Farther along the shore were some squalid huts. There were bogglins—dozens of them—boiling out of the huts, one in the lead, two strides from Aneas, and something emerged like a shadow from the tent of stones—another wight.
Krek shot the lead bogglin. It was a long shot; the old bogglin was back by the edge of the causeway. But his arrow was true, and Aneas had another three heartbeats to ready himself.
Nita Qwan, thirty feet away, loosed the arrow on his bow and downed the next bogglin. Then he reached into his belt and drew his short sword and threw it in one motion, hilt first. It rotated in the air like a tomahawk, and Aneas reached and plucked it from the air by the hilt, using the momentum to cut left to right, high to low, through the third bogglin’s attempt at a parry and then through all four hinges of its jaw. Tessen came up, her long Irkish sword plucking one off the edge of the pack; then she swept low, even as Lewen loosed and loosed again, a steady ripple of shafts rolling off his fingers, the range too short for the veteran irk to miss. Irene’s crossbow coughed just behind the irk’s shoulder and Aneas heard the ratchet clack as she cocked again; then he kicked one of the smaller creatures; it tried to seize his leg and he cut into it with his skinning knife and thrust with his sword.
Nita Qwan was coming closer; a step, an arrow, then another step.
The wight cast. The range was too close; Aneas could not cover the blow, and white fire struck his shoulder, annihilated his amulet, and his skinning knife fell to the ground. He stepped right and cast, a weak, one-word working, and snapped a rising true edge cut that rolled into a thrust with Nita Qwan’s broad-bladed short sword in the same tempo.
The wight made a human mistake—the instant of decision as to which sword should cover the center, complicated by trying to shield itself against the hermetical attack. Aneas’s thrust went into the joint where the shoulder chiton met the elastic neck; the wight stumbled, both swords cutting reflexively—Aneas passed to the left, his countertempo exact, and he severed the wight’s right sword from the stalk of its armoured arm even as the second sword reached for him; the tip cut his leather coat and scored into his arm, but he was inside, his hand turning; the wight’s chitonous arm tried to turn, lost the race, and his thrust went home into its face even as Black Heron’s arrow went in under its second arm to the fletchings.
The bogglins broke. There were eight bodies on the ground, and the will of their lord was not on them; they turned almost as one and ran for the huts.
Nita Qwan ran past Aneas, an arrow on his painted bow. Irene got another wood-fletched bolt onto her latch and held it pinned with her thumb as she ran forward behind the Sossag.
Aneas made himself follow them. He was wounded; the wight had used up anything he had left.
The light inside the stone tent was odd: dark and light, red like fire, flickering. Aneas understood instantly that it was a vent; that this was a place where the aethereal and the real touched. It was terrifying, but he was already terrified.
Irene shot a bogglin at a range of perhaps five feet; the creature was trying to hide in the junction of two great stones and she was not feeling merciful. She latched her crossbow again, working the lever without thought. Her face was set; the network of black left by the moth’s blood made her look like a bain sidhe from legend.
Aneas reached out. The potentia was right there, and unfettered; he drew on it, and made a shield for himself and his two immediate companions.
Nothing came at them.
The ruddy light shone like a glimpse of another reality, which indeed it was; the roof of the cavern glinted like the eyes of an insect, the reflection of thousands of crystals growing in an endless profusion, the points of light stretching away into infinity, lit from below.
Looks-at-Clouds came through the gateway into the fire-shot dark.
“Ah,” s/he said. “Ah! Mine!”
There was a flash.
Master Smythe stood beside Looks-at-Clouds.
He bowed, a deep, courtly bow. “My dearest changeling,” he said. “A thousand thanks for the loan of your beautiful body.” His voice … Aneas was just beginning to hear again, and he sounded odd, distorted.
The changeling shaman wriggled, like a woman putting on a new dress for the first time. “Ahh,” s/he said. “Such a pleasure having you inside me.” S/he laughed. “The things I have learned.”
Master Smythe’s eyes flashed red. “And now,” he said.
