Lot screamed, in the real and the aethereal.
Four white-faced hornets, now the size of falcons, sped down through the hermetical shields of four mages and began to hunt Aneas and Gas-a-ho and Looks-at-Clouds.
The last of Aneas’s hornets survived being crushed by Lot’s enormity and slipped into the space between the two dragons, tracking its prey, ignored because of proximity to the other dragon, and by luck or fate or fortuna struck amid the damage wrought by Lot’s breath and bit deeply into the still-bubbling flesh. The bite of the insect was nothing; the channel for Aneas’s spell of corruption, as dark as his mother’s heart, was perfect, the more so as the insect struck against a wound.
Ash was aware of the burst of ops, but such was the background of power that he paid the blow little attention, instead tracking his counterattack to the ground. Ash loved the use of an enemy’s work against him; he reveled in the sheer superiority of such an attack.
Lot fell into the lake.
Tons of water were thrown into the air.
Men and irks were unable to respond. Most men and women were lying flat in the leaf mold, overwhelmed by the sound, the fire, the gouts of ops from rival alternatives of reality, the fires ignited by the heat and whipped to an inferno by the huge wingbeats at low altitude. The mass of water thrown into the air by Lot’s fall then collapsed back in turn, falling on the peninsula and the surrounding forest, knocking anyone standing flat or sweeping them against the ground or grinding them against rocks like a sudden spring torrent. Ricar Lantorn lost Wilful Murder’s bow, ripped from his hands as a tidal wave swept away the encampment, taking every scrap of canvas and food. Irene found herself locked in Aneas’s arms, wedged against the cross of a pair of ancient fallen tree trunks, and Looks-at-Clouds held strong and continued to work, reading Ash’s casting even as it emerged from him and working a counter almost instantly in the aethereal, an act as subtle and difficult as reacting instantly to a sneering jibe in a crowded room. Cleverly, elegantly, s/he used hir own powers, and even as the waters hammered them and swept by, the reaching cloud of the changeling’s will gathered the surviving houseflies that had troubled the camp and drew them in a frothing sphere across the path of the giant hornets who turned, wings beating frantically, engorged heads bobbing, as nature fought subversion in their uncomplicated nerves.
One turned away and followed the flies. The others slowed, lost their focus, and then rediscovered their prey and attacked.
One dove for the three lying in the cross of downed trees.
Aneas had no time to think. He pulled the pipe axe from his belt, rose from his knees to a standing posture, and threw.
Ash’s wings beat.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl.
Looks-at-Clouds’s fingers made a web of light—a dreamcatcher of cobwebs stolen from the sun.
The throwing axe struck the insect. The shaft struck first, a glancing blow, but the impact cracked the thing’s head and moved it off its course, and it struck a tree and fell to the ground, made a terrible noise as its wings beat furiously against the mud …
Ash began to feel the effect of Aneas’s spell. Every iota of the great monster’s concentration was shattered as the whole of his great, multifaceted mind attempted to comprehend the damage he’d taken. And like any massive predator experiencing peril, he fled.
The rent in reality had never left the sky, but Lot’s workings had caused it to begin to close, or heal. Now, with two enormous wingbeats, Ash cast himself back through it into the looming outer darkness.
There was a scream, or a roar; a sound so immense it was pain, making and unmaking, and despite it, Looks-at-Clouds stood and raised both hands, the labyrinthine complexity of the dreamcatcher pattern increasing with every heartbeat, and a mighty heart of light pulsing between the patterns.
Ash’s truncated tail passed through the gaping hole in reality, and Looks-at-Clouds was clearly struggling to master something incredibly powerful. Even as Ricar Lantorn cut at the downed hornet with his cutlass; even as Irene, freed from Aneas’s weight, struck the monstrous insect with the axe still in her hand; and even as Gas-a-ho effortlessly blew the third hornet into a messy rain of syrup, Aneas reached through the aethereal to Looks-at-Clouds. He could feel the shaman struggling under the weight of the potentia; he guessed that s/he was trying to close the gate behind Ash lest he return.
