“I think you are lying,” Aneas said. “My brother shared a body with Harmodius. For months.”
Master Smythe looked back and forth. In the aethereal, his frustration was evident. “Listen, you fools!” he began.
Gas-a-ho laughed. He produced a fine bear pelt from the air, shook it out, and sat on it. “Calling us fools will not help you,” he said calmly. “There is no hurry. Convince us. Otherwise, we kill your body.”
“And doom the alliance!” Master Smythe spat. “The Odine are rising! Even now I can smell them. Him. It. Even now, Ash is turning his powers on the Army of the Alliance. Everything is in the balance.”
Aneas sat beside Gas-a-ho, on the endless, infinite plain. The bear fur was comfortable under him. “Perhaps everything is always in the balance,” he said.
Gas-a-ho gave him a nod.
Master Smythe pursed his lips. “Listen,” he said.
Gas-a-ho nodded. “We are here to listen. We did not kill you outright. Not least because Irene guessed that it must be you. And not, for example, Kevin Orley.”
Smythe took an aethereal breath.
“Very well. We near the climax. Ash has the force to take Lissen Carak; whether he can manage it before the gates are ready for him is open to doubt. The Odine are rising; their rise will be swift. The will is strong. If Ash had not attacked us at Forked Lake, I would have been with the army, facing Ash with the help of all the magisters. Instead I am here. But we can still strike a mighty blow! We can take the island. I can make myself whole and restore this person to the body s/he requires. And then we will be stronger than ever.”
“Why not just tell us?” Irene asked.
“A habit of secrecy,” Smythe admitted. “And … you are so vulnerable. If Ash finds the time to come after you again … We are easily distracted; I know how his mind works, because it is a mirror of my own, if older. Every second, he must dismiss thousands of thoughts as wasteful, if only to avoid madness. Ash is not omniscient; he trusts his control of Orley to be sufficient to his purpose. But if there was a hint of my presence here …”
“Because you two are rivals for the gate?” Gas-a-ho asked.
“No. I represent the party of fewer negative outcomes. We want the gates closed; ideally, forever.” Master Smythe shrugged.
“You have never said as much before,” Aneas said.
Smythe sighed. “I am reduced to a kernel of my true self, and you threaten me with death. Shall I beg? Killing me will doom every human, in fact, every sentient, in this circle of creation.”
Gas-a-ho sat back and raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked. “Aren’t you a little worried that we’ll just do it all ourselves, without your party? I was listening to the Red Knight and to Irene, Master Dragon. Harmodius wants you all dead. I could do some of his work right here.”
Smythe’s eyes narrowed. “I made the Red Knight,” he spat.
Aneas laughed. “I doubt he’d appreciate hearing that,” he said. “But Ash made Thorn, and look what happened to him.”
Irene leaned forward. “You made Gabriel? Do tell.”
Smythe shook his head. “Why won’t you trust me?”
Irene looked around. “It is all about trust, isn’t it?” she said. “You can’t trust us, but you’d like us to trust you. But I see two possible outcomes you have not mentioned. First, if we allow you access to the well of power at Lake-on-the-Mountain, we will have no reins on you at all. You will return to your full powers, and we will be a mere party of rangers. Second, a lifetime in throne rooms has accustomed me to listen to what men do not say. I have listened to you, and I have not yet heard you say that your party intends the destruction of Ash. Do you intend to make him your ally against the Odine?”
Aneas looked at Irene with new respect. Dressed as a great queen, in that hour she seemed one.
Master Smythe turned his head to her, and his unnaturally beautiful face had a wry smile. “If I was Ash,” he said, “I would now wish that I’d ordered you killed, instead of merely suggesting it. Very well, Irene. You wish to be treated as my peer? There is no force with which I will not ally to save this world, to save the bears and the forests and the earthworms and the wyverns and even Man and Woman. There, ’tis said. We do not love Man. But we have allied with Man in this war. Is that too honest?”
Irene smiled. “Trust comes from honesty,” she said. “I have learned that recently.”
