Ta-se-ho nodded.
Nita Qwan nodded.
Looks-at-Clouds, the changeling shaman, squatted bonelessly. Behind her, the camp was coming down. Where, just days before, Aneas had a hand of rangers on what seemed a hopeless pursuit, now he had hundreds; all woodsmen; Jacks and foresters and some long hunters; irks, some bogglins, and a powerful band of Sossag warriors, the victors of two great battles in the Wild. And Slythenhag and her brood, a hand of wyverns; and young Lilly, a two-year-old Golden Bear, with two males, Darkroot and Berrydrunk. By the standards of war in the Adnacrags it was a mighty host, and the tireless wyverns brought supplies while the Outwallers built canoes, fragile bark craft to pass the Cranberry River.
“At the inn, I heard tell of Galles on the Great River,” Ta-se-ho said, and Nita Qwan nodded.
Aneas shook his head. “We can’t face Orley and Gallish knights,” he said.
Nita Qwan, who had sat at the great council, rocked forward. “They may not be enemies,” he said. “There are new councils. The King of Galle is dead. The Sieur Du Corse is an ally, not an enemy, or so we were told at the inn.” He shrugged, because the affairs of Antica Terra were as unreal to him as legends of the past. Except that legends of the past were rising every day to face him.
“And Gavin is already fighting in the south,” Aneas said. “Gabriel is in the Antica Terra. We are the sideshow of a sideshow.”
Looks-at-Clouds glanced at him. “An arrow will kill you just as dead,” s/he said.
He smiled. “Good point,” he admitted.
Gas-a-ho had sat silently, staring into the smoke of the dying fire for many minutes, but now he spoke. “We are not forgotten,” he said. “Listen. Plague, fire, and war. The alliance is together not for glory but to maintain the gates. Master Smythe fears that there is a gate in the north; we at the council dreamed together, and solved nothing.”
Looks-at-Clouds glanced at her fellow shaman. “Lake-on-the-Mountain?” s/he asked.
Everyone at the fire knew the place, although more recently, men had called it “Thorn’s Island.” A place of immense power, at the meeting of two of the greatest channels of ops, a sacred place to the Outwallers and irks alike.
Skas-a-gao shrugged. Ta-se-ho handed him the pipe. He drew deeply. “I was there as a boy, when I chose the way of the seer,” he said. “I feel that I would have known if there was a gate. But perhaps not.”
“So we must win the race to Lake-on-the-Mountain,” Aneas said.
Ta-se-ho raised an eyebrow.
Aneas nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “We must win the race while remaining aware that mayhap that is not the goal at all.” He looked around at them. “But it will be a bold stroke, and mayhap it will be like one of those strokes in a sword fight that steals time from the enemy. Make Orley dance to our tune.”
Looks-at-Clouds wore an odd expression. “Even if the enemy has other plans,” s/he said, “the seizure of Lake-on-the-Mountain would rally the Outwallers and provide us with a base and access to power.”
“Beware so much power,” Skas-a-gao said.
Looks-at-Clouds shrugged. “Always our people are wary, like small animals in the woods where every rock hides a wolf. I wish to be a wolf.”
Skas-a-gao winced. “That is not the way of the shaman,” he said.
“Maybe it is time to change,” Looks-at-Clouds said. “I am a changeling. I bring change. The wise adapt.”
Aneas cleared his throat. “Friends,” he said cautiously.
Nita Qwan rallied to him immediately. “Beware the quarrels of shamans,” he said lightly. “Usually caused by a shortage of pipe weed.”
“How long until the canoes are complete?” Aneas asked.
“Tomorrow, midday, if the sun is hot,” Ta-se-ho said.
“And we have more supplies coming today,” Gas-a-ho said.
Looks-at-Clouds nodded to Aneas. “Will you send Irene home?” s/he asked.
Aneas shook his head. “I have not decided.”
Looks-at-Clouds nodded. “Keep her, is my rede. She wishes to be a hero. She belongs here, with us, who are heroes.”
Aneas smiled. His smile widened to a grin. “Sometimes you say the best things,” he whispered.
“Yes,” s/he said. “I bring change. I revel in it. And sometimes, it is necessary. We may all die in horror. But if we triumph, I see her as … something wonderful.”