Looks-at-Clouds’s casting palace was unlike any he’d ever seen: fluid, organic, like an animal seen from inside instead of outside. Nor did s/he stand or sit, an avatar of self; it was as if he was directly inside the changeling’s mind and s/he had no avatar. But even in the aethereal there was no time to savour this, or be appalled or frightened. He followed the direction of the changeling’s thought to the surface of a pool of … intention, and rose through it, the metaphor flowing into the reality.
Looks-at-Clouds was indeed struggling to close the gaping tear in the sky.
Something was helping, but despite it all, s/he was inarticulate. The ops required a trigger and an expression of will.
Almost unbidden, the thought formed in Aneas’s mind, and his palace expressed it, and Looks-at-Clouds’s eyes snapped open, and in hir flawless High Archaic s/he said:
“En arche en ho LOGOS.”
And the sky was healed. The rift was not. Irene’s axe pulped the hornet’s head.
Silence fell.
The sheer shock of the combat lasted some minutes, and yet, for whatever reason, Aneas’s mind was clear enough, and he retrieved his fallen throwing axe even as Ricar Lantorn retrieved Wilful Murder’s red-painted bow floating in the wrack of the dragon’s fall. Men began to move; some unaffected, others unable to speak. A woman cried; another woman saw a man drowning, unconscious in the water, and saved him.
Bogglins who had, moments before, turned on their companions now dropped their weapons, sickened. Some were slaughtered. Some fled into the forest.
It was chaos, and Aneas rode above it. He was trying to imagine what the death of Master Smythe would mean; he was trying to see through the thicket of problems besetting him to imagine his next step.
Nita Qwan and Gas-a-ho were already on their feet. Ta-se-ho was slower, sitting holding his head.
All over the peninsula, people discovered that others were injured, or dead.
Aneas put his wet horn to his lips and blew. The first sounding might have been the call of a sick moose, but the second roared, and heads turned.
“Look sharp,” he said. “Change bowstrings! Prepare for an attack.” He roared these words so loudly that his throat hurt, but people moved. They were so shocked that none argued. Aneas ran from point to point. He rescued a knot of bogglins, but had them disarmed; he found the old bogglin, Krek.
“They are young,” Krek said. “They cannot … understand. That the scent is not … legal.” He rustled his wing-cases and his four mandibles clashed. A pair of royal foresters watched him, arrows on bows.
“Watch them. Slay none,” Aneas snapped at the foresters, and ran on. He didn’t see anything that could attack them, but he was painfully aware of how vulnerable they were.
In the next ten minutes, he learned that his camp was gone, irretrievably; the canvas washed into the lake in a tangle of rope; most of the dried food already ruined. Almost a hundred of his woodsmen were dead; some, their bodies flung grotesquely into trees to die impaled on branches stripped bare by the conflict, some drowned, some burned or simply missing, gone forever when the hermetical defences burned through.
“Why hasn’t Orley attacked?” he asked Irene.
She was playing with a light crossbow, trying to see if that heavy string was wet through or still capable of dealing death. She met his eye. “He can’t,” she said. “If he could, he’d kill us all this instant. So, he can’t.”
“No boats,” Ta-se-ho said with a nod.
Looks-at-Clouds shook hir head. “That was …” s/he breathed. The changeling’s features had always been mobile, but now a series of expr
essions ran across hir face like an actor demonstrating emotion. “The enemy acted in the aethereal instantly. They live in the aethereal. The … dragons.”
Gas-a-ho’s forehead furrowed.
Dmitri, the taller of the Moreans, shook his head. He was maintaining a shield over them. “I do not understand,” he said slowly.
Looks-at-Clouds glanced at him. “There was no plan. Our enemy is a great predator. His prey moved from cover, and he struck.” S/he lowered hir head. “And triumphed.” S/he shook hir head. “But he never enlisted Orley.”
“But he will now,” Aneas said.
“Damn,” Lantorn said. “Of course he will.”
Aneas could see it all. He’d never had such a feeling of absolute certainty before. He could see his plan, his enemy’s intentions, his own response. He wondered if this was a product of shock; he wondered if this was how his brother felt and acted.
