Chapter Twelve

Irks and wardens had set a trap on the road—a carefully sited ambush in deep old woods. But they were westerners who had not faced the Alban chivalry before, and both horns of the ambush were smashed by knights charging through the woods, moving almost as silently as hunters so that the ambushers had only a few heartbeats to see the glint of metal before the avalanche of steel and horseflesh fell on them.

Lord Weyland rode down one side of the road, and the Grand Squire down the other, and they cleared the woods for hundreds of paces.

Down the road, uncontested, rode the silent Knights of the Order, cloaked in black, a great golden and green shield rising over them, and behind them came Donald Dhu, tall as a monster himself, grim, in black maille, with a great axe over his shoulder, and behind him came all the men of the Wyrm of Erch. And with them were the survivors of the royal foresters, while north of the woods, in echelon, were the two bristling phalanxes of 1Exrech and 53Exrech.

Then came the militia, already formed in long lines, interspersed today with wedges of the Count of the Border’s knights. Tamsin rode with Lord Gareth, the count, and he shook his head ruefully at their thinness on the ground.

Lord Gareth’s Northern Prickers were out to the right, moving over ground heavily infested with worms. He got a regular stream of reports, but at a high cost, as horses and men were taken.

He sent messengers forward to the Earl of Westwall, but none were coming back.

Harmodius could not withstand Ash’s full power. His resistance had a cost, and doubt began to creep in; he knew that Ash had not been fully manifest when he attacked Desiderata in Harndon, and even as he doubted, a wash of black began to seep through his golden bricks …

He made his move. He had the working ready to hand, and he went … elsewhere.

Ash turned over the falls, located his true target, and threw his will upon her. And had the immense satisfaction of watching the gold melt away, until he realized that this puny thing was not even a woman.

His fury was beyond rage. He had been deceived; tricked by Tamsin and misled by Desiderata; his loathing of their kind peaked in a kind of insane malevolence that leveled forests and hills and laid waste to the countryside for a mile as he flew back toward Albinkirk.

Master Pye took his hands from his ears, and blinked many times against the scene burned onto his retinas.

Then he ran lightly, for such an old man, down the steps carved by the falls.

“Would be a funny time to slip an’ fall,” he said aloud. He went all the way to the base of the falls, where the rich green grass was now burned to ash, and rocks themselves were scorched.

He poked his head in through the edge of the falls.

“He’s gone,” Master Pye called.

Ser Ranald pushed through the falls and ran for the steps.

Harmodius surfaced in the real long enough to throw a powerful attack, and then left.

Ash, lost to rage, turned and followed him. Again.

North of Lissen Carak, the white bear’s scouts froze, far out across an autumn marsh, and the white bear’s paws shot up, and every man, every irk, and every warden froze, or went to ground.

“My paws, my claws, they, grrr, see something.” He was as still as a furry statue; Tapio was already down behind a clump of alder, his great white stag flat in the marsh grass. Bill Redmede nodded. He pointed with his left hand; drawing the white bear’s attention to a line of alder clumps and the mouth of the stream.

Redmede could not read a bear’s expression, but he knew careful consideration when he saw it.

“We’re quiet,” he said.

“Humans are all, grak, loud,” Blizzard said. One great shoulder rolled up in a shrug. “Go.”

Redmede waved back at Stern Rachel and Long Peter, and they put arrows to bowstrings and began to slip into the high grass of the marsh, their dirty white cotes almost invisible against the pale gold of the dead grass.

They led the way, moving like wraiths, and then there were more men and women crossing the marsh, and then Redmede went himself, slipping back along the column to gain the best ground, and then moving quickly, his head low.

They moved fast, even when being silent—out across the marsh, over the stream at a beaver dam without a single splash, and then into the Alder brake on the other side and up the ridge. Now with the marsh between them and the irks and bears, they went east into the sun. Redmede spread his arms, palms down; his Jacks began to move into a skirmish line, pairs sticking together closely, moving from tree to tree as they entered the open highlands with the bigger beeches. Autumn had killed the hobblebush; hardly a stick cracked as they went, soft-footed, up the ridge.

Then Grey Cat stood, suddenly, erect. The Outwaller gave a call. Redmede raised his horn; he didn’t know what the Cat was doing, but the Outwaller was half mad and all daredevil, and …

The Outwaller call was answered, or echoed. Eeeeeeaaaaauuuuuuu.

