A beam of green passed over his head, splitting the great torso of the second troll so that its very mammalian guts slithered into the river.
Duchess Mogon stood on the bank, ten paces away, and the haft of her axe was smoking.
Gavin looked back, but Mogon’s people were pouring into the ford and more cave trolls were lumbering out of it.
“Sweet Christ,” Gavin managed. He sank to one knee in the cold water.
Ash turned again. The Loomsack was his; he could see his adverserae on the crest and a veritable tide of bogglins flowing around the base of the mountain, but somehow he’d lost the ford again.
He could see Mogon in the aethereal. Her power was innate; and she had two artifacts of legend, items so old that they were old even to Ash. She had just used one.
She was clearing the ford, allowing thousands of men and bears and wardens to escape his trap.
Ash weighed the odds. His timetable was wrecked, and he had yet to face the will, the most dangerous opponent of all. And then the gates would open …
It was time to take some risks.
He tested his powers; sighed inwardly in a sort of conservationist disgust at the sheer waste of power required to control his distant oceanic subjects and the expenditure to keep his bogglins loyal and moving forward. He sensed a countercurrent of mutiny among 53Exrech’s bogglins.
He was arranging to spend analytical energy on the root cause of the bogglin mutiny when he felt the distant tug of an alarm. He had dozens of them; he set them to remind him when things needed to be awakened, put to sleep, reenforced, destroyed, created …
This one was shrill, a high, keening wail.
The bogglins were passing out of his control.
A bolt of white fire struck his innermost shield, taxing his energies yet again to the moment of immediate defence. And then, as he continued his turn, Tamsin struck, a web of deceit, a tissue of lies, and for an instant, he feared nothing more than that his infected wound was mortal; he focused his analytical powers on a diagnosis before he understood that his will was under attack; rage consumed him, and he raised a mighty foreclaw and red fire fell on Tamsin.
He reached into the vortex of his empowerment and pulled, drawing realized ops from the vast reservoir in the north.
Then he completed his turn, and Loomsack Mountain passed under his left wing, and he stooped on the ford. The scream of his challenge blasted across the real and the aethereal alike.
The Inner Sea—Aneas Muriens
In the same predawn light that Gavin had examined the onset of Ash’s horde, eight long canoes raced out of the morning mist, paddles flashing.
Aneas stood in the bow of the lead canoe, his shields prepared. At his shoulder, Looks-at-Clouds wore no expression at all. Looks-at-Clouds had given control back to the dragon.
Master Smythe made no comment about the transfer.
Aneas was watching the shore. The great island rose away from the beach, tall slopes not quite steep enough to be called cliffs rising from a narrow shingle, a fortress built by nature. Gas-a-ho, the only one of them to have been to the island, had chosen the approach and the landing as the closest point to the sorcerer’s place of power.
Deadlock crouched in the bow of the next canoe, an arrow on his bow. He had piloted them through the Mille Isles and out into the Inner Sea. Behind him, Black Heron, the Huran warrior, sang the paddle song quietly into the silent morning. Wisps of sea mist rose like a kraken’s arms around the boats.
The slopes of the mountain rose, covered thickly in old-growth trees, maple and beech, their leaves red and gold with autumn, a blaze of colour even before the sun was on them.
No birds sang.
The air seemed heavy and potent, and Aneas could feel the incredible well of potentia in the lake, above him, at the top of the mountain.
The paddles dipped and dipped, and the long canoes shot forward, covering the last twenty paces. The beach was sand and gravel; the bow shot up, the hull scraped on the sand, and Aneas was running on solid ground.
A keening scream sounded the moment his moccasined foot touched the beach. The scream came from everywhere and nowhere, as if the trees themselves were screaming.
Aneas went forward, Looks-at-Clouds at one shoulder and Nita Qwan at the other.
The slope rose, all but impassable.
Aneas grabbed a tree, leapt, and pulled on the next tree, and the others emulated him, climbing steadily. In ten paces, his breath came in gasps. He dropped his pack; looked left. All the rangers were dropping their packs. The Outwallers had left theirs in the boats.
