For five days, while the boats full of gonnes and grain and soldiers moved at what seemed to him a snail’s pace up the Albin River, he’d sat in the stern of the first boat, his hermetical sense watching the sky while the rest of his intellect unpacked, sorted, and put to rest the subsumed power of Richard Plangere; royal magister, lover of the king’s mistress; traitor, Thorn. In the process he had learned a surprising number of festering secrets that had driven his former master to despair. Most of them were no longer even pertinent to the world in which they lived; secrets about the court, about sex, about illegitimate birth, and murder, and the process by which a kingdom is governed. Harmodius was able to watch his former master’s disillusionment, his crisis of faith, his change. His fall, as a poet would describe it. Yet there were other stories to be told from his fall; and in five days of reliving a great many of Richard Plangere’s memories, the silent Harmodius found that he liked the cautious, thoughtful Thorn a great deal more than he liked the socially grasping, upstart Plangere; and he learned so much about Ash that he began to question whether he had ever understood anything before.
In fact, he thought he might understand Ash.
And on the last day, the day when Master Pye set his ambush and all the boatmen hid in the great cave, Harmodius had a long time to wait for Ash; time to think.
Time to think that he had subsumed Askepiles and Thorn. And thus, held within him the total knowledge of two servants of Ash.
“Indeed,” he said aloud. “Now I might be said to be Thorn.”
He smiled. He had no fellow feeling for Askepiles at all. But for Thorn …
Lissen Carak
Abbess Miriam felt the tipping point when her adversary began to lose control of its choir. It was as if it had been ambushed in the real; a pinprick, a tiny scream, and suddenly the enemy will was slipping away, elusive and alien, into the endless darkness.
She looked up. “Ladies,” she said in the real.
Both of her choirs were there, every woman present. Even the women who would ordinarily be in the hospital; even Sister Helen, who was one hundred years old.
She smiled. “That was not the battle,” she said. “That was the morning alarm. Our enemy is as great as ten cathedrals and outnumbers us the way the stars outnumber the earth. Remember your parts; remember prayer and faith. Remember that what we do here is not for ourselves, but for everyone who lives here. Sister Elisabeth, you will watch while the right choir takes communion. Then the right choir will have the watch. Carry on.”
Women rose and stretched. Most prayed. A few brushed their hair.
Novice Isabella turned to Novice Stefana and said, “This is going to suck.”
Stefana failed to stifle a giggle.
“Ladies,” said Sister Elisabeth. She raised an eyebrow.
The left choir began the Credo.
“What is our plan?” Harald Redmede asked the Green Earl. Redmede had a horse now; food was suddenly plentiful, and the army was moving into a camp, a fortified camp, at least with a heavy abattis of felled trees built by the Albinkirk garrison.
They were joined by Lord Gregario, and Duchess Mogon, and then, after some desultory talk and a lot of sausage chewing, by the Grand Squire and the Prior of Harndon and Syr Christos.
Gavin grinned and shook hands with the Morean knight. “Does this mean …”
Christos nodded. “Syr Alcaeus is half a day away, south of the inn and marching hard. And I passed Donald Dhu on the road with almost a thousand Hillmen.”
“We cannot defeat Ash with men,” Gregario said.
Gavin glanced at his imperial messenger. “The royal army is at the falls of the Albin this morning,” he said. “Harmodius is with them.” He spread his hands.
“Now you’re talking,” Gregario said.
Gavin made himself smile. “We’re just in time, gentlemen. The first attack on the gate took place an hour ago, in our time. The abbess now has to hold Lissen Carak from within and without. We need to lift some of the pressure off her.”
Every man and woman present frowned, except Mogon.
“I agree,” Mogon said. “I have not seen an opening, but I know what happens. All the armies converge, and fight whatever emerges.”
“We need a lot more sorcerers!” Lord Gregario said. “We can’t stand another day of being pounded by Ash. And the worms!”