Suddenly the woods to Redmede’s left exploded in Outwaller calls, and there were painted figures rising from the leaves, and stepping out from behind trees, and close in to Redmede a man in red and black paint rose out of a hollow tree.

But Redmede’s initial impression that they were all Outwallers was mistaken; many were, but there were dozens, hundreds of them; he saw the white of his own cotes and the dreaded green of royal foresters and Outwaller paint.

But the man in the red and black paint had dark skin, and a blue stone dagger slung at his hip, and Bill Redmede knew him. He knew them all; he certainly knew old Wart, who was already slapping Stern Rachel’s back.

He was surprised at how much young Aneas looked like his brothers. Though the man had deep lines on his face, as if his youth had been erased.

Bill Redmede wasn’t much for bowing, or authority, but he managed to incline his head in a polite manner.

Aneas Muriens returned the gesture.

Nita Qwan was enjoying the rare embrace of the Faery Knight. Tapio rarely displayed emotion to the children of men, but today, at the edge of battle, a century of rangers and a handful of Outwallers seemed like a gift from his gods of fortune.

Blizzard looked as if he might have to allow himself to be provoked by the accession of so many strangers in his innermost holding, but Lily, who had followed the rangers through a hundred leagues of forest, would not hear of it.

“There is no, rrr, owning!” she insisted. “It is this, mmmm, owning, that makes men so greedy. Let us not bear, grrrrk, its taint!”

Blizzard watched them crossing his marsh; now almost a thousand nonbears. It had just started to snow, a light dusting of snow falling thickly enough to obscure the head of the column.

He shook his great white head. “They will come here, rerak! With their ploughs and their swords. I have heard, rrrgrrr. They say they will beat swords into, grrrrr, ploughshares. I say, arrrr, to a bear, rrrr, one form of conquest for another!”

Lily shrugged. “They are dangerous, Blizzard. Their smell makes me, grrrrr, deep in my throat. They killed my mother.” She touched her snout to his. “They are, geerrrak, dangerous allies. But if we, mmmm, hide in our, rrrr, woods and try to, rrrr, fight the world, we will be warming, arrrr, floors across the world, our, grrrr! hides for rugs.”

“They killed your, grrrr, mother, young one? And you, arrrrr, you walk the woods with them?” The older bear nuzzled her.

She grunted, turning away from his advances. “I, grrrr, end the war! Not revenge, and not, mmm, a mating with you, old bear.” She laughed a bear laugh at his surprise, and she put a paw on him. “Listen. Grrr! Some men killed my mother. Grrr! Other men let me go. The world is not simple. Let us help these human love us. Arrrrgrrr?

Blizzard swiped a paw at her. “So much, grrr, talk, from one so, grrr, young,” he said. And when she loped away, he said, “And, rrrr, beautiful,” and ran a hirsute thumb over the razor-sharp blade of his great axe.

The Army of the Alliance cut west, into the setting sun and the darkening sky. Now, almost three full weeks since the battle of N’gara, the whole sky seemed to mourn the fall of the Irkish citadel and the ruin of their hopes. The setting sun made the western sky into a blazing quilt of reds and oranges and long trails of brilliant whites, like dangling threads, and under all a pall of dark orange like a looming storm. It would, under ordinary conditions, have been a terrifying sky.

Most of the men and women of the alliance were used to it.

To the north of the road, in the closed fields bordered by hedges of the Albinkirk out-towns, companies of bills and bows, or heavily shielded crossbowmen guarded by armoured men with heavy spears, stood their ground against a sudden flood of bogglins and worse. A whole company of Jarsay militia were caught moving by a sudden charge of imps and annihilated in a spray of blood and flesh, and the greyhound-sized monsters fed on the corpses and then on each other in a frenzy of bone and blood as hideous as anything a storyteller could imagine of some distant hell. But in most of the fields, the stone walls and low hedges helped the militia make their stands, and where they failed, a sudden charge by armoured knights could stem the tide or at least buy the militia time to retire.

Most of the fighting to the north was a development of commitments from Lord Gareth’s second line; he was cautious, and fed only as many of his infantry into the fields as were absolutely needed to cover the flank of the advance on the road to Lissen Carak.

