Arles—The Red Knight, over central Galle
Gabriel’s layered shields were up now, and mostly held the incredible flash of ops, but despite losses, he loosed back, throwing preset counters down his opponent’s line of thought in the aethereal while Prudentia spun and spun his memory palace, catching, amplifying, shielding …
Another godlike fist of power struck his shields, and his shields held again.
He had time to think about what Mortirmir had said about the accession of powers. He had already turned to flee; his reactions in the aethereal were defensive …
But he was untouched.
He leaned, and Ariosto turned.
There, below him, was a forest, and in the forest there were Titans. Hundreds of them, their size a little distorting until he saw one by a tree.
Umroth.
A whole herd.
Connections were made; more, when he saw the herd draw power in a great indrawn aethereal effect like a breath taken; every one of the four hundred or more not-dead beasts …
A distributed intelligence.
Odine. Rebel Odine, if Kronmir was correct.
He knew the working that Mortirmir had used to free the not-dead at Arles, but he didn’t have it cast, ready at hand, hanging on Prudentia’s arm or around her neck. It was something that would take time and patience to work, and right then he had neither.
And he was taking an utterly unnecessary risk.
Inside his helmet, his lips twitched involuntarily, and Ariosto screamed, pivoted, and struck like the great predator he was. His wings overshadowed one of the Umroth, and the thing, thirty hands high, forty feet long, with four legs like pillars and huge tusks that curved like Mamluks’ scimitars.
The huge thing reared on its hind legs, reaching for the heavens.
Gabriel’s ghiavarina shot lightning, which careened off the thing’s black hermetical shield—the only passive shield he’d ever seen. He coveted it; a shield that was always on …
Ariosto screamed. His talons slammed into the shield.
Leaning out, Gabriel’s weapon sliced through the black shield, and the combined assault of talon and weapon defeated it; it vanished, Ariosto’s talons raked the thing’s head, and Gabriel pulsed three bolts into the stinking carcass of the ancient, not-dead hulk, the third a different hue from the first two, and they were past, rising away as two more of the monsters charged them from the deep, dark spruce forest.
A ripple passed over the herd, almost as if their colour was changing.
The one Gabriel had hit exploded.
“Home,” the Red Knight said.
Behind him, a shapeless black arm reached out of the herd. It grew until it was hundreds of feet high, and then it reached into the east, as if blindly groping for Ariosto.
Gabriel blew it a kiss, and raced farther east into the rain clouds.
Mitla—The Duke of Mitla
Three hundred leagues to the east, the Duke of Mitla drank two cups of wine, spilling some in his haste to get it down. He had to put aside his burning impatience at the tardiness of his allies; he was angry, and his anger frightened his guards and servants. Then he shed his armour. No squire helped him, and as the armour fell to the floor and met the spilled wine, it hissed with heat.
Dressed in Ifriquy’an aesbaestos, he went out into the public square under heavy guard to give alms to the poor on his way to mass. His chamberlain handed him a heavy purse of chain maille, and he went along a line of poor men, putting a solid gold coin in each hand. The coins were hot.
“Pray for me,” he said as he came to each man.
They fawned on him, but they had learned better than to touch him. They took their coins from a slight distance. Which he enjoyed. He hated it when the poor were not appropriately thankful for his largesse, and he basked in their proper admiration.
“Pray for me,” he said, putting a gold coin in a woman’s hand.
“Your bravos killed my man,” she said. If the touch of his fingers burned her, she gave no sign.
He paused. And glared. “Take the coin from her,” he said to his chamberlain.
The woman must have known she would forfeit the coin by making any protest, but she struggled and a pair of soldiers beat her with their scabbarded swords. The gathered crowd watched, silent, as the thugs beat the woman, who was old enough to be anyone’s mother. It wasn’t a severe beating; no bones were broken. It was merely humiliating.
Infuriatingly, the woman smiled throughout her beating.
“You’ll see,” she said through her split lips.
“See what, Mother?” asked one of the soldiers. “You don’t have anything I want to see.” He smacked her again for emphasis and then tugged at his hose to smooth them while his partner rotated his head, reseating his chain maille collar.
The duke moved on, putting coins into hands of fawning men, now well ahead of his escort.
“You missed one,” whispered his chamberlain.
The Duke of Mitla was at the part he always dreaded—the lepers. He tried not to touch them at all, and indeed, he feared them.
But in his hurry to get it done, he’d skipped a man, a sort of huddle of rags with a round, nondescript face.
He held out the coin and the man seized his hand, a shocking invasion of his space. And used it to pull himself to his feet.
“Pray for me,” spat the duke in revulsion. The man was a leper. And he had touched the duke. The duke turned away and hurried through the others, avoiding contact as much as he could.
His right hand began to hurt. The duke had a good understanding of the darkness of his own head; he knew that he was manufacturing pain because he feared the leper. He resisted his own urge to look at his hand; he told himself the throbbing was in his mind. But the last of the lepers actually flinched when handed the coin; the horrible man had no lips and no nose, and yet he had the effrontery to pull away from the duke’s coin.
One of the soldiers at the duke’s side gave a low hiss.
The duke’s hand was black, and the black was spreading rapidly up the veins of his arm and under his shirt cuff. The leper shrunk away.
The duke gave a choked scream.
His chamberlain grabbed his shoulders. “Your Grace! We must cut it!”
The duke spun away. “Out of my way!” he bellowed. The pain was incredible. He couldn’t think. Fire played around his lips; his soldiers flinched.
One of the soldiers cut down the nearest leper, and people in the square began to scream.
The whole skin of the Duke of Mitla seemed to split apart and the duke’s head opened as if cut with a battle-axe.
The man who had been the nondescript bundle of rags grabbed the beaten woman by the hand and hauled her along as if she were a child. The soldiers were killing indiscriminately, but everyone was trying to escape the creature that seemed to be clawing its way out of the duke’s body. Whatever it was, it was turning black. It moved with incredible speed, but it bludgeoned into the wall of the cathedral garden as if blinded, and cannoned into a trio of screaming women.
They were ten paces away, and the nondescript man went into an open house door on the square and out the kitchens into a small garden, where the gate was open. He dragged the woman behind him. His right hand had a burn mark across the palm, and so did hers.
They went through the gate into an alley.
Up the alley to the back of the cathedral.
The bundle of rags shed his rags and his face makeup and became a notary in fine, but difficult to describe, brown and grey wool.
“Sorry they beat you,” he said in unaccented Etruscan.
“Worth it,” the woman spat through her split lip. “Why is he so hot?”
“No idea,” said the man. “I still don’t know what just happened.”
They walked through the back of the crowd in the cathedral; the same crowd whose front had just watched the duke contract some dread disease. They crossed the nave and left by the side chapel door, which was open, and crossed the street into the poorer neighborhoods behind the church school. They walked fast, but that was normal for well-dressed people in this area, and as soon as they entered the stews, they were clear of the press of people flocking to see what had happened. The duke was a very unpopular man, and the series of open doors and gates they’d just passed mapped his unpopularity across the city.
The middle-aged couple walked out the back of the stews and along a line of traveler’s taverns by the city’s Berona gate. There were soldiers there, but there were soldiers everywhere, and the couple went into the second-to-last inn, and emerged with the lady’s face clean, at least; she looked as if she’d been beaten, but that was not so uncommon. Both of them riding good horses. Excellent horses, in fact—Ifriquy’ans.
They rode to the gate with a baggage donkey behind them. By then, there was a rumour that the duke was dead and a demon had emerged from his body and now it was dead, too, and the soldiers were on edge, debating closing the gate.
The couple were patient and meek, a merchant and his wife going to Firensi on business.
“There’s a war in the way, you fool,” growled one of the soldiers.
The merchant bowed. “I have a pass from the duke,” he said. “And one from the Count of Berona.”
The gate captain assessed the cost of two such passes and the magnificent riding horses and became more respectful.
“We should close the gate,” demanded his sergeant.
The gate captain nodded. “No one’s ordered it,” he said, pocketing the golden coin he’d just found stuck to the merchant’s pass with a bit of beeswax. “Let ’em through!”
The merchant and his wife rode slowly out of the city, their horses ambling, and could be seen for half an hour as they made a quarter circuit of the city walls at a glacial pace before turning into the countryside.