“Is Master Smythe dead?” he asked.
No one would meet his eye.
“Damn,” he said. “Very well. Ta-se-ho, the canoes are the highest priority.”
“We have no food,” Irene said with devastating practicality.
“We will salvage some food. Dried peas become peas, in water. We think Orley is a day away, perhaps two? Will he turn and come back at us again, when we beat him the last time?”
“Yes,” Lantorn said.
The other warriors agreed.
Aneas almost smiled. It was … like the moment in a fencing match when you know that your feint has succeeded. He should have been depressed, perhaps mourning the fallen dragon, but Master Smythe had been a name to him, and he saw a way to lead Orley to defeat, and it was all he could do not to grin.
“We are naked to the enemy if he returns,” Looks-at-Clouds said.
“No matter what we do,” Aneas agreed. “Perhaps we could hold him for a minute. Gas-a-ho, you have a working …”
Gas-a-ho was handling a charm around his neck. “Yes,” he agreed. “Yes. Maybe longer. Maybe a really long time.”
“Boats,” Aneas said.
Ta-se-ho looked out over the bay of flotsam behind them. He shrugged. “Birchbark floats,” he said. “Water does it no harm. Tomorrow, at nightfall.”
Aneas nodded. “We need to salvage what we can, to bury the dead, to tell people we are not beaten.”
Irene smiled. “We are not beaten?” she asked. “I like that. We are not beaten.” Her eyes wandered over the wreckage and the dead, and Aneas wondered if he was being mocked.
Ta-se-ho smiled at her. “What makes men so dangerous is that we are too stupid to know when we are beaten.”
Irene’s look was as feral as a wolf’s. “I know,” she said.
Harndon
Harmodius was washing, a routine matter made complicated and even dangerous by circumstance, standing up to his hips in cold water with a borrowed bar of soap. Around him were seventy other naked and near naked men; some wearing their linens and washing them as well. Many had only just been delivered from the plague. Harndon was only just recovering. There were still women coughing, and men, and lines at the hospitals that ran down the Cheapside hill. But there were no longer so many that they needed a corps of crossbowmen to keep them from violence; the nuns of the Order of Saint Thomas were not threatened, and only the shortage of Umroth ivory prevented the outright defeat of the disease.
Harmodius felt the blow in the aethereal and he instantly raised a working and looked very carefully about him, passively, a little like a veteran warrior peering around his shield.
But the ripples were very far away in the real. In the aethereal, the shades of green and gold had a darkened cast to them, and there was something …
… Harmodius would have ducked, if hiding was really possible in the aethereal, or flinching. He did so symbolically, hoping his outward sign would drive reality.
There was something like a detonation and he was cast back into the real.
He stood, naked, in the Albin River, in the shadow of First Bridge by Harndon, and wished for a place to hide. But when the feeling passed, Harmodius dressed on the riverbank, visited his patients, and went to the castle.
Desiderata had spent less than a week in her capital. Already she was exhausted; already she remembered the heady days of tournament and battlefield as a time of joy. Since her hurried return downriver, she had held more than a dozen council meetings, and she had spent more time watching scribes write and seal parchments than she had spent with her child, who had vanished into the care of wet nurses she scarcely knew. Her foe, the archbishop, had done much to destroy the palace staff; she interviewed every servant and officer herself, with either Ser Gerald Random or Ser Ranald by her side.
The rooms were full of her husband, the king; the corridors reeked of her imprisonment, and the foundations of the castle tasted of Ash.
She found that she did not love Harndon, whose cheerful bustle and magnificent shipping had so pleased her when she first arrived as the beloved bride of the king.
Ricar Fitzroy, acting as the steward of her household, was with her almost every waking moment.
“It will pass,” he said yet again.
She raised both eyebrows. “So you tell me.” She gave a small shrug. “You were my first friend here, and I want you to be correct. And yet, right now, I hate this place.”
Fitzroy tried not to gaze too long at her more-than-mortal beauty. So he looked out the window. They were in the throne room; in the brief interval between a formal meeting of the Small Council and an informal review with various guild heads of the commercial state of the city.