He saw Irene. Her crossbow was pointed at his temple. She was perhaps three feet away in the rich orange light, her face etched with black, her beautiful eyes huge.
“And now?” she said, her voice full of steel.
“I thought you trusted me?” Master Smythe asked.
“No,” Irene said. “We told you to trust us.”
Master Smythe raised his hands. “I mean you no harm,” he said. “And by now, Ash knows I have his reserve of power. Things will become very complicated. You, of all people, need my help. You know what is in your head.”
Aneas watched Irene.
“I know, thank you. And things are already very complicated,” Irene said. “Looks-at-Clouds?”
The changeling nodded. “We have to trust him. He could kill us all and fly away if he chose. You can’t keep a crossbow pointed at his head forever,” s/he said.
“I know,” Irene said with icy calm. “I’m considering simple murder. But I suppose I shall not.” She raised her crossbow so that the bolt aimed at the ceiling.
“I do not like being threatened,” Master Smythe said.
“I do not like being called a patricide,” Irene nodded.
Master Smythe looked at her and nodded. “You, I understand,” he said. “May I? While I have this marvelous advent of sheer power?”
He reached to touch her, and she flinched.
Aneas moved toward him, but he was too fast.
“There,” said Master Smythe. He had a black egg in his hand. “Good-bye,” he snarled, and tossed it into the inferno behind him.
Loomsack Mountain—Ash
Ash’s breath of unreality swept along the stones of the shore and into the stream; Mogon’s shields shriveled; wardens died at the very moment of salvation, and a Golden Bear, heavily pregnant; a dozen Morean knights who’d survived the fight with the cave trolls, twenty foresters running for safety, half a hundred Morean mountaineers caught by ill luck in close order …
Ash filled the morning air. Even with the loss of his tail, he was bigger than a ship, or a castle, and he blocked out the sun, his wings beat the air, the trailing wingtips black as night, lifting vortices of water off the river’s surface, his head already across, his black, forked tongue like a banner of wickedness as he opened his mouth to breathe again where Tamsin, 1Exrech, and Gregario held the rear guard together. Every horse panicked; the wave front of his terror was such that men fell on their faces; Mogon herself simply stood in midstream, unable to act, her great shoulders hunched against the weight of his presence; Tamsin lost her working, her mind clouded.
Now! Ash exulted in the moment of his triumph.
And now? asked Lot, two hundred leagues to the north.
And his life line, his unending reserve of potentia, was cut. And in the next moment, one of his precious eggs was destroyed; a little bit of himself, dead.
In one moment, a tolerable risk became deadly peril. Ash rolled, so low to the ground that his wingtips ripped dead leaves from autumn trees, and turned his vast bulk upstream toward the west, where the looming dark of vast ash clouds rose still from the burning craters of the battlefield of N’gara. It took him time to turn; time, his foe.
Not an arrow rose to strike him.
Not a hermetical working leaped to wound him.
Loomsack Mountain—Lady Tamsin
Tamsin had a hand to her throat. She looked old, with creases in her face that Gregario had never seen before; her skin appeared tight over her bones, and her hair fluttered around her face.
“Why are we still alive?” she ask
ed.
Gregario watched the immensity of the black-brown dragon sailing off into the west against the leaden sky. The size of the dragon drew the eye like the beauty of the dawn.
He was having to force his body to breathe.
“Sweet Christ,” he said.
A hundred feet away, 1Exrech was faster to recover; a different blood chemistry and an immunity to some forms of fear powered him, and his cold, layered understanding leapt to the moment.
He directed his scent glands at 53Exrech, just a few paces away, her wing cases vibrating in agitation. In scent, he proclaimed:
Truth.
Justice.
Revelation of Falsehood.
End of Slavery.
She writhed, her legion almost at the tips of her enemy’s spears, and then she inhaled. No countercommand reached her; no uttering of her master’s mighty will.
She did not try to resist further. In a moment, her own scent glands echoed those of her former adversary, now her senior.
In their next inhalation, all the bogglins south of the Cohocton River changed sides.