A mile south of the city, they turned sharply off the road, onto a farm track that led into a farm yard where two infidels were holding horses.
M’bub Ali emerged from the barn. “Well?” he asked.
Brown shrugged. “A fucking disgrace.”
“Did you get him?” Ali asked.
Brown shook his head. “No idea. The poison didn’t kill him outright; never seen anything like it.”
The woman, Donna Beatrice, raised her face. “I saw,” she said. “There was a daemon from hell inside the duke. He ripped the duke open and came out into the light of the sun, which shriveled him black.”
Brown turned and looked at her. “A word of advice, goodwife. Go far away—Venike, or Rhum. Never mention this again, even to yourself. One of these lads will see you have a change of clothes and a bag of gold.”
“Killed my husband,” the woman said. “Killed my son. I’d have done it for free.” Her head was high, her eyes shining. “I don’t care if they catch me.” But then she seemed to shrink. “I don’t even know what to do now.”
M’bub Ali gave her a slow smile. “No husband, no brother, no sister, no child?” he asked.
She shook her head.
M’bub Ali raised an eyebrow. “You might as well come with us,” he said.
Brown, who mostly disliked people, sighed. “We’re not recruiting,” he said.
Arles—The Red Knight
“Sauce beat the Patriarch. Kronmir’s dead,” said Bad Tom.
Gabriel got his helmet off. “You bedside manner’s still a little rough.”
“Aye, I liked him.” Tom shrugged. “Loons get kilt. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Aye?”
“Och, aye,” Gabriel said. He was reading the thin parchment in Tom’s fist that had been brought by the messenger, and anger and depression settled on him. He told himself it was a reaction to the fight.
“Jesus,” Gabriel said. “Oh God.”
Tom Lachlan smiled a hard smile. “Ye ken it was a man who did that to him, aye? Nae monster. Nae dragon. Nae worm. Only fuckin’ men.”
Gabriel blinked. He was in the place he went, where all he could see was all the people he’d killed. “Yes, Tom. I take your meaning.”
“Sauce talked to the worm. It never got into Kronmir’s head.”
Gabriel let go a breath.
“That close,” Lachlan said, and suddenly his arms were around Gabriel. “Fuck it, Gabriel. We almost lost it all, and Kronmir, that slippery bastard, held ’em. In his wee head. ’Til he died.” Bad Tom was looking out at the falling darkness. “Mayhap the bravest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Aye, Tom.”
Tom Lachlan shook his head. “Didn’t even like the loon,” he admitted.
Gabriel took a deep breath. “I did,” he said. “Get me Mortirmir, please.”
Mortirmir found Gabriel watching Ariosto eat.
“You found him,” Mortirmir said with satisfaction. “I have him to the inch.”
“Yes,” Gabriel said. “He’s distributed in a whole herd of Umroth.” He described the passive shield.
Mortirmir raised both eyebrows.
“I’ll save the time of saying that’s impossible,” he said. “It’s fascinating.”
Gabriel had out a map. One of Kronmir’s maps.
“He’s dead,” Mortirmir said.
“I know,” Gabriel nodded.
Mortirmir shook his head. “Tancreda was instrumental in winning the battle,” he said. “I wonder what I’d do if they did to Tancreda what they did to Ser Jules.” He frowned.
Gabriel winced. “I also agree with you that we have increased in power. I assume that distributed intelligence is the Necromancer. He couldn’t get through my shields.”
Mortirmir nodded. “I can find the Patriarch,” he said. “Any idea what the Patriarch actually is?”
“We need to finish the Necromancer,” Gabriel said. “And we have some evidence that the Patriarch isn’t the tool of the Necromancer, but serves another will. Or is a new player.”
“I want to find the Patriarch,” Mortirmir said. He glanced at Gabriel. “Ahh. Yes. A third player. Master Smythe never even hinted at such a thing. Kronmir did.”
Gabriel took a deep breath. “I know. Necromancer first.” He looked at Mortirmir. “Kronmir was afraid we’re being played.”
Mortirmir shrugged. “Very well. When?”
“Day after tomorrow,” Gabriel said. “Then we’ll find the Patriarch.”
Mortirmir nodded. “Shorn of his army, I suppose he’s nobody.”
Gabriel smiled. “And if Giselle finds him first, he’ll be very thoroughly nobody,” he said. “But I worry that we have a third player and we know so little.”
Mortirmir pulled at his mustache. “We could have ten more players,” he said. “If they are dragons, they can take men’s shapes. If they are Odine, they can control men. How would we know?” He looked at Gabriel and frowned. “We could even have players who are men. And women. Anything we have learned may be known by others. Dame Julia’s prognostications are not exactly a secret.”
“Christ,” Gabriel muttered.
Mortirmir waved a hand in adolescent dismissiveness. “Never mind. Let’s just kill the ones we can find. Life is complicated enough already.” He raised an eyebrow. “Speaking of which, I’ve unpacked most of Magister Rashidi’s workings.”
“And?” Gabriel knew that he had not unpacked his set of tiles. And he needed to.
“I know how to make a Fell Sword.” Morgon smiled.
“Harmodius …”
“He knows how and chooses not to share.” Mortirmir shrugged.
Gabriel was staring east.
“Gabriel,” Mortirmir said with a familiarity no one else used anymore except Sauce and Bad Tom. “You don’t think it’s all about Ash? It won’t end. That was Master Smythe’s great point, and he made it well. Even if we win here, there will be another and another and another. To the last syllable of recorded time.”
“Thanks for that cheerful thought. You are right. Let’s just squash the ones we can see.” Gabriel sighed. “Jehan once asked me if I could fight all the time, every day. And today I find the answer to be: no. I’m tired.”
Morgon looked raised an eyebrow. “My point about the Fell Swords …” he said.
“Yes?” Gabriel asked, mystified. Perhaps even annoyed, because Mortirmir, once launched on a topic, was as tough as one of his own shields to dislodge.
“I could make them.” Mortirmir smiled.
“Really?” Gabriel asked.
“It is really just an exercise in linking points in the real to points in the aethereal. Mortirmir entered Gabriel’s memory palace and showed him.
“That’s incredibly power intensive,” Gabriel said. The process took his breath away; it was, to a startling degree, beautiful.
“I could do a few a day, when I was safe and didn’t need the ops.” Mortirmir raised his eyebrows.
“A few a day?” Gabriel said. “It would take me all day to make one.”
“Do not,” Mortirmir said. “I feel in you that same transcendence we saw in Sister Amicia …”
“Yes, I know. Thanks so very much.”
“You are welcome, of course. You should restrict your casting to the bare essentials. Yes, I think I could manage three to five a day at first; more later.” Mortirmir’s velvet-clad avatar gestured grandly.
“Arm the casa?” Gabriel smiled.
“Yes. Although I will note that there is a direct relation between the mass of the matter and the difficulty of the transference. So that a long sword is a masterwork; an arrowhead is a mere bagatelle.” Mortirmir pursed his lips. “Do I mean bagatelle?” He frowned. “I have been circuitous, I find. Listen, then … I want to say that we will be fighting increasingly … hermetical opponents.”
“I certainly hope so,” Gabriel said.
“Well, a little interface between the hermetical and the real would spare us some effort.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Gabriel stretched.
“You are truly growing tired of war?” Morgon asked.
“Never mind,” Gabriel said. “It was years ago.” He paused, and a look of confusion passed over his face, and he grimaced. “Like, two years ago,” he admitted.
Adrian Goldsmith stood a few yards away, sketching them.
They marched before dawn, following Count Zac’s guides through the woods, heading north and west. The easterner had a new weapon, which he demonstrated for Gabriel and Bad Tom; a tube which fit to his bow, so that he could shoot very short, heavy darts from his powerful horn bow.
“So?” asked Tom.
“Watch,” Zakje said. He put the half-tube against the lacquered bow and used it to draw a slim arrow with a long steel head. He loosed it through the moonlight at a small ash, and the arrow went through the tree.
“It turns your bow into a crossbow,” Bad Tom said.
“It will help us kill the big monsters,” Zakje said. “And knights, too,” he added with a wicked grin at Tom Lachlan.