Tamsin nodded. “I would wish we were a day later,” she admitted. “I cannot face Ash alone. Even with Miriam and all her choir providing me with power. I am not the channeler that Kerak was. I am not the scientist that Lord Nikos was. My powers lie in other directions.”
“The good news,” Gavin insisted, “is that Ash sent a sizable force after us yesterday, irks, bogglins, and other creatures, and we’ve just left them behind on the south bank.” Gavin scratched his unshaven jaw. “My sense is that we need to put in an attack, a serious attack, and distract Ash.”
The prior nodded. “If you could get me and my knights into the abbey, I think we could guarantee its defence for a long time. And hand Ash a defeat.”
The slim, hooded figure with him nodded.
Tamsin looked at the slim figure, and knew who she was seeing. An idea came to her.
Gregario shrugged. “I will fight where I’m told, but this seems … chancy. To me.”
Gavin looked around.
Mogon squinted her eyes and clacked her beak. “We are at a point where all the chances are long,” she said. “We have survived the retreat. Now I wish to get my beak into Ash.” She looked at Tamsin. “Is there anything you can do?”
The Queen of Faery smiled. Her eyes sparkled. “It is, as you say, a long chance,” she said. “But I have played fairly for long enough. Now I will play unfairly.”
Tamsin appeared in the aethereal as a female irk, but clothed in smoke and fire; and the smoke was incense, and the fire was a very different kind of heat.
“Ash,” she said.
Ash was with her immediately.
“What prize do you offer me, Ash?” she asked.
Ash regarded her. And despite layers of minds and protections, he saw what he saw, in glimpses, and he was more than satisfied. “What do you want?”
“Freedom for my people, and the safety of my hold, forever,” she said. “What else would I want?”
Ash remade himself as a handsome, dark-haired man with a limp. “Power,” he said. “All of you mortals want it. I have it.”
She smiled, and her fangs were well hidden, and her lips parted slightly; lips lusher and redder than any human woman’s. “Power?” she asked. “For what do I need power, Ash?”
“Power to work your will on the world,” he said.
“Alas, my will is only that of an old irk woman,” she said. A billow of incense showed a long arm, naked to a shoulder, and Ash stirred.
“If you are old, then I am ancient,” Ash said. “Surely there is something you want.”
Tamsin was already dancing away from him across the plane of the aethereal.
“Perhaps,” she said with an enigmatic smile.
Ash shook, and suddenly she was looking at a single, baleful eye.
“Let me tell you what I want,” Ash said. “I want you to leave all the little men to me. And my friends.”
“Perhaps,” Tamsin said. “To tell you the truth, Lord Ash, I am not at all sure you will be the victor in this contest.” She turned, and the smoke turned with her, weaving tendrils. An ankle showed, and then a thigh.
“Of course I will be victor!” Ash roared.
“Not the will?” Tamsin asked. “Even now, the will attacks the gate. If it wins the gate, what will it give you?”
“I can master it. It is weak in the real; a mistake I have made too often. This time, I am the stronger in the real.”
“Even now, a mighty army builds against you; it will be led by Harmodius and Desiderata.” Tamsin’s voice was laced with concern.
“You are a great fool if you think that bitch can resist me,” Ash spat.
“But … she has, has she not?” Tamsin said.
“She is already dead,” Ash said with enormous satisfaction.
“Really?” Tamsin asked. “I think you are deceived.”
She allowed the dragon a glimpse of her apparently unguarded thought.
“At the falls?” Ash reacted. “That deceptive bitch.”
He vanished.
Tamsin gathered her smoke about her. “And not the only one,” she said aloud to the aethereal. She passed a signal to Harmodius, and she paused to examine the edifice that the Odine was building; she sent a message to Miriam, and then she betook herself into the real.
The falls were two hundred feet high, with a cave at the base and a magnificent cataract of water that could really be seen only from the bottom.
They were barely visible from the new roadbed, although their thunderous roar drowned out almost all sound, even fifty paces distant.
