There was no causeway.
A red, red sun lit a world of ash. The ash was pale grey and almost completely uniform and stretched away to a red horizon, and everything was tinted with that red except the next gate portal, a few miles of heat distortion away across the plain of ash.
No ancient god awaited them.
But there were bones. Charred bones.
As far as the eye could see, resting on the fine grey ash, there were bones.
In the foreground, nearest the gate, was a dragon. Part of its skeleton was buried in the fine grey ash, but the vast skull was obvious, and one whole wing that trailed away to the right until it vanished out of sight, perfectly polished to a gleaming white by the windblown ash.
Gabriel raised a shield and stepped through. He was wary of using power for a variety of reasons, but precautions seemed necessary.
Sauce came at his shoulder, and Daniel Favour and Wha’hae, too. They walked out onto the plain, and the ash resolved itself into an endless sand of powdered bone.
A wind stirred the ash and it rose, choking them. The scouts pulled up scarves. Gabriel closed his flying helmet.
The wind rushed past them like a charge of cavalry.
It subsided.
Under the bones of the dragon were other bones.
“I might as well check the next gate,” Gabriel said.
Sauce shook her head. “These places are all horrible,” she said slowly. “Had God no mercy? Look at them.” She bent, and lifted the skull of a Quazitsh. A freak of the wind exposed a vein of them, as if a regiment had all died here. They were so tangled together that they might have died in a vast embrace—hundreds, or thousands, of salamanders …
Gabriel put an arm around Sauce. “We’re lost,” he said. “I have to see. I have to check everything. It’s all a nightmare, Sauce. But it was never going to be easy.”
She smiled. “We don’t do easy, do we, Cap’n?” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Don’t die. You’re glowing like a lamp.”
He was, too. He passed back, took Ariosto, fed him some potentia, and they were in the air.
Really tired, boss.
Five miles.
Sure. But I bet you want to go back, too.
Gabriel was looking down at another dragon. And another.
He flew along, too stunned to think. They passed a fourth dragon.
And a fifth.
And by the fifth dragon he saw something amid the ash. They weren’t very high; he was saving Ariosto as best he could.
But he had no time, and he was filled with a different foreboding.
The skeletons of the dragons were …
He was struggling to think of what could kill six dragons.
Seven.
They descended toward the second portal. It, too, was the bone white of most of the other gates, but it was different, at a distance, less shapely, the dome lower.
Closer, and it became clear …
… that the dome had been destroyed.
Gabriel landed and entered to confirm what he suspected. His heart was too tired to race. He felt almost nothing.
The pedestal was blackened, and the jewels, all three of them, were gone, leaving sockets like wounds or abscesses. We can’t get out, he thought, and then he realized that, if Tancreda was correct, his only hope was that the gate behind him was still open. He thought he’d left it open, and he had left the key in it.
It was an irrational fear. He knew he’d left it open. But he all but fled the broken chamber.
The moment he mounted Ariosto, the monster’s love calmed him.
He took some breaths. The red sun was terrible.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
On it, boss.
They flew back. Gabriel tried not to look down at the line of skeletons, but it was like a boil, and he kept worrying it, looking down, feeling the dread and the sense of skewed scale, and looking down again.
He saw the glare, the wink of light on something metal, by the great skeleton of the dragon, and he could not resist.
I want to see that.
Ariosto coughed. Very hungry, boss. We might have to walk, and I don’t really want to walk on all this dead stuff.
Gabriel hesitated.
Oh, fine, Ariosto said.
He landed. Water?
Gabriel handed over his canteen after taking a single pull. He held it until the eagle beak grabbed it, tilted it back, and the purple tongue moved, and then the canteen was crushed.
Oops. Better than nothing, though.
Gabriel walked across the ash, his flying boots leaving clear tracks. The dragon’s skull was huge, like a building.
But under it were the skulls of men.
He knew what he was looking for a moment after the skulls registered, and he reached in among the skulls and the bones. It was a single ornament: bigger than the head of a man, and hollow, made of pure gold.
An eagle, wings back, holding lightning bolts in each talon.
He held it a moment, and then put it gently back near the bony hands of his fellow men.
I will never know.
He got back on Ariosto.
Can you get us back?
Sure, boss, Ariosto said. But don’t we still need to get back past the sea monsters?
One thing at a time, Gabriel said.
They landed at the gate, and Sauce was there, and a dozen greens, prowling through the bones and making a pile of finds. There was more evidence of men: an ivory-hilted dagger, a gold medallion, an ivory shield boss, the ivory warped and mangled by time, grey with age and ash.
And a comb. The comb was magnificent, solid gold, with the figures of a soldier or knight on horseback fighting a footman, each figure as perfectly realized as a statue. Wha’hae handed it to Gabriel; he held it for a while.
“She must ha’e been something, eh, Cap’n?” Wha’hae said.
“What do you want for it?” Sauce asked.
Wha’hae looked at it a moment. “Fifty leopards,” he said. “Gold.” He smiled. “An’ that’s for a friend.”
Sauce laughed, but she snapped it out of his hands and put it in her long black hair.
“Like it were made for ye,” Wha’hae said.
Gabriel looked at her a moment. “I’m not sure I’d recommend wearing ornaments until a magister …” He shook his head.
She grinned her crooked grin. “My brain’s too tough to get fried by some sorcerous claptrap, and I’m wearing a fortune in Magister Petrarcha’s amulets, and a few by the Mighty Mortirmir hisself. I’ll be fine.”
Daud the Red produced a small silver mirror. Sauce preened a little.
Gabriel laughed. He drank some of Wha’hae’s water and laughed again.
“We’re surrounded by horror and you lot are busy looting,” he said.
Wha’hae shrugged. “And?” he asked. “There’s a fortune out there, Cap’n. I say we bring the whole company here and comb through it for days …”
“I say we get our arses back past the sea monsters and march on,” Gabriel said. He smiled.
The greens hastily pocketed their finds.
“Who were they, Cap’n?” asked an archer.
Gabriel shook his head.
Sauce appeared by him, the gold comb magnificent in her hair.
“Isn’t that going to hurt under a helmet?” he asked.
She shrugged. “When did you last eat?” she asked.
Gabriel tried to think.
She handed him a whole sausage and an apple and a chunk of cheese. “The boys and girls are happy finding a fortune in old crap,” she said. “Eat this and rest.”
Gabriel ate while walking across the mosaic floor to the watch post at the outer gate. There, the smell of the sea was omnipresent, and the men-at-arms and archers were alert.
“Somethin’ unnatural came up at the edge o’ the water,” the lead man-at-arms said. Green banda men-at-arms were not all knights; many had come up the hard way, former royal foresters or Jacks.
“I don’t know you,” Gabriel said, embarrassed.
“Jeff Kearny,” the man said. He was short, broad, and red bearded. “This here is Tom Wilsit. You know Short Tooth and Long Tail, eh? Sir?”
Gabriel looked out into the oddly lit night. The patch of pure darkness had the same effect as an hour before.
“Don’ look at it,” muttered Short Tooth. “Seriously, Cap’n. That’s fucked up.”
“No shit,” Gabriel said. “And then what happened?” he said to Kearny.
“It moved back,” Kearny said. “We did nowt, like Sauce said.”
“Never piss off somethin’ ye cannae’ kill,” said Short Tooth. “Long Paw’s rule number two o’ scoutin.”
Gabriel finished his apple and lobbed the core out into the endless night. “Rule number one?” he asked.
“Scoutin’ an’ fightin’ are two different jobs,” Kearny said.
“He’s full o’ crap like yon,” Short Tooth said.
Gabriel nodded, suddenly feeling much better.
“We’re going to cross in groups of three lances,” he said when he’d walked back to Sauce. “I’ll go first with whomever you choose. You’ll come last. I’ll pause at the midpoint in the causeway, in case—”
Sauce leaned up and gave him a sudden kiss. “You are so full of shit,” she said. “You go. All the way to Mortirmir. If’n you want to cover us, send him to the midpoint. Not you, Mister Emperor. Not now.”
He thought about it.
“Just once, do as I say,” Sauce said.
Gabriel made a face. “Sure,” he said.
She laughed. “Things must be desperate.”
The first three lances included Wha’hae, and they went out at a trot. Gabriel mounted Ariosto and they launched into the wet air.
So hungry, the griffon said. Love Sauce, too?
Gabriel’s breath caught. But there was no lying to a griffon. Love Sauce, he admitted.
The griffon seemed to chuckle, and something like a rippling purr passed along its trunk and spread to the wings.
By then they were high enough to make out the first three spots of phosphorescence. They were farther away—two or three thousand paces. Gabriel watched the second party of lances depart. And the third.
On the far side of the causeway, a great lidless eye of pale green began to drift in.
Gabriel turned Ariosto. Sorry, he thought. I need you to fly about ten more minutes.
Ouch, Ariosto said.
Gabriel turned again, coasting back along the causeway. He flashed over the fourth trio of lances, spooking Kearny’s horse, and he turned Ariosto and they went in through the gate as if it was not a magnificent flying achievement.
Gabriel didn’t augment his voice; he was trying to use no ops whatsoever. But he used his lungs, which were powerful.
“Everyone. Right. Now!” he called, and pointed with his spear at the outer gate.
They all saw him. And Sauce understood immediately.
He turned Ariosto, or Ariosto turned him, and they were out in the moist dark, the griffon’s wings beating strongly in the eerie moonlight. Another phosphorescent patch was creeping in.
The fear was palpable, like the onrush of a dragon or twenty wyverns.
Gabriel rolled Ariosto at about the midpoint of the causeway and took him down over the water in a long dive away from the causeway. Three minutes.
Doing it, the griffon seemed to pant in the aethereal.
Gabriel plunged into his palace and began casting, working new ops from purest gold and pushing a quantity of this sphere’s dark blue into it, raw. The result was crude and it leaked raw potentia. Gabriel hung the bag from one of his javelins …
In the real, he turned again, now over a black patch of empty water between the two nearest whorls of phosphorescence.
Here goes nothing. Literally.
He dropped the javelin into the fathomless water and turned.
Gate! he called.
Which one? Ariosto asked.
You think that’s funny? Gabriel thought as the griffon put on a burst of speed in three great wingbeats that pressed him back into his high-backed saddle.
Yes, the griffon said, just as the water behind and below began to boil like a pot on a campfire far too long, huge bubbles rising.
Both of the spiral clusters began to drift rapidly toward the boiling sea.
Hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom
A third came in from farther out at sea. From altitude, the whorls and whirls and globs of phosphorescence out there, out to the far horizon, began to move in, drifting on some invisible tide.
Oh yes, Gabriel thought. Ariosto was labouring, the wings jerky with fatigue, his noble head down, drooping …
The last horse was past the midpoint on the causeway. They were racing, galloping through the moonlight. The sea had risen, and the horses were raising spray as they cantered along the beach.
A huge dome, wrinkled, black, slick with seawater and crusted with some nameless parasite, began to rise from the sea. The size of it baffled the eye and the human sense of distance. Veins of glowing ice green ran across it. It rose slowly, and with it, the nameless dread increased …
Gabriel fed his mount some of his ops. He was burning gold, and he knew how dangerous it was now for him to cast almost anything.
What would happen if I achieved apotheosis here? he wondered, even as he passed over Sauce and Ariosto’s wings gave a shiver.
Love you, Gabriel said.
I bet you say that to all the monsters, Ariosto said. But the wings shot back and cupped the kelp-reeking air and then the lion legs were on the sand, running.
Gabriel was thrown right over the pommel of his saddle even as Ariosto rolled over his folded wings.
Gabriel lay in a hand’s depth of warm salt water, staring up at the darkness as the water filled his helmet.
Tancreda stood over him. He wriggled his toes; his neck hurt.
“Damn,” he said aloud.
Hungry! Ariosto wailed.
“Get through the gate! Get clear!” Gabriel roared, coming to his senses. He was soaking wet. “Go, go!”
A dozen greens poured across the last sand spit. Mortirmir was casting; Gabriel could tell from his posture. So was Petrarcha.
“Go!” Gabriel screamed at the company archers who stood across the gate. “Milus! Form ranks on the other side of the gate.”
Ser Milus turned immediately, gesturing. The Company Saint Catherine retired; the line of lances went back with it.
More scouts were coming down the end of the causeway. The water was rising.
“They know we’re here,” Morgon said. “And they hate us.”
Gabriel grabbed Mortirmir by the shoulder. “Run. Don’t walk. Run.”
He put an arm around Petrarcha, even as he could feel the malevolent will working out in the water … working … magnified …
Sauce was galloping. She had someone riding double; she was last, and alone.
Behind him, Anne Woodstock got Ariosto through the ranks of the company and through the gate.
Sauce had a long way to go still. She’d stopped for someone.
Gabriel went into his palace and slammed the iron gate shut, just to be sure. Then he reached down through memory and practice to the Umroth, and their passive shield. He took it out, examined it, and rolled it off as an effort of will powered entirely from within himself; from the same source that made his skin glow gold. He didn’t need to understand it completely; he knew enough, now.
It was like working with emotion instead of power, and he wove a shield of hope. And he built a wave front of hope; the antithesis of the hate of the sea creatures.
It was as if everything he’d ever learned, from Prudentia, from Harmodius, from his mother, from the Patriarch, from Al Rashidi and Mortirmir, all came together in a single expression of his innermost will.
There was no casting.
There was only being.
In the real, the sea rose until Sauce was galloping through water up to her charger’s fetlocks. And the deep dweller rising from the water was exposed; vast, bloated, and it threw a fell wave of pale green light …
The light struck something invisible, like the prow of a ship, and passed along either side of the causeway to break against the island of rock that contained the gate; and the stone began to crack.
Sauce, with Daud clinging to her, burst past Gabriel who began to walk backwards, carefully. The green light was everywhere; not the green of home, but a watery green, pale, and eager to drink his essence.
His hope met its desire to destroy, and defeated it.
He took another step backward, and another, and another.
“Gate!” called Mortirmir.
A hand seized his hand and placed it on the key in the plaque.
He turned it.
The gate closed in silence.
He let go his nonworking and stood breathing, feeling superb.
Mortirmir leaned around him. “That was spectacular,” he said.
“I liked it,” Gabriel admitted. “Ready the company. Two minutes. All magisters, on me.”
“You need rest,” Sukey said.
“We are out of time. Is everyone fed?” he asked.
Sukey nodded, on the edge of anger. “Fed, and horses foddered. I’m out; unless we send back to Arles or start looting these poor irks, we’re done.” She shook her head. “Of course, I have forty useless wagons of loot and Umroth ivory …”
“Not useless,” Gabriel said. “Well done, Sukey. I hope everyone had a nap.” He looked around; there was Michael, his great sword in his hand; there was Tom Lachlan, already dismounted, with the lances of the casa dismounted right behind the white banda; there was No Head, and Francis Atcourt; Sauce, directing Conte Simone’s knights. The vast hall was packed with soldiers; maybe twenty thousand men and women, a few irks, and a single bogglin.
He walked back, pressing through packed and armoured people. He was dripping as he walked, but he wasn’t cold. The people were warming, even this vast place.
He found Blanche. “Wish me luck,” he said. “If this one isn’t it …” He shrugged, “Then I don’t know where we are.”
She kissed him. “Go,” she said. She smiled. “You look like a fantastical beast, my love.”
He smiled. His feeling of joy remained, and he squelched back across the hall, and men called out to him, and he paused to kiss Oak Pew on the cheek.
He got back to the pedestal, and he nodded to Mortirmir. “May I borrow your voice?” he asked.
“Of course,” Mortirmir said. He snapped his fingers.
Soldiers.
We have marched and we have fought. Now, I hope, we will find what we seek.
If our guess is correct, this will be a fight. You need to be ready. You have drilled for this. Follow the drill and we will win quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
Ready?
There was a roar. And then three giant cheers, a flood of sound echoing from the high ceiling, three roars that shook the mountain.
Gabriel stood very straight. “Ready?” he called to the red banda, first at the gate.
“Get on wi’ ye,” shouted an archer. Men laughed.
Ready? he asked in the aethereal.
They all answered him; Mortirmir, Tancreda, Petrarcha, and a dozen lesser lights.
He turned the key four places.
And pressed down on the jewel.
Instantly he felt the will fighting him for control of the gate, and his heart soared with victory.
Got them! he yelled.
Mortirmir appeared inside his palace, and then Petrarcha in long, blue velvet robes, and Tancreda in the habit of a Liviapolitan nun, and as they entered they took his aethereal hands. The other casters, mostly Morean and Alban university students, pushed potentia into the link.
The will pressed against the gate.
Gabriel pushed back.
Mortirmir laughed. “Anytime,” he said.
If the struggle for the gate was like arm wrestling with hermetical will, Gabriel did the equivalent of rotating his adversary’s hand and wrist. He slammed his opponent’s arm down on the metaphorical table.
The gate opened.
It was open for exactly as long as it might take a faery to blink her eye.
Mortirmir displaced a small, round egg of pure gold through the gate.
The gate shut.
Three. Two. One. They all counted down together.
Gabriel reached for the gate again.
No resistance.
He flicked it open, and the sun of a bright day fell across the line of the red banda.
They were looking out across a rocky down slope; volcanic, the earth red brown, the stone grey and black in contrast, with clumps of grass and a marvelous yellow sunlight. It was warm.
The air was full of dust, so full of dust that nothing of the landscape was visible beyond a few spear’s lengths.
The ground outside the gate was thick with the corpses of bogglins. They were messily dead, their juices splattered across the ground in front of the gate.
“Go,” Gabriel said.
The red banda marched through the gate. They marched forward two hundred paces, flowing around an ancient altar and two downed basalt columns and a huge volcanic rock and halting with both flanks resting on dry streambeds.
The white banda went through the gate and wheeled to the left by sections of lances. The casa came through on horseback, at the double, and formed to the right, and by then, the first wave of enemy had appeared out of the dust and died.
Mortirmir had passed the gate. He took a moment while Tancreda and Petrarcha raised immense shields in the ops rich air to draw the baselard from his hip and slit open the carcass of a bogglin.
Gabriel looked down at the mass of the thing’s pink-grey innards.
“Not bogglins,” Mortirmir said. “And look.”
Gabriel knew what he would see. And it caused his heart to swell with joy; it meant they were on track, it meant he was right …
A worm. An Odine possessor worm in an alien bogglin-thing.
“We did it,” Morgon said, and for once his adolescent superiority was utterly punctured, and joy covered him, and he threw his arms around Gabriel, who pounded his back.
Tom Lachlan looked down from his great black horse as if the two were idiots.
“Ye’r wode!” he said.
Gabriel thought he might cry, the relief was so great. So painful.
“Ye can tell ’em. Are we fucked?” asked Tom.
“No,” Gabriel said. “No, Tom. We’re fine. There’s nothing left now but the fighting.”
Tom’s face broke in his broad grin. “Ah, laddy. Now yer fewkin’ talkin …” He looked up. “Watch yer pennons!” he roared. “Keep your dress!”
He rode off, and the army continued to pour through the gate even as the archers of the red banda engaged a charge of imps, the small greyhound-sized monsters quick and deadly and very vulnerable to plunging shafts in this open ground.
Gabriel mounted the big bay. “Do you have a name?” he muttered. “I’ll call you John.”
John pricked his ears.
The attacks coming at the face of his square were uncoordinated, the creatures clearly Odine-animated. Gabriel watched the army unfold; there was confusion early on when the casa wheeled up into line as the Venikan marines came up on their flank; almost a half-century of Venikans died, caught moving by a flood of imps and a tide of sorcery, before Peterarcha stepped forward and countered it. Conte Simone was surprised by another assault coming from behind the gate, because it had a two dimensional quality that was evident only to the hermeticists; but the Etruscan knights were all fully armoured, from toe to groin to helm, and the imps found them almost invulnerable, and even a man pulled down by their horrible strength was cut free without loss.
Despite the setbacks, it was not a battle, or if it was a battle, it was one of near constant movement. The army fed through the gate, and the army advanced, filling in from the flanks, scouting the ground fifty paces ahead. It called for constant management; a bad decision could result in fifty people lost, or taken but the company stepped forward, stepped forward again, shaking off the counter attacks and occupying the ground and the magisters began to shift from defensive to offensive and the rate of movement increased.
Gabriel began to feel like a spectator. He rode back and forth along his line, making corrections, but he avoided the aethereal. He was on the edge, and he knew it; and he was damned if he was going to God before his task was finished.
But when the immediate ground of the gate was clear, his staff pulled themselves out of their combat roles; Michael was back at his side, and Tom Lachlan, and Sauce, and Milus.
Michael looked at the imperial standard flapping over their heads in Toby’s fist.
“Like old times,” he said to Sauce.
She gave him a grin. Her face seemed lit from within with the ferocity of her joy, and that look was reflected in every archer, every man-at-arms, every marine and every waggoner. The golden emperor raised his sword and pointed; Adrian Goldsmith sketched rapidly with charcoal in his book, and Francis Atcourt prayed.
The line moved forward.
Gabriel rode up a little hill that resembled a protruding tooth. “We’re behind them, and our surprise is complete. Have you found the target, Mortirmir?” he asked.
“Target?” Sauce said.
Michael shrugged. “Long story. We figured the last gate had to be held by Odine, ready to back Ash. Or the will. Or both. Had to be, really.”
Andromeche Sarrissa, one of the Morean students, was with the banner. She said, shyly, “We’re looking for the Odine Will, my lady.”
Sauce nodded. But her eyes were on her Etruscan infantry; their line was starting to trail off into the increasingly low ground to the right. “We sound really cocky,” she said. She smiled. “Tell his nibs to keep me up-to-date on what to kill.” She turned and rode off to the right, already shouting orders.
Now, for the first time in a long time, the whole of the company was displayed together; almost a thousand lances, with two hundred more in the casa. Carts appeared from the gate, and bags of livery arrows were delivered by pages through the dust, bags of twenty-four heavy arrows held by leather spacers. Other pages appeared with water. Wounded men were dragged to the rear, inside the box that continued to form out of the gate, but the front of the army vomited arrows that fell like a wicked sleet, and the enemy died.
Three hours into the action, Gabriel could see the sea off to the right, beyond a marsh; a glorious expanse of seamless blue.
“Found it,” Mortirmir said.
Instantly, all the magisters’ faces fell, like puppets with their strings cut, but that was only all of them turning inward.
Gabriel joined them, cautious about his expenditure.
They all joined hands, and he stood aloof; Tancreda provided a lead, and they powered shields they’d woven and laid aside, the new, fractal shields of interwoven scales and leaves.
A titanic bolt of purple-white lightning struck their shield.
There was leakage, and in the center, six lances of the red banda died; Ser Richard Smith; Kessin the archer, and Lowper, and twenty other men and women who’d marched across four worlds and fought their way from Lissen Carak to Arles were turned to ash.
Five paces away, Urk of Mogon drew a heavy clothyard shaft to his four cheeks and released into the clump of irks who seemed rudderless and stood in the open. By him, Heron drew, grunted, and loosed. The smell of cooked flesh floated over and Urk’s mouth cracked open to expose his sensory organs to the wonderful smell of cooked human flesh. It was all unconscious; he was drawing his next shaft from his belt, listening for Smoke’s orders.
Forty paces away, Edmund cursed. “Heave!” he roared. His voice cracked, but the wheel came free from between two huge chunks of volcanic rock and the falconet rolled forward again. There were twenty men on each drag rope, every one of them with a hand gonne slung over their shoulder, and a dozen smaller gonnes on platforms were moving forward on donkeys; a last-minute innovation by Sukey.
But there had been no time to employ the slow falconets; he had his third set of crews on the drag ropes and his fourth set ready, but the gonnes moved more slowly than the rate of advance.
There was a purple-white flash that illuminated a faery forest of golden light hundreds of feet in the air. A concussion rolled back over the panting men. The sound rolled like thunder.
Tom Lachlan raised his long sword. “We only get home by going forward,” he roared. “Follow me!”
The casa went forward into the fire.
Out on the right, the Vardariotes joined the line, which was now more than a mile long and seemed to outflank any resistance.
Count Zac didn’t need direction or orders. He could feel the vacuum in front of him, and he moved his command more rapidly, and Comnena linked on him, and they began to pass the main line.
Edmund’s gonnes fell farther and farther behind as the casa accelerated away. And began to turn like a door on the hinge of the Nordikaans, swinging inward.
Two thousand paces to the left, Simone raised his visor just in time to see the five hundred-fold forked purple lightning strike the center. But like Count Zac, he could feel the absence of the enemy, and he pushed his knights to mount; their stumbling advance became much more fluid; and the Venikan light horse suddenly had Sauce at their head and they were outpacing him, spreading through the thorny brakes and probing out to the left of the road.
The third pulse of purple-white burst on the center. It was followed by a massive surge of bogglins, or whatever they were; they had long spears and they came in dense clumps. This time, it was all coordinated, and on the flanks of the central phalanx there appeared two massive blocks of Grecklins (Snot coined the term for them between one shaft and the next) who had crossbows.
The company archers shot them away.
The lightning didn’t even scorch the ground.
The company went forward. The Saint Catherine streamed in the breeze; and by it, a sable banner with three lacs d’amours and the red banner, a massive golden lion on scarlet silk.
Gabriel was under the red banner now. He’d raised his new passive shield over the center of the center; it seemed to him the only contribution he could make.
“How are we doing?” Michael asked. “To me, it looks like we’re winning.”
“We’re winning so handily that I’m saving myself for the real fight,” Gabriel said. He looked to the right; where he could see Robin Carter and Gadgee and Scrant all drawing their bows together, and beyond them, a hundred men and women he knew by name; thousands; there was Oak Pew, calling orders, and there, far off on the plain, the brilliant sun shone on the red coats of the Vardariotes as they turned inward and there was Zac, and the Scholae drew their sabers and they shone like the spears of the phalanx of angels in heaven.
The magisters cantered up.
The phalanx of enemy spear-creatures was melting under the shafts of the company, but they stood, stolid, stubborn, waiting. Their unshielded crossbowmen were gone; already lying in long rows in the volcanic dirt, like sea wrack washed up after a storm.
Edmund’s gonnes appeared, and with the surviving Nordikaans covering them, they ran forward, the heavy bronze tubes bouncing up and down as forty strong men and women hauled them by ropes, another dozen carrying the trails of the long carriages.
The enemy will rose and cast, and Gabriel’s passive shield of hope and joy swatted it to earth. Gabriel didn’t even realize that his wave front was as wide as the front of the whole red banda; that as he went forward, it went forward, like a great power of the Wild.
Edmund’s sweating apprentices dropped the trail on Blanche, the first falconet. Cat Turell, eyes squinting through the dust, traversed the tube until the mouth was squarely in the center of the spear-things phalanx.
Another apprentice came forward with a wooden plug bound with twine; inside were one hundred and forty four iron balls. It went into the dragon’s mouth.
Morgon Mortirmir spread his arms.
“Everyone ready?” he said. He raised both eyebrows and favoured his wife with a look.
She blew him a kiss.
The Ifriquy’an kid whirled the porte-fire through the air as if he’d been doing it all his life and put it to the touch hole of the falconet.
Twenty four iron balls blew through a corner of the enemy phalanx, passing diagonally through the dense-packed things.
A shrill shrieking erupted.
Kaitlin, gonne two, fired.
Clarissa, gonne three, fired.
Morgon cast. In the real, he and Petrarcha and Tancreda were momentarily outlined in light, and then an uncountable number of lines of fire arced away into the heavens. They burst, all together, in tens of thousands of lines of angry red that raced earthward, arcing and turning at impossible angles like lightning on a dark day.
All this in the time a congregation might say “Amen.”
They struck all together silently.
Gabriel motioned with his sword. “Forward,” he said. He nodded to Payam, whose Mamluks were now filling the field behind the company. The Ifriquy’an waved. The Mamluks were deploying from column into line at a canter.
“What is happening?” he asked.
Michael turned his horse. “The Odine have formed up a great army to invade,” he said. “We’re pulling it to pieces. Just as we planned. Morgon is now pounding their wormy masters.”
“Il Conte Simone is now turning their flank,” Payam motioned with his Fell Sword. “Perhaps I should join him?”
Gabriel shook his head. “There’s no flank to turn,” he said. “This is not a formed host. The will …that is, this will … They weren’t ready. It isn’t ready.” He shook his head. “It is what I dreamed.” He turned to Michael. “Go see what the left is doing. Pavalo, on my word, I want you to exchange lines with the casa. In a little while, we will face the Odine.”
Payam nodded. “Allah hath a thousand hands to chastise,” he said with a smile. “And we have brought a few thousand more.” He smiled broadly. “We have faced the Odine a few times.”
Gabriel went back to watching the company.
The enemy phalanx stood its ground in the center, and died. Too late they attempted to charge, but their cohesion was failing them, and the gaps torn in them by gonnes and shafts were too great to heal.
Gabriel followed them forward, his body burning gold so that now, in bright sunlight, he gave off light. He paused to watch No Head cutting up another corpse. One of the not-bogglins.
“Need Mortirmir to be sure,” No Head said. “Looks to me like this beastie’s been bred to host the worm.”
Gabriel frowned.
The company went forward over the last of the phalanx, and there was a moment of vicious hand to hand, a cloud of dust, and the line buckled, knotted, and moved on, righting itself. The flanks were still pressing in.
The company had taken losses. There were fifty men and women down; knots of magisters tried to save those taken by worms even as they tried to fight their mates.
Gabriel winced that it had become routine to his people.
The banners pressed forward, and the fighting slackened. Ser Milus began to consider ordering his people to mount, but he rode over to Gabriel.
“Boys and girls are tired,” he said. “And what do you think o’ that?” he asked, pointing at a dust cloud at the gate.
“I’m putting the company into reserve,” Gabriel said. He waved to one of the imperial messengers and snapped orders.
Michael rode along the left of the army, watching the Etruscans form from their columns and then link their lines, the whole as they began a great turning action toward the now visible gate pylons, a little more than a mile away. Sauce gave orders as effortlessly as Gabriel.
“You are having too much fun,” Michael said.
“Yep,” she answered. “I thought I wanted to be a knight. Turns out I wanted to be a great captain.
He had nothing to add, so he watched.
A messenger cantered up. “Lord Michael?” she asked. “The emperor asks for the casa to take the center of the line. And for you to attend him.”
Michael looked left, along the line; then he turned and rode toward the center. The whole of the imperial army was moving forward, the wings closing as they had practiced, the center pressing ahead slowly. Michael rode to Bad Tom.
“Gabriel wants us in the center,” Michael said.
“Aye,” Tom said. “Already heard. Watch this.”
Even as Michael watched, the casa began to mount the horses brought forward by pages and servants, and suddenly they were four lines of mounted men and women, their armour glittering in the brilliant sun.
Behind them the Mamluks came forward, closer and closer.
The casa began to file off from the left of sections. As they filed off, mounted, they passed to the left of sixty-man sections of Mamluks, who passed through them, moving forward, so that in the twinkling of an eye, the casa was in the second line.
Payam saluted with his long, curved sword. “Odine,” he said. “I can smell them.”
“This is it,” Michael said.
Tom nodded, as did Payam.
The center halted.
The wings continued to move in, overcoming knots of resistance. The Beronese chivalry charged, annihilated a mob of not-bogglins, and rallied.
Tom Lachlan appeared in the command circle.
Mortirmir was on horseback, his feet out of his stirrups, his hands at his sides. He looked terrible, but the ops rolled off him in waves.
And then, very suddenly, his eyes opened, and he looked directly at Gabriel.
“There it is,” he said. “The will.”
Far off, almost at the edge of the gate, something was rising.
A mile is a long way. Across a battlefield, few things register at the range of an imperial mile; people are like a stain of colour, blocks of men big enough to take kingdoms are smaller than fleas. A fleet of ships can vanish in the haze, a mile away. A dragon looks like a bird, a mile away.
Something like a living mountain began to shamble erect. A mile away, it was huge.
His voice matter of fact, Mortirmir said, “That is it.”
“It’s in the gate,” Gabriel said.
“I think we’ve failed to put the facts together correctly,” Mortirmir said. “I’m willing to wager that it is stuck in the gate. Where the dragons trapped it, a thousand years ago.”
Gabriel was watching it in horrified fascination. “But …” He paused. “No. I see it. Its head is in Mistress Helewise’s back garden and this is the arse end.”
Michael smiled. So did Tom Lachlan, and Zac, and a dozen other men and women around the emperor.
“It’s trying to take control of the gate,” Mortirmir said.
Gabriel smiled. “And it hasn’t yet!”
“QED,” said Mortirmir. “Lissen Carak is still fighting.”
Gabriel’s bay turned in a circle as he looked around at his officers.
“Damn it,” he said with as smile. “We can win this, my friends.”
Michael glanced at Tom.
“Ye sound as if ye didn’ae believe it, your own sel’?” Tom asked. He laughed.
The horrendous compendium of worms writhed a mile away.
“Mortirmir?” Gabriel asked.
“My rede would be to press it hard in the real, as we did the Umroth. When it responds, I’ll …” Morgon shrugged. “I’ll hope to do better than last time.”
“Same massive wave of coercion?” Gabriel said.
Mortirmir shook his head. “The will is to the rebel as ten is to one,” he said. “But the will has never been a man, nor understands hermetical science.”
Gabriel nodded. “Form the choir. Get me Edmund Chevins.”
An hour later, and the army was halted in a rough semicircle facing the writhing titan at a range of roughly a thousand paces.
“It does appear pinned in place,” Mortirmir said. They had survived a probe of coercion; the casa, having experienced the mass despair before, stood their ground, gritted their teeth, and tried not to think.
Gabriel did the same as he witnessed, again, his abject failure on every front.
The gonnes rolled forward.
“Can you hit it?” Gabriel asked Edmund Chevins.
He bowed. “My lord, I expect we’ll hit it with every shot. It is … very … large.”
“Then what happens?” Ser Michael asked. He was dismounted. Every one of the emperor’s comitatus was dismounted with their lances behind them, and the fractal forest of white faery leaves was already before them, hiding the worst horrors of their enemy.
“Then we teach it a basic law of war,” Gabriel said.
Michael turned. “God, I love it when you claim there are laws. What law of war?”
“You can’t hold ground with magic,” the emperor said. “You can kill things, but you can’t take ground, or hold it. See that tower of worms? That’s not a monster. That’s an absence of effective infantry.”
Michael looked at the thing. It had no great fangs, no glowing eyes, no face of any kind. No thousands of legs, no body hairs.
Merely billions of worms writhing together.
“Jesus, I hope you’re right,” Michael said.
“I hate it when you call me Jesus,” Gabriel said with his old, blasphemous smile. “Gonner?”
Edmund bowed.
Gabriel took his ghiavarina in hand and walked to the very center of the casa, and shoved into the front, with Anne against his back and Cully ready to loose, down the open file. He had ten monster killers in the ground beside him. Every casa archer did.
Edmund walked to the right, to his gonnes. He and Duke slapped hands, and then Edmund crouched over his trail, had a peek, and muttered, “Here goes nothing.”
His porte-fire went down, and he slipped sideways, out of the way of the recoiling wheel.
Five hundred and twenty-one paces away, the first iron ball smashed into the Odine. It passed all the way through the thing, crushing individual worms, and exploded out the far side in a gout of semireal worm paste.
The second gonne fired; Duke’s body nimbly avoided the wheel as it passed him, and Edmund’s loader was already putting a wet sheepskin sponge down the smoking tube. Giron le Courtois, a Galle, was just putting his porte-fire down.
The third gonne slammed out.
Sulphur powder smoke drifted over Gabriel’s position.
The Odine raised a massive shield in the real.
“Here we go,” said Mortirmir.
“Gonne one,” Edmund said.
Bam.
In the aethereal, a short, vicious war was played out in which the coercion tried to control Edmund; Mortirmir tried to open a hole in the shield, and both failed.
“Gonne two,” Duke called. Edmund was retching; he felt defiled.
Bam.
The wave of coercion played about the casa; Tom Lachlan had doubts, and Cully relived something he’d done, once, to Sauce. Michael heard his captain remind him of his many shortcomings. Oak Pew drank herself to death. Urk of Mogon missed with every arrow and Mogon stripped him of her scent.
The iron ball ripped through a perfectly timed hole in the worms’ casting and a gout of superheated white mush erupted on the thing’s far side.
It went for Mortirmir in the aethereal, and the whole choir covered him, but he choked in his own inadequacy, and fire raged along the edge of the fractal shield and it collapsed, leaving another, golden shield in its place.
“Tom,” Gabriel said. “We are going to have to do this on foot. The old-fashioned way.”
“Now y’er fewkin’ tellin’ me a story I want to hear,” Tom said. “Prepare to advance!”
The new trumpeter played, and a dozen horns took up the sound.
The casa began to walk forward.
Fifty paces to the rear of the casa, Ser Milus squinted and then shrugged.
Sauce appeared at his shoulder. “You goin’ forward?” she asked.
The casa’s shields crackled and a huge hole appeared. Hand gonners died. Horses shied in the Vardariotes. The Nordikaans were down to only a few, under Thorval Armring, now Spatharios, and he went forward as if he had two hundred axe-brothers with him and not sixty.
“No orders,” Milus said with a shrug.
“I’m ordering it,” Sauce said. “Forward.”
The gonnes fired again; bam bam bam.
The casa was already two hundred paces away when the company rumbled forward.
“This is gonna suck,” Tippit muttered. He looked up at the vast puissance of the worm.
“Always does,” Smoke agreed.
Mortirmir was deep in his palace. He was waiting for the waves of emanation off the enemy, and then working to cancel them, not with blunt defences like shields, but at their roots.
He was learning the hermetical language of the Odine. It was very like the language of the rebel, and yet different. Rigorous. Pure. Undiluted.
A little naive.
He could feel it planning, preparing, building power.
He tried sabotaging a thought, and failed; it ignored him.
He lost the initiative and spent a great deal of his choir’s ops on defence. He wasn’t altogether successful and lost almost a hundred people, and the will pounced. It knew the code by which mere humans lived, and it assaulted Mortirmir with a wave of revulsion and self-loathing based on his failure, his love of his fellow men, his betrayal of their hopes.
The Odine was as mistaken as the man had been. Mortirmir was not very interested in people. He protected them because by doing so he could win, but he could sustain losses and still win, and the coercive attack washed over him. And in it he found information. He changed his own message; he fine-tuned the choir’s shields and exchanged, at the speed of thought, some ideas with his wife and with Magister Petrarcha.
The gonnes fired in the real. They were working; the will feared them. Even though their immediate effects were infinitesimal, Gabriel had correctly assessed that the will must view the world in very long aeons. The will could not afford a siege of its puissance by gonnes.
The will shielded itself. But the kinetic force of the gonnes was huge, and required a massive manipulation of potentia and thus a huge display of information in the aethereal, and Mortirmir watched, manipulated, and unleashed.
He failed, and the balls were stopped on the magnificent shield that towered over the thing.
It struck back.
In the real, the will’s counterstrike fell like a sheet of lightning two hundred paces long, and it burned through the casa’s shields in a dozen places. Comnena fell at the head of the Scholae, burned down one side of his body and saved only by one of Mortirmir’s finest amulets, and behind him, a hundred gentlemen of Liviapolis were burned to death in an instant.
Count Zac died as the air in his lungs ignited. Forty Vardariotes died with him, and the white lightning played over into the hand gonners, killing a dozen Venikans and an Ifriquy’an.
The casa went forward into the fire.
The company followed. Out on the flanks, men and women began to edge forward because courage is infectious and because there were no orders not to. Sauce was now at the head of the company; Conte Simone was not a man to wait while others did the fighting, and the duchess, on the far flank, walking easily at the head of her scarecrows, thirsted for vengeance against this very monster, the personifier of her fears, the epicenter of her nightmares.
The scarecrows went forward.
But in the center, the casa covered ground; they were less than five hundred paces from the great worm of worms now, and they began to pick up speed because they were afraid, and they all, collectively, wanted to get it over with.
The gonnes fired again.
The will responded, concentrating its efforts directly at the gonnes.
But this was the attack that the choir had anticipated, and now it struck shield after shield, knocking one down only to meet another. The gonnes had been a trap; Mortirmir had expected the will to attack them first.
Now Mortirmir had the initiative, and not a single gonner was killed.
Mortirmir recast shields, along with a dazzling array of attacks: balls of spectacular fire, bolts of lightning in various colours, a driven wind of colours from beyond the human spectrum of perception, through the rainbow and beyond again.
The will stopped them.
In the real, the world beyond the shields was a rolling cacophony of noise and light.
Anything you could do to distract it would be appreciated, Mortirmir said inside Gabriel’s palace.
People were down. There were gaps in the casa; the Scholae had stopped advancing altogether. The Vardariotes were unable to continue forward and began, despite Kriax’s entreaties, to run. Edmund’s hand gonners were wavering, unable to see beyond the ends of their weapons.
But …
Even as Gabriel prepared himself in his palace, the Saint Catherine came forward, the company dividing along the middle to pass on either side of the casa. They were less than a hundred paces from the maelstrom of chaos.
Gabriel, despite his fears, prepared to cast. He went into his palace and saluted Prudentia.
“You are very close now,” she said quietly.
“My friends are dying,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He pointed to three simple sigils.
“Allow me,” she said. “You really should not power anything just now.”
Gabriel stepped back out of the line in the real and augmented his voice.
Archers! he called.
Knights! Forward!
Then he pushed past Woodstock and went forward into the storm. He could not see that the Etruscans and the scarecrows were also pushing forward. He couldn’t see that Cully was loosing heavy arrows behind him, aiming high at a conglomerate of terror that towered over them. He couldn’t see Tom Lachlan or Michael or Sauce or Francis Atcourt or any of the rest of the men and women he’d led for years.
But he knew they were there.
And together, they went forward.
The shield of the Odine was like a wall of soft clay—clinging, cloying, sickening, an assault on every sense. But soft.
The ghiavarina cut it like butter, and Gabriel was momentarily reminded of fighting his mother’s curse of black felt, except that every stroke of the weapon took his deeper and opened a hole.
And then he could see the mountain of worms on the other side, a thousand thousand ravening mouths. He set himself and cut, even as the first worms began to turn on him. Two paces to his right, Bad Tom’s sword burst through in a spray of fire and even in the hell of the Odine’s maw, Gabriel heard, “Lachlan for Aa!”
Then he was cutting. It was like exercise; like cutting at air, except that the worms themselves had the same consistency as the shield, and they fled him and Lachlan, the wall of mouths and glistening grey bodies writhing away.
Lachlan, as casually as if he were fighting in a tournament, spared two blows to widen the rift in the shield.
Gabriel cut to his left, opening the tear wider.
Mortirmir couldn’t handle the ferocity of the attacks.
But he didn’t have to. He wasn’t alone, and Tancreda spun her web faster than a hermetical spider while Magister Petrarcha wove a fabric of deceit and reconciliation. A Morean magister dropped, exhausted, and was killed; the choir faltered, and the shields flickered. Women died, and men. Irks died.
But …
The choir held. The will was distracted; swords were eating at its base in the real, and its shield of flexible adamantine had become porous. It began to change its priorities, and orders flowed through the aethereal as its millions of component beings demanded, ordered, shouted, received …
Mortirmir found what he sought; and in the haze of communications that the Odine used to master themselves, he and his choir deciphered. Analyzed.
Prepared.
If the duel had been with swords, then all the attacks, all the lightning, all the fireballs, all the swords would have been an attack in an outside line.
A feint.
Mortirmir gathered every shred of power remaining to his choir.
His chessboard was empty. His wall of diagrams was complete. He didn’t even have time to savour the moment at which he was either triumphant or annihilated.
He cast. A single pulse, a single ray of light. Or perhaps a single musical note. Or perhaps a single colour. A texture. An emotion.
He cast it on what he had perceived as the moment in the spectrum wherein the Odine’s components communicated, and he sustained it .…
In the real, the worm of worms began to collapse like an undermined tower in a siege; slowly at first, like a wounded man subsiding, and then …
… then the worms were everywhere, writhing like larvae, mouths pulsing. Swords took a few; arrows snapped through the air and nipped others, but the effect was like that of a single gardener attacking a forest. And the knights and men-at-arms were buried in the collapse, the grotesque unmaking of the Odine into its components, but the components themselves were still deadly.
Gabriel felt the dissolution and knew, too, that the moment had come.
He went into the palace.
“Don’t!” Pru said.
He spun, pointing. Spun again, and siphoned the gold of his own burning will into his working. Complex, layered, with limitations and stops and buffers he’d learned and mastered until he raised one arm.
In the real he said, “Fiat Lux.”
There was a flash. Thunder rolled, and Gabriel still stood in the worlds of the real, shining with unshadowed gold.
From his outstretched hand to the pylons of the gate, and beyond, the earth was clear except for a fine grey dust that lingered, and the sun lit it in brilliant shafts.
Outside the circle of his choice, millions of the worms writhed in the sunlight and could offer no hermetical response.
The gate was clear. The golden pedestal stood where he had expected it to be. Gabriel walked forward, the metal sabatons on his feet crunching against the tiny fragments of desiccated worms as he walked.
Tom Lachlan was beside him, and Sauce. The company was in chaos; intermixed, knights and men-at-arms, archers and pages spread over hundreds of paces of ground, most of them ferociously stomping, cutting, or kicking.
Lachlan looked angry.
Gabriel managed a smile.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” he said. “There’s still an army of bogglins. And the dragon.”
“Oh aye,” Bad Tom said. “Fuck.” He shuddered. “I hate worms.”
Gabriel laughed. It was a good laugh. He hadn’t ever imagined that Tom Lachlan hated anything.
He was still chuckling when he got to the pedestal, and found the key inside his breastplate. He had to drop his gauntlets to fumble it out. His hands were shaking so badly that he had to pause and breathe. His knees were weak; his heart pounded.
All for this, he thought. Please, God, let me have been right. Please. I will not brag or be smug or claim I figured it all out. Just let me be right.
It was the most complex gate yet: six stops on the plaque, and none closed.
But only one of them could be the right one. The green jewel, on the far left; the one already burning, because, of course, the will had been trying to force its way through.
He turned the key.
His shaking hand reached out to press the gem.
It would not push.
Please. Please. Damn it.
Nothing.
An exhausted Mortirmir appeared in his memory palace, standing beside Pru. And there was Tancreda and Petrarcha and the rest of the surviving choir.
“It is locked from the other side,” Mortirmir said carefully. “Miriam must have been holding it against the will all this time.”
Gabriel felt a rush of frustration almost as intense as physical pain.
He put his right hand, physical flesh, on the jewel. Hello? he called into the void.
And Desiderata replied, Gabriel!