I’m not fooling anyone, Toby thought. She loves me! he also thought simultaneously.
Anne came back. He heard her footsteps, and they seemed to last an eternity of joy; the anticipation warred with a nameless fear …
She came in with the stub of a candle, and closed the storeroom door. It wasn’t much larger than a wardrobe. She looked up at Toby, and he leaned down and kissed her. It was clumsy, went on longer than they’d expected, and there was some dripped wax and then they broke apart.
“This is not the love nest of my dreams,” Anne whispered.
Somehow, that seemed very funny indeed.
“If we knock down a shelf in here …” Toby said. His hip was resting against all the spare oil lamps.
They both giggled.
“Why did you marry me?” Blanche asked. She was lying on their bed, and her hands were on her stomach. There was a little hardening, as if she’d grown new muscles there. She didn’t really show yet; but her kirtles didn’t quite lace up, and her breasts were tender.
“Because I love you?” Gabriel said. He was looking out the window at the night.
“I have good legs,” she said. “Or so I’m told.” She sighed. “I’m a laundress. I’m an imposter. That poor armourer; he treated me as if I was the Blessed Virgin herself, and not some woman, a woman who farts and laughs and …” She paused. “I’m not a great warrior like Sauce, and I’m not a great magistrix like Tancreda. I come from no great family. My mother was the mistress of some great noble or other.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I look at you … today, during the review. And I think … that it is like pretending you are married to God.”
Gabriel turned from the window. His face was odd in the play of the candlelight; the shadows distorted him, and he looked fiendish. “You do have good legs,” he said. He ran a hand down one.
She sighed. And slapped at his hand.
He shook his head. “My sweet, we are all imposters.”
Their eyes met.
“One of the reasons I married you was that you are the companion I wanted for this night.” He looked at her. She blushed but he went on, “I am taking a risk. Tonight, it seems insane. Jesus, why did I make this choice?” He shivered, and instantly her arms were around him.
“I pretend. I pretend I’m brave, and I pretend I’m in command, and I pretend that I have a magnificent plan, and half the time I’m making it up as I go, and I’m scared out of my wits and I am juggling eternities.” He gave a great shudder and subsided. “I have killed an awful lot of my friends and I’m still not sure what the prize is, and in the morning …” He turned and wormed an arm out of her embrace, and he kissed her. “Listen. I’m not an astrologer. But more than a year ago, I imagined …” He frowned. “Perhaps this is too much. I imagined that if we made it this far; and I didn’t even know yet how far this would be. If we made it this far …” He took a deep breath.
She kissed him. It wasn’t companionable after the first few heartbeats. It was erotic.
“When I pulled you into my saddle,” he whispered, “I knew you could … survive … anything I threw at you.”
His skin was glowing like sun-lit metal. His metal hand was dark.
She sat up and shrugged her nightshirt over her head.
“Shouldn’t we be asleep?” he asked. His hands were at variance with his words.
“No,” she said.
Seven hours later, his skin was glowing enough that there was a rumble of comment in the casa, who stood, weapons unsheathed, at the very top of the ramp down into the great underhall.
The underhall was not dark. It was lit in a brilliant rainbow of colours, as if the sun shone directly in the great half-rose window. And on the window, the Emperor Aetius marched across window after window, making laws, ordering the execution of the former emperor’s family, winning the great battle of Chaluns, living out his life as a monk.
The emperor himself wore his armour of gilded steel. He had his ghiavarina in his hand, and his helmet on his head.
Ariosto, in the hall above, gave a raucous scream.
“You’re sure?” Mortirmir asked.
Gabriel looked at him and gave an easy smile.
Cully stepped out of the ranks. “Cap’n?” he asked.
“Cully?”
“I’d like to stand wi’ ye, if you don’t mind.” Cully shrugged.
Bad Tom gave a fractional nod.
Gabriel nodded back. “Thanks, Cully.”
The two of them walked down into the sun-drenched room. It was warm. The flood of colour was supernatural.
“Cap’n?” Cully asked.
“Yes?” Gabriel asked. He was trying to rein in his impatience to get it done.
“Look there,” Cully said. He was pointing at the central figure of Aetius.
Gabriel shrugged. “Beautiful,” he said in a meaningless way. He walked forward toward the central panel, and the keyhole, and Cully could see his hands were shaking.
Cully took his great bow off his shoulder and checked the string, and then drew a single heavy arrow from his belt and put it on the string.
“Good luck, Cap’n,” he said.
Gabriel looked back. He looked up, at the waiting troops, and then he looked at the gate.
The light grew, if anything, brighter.
There was a sound, like a bell ringing, a perfect note, like silver or crystal. The sound seemed to fill the underhall.
Morgon raised his shields. So did Petrarcha and Tancreda and twenty other magisters.
Gabriel went inside his palace, where the simulacrum of his tutor stood on her pedestal.
“Ave, Prudentia,” Gabriel said.
“Ave,” she answered. “You stand on the threshold.” She smiled, her white marble lips arching. “I hear the music of the spheres.”