Forest of Northern Arles—Cully
The stars were bright and seemed very close, and the comet was so brilliant that its light created shadows that crossed the shadows cast by the equally brilliant moon. The trees seemed almost infinite, their branches silver in the starlight, rolling away to east and west in a mysterious majesty of leaf and branch.
Urk of Mogon looked into the vastness and nodded at Cully, breaking open his mandibles. “Want to walk away,” he said. “Want to walk into cool dark and green and never come out.”
Cully frowned. “All I see is standing firewood.”
Urk looked at him, his all-too-human eyes registering revulsion. “Here is beauty,” he said.
Cully put an arm around the thing’s wing cases. It had taken an act of will once, to embrace the bug, but that was weeks and many shared dangers ago. “If’n you say so, mate,” he said. “In the dark, I see danger, spiders, wet, cold, and hunger.” He shrugged apologetically. “No pay, no wine, no women, and no fuckin’ song.”
Urk smiled, his four jaws yawning in a particularly loathsome way. “You make war,” he said. “And this war is nothing but cold, damp, and danger.”
“True for you, mate,” Cully muttered. “But there’s pay.”
“And?” the bug asked.
“Oh aye, yer fewkin’ point is made.” Cully looked out into the dark and threatening woods, trying to see a shred of beauty.
Adrian Goldsmith watched the captain, which was to say the emperor, mount his griffon. He sketched rapidly in the book he now carried all the time. Ariosto stretched, a particular motion he made before his wings began their beat, and in that moment he was perfectly caught by the rising sun; the fractal complexity of his feathered wings, before he blazed into a single glory of ruddy gold; the scarlet of his saddle and reins and holding strap, the brilliant scarlet and steel of his rider.
The captain launched into the morning air, and Tom Lachlan was suddenly everywhere, bellowing orders, and Edmund went down the guild line, stopped to look at Duke, and the two mocked each other for a moment, as usual.
Adrian Goldsmith felt a pang of homesickness. He was, after all, guild born and bred.
Lachlan was right behind Edmund, and he stopped to talk to two apprentices from the Cutlers’ Guild. He leaned forward a little, his darkly burnished armour somehow one with the last of the night, the gold edges glowing with the rising sun. Adrian switched targets, flipped his palette, and began to sketch the Primus Pilus.
Lachlan was hefting one of the heavy bronze tubes on a long spear pole. “Hard to carry?” he asked.
Donald Leary, Cutler’s apprentice, was the kind of Harndoner who was not ever abashed. “Heavy as sin, mate,” he said as if he and the giant knight were old friends.
“Aye,” Lachlan agreed. “An’ how many rounds do ye ha’e?”
Leary smiled. “Forty,” he said.
Bad Tom looked at the thing, like a mace on a pole. “Sweet Christ,” he said. “Well, Gabriel thinks the world o’ yon. I ha’e me doubts.” He shrugged and looked at the crews of the two long bronze falconets on their wheeled carriages.
Francis Atcourt, who was nominally in charge of the casa and liked to divert Tom’s attention if he could, spoke up. “We’ve hauled these blessed things over hill and dale for a year,” he agreed. “And never used a one.”
Tom nodded at Edmund. “They work?” he asked.
Edmund nodded. “I promise you they do, Ser Knight. Show us a dragon.”
Bad Tom Laughed. “Aye, that’s the spirit,” he said, his tone indicating that he didn’t believe the things could harm a house cat. The head of the column was long gone, and Tom realized he was slowing his own march. “Off wi’ ye,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll see what yer smelly de’il’s powder is worth.”
Forty leagues later, and again the force made camp with few fires and no tents. Men were hungry; the dash across the Massif had taken a toll in men and horses. The food wagons were mostly empty, and Gabriel ordered them unloaded and sent back. But he ordered a dozen kept, and gave no reason.
“I wish you could ride Ariosto,” he said as an aside to Morgon.
“I don’t,” Morgon admitted. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. That beast mislikes me.”
“Beast my arse,” Gabriel said. There was a silence; both men had their own thoughts. Finally Gabriel said, “Sometimes I suspect I am the junior partner.”
“I am sure your temporal power more than balances my superiority of hermetical talent,” Mortirmir said graciously.
“I meant to Ariosto,” Gabriel said.
There was a little more silence.
Gabriel smiled to himself, and was saved from further insulting his most vital asset by the arrival of his officers. Toby hovered, no longer a squire but eager to help Anne; Anne laid out a folding table, and two pages placed the top across the sawhorse-like folding legs. Another of Kronmir’s carefully drawn maps was laid down and the curling corners tacked with eating knives.
Kronmir’s beautiful calligraphy, each place name carefully labeled, stood as a monument to the man. Gabriel felt a lump in his throat; had more than a passing qualm about the bodies he was leaving behind. He paused.
“I assume we’re out of wine?” he asked Anne. She looked startled, and blinked, then waved to one of the pages.
Gabriel sighed. He took a breath, steadied himself, and pointed at the map. “Here’s where the Necromancer is. He must know what’s coming for him. Today he tried to slip south and ran into Pavalo’s pickets, so now he’s coming for us. Du Corse is hard on his heels, here.” He drew them out. “Pavalo cut up most of his not-dead people and trapped two of the Umroth, the way they do it, in pit traps.” He shrugged. “We don’t have any soft soil to dig pits in, so we’ll need a little luck.”
Francis Atcourt handed his emperor a heavy glass flask with a densely woven net covering of linen to protect the precious glass. It sloshed.
Gabriel grinned and took a mouthful. “Ahh,” he said.
Morgon Mortirmir leaned over.
Atcourt tapped the map wordlessly and Bad Tom took the wine. “It’s more like hunting than like fuckin’ war,” he said.
“And so, when we move, we move from cover to cover,” Gabriel said. “Right here. Mouth of this valley. And we hold there until Pavalo or Du Corse comes.”
Mortirmir shrugged. “We can just finish the Necromancer ourselves,” he said. “No need for all this elaborate preparation.”
“Why don’t ye fewkin’ go fight the thing in yer hosen and the rest o’ we will ha’e a nice day off an’ wash our fewkin’ clothes?” Tom spat. “Ye talk a mickle stream of shite fer a boy wi’ ten hairs on his wee face.”
“Tom?” Gabriel said. “He probably can take the Necromancer one to one. I certainly hope he can. The rest of us are here to avert various alternatives. And disasters.”
“Thank you,” Mortirmir said icily.
“I ha’e said it before and, nae doot, I’ll ha’e to say it agin. Ye’r takin’ all the joy out o’ war.” Bad Tom took another swig from the bottle and left the group.
“That oaf thinks we are here to amuse ourselves,” Mortirmir said.
Bad Tom reappeared. “Oaf?” he asked. He was smiling ear to ear.
“Tom,” Gabriel said.
“Oh aye. I’ll beat the fuck oot o’ him tomorrow after he cooks the Necromancer,” Lachlan said. “I promise ye that, boy.”
“It’s a band of brothers,” Gabriel said wearily to Francis Atcourt, who handed him the empty bottle.
Morning dawned and the company was awake, hungry, surly, and moving very fast over the hills. Their riding horses were done in, their bellies were grumbling, and even water was in short supply.
Gabriel was aloft as soon as it was light, feeling his way north and west, flying very low and inhabiting the aethereal, leaving Ariosto to handle the real. But the Necromancer was invisible, and Morgon’s passive location technique was no help.
And Gabriel felt alone, exposed, and foolish.
When the sky was merely pink, he overflew the Ifriquy’an columns to the west. They were all mounted, moving quickly with a herd of remounts, and a line of dust like surf on a beach marked the front of their skirmish line. He could feel the power of at least four casters, all pupils of the great Al Rashidi, and he was reassured.
He landed. He tried to ignore the signs of looting; the Gallish women in the tents. Galle and Ifriquy’a had known war for centuries. But it still rankled.
A slave led him to a circle of horsemen; Pavalo Payam sat in the middle. Something had changed in him; the slight subservience he had always showed in Alba was gone, as if burnished off as a flaw; now he was a warrior among warriors, the paramount warrior.
He did not bend so much as a muscle of his neck.
“Ser Pavalo,” Gabriel said.
“Ser Gabriel. Your beast makes our horses uneasy.” Then he allowed his old, easy smile to cross his grave face. “We have him, I think. Salim al-Raisouli brushed his screens less than half an hour ago. He flinched away from us.”