The keening scream went on, shrill and terrible.
Aneas didn’t allow himself to look up. He climbed, steadily, efficiently, aware of his companions, of the canoes emptying behind him, of the two Gallish ships entering the bay now that surprise was lost, their sails huge, the brilliant red cross of the lead ship like an invocation in the first true light of the sun.
An arrow whickered past him. He moved to the next tree. And looked up.
He was halfway up the wall of the mountain, and the trees about him were dying. He could feel their blight; see the moss hanging from their branches, much as he had seen on the tree in his memory palace; there was lichen on every trunk, and dozens of downed trees where a wild wind had flattened a whole row of forest giants.
He went over a downed tree and another arrow rattled past him. It had already struck branches, and was losing force, and it fell just to his left—a bogglin arrow.
Until then, Aneas had hoped that the island might be empty, stripped by Orley for his war in the mountains.
He stopped behind a downed tree thicker than he was tall, and sounded his horn. The sun was rising; the sky was a patchwork of blue and grey, and there was rain in the air, cold rain.
But the sun peeked over the horizon, its golden light catching the autumn leaves and the trees yet alive. He winded his horn again, and twenty horns sounded back in an arc to his right and left.
Away to his right, a tree exploded.
Instantly, Aneas raised a shield. So did other casters, so that the whole arc of the ranger’s advance was mottled in transparent gold and green.
Two trees to the west, Deadlock crouched and loosed his crossbow, leaning out to loose well up the ridge. A gout of power struck back instantly, and the ranger fell, screaming, as acid burned into his left hand and arm.
Looks-at-Clouds rolled, hir long form folding like an acrobat’s, and s/he rose by the wounded man and removed the acid.
But others were harder hit; to the east, a fine mist of something fell on a dozen unsuspecting Albans, and in a single breath, they died.
“Ware poison!” came a panicked call.
“Forward!” Aneas roared.
A heavy casting slammed into his shield. He was rocked back.
He had an idea. “Cover me?” he asked Gas-a-ho, and the shaman spun his endless flower-petal shields faster; a variety of workings impacted, but the depth and complexity of the moving shields baffled each attempt in turn.
“Strong,” he grunted.
Aneas was deep in his memory palace, working. It was a variation of a simple solution he’d used before, even in combat; he was stronger, and his access to ops was unprecedented, but the scale of this working was beyond anything he’d attempted.
There it was. He wrote a sigil in the aethereal air of his mind, focused on the letters of fire, and sang a snatch of Irkish poetry aloud, focusing two effects in one effort. In his mind, he saw the slope; he defined the limits of his effort.
In the real he sounded “Halt” on his horn. One long blast while he held all his potency in his head. “Lie down!” he roared, his voice tearing at his vocal cords.
Gas-a-ho turned a precise, deadly working, a stream of black, on a single rose petal of his mind …
Aneas triggered his working.
Six hundred dead trees between Aneas and the ridge top all exploded together, all their moisture concentrated and then superhe
ated in a hermetical sleight of hand. The sound was like six hundred lightning bolts striking the ground all together.
He used the power of his will to channel the splinters and flechettes of ruptured hardwood in one direction, up the ridge.
He put his horn to his lips, but when he winded it, he couldn’t hear a thing. He felt the vibration of the instrument against his lips, but heard nothing.
He climbed over the dead forest giant in front of him and there before him was a blasted waste: sixty yards to the summit, and covered in a dense carpet of wood splinters and bark with more falling, a silent rain of leaves and dead wood. There was little cover; in one place, a sheet of rock had been exposed when the explosion ripped the thin layer of soil off and flung it up the ridge.
Aneas ignored the ringing in his ears and ran forward, his boots strangely noiseless.
Fifty paces to the top.
He had two shields up, and he was still going. At the corners of his vision, he could see other rangers rising from their concealment. He prayed they had all lain down.
Now he was in the middle of a line going up.
At the top of the ridge, something stood up. It was huge, and an unnatural jet-black, like a suit of black armour.
Then another appeared.
The first unleashed a bolt of black fire.