High above, on Loomsack, both Tapio and Master Niko understood immediately.
“Now!” Tapio said.
Niko, the only allied magister who had not been directly in Ash’s path, threw a ripple of simple energy strikes down the mountain against the relatively defenceless wardens and bogglins still pressing east toward the ford. Their own casters rose to the challenge, shielding many, but again, the precision of Niko’s involvement allowed his castings to penetrate shields and then expand, a single strand of hermetical ops exploding into hundreds of deadly filaments.
“I must keep the rest for shields,” he said.
The irk knights whose mounts were able to move leapt down the hill; the charge was pitiful compared to the might of their earlier attacks, but the creatures of the Wild at the foot of the mountain were rudderless, demoralized, and had just had windrows of death carved through their ranks, leaving only desperate islands of safety around their shamans. Hukas Helli alone held his people together in a great shield wall, but Tapio left them on his shield side and carved his way through easier prey, and his tired knights simply widened the road made by Master Niko and his choir of magisters, and the survivors of the allied right wing pushed tired muscle to the limit, running north, away from the river and the road, and following Tapio.
Niko and his choir were almost last, covered by Bill Redmede and a dozen Jacks, their bows useless, all their arrows spent, their swords and axes in their hands, but the sounds of fighting had died away. The sun was high; in the east, bells would be ringing the hour for ten. The bogglins were as exhausted as the Jacks; the enemy wardens stood in ranks, their crests deflated, and watched the last survivors of the allied rear guard pass through their lines with weary indifference. Nor did Niko unlimber the mighty working he had ready to his mind; once cast, he would have no further ability to shield them, but he was determined to sell himself dearly.
No challenge was offered, and the Battle of the Cohocton ended, not in glory, but in a stillness broken only by the shrill despair of the wounded and the fatigue of the survivors; a stillness deepened by the silence of the dead.
Then Bill Redmede had to drive his people as if he were master and they slaves; Tapio’s knights all dismounted and led their poor, stumbling beasts; Niko was as pale as a corpse and Kwoqwethogan walked like an animal, his tongue hanging listlessly from his mouth. Niko tried to talk to him, feeling guilt, and shame, that he had so overtaxed an ally. He was worried, very worried, that the great warden mage’s mind was damaged.
Bill Redmede made himself run to Tapio’s side. “How far do we go?” he asked.
Tapio looked at his knights, walking through the daylight woods leading their great antlered elk. “Until one of the animalsss fallsss,” he said.
“Holy Trinity,” Redmede blasphemed. “What if I fall first?”
Tapio’s face was set. “I leave you behind,” he said.
South of the Cohocton, the allied army was in rout. The column that had crossed in the darkness had no idea that the dragon was gone; the wave front of his terror had been more than enough. Nor did the rear guard do much better; Mogon walked, hollow eyed, her feather cloak lost. Gavin had lost both his horses and all of his squires, and he walked beside her, his sabatons weeping water as they trudged over a trail churned to black soup by the flight of his army. Ahead went Tamsin, her powers so far spent that she spared nothing for the glamour of beauty with which she usually surrounded herself; Ser Gregario walked his horse and contemplated cutting away his greaves and sabatons and leaving them to rust.
But behind them, it was the bogglins’ day. 1Exrech had not just proved victorious, but had tripled his numbers, and in the wake of the shattered allied army, the phalanx of free bogglins marched in close array, unbeaten, unbroken, and ready, if required, to save the army.
Gavin looked back at them. He was trying not to ask questions; Tapio lost, and Master Niko, and the flower of Alba’s chivalry. It was a dark hour, despite the sun, but there was a host of bogglins, marching, their spear points glittering. There were certainly more of them than there had been the night before.
He was trying to get his head around that when Giannis Griatzas rode up with a riding horse by the reins.
“My lord earl,” he said. “Your horse.”
Gavin shook his head. “For Tamsin,” he said.
She was too tired to even protest at his chivalry. She needed young Griatzas to help her into the saddle. Once there, she sobbed once, and her hands went to her face.
“Ah!” she said. “My love!”