“So,” Gas-a-ho said. “You wish us to allow you to go forward, wearing Looks-at-Clouds. We trust you to behave well when we storm the island, even though we will be utterly at your mercy.”
“Worse than that,” Master Smythe said. “The island is defended.”
“Why do you refuse to produce Looks-at-Clouds?” Nita Qwan asked.
“Both Irene and Aneas are in love with him/her,” Smythe said. “I cannot have a hope of their rational minds overcoming their lust. I know humans all too well.”
Irene’s voice dripped contempt. “I think that is the most patronizing, most foolish thing I have ever heard a dragon say,” she sneered. “You ask us to trust you. You do not trust us, or even think of us as peers. More like pets.”
“The witchbane is wearing off,” Gas-a-ho said. “We must choose.”
Nita Qwan raised a hand. “I have a proposal,” he said. “A compromise.”
Smythe looked from one to another. “You know that I could just pass through your avatars to attack your minds,” he said. “If I take any of you, I am free of the witchbane.”
Gas-a-ho shook his head. “You will find that we all came through Aneas, not directly into you,” he said. “Aneas’s palace is heavily guarded. If you try, I guarantee our verdict. The real trumps the aethereal. You will be dead.”
For the first time, Master Smythe’s inhuman face registered fear. But he managed a smile. “Well do the dragons fear Man,” he said.
“Tell us your proposal,” Aneas said to the Sossag leader.
“Let Master Smythe relinquish control to Looks-at-Clouds,” he said. “Let us see hir in control of this body. Then, if s/he agrees, we allow him to regain control at the island, or before. But he must let the changeling go, and s/he must be allowed a vote. It is hir body.”
“S/he will never agree,” Smythe said.
Gas-a-ho nodded. “You will be a great sachem, if only we live long enough to plant corn again,” he said to Nita Qwan. “I agree that this is good.”
Smythe’s face was blank.
Irene waved a hand. “He considers desperation. Master Smythe, I appeal to you as one exile to another. Trust us. Trust Looks-at-Clouds, as you ought to have trusted from the first.”
“This from you, patricide?” Smythe said.
Irene nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Precisely. This from me. You may be thousands of years old, but I have learned this in the last four weeks. Trust is what makes us great. Not deception.”
Smythe’s black eyes met hers. “You have grown wise,” he said.
And then he was gone.
In his place stood a slim man, or a strong woman, with short white-gold hair and slanted green eyes. S/he blinked, and the plain around them became a forest, deep and green, full of forest smells, and the smell of lavender and spruce over all.
S/he wore a shapeless white shirt and hose, and in hir hand was a red crystal that flashed like the beating of a heart.
S/he looked at Aneas. “How foolish can a mortal be?” s/he said. “I drew him into me. I knew what I was doing. Those who play for power are doomed to be fools perhaps.”
“You are unhurt?” Irene asked. The woods were magnificent; the trees ancient and hale. Aneas’s distant spring looked pale, its trees insignificant by comparison.
“Only my sense of self, a little,” the changeling said. “I think he has hurt my … feelings. But by all the spirits of wood and water, I have learned … I have learned!”
S/he bent and kissed them one by one. “Welcome to my woods,” s/he said. “I vote that he be allowed to return. When he h
arms us, it will only be by his indifference.”
“Is this prophecy?” Nita Qwan asked.
“Yes,” the changeling said.
“And you will allow him to take you anyway?” Gas-a-ho asked.
“Yes,” the changeling said.
Aneas nodded. “Really, yours is the only vote that counts,” he said.
East of Firensi—Long Paw
Twenty leagues east of Firensi, Long Paw could see the columns of smoke in the dawn.
“War without fire is like sausage without mustard,” he said with an easy smile to the Etruscan woman who’d followed Brown.
“That is a horrible thing to say,” she snapped. “Those are people’s homes.”
Long Paw shrugged. “Aye,” he said. “Sì.”
Brown emerged from the cottage wiping his hands on a woman’s apron. “He was here,” he said.
