Chapter Seventeen

Tom Lachlan sprang through the gate with the whole line at his back, and with Petrarcha pouring ops into the casa’s great golden shield as they advanced, and a firework of potent sorceries rolled off the old scholar as he went forward just behind Cully, his head up and his hands opening and closing like a puppet master working marionettes. It was dark, and there was snow in the air, and Tom had somehow expected to arrive in the cellars below the abbey; instead, he was fighting between two great bloodstained pylons of yellow-white, his sword flickering effortlessly through crowds of unmotivated not-dead.

On the other side of the gate, where it was warmer and the sun shone, Ser Michael was rebuilding the army in a parade ground voice. The gate gapped, with a vision of snow-laced darkness, just as, a hundred paces away, Tom Lachlan’s fight was illuminated strangely by the sunlit day pouring through the gate behind him, lighting the falling snow in a most unnatural way.

The will collapsed, its constituents struggling for supremacy. Thousands of worms and larvae fled, on the ground, virtually vanishing into the falling snow.

Petrarcha cast a rolling fire that cleared the ground of both snow and Odine, at least closer in.

In the aethereal, Ash reached out and began to subsume the power of the massed wills of the Odine. He needed the power, to replace all that he had used and squandered, but the subsumation of the scattered wills of the Odine was not like taking a single defeated entity, and it took time.

Blue Berry of the Long Dam Clan had fought all day, and her fur was clotted with blood and other fluids, and her gold was dimmed to a dingy brown, and she had a bad wound all down her left side, the slash of a cave troll’s stone axe. But she and her clan had stood their ground with the duchess and held her flank until the very end.

And the men had come, and freed them from the trap.

It was all very well for men to offer them food, and she ate well, but as the darkness deepened, she wanted trees over her head, and to be away from the open sky and the falling snow, which made her, and all her kin, sleepy. Together they loped west, their axes on their backs, into the debatable ground between Penrith and the woods. There were men there, where the ancient road rose up four feet above the fields on either side; and Blue Berry could see other men landing from boats to the south, and more snow coming into the east. But she craved the safety of the woods, and she and her clan went into the open trees at the edge, where in better times men kept pigs and all the undergrowth was clear; and when she was under the branches of the huge old maples, she relaxed.

But she kept going, moving carefully, because the woods were not clear of enemies and the fields to the east were now beginning to fill with bogglins and worse. Blue Berry led her bears north, avoiding combat; looking for a huddle of fallen trees or a little cave to spend the night.

After an hour of steady moving, she found a fire, and a little cautious exploration showed that there were men at the fire. Blue Berry had little trust in men, but much experience, and she liked the look of the two caves the men had found.

She motioned with a paw and her warriors went flat in the snow. Then she approached carefully, until she was challenged by a sentry, a young knight with a heavy crossbow cradled in his freezing-cold arms under a heavy cloak.

“Halt!” the young human cried. “Identify yourself.”

She gave a growl. “I am Blue Berry of the Long Dam Clan,” she said. “I have fought all year alongside men.”

“Galahad!” roared the boy.

Before the ice on her paws between her long toes could harden uncomfortably, another man came. He bowed to her, and she thought she might recognize him.

“I knew Flint,” he said. “I am Ser Galahad d’Acon.”

“Ah, the gallant Galahad,” purred Blue Berry. “I come to share, grrrr, your caves.”

Gabriel nodded. “Come and join us.”

The crowd of fighters who had cleared the gate were tired, and Bad Tom pulled them back; he had not lost a one, but he was troubled by the worms and the snow.

Ser Michael replaced them with the scarecrows. The whole phalanx came through the gate very quickly and formed a hollow square, covering the opening of the gate.

The snow squall ended. Moonlight fell on snow; to the west, a long line of clouds marched in, presaging worse weather, but for the moment, there were stars.

The Duchess of Venike shrugged into a fur-lined khaftan held by her servants. Edmund Chevin’s hand gonners were filing through the gate and gazing around in astonishment, and then Ser Michael was there with her, and Sauce.

“It is fucking cold,” muttered Sauce. “Hello, honey,” she said, kissing the duchess.

Michael bowed.

Sauce stepped back, snapping orders, as the Venikan marines began to move through the gate, followed by her other Etruscan infantry.

“The emperor will come through in person in a few minutes,” Michael said. “We’ll eat and sleep in shifts—back there. It’s too damned cold here.” He was already shivering.

The duchess nodded. “How long?” she asked.

“Two hours,” Michael said. “Tom Lachlan says to watch for worms and not-dead.”

The duchess nodded. “Can I take some ground?” she asked. “There’s a house over there, and farm fields, and a hill …”

“We need someone who’s been here before,” Michael said. He shivered again.

And then the emperor was there; he came through the gate on foot, and Anne Woodstock was leading Ariosto, who was beaming at her.

“I’ve been here before,” Gabriel said. “This is Lady Helewise’s back garden; what a lot of blood. You can tell Tom’s been here, can’t you? Giselle, there’s a ridge just there, to the west. Take it and clear all the ground from there to here. Sauce? I’m going for a fly. Don’t lose the gate. And someone stay awake; I’ll want a drink when I come back.” He grinned. “We did it!”

He swung up into the high-backed saddle. He was grinning ear to ear, and Sauce found that she was grinning, too.

“We did it,” she shouted at him.

“We certainly did,” he said, and then the griffon leapt into the freezing air.