Aneas parried it and went forward another step.
Gas-a-ho lifted a stag antler and one of the black-armoured figures snapped back, knocked flat by the kick of an unseen stag.
Celia loosed an arrow and was struck by a bolt; her arm turned black, and then she dissipated. Nothing was left of her. Spores of black drifted in the light breeze.
Aneas pushed forward another step. It began to seem impossible; the hill was too steep and the enemy’s puissance too great for mortals. A fifth of his rangers were gone, and they were still thirty paces from the top.
And he was pushing through a wave front—fear, doubt, terror. He could feel them, over the fear he already felt: the gnawing of doubt, the suggestion of self-loathing.
Gas-a-ho and one of the black figures were exchanging spells at an almost inhuman rate. The black figure’s armoured hands gathered raw potentia and flung it without shaping, and the shaman shaped it in the air and threw it back like an endlessly flexible mirror of will.
Nita Qwan paused for a single beat of his heart and loosed his arrow without consciously aiming; the shaft of a lifetime, it struck the black-armoured figure under the left arm in mid-invocation, and stuck deep, the charmed stone head of the arrow chewing into the wooden flesh. Its rhythm was interrupted; two of Gas-a-ho’s counterworkings struck home, and it tottered and fell backward out of sight.
The surviving rangers gave a thin war cry and dashed for the top. A volley of bogglin arrows dropped one woman, and then the leaders were in the last few paces to the top, where a handful of bogglins stood around the three remaining armoured figures and a wight, its pale ivory armour laced in purple-white fire.
Ricar Lantorn loosed a heavy arrow into one of the black figures from just a few yards and took a bogglin arrow in his gut. He fell; Tessen came past him, and her bow flexed three times in as many paces as she shot away the screen of bogglins, and Lewen and Cigne passed her, the latter with her sword out. A black hand caught her sword blow, her sword shattered, and she fell with a choked scream, her right hand desiccated, the withered bones falling away from the stump as she screamed.
Sythenhag, the wyvern, flashed in over the trees and stooped on the nearest black-armoured figure. She was so fast that he never had a chance; her talons took him, pulled him into two pieces, and dropped them far out in the lake, exactly like an enormous osprey seizing and then rejecting a crayfish.
Two more wyverns crested the ridge and went after bogglins, taking them and eating them.
Aneas watched one for a moment, and saw the surface of the lake, the still, black waters disturbed only by Sythenhag’s wingtips and the ripples of her kill, and the island rising from the near shore, separated by only a narrow strip of water.
He raised his hand and coated the nearest black figure in fire. His fire stuck in ugly gouts, and his will refused his opponent’s counter, and he seized on the darkest aspect of his mother’s dark art, took all the fear and hate engendered by Cigne’s fate, and the black thing immolated in red fire.
It leapt into the lake.
Aneas sprayed the other one; it raised a shield of shimmering purple-black, and Looks-at-Clouds pointed and spoke a work aloud.
The sun seemed to dim.
A hole the size of a man’s fist appeared right through the black-armoured form; for a fraction of a heartbeat, Aneas could see the sparkle of the lake through the thing.
The purple-black shield fell, and Aneas’s tide of fire fell on it.
It burned. And it made no sound, because the blank helmet of its head had no mouth.
Irene cut Cigne’s dying arm from her body at the elbow with one blow of her hangar. Gas-a-ho cauterized it without altering the tempo of his casting, and the last bogglin fell. The wight vanished behind a screen of mirror clouds.
“The island,” spat Looks-at-Clouds.
There was a narrow causeway, perhaps wide enough for two men to run abreast.
The keening scream went on.
Looks-at-Clouds shouted something, mouth stretched wide, and ran for the causeway.
Aneas followed, and Lewen, and Tessen, and Irene, and Deadlock, wounded but still game, the acid burn livid on his dark face.
Nita Qwan ran to the edge of the water and released an arrow almost straight down into the water, and again. “Ware!” he mouthed as his third shaft went up into the air. Black Heron stood by him, killing bogglins in the water.