When the sun had begun to go down the sky in the west, there were three mighty pulses of light in the west. Just after, Gavin rode back from the edge of the Lillywindle Woods and looked out over the battlefield to the north.

“We’re overextended,” Montjoy said.

As they watched a horde of enemies roll down the distant Kanata Ridge and across the north road, they were joined by Ser Alcaeus. He dismounted and changed to a big stallion, a warhorse, even as he greeted them.

With him were a hundred knights of Liviapolis. Behind him, on the Morea road, could be seen a dense column of men and baggage wagons. Ser Christos was in among the phalanx of the men of Thrake, dismounted, greeting men he knew, men who’d survived the last three weeks in the west, and more.

“We’re too overextended,” Montjoy said again.

“Give us another hour,” Ser Gavin said. “The woods are a nightmare.”

Montjoy slammed his visor up. It kept falling over his face; the catch had broken in the fighting. “My lord earl; I am struggling to hold Woodhull. Livingston Hall is virtually under siege. The tide is rising, my lord.”

Alcaeus looked blank. “Woodhull?” he asked. “Living-stone?”

Gavin waved a hand. “Livingston Hall is just north of here; look, there, through the trees at the base of the hill. A castle.”

Montjoy shook his head. “A fortified hall at best.”

“It can hold off an army,” Gavin said. “Woodhull; see the steeple of the church? North. Farther.” He pointed beyond the creek at the foot of the ridge, almost a mile distant. The red light glinted on men and steel.

Gavin then waved his hand at the Lissen Carak road, running not-quite-straight from the southern edge to vanish in the woods to the west. Halfway from the Albin Ridge to the woods’ edge, there was a fine stone church and a small walled town. “Penrith,” he said. “Right now, it’s being held by royal foresters and some Moreans and all our wardens and bears, under the duchess. She’s keeping the road open for us.” He looked at the imperial troops coming up behind them, and at the distant edge of the woods to the west, where his knights had vanished. “We don’t need to hold all the ground,” he said. “Hold the towns, and we’ll retake the ground between at will. So far, there’s nothing out there that can stop a charging knight.”

“So far,” Gareth Montjoy muttered.

Harmodius was almost done; almost out of both ops and options. He’d been clever; he’d been magnificent; he’d been subtle.

Now he was just tired. It was time for his last trick.

When Ash eventuated, very close, Harmodius held his shields and took the whole brunt of the dragon’s wrath, the light dusting of snow vaporized, the hills beneath him melting to slag.

He took the last of his enemy’s effort and followed it back, as quick as an angler taking a trout on a wild stream. Except that instead of reeling in his great fish, he was reeled in; his consciousness snapped back along the line of his enemy’s casting. It was Thorn’s working; the irony was not lost on his former pupil.

And like that, he was aboard. That was how Harmodius thought of it, in the fastness of his own essence; he was a lone pirate, boarding a vast ship.

The halls of the dark temple that was the mind of Ash went on for infinity, and the walls were written in an endless script, an alien hand that confused and frustrated thought even from a glance.

It was not like taking the mind of Askepiles, with its wheels and levers. Whatever he had expected, it was not this: the endless corridors of madness. He had expected to confront his great enemy for one last fight; instead, he was alone with uncountable internalized truths and overwritten falsehoods and a vista of stony darkness and abandonment.

Harmodius drew a Fell Sword from within himself. His right hand burst into life; light shone, where only darkness had ruled for aeons.

Harmodius took the sword and slashed it along the tiny lines of script that seemed to ebb and flow in three or more dimensions on the wall. The spot was not carefully chosen; Harmodius was aware that at any moment, out in the real, his borrowed body might be killed; if not by some hammer-like blow of ops, then by superheated steam or molten rock.

His sword went through the wall like a sharp knife slices the belly of a fish; slowly at first; then deeper, then gliding easily, almost without friction.

Once he had it deep, he began to walk along the apparently infinite corridor, dragging the Fell Sword through the entrails of Ash’s thought.

He couldn’t help himself. He began to laugh.

He allowed some of Thorn to surface, to see what they were doing, and Thorn laughed, too.

And then they began to vandalize Ash’s subconscious.

Ash had lost his enemy; and he turned away in the air above the dark hills, his great eyes searching the path of steaming ruin left by his breath, but he could see no sign. His adversary might have translated again; or might be dead.