“The thing in her head …” Aneas raised an eyebrow.
Looks-at-Clouds made a face; almost the face of an adolescent girl. “I look at it every day. I almost have the secret of its unmaking. Give me time.”
“You are in love with her,” Aneas snapped.
“We share that, do we not?” Looks-at-Clouds snapped back.
Gas-a-ho laughed. “Perhaps I will cut her in half for you,” he said.
Both of them looked at the shaman, who shrugged.
Ta-se-ho banged the pipe out against his moccasined heel. He was smiling, but he added no words.
“Let’s get to work,” said Aneas.
Two hours later, there was an enormous disturbance on the flow of ops. Looks-at-Clouds, Aneas, and Gas-a-ho all detected it; so did their two university-trained mages, young Moreans who never stopped slapping at the endless midges and mosquitoes. The magisters all came together at the council fire. The various Jacks, rangers, foresters and Outwallers stopped working on boats and sprang to arms. As the camp was well sited, on a long peninsula running far out into Cranberry Lake, the only approaches were across open water and along the base of the peninsula, which was less than ten horses wide at its narrowest. The Outwallers had built a brush wall; the rangers had added a breastwork of downed trees.
Beyond the rough walls had been a mighty stand of old birch trees—white birches in the prime of life. Ta-se-ho had offered tobacco to their spirits and chose fifteen of them to become boats, and the rest left standing, but the result, which Aneas had intended, of a day’s work there was to create a wide swathe of open ground beyond the narrowing of the isthmus. Three hundred men and irks with axes and saws could clear ground faster than beavers, and the peninsula was, by the standard of wilderness war, impregnable.
Now the rampart was manned, the two rocky beaches covered, and the skies watched. Slythenhag leapt into the air with her brood, and they wheeled away north and south, watching.
Slythenhag gave a great, long call of warning.
Aneas shook his head. He was standing, bow in hand, by the council fire. His small baton was in his hand. “It’s like watching a volcano,” he said. “And yet, everything slides off it.”
Looks-at-Clouds was raising shields. “It is the enemy,” she said, and for the first time, he heard a crack in the changeling’s voice. S/he was afraid.
Aneas continued to search in the aethereal. He went into his memory forest, where a huge maple tree dominated a little meadow of pine needles and sparse grass. A pool lay in the shade, with a burbling spring. He often stood on the rock at the head of the pool to cast, but today he watched the pool.
Irene came out of the woods with a light axe in her hands. She was covered in sweat, had twigs in her hair, and wore a short, heavy blade at her belt. Ricar Lantorn was just behind her, and Heron, the Huran war leader, his woods shirt dark with sweat.
She smiled at both of them.
Aneas was far away, watching his pool in the aether but that smile snapped him back.
Looks-at-Clouds shook hir head. “Don’t go into the aethereal. It is huge. And hunting us.”
Aneas looked at Irene.
She shrugged. “Nita Qwan ordered us back here.”
Lantorn was looking out across Cranberry Lake, like fifty other woods’ warriors.
“Nothin’ out there,” he said.
Heron was silent, but his nose wrinkled, and he took an arrow from his quiver.
“Except me,” said Master Smythe. He walked out of the same woods that Irene had appeared from, and bowed his superhuman bow. “I am sorry, but I have to move very c
arefully these days. Ash is hunting me, and I am vulnerable out here.”
Skas-a-gao embraced the tall “man.” “We are honoured to have you at our fire,” he said.
Master Smythe grinned wryly. “Slythenhag isn’t so sure, but she’ll come around.”
“How did you come here?” Aneas asked. He was somewhat awed and, like a young man, trying to hide it.
“The usual way. I flew. In the real.” Master Smythe smiled. “You look more like your brother Gabriel every day. What an extraordinary family you all are. Despite everything. He smiled. “Or is it because of everything that you are so extraordinary?”
He looked around, and his gaze fell on Irene. “Ah,” he said. “Greetings, Princess of Empire.”
“You are the dragon,” she said.
“More precisely, I am a dragon,” he said. “Calling me ‘the’ dragon would be like my calling you ‘the patricide.’”
