He couldn’t stifle a giggle. “I am God,” he said, delighted. “I can make and I can destroy.”
He touched another dozen cringing slaves and made their slavery more abject.
And more efficient.
All of this required an investment of power, as did the maintenance of his armies, the empowerment of his various shields, and the bonds of adamant that held his aquatic “allies” to his purpose.
And through the ties of will that bound him to every bogglin in his host, he felt the further stirrings of the will. The process was not unlike the way a cat might feel the edges of a tunnel with her whiskers. And Ash’s reaction was as instinctive.
Even as the distant will began to seize his slaves, Ash drew himself up. He withdrew his will from Orley’s monsters and turned to walk back down the beach.
In a forest clearing, a hundred leagues to the south, two Rukh, a cave troll, and a hundred bogglins were conquered. The process was as swift as lightning.
The battle was on.
Ash cursed.
Trees died.
He took on his true form and leapt into the air, flying south. Almost as an afterthought, he ordered Orley’s horde to follow him. Lot had won this round; he could not retake the well and face the will at the same time. And the well was not vital.
Ally with Lot?
The will was the true enemy.
Or so he might say to Lot.
The Inner Sea—Aneas Muriens
On the shore of the Inner Sea, Aneas’s rangers were ready. The two Gallish round ships waited like floating fortresses in the two coves, covering possible landing beaches; the rangers waited in concealment, under webs of defensive spells, their own and those cast by Master Smythe.
The sun rose and dispersed the mist on the great lake, and eyes searched the sun-dazzled water for the flash or oars or paddles.
Aneas fell asleep, and woke, ashamed. But no crisis had occurred, and he changed his position, adjusted the screen of orange leaves he’d woven to cover himself, and listened.
Master Smythe walked out of the cover of the forest and onto the gravel beach as if Aneas was not concealed in any way.
“Aneas,” he said. “He is gone.”
“Ash?” Aneas said.
“We should not say his name,” Master Smythe said. “Entanglement has many effects. He is now utterly of this world, and so in this world his name will now draw his attention.” He looked out over the water. “He has other problems than losing his well right now, so he is running off to fight the Odine, who are awakening on schedule. He cannot spare me his attention.”
Smythe was smiling.
“And that’s good?” Aneas asked.
Smythe nodded. “Orley is headed south to the great battle,” he said. “I thought you would want to know.”
Aneas stood up. “You want me to follow him?”
Smythe shrugged. “Don’t you want to follow him?” he asked.
Aneas narrowed his eyes. Other rangers were rising from their concealment: Ricar Lantorn, already recovered; Looks-at-Clouds, Nita Qwan, Irene, Gas-a-ho. “Can’t you see the future?” Aneas asked.
“No,” Master Smythe said. “But I know a good deal about the past.”
“But Irene says you planned all this,” Aneas said.
“Irene gives me far too much credit,” Master Smythe said. “But what I have done is done. My role is largely finished. I planned some of it. But other hands shaped the wax, and some of them even I cannot see.”
“Is that just mumbo jumbo?” Irene asked.
Nita Qwan began the process of lighting a small stone pipe from his pouch.
“Ask Amicia, if you can find her,” Master Smythe said. “There are now forces in contention that are to me as I am to you.”
“And so you drop your tools?” Irene asked.
Master Smythe frowned. “I prefer to think that I allow my allies the free will to complete the task ahead as they see fit.”
“Will you help us to pursue Orley?” Aneas asked.
Nita Qwan had his char cloth lit with flint and steel, and he drew deeply of the pipe, pulled the smoke over his eyes and head like a hood, and turned to face the four cardinal points.
“Oh yes,” Smythe answered. “But fairness requires me to tell you that Orley is no longer Orley. Your enemy, the man who was Ota Qwan, is effectively dead, and more horribly than any revenge of yours or sentence of the Sossag Mothers would ever have arranged. He is now a living extension of our enemy, in a way that Thorn never was.”
Aneas nodded. Nita Qwan handed him the pipe and he, too, drew deeply on it and turned to face the sun, and then the other three points.