M’bub Ali was using an amulet; he held it aloft in the door of the cot and watched the white cabochon jewel. It sparked.
“There is potentia here,” he said. “I can see it. Ahhh. I can track it.”
Brown’s lips didn’t twitch. “Let’s go,” he said.
Lucca nodded. He had his mask on, which made him inhuman.
They all mounted.
“You should stay here,” Long Paw said to Donna Beatrice. “This will be ugly.”
She shrugged. “I am with you now,” she said. She had a knife, and she loosened it in its sheath.
Long Paw nodded. “I guess you are,” he said. “Stay close to me if it’s fighting. Can you fight?”
She thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Probably,” she said. “Is it different from killing pigs?”
Then they were all mounted, and moving.
Sauce was just approaching the gates of Firensi below them, and the air smelled of smoke. There were storm clouds rolling in from the south, heavy with rain.
They unrolled hoods and kept riding into the hills. They stopped at one cottage and then the next, using M’bub Ali’s amulet.
At the third, a crossbow bolt greeted them, killing a horse. Lucca fired the thatch with a word, and the cottage burned. When the smoke filled the place, a man came out; M’bub Ali shook his head, and the man was shot down by his archers. Then another man screamed and tried to come out the back where the roof had fallen in.
Brown disarmed him and stood on his burned arms for three questions, and then after a nod from M’bub Ali, Brown simply walked away, leaving the man with his burns and a broken arm.
“This morning,” Brown said.
“If he has the art, he knows we’re here,” Lucca said. He had the distant look that casters got when they were preparing.
Brown shrugged. And mounted.
“Stay with me,” Long Paw said to Donna Beatrice. She shrugged.
“Do I have a choice?” she asked. There was no bitterness in her tone, just a sort of peasant fatalism.
Long Paw nodded. “Sì, ma donna. You could just ride away.”
She shook her head. “And do what? Whore? Cleaning lady?” She looked at the dark sky to the south. “I’m too old for the first and too bored for the second. Maybe I will be a killer.”
San Batiste—The Patriarch of Rhum
Ali-Mohamed was asleep, and the Patriarch woke him with a sibilant hiss.
“The enemy is close,” the man said.
Ali-Mohamed was still unsure whether the Patriarch was in fact so deeply locked in terror that he created things of which to be afraid, or whether he actually had arcane knowledge, but his eyes had a terrible green light in them, and Ali-Mohamed had to assume the latter.
“I’ll get the horses,” the former mamluk said, getting his feet on the floor.
“No,” the Patriarch said. “You keep them from following me. I need an hour or so. I should have done this days ago.”
Ali-Mohamed was about to protest when a slender talon, like the thorn on a rose, burst from the tip of the Patriarch’s reaching finger, and scratched his cheek.
He ceased to have his own volition.
East of Firensi—Long Paw
“Here,” M’bub Ali said.
They dismounted. There were a round dozen of them: Long Paw and Lucca, Brown and the woman, M’bub Ali and seven of his horse boys.
“We’ll hold the horses,” Long Paw said.
Brown nodded.
He was watching the stone cottage high on the hillside above them. It was a little after noon, and thunder rolled in the valley below, and the Council of Firensi had just agreed to give Sauce forty thousand ducats in gold and three hundred heavy wagons of grain to march away.
“We’ll wait for the rain,” Brown said.
“He’s casting,” Lucca said. His face went a little slack. “Christ risen, he’s a strange one. Never seen …”
There was a burst of colour from the stone cottage.
Lucca’s ruddy gold shield sprang up, but the bright red working didn’t come near them.
And then the storm front hit.
Thunder rolled again, and lightning flashed. The Etruscan woman went down on her knees in the gravel of the road and began to pray.
The sky was a very odd colour.
The rain came down like a waterfall unleashed. It fell so hard that it drowned sound; it almost covered thought. Brown made a hand motion; he and Lucca moved off along one of the stone walls that defined fields. M’bub Ali gave Long Paw a soaking-wet smile. “You have the best job, I think,” he said, and slipped over another wall into the olive grove. One by one, his people followed him.