Ash was confused, because there at the end, his adversary’s casting had more and more resembled that of his acolyte, Thorn, whose passing Ash regretted the way an old woman might regret a lost love, with unrealistic half-memories of splendour.

But even while the part of him devoted to immediate combat turned and searched, his consciousness had other demands on it, and he passed one more time along the line of hills, breathing unquenchable fire into the dark and snowy woods and rising on a wave of heat to look north, to the walls of Albinkirk.

His great armies were in disarray, but his plans were maturing. The armies of men were contesting the areas around the gate. His slaves needed orders. The will was utterly distracted, its full attention on forcing the gate.

Best of all, Orley and his little army were entering the field from the north; inconsequential in their numbers, but Ash had prepared five commanders for this very moment, and he reached out through the aethereal and filled them with purpose, examining, analyzing, passing information and command to each.

Every one had a chosen bodyguard of antlered knights. Each of them could run all day and all night, at the speed of a horse.

Ash sent one south, to his army of bogglins on the south side of the river. He sent another south and east, to lead the attack on Penrith, the obvious key to the army of men. A third he sent to crack the walls of Albinkirk. Orley himself he sent to attack Lissen Carak in the real; a necessary component to Ash’s end game. The last of them, neither the least nor the greatest, Ash sent to the head of his legion of black trolls; the stone trolls of the highest mountains. To go to them, and stand silent.

Because Ash had learned that reserves were the key to battle. And although he couldn’t foresee a need for such a mighty reserve today, he knew that victory today only meant that there would be other days and other foes among the million spheres.

But his plan was working; his slaves were holding together, and he had what he needed to destroy the surprisingly potent alliance and then clear the Odine off the gate. His “allies.” The moment the will showed weakness, he meant to finish it. He didn’t need them to win; he just needed them gone.

He missed Thorn; the closest thing to a confident he’d ever had. He wanted to gloat. There was no one with whom to gloat. Still, as the dark air rushed under his wings, he burned with maleficent glory.

“I will make war on heaven,” Ash told the destruction beneath his wings. “I will change everything.”

The bells atop the abbey at Lissen Carak were just ringing for four o’clock when Ser Gavin entered the woods that grew, deep and dark, on either bank of the Lily Burn. There were corpses in the road, and he paused, looking down at a shaman of the adversariae, dead with a black lance through her, surrounded by her bodyguard.

Ser Gavin paused, flipped up his visor, and drank from his canteen.

Grazias, his squire, took the canteen and drank some himself. Other men-at-arms, most of them northerners from the Albinkirk garrison, drank in turn. They were watching the woods. Nothing happened, but they all knew that the alliance battle lines were porous and fluid and they could meet enemies at any moment.

“Warhorses,” Gavin said. He slipped down from his favourite riding horse and mounted Bess, his great roan. She grunted.

He liked Bess, but he wasn’t sure she’d survive the hour. She’d been waiting for him in Albinkirk, and she had a blanket of double maille and a magnificent caparison with his arms, green and gold, emblazoned, so that she was brighter than his banner, which Grazias had.

He smiled. He’d always enjoyed being a popinjay bragging with the brilliance of his accoutrements, just like his brother. And his father.

Grazias offered him a pair of gauntleted hands to get up on Bess, but he leapt—his boyhood trick—caught the war saddle’s pommel between his hands, and scissored his legs over the high back and into the depths of the saddle.

Bess grunted, and then let out a fart. Her breath steamed in the cold air.

Gavin rode back along the little column; about two hundred knights and armoured squires. He made a joke, slapped a back, and exchanged a hand clasp.

“Gentlemen!” he said. “This is why we are knights. So that on a cold autumn day, when all is dark, someone does the fighting. Today is the day. We can win this. Fear no evil. Fear no magistery. Kill whatever passes beneath the hooves of your horse, and we will, God willing, have the victory.”

Men cheered.

They didn’t know him. He’d lost all his own knights and men-at-arms in the fighting in the west; when he used his own household as the reserve, time after time.

They didn’t need to know that. Because they were about to be the fire brigade again. Tamsin said something was wrong, on the Lily Burn.

“Let’s go,” Ser Gavin called, and the column, now mounted on warhorses, went forward, their harness jingling. A little snow began to fall and the light was fading, developing a silvery shimmer.