Harmodius received the signal he dreaded, and expected, from Tamsin, in the aethereal, and he reviewed his preparations; most especially, his wall of golden bricks and his new tools taken from his efforts to unpick what he had subsumed from Thorn.
He notified Ser Ranald with a single flash of light.
He raised a layered simulacrum of Desiderata. He twinned a tiny portion of his own talent into his illusion and built there a pale shadow of his own golden wall, creating an animated statue with an apparent will. It frightened him a little, to be able to create something so very nearly alive, and he wondered, for a moment, if he could actually create something alive, and what the ramifications of that would be.
He saw Ash coming. The dragon made no effort to hide himself in the aethereal, and Harmodius sneered at him.
He launched a veritable barrage of attacks across the entire spectrum available to his talent. None of them were illusions. And all of them intercepted the giant dragon fifty miles from his goal, in the real.
The lightstorm struck the dragon as he climbed for a better view of the landscape around the falls, and he had no warning.
What he had, however, was aeons of age and experience, and his defences went to work, absorbing, channeling, deflecting, mirroring. A tiny fraction of the intense gout of power thrown at him at such an incredible range leaked through, but what fell off his defences exploded ancient rock, blew the top clear of a tall hill, leveled thousands of acres of forest, and started a huge fire.
What penetrated caused him pain.
He launched a retaliatory barrage.
Ranald’s men were scrambling for cover long before the dragon struck; the whole advance guard packed into the cave under the falls, workmen, sailors, rowers, and soldiers packed like mackerel in a barrel.
The boats were, for the most part, already up the rails and ready to launch. Their cargo lay on the sand of the riverbank, all except one, which was assembled with its carriage. Master Pye stood by that one, and it was a monster with a mouth like a dragon, twenty-six feet long.
The dragon’s response came in, titanic and ill aimed, and it struck in an ellipse roughly a mile long, raining fire into the woods and waters.
Harmodius did not await it. He removed himself, leaving his simulacrum of Desiderata alone.
Ash rushed on, scattering massive emanations the way a child might throw a tantrum, screaming, as it rushed down the stairs. Trees burned, or withered and died, and waters boiled.
Harmodius flitted to a new position, a mile or more north of the falls, and launched a new battery of hermetical devices.
Ash stopped them all. He turned, and breathed, laying utter waste to a section of riverbank.
Harmodius was already gone, passing through the aethereal to yet another place, this one carefully chosen with Master Pye’s help.
The dragon turned, eager to close with his elusive foe, and passed over Harmodius, his great wings cupping air so that for a moment he hovered …
Harmodius loosed nothing, but withdrew his entire array behind the wall of gold that Desiderata had taught him, and Ash’s arsenal, even his breath of unmaking, crashed on Harmodius.
The old magister was weakened. But he was still there,
Two hundred paces distant, Master Pye touched fire to his magnificent bronze tube. The powder ignited, and burned; instant, to the mind of a man, and a long, slow burn to the mind of the dragon, except that Ash was absorbed elsewhere with layer upon layer of other considerations; hatred and fear of Desiderata, perhaps lust for Tamsin, fear for the Odine, and within them layers of demands, of orders and commands and an edifice of control, and over all, the need to defend himself and kill Harmodius. His wings fluttered and he hovered …
The vast gonne fired.
A fifty-pound stone ball, touched with magicks, the surface of the iron covered in runes, sliced through Ash’s shields.
For a beast the size of a great ship, the ball was less than the prick of a pin.
But the pain was immense.
Again.
It was late morning before the will came again, and this time, the attack was swift and vast, and in the first moments, a novice panicked and died, her nose spewing blood, frightening another, and she, too, fell.
But the other sisters of the left choir sang on. Miriam had not left her place; now she raised her baton and pointed at Sister Katheryn, and the right choir stood in a rustle of long gowns and habits and a gentle clatter of beads.
“Sanctus,” said the Abbess.
The music built immediately; the women’s voices building, one, two, three sections, and then the sopranos rising over all, and the web was established, to the Dominus Deus and the refrain.