Gabriel unrolled one of Kronmir’s maps, and the mamluk officer dismounted—grudgingly. Gabriel gathered that most of them viewed war as an exercise in horsemanship, not map reading.
When they were all oriented, Pavalo summoned Salim, and the magister, mounted on a mule, placed coloured symbols of light on the Venike paper of the map.
Gabriel nodded to Pavalo. “I think we’ve got him. I need to hurry.”
Pavalo grinned. “This is a great day. And Du Corse?”
“Close. He has the most men and the worst hermeticals. I don’t want him engaged unless we have no choice.” Gabriel looked up to see one of the mamluks listening to the translation with what could only be described as a wolfish glee.
“A word with you?” Gabriel asked. He walked out of the circle, until he and Pavalo were as alone as they could be in the midst of an army of ten thousand.
“This is delicate,” Gabriel said. “And I have no time. So … please do not consider going for Du Corse when the Necromancer is eliminated.” He smiled with what he thought was good courtesy.
Pavalo returned the smile. “I will, in all things, obey the commands of my sultan,” he said. “I am not a servant of the emperor.”
Gabriel looked back over the column. “You have been to Alba. You heard Al Rashidi. You know what’s at stake.”
Pavalo nodded. “I do, Gabriel. But sometimes I think it is … naive … of you to imagine that every man you meet can be trusted to keep his eyes on the main goal and not seize some of the prize for himself.”
Gabriel nodded, relieved that it was in the open. “Ah, Pavalo, I understand; usually I try to find a way to engage self-interest alongside the greater values.” He looked back at the column, letting his eyes rest on a chain of Gallish peasants clearly taken as slaves. “If we fall, he will exterminate us, root and branch,” Gabriel said. “There will be no private triumph. And if we triumph,” Gabriel said quietly, “do you not think that we will be so puissant that it might be better to be our ally than our rival? Because any power that can break the dragons will be a mighty power for many years.”
“This is very like a threat,” Pavalo said, stung.
Gabriel shrugged. “Pavalo, I am in a hurry; I am afraid of the Necromancer, I have to ride the air alone, and your mamluks are clearly posturing. And they are taking slaves.”
Instead of further bridling, Pavalo stepped closer and put an arm on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Ah! That is the sand in the shoe, is it? Yet if I fought them on this, I would have to fight many other battles. My word to them is the same as yours to me. Defeat the Necromancer, and then see what cometh. Yes?”
Alliance was a dangerous process. But he needed Pavalo, and the man had been Rashid’s paladin. He, of all men, knew what was at stake.
“Yes,” he said. But as Ariosto climbed away and the sun peeked over the shoulder of the world, he thought how sad and twisted it was that he found it easier to trust Du Corse, whose ambition he could understand, then Payam, who was a far nobler man, but whose loyalties were almost unfathomable.
Before the red orb of the sun was resting on the eastern horizon, he was standing with Du Corse, twenty leagues to the north.
“No contact at all,” Du Corse said.
“Let’s keep it that way,” Gabriel said, and unleashed a great pulse of ops into the real. He did so again from the back of Ariosto as they rose over the Gallish army, cheered by the knights and the foot soldiers, too.
And then Gabriel attempted the experiment that he and Morgon had discussed on the ship, what seemed like months before. For the first time, Gabriel attempted to raise a wave front of emotion, as the great creatures of the Wild did. He found it easy enough to raise fear within himself, and once raised, to project it, and he was amused to discover that the waves of fear and terror that creatures projected were mere outward signs of their inward emotions. Of course the wardens were afraid of combat; of course the wyverns feared man. Even as he shaped his projection, he understood what Morgon had suggested—that the great powers had developed these emotional fronts as ways of detecting the presence of their ancient enemy. Somehow that was both sobering and profound.
And there it was. It was so easy that Gabriel might have cursed, if the whole of his attention was not on his projection. But the Necromancer was instantly visible as a vacancy in the emotional world that the aethereal could be, despite the attempts of humans to render it rational.
Finding an object or entity in the aethereal was not always the same as finding them in the real, but in this case, the ranges were short and the resolution surprisingly fine.
In the real, Gabriel laughed again. And fled, diving to the very height of the treetops to put solid earth between his route and the enemy.
He landed in a beautiful dawn, and Ariosto hopped off to eat sheep. His force had moved farther than he had thought possible; they were dismounting in a deep valley between two rocky summits. The ground was sandy and full of glacial rock, and despite that, there were ropes already stretched across the valley.
Forty yards away, Cully groaned.
Adrian Goldsmith groaned.
In fact, almost every soldier groaned, because the stretched ropes on neat wooden pegs meant they were to dig. Most men had a pick, and a few had shovels, and most of them were veterans of other engineering feats, but the shallow soil and rock looked particularly threatening.
Bad Tom rode along the rope line, his great warhorse kicking up dust. “However much ye may hate to dig, lads,” he roared, “that trench and upcast will seem like yer maether’s own hearthside when the Umroth charge ye. Now get it done. And put in yer stakes. Every fewkin’ one.”
Cully watched Anne and Toby begin to dig, and he took a drink of water from his almost empty canteen and walked back to where the captain and the banner were. Young Mortirmir was casting; he had that look, and he already had shields up. The captain was watching his griffon eat.
The captain was just speaking. “I’ve never found my cowardice so useful,” he was just saying, and Morgon wore a rare smile.
“My lord, I honour you for essaying it, and the result is remarkable.” The magister gave a terrible smile. “I cannot wait to try myself,” he admitted.
“Sorry to interrupt, Cap’n,” Cully said. “You want me wi’ ye, or wi’ Toby?”
“I’ll be in the air soon enough,” Gabriel said. “Don’t let Toby die. Or Anne.”
Cully smiled. “Lads would like it if you’d dig,” he said softly.
Gabriel met his eye. His sigh was heavy.
“Fine,” he said. “I know you’re right. I just don’t like it. I’m already tired.” He walked forward, still wearing only his arming clothes. Two pages had his flying armour on a ground sheet.
He walked up to the line and wordlessly took a pick from Anne Woodstock. “Go make sure my harness is ready,” he said. She wiped sweat off her brow in the chilly autumn air and managed a bow before heading back.
Gabriel began to work the ground with the pick. Anne had found a rock about the size of two men’s heads. He worked around it, loosening the soil, and then when the pick used as a crowbar moved the whole thing, he summoned Tom Lachlan, and the two of them lifted the rock and threw it on the upcast.
Cully stepped in with a small shovel and cleared all the loose soil onto the upcast.
“I’ve got them,” Mortirmir said. “Him. Them. Coming this way.” He looked down. “I don’t suppose I should ask you why you, the Emperor of Man, are wasting your time digging? When you should be preparing your workings?”
Gabriel began to work away at the ground again. The first blow hit yet another rock, the blow almost numbing his hands. “Because I need these men and women, Morgon,” he said. “I need them alive. And to survive the next hours, I need them in trenches.”
“Yes,” Morgon agreed.
“They will dig better if they see me dig,” Gabriel said.
“Why?” Morgon asked.
Tom Lachlan slapped Morgon Mortirmir lightly on the head, and Mortirmir flinched. “You ha’e blood an’ bone in there, warlock?” he asked. “Or gears?”
“And yet,” Gabriel said, loosening his second rock, “He’s right. I need to prepare.”
Mortirmir looked at the sweating men and women. “If every one of them had a Fell Sword …”
Tom Lachlan paused. “Ye can do that, laddie? I’d stop givin’ ye shite if ye did.” He grinned.
Then he grunted, dismounted again from his warhorse that was as tall and black as the emperor’s Ataelus, and armoured head to foot, took the pick from his captain. He threw one blow, even as the captain muscled his way out of the rapidly forming trench, and his pick-blow split the rock Gabriel had been working at.
He looked up.
“Brawly fechit,” Gabriel said.
“Ye sound like a wee fool when you try and sound like a Hillman,” Lachlan said with a grin.
“You should hear what you sound like to us,” Gabriel said. “Right. I’ve faced the dirt. Let’s face the Necromancer.”