Long Paw collected the reins of all the horses, and staked them with a pair of picket pins in the rising wind. He was already soaked through; his hands ached, but the loss of their horses here would kill them as thoroughly as arrows or sorceries.
The rain was unnatural. Long Paw got Donna Beatrice under her arm, raised her out of the road, which was now something like a stream, and hauled her to the relative shelter of the wall of the olive grove.
Then he slipped over the wall and opened the gate. Watching back toward the cottage all the time; but there was nothing to be seen but the grey curtain of rain. The valley was gone, the city of Firensi invisible, and even the next mountain was gone.
Long Paw went back out into the road, got the woman, and by gestures, explained what he wanted to do. Then each of them took out one of the picket pins, and with twenty horses between them, all spooked by lightning, they moved the picket and the line into the olive grove. It seemed to take forever, but the woman was good with horses. It gave them something to do, and when the horses were inside the walls, Long Paw closed the gate.
Then the two of them huddled in the corner of the wall—a good shelter, if two walls and no roof make a house. Long Paw went and fetched his heavy riding cloak off his saddle and threw it over the corner, and then they could think; the rain fell outside the little shelter, although the cloak filled with water in very little time and had to be dumped.
“I am so cold,” said the woman.
An alarm was hammering in Long Paw’s head. He’d done all these things to pass the time. We’ve been here an hour, he thought.
And the light was changing. The storm was passing them, but the light was failing.
“Stay here,” he told the woman, and he went out into the rain. He grabbed Lucca’s heavy riding cloak off the back of his saddle and put it around Donna Beatrice, and she smiled. Then he hauled himself up onto the wall.
Too old for this crap.
He could see the cottage.
He could see a body outside it.
Brown moved very, very slowly toward the back of the stone cottage. The rain would cover most of his movement, but he was a cautious man who’d lived a long time in a dangerous business, and he had no intention of showing himself. He crawled a long time, and then he waited while Lucca moved.
He was crawling through some sort of gorse: green and brown, unpleasant to the touch, growing over very stony ground. He found a shallow depression,
maybe only two or three hand-spans deep, but he clung to it, moving parallel to the house.
There was a bright red flash; he didn’t raise his head, but he smelled the burning meat.
He waited.
He heard Lucca move behind him, despite the rain. Eventually the man came up almost level.
Brown made some hand signals.
Lucca nodded.
He was very cold.
Someone loosed an arrow from higher up the hillside.
A pair of arrows flew from inside the cottage. And another from the hillside.
Lucca held a thumb up.
Brown nodded, and they both moved, crawling on their bellies as fast as their elbows and thighs would allow them. Brown raised his head when he made the pigsty, and there, twenty paces away at the other end of the farm wall, was M’bub Ali, and they didn’t kill each other.
It was a particularly unpleasant patch of mud on which to lie.
M’bub Ali raised two fingers, pointed at the house, then raised three.
Brown shook his head.
The rain came down harder.
M’bub Ali reached into his pack and produced a black, pitch-encrusted bottle. He held it up.
Brown shook his head, having no idea what it was.
M’bub Ali shrugged. Then he took out a tinder kit, and, in the pouring rain, tried to get a light.
There was another exchange of arrows.
M’bub Ali made a face.
More time passed.
One of the horse boys appeared behind M’bub Ali. In one pass he got the char cloth lit.
Brown’s eyes narrowed.
M’bub Ali lit the stub of a candle despite the wind, and then lit a tab on the end of his black bottle. The tab flared.
M’bub Ali leaned and threw the bottle straight through the window of the cottage and took an arrow through his arm in return.
The bottle burst with a whoosh, and all hell broke loose.
A line of red fire emerged from the maelstrom and struck the horse boy with the tinder kit, and he was flayed, his skin burned off his muscle, eyeballs melting. He screamed. But not for long.
Lucca’s shields snapped into place.
A red line went through the shields, attenuating as it went, and Lucca was hit. By luck, his leather mask caught most of the leakage, but his shields went down as he lost concentration.