“I was never charged to punish my brother,” Nita Qwan said. “The mothers told me that he will only punish himself. But I am to kill him, as one would kill a beloved dog who suddenly foamed at the mouth and bit strangers.” He touched the blue stone dagger at his waist.
“There is much wisdom in men and women,” Master Smythe said. “But it pains me to say that in this war I have discovered that we dragons are just like you men in this one thing: that we project on you what we are ourselves, as you do on your pets.” He took another pull and shrugged. “I have reconsidered. When I am a little more secure in my form, I will follow you to war. If this is the last battle, I risk nothing by being there; I will not long survive defeat by any of the contestants. Even here. And you are good companions.” He shrugged. “But I think it will be aeons before I can fly, or take my natural form again. Or work power anywhere but near my sources.” He shrugged. “Still, I have sufficiently become a man that I cannot really imagine waiting here to find out who won, either.”
Arles—The Red Knight
Every foot soldier occupies approximately one pace, or three imperial feet, of frontage and depth in a military formation. A mounted soldier occupies almost two paces in width, and almost four paces in depth, because horses are so big.
So fifty thousand men, in a single rank, on foot, occupy fifty thousand paces, or almost twenty-five miles. Even formed four men deep, they would occupy a frontage of almost six miles, and if a sizable proportion of them were mounted, it would amount to almost ten miles.
Even formed in deep divisions, the ends of the line would never even see each other, and they would take hours to take up their formations.
When Gabriel, clad head to foot in cleaned and repaired armour of gilded steel, worn with gilt maille and scarlet arming clothes, mounted Ataelus, most of his officers had been awake for ten hours, chivying men and women and the occasional inhuman into ranks and files; checking girth straps, reacting to foolish suggestions, reminding, cajoling, and sometimes threatening. The fifty thousand men, women, and monsters of the imperial army had recently been five armies and no army. The Sieur Du Corse’s Gallish forces shared a language and a great deal of ill-will with the newly reestablished Army of Arles; the Etruscan states had various internal conflicts and histories, and almost everyone in every contingent shared a mixed feeling of dread and distrust for the “scarecrows,” former slaves to the rebel. The distrust was almost as deep for the magnificent cavalry of the sultan.
The opportunities for bad feelings, slights, petty jealousies, and subtle insults were legion.
Among all these, the company stood out; professional, multinational, and even multispecies, the company had the habit of cooperation … and of victory. The company’s officers were the glue that held the alliance together, and yet the experience of creating this grand review stretched them to their collective limits.
Ser Tobias sat on his charger with the imperial banner in his fist: a golden, double-headed eagle on a ground of crimson silk. Next to him was Ser Francis Atcourt with the casa’s three lacs d’amours, and Toby could see Ser Michael, mounting his charger after a short conversation with the Duchess of Venike, and Ser Milus, who had command of the company. Ser Alison was far off to the right, commanding the Army of Etrusca.
Ser Thomas, head-to-toe black and gold, was alre
ady mounted on his stallion, as big as a monster. He was commanding the same troops that he had led east: the Vardariotes, the Nordikaans, the casa, and the Armourers’ Guild. Under the Umroth banner, no longer a joke, they were the imperial guard with the addition of Comnena’s Scholae—almost two thousand mounted soldiers, the elite of the army. They were drawn up already, along the road that led to the castle.
To Toby’s left, the empress and the Queen of Arles were mounting. Both wore armour.
“How are we doing?” the emperor asked his chief of staff.
Ser Michael nodded. “Just a little late,” he admitted.
Gabriel looked back. MacGilly had his helmet and lance; Anne Woodstock carried his war sword, unsheathed. She glanced over at Toby, and Toby caught her look.
She grinned.
He grinned back.
Most of the women and men in the courtyard were grinning.
“If I die,” Gabriel said to Michael, and Toby felt like a lightning bolt had gone through him. “Are you ready to take command?” he finished.