Outside Lissen Carak—Gavin Muriens

It was colder atop the ridge than down in the valley, but the view was better. Gavin was very cold, and he had no one to blame for it but himself; his cloak was somewhere with the camp, away down by Southford.

But there was a line of huge fires along the top of the hill, as much to rally the army as to warm it, and he had a stool, and he sat with his back to one fire and his face to the battlefield. Now that the snow squall had passed, he could see Penrith, still burning, in the distance; closer in, he could see the smoking ruins of Woodhull to the northwest, now full of bogglins, and the church steeple of Saint Mary’s almost due north, at Ambles Inn. He could not find the inn itself. At the foot of his ridge, directly to the north, lay Livingston Hall, which had been the scene of brutal fighting since late afternoon; even now, another clutch of daemons attempted to storm it in darkness.

The Prince of Occitan was there in person. It would hold, or all the world would fall.

And behind him were the suburbs and walls of Albinkirk, and the enemy had made two attempts on it since darkness. So the enemy held a huge semicircle, from Penrith to almost Southford. Gavin was surprised, and pleased, to find that the enemy’s army was almost countable; he reckoned it not in numbers but in frontage. Today they’d stretched Ash’s forces over almost fifteen miles, and in that kind of fighting, good armour and good training had repeatedly overcome ferocity and predation.

But now they were being pushed into shorter lines. Tomorrow, Ash would come with his terrible fire, and Gavin would have no response.

“What I want to do,” the Green Earl said, “is attack.”

“Attack?” Gregario asked. “Aren’t we a little thin on the ground?”

“It worked today,” Gavin said. “Listen, if 1Exrech turns around and faces the other way, he’ll be looking out toward the walls of Albinkirk. He could cut the enemy off; force Ash into a fight under the walls.”

“Where our folk are protected from most of his sorcery,” Gregario said.

Mogon nodded. “How do you people deal with this cold?” she said slowly. “I should have stayed in the burning town and spent the night killing bogglins. Freezing to death seems a poor way to go.”

A cup of steaming apple cider was put in Gavin’s hand.

Lady Tamsin was smiling like a girl at Christmas. She grinned at him, her fangs showing.

“You look better,” Gavin said.

“Wait,” she said.

He drank the cider. “Anyone want to comment on my attack?”

“It’s an excellent idea,” a voice said.

Gavin knew that voice. He rose, cold forgotten, and whirled into a steel-clad embrace.

“You bastard!” Gavin said, pounding his brother’s back.

“Probably,” Gabriel said.

At Lady Helewise’s manor house, the duchess and Sauce had a brief discussion, and then the scarecrows formed with crossbowmen on either flank and crunched off across the snow, headed north. Almost immediately they came across irks and bogglins, also moving. Sauce threw in some of Conte Simone’s knights, and the thing was done; the bogglins fled, and even the irks ran, panicked, scarce believing what had suddenly come at them out of the snow.

They fled away north, into the eaves of the great wood along the Lily Burn, and there they rallied, for they were a great host all by themselves, and there they prepared to counterattack.

But Galahad’s sentries were alert, and his camp turned out, unaware of how close they were to the center of events. The fugitives tried to overrun the men and bears by sheer numbers. The fighting along the northern Lily Burn became general in the frozen dark.

Tapio and Blizzard and Aneas gave up trying to get into Lessen Carak before they really made an attempt; the enemy were so thick in the lines that Tapio allowed Blizzard to lead them east, to the Lilywindle, and before darkness they were at the new bridge at North Ford, which marked the uttermost northern limit of the world of men, and the southernmost border of the Wild, at least in these parts.

“There used to be a trail along the banks of the Lily Burn,” Blizzard said.

Now Nita Qwan stepped forward. “I was here three years ago,” he said. “If I do not lose my way in the snow, I know where there’s a trail just the other side of the bridge.” He shook his head ruefully. “I feel I have come full circle,” he said.

Tapio shook his head. “But why?” he asked.

Magister Nikos pointed. “Because the greatest battle of our lifetimes, even yours, my prince, is being fought right there.” He pointed south and east. “Desiderata is holding Lissen Carak. The real fight will be in the fields below Albin Ridge.”

“I want Orley,” Aneas said.

“I want victory,” Tapio said. “I want thisss to end. I want Tamsssin in my arms.” He grinned, and his fangs showed. “I want to kill Asssh.”

They started south, moving single file along the path of the Lily Burn in the moonlight. Aneas was tired, but he had now been tired for so long that he couldn’t really remember any other way to be; Irene cradled her crossbow in the moonlight. Her heart was hammering, wondering, as she was wont to, whether she really loved this or had made herself love it; and ahead of them, Tapio rode on his great elk, singing quietly to himself of his lady Tamsin.

When they had gone a mile, there was a sharp snow squall, and Tapio felt something like a blow in the aethereal. He motioned, and all his people dismounted and lay with their mounts in the new snow; but the feeling passed, and Tapio wanted, with all his heart, to go into the aethereal and find Tamsin, and see what he could see. But this force, even this small force of men and irks and bears, might yet have a role to play, and he kept them quiet and secret, forbidding his knights access even to the simplest of warming spells.

But he paused and listened to the aethereal as often as he could, and then, while he was listening, he heard not the tinkle of his beloved’s magical bells, but the sharper sounds of dying creatures and weapons striking shields. It was close, but not close; almost due east.