They rode forward a half a mile without meeting any opposition, and then they hit a mob of bogglins, right on the road, and Gavin snatched his war hammer off his pommel and beat a couple of them to death, cracking their skulls, while Bess made a liquid ruin of another dozen under her hooves.

They had been feeding on a Knight of the Order and his horse, and there was another, and then another.

“Look sharp!” Gavin called.

His column trotted along.

He began to see movement in the woods to his right, and then to his left.

He ordered his rear to move up, and two dozen knights led by Ser Galahad d’Acon moved out into the woods and there was fighting immediately, but the big horses moved easily through the dead foliage and open trees, and bogglins died.

Even with his visor closed, Gavin could hear the fighting. It was all along the line of the stream; he knew these woods and he knew the sounds. And the presence of bogglins in the woods meant that the enemy was leaking around both ends of the alliance line. He had to guess; it was getting dark; this was their only chance.

It was all risk.

He slapped his visor up. “Galahad!” he roared in his father’s voice.

“My lord?” D’Acon called, from fifty paces away. All the knights halted.

“Take half and go north until you are free of enemies; cross the creek and then fall on their line. Watch your flanks.”

It was a huge, terrible responsibility for a royal messenger who’d been a knight for two weeks and was just twenty-two years old.

D’Acon put his fist to his visor. “Consider it done,” he said.

Ser Gavin left his visor open, passing forward along the road. A gust of snow swept in; they came to a gentle bend in the road, and there it was.

The enemy was holding the bridge. The new stone bridge, four men wide, a high arch over the ink-black waters. It was called The Warden’s Bridge because Gabriel had killed a daemon there.

Now there were a great many dead knights. Indeed, Gavin’s heart almost broke; a third of the Order lay there, and twenty more knights, some dead, some terribly maimed, and their horses screamed and kicked, impeding any further attempts to force the bridge. The Knights of the Order had erected a shield of shimmering gold-green; even as he watched, a great gout of ops slammed into it.

There was something on the bridge.

“Prior Wishart is wounded,” Ser Ricar Orcsbane reported. The young, usually silent knight was also wounded. “My lord, we cannot defeat this thing. Weapons will not bite on its hide, or armour; its weapons cut our steel like paper.”

“Cave trolls,” Grazias said, unnecessarily, at his shoulder.

Even as he watched, a Knight of the Order rode forward. His warhorse, despite massive armour and a heavy rider, leapt over the tangle of bodies that choked the bridge, and the horse’s steel-shod hooves struck sparks from the stones that looked like fire in the falling darkness, and the knight’s lance lined up with the great antlered thing’s chest, and struck home, and the antlered demon was rocked back …

… but the lance shattered, and the dark thing struck back with an axe, killing the knight’s horse in a single blow. The knight was thrown against the bridge. He didn’t rise.

“Where is Ser Gregario?” Gavin snapped. He’d left Lord Weyland in charge when he’d ridden back to look over the battlefield only an hour ago.

“Attempting to turn the position from the north,” Orcsbane said.

Another Knight of the Order saluted, made the sign of the cross, and charged. His horse sailed over the tangle of dead and dying and his lance, either perfectly managed or lucky, struck the antlered man in the forehead, between the sprouting antlers that stood out roughly parallel to the ground, two long black spikes. The thing had a dark coat, like matted sheepskin, and fire came from its mouth, and the lance knocked it flat, and the Knights of the Order on the road gave a great cheer.

It rose, muscles rippling, as the knight swept past and threw its axe, casually, and the axe split the knight’s head all the way to the root of his neck and he slumped forward and his body burst into flame, a dark, smoking flame that immolated corpse and horse, and his fine stallion shrieked in terror as he burned.

The thing on the bridge turned, faster than a man could turn, caught the handle of his axe, and pulled it from the corpse-torch and brandished it, and all along the streamside, the bogglins and daemons and irks cheered. There were thousands of them.

Gavin rode to the Prior of Harnden as yet another young knight launched his charge.

“We must retreat,” Gavin said. “This is foolishness.”

The prior looked up. He lay against a tree with his right arm gone from the elbow.

“No,” the prior said. “I’m sorry, but I must get into the abbey tonight. Everything depends on it.”

Gavin shrugged. “We can’t lose the rest of your knights.” He looked over his shoulder.