Irene flushed. Her hand went to the heavy sword in her belt.
“You know,” the dragon said companionably, “I counseled your removal. Permanently. Gabriel chose another way. And I find his way better. This gives me great hope. In fact, in a backwards way, Irene, you represent the greatest hope of the alliance.”
Irene’s flush mounted. “Why?” she asked. She hated to be baited.
Master Smythe shrugged. “I am a dragon; I am thousands of years old, deep in cunning, matchless in guile. The organism of my brain weighs more than two human beings. And yet, Gabriel was right, and I was wrong. Think on it, friends. Our enemy ought to be unassailable in his puissance. Why is it that any of us can outthink him?”
Silence.
Master Smythe shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, either, and it is more entertaining to ponder than moral relativism. In the more immediate reality of the now, I have brought you a truly stupendous cargo of supplies, and I wish to add that I believe this marks the very first time that one of my race has condescended to serve as a beast of burden.”
Looks-at-Clouds smiled. “Do you always speak this way?” s/he asked in High Archaic.
The man’s overly smooth brow furrowed. “Is there another way to speak?” he asked.
Aneas felt a pang of jealousy. Looks-at-Clouds regarded the dragon with something like awe.
He returned hir regard. “You are a remarkable being,” he said.
“Yes,” Looks-at-Clouds returned. “As are you.”
Aneas cleared his throat.
Master Smythe had the good grace to look faintly embarrassed. “What a delightful triangle you three make,” he said. “It is like fate. I will not interfere, but …”
And then the sky split open.
For a moment, an eternal moment, there was a tear in the fabric of the heavens. Aneas saw stars, and a deeper black than any night; there was a dazzle before his eyes as if he’d stared into the sun.
A dragon emerged from the rift. It was longer than a ship, bigger than a castle. Its emergence from the blackness defied perceptions of reality. Men screamed, or hid their faces.
“Damn,” said Master Smythe.
Looks-at-Clouds cast, cast, and cast. Aneas, in excellent training after two weeks of near constant combat, matched the changling working for working.
Master Smythe vanished.
Ash dove.
Heron loosed the arrow off his bow, and a thicket of bolts and arrows rose to meet the dragon.
Contemptuously, he breathed, and his breath eliminated every shaft aimed at him. They simply were not.
The dragon cast, or worked—the action, in the aethereal, was too reflexive to merit the term working—and Looks-at-Clouds’s glowing green prism was extinguished. S/he fell to the ground, but Skas-a-gao stood over hir and raised a working of a type Aneas had never seen, a shield, or a net, that appeared as the shadows of leaves cast by the sun. It was fractal, fabulously complex, it had a logic of its own, and the dragon’s second assault entered it …
… and could not leave. Inside his own fortress, Skas-a-gao feverishly raised the golden wall of indomitable will that Desiderata had taught them all at the Inn of Dorling, and from its foundations he elaborated his forest trap of light and darkness, and it held.
Aneas was still working. He observed, but not in any detail. And he loosed a dozen illusions; himself, Irene, Looks-at-Clouds. They began to turn and run, spreading out; he continued to work. Deep in the forest of his palace, he placed pebbles on other pebbles, altered a tiny watercourse, summoned a fish from the mere.
Ash. It is Ash.
He laced his illusions with the flavour of his hatred for Kevin Orley.
He put a complex shield of his own devising over the simulacrum of Irene.
He was peripherally aware that all of them were only alive because Ash was searching frantically for Lot. Who was Master Smythe.
Another gout of dragon breath smashed against their shields. Men died. Irks died. Bogglins died.
Another forest of shafts rose into the heavens and were banished.
Ash reached out, and cast a simple scent. In a single heartbeat, most of the bogglins fell subject to his will. Ash relished their betrayal and sent them against their friends.
Ricar Lantorn drew his heavy bow. It was not his; it had been Wilful Murder’s bow and he had not yet shot it. It was the heaviest bow he’d ever pulled.
Mark my words.
Lantorn got the nock of the heavy arrow to the very out-curl of his lip and loosed, almost straight up, with a grunt of real pain. His arrow was out of time with the last two volleys. It escaped the dragon’s massive counterspell and slipped past his breath and struck in the enormous beast’s side, smaller than a blackfly bite on a man.