He nodded. He had prepared everything he could, the way he had for his tutor’s examinations; shields hung, ready to use, and spears of light, clouds of darkness, balls of fire, a sword he’d designed himself, and some subtle, complicated stuff he’d decoded from Al Rashidi’s fading mind.
He took a single shield of pure green and a living buckler of gold; perhaps the densest protective spell he’d ever cast.
“Ready?” he asked.
Prudentia smiled. “For this, you were born,” she said.
He started. “What? You can’t know that!”
Prudentia smiled. “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”
“Damn it, Pru! This is not the time!” he said, but inside he felt as if a dam had burst.
Would you be lord of all the worlds?
The golden target burned like a sun on his left fist, yet being hermetical, it didn’t interfere with his grip on his ghiavarina.
He put the golden key he’d stolen from Miriam into the gate.
Lines of white fire ran from the corners to the center.
“The gate is live,” said Bin Maymum.
As the fire ran over the gate, Gabriel could see that, unlike Lissen Carak, with ten settings, this gate had only two.
He took a deep breath.
He turned the key to the second setting.
The tracery of stone and glass vanished, and a hot wind blew into his face.
Sand whispered against the edge of his green shield.
For a long heartbeat, Gabriel stood alone in the light of an alien dawn. Behind him lay the underhall of the Castle of Arles.
Ahead of him lay a road made of stone, running on a stone causeway above a desert. The road ran right to the mouth of the cave; he could see. Looking around, he seemed to be standing in what appeared to be the mouth of another cave.
His heart felt as if it might burst.
He took a step forward, even though that had not been the plan.
His green shield vanished. He stood, unprotected except by his golden buckler, in the intense heat of a desert summer day, just after dawn, and a ribbon of road ran away toward a lonely mountain rising at the very edge of the heat shimmer.
He took a breath.
It was so hot that the air seemed to burn his lungs, and he was already sweating.
“Jesu,” Cully said beside him. “You are taking us to fuckin’ hell.”
Part II
Entanglement
“Fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.”
Chapter Eleven
The Inner Sea—Aneas Muriens
Aneas landed his canoe on the south shore of the Inner Sea, and the peaks of the Adnacrags stretched away to the east like a wall. The shore of the great lake was ablaze with autumn leaves, and the sun was already high in a peerless blue sky.
“Once more into the woods,” Irene said.
Aneas made himself smile at her, although he was finding her advances increasingly distasteful and he was almost sure that Master Smythe was attempting to put a geas on the two of them.
Behind her, eight more great canoes landed his rangers, and the two round ships began to disgorge men-at-arms and crossbowmen.
Aneas scouted the immediate landing area and found Krek, the bogglin, and Lewen standing among the beech trees.
“All clear,” Lewen said in his odd lisp. “I have been away south, almost to the first river—Liliwithen.”
“Gardunsag,” spat the bogglin. Its four mandibles clashed together—laughter.
Lewen rolled his blue-black eyes. “Please,” he said. “The mere sound of your distorted tongue makes my shoulders itch.”
He showed his fangs, and the bogglin clacked away with pleasure.
“Gentlemen,” Aneas said in almost exactly his brother’s tone.
Lewen rose from his crouch and even the mighty irk favoured his thighs. “A long day and a long night,” he said. “I smelt the taint of Orley and his kind by Liliwithen. They are ahead of us. Two days to the fortress for them; three for us.”
Aneas looked into the silent woods. “I am tired already,” he admitted.
Lewen nodded. “And I.”
Aneas trudged back to the beach, where all of them were getting their packs on their backs, and the Galles were looking warily at the trees.
“Seventy leagues,” he said. “We will go as quickly as we can, by paths that are mostly safe. But we must be aware that we might have to fight at any time.”
Gas-a-ho waved a pipe. “I will know if Orley is even close. Our … host … gave me a sign.”
Aneas wished the news cheered him, but he felt more fatigue than anything; the pursuit, the hunt, held no joy for him.
He looked around him, and mostly what he saw was how many of his people weren’t there anymore, their places filled by strangers.
He took a deep breath, and tried to make himself focus on the scent of the trees and the taste of the sun.
“We will alternate running and walking,” he said. “Twenty leagues is a long day. Twenty-five is even longer. Come!”
He sounded his horn, and all the rangers who had horns raised them and made a deep music, and then they were trotting through the trees.
The Cohocton—Ash
Ash passed south like a murder of crows writ large, and animals quailed beneath his wings.
From his vast altitude, he could see the earth almost as far as the great river in the west. His army moved along the valley of the Cohocton, a column of darkness like the march of an army of ants seen from the top of a house, and the three mounds in the west that still spat ash and molten rock were filling the sky in a way that boded freezing winters and enormous hardship, an unexpected and delightful consequence of his meteors.
But in the aethereal, his race’s oldest foe was stirring, and more than stirring. It was becoming. Ash knew the signs, having in some ways deliberately weakened the old workings that kept the Odine trapped in the gate.
But it is too early, and too strong. I need it docile.
Ash gathered power as he flew, and he left lines of dead and desiccated trees in his wake. He had discovered—or rediscovered—that the black was almost always the easiest power to seize.
He raised his various protections and descended …
The first bolt raised against him was almost his undoing.