There was no one to ask but his own knights, and their eagerness told him what he wanted to know, so he turned, looking south for a moment. The Flow, the largest pool on the Lily Burn, lay just south of him, covering his flank. He turned east into open spruce trees, a veritable cathedral of magnificent straight trunks stripped by generations of foresters of their dead lower branches, rows and rows, with little underbrush and only a dusting of snow.

His knights began to spread out in an open line, and behind him, Aneas brought on the Galles and the rangers, and Blizzard brought the bears, silent and purposeful in the sudden snowfall. The mounted Galles, only a handful, pressed forward and joined Tapio’s knights, and the two dozen of them made more noise than all the irks, but there was no foe to contest the woods, and they began to cross their second thousand paces since they had left the trail, a long line that glittered in the pale moonlight like steel-clad ghosts crossing the snow under the ancient trees, the breath of the horses and elk like the smoke of a hundred dragons, the starlight on the golden fur of the bears and their sharp axes.

And then he could see the enemy: hundreds of irks in a shield wall, and a wash of bogglins and other creatures. They were calling to each other, and there was a golden helmet gleaming in the moonlight.

For a heartbeat, Tapio’s eyes had a feral beauty, and his features transformed in the moonlight, and his elk seemed to grow, and every spike on the great animal’s magnificent rack began to glitter with its sharpness.

Tapio reined in with nothing but his mind and the weight of his body, and his elk reared, pawing the air, and all along the line of Faery Knights, they raised their silver and ivory oliphants, and the cold night air was filled with the hunting horns of Faery, and the irks facing the scarecrows were suddenly filled with fear.

Almost five miles away, Gabriel was just embracing his brother on the top of the Albin Ridge when he heard the low, eldritch music. He looked off into the darkness a long time.

“Penrith is no longer the axis of our lines,” he said. “Tapio has entered the field.”

And Tamsin began to cry, for joy.

Gabriel looked at her. “Stop that, or I’ll be doing it in a minute,” he said.

“I’ve never seen you grin like that,” Gavin said.

Gabriel embraced him again. “We did it!” Gabriel said.

Gavin was still trying to adjust to this. “Christ. We almost lost everything yesterday. We … I …”

Gabriel was walking around the fire, shaking hands, and embracing Tamsin, and in the background, Ariosto was slurping down the entrails of a sheep, his beak raised to the heavens.

Tastes like home, he sent.

And then the reality of it struck Gavin. And then he threw his arms around his brother again, and said “God damn it, Gabriel, I thought you weren’t coming. I thought … I thought this was one of your stupid schemes; that we’d have to hold it ourselves.”

Gabriel nodded. “Good,” he said. “You almost did have to. And God helps those who help themselves.” He put his hands together, and his grin was almost demonic. “Now let’s put it all together,” he said. “I intend to win this in the real, with as few casualties as can be managed. But first …”

Tamsin was quivering, and Gabriel put a hand on her arm.

“You want to find him in the aethereal?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “But we cannot reveal our position to Ash …”

Gabriel nodded. “That’s over now,” he said. “Who else do you have here? The Patriarch?”

“Yes,” she said.

The emperor went to the Patriarch and knelt in the snow and kissed his ring. Then he rose and took their hands, and he reached into the aethereal, and he took the hand of Queen Desiderata, and Magister Petrarcha, of Tancreda and Mortirmir, of Master Grammarian Nikos and of Kwoqwethogan. There were dozens of others; there was the entirety of the choir of the abbey; there was the new Archbishop of Lorica on the floor of his cathedral in Albinkirk, and there was Tapio. And there was Desiderata.

And Gabriel held them all in his mind, and he threw open the gate outside his memory palace, and he said, ASH.

In the cold darkness, Ash was watching victory and the taste was remarkable—like food after aeons of hunger. His enemies thought the day was over; he was preparing to show them how many of his slaves could fight in the dark. If he traded twenty for one …

ASH

In that moment, Ash felt the full weight of his error. It was as if he had been blind, and suddenly was able to see.

What he could see was the power of the choir facing him, which he had only ever known as a divided set of individuals, and the leader of the choir burned a solid gold in the aethereal, and Ash quailed.

“Lot? Is that you?” he asked.

And Gabriel laughed. “Ash. I have crossed seven worlds and won the gates. Your cause is lost. Surrender to our mercy.”

Ash looked at them, from one to another. He was looking for weakness; for division; for hatred or contempt or any flaw. But when he looked at them, he saw nothing but the walls of golden bricks that Desiderata had taught them, and they showed him his lone image reflected back twenty, thirty times.

“Surrender?” He laughed. He was silent a long time, and then he spoke carefully, as if considering them all. “You are nothing. In a generation you will done, and nothing will be left of you but the wind. The gates will be open for years, and I will be here waiting for your alliance to collapse. The irks will fight the men, and the men will hunt the bears, and the Outwallers will rise to old grievances, and I will be here to make sure you all drown in your own blood for daring to impede me.”

And Gabriel said, “All that may be. All that you say is my greatest fear, so I thank you for threatening it; men’s memories are helped by such terrible words. But today, I have a great army; the greatest army that any being has assembled here since the Empress Livia passed the gates. And I have a choir of magisters who are your match. And I say to you: Dragon, surrender, or we will end you. I offer no other choice; no condition, no bargain, no truce. Surrender to our mercy, and allow us into your mind. Or we will make an end of you.”

“I cannot die. At best, you will force me into the immaterium.” The dragon’s voice betrayed his fear.