In the center of the line, a wagon, one of only four left with them, dropped four huge wicker baskets, as tall as a man and as big around as a tree in the Adnacrags. Immediately, every man in the guilds began to fill them with dirt. The dirt came from in front; they were in the middle of the valley, with the deepest soil, and the work went quickly, the more so as every stone they found could also go into the huge baskets.
Horses came up, and the falconets were dropped into position between the baskets. Their crews began to tend to them. The rest of the guildsmen kept digging.
The sun was halfway up into the sky and the more pious had just finished saying their hurried devotions when trumpets sounded. In most places the trench was four feet deep and the upcast at least two feet high. Most of the archers and all the guildsmen had carried long wooden stakes for the last six days; now they planted them as deep as the soil allowed, leaning slightly out, in the top of the upcast, driven in at least three feet. The wicker baskets or gabions in the center were full to overflowing, the long bronze falconets gleaming in the morning sun.
Gabriel’s hands were shaking.
“You know you are glowing?” Mortirmir asked him. “You are visibly golden.”
Gabriel closed his eyes.
“Are you transcendent, then?” Mortirmir asked. “Interesting. Why you and not me?”
“Maturity?” Gabriel asked. He opened his eyes.
Mortirmir raised an eyebrow. “I suppose that I deserved that.”
“Can we hide it?” Gabriel asked.
Mortirmir frowned. “Ask me when we’re done today,” he said. “For all my bluster, I want to keep every iota of ops.”
“It almost pleases me to hear you speak thus,” Gabriel said.
“Here it comes,” Mortirmir nodded. “It? They?”
Down the valley, a cloud of dust rose.
Trumpets sounded.
Gabriel walked to Ariosto and put a hand on his hide.
Ready?
Sure, boss. A-hunting we will go.
“My lord?” Anne Woodstock was standing at his elbow. “There’s a herald.”
Gabriel walked back to the line of trenches and watched with Bad Tom and Mortirmir and Francis Atcourt as a man on a skeletal horse came forward.
“Well, well,” Mortirmir said.
“Ye’r not goin’ to ha’e speech wi’ yon?” Bad Tom asked, his irritation increasing his Hillman accent.
Gabriel pursed his lips. “I am minded to speak to it,” he said.
“Send me,” Mortirmir said.
Gabriel looked at the young magister. “Let me pander to your pride, Morgon Mortirmir. Right now, if one of us is taken by surprise and killed, I’d rather it was me. For the good of all.” He waved at Anne, but she’d already brought up Ataelus, who was restive at being left out, as had become usual, and delighted to be ridden.
Tom Lachlan unsheathed his great magical sword, what men called The Dragon’s Blade, and held it in the air like a man holds a torch. “I’ll just ride out wi’ thee, eh?”
Gabriel nodded. “Yes,” he agreed.
They rode a little outside the new earthworks. The sun was high, and the last damp in the newly dug ground gave a flavor to the air. It was cool and pleasant, and easy to love life.
The herald was a not-dead. He was not carefully dressed; he had a shirt, and braes that were badly soiled, and no shoes. He was tall and very thin, and his eyes didn’t move. The horse he rode was as thin as he was himself.
He stopped about two horse lengths from Gabriel and Tom Lachlan. He didn’t pull his reins or make a noise; rather, man and horse simply stopped.
“Greetings,” sang a choir within the man’s throat.
Gabriel took a breath with a little effort. The thing in front of him was terrifying in its similarity to a man, and its alienness. He had never been so close to an animated not-dead, and he found the experience deeply unsettling.
“Do I address the being commonly known as the Necromancer?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes.” The voice was not even the half of the effect. “I was a man once.” After a pause. “Or were we? Some of us were.”
Tom’s sword tip twitched like the tale of an agitated cat.
“You are not dragons?” the disharmonious voice said.
“No,” Gabriel said.
“Like and not like,” said the voice. “We thought dragons.”
“What is the basis of this parley?” Gabriel asked.
“I would surrender,” the thing said. “If that is even possible.”
Gabriel’s heart beat very hard.
“It’s a trick,” Tom said, his eyes hard.
“Listen, oh man. Lord of men and Killer of men. I wish nothing but to leave. I have lost. I know it. I have reached deep into my memories and I remember this thing; that I may be allowed to surrender. Perhaps you will exterminate me. Or perhaps you will let me go. My so-called allies have abandoned me and I have nowhere else to go.”
“Even if I could imagine a way to keep you a prisoner,” Gabriel said, trying to find words to cover his shock, “I have allies who require your … end.”
“You have regard for your fellows? Then I have something to offer you. First, if we struggle, I will end many. Perhaps more than you imagine. I have the counter for the dragon’s fire.” The choir was discordant, and the words dragon’s fire were like the knell of a church bell. “You will not surprise me today.”
Bad Tom smiled. “Bring it,” he said.
“Killer of men. You are afraid of nothing. I have lived too long for courage. I have none left, or I would not be attempting surrender.” The not-dead’s head didn’t move, nor did its eyes. The whole horse had to move so that he could address Bad Tom.
“What else do you offer?” Gabriel asked. He was unprepared for surrender. He couldn’t imagine a path from here so his temptation was to refuse, and get it over with. Couldn’t imagine how he could keep an entity as alien and powerful as this to any bargain; couldn’t even imagine that such an entity would understand surrender. Wasn’t even sure to whom he was talking.
“This is interesting, and in keeping with my memories of men. You have this much power and you are merely men? We/I were once men/man. Some of us.” It paused. “We had no idea humans could be so puissant.”
The silence was ruthless.
Gabriel could smell the Umroth in the woods beyond the little plain of dirt and scrub, and his nose wrinkled.
“You hold the gates?” it asked.
“Let’s say I do,” Gabriel said, even as Tom’s sword point twitched again.
“Some part of me has been on the other side,” it said. “We could be your guide. You intend to conquer? Perhaps we could be your ‘ally.’ And we know many things.” There was a pause. “You are merely men and women, and you are to be the victors? Have you killed all the dragons? How do you escape slavery?”
The sentences were patched together. Gabriel had to wait and read them back. The delivery was both flat and discordant, the emphasis inhuman.
Gabriel took another breath. It was curiously hard to breathe, and he glad for the comfort of Ataelus, who was solid between his legs; alive, willing, able. “I could make no agreement without my allies,” Gabriel said. He was tempted to babble; to explain that when they arrived, the being had no chance at all.
Why? he asked.
He went into his palace and looked at the mirror. And saw the encroaching envelopment as a cloak of mist, a mantle of smoke.
“Pru?” he asked.
Her white marble face looked in the mirror. “Coercion,” she said. “A masterwork.”
In a moment of insight, Gabriel saw that the Necromancer, who had once been a mighty magister, had at his command not just the unearthly powers of the Odine, but human hermetical magistery as well.
“You cannot merely accept my surrender?” it asked.
“Serpent!” Tom Lachlan said. “Don’t trust it.”
Unerring, like a bolt of lightning, the dragon’s blade shot out and swept through the space between them.
In the aethereal, the wisps of coercive fog vanished like morning mist in August sun.
The horse and rider flinched. That is a very powerful weapon, the voice said. I thought I knew where all of them were. Wait! Who made that? Come, who is your master?
Gabriel looked at Tom, and then at the herald, even as he backed Ataelus. He rose in his stirrups, looking at the forest below, where the Umroth were waiting. “I cannot see any way that I could secure your surrender and then trust you, or work with you,” Gabriel said. “I cannot imagine how I could chain you and not fear you too much to leave you … alive.” He sighed. “Or whatever you are.”
“We feared this.” The herald’s horse moved, backing a few steps; not like a real horse, but without a weight change. “Action is consequence. But man, I am Patchwork. I am not like the shadow fire, not like Ash, and the will is my inveterate foe. You have brought low my tame dragon and subsumed my puppets. I could bend my back. To live.”
“You just tried to steal my mind,” Gabriel said tersely.
“We are not one! We are many, and there is disharmony.”
He’s casting again, said Morgon Mortirmir, who appeared suddenly inside Gabriel’s memory palace.
Gabriel raised a shield.
The necromancer’s chorus unleashed a wind; on it were studded the sorcerous roots of the Odine’s control, but vastly enhanced by the ars magika. It was a vast, potent working, harnessing gold and green and darkest black with an intricacy that rivaled Rashidi’s magnificent working.