Aneas heard nothing, but he followed Nita Qwan’s shaft with his eyes.
A flock of black moths came fluttering out of the dead trees of the island.
They had black velvet bodies the size of fat children.
But suddenly the air was full of arrows; sixty rangers had made it to the top of the ridge alive, and fell as the moths might be, they were high in the air and easy marks.
Looks-at-Clouds cast into the moths—a simple, deadly rain of ops, a spray that coated moths and arrows, too.
“Go!” Aneas yelled. “Go!” He shouted in silence; he could hear nothing.
He understood that the moths could not be harmed by normal weapons. He laid a carpet of fire across them. But the rain of ops coated the arrows in flight, and they went home.
Nita Qwan sprinted for the causeway.
Aneas was right with him, and the others close behind as the surviving moths closed on them.
Gas-a-ho, behind them at the crest of the ridge, unleashed a wind that slammed into the surviving moths. It blew Aneas flat on the damp stones of the causeway; Irene almost went into the lake. But the moths had no defence and no weight; one was spun out into the lake, and the other had its wings bent right back. It bounced on the island, slammed into a tree, and fluttered limply.
Aneas got to his feet. Irene was just beyond his reach; a moth settled on her and she screamed, her arms scrabbling against the proboscis.
Black Heron drew a black arrow from his deerskin quiver. The head was of amber flint painted red. He licked it. And then, fluid, he nocked, drew, and loosed.
The magic arrow punched into the velvet skin.
The moth seemed to collapse; its fluids leaked, as if boiled from the inside, and Irene was coated in a thin black syrup that smelled of turpentine.
One of the black-armoured figures was dragging itself from the lake. It bore the marks of arrow and fire, but it was still coming up the bank of the island, limping.
Aneas took his axe from his belt, and threw it.
It struck blade first, and bounced.
Aneas ran forward, committed, trusting his friends, as it turned to him and grew two swords. Aneas saw it happen; a sword emerged from each arm. Aneas raised his green shield and rolled, passing the thing on his left as his
shield of green ops took a massive blow and vanished with a pop.
He came to his feet, turned, and drew his long sword.
With his left hand, he unleashed a gout of fire into the creature’s visored face.
It cut at him.
He stepped off line and parried, and his sidestep saved his life as the black thing’s sword went straight through his, cutting it in half.
“Jesus,” Aneas said aloud into the silence.
He threw the stump of his sword at the thing’s head and tried a lightning bolt. Neither had any effect.
“What the fuck are you?” he shouted. He could hear his voice dimly inside his skull.
Its purple-green sword cut down and he made a buckler of gold to cover his head, and then he was lying on his back. When the purple met the gold there was an explosion of force. Even his adversary had been driven back.
He rolled before the thing could gut him, breaking the strap on his shoulder bag and losing his quiver. He got to his feet with nothing but a curved knife more useful for skinning game than fighting monsters.
All Aneas could think was, What the fuck is this thing?
Then Looks-at-Clouds appeared behind it; there was a flicker, and it lay full length on the leaf mould. A massive kinetic blow.
But it rose again.
A pit opened between Aneas and the monster; a curious pit, as it was perfectly made, as if a geometric cube of earth had been removed …
Aneas understood. He threw a lash of white fire, a rope of thought. It caught on the thing’s shields, but Aneas cared nothing for the shields. He pulled even as the thing tried to rise, force exerted in the real, even as the black thing flung out one arm and threw a gout of its purple-black fire. The glob struck Looks-at-Clouds and knocked hir down so hard that hir body bounced.
But Aneas had it. He pulled. The thing’s arms rotated, and it fell backward, into the pit.
Looks-at-Clouds cast from the ground, rose to a knee as Aneas hurled simple gouts of ops at the thing. S/he stepped to the edge of the pit and unleashed a crescendo of workings straight down. The earth boiled. Aneas’s face was burned as he scrambled away, and then he ran for the opening in the earth, where two great stones rested against each other like a tent of rock. The sense of urgency had not left him, and he was sure that this could only be done in one rush or not at all. Either they seized the well of power … or …