In a pocket of the real, the word mind keyed something. Gabriel had an odd sensation, so that he looked around, as if he’d heard a hail, or a call for help, or a woman’s scream.

He went back into the aethereal. He made his avatar’s face take on a lazy smile. “Are you sure?” he asked. “If I were you, I would wonder how this all came to be. How I came, as a being that can transcend reality, to have lost a war so thoroughly to a mob of mortal rag pickers.” Gabriel nodded. “Perhaps you are losing your mind,” he said.

(Again, the word mind. Again, a call; this time he felt it in the aethereal, a sort of substrate under the voice of the dragon.)

“I am the lord of this world,” Ash said. “I will do with it as I please, and no mortal hand will keep me from the least of my desires. And I have subsumed the Odine, and you have no idea of my power. I could break this world and kill you all.”

Desiderata laughed. “You dream dark dreams,” she said. “You can no more break this world than I can.”

“I spit on your pitiful offer of surrender,” Ash said.

Gabriel nodded. “I knew you would,” he said.

(He knew that note now. It was Harmodius. The instinct to aid him was stronger than revulsion or fear, and he extended a tendril of his thought …

The non-moment seemed to stretch into an eternity of possibilities. The aethereal was, at best, a chaotic place full of paradox and ambiguity and immeasurable essence; now, Gabriel, standing on a hill in the real, was simultaneously on the featureless plane with his allies, and sitting in the firelit sitting room of his own memory palace, where there was now a tall, fit young man in hunting clothes. And he was also inside the mind of the dragon, Ash, and also outside it, looking at it from the point of view of Desiderata, and he was also aware of another presence, a strong light at the edge of his vision.

Harmodius laughed, clearly shaken. “Well. I’m here.” In one instant, all his nightmare experience in the mind of the dragon was laid bare.

Gabriel bowed. “You are in his mind?”

“We are,” Harmodius said. “Ah. Thanks for the rest.” He stretched. “Do not trust Lot. That’s my last word to you.”

“Who is we?” Gabriel asked into the timelessness.

“I am the lion,” Harmodius said. “And my former mentor is now the Thorn.”

And then he was gone.

Gabriel, who did not fully understand, sighed in the timelessness and returned to the immediate reality of the aethereal.)

“Who are you?” Ash asked.

“I am your nemesis,” Gabriel said. Even in the aethereal, his voice was resonant with grim humour. “That is all I am. Surrender, Ash.”

“I will destroy you,” Ash said.

“You are already defeated,” Gabriel said. “You were done in the moment the gates opened. I offer you the preservation of your self, and the ability, perhaps, to wait out the aeons of our supremacy and perhaps effect your own restoration. I offer this freely, because I offer mercy, in hopes that you might change.”

Ash laughed. “This is hubris, personified. You, an insect, offer me, a god, your mercy?”

Gabriel nodded. “We, the allied insects, offer you our mercy.”

“I still spit on it,” Ash said.

“Good,” said Gabriel. “You are better dead. And tomorrow we will defeat you utterly. Once more! Spare the thousands who will die tomorrow. Surrender to our mercy.”

“They are insects, as you are an insect. Why would I spare them? It is the way of the worlds, that the insects serve the will of the mighty.” Ash laughed.

Gabriel nodded. “Then tomorrow, you will be killed and eaten by insects,” he said. “So be it.”

In his sitting room, there was Desiderata, and there was Gabriel.

“Harmodius is Ash’s mind,” Gabriel said. “Do you think he has another body stored somewhere?”

“No. If Askepiles’s body was destroyed yesterday, he has nowhere to go,” Desiderata said sadly. “He has nowhere else to go.”

“I thought of offering him sanctuary,” Gabriel said. “He did not seem to want it, and he is a puissant ally, placed where he is. And I may very shortly be nowhere myself.” Gabriel thought he ought to be appalled, but actually, he found the old wizard’s placement a comfort.

“It is clear to me that you are at the very edge of transformation,” Desiderata said. “I … don’t know what to say.”

“Imagine what I think,” Gabriel said with an aethereal smile.

Desiderata met his smile. “To me, it is fitting. Perhaps God has a sense of humour.”

They both laughed. But then Gabriel spoke bitterly.

“I’d like people to stop saying that it is fitting,” Gabriel spat. “I would happily live a long time, raise a lot of babies, and indulge in a host of the sins of the flesh. I am no saint; I lack any of Amicia’s qualities. I am a killer. Why is this happening to me?”

“Ask a priest,” Desiderata said. “That it is happening is beyond doubt. I would be sorry for you, but in this space it seems I ought to be sorrier for Blanche. What will she do? I cannot imagine.”

“I have made arrangements for her,” Gabriel snapped. And then, relenting, “She will be a very powerful woman,” Gabriel said. “Enough of my personal life. Are you ready?”

“I have the well and the choir,” Desiderata said. “With the knights around me in the real, Lissen Carak is invincible.”

“The last few days have made me doubt that anything is invincible,” Gabriel said. “Very well. Go with God, as they say.”

And Desiderata came and kissed him, in the aethereal. “My, my,” she said.

Gabriel laughed.

Ash’s rage shot into the aethereal and into the sky above the ruins of the inn.

A forest of shields snapped into place over the alliance, showing their army in an arc from Helewise’s manor house, to Penrith, to the Albin Ridge and across to Albinkirk; green and gold and sometimes deep blue or red. There was a sudden cheer from the soldiers; men and women, freezing in the snow, saw the solid shields and knew that there had been a profound change in the battle.