Another young knight was cut down.

“Stop it!” Gavin roared.

The slim figure in the black cloak who was working on the prior’s wound moved a hand.

“Ser Gavin,” she said. “Hard Hand. We must win through to the abbey or we will lose everything.”

“My lord,” Grazias said. “My lord. The dragon.”

Gavin turned, looking back along the forest road toward Albinkirk. The trees were mostly bare of foliage, and through them he saw a looming black shape, and then the bright sparkle of the dragon’s fire.

Judging from the position of the thing, it was setting fire to Penrith.

The loss of Penrith would collapse his center.

Gavin looked around—at the prior, at the tall woman by the prior, at Grazias and at his own knights and at young Orcsbane.

“Right,” he said. He bowed to the woman, and saluted the prior.

“Grazias,” he said. “Give me the other sword.”

“Other sword?” Grazias said. But he put his hand on it—the great black sword of Ser Hartmut.

He held the scabbard, and Gavin reached out and drew the sword.

“Time to fight fire with fire,” he said.

He wheeled Bess on her back hooves, so that the great mare spun like a top, and he put her head at the bridge. But he didn’t charge. Instead, he trotted up to the bridge, covered by the Order’s shield, and the shaman on the far bank launched a forked attack that was wasted on the golden leaves of the defence.

Gavin came to the tangle of dead knights and let Bess pick her way around it.

He reined in at the base of the bridge.

The antlered man came and stood at the very crest of the bridge. He … very emphatically he, with a parody of manhood between his heavily muscled legs, raised his great steel axe and shouted. His shout was echoed by irks and bogglins and by the wyverns who had begun to circle overhead like huge carrion crows.

Gavin saluted with his sword, and it burst into flame.

“Do you think your puny magic can harm me, mortal? I am a Son of Ash! I am immortal! Your day is over, and my master will make a new earth.”

Gavin listened, but his attention was not on the monster’s words, but on the sounds from the north: the ring of steel, and the round of horses, and a trumpet playing a particular set of notes.

“Did Ash promise that you would be immortal?” Gavin asked. His right hand reached out and gave Bess’s neck an affectionate pat. The black, fiery sword spat and crackled. It felt like a feather in his hand; beautifully balanced, but more than that. He was more than a little afraid of it, but at this moment, it was his hope of victory.

“Ready, my sweet?” he asked his horse. The trumpet sounded again. Darkness was falling.

He just touched his spurs to Bess’s flanks and she leaped forward up the bridge.

Gavin leaned forward a little, against the slope of the bridge, sword held, blade down, on his left side, where the monster couldn’t see it. His horse was passing the thing on his right.

Its axe swept up.

Gavin cut up. The thing’s head was as far from the ground as his own, and his rising cut met the axe at the haft as it descended.

Hartmut’s sword cut through the haft like a true sword through a twig. He wasn’t at a gallop so in the same tempo his sword cut back down the same line, the simplest of re-attacks.

The horned man twisted, sweeping up the haft and slamming it into Gavin’s right side under his arm; the blow rocked Gavin, the force was terrible …

… but not as terrible as the force of a mounted lance. His armour held; he shrugged off the blow and turned Bess, even in the tight confines of the bridge.

One long, spiked antler fell to the bridge with the sound of breaking crystal.

“Immortal?” Gavin asked. His sword licked out, faster than thought, fastidious as a house cat.

The other antler fell.

The denuded monster roared with anger and cut at Gavin with his staff.

Bess danced.

Gavin cut the monster’s staff at his hand. Fingers sprayed like blood and the shaft fell to the bridge. Bess planted one steel-shod hoof on the thing’s chest, and then another, one, two, like the punches of a veteran boxer. Her hooves did the thing no damage, but her blows knocked it back. It stumbled, and the Knight of the Order who’d been thrown against the bridge put the butt of his broken lance between its legs as it struggled for balance, and it fell, back, over the wall at the edge of the bridge.

The knights roared.

Gavin pointed the sword over the bridge and Bess blew into a canter, the leap of a jousting horse; Gavin took a long moment to recover his seat, and then the daemon shaman was headless, slumping to the ground, and Bess was trampling bogglins.

Gregario’s trumpet was closer.