More and more voices.
Dominus Deus!
More, and more voices. Miriam added her own voice for the first time; in the real, an unimpressive alto; in the aethereal a mighty stroke of power.
Hosanna in excelsis!
And now all her voices were committed, and yet it seemed to her that more voices were there than should have been; she felt, for a moment, as if she could hear Anne, dead two days, and even Helewise, murdered so long ago …
In nomine Patris …
“Ash is attacking Harmodius and the will has thrown itself on the gate,” Tamsin she said. “You must try now.”
Gavin closed his eyes. “It’s broad daylight,” he said.
“Nonetheless,” she said.
He looked around. He’d moved a mile north of the ford, to the low ridge, more a fold in the earth, that looked out over the valleys that ran like fingers into the Adnacrags; there was the West Kanata, and there, the Lily Burn.
Just for the moment he held the initiative, and he had the north road through the farms along the river, which ran west to Lissen Carak, ten miles distant.
As best he could see, there was a major force to his north, and slightly east; centered, he was told, on Mistress Helewise’s manor house; thousands of not-dead and a veritable mountain of worms, and beyond that, tens of thousands of bogglins who had come through the woods from Lissen Carak in the night.
And there was another force of them in the low ground beyond the Lily Burn. A huge force that no one dared scout, but Tamsin guessed it was many times larger than his own.
And a third force right along the Cohocton.
And a fourth force on the south bank.
And a fifth force covering the siege of Lissen Carak.
Gavin grinned in the near assurance of having, for once, done something right. His adversary, like an impossibly rich man, was squandering his fortune on a dozen projects; Gavin, like a miser, had gathered all of his in one place.
Oh, my brother. How I wish you were here to help me decide this.
What if this is our only throw of the dice?
Where the fuck are you?
To Lord Gregario, he gave a wave. “Go with God,” he said.
Gregario nodded. “We’re really doing this?”
“Right now,” Gavin said.
Chapter Twelve
Irks and wardens had
set a trap on the road—a carefully sited ambush in deep old woods. But they were westerners who had not faced the Alban chivalry before, and both horns of the ambush were smashed by knights charging through the woods, moving almost as silently as hunters so that the ambushers had only a few heartbeats to see the glint of metal before the avalanche of steel and horseflesh fell on them.
Lord Weyland rode down one side of the road, and the Grand Squire down the other, and they cleared the woods for hundreds of paces.
Down the road, uncontested, rode the silent Knights of the Order, cloaked in black, a great golden and green shield rising over them, and behind them came Donald Dhu, tall as a monster himself, grim, in black maille, with a great axe over his shoulder, and behind him came all the men of the Wyrm of Erch. And with them were the survivors of the royal foresters, while north of the woods, in echelon, were the two bristling phalanxes of 1Exrech and 53Exrech.
Then came the militia, already formed in long lines, interspersed today with wedges of the Count of the Border’s knights. Tamsin rode with Lord Gareth, the count, and he shook his head ruefully at their thinness on the ground.
Lord Gareth’s Northern Prickers were out to the right, moving over ground heavily infested with worms. He got a regular stream of reports, but at a high cost, as horses and men were taken.
He sent messengers forward to the Earl of Westwall, but none were coming back.
Harmodius could not withstand Ash’s full power. His resistance had a cost, and doubt began to creep in; he knew that Ash had not been fully manifest when he attacked Desiderata in Harndon, and even as he doubted, a wash of black began to seep through his golden bricks …
He made his move. He had the working ready to hand, and he went … elsewhere.
Ash turned over the falls, located his true target, and threw his will upon her. And had the immense satisfaction of watching the gold melt away, until he realized that this puny thing was not even a woman.
His fury was beyond rage. He had been deceived; tricked by Tamsin and misled by Desiderata; his loathing of their kind peaked in a kind of insane malevolence that leveled forests and hills and laid waste to the countryside for a mile as he flew back toward Albinkirk.