Ser Michael looked for a moment at his wife, who was across the yard, getting up on a horse he felt was too big for her. “Yes,” he said. He shrugged. “I mean, probably not, but what the hell else have you trained me for, the last three years?”
“Exactly,” Gabriel said, at his most smug.
Toby wondered if he was supposed to be hearing this.
Atcourt glanced at him.
Ser Michael sighed. “May I ask what I hope is a very intelligent question?” he said.
“Is this an apprentice imperial commander question?” Gabriel said.
“Yes.” Michael looked back at Kaitlin, who was mounted and looking apprehensive. “Did you send armies to finish the Necromancer and defeat the Patriarch of Rhum just to train all these people to obey our officers?” he asked.
Gabriel returned a smug smile. “Mostly,” he said. “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.”
“You mean, it was all an exercise?” Michael asked.
“Oh no,” Gabriel said with his most annoying smile. But then he looked at Blanche, and his smile changed. “We had to finish the Necromancer. Far too dangerous, and anyway”—he was looking somewhere else, but then his attention snapped back to Michael—“to cement the alliance with the sultan if for no other reason. Did I tell you the Necromancer tried to surrender?”
Michael whistled. “No,” he said.
“There were lots of good reasons to fight both campaigns,” Gabriel said.
Michael realized that the emperor was not really talking to him. He was talking to Blanche. “We had to pin Mitla in place so that Venike didn’t feel threatened, nor Berona. We needed all these allies, Michael, and they all have their own concerns. And Kronmir—” Here Gabriel looked away. He took a deep breath and released it in a sigh. “Kronmir had a theory that needed to be tested in the field. We needed northern Etrusca secure. We couldn’t have the Patriarch threatening our lines of communication.” He shrugged. “But yes, in part they were exercises.”
“Remind me never to go to war against you,” Michael said. He looked back. “Everyone’s mounted up.”
“Then let’s go and see this army,” Gabriel said.
The emperor led the way, alone, out of the gate.
Behind him, Blanche, wearing her crown, and armour, rode between the banners. But today, the emperor rode out alone.
Just outside the gate, Harald Derkensun roared an order. Hundreds of axes went to shoulders. Most of the Nordikaans were so tall that their heads came even with the eagle on the emperor’s coat armour, even when the emperor, not a short man, was mounted on Ataelus, eighteen hands of black warhorse.
Derkensun raised his great axe straight in the air. “Ave,” he called in a voice as deep as Ocean.
IMPERATOR
… came the reply from thousands of throats.
The emperor struggled to hold his composure. It was hard not to show what he felt; difficult not to let the tears in his eyes flow over his face. Almost impossible for a man who remembered being a despised adolescent to accept the roar of such acclaim with equanimity.
The Nordikaans closed in around his horse and walked forward with him. There were more than two hundred of them; more than there had been before the disasters of the last three years.
Beyond the Nordikaans were the Scholae; beyond them, the Vardariotes; beyond them stood the casa, who bore at their head the ancient Phoenix of the Athanatoi, the immortals of Emperor Atreus. Gabriel hadn’t seen the banner before, but he paused, and smiled, and looked back at Blanche, who beamed.
The emperor looked down at Derkensun. “Blanche embroidered that,” the emperor said proudly.
Derkensun smiled. His mind was elsewhere. Battle was coming.
As he passed, each company saluted and fell into the column.
Last among the “guards” stood the gonners of the Harndon guilds, augmented by the Etruscans they’d recruited as well as detachments of Galles, Mamluks, and Venikans, all states who had claimed to need to have the new weapons immediately. Edmund wore light harness and commanded almost a thousand men, but still only the three falconets. Arles could cast bronze hand-gonnes, but no one in Antica Terra could cast a two-ton bronze tube on such short notice.
The gonners were still learning to march.
“Pitiful,” Derkensun muttered.
“They’ll have lots of practice in the next few days,” the emperor said.
“They make the guard look shabby,” Derkensun said.