The Order’s knights began to come over the bridge; there were perhaps fifty left, or fewer, and behind them his reserve, the knights of Albinkirk.

Gavin burst through the back of the enemy and turned Bess in a shallow curve, filled with the spirit of combat, wanting to laugh and shout with joy, wanting to go sleep, wanting never to have to do such a thing again, and as he turned, he saw the dark thing coming up out of the streambed.

Gavin blinked. “Fuck,” he muttered.

He saw the thing unhorse a knight with his fist, point at a second, and there was a burst of pus-yellow fire and a scream.

Gavin put spurs to Bess, who did not deserve any such.

His adversary let loose a torrent of sorcery, and knights and men-at-arms died in every direction—twenty, thirty in a heartbeat.

Bess went forward as if galloping through molasses.

Gavin rose in his stirrups and put the burning sword between him and the thing.

It loosed its bolt down the line at him.

Orley, if the armour of flesh and bone on Ash’s auxiliary consciousness could still be called Orley, drew on his master’s enormous power and began to throw his bolts against the vast, puissant shields of force that covered the whole of the abbey ridge and the towering fortress itself. Behind him stood a dozen of his own kind and twenty stone trolls lent him by the reserve; a host of bogglins who darkened the earth; and another thousand of the western daemons who, despite their dismay at the cold weather, were eager to fight their way into the warm caves beneath the fortress, their ancient and traditional hold.

They slammed weapons into shields.

Orley raised his arms and threw another impossible wall of power into the ancient wards.

Miriam was aware that she was losing. The loss was gradual; it might take the will aeons to break her, but its massive powers raged against her choir, her wards, and the impossibly ancient powers of the gates like a massive flood facing a very ancient dam. The water rose slowly, interspersed with sudden surges; the weight increased by degrees, on many levels, so that even as the allegory of the flood might be one reality, in another, Miriam’s very sanity was challenged; her identity, her sense of self, her faith, her gender, her confidence, her love. All undermined; all sabotaged.

No abbess was chosen for anything but this; that she knew herself, and had that kind of spirit that cannot easily be broken. Miriam’s identity was always a little malleable; her faith was open to doubt every day, her gender had never been the center of her being, her confidence had always rested in her faith in others, her sanity was always a matter for her private mind.

But her love for her people and all people she’d even known was like adamant.

And her choir was very, very good.

By the time that darkness was falling across the snowy fields at the base of the ridge, she had fought all day, resting her choir the way Ser Shawn was resting knights, but now the battle was approaching the inevitable climax and she was being forced, like a tiring swordsman, to resort to her last tricks.

She pointed at Sister Elisabeth, and the left choir, on note and on tempo, joined the Ave Maria.

Now she had both choirs in. Now there would be no rest until the end.

Miriam knew that the end was coming. She could see it; like a checkmate in chess, the inevitability inescapable. But she could postpone it as long as possible, in hopes of a miracle.

Gabriel, where art thou?

She dismissed Gabriel, and any dreams of glory, and focused on prolonging her own agony.

Beneath Ash’s mighty wings, chaos reigned. He stooped, ignoring a hail of darts and arrows, and breathed again on the ruins of Penrith, and the steeple of the church fell, the stone cross crashing to earth, and the flame of his breath burned among the foresters. Harald Redmede died there, and John Hand, and a generation of Alba’s best woodsmen. And then another of the antlered men led the bogglins forward, and crashed through the handful of men still able to face them, taking a few to eat alive and destroying the rest, scattering fire and lightning.

Ash’s magnificent wings beat, and he stretched out his neck in glee. The army of men was broken; his slaves poured through the ruins of Penrith like the waters of the sea through a broken dyke.

Command of the Alliance Army had devolved to Alcaeus. Lord Montjoy had taken his knights and charged into the maelstrom behind Penrith. He’d said he was going to try to stem the tide, but he left Alcaeus with the impression he hoped to die well before the collapse became general.

Alcaeus smiled a bitter smile. It was a very Alban attitude. But Alcaeus was not Alban; he was Morean; he had seen many bitter defeats, and many hollow victories, and his people resisted the impulse to glorious self-destruction. Moreans endured. They were patient.

He watched for as long as it might take a priest to say a hurried communion prayer. He watched the dragon breathe fire into the ruins of Penrith; he saw the knights strike home, rocking the enemy back; then he saw them slow, unable to face the heat of the burning town, as the enemy began to leak in around them.