In the aethereal, the thing in the gate was like an infinite web of organic mush linked by trails of slime. Its presence threatened to overwhelm him, and its coercive powers rose to choke him, but the massive bolt of raw power it tossed at him blew aside his more careful protections and challenged him as neither Kerak nor Tamsin nor Nikos had challenged him. The fire exploded along his senses and he roared his rage in the aethereal and the real.
The house in which Phillippa had grown to womanhood was destroyed in a single outpouring of dragon fire. Ash’s unmaking fire roared across the roof and left black earth behind, and continued into the field of standing stones. But the thing there withstood him effortlessly, a canopy of pearlescent grey shedding his breath of unmaking as if water ran off an upturned bowl.
Ash turned, looking for a threat in the real or the aethereal; he cast a heavy attack and was rebuffed, and he began to doubt he could break the thing’s shield; a genuine peer. And with that doubt, other doubts crept in immediately; his grip on the sea monsters was weakening, and the flow of bogglins from the west had slowed to a trickle, and he’d lost track of the enemy’s main army; his changing of the antlered men into copies of his mind began to seem a little foolish, and his failure to retake the well like some form of self-delusion, and suddenly all his plans were laid bare, insufficiently realized, and he himself had failed on details, and he began to wonder …
And then his overmind felt the trap, and he lashed out, breaking the coercion with a hammer of his contempt.
Lissen Carak
On the walls of Lissen Carak, Miriam watched the duel the way a child watches fireflies in the back garden. The sky was dark, but the pulses of light, red, blue, violet, and white, came at an accelerating tempo. The rolling sound of thunder came, each boom a few seconds after its corresponding flash of light.
“Half a day’s travel to the east,” Miriam said to Sister Anne.
Beneath their feet, the infantry of the royal army, most of them northern militia, stood guard in the long trenches and reinforced earthworks that a small army of northern peasants were still refining. Darkness was falling, and Miriam wished that the workers would retreat into the safety of the inner defences, but she could not cover all of them.
Worse, her two attempts at the dragon working had failed, either because the massive spell was too complex for her, or because the newly empowered Odine were too strong for her magicks. She knew that there were worms in the woods; already, she knew that workers had been lost.
A long series of flashes. Most of her people were on the walls, watching.
“The choir should be ready,” she said aloud.
The roll of thunder: crash, crash, crashcrash, crashcrashcrash CRASH.
Silence.
And then another brilliant display.
In the aethereal, Miriam could see the wispy magnificence of the new power; the dense web of what she assumed was the Odine, and the malevolent green pyre of vanity that called itself Ash. They were hammering at each other, throwing enough power to level a town with every gout of sorcery.
“Oh, Abbess! They will destroy each other!” Sister Anne said.
The most powerful of the novices echoed her.
Miriam watched them, like dark gods, showering each other with the very essence of the universe, and she began to raise her citadel’s shields.
“I pray it will be so,” she said. “But truly, my sisters, my heart tells me that the victor will have the power of the sum of them both.”
After almost an hour, the light show ceased suddenly, and the night was dark, although no bird song or night noise returned to the air. Miriam sent word to the militia to beg them to keep a good watch.
Theodora, the messenger, a novice from the west, came and knelt before her mistress in the hall. “Lady, the captain of North Albin says that his people keep very good watch. A
nd that he only takes orders from his feudal superiors, and not from old women in holy orders.”
In the morning, from the height of the abbey’s walls, her garrison could see the flicker of movement across the Cohocton and miles to the west, or thought that they could. And at the northernmost end of the new earthen fortifications, out toward Abbington, a work party was massacred by daemons—a sudden onset, and the only survivor was the first man to run. The abbess paced her walls all morning, because she had almost four miles of fortifications to man and less than three thousand infantrymen to man them. She sent an imperial messenger to the Count of the Borders to request that he march to her. She heard reports of a second attack south of Abbington, this time by bogglins.
Michael Rannulfson, her captain, joined her on the walls. He had white in his beard and he’d seen a life of war.
“Can we retake the section we lost?” she asked, pointing north into the magnificent autumn foliage of the wooded valley that came down from the high Adnacrags. The earthworks lay along the valley like a ribbon dropped on a carpet; a narrow wall of earth and timber, and a wider area of abattis and tree stumps to leave the militia a field of fire, all punctuated with small square forts outthrust from the walls to cover bad ground or take advantage of hills. Four miles of it, and now they’d lost a section.
He made a face. “I wouldn’t try,” he said. “We’re like too little butter on too much toast as it is, lady. Let the Count of the Borders retake the lost section when they come.” He shrugged. “I’m more for collecting yer taxes at fairs, my lady. I’m not a great captain.”
“Would you try and retake it?” she asked. “If I let you take all our garrison?”
“My lady,” he said. “I will do whate’er you order me to do. But let me tell ye as a soldier, that as long as you and yer ladies hold the … the air, so to speak, the hermeticals, my fifty lads can hold these walls against the legions o’ hell. But when ye send us out into the woods, you are naked to any assault—ladders, engines, towers.”
She snorted. “So you say me nay, in your very polite way.”