But it was the first damage they’d done to the behemoth.
Ash turned.
Aneas’s working came to its completion. It bore every mark of a son of Gause: labyrinthine, deep and a little musty and very dark. And it carried everything he had. And it was a titanic risk; he left himself neither defence nor reserve.
Amid the lean-tos and wigwams of their encampment, dozens of hornets and wasps were seized in mid-career. Most were chasing the innumerable flies and eating them, but suddenly their wills were suborned, and they chose a higher prey. Mighty predators of the insect world, they knew no fear, and they rose into the air, searching their new prey, drawn by his signature across the sky.
Looks-at-Clouds raised hir head, snapped the fingers on a hand, and cast. A simple bolt of lightning followed the turning dragon, and struck home. Ash turned again, trading altitude for speed in his anger.
A second dragon appeared in the sky.
Ash became aware of the second dragon rising to meet him from the south and he turned again.
The wyverns began to gather to the north.
Ash breathed, and the other dragon breathed, and where their breath met, a three-dimensional curtain of brilliant light framed them.
Unafraid, the white-faced hornets rose into the sky; a dozen died at the interface of the two contenders’ clouds of power, another dozen were lost in a cyclonic vortex when Ash’s tail whipped at incredible speed across the sky.
The rest continued.
Aneas reached into the aethereal and spoke the key to his working in Archaic. “He watches even the sparrow’s fall.”
In the real, Ash beat his wings strongly. He was black, but the scales along his neck and belly were gold and seemed to glow; his eyes were a jewel-like green, his tail so long that it appeared to follow him through the sky like a second beast, a serpent, and there was a sting at the end.
Lot, or Master Smythe, was smaller, and his as-yet-unhealed wing was protected in a web of fire and light. He was green, his scales tipped in gold, his snout longer and more sinuous, his tail shorter. He turned inside his larger adversary’s turn; Ash was too low and too slow to be evasive, and the very end of Lot’s exhalation of fire and potentia crossed Ash’s spectacular tail and severed it, so that the lashing serpent fell away into the lake; a huge gout of steam rose even as t
he waters parted, and there was a flash like an explosion. The dragons were so close to the ground that their wingbeats knocked branches out of trees and their breath ignited fires where the mages’ shields didn’t cover the vegetation.
Ash forced himself up, his titanic wings beating against the thickness of the air. Above him, the open gate into the darkness beyond the aethereal towered above everything, and every creature on the battlefield of the real felt a tug of horror, of disbelief, of impossibility, yet where Lot’s exhalation crossed the void, it was healed and reality seemed to grow like a scar forming across a wound.
The white-face hornets hit Ash.
But Ash was no novice. The layers of his wards were as deep as the armour of his layers of scales; integral, in fact. The first hornets found nothing to bite; they slid off his impervious shields and their clever, subtle workings were wasted even as Ash was forced to notice the nature of the working cast against him.
Even in a life-or-death struggle with Lot, he took the time in his immeasurable aethereal self to master a pair of the hornets and turn them, subtly enhancing, conquering their tiny wills, subverting Aneas’s working, sending them back against their caster. He didn’t trouble to learn their purpose; he merely turned those he could reach.
In the same moment he located Irene by the egg inside her soul and he passed her by, found another tiny foe and his dried-blood lightning flew, but to his disgust he crushed, not a man, but an illusion of a man.
Ash had become too entangled; Lot sprayed him with potentia. He was below, too close, perhaps aware of his vulnerability, perhaps as desperate to close the void as to defeat Ash.
Ash was hurt. But he bided his time, and in the real, one vast taloned foreclaw licked out like a knife the size of a tree, except that like a Fell Sword, Ash’s claw existed in both real and aethereal. In one blow he severed Lot’s wing of fire, and then, closing, almost lovingly, his other foreclaw ripped Lot’s other wing from his vast body and the broken green dragon fell away between his claws, and Ash laughed despite the black smoke rising from his underside where Lot’s breath had carved along the same scar that Tom Lachlan had made and Ricar Lantorn had struck with an arrow and Kerak had gouged with primal fire.