The dragon passed along them, and again his fire lashed men; hundreds died.

But then the dragon turned suddenly, his long, terrible neck curling north and west, and the titanic wings beat, and the vision of hell passed suddenly west, wings beating so hard that the wind raised a curtain of snow.

Alcaeus watched the dragon depart with narrowed eyes.

He looked down at his people: five thousand Morean veterans, the very last of Livia’s ancient legions, armoured in long shirts of maille and armed with heavy spears and round shields. Some had fought all the way to N’gara and back; others had guarded Liviapolis until a few days before.

A man grinned at him. “Lead us, Alcaeus,” he said.

And Syr Christos nodded. “We can save this,” he said.

Alcaeus pointed at the very center. “Christos, go. All the way down the hill, and restore the center. I will go to the right …” He was looking at the base of the ridge, where 1Exrech and his legions still held. “I will go to the right and attempt to … do …” He smiled. “Something. Damn it, Christos. I’ll try and do something.”

“And so will I,” Christos said. He saluted. “For the emperor.”

“Wherever the hell he is,” Alcaeus said.

Ser Gavin Muriens

The bolt struck Gavin’s flaming sword, or perhaps he parried with it; the bolt was split into two, and each went into the ground, churned to mud by the blood and intestinal fluids of a thousand dead sentient creatures and a hundred horses’ hooves, and he leaned forward, pressing Bess to do her best, and she responded, her stride opening.

The antlerless demon slammed a fist into Bess’s armoured head; he crumpled the great spike, and her great strength was no match for its malevolence. Gavin went back over his crupper like he was practicing in the tiltyard.

He hit hard; the ground here was almost frozen, and he had a flare of pain in his shoulder, and then he was up, moving, and the realization that he had lost Hartmut’s sword was almost perfectly twinned with the sight of it pinned neatly under the demon’s outstretched foot.

But it was an ungainly position for a monster with legs so long.

“Now,” the thing said. “Now I will eat your soul .…”

It was bigger than he was, but not immeasurably bigger, and its posture was ridiculous, and Gavin used the whole spiked peak of his bassinet on its abundant testicles as it pounded a fist into his armoured back, but it was toppling, its weight overextended, and Gavin, despite the crunching of his ribs from the blow, stumbled back and got his hand on the hilt of Hartmut’s sword, and it burst into flame.

He cut at the nearest part, a flailing near-human hand, already missing a few black talons, and he severed it, and black blood began to come in great gouts, as if being pumped out by a strong boy at a summer well.

It pointed the bleeding stump at him and he was showered in its terrible blood, but he cut again, this time blind, but still a good cut, a simple fendente that caught something. Gavin stumbled back, threw up his visor, and saw it clutching his face.

“Noooo!” it said. “Noo! I am powerful! I am indestructible! I am immortal!”

Despite the burning of his skin, and despite a mote of pity in his heart, Gavin stepped in close and swung the sword right to left, a simple, snapping blow.

Its head fell clear of its body.

Ash felt the death like a blow. He already felt giddy; his memory was being attacked by a wave of unaccustomed memories and doubts, and yet a sort of bubble of success was rising in his dark heart as his slaves rolled forward in the last light, sweeping all before them.

And then …

One of his creations was injured. It should not have been possible; it represented a flaw in his foresight, as he realized that he’d left undone things that he ought to have done, which was of a piece with all the revelations in his innermost mind; why was he suddenly recalling a terrible betrayal an aeon old?

His creature died at the hands of a mere man.

The humiliation was immense. He felt revealed as a failure; he felt …

He paused, and wondered if he was being attacked by the will.

He could find no trace of such an attack, but the fire of self-doubt was burning strong, and he had to wonder …

And something was happening at the gate.

It occurred to Ash, too slowly, that he was being played. That the will had used him to distract the men from the main effort. That his own captain, Orley, was directly serving the will.

Ash paused in indecision, looking down over his victory. He could sense Tamsin, over on the ridge, trying to keep him off by misdirection; the seductive witch was next. And he could feel something else, beyond the ridge; something strange and powerful. And again, where his creature had just been cut down, there was another he couldn’t identify. Very powerful. Burning like a fire.

In that moment, he identified her, and he screamed with rage and frustration.