Gabriel looked back over his guard; thousands of men in brilliant red and green and gold, steel bright, silk-turbaned, moving in unison. “Oh, we don’t look so bad,” the emperor said.
From the end of the ridge on which the citadel of Arles sat, the whole of the army was laid out, lining both sides of the road for almost four miles, facing inward. On the right, Du Corse’s Galles; on the left, the scarecrows. Gabriel led the guard down the plain at the center, and the guard marched eight abreast, thirty ranks at a time, led by a phalanx of flags.
The scarecrows were thin, and their eyes burned, and many of them were one-eyed like the king of the old gods, but they’d all come up with undyed white wool cotes, many of them donated by the women of the town, and every one of them bore the phoenix badge in red wool on their left breast over the heart. There were more than ten thousand of them, the Duchess of Venike had refused the regency of Etrusca to command them, and every man and woman had survived the experience of hosting a worm.
Across the road stood Du Corse’s levies, the Arriere Ban of Galle. He, too, had armed his foot with very long spears, fronted with halberds and war hammers for crushing the larger monsters, and he had four big blocks of arbalesters and a big company of heavy brigans in good armour; the very men who had so oppressed the burghers of Harndon not a year before were now imperial infantry. Gabriel detected no flaw, no irony in their cheering; less than a year before, he’d ambushed that very company on the road south of Lorica. And captured Du Corse, who now sat on a magnificent charger with the silver crown of the Regent of Galle on his helmet.
The regent saluted the emperor gravely and Gabriel returned the salute, turned, and raised his sword to the Duchess of Venike, who also returned his salute.
After the scarecrows came the Mamluks; on the other side of the road, the Galles gave way to the company. Ser Pavalo sat easily on the parade’s finest horse, his Fell Sword in his hand, facing Ser Milus across sixty paces of sunny dust.
Gabriel turned and made a motion to Bad Tom, four horse-lengths behind him, and Bad Tom’s bronze lungs roared the order to halt.
As near as could be managed, the company’s Saint Catherine banner was in the center of the whole army.
Gabriel rode his horse in a tight circle, looking at them all, and then he beckoned to Mortirmir, who, bored, had his feet up on the cantle of his saddle and was reading.
“A mighty tome of magik?” he asked, sotto voce.
“No,” Morgon said. “
Here?”
“Yes,” the emperor said.
Mortirmir’s fingers grew with a pale fire, and then he nodded.
Gabriel sat up straight.
FRIENDS
Even the emperor himself was startled by the sound, and Atealus laid his ears back and twitched.
Tippit mimed putting his hands over his ears and No Head slapped him on the helmeted head.
Gabriel took a breath. He felt foolish; felt that he should never have done this at all.
Every eye he could see was on him. And Blanche was probably right.
Friends! he said again. It was better this time.
For a moment he could not remember a thing he had intended to say. And then it was all there, like the hermetical workings in his memory palace; hung on neat pegs. Because …
Tomorrow, barring accident, we will begin the greatest adventure that any army since Livia’s Legions has undertaken. We will go to another world. In fact, my friends, we will go to three other worlds before we return to our own. We have a map. We have food, and water, the best equipment, and for many of us, months or years of training and planning. This is not a desperate gamble. This is the culmination of a careful strategy. We do not have to die to the last man. We only expect everyone to do their duty, and we will triumph, and our children and their children will have peace.
You have survived the claw of the monster and the silence of the Darkness, the wing of the wyvern and the breath of the dragon. Many of you bear the marks of the weapons of the Wild and the weapons of Man.
Whatever awaits us across the gates will not be worse than what you have already faced, because your ancestors and your adversaries here are the survivors of other wars for those same gates. We have a level of hermetical support that our ancestors would have envied. We have the best weapons our world can supply.
Conquering fear is what everyone in this army has in common. We have all done it, and tomorrow we will do it again. And in conquering fear, we will win.
Then, quite spontaneously, he smiled.
And all the loot will be divided equally, by the divisional commanders, he said.
Now there was laughter.
Cully roared “Now ye’r bloody talking!” so loudly he hurt his voice.