Fitzroy’s eye went to a faded posy of wildflowers, hung by a ribbon.
He didn’t move his eyes in time, and she saw it. “And it hasn’t even been cleaned yet,” she said.
“The staff are doing their best,” Fitzroy said. “The guard are pitching in; Master Pye has sent some trustworthy people. My Queen, you must relax.”
Desiderata smiled at him from her throne, but her eye caught on the brown stain at her feet, and she flinched. “He died here,” she said, a hand at her throat. Then, rising, “I want to see my son.”
“Madame, the guilds.” Fitzroy wore armour all the time.
“If they kill my son, we are undone,” Desiderata said. Then she sagged. “By our Lady, what a harridan I am becoming. Never mind, my dear knight.”
A page came in, and handed Ser Ricard a note. Rebecca Almspend came in with a bowl of fruit, mostly new apples, and placed it on a waiting sideboard. “I miss Blanche,” she said. “I suspect we never noticed how much work she was doing.”
Desiderata smiled at the name. “And now she is empress,” the queen said with quiet satisfaction. “She will keep him steady and true; the kingdom will have a stout friend there.”
“My Queen, the Magister Harmodius requests audience.” Fitzroy was already up, despite the weight of his harness, and moving.
“Immediately!” She clapped her hands. Lady Mary, once known as “Hard Heart,” appeared and curtsied, and then went out and returned with the magister on her arm.
Harmodius went down on one knee. “My lady, the fighting in the north is …” He paused. “I feel I am needed there.”
“You have word?” the queen asked.
Lady Mary put a hand to her mouth. After all, she was affianced to Ser Gavin Muriens, who was in command of the alliance in the north.
Harmodius shook his head. “No, my Queen. I merely feel the concussions in the aethereal.”
“As do I,” the queen admitted. “We are wasted here.”
Harmodius saw it in a glance: the tawdry hall, the tapping foot, the pen knife and the litter of a dozen cut quills and some spilled sealing wax. He bowed again. “Lady Queen, I must disagree. Three thousand of your subjects would be dead today, or more, if you and I had not returned.”
The queen put her chin in her hand, a most un-Desiderata-like pose. “I feel that I should leave Ser Gerald to rule as king, and perhaps take my place as Ab
bess at Lissen Carak,” she said. “He makes every decision well; I wish to be at the battlefront.”
“But your child?” asked Lady Mary softly.
“Already has nurses, and a tutor!” the queen spat. “A tutor! When the only thing he practices is sucking at my nipples!”
A few of her ladies gave little shrieks, but the queen’s sense of humour was well established.
The queen smiled at Harmodius. “Magister, I do not mean to be difficult.”
“Madam, you are the soul of courtesy,” the magister said. “But I feel that the plague is passing; fifty pounds of Umroth ivory and we would be able to defeat it utterly. And the north …”
“We should go back north,” the queen agreed.
“Your Grace,” growled Ser Ricard.
“My guard are the best knights in Alba,” the queen said. “My kingdom and my world are at risk. Why am I here?”
“Because we must to hold Harndon above all places,” Ser Gerald said. “I am sorry to be the endless source of boredom and anxiety, Your Grace, but if Harndon falls, everything falls. The Red Knight …”
“Is the Red Knight your king?” Desiderata snapped.
“My Queen, that is unfair,” Random snapped back.
“He wrote our orders, and we must obey him?” Desiderata asked.
Random glanced down. And then met her eyes. “Yes,” he said.
“I am wasted here,” Desiderata said. She sighed. “He takes too much upon himself, your Red Knight. Emperor or no emperor.”
“Perhaps, Your Grace. And yet, my sense is that we have not yet been tested here.” Random shrugged. “Harndon is not yet restored to its power, Your Grace.”
Becca Almspend stood up beside Random. “I must agree, Your Grace,” she said with a bob of a curtsy. “Harndon must be held, and I agree that we have not yet been attacked. We are weak; our strength is a tithe of what it would have been a year ago. Look at the creatures you have discovered working in the palace.”