Gabriel was staggered. But the remnants of his wave front of fear seemed to split the working like an ancient rock splits a river, for a while. Gabriel had plenty of fear; he focused it.
The terrible working, demanding submission, flowed over Gabriel’s shields and then struck Morgon’s just behind him in the aethereal.
The spell pooled like water meeting a dam, but whether it was a fragile dam of twigs or a mighty dam of stone remained metaphorically unsure, and the dark waters rose. And flowed over it like water over a rock. And Gabriel’s fear was not enough to stem the rising flood around him. He was, alone, the target …
In a moment of panic that almost cost him his concentration, he realized that he was not alone; that Tom Lachlan was beside him. In the aethereal, Tom’s armour shone like the sun, and Master Petrarcha’s sigils burned like white-hot metal.
Gabriel wagered his life and Tom’s on a hunch, and in the real he put his spurs into Ataelus’s sides. His right hand went to his long sword hilt; Ataelus crashed into the herald’s horse, and even as the horse began to fall, Gabriel’s sword rose from the scabbard, missing Ataelus’s left ear by the width of a hair, sweeping over the warhorse’s head in a flat cut that caught the not-dead herald where his jaw met his neck and cut diagonally through the falling man’s skull, exiting through his left eye and left temple.
The titanic compulsion ceased as if a door had been closed.
“Sweet fewkin’ Christ,” Bad Tom spat.
Mortirmir didn’t pause to assess. He countercast, the huge working they’d used together just days before, and the tiny lines of light leapt away from his fingertips like thousands of illuminated bees.
They were swallowed by the darkness to the north.
“Damn,” Morgon said. “That should not have happened.”
“Run,” Gabriel said to Bad Tom, and together they turned their horses as a veritable tide of wild animals came up the valley, thousands, tens of thousands of deer, wolves, dogs, sheep, oxen … some cadaverous, some newly taken, all in a mindless stampede.
All along the line, men and women nocked their bows.
“Not-dead animals,” Gabriel shouted.
But Bad Tom had chosen his ground well, and the tide of creatures had two hundred paces of open scrub and arid dirt to cover before they could reach the ditch.
The first falconet rolled forward, its muzzle just two feet above the dirt, well dug in.
It fired over their heads.
A cloud of scrap metal flayed the center of the charging mass.
The second falconet rolled into place between its gabions and also fired, its muzzle rocking back like a barking dog.
The charge of the not-dead animals came on in almost complete silence, broken only by the sound of Cully’s orders to the archers of the casa; Count Zac’s orders to his Vardariotes; Edmund Chevins’s orders to his guildsmen.
The guildsmen stepped up onto the back of the upcast dirt, leveled their tubes between the tall stakes …
“Fire,” Edmund said.
Two hundred hand gonnes went off in a long ripple; no two went off exactly together.
“Loose,” Cully called in his singsong command voice. The heavy arrows leapt off heavier bows, and smashed into the not-dead, falling at a steep angle like a wicked sleet.
Harald Derkensun raised his axe.
The falconets fired again. Their crews had practiced for months; they were more afraid of censure than of not-dead. Where their loads struck, the not-dead went down as if a scythe had cut through them.
Any mortal charge would have faltered. This one had huge tears in it, like an old rug pulled between angry children, and yet the not-dead came on, and any one of them knocked down by round shot or scrap metal that was not destroyed would rise and run, or hobble. Creatures missing two legs would drag themselves forward.
The not-dead came on. And there were still thousands of them.
Men in the line began to consider options. Running was not really one of them, but the archers knew that the time for archery was ending. One more arrow? Two?
The guildsmen stepped up to the wall again. The wave front was less than a hundred paces away. Every man was deeply afraid.
“Present!” Edmund Chevins called. Every tube came smartly down from vertical to horizontal. Men and women squinted down their short bronze tubes, slow match burning in their hands.
“Fire!” Edmund roared. He pushed the match into the touch hole of his own piece and felt the welcome tug of the recoil, and then he reversed it, up and over his shoulder. The stave that held the hand gonne was stout oak with a steel tip; the gonne itself made a lethal mace.
The cloud of sulphur smoke lingered like a collection of old farts and rotten eggs.
Something rippled past them from behind, a liquid vortex of colour that passed them at ankle height and made the hissing of a vast tribe of serpents or the fall of heavy rain as it passed. It went through the stakes, out into the smoke. Whatever it was, it seemed to sever the not-dead at their ankles, leaving them writhing in horrible deformity on the ground. The grim working passed over some, and seemed to lose coherence in the mass, but it was terrible in effect.
A stag, its antlers broken, leapt the low wall. It struck clumsily against the angled stake to Edmund’s left and turned on him, and Edmund swung his massive bronze pole-mace with all his strength and fear.
The creature was struck, and struck again; its backbone and pelvis broken, and it fell and writhed until Duke severed its head. The worm erupted and Duke cut it on the back stroke.
Nothing else came out of the smoke.
“Load,” Edmund said. He was amazed at the sound of his voice. He sounded so sure of himself.
A dog came out of the smoke, already short a leg, hobbling. It was struck down, its skull pulped. No worms emerged.
The smoke began to clear. A wind came up, blowing from behind them, and tore the smoke away in gouts, and there were the ancient not-dead mastodons towering over them, or so it seemed, although in fact they were two hundred paces away at the most distant red flags planted only that morning by the guild and the master archers.
A wave of hopelessness, of sheer, unwavering despair, the end of all joy, the extinguishing of the fires of intention, swept over the casa. But no one ran.
No one believed that there was anywhere to run.
It was the end of the world. The end of plans, the end of victory, the end of saving the world.
Edmund’s heart skipped a beat. Or perhaps it beat too fast for him to comprehend. They were an embodiment of terror, and they came on, hundreds of them. They stretched across the field, as far as his eye could see, and the stench was terrible.
Sorcery played in the air in front of him; a rolling barrage of fireballs struck a black shield like a translucent storm front and either vanished or burst without apparent effect.
“Sweet Christ,” Duke, former apprentice and now veteran, said.
The hand gonners froze.
Smoke’s voice rose over the evil silence. “And that’s just another crowd of fewkin’ monsters,” he said.
Mark my words, said a voice.
Duke found his hands moving of their own accord even as his mind failed to really accept or comprehend all the horror he was seeing.
A dark sleet and a horrible lavender mist rose from the phalanx of mammoths and came back. Duke was praying; Tom dropped his round lead ball into the sand and had to find it. Sam got his load down and his face was white.
“Load!” Edmund roared. “There’s nothing out there we can’t crush with alchemy and muscle and craft. Five! Four!”
Most of the gonnes were upright, their poles set in the sand, the sign a man or woman was loaded. A few were still struggling. Tom had his ball on the soft leather patch and was pressing it in with his thumb, his eyes on the terrible line of monsters.
Off to his right, a falconet fired. It was a gonner’s triumph; the round iron ball struck an Umroth full on. There was a flair of violet lightning, and the thing unmade.
The guild cheered. It was thin, and unplanned, but the strike heartened them tremendously.
“Three!” Edmund roared. “Two! Make ready!”
The second falconet spat. Its ball missed.
“Present!”
Two hundred gonnes went from vertical to horizontal. Abby Crom, all five foot ten of her, put her cheek down on the shaft of her weapon and put the muzzle ring just under the center of a monster’s forehead, just as if she were practicing in the fields of Berona. Then she put her tongue between her teeth and raised the muzzle the width of two fingers for the range.
“Fire!” Edmund called.
This time, he made the word into one sound, and all the gonnes crashed out together. The smoke billowed.
A hermetical breeze came up from behind them and swept the smoke away, and there were two of the monsters unmaking in a brilliant display of blacklit fireworks.
Gabriel was almost out of ops, and all he’d done was defend himself. Morgon had landed one major blow; a rippling plane of dissolution that had broken the back of the assault of the animals.
The line of Umroth came out of the woods when Gabriel threw a simple wind working to give his people a line of sight.
And then he threw a leg over Ariosto’s back. The griffon launched them in two strides.
A levin bolt rose out of the Umroth; he deflected it easily enough, and it was followed immediately by a hundred levin bolts. They came from a broad field and cleverly eliminated his favourite tactic learned from Harmodius: the use of small, light shields far distant to block emanations at the caster’s end of the aethereal. The wide volley forced Gabriel to expend energy at a prodigious rate.