“What now?” Gavin asked.

“Now we rest. And move troops. And in the morning, we go in and get him.” Gabriel nodded.

“What are you not telling me?” Gavin asked.

“Quite a bit, Gavin. But none of it matters.” Gabriel glanced at his hand to make sure that Morgon’s protections were holding, but the hand appeared merely human and so did his face, when he looked at his distorted reflection in his light steel vambrace.

“Won’t he attack in the dark?” Gavin asked.

Gabriel shrugged. “He can. But now we have the hermetical edge. He’ll be better off in the morning.”

“How can you be so sure?” asked Gavin, with something of his old, brotherly annoyance.

Gabriel was looking north. “Do you remember my sword master’s definition of a battle?”

Gavin nodded. “When two commanders both think they can win, and only one of them is right,” he said.

Gabriel nodded. “He couldn’t break you yesterday,” the emperor said. “And now you have forty thousand more men, and Mortirmir, and me.” Gabriel glanced at his brother in the firelight, and raised an eyebrow. “It’ll be hard, and bloody. Ash will want to be sure we pay dearly for it. But this time tomorrow, we’ll be done.”

Gavin thought his brother sounded sad.

Then he came over. “Listen, Gavin,” he said. “You performed … a miracle. You kept it together. I can’t believe how many men you got here. You might have held Ash by yourselves.” Gabriel smiled. “Don’t be jealous that I came and stole your victory. I know who the architect of it was.”

Gavin nodded. Then he grinned.

“We did it, didn’t we?” he said. “The plan.”

“The plan. Even Aneas did his bit,” Gabriel said. “It should make a good song.”

When he was gone, Gavin realized that his brother had, as usual, avoided answering his question. What are you not telling me?

Just before dawn, the snow started again. It came in from the west: big flakes, full of ash from the volcanoes, or so some of the old weather women said. Edmund Chevin had marched his hand gonners through the light snow, right along the edge of the Lily Burn woods; their cavalry escort had to fight twice, but the hand gonners had moved on, unimpeded. Well before the first tendrils of dawn, they’d passed behind the ruins of Penrith, and Edmund and his vanguard had shifted the stones of the church steeple, collapsed across the road, so that there was enough of a lane to roll their three falconets through the gap.

And then they marched in the moonlight along the black ribbon of the ancient road toward Albinkirk. Half a mile on, they found hundreds of workmen unloading boats. Edmund heard the voice he was seeking, and he ran past the long line of wheeled tubes to Master Pye, who was directing the swaying up of a great gonne barrel on a heavy oak tripod with a set of pulleys, by torchlight. The tube went up about five feet, and then the gonne’s carriage, a two-wheeled contraption, was pushed by boys too young to be on a battlefield; they grunted, and shouted, and the carriage rolled up over two chocks to stop precisely where Master Pye wanted it; but then he measured, quickly; and then the great tube was lowered by men on the ropes, inch by inch, as Master Pye embraced the young man who had once been the lowliest of his apprentices and was now one of the emperor’s war captains.

The gonne’s cast-bronze trunnions dropped into the grooves made for them in the carriage.

Two boys leapt up and put the trunnion guards across the trunnions and hammered home iron keys, and the lethal monster, the muzzle cast like a raging dragon, was rolled away into the darkness and snow.

“Thirty-seven,” Master Pye said. “I could only complete thirty-seven of the fifty that were commissioned.” He shrugged. “Mold problems, for the most part, and a certain hesitancy by my brother-in-law to supply the arsenic for my bronze.” He shrugged. “But what was really interesting was how easy it was to change the casting point of the molten bronze by adding—”

“Master?” Edmund had never interrupted his master before, but the world, he was told, hung in the balance. “Master, I’m very interested in how the gonnes were cast, but I have brought you a thousand men and women.”

“A thousand men? Are they intelligent? Are they strong?” Pye smiled.

“Yes,” Edmund said.

“For the shop?” Master Pye asked, and his smile was knowing.

“For the war, master. To serve the gonnes. I trained them; that is, Duke and Tom and I trained them. Just as we said we would.” Edmund bowed, and waved his arm at his gonners, who stood in three ranks on the road.

Master Pye walked over and looked at them.

He looked back at Edmund.

“Master Swynford made the paper,” he said. “And from it we folded cartridges. Master Donne’s shop made the powder from the chemicals Master Gower found for us. Mistress Benn made the ironwork. Master Landry cast the gonnes. Six hundred out-of-work weavers and furriers helped make the carriages.” He shook his head. “It is the largest project I have ever undertaken, on the shortest notice, and I have learned so much …” He was looking over the men and women who stood in the ranks; all in neat black wool cotes and caps, with hose striped; some plain, and some fantastically adorned. The magnificent hose had become a sign of the gonners, a brag, a complement to the sober and powder-stained jackets.

“But you have made the people,” he said. He walked up to a woman, a tall, pretty woman with pouting lips and two heavy gold earrings. “Miss?”

“Master,” she said with a heavy Etruscan accent.

Pye nodded and switched to Low Archaic. “If I were to ask you what weight of powder would throw a six-pound iron ball five hundred paces?” he asked.