Under her horse’s hooves, flowers burst from the leaf mould; a carpet of Adnacrag wildflowers.
She whirled, as if startled, or under attack, but her face was alight. “He lives! They live!” she said.
Gavin’s heart gave a great beat.
Chapter Nine
Harndon—Queen Desiderata of Alba
Far to the south, on the Albin River’s wharves, a hundred riverboats and barges were loading under the direct eye of the queen and her officers, barricaded by a line of guardsmen.
Ser Gerald Random stood on the wharf, remonstrating with his queen.
“My lady, you are safer here,” he said.
“With the plague?” she said. “Nay, Ser Gerald. There is no safety here. This is the last effort, the last throw. I am too puissant to cower here in my castle; indeed, such is my inclination that I would go if I were the least of my archers, with a bow in my hand.”
Ser Gerald paused. “Then I can only wish that I were allowed to accompany you,” he said bitterly.
“Hold my city,” she said. “Keep my people alive so that they may enjoy victory.”
“A victory so dear won that we will have nothing but the shell of a city and the husk of a nation,” Random said. “There is hunger in the streets. And the plague is spreading again.”
Prior Wishart came up, having overseen the loading of the last of the Order’s chargers. “I leave you fifty knights,” he said. “I cannot spare more. Even that is almost half of my Order.”
The queen put her hand on Ser Gerald’s arm. “I would say this to no one but you,” she said in a low voice. “But it would be better to lose Harndon than to lose everything. You are the rear guard, sir knight. Hold here if you can.”
Behind him, Master Pye called out as an immensely heavy bronze tube was swung up on a network of ropes.
Prior Wishart put his hand on his queen. “Madame,” he said. “Even as you command your rear guard, I beg your leave to ride with my vanguard. We are few but we have remounts and I fear for Lissen Carak. I fear everything: betrayal, siege, battle, magic. Please let me go.”
She gave him a queer look and returned the pressure on his arm. “Bide, my lord. I have a plan for you, and will take care of my fortress at Lissen Carak, too.”
“Belay!” he roared. Two hundred men paused; a heavy hawser was tied off to a bollard. The
old master leapt down onto the deck of the barge and eyed the bronze tube. “Cast her off!” he called. The men grunted; the tallow-greased blocks squealed as they took the immense weight. The oxhide and canvas cradle holding the tube seemed to groan, and then the whole contraption swung a finger’s breadth, and then another. A nimble apprentice took a sharp knife and, at a nod from his master, cut a yarn, and the cradle came down a hand’s width, and then another was cut, and another, and the cradle descended in short jerks, a finger or two at a time until the massive thing touched the barge’s supports, and came to rest, pressing the big boat down in the water like a giant’s hand, and the whole vessel groaned, and water came in at several seams.
The queen walked up beside Master Pye, where he stood in the bowels of the barge, watching his apprentices remove the cradle from the massive bronze tube. The tube was decorated from butt to mouth with handles shaped like dolphins and with a muzzle shaped like a dragon’s roaring mouth. Around the breech were cast the words Ultima Ratio Humanum.
“How long, Pye?” she asked.
“Seven more,” he said. “I’m sorry, Yer Grace. This cannot be hurried.”
Her captain, Ranald Lachlan, spoke quietly to Rebecca, his wife. She nodded and approached the queen.
“Your Grace, the river convoy is already very large. Ser Ranald suggests that the advance guard take the tide and go.” She looked down at Master Pye, who was watching the apprentices test the cradle for stress. “And begs you release the good prior.”
The queen nodded. “My very thought, Lady Almspend. Ah! Lady Lachlan.”
She went back to her officers. She paused to kiss her son’s head, and then turned to the city officers. “My lords and ladies. I am determined that we will all march today. Tell me of the cost?”
Prior Wishart pointed at the barges. “There is a real risk of defeat in detail,” he said. “Even as it is, we have to fear that our enemy will attempt to divide us, Ser Gavin north of the river and we south of it, and defeat us, first one and then another. Any division in our forces makes us weak.”