A second volley rose from the Umroth even as they rolled forward against his line. But in the real, the falconets and the guildsmen were hurting them, and Gabriel had enough entanglement with his enemy to understand that every Umroth down was a little of its self lost.
But the travel time in the air was very short—less than a hundred paces separated them now—and Gabriel was committed. He moved all his shields to the front, and charged. In the real. He didn’t have the ops to make a long fight in the aethereal and he sensed that Morgon couldn’t hold for long enough to convert potentia.
The second volley from the Umroth was like a blizzard of black light on his visor and then he was through, still alive, and he bore the full brunt of all the coercion that the Necromancer could summon.
His plans were in shreds, his people defeated. Bad Tom died, pointlessly, of plague; Sauce crucified by triumphant monsters, Michael eaten alive, Blanche was torn asunder, Kaitlin’s baby ripped from her womb, Petrarcha, his old grey hair brown with his blood, thrown from a cliff to ravening hordes as tides of monsters rippled over the world in the utter defeat of the last attempt of the alliance …
… and Ariosto came through the Umroth’s wave front of fear and resistance, his wings beating at the ragged holes he tore in their hermetical shields. Talon and blade slashed at the hermetical reality; and Gabriel remembered the power of his metal hand and, dropping his reins and trusting his mount, rained white fire into the Umroth from above. Ariosto’s talons ripped the stinking, rotting hide from the back of one as the light from a second’s fiery death backlit its end, and a third towered over all, trying for mount and rider with its saber tusks and finding only sky.
Down he stabbed, down and down, his mount steady between his knees as if Ariosto trod on earth and not on air, moving with his every twist, rising when the tusks came up. The two of them were deep in the herd, under their shields; and there was a line of fallen Umroth behind them. A golden light seemed to suffuse them both.
Their adversary stopped trying to face Mortirmir in the aethereal and threw everything at the man on the griffon. It went for the other threat. The one in the real. The one that could fly.
It was afraid.
The left-hand falconet fired.
The ball struck an Umroth in the middle of its skull. Black ichor sprayed, and the massive thing slumped like an ox struck by a butcher’s mallet. The bronze machine rolled back, belching smoke, and the sponge went in; the ballet of loading began, uninterrupted by the tusks of impending doom.
“One more!” Duke yelled. “One more and run!”
The rammers spun their implements; the round shot went down the long bronze throat.
“Jesus Christ Almighty. Jesus Christ Almighty. Jesus Christ Almighty,” muttered one of the loaders over and over.
Twenty strong men rolled the two machines back up. The Umroth were forty paces away; close enough to see the damage a thousand years had wrought; close enough to see the gleam of the hermetical bones and smell the unsealie stench of corruption.
They weren’t fast.
They bristled with arrows that didn’t seem to harm them.
“Fire!” called Edmund, and his hand gonners vanished in another ripple of fire and smoke.
The left-hand falconet had its target; the porte-fire came down and the piece leapt back with a sharp crack.
The right-hand piece was covered in powder smoke.
The gonner stood his ground and waited, duty at war with terror. And a sinuous and ancient trunk took him and tore him, screaming, to shreds. But another journeyman picked up the fallen porte-fire and slapped it on the touch hole, scattering the powder in the quill, but after a delay that cost the brave journeyman his life, too, the falconet barked, and the ball smacked home in the same heartbeat, its impact inaudible in the roar and the screams.
Forty paces behind the gonnes, Bad Tom stood in his stirrups.
“Steady!” he roared.
All along the front of the valley, the monsters were against the trench and the stockade; all along the wall, brave men and women slammed heavy axes and long swords and spears into the towering, stinking things, and died. Or stood their ground. The monsters had real trouble with the trench and more with the stakes. The bravest of the archers emulated the Nordikaans, and went in under the things, cutting their legs.
Edmund’s guildsmen held their last volley until the monsters were at the very lip of the trench, and fired.
The creatures bunched up at the center, and went in over the dead gonners, right at the banner and Morgon Mortirmir. They were silent. Their stench panicked horses and rendered men uneasy.
The household knights were mounted on the best destriers in the whole of the Antica Terra, and none of them wanted to face the stinking monsters.
Morgon Mortirmir, ten paces to Bad Tom’s left under the household banner, spared a single instant of concentration from the labyrinth he was balancing to toss a calm on the horses. Then the monsters burst through, and Mortirmir had no working to strike them with. He was fighting on another plane, and he watched his doom approach.
“Ready!” Tom bellowed.
Forty knights held their lances upright in one hand, like jousters ready for the lists.
Tom used his knees and his left hand to keep his horse in check. The black behemoth between his knees had no more fear than the man on its back.
The Umroth were clear of the gonnes. To their left and right, they were still having trouble with the stakes and the ditch. They were stalled, as if something had sapped their will, but in the center they came on and still Tom held his counterstroke. Francis Atcourt’s charger pranced forward, out of the line, and Tom turned his head. “Wait for it!” he called.
Atcourt reined in hard, his lance tip bobbing, his face white with fear under the visor of his heavy helm.
The smoke around the gonne position was clearing. There were a dozen of the great hulks down, and the ones behind shambled over them.
And then they gathered speed, a rumbling charge, and the earth shook, the dust rose, and the horrid stench of corruption filled the air …
“Aim fer the head!” Tom called.
Four of the monsters came through the dust and smoke, their eyes burning black in their black and glistening heads. Then, in a leap as fast as a lion’s, they were all headed for Mortirmir and the casa banner.
Bad Tom felt he could almost see the will come upon them.
“Charge! Lachlan for Aa!” Bad Tom exploded forward like any skilled jouster, and his destrier crossed the ground like black lightning. Tom’s lance swept down, steadied with his weight change as he leaned forward, and struck the lead not-dead beast dead center of its skull as the solid lance exploded, the pressure of the strength of man and horse too much for twelve feet of oak, but the steel point, a hand-span long and widening from a needle tip to a breadth of four fingers, cracked open the ancient skull even as man and horse crossed to the target’s right and danced off beneath the tusks. The great beast plunged forward, fell to its knees, and then the whole edifice of bones began to unknit.
Tom leaned as far as armour and saddle allowed him to the right, plucking his war hammer from his saddle bow without conscious thought as Francis Atcourt followed him. Tom’s destrier jumped the left-hand carcass, armour, man, and all, and they brushed past the wheel of the left-hand gonne …
Atcourt’s lance tracked the second Umroth; his horse stumbled, or shied in terror, but Atcourt’s jousting skill was beyond terror; his point dipped, came up, and went in an empty eye socket; the shaft levering front and rear of the skull for a moment; the bone and the lance shattered together; and Atcourt’s terrified horse ran full tilt into the behemoth, even as its unmaking came upon it. Falling bone struck Atcourt a massive blow, but he kept his seat and was suddenly through and into the choking, stinking dust beyond the gonnes.
Phillip de Beause flinched at the thought of death and then leaned forward the fraction that told his destrier to go and he passed the first two beasts unopposed and followed Lachlan through the dust, his lance still held high. He saw Lachlan smash another beast with his hammer and ride on, and in a flick of his arm and hand, his lance came down, stooping like a falcon to strike the thing. His lance shivered; the skull cracked, but his horse was brought up at a stand, and one of the great ivory tusks slammed into his horse’s breast and threw them down.
De Beause went down hard, falling on his side, but his armour and its padding held and his horse, terrified but still game, rolled away without crushing him. Another not-dead mastodon impaled the horse on its tusk; there was an explosion of deadly amber light and the horse rained blood and gristle across the field, but de Beause was up again, on foot in a horde of giants, and there was no place for the terror he felt. His sword was gone, and he plucked out his dagger from habit, ran under the next creature and stabbed up into its dangling rotting guts with no effect, gagged on the stench, and struck again.
And then he was struck down. Something was broken in his chest, and a worm head was coming for him.
Tom Lachlan appeared in the dust and threw blows with his war hammer so fast that de Beause couldn’t count them, and then Lachlan’s mount stood up on its hind feet and its steel-clad forefeet struck like a boxer’s fists. De Beause watched in distant admiration; the pain from his broken body left him above the fray, an observer, as Tom’s superb warhorse pivoted on its back feet, standing like an angry cat, to slam one more blow into the Umroth’s head as Tom rolled his hammer through a long arc and leaned between the tusks so that his blow had all the weight of his arm and the gliding step of his heavy mount as well.
