voices all together; Miriam’s high alto and Amicia’s low alto and over them all, a young novice’s magnificent soprano raising their praise of God to heaven. Amicia spread her arms, and the glow of golden light that suffused her began to intensify.
The choir’s power grew. The power passed west to Kerak and to Tamsin.
Ash could no long ignore the immanence of Amicia. It was a crisis for which he was prepared, and yet unprepared.
“Damn,” muttered Lord Kerak, and he was hit as Ash’s power began to leak through his mind, unable to hold the power of the choir and the power of Ash in his head. In no time he was dying, but the Army of the Alliance lived, and Ash turned, rushing east to try to prevent a disaster to all his plans, and he cursed, his curses palpable, abandoned any immediate hope of destroying the Allies, and cast from the ops he sucked from the fountain at Lake-on-the-Mountain and he took the wyrm’s way to Lissen Carak in a single mighty effort of will.
Tamsin herself left her fortress and stepped through reality to save Kerak. She reached as far down Kerak’s lifeline as she could, trying to save the ancient Warden sorcerer, greatest of his kind and perhaps as great as Harmodius himself.
Kerak’s physical body lay in a crumbled heap in the midst of the Whale’s Jaw, a huge rock outcropping on the reverse slope of the ridge where two ley lines converged, hiding him in the aethereal. Tamsin stepped through reality even as she reached far into the aethereal, but Kerak was far beyond her, his fading self already almost gone even from the farthest halls and tunnels of his great and Wyrm hole–like memory palace.
“Oh, Kerak,” Tamsin said, or something equally foolish. Tamsin and Kerak had been allies and foes many times in many contests; now, at what she knew to be the end of her age, she would have traded every knight and archer and every irk in the Army of the Alliance for Lord Kerak, her peer and friend.
She knelt in the darkening cave of his memory palace, and bowed her head. And ash and grit fell on her from the lowering sky.
Far to the east, in the darkening sky over the great abbey, Ash poured fire onto the battlements to no effect. He cursed, and raved; a thunderstorm, feeding on his excess and rich in volcanic ash, burst over the high castle. He was unwise in his expenditures, and his will lost adherence, and still he could not penetrate the choir’s canopy of resistance.
And then, to his embodied senses, chaos came. The roof of the abbey’s central church did and did not open; and the simultaneity of the two realities, invisible to mere mortal observers, terrified Ash. And from the paradox arose Amicia crowned in golden glory, and against her will of shining adamant gold Ash did not try his own, but turned, too late to stop what he could see, and he fled into the near aethereal. He could only see her as a new and potent adversary, but perhaps not yet a contestant. Not yet. Not this epoch, not this aeon.
Nonetheless, in her moment of apotheosis, he fled before her.
Pass me by, he said quietly. Another day I will eat you.
Light gathered in the shadowed remnant of Kerak’s palace.
Tamsin knew it was time to leave, but the sudden accession of light gave her hope.
And then, above her, an immortal appeared, holding Kerak as if the great Saurian were a toy. Tamsin raised her eyes to see that it was no angel, but Amicia, like a living statue of solid, glowing gold, and her eyes were too bright for even Tamsin to meet.
“Now, Faery Queen, fear no evil,” she said. “This one goeth to my house, which indeed has more rooms than any mortal could imagine. But listen! I speak with the last breath of my living. The undead dragon Rhun is falling to his last death; Gabriel is victorious in the Antica Terra. All the world is balanced on the razor’s edge.”
“Counsel me!” Tamsin begged.
“Save Lissen Carak,” Amicia said. Then she blinked. “Or not.”
Then she smiled the warm, rich smile that Tamsin remembered from the Inn of Dorling.
And she and the glowing form of Kerak vanished into the darkness.
Tamsin tore herself from her friend’s silent palace, taking with her a web of workings she didn’t understand, and—
Found herself standing amid the great stones of the Whale’s Jaw. Kerak’s body was gone.
Tamsin fell to her knees.
A mile to the east, in a sheltering stand of ancient beeches, Tapio and Ser Gavin were gathering the army. Mogon knew of Kerak’s death and of Flint’s; the loss of two powers of the Wild was a heavy blow, and for Gavin, the loss of the Lord of Bain and his retinue was as bad. A terrible wind gusted from the west with a smell of burning and corruption, brimstone and heavy treacle. The sky was dark, the sun aglow like a distant fire on a dark night.
“We can’t make another stand,” Gavin said. His archers looked haunted in the queer brown light; they flinched every time something fell through the treetops. The N’gara Jacks looked as if they had been beaten with sticks; the royal foresters were slumped with their packs on, as if they had been struck by lightning.
In fact, they had been struck; they had watched fifty old comrades immolate and scream to their horrible deaths.
Tapio sighed and looked west. The sky was blood orange at the base of the horizon, and the air was stifling and close, like an old house with the windows closed. There was hot ash falling from the sky.
“If we have lossst my lady Tamsssin, we are indeed doomed,” Tapio said.
“Tamsin is right here,” she said, kissing her love. She appeared as a beautiful mortal woman, in a red houplande with a gold belt of heavy plaques.
Men looked up.
“Lord Kerak is dead,” he said. “I saw his soul in the arms of Sister Amicia.”
No one spoke.
Tamsin bowed her head, and then raised it. Her fanged mouth opened and she sang like a minstrel, “The impossible is now everyday. I have called down fire from the sky, and I have seen an angel of the Lord, and she was the embodiment of a nursing sister named Amicia, and she took Kerak away to heaven. Or so it appeared to me. Is she the Lady Tar? Your confusing Virgin? Or now a God unto her own right?” Tamsin shrugged. “We live in a great tale. Let me say only what I saw. She told me that Gabriel has triumphed in the East; that the dragon Rhun is destroyed. And that we must protect Lissen Carak.”
Tapio looked hard at the magister. “A glowing angel of their god told you this, my love?” He was curious. Cynical, perhaps. “Lissen Carak? Not N’gara?”
“She said, ‘Save Lissen Carak … or not.’”
Tapio laughed without bitterness. “No ambiguity there, my love.”
Tamsin looked at the ground in weariness. “I would trust her,” she said simply.
Ser Gavin looked over the army, such as it was. “It is two hundred hard leagues to Lissen Carak,” he said. “Fifteen days. Without rest.”
Ser Gregario had come up, eyes red. “It’ll take us that long to unfuck all this,” he said. “And none of these lads and lasses will be any good in a fight for a long time.”
Tapio looked at the human, and looked, too, at Bill Redmede, who looked sixty years old and not thirty. Redmede nodded. He was having trouble hearing what the others were saying.
“If we retreat, N’gara will fall,” he said.
“Can’t you … hide it?” Gavin asked.
“No,” Tapio said. “Not from Asssh. Not anymore.”
“Three times we have stood, and three times been defeated,” Gavin said.
“This was no defeat,” Tamsin said. “Hear what I sing. We have dealt Ash a blow that may prove mortal.”
Tapio shook his head. “Even ssshorn of hisss insssane horde of bogglinsss, he is puisssant beyond our bessst effortsss,” Tapio said. “And now you have taught him to take our sssorcccerersss ssseriousssly.” He turned and looked at Gavin and his dark eyes glinted. “I would hold my N’gara. I would hold it and send you all to your devil.”
Tamsin shuddered in the strange light. “No,” she said.
“No, my love?” Tapio shook his head. “Together we coul
d stop Asssh. Or at leassst hold N’gara.”
“No,” she said. “It is a fine dream, but when we entered this war, we risked all we have. Now the bet comes due.”
Tapio grunted. “We are losssing. Perhapsss we have already lossst.”
“Yes,” admitted Tamsin. “And we lost Amicia and Kerak in one day. We will never be a choir like this again.” She sighed. “Unless Harmodius and Desiderata come.”
“Next time Ash will come with caution and sssubtlety,” Tapio said. “And you will die, Tamsssin.”
Men shuffled and one spat. Ser Gregario fiddled with his sword, and Ser Gavin wished he were good at speeches.
Bill Redmede spoke cautiously. “What does it mean that Ser Gabriel is victorious?” he asked so quietly that other men, deafened by the concussions of the falling rocks, made him repeat himself, and he flushed.
“So the Red Knight won?” he barked more loudly. “What does that mean?”
“It means he’s drinking good red wine in Etrusca while we face fucking Ash,” muttered Ser Gregario.
“It meansss he hasss traded my N’gara for Arlesss,” snapped Tapio.
Tamsin nodded. “Yes. If we wish to save Lissen Carak, we must leave N’gara.”
“The gates align, or open, or what have you, in twenty-three days,” Gavin said. “Whatever happens …” Gavin closed his eyes, and opened them again. “We’re on our own.”
Tamsin raised her hands despite her weariness. “Listen; our workings, and Ash’s, have turned Dykesdale into a carbonized desert with a pool of molten rock at the bottom. We have a day; perhaps two. We can break off, move east, and … begin laying traps and ambushes. Every day.”
Tapio looked away.
Bill Redmede looked at his brother. “Twenty days?” he asked.