She bowed, her unease visible even in moonlight. “Master, I can’t say.” She looked anxious. “Master, I would have to know many things: the length of the barrel, the quality of the poudre. And with a strange gonne …” She shrugged. “I would start with one half a bag, just to see how she throws.”

“Are they all this good?” Pye asked his former apprentice.

Edmund grinned at the tall woman. “No, Master. Sabina is especially talented. A wonderful cook, an excellent gonner. They are not all so good.”

Pye bowed to the woman. “You may come to my yard anytime, mademoiselle,” he said.

She flushed, and bowed her head in pleasure, and Pye walked along the ranks, making his odd, technical small talk with a number of the gonners; he embraced Duke and Tom.

Then he stopped, looking at the three falconets now dwarfed by the mighty cannons and the sakers and demi-cannon. “You brought them all the way?” he asked, amazed.

Duke couldn’t resist. “Master, last night we shot them on another world.”

“And before that, another world yet,” said Tom.

Master Pye shook his head. “Well,” he said. “Well, well.” He was grinning. “What artifice and the hand of man can do, we’ve done. Now you must take them into action.”

Edmund hesitated. “Me?” he asked.

Pye frowned. “Of course you,” he said. “You are now the master. I have fired one of these—the great cannon. Once. You have made all these men and women, and you have commanded them in battle. This is your art, your craft. Please take command.”

Edmund looked around, unable to speak. Finally he said, “But, Master Pye …”

But his master was already walking away, shouting orders about unloading the prepared cartridges.

Edmund shrugged. He glanced at Duke, who winked.

“Right,” Edmund said. “Now we need forty crews. Tom, get the weights of the gonnes and tell off the crews.”

“Saint Barbara!” muttered Tom. “Do we have forty gonne captains?” he asked.

Edmund nodded. “I’m sure we do,” he said. “And if we don’t now, we have until dawn to practice.”

Hawissa Swynford was wakened from her cloak between two warm mates by the off-going watch—Bill Stouffy.

“Fucking creepy,” Stouffy said. “Snowin’.” He shrugged. “Come on, Hawi. Yer turn. I wanna’ get some shut-eye.”

Swynford wanted more sleep more than anything in the world. She had been so warm.

She got up. They were in a shed—a furrier’s shed for storing furs—and the roof had somehow survived sorcery and dragon fire. She got her feet under her and groaned a fair amount, but she felt better than she had in days, and better still when Sarah Goody put a steaming cup of chicken soup in her hand.

She drank the hot soup, scalding her tongue, chewing on the chicken bits automatically. Her sword was ruined; she had a dagger …

Stouffy was already deep in the piles of furs and cloaks. “Arrers,” he said. “Bales o’ they. Stacked on the north side o’ the shed. Nighty-night.”

Swynford went out into the icy darkness, where the snow was now coming down steadily, and found the arrows, in neat bags with spacers, all stacked against the back wall under the overhang. She took a sack, opened the end, and withdrew one. It had the Royal Armoury mark on the head, over the broken circle of Master Pye.

She kissed it. And dropped the whole bag into her open quiver.

Then she buckled on her heavy belt and pulled her cloak over her kit and ducked into the snow.

Collingford was waiting for her, and they checked their sentries: half a dozen cold and tired men and women staring out at the snow. Then they went north along the edge of the town. There were still fires burning, and the snow was mostly ice melt here; terrible on the feet.

“Should be milice here,” she said. She moved carefully, and Collingford spanned his crossbow. It wasn’t a war bow, which he had across his back, but a light arbalest; the sort of thing a fine lady might use to shoot birds. Collingford liked it because he could carry it cocked and ready.

Swynford wished she had one. The darkness was wrong and the snow only made it worse. She moved carefully, her feet freezing in the icy water, the fires flickering like a vision of hell through the snow.

She saw a shadow of movement, and she froze and put a shaft on her bowstring, the horn nock gripping the waxed string. “Halt!” she called.

“Halt!” the shadow spat back.

There was a noise; a sound of steel scraping on rock.

“Advance and be recognized!” shouted Swynford.

The figure emerged from the snow like a conjuror’s trick: a tall man in good armour.

Swynford knew him immediately: Gareth Montjoy, the Count of the Borders. She sank to one knee.

He stepped forward, and there was a heavy dagger in his fist, and his face was utterly blank, and one eye was gone. He moved swiftly, but Collingford was faster, and he put his light shaft in the earl’s other eye. Then he stepped forward, his heavy forester’s cutlass in his hand, and in one fear-fueled swing, he beheaded the stumbling, blind thing and saw the worm emerge from dead earl’s neck.

Swynford was running on training alone; she drew the short mallet from her belt, the one she used for pounding stakes, and smashed the count’s neck repeatedly until the worm was worm paste.

Then she whimpered a little.

Then she hugged Collingford. “Thanks,” she said.

“Think nothing of it,” he said. “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” she agreed, and took the dead count’s beautiful arming sword. She started to walk away, trembling in every limb, but even in the grip of terror, she was a veteran; she went back to the messy corpse and took the belt and scabbard, too.

Collingford was already sounding the alarm on his horn.

Dawn was almost in the sky, to the emperor, a thousand feet in the icy air. He could see the first flush of colour away to the east, but there was an hour or more before it would reach the ground. The Odine were contained—the surprise had failed, if it had even been an attempt, and not the kick of a corpse—and his preparations were made.

It was all done.

Tomorrow? Ariosto asked.

Today, brother, Gabriel replied.

Whatever, Ariosto said. I will achieve my full growth today.

I thought you were bigger, Gabriel said.

Ariosto laughed.

They landed by the gate, and Jon Gang took Ariosto with Hamwise, and there were half a dozen fat Alban sheep waiting with fully justified terror, bleating their last.

Do you ever consider that in the universe of sheep, you are the ultimate villain? Gabriel asked.

No, Ariosto said. Should I?

Absolutely not, Gabriel said.

He dismounted, and walked wearily through the gate, waving at the sentries and the murmured “good nights” of his people.

His great red pavilion was set up just inside the gate. It was instantly warm; a pleasant night, and he walked into the pavilion to find every evidence that there had been a fine party. Tom Lachlan was asleep, his head down on the table, snoring, with Sukey sprawled in the next chair; Anne Woodstock lay with her head in Toby’s lap on the carpet; and Michael lay asleep with Kaitlin’s head on his shoulder and their daughter between them. Master Nicodemus was asleep; Mortirmir was asleep with Tancreda by him, an untouched cup of wine in her hand; Francis Atcourt was stretched full length on the far side of the table from Toby; de Beause appeared awake at first, but he had fallen asleep in his armour.

Gabriel looked around at all of them, and his first thought of annoyance was replaced with a simple warmth. He wanted to cry. It was an absurd feeling.

And then Blanche was there. “I stayed awake,” she said softly. “I hoped you would come back.”

“You are a wise maiden,” he said.

“There is, in fact, still oil in my lamp,” she said.

“Is that a double entendre?” he asked.

“Did you want me to help you with your armour?” she asked. “Or just walk off and leave you to your fate?”

And a few quiet moments later, he had a hand on her belly and was listening to his son or daughter move.

“You should sleep,” she said.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to sleep,” he said. “I want this cup taken from me. I want time to stop.”

She kissed him. “At least, if we cannot make time stand still,” she said, “we can make him run.”

He laughed. “I love you,” he said.

She laughed with sadness, because weeping would waste time.

Sunset. The long, pleasant sunset of the last world; a world cleared of predators by the Odine. Through the gate, Gabriel could just see snow falling from the open doors of his red pavilion. Today the emperor’s pavilion was almost empty, and he stood in the vast red space while Jon Gang and Hamwise and Woodstock put him in his newly polished golden armour. His officers came through and there was little talk—an embrace or a handshake, and not much more. Ser Michael came in and took a whetstone and sharpened his dagger.

Morgon Mortirmir came in and stood watching them. “I finished felling the weapons,” he said. “It’s done. All the casa. Most of the company. Really, all of them, but some of them wanted daggers as well as spears, and I’m not—”

“Morgon,” Gabriel said.

The young magister flushed.

“We’ve defeated the shadow, the will, and the rebel,” he said. “We’ll win.”

Mortirmir nodded. His hands were shaking.

Gabriel went and took them.

Mortirmir suddenly embraced his captain. “You are so close,” he murmured.

“I know,” Gabriel said.

“Don’t cast. You can never cast again. You must not …”

Gabriel’s smile was distinctly unsaintly. “We’ll see,” he said.

“I should touch up your … disguise,” Mortirmir said.

“Save it,” Gabriel said. “In a few minutes, I will cut it free.”

“You will burn like a torch,” Mortirmir said.

Gabriel nodded. “Yep,” he said.

In the end, he shook hands with his squire and his pages.

“Kneel, Anne,” he said. He knighted her, with Ser Michael standing close by, and Sauce just coming into the pavilion.

She couldn’t stop herself from crying, and she was mortified, which made the emperor smile.

Then he stepped out into the sunset of this world and knighted a dozen more young men and women.

Lucca appeared with a pile of messages; Ser Michael started through them and gave a cough.

“Tell me,” Gabriel said.

“Towbray has stormed the palace in Harndon,” he said. “Lady Mary was left as a surrogate for the queen. It appears he killed her.” He looked stunned. “My fucking father,” he spat. “Christ, I feel unclean.”

“Michael, do not, I pray, take this personally. Michael!” Gabriel snapped as if the younger man were still his squire.

His first squire stiffened.

“I need you. Here. In command. Forget your father. He is nothing. This is the battle of our time.” Gabriel waved at the gate. “Fetch me Bad Tom, please.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Michael said. He went out to the tent, his face set.

“Lucca,” Gabriel said. “I need a favour.”

“Anything, my lord.”

“Go to Harndon and kill the Earl of Towbray. Don’t even make it look like an accident. And Lucca, if he ever asks you, tell Michael that I ordered it.” Gabriel smiled.

“Now, or after the battle?” Lucca asked.

“After will be fine, but do it,” Gabriel said.

“Ser Maria, my lord,” said Ser Anne Woodstock.

Gabriel spent a minute on his gauntlets, and then looked at his gold bascinet and sniffed the lining, which was very clean.

Anne showed him his sword. He touched it, making sure that it was sharp at the tip and dull where he liked to grab it when he was half-swording. He noted that it now bore a small Gothic letter M under Master Pye’s maker’s mark.

“Highness,” Ser Maria said, and made a full reverence. “Master Brown and Master Lucca and I have been made an offer.”

Master Brown, as unremarkable as ever, bowed. “My lord,” he said. “The salamanders have invited us to their home.”

Gabriel nodded. “Remarkable,” he said.

“I think so,” said Ser Maria.

“I have given Master Lucca a little task to accomplish first,” the emperor said with his most annoying smile. “I think both of you might accompany him. But then, yes, I think you should go with my writ and seal. Master Julius?”

“I’m writing,” he said. “Ambassador?”

“Perfect,” Gabriel said as Tom Lachlan entered and kissed Blanche. “Tar’s tits, Gabriel. You look like a fewkin’ angel.” Behind Tom, Sukey came in with a tablet in her hand, and she and Blanche kissed and then began to copy.

“That’s me,” Gabriel said. “Kneel, Ser Thomas. Sukey? Come. Kneel.”

Thomas Lachlan did not kneel easily; it took an effort of will, but he managed it, his great blue-black armoured knee crashing down. Sukey knelt with bony grace at his side.

Gabriel took his great sword of war, which was naked on the table. “Thomas Lachlan, I hereby vest you with the title of Earl of the North Wall, and the lands adjoining that wall and formerly owned by the Orleys, as well as the Imperial Barony of Birdeswald. And Sukey, I vest you in your own right as Imperial Count of Osawa. I recommend that you two get married and solidify all this feudal magnificence before I change my mind.” He grinned, and Sukey rose and gave him an almost unsisterly kiss, and then so did Bad Tom.

“Couldn’t that ha’e waited?” Tom asked.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I will leave my house in order, and my debts paid.” He blew a kiss to Blanche, who made herself smile.

They walked out into the fading sunlight of an alien world.

“What the hell did he mean by that?” Tom asked.

Blanche finally burst into tears.

Full dawn. To the west, heavy black clouds, like thunderheads, and behind them a leaden sky. To the east, a bright sunrise, and the red ball of the sun sitting on the Green Hills.

The emperor stood on the Albin Ridge with the Earl of Westwall and his officers. All the ground from the distant slopes of the Kanata ridge to the ruins of the Ambles Inn and the shattered steeple of Saint Mary’s was full of the enemy—a dense carpet of monsters.

The first attacks had been made at dawn, against the garrison of Livingston Manor. The cave trolls had discovered that Ser Ranald and the royal guard had moved in during the night, and they had the direct support of the entire choir of magistery up the hill behind them five hundred paces.

As the sun rose, and Gabriel flew slowly and carefully at very low altitudes along the line of the Lily Burn to the Cohocton and around to Ser Gavin’s position, a massive sorcerous assault shattered the outwalls of Albinkirk and discovered a nest of workings and a labyrinth of pre-dug defensive trenches behind the walls, and legions of bogglins flung themselves into the assault. Prince Tancred of Occitan and the new Captain of Albinkirk stood with almost a thousand knights and most of the militia who’d survived the day before and stopped the bogglins in the breach.

In the west, the man who’d once been Ota Qwan and more lately been Kevin Orley led his own horde over the smoking ruins of Hawks Head and Kentmere and across the fields, pushing back a skirmish line of rangers and militia archers and then advancing into the woods that lined all seven miles of the Lily Burn’s length. Orley and his master expected the Lily Burn to be unoccupied or thinly defended.

As the sun rose over the Green Hills, Orley’s first attack on the Lily Burn woods was stopped dead by Mogon. The fighting spread from the center, just south of the Flow, but as the enemy spread, they found ambush after ambush, and the icy waters were in flood and difficult to cross.

But Ash and his lieutenants had learned a great deal about war in the real. And so a second captain led all the schiltrons of irks, and tlachs of daemons west, into the low hills around Lady Helewise’s manor house, clever enough to know that their enemies coming through the gate would be trapped between the two pincers and destroyed, or neutralized.

But all of those were merely pinning attacks. None was Ash’s great effort.

Ash unleashed that as the sun rose.

Gabriel pointed out over the fields of Woodhull. “He’ll attack right here,” he said. “Right down between the ridge and Penrith, and break our army into two pieces.”

Gavin was smiling, and so were the rest of the men and women on the hilltop.

“He’ll attack in the real to draw us out,” Gabriel continued. “And then, when we contain his attack, he’ll turn to the aethereal.” He smiled like a beatific saint.

“And we will stop him,” said the Patriarch.

“Holiness, we will more than stop him. We will leave him no choice but to come at us in person. On our ground, in a place of our choosing, on a day of our choosing.” Gabriel smiled his most damning superior smile.

The Patriarch narrowed his eyes. “How are you so sure?” he asked.

Gabriel laughed. “I’m not. I’m telling you what I’d like to happen.” He shrugged. “But the pinning attacks are happening, and we’re in it. And there …” He smiled again. “There they are.”

Out in the fields south of Woodhull, there came a seeping stain of dark colours, tinged with the rose pink of the snowy dawn.

Gabriel pointed with his baton and continued his commentary. “Front is about a mile wide,” he said. “Three thousand creature front. Fifty deep? A hundred?” He nodded, and behind him, Anne Bateman made a note and accepted a message from a black-and-white bird. By now she knew her friend Ser Gerald was dead; everyone knew that Harndon was in the hands of the traitor. But the messengers were still flying; the garrisons were all still linked.

In the fields below them, on the line of the road to Lissen Carak, there stood the imperial veterans; all the Thrakian spearmen, leaning on their spears, and beside them, the tagmatic cavalry, all dismounted; the other Moreans were off to the west, covering their flank along the Lily Burn, but all of the Albin militia had been put under Ser Alcaeus’s command as well, and he had most of the available infantry; almost sixteen thousand men and women