This blow smashed through the heavy bone. And even as the thing shifted weight, trying to put a foot down on de Beause, it unmade. The pain increased, and de Beause went away.
And then he was back, buried in a fortune of Umroth ivory.
And alive.
The Umroth’s worms came for him a few terrified heartbeats later. They were old, and huge, like malevolent pythons, but their very size saved him for a moment. They battered against his armour, their snake-sized jaws trying to get through his steel visor.
Every man and woman of the company had been exhaustively briefed on the worms, but de Beause, wounded and pinned to the ground, could do nothing but lie still and scream while the things sought unguarded flesh and battered at his armour.
But Ser Berengar and Ser Angelo, their own lances shivered, saw the worms and came to his aid, dismounting with poleaxes in a melee of mammoths and warhorses.
Philip de Beause saw a worm turned to an aethereal mist before his very visor.
Ser Angelo started heaving Umroth bones off de Beause while Ser Berengar covered him, and de Beause began to breathe again.
“Buried in Umroth ivory,” Ser Danved shouted down from atop his warhorse. “What a way to go!”
De Beause managed to get his visor open before he vomited.
Ser Danved laughed. “Lucky you have friends,” he said, and rode back into the melee.
Gabriel had gone forward to buy Mortirmir time to cast, but at some point he realized that he had passed from deception to main attack; he’d lost count of the great beasts he’d sent to dissolution, or that Ariosto had; the griffon’s talons had a strength as great as any monster in the wild, and Gabriel had a shard of memory of an ancient mastodon, its backbone severed, falling away beneath them.
And then, in one instant in the aethereal, the conglomerate being known as the Necromancer gave a cry of despair and pain and loss, agony, sorrow, even regret.
And Mortirmir’s voice slapped through the fog of possibility, ops, potentia, and violence.
Got him.
In the real, every remaining Umroth unmade and the huge worms that knitted the beasts together began to writhe, screaming in thin voices until a horde of terrified men and women pounded them to mush and mist.
The dust swirled. Wounded men continued to scream.
Gabriel rose above the battlefield, watching under his mount’s flashing wings. In three places, the titans had penetrated his wall; the Nordikaans had let them cross, and four of the beasts were there, battered to undeath by the axes of the northerners. They’d made it into the gonnes and killed a dozen men and women. And they’d passed the line of stakes where the Vardariotes had stood, but the Vardariotes had never planned to stand their ground; they simply mounted and rode back, flaying the great beasts from a few horse lengths away.
They still had a butcher’s bill.
So did the casa, and the guildsmen.
And there stood Morgon Mortirmir, beneath the banner. The nearest Umroth had fallen so that its long, curved tusks almost seemed to touch him. The light hadn’t changed; the whole fight had lasted mere minutes.
Gabriel looked down with a sinking heart.
I hate killing stuff I can’t eat, Ariosto said.
“It had no hope,” Mortirmir said. “It never thought it would win.”
“Morgon,” Gabriel said gently. “I’m not really of a mind to have this discussion just now.”
“And yet,” Mortirmir said. “It defeated my working. That was bad.” He shrugged. “I found the way it linked together and I broke that link.”
Gabriel took a breath. And then another. And then, almost against his will, he looked at the young magister. “What link?” he asked.
“The Odine aren’t one creature,” Morgon began.
“I know,” Gabriel said, a little more testily than he had intended.
Gabriel glanced at Tom Lachlan, who was himself watching archers stack the precious Umroth ivory while fully armoured men-at-arms saw to the burning of the worm-infested mounds of bone.
Morgon shrugged. “Of course, my lord. It is only that … the passive shield. Nothing went through. And he was striking me over and over; not very hard, but very expertly.”
“Yes,” Gabriel agreed. “So that every response had to be—”
“Calculated,” Morgon agreed. Then he looked at the tall Hillman in the blue-black armour. “Thomas Lachlan, I am sorry. But for your puissance, I would be dead.”
“Aye, laddy! And where were yer precious warlockeries?” Bad Tom was very much himself.
“I spent too much on the … the dragon working. As our adversary called it.” Mortirmir suddenly looked seventeen and deflated. “I cocked up. And then I had to scrabble to stay alive in the aethereal. Until Gabriel charged, it focused almost everything on me.” Mortirmir looked at Gabriel. “You chose to attack in the real. Why?”
Gabriel was watching a burial party while Anne disarmed him. He intended on going to stand and watch his men buried. He shrugged. “I can usually get things in the Wild to focus on me,” he said. His voice was distant.
“All the more reason to build Fell Swords,” Mortirmir said. “The real … is where the sorcerous pay no attention.”
Gabriel paused. He was being disarmed of all his harness, but he put out a hand to stop his page and he looked at Mortirmir. “That may be the most profound thing you’ve ever said.”
“I doubt it,” Mortirmir said. “First, I said—”
“Not now, Mortirmir,” Gabriel said.
Anne got the maille off him, and he sighed. “Do you think it really wanted to surrender?” Gabriel asked.
Mortirmir looked at him. A rare look passed over his face; a raw emotion. Regret. “Yes,” Mortirmir said. “Part of it anyway.” He paused, and looked under his eyebrows at Gabriel; a rare look of self-awareness from the mage. “When I cut the links between its entities, it was arguing among itself. And then I took down its … connections. And then it … tried to kill itself.”
Tom Lachlan shrugged. “Better this way,” he said. “Better that it is dead. Ye’r too soft, Emperor-man.”
“Better with sixty dead?” Gabriel asked. “I haven’t even looked yet. Who did I lose? Cully? Francis? Maybe just Gropf?”
“Listen, lad,” Bad Tom said. “Shed no tears for the old monster. Think o’ what Pavalo will say. Think o’ all the lads an’ lasses in Dar. Free to farm. Think o’ watchin’ the whole fuckin’ herd day an’ night. Knowin’ that in a dozen worms, they’d start the whole fewkin’ thing again.” He looked at Gabriel.
“Wyverns stopped fighting,” Gabriel said through his fatigue and depression. “And wardens. Demons. Whatever. They made peace. They even fight alongside us.” He shook off Anne’s hand. “I need to see our people buried,” he said. And turned to stalk off.
“Sixty dead?” Bad Tom insisted. “Sixty, and we scragged the fewkin’ Necromancer.” He looked out over the stinking corpses. “Wyverns don’t ha’e empires, don’t lay waste to civilizations. We scragged the Necromancer. We win. It lost. The end.”
Gabriel turned back, and his jaw set a moment. “Tom,” he said, “Has it occurred to you that we’re taking losses in every one of these fights? We lead from in front, and we die. Kerak and Kronmir and Master Smythe and Wilful Murder and John Crayford and, in the end, you and me. You get that? They were alive. Now they are dead.”
Bad Tom shrugged. “No, laddie. They will live forever in song. An’ so will we. An’ when ye go down, I’ll be there wi’ ye, and that’s why what we have to do here an’ now is drink the fewkin’ wine and sing the songs and e’en, God save us, smell flowers. An’ pretty girls. Life is too short to waste on yon; they’re dead, all praise to ’em, and we’re alive. Amen.”
“I wish I found it so simple,” Gabriel said.
“Simple, you lout? You sound like bloody Mortirmir here. Nothin’ simple about yon, laddie. I kilt fifty loons before I kenned it. They’re dead and I’m not.” Tom pushed him gently with one ham-size hand. “I ha’e always gi’in ye the best advice, have I not?”
That made Gabriel smile. “That you have,” he said. “Except … never mind.”
“Aye. So take this as read. Mourn the dead when you’ve the luxury of time. Until then, the only rule is that you are alive and they’re dead.” Tom raised an eyebrow. “Eh? Don’t mourn inside, whatever you do outside. Wastes your strength.”
“Tom Lachlan, the philosopher of war,” Gabriel said.
“Ach, aye,” Tom said with a grin. “Like enow’.”
Gabriel turned back to Mortirmir. “What happened at the very end? The … Necromancer … went out like a light.”
Morgon’s eyes sparkled. “I subsumed it,” he said, unable to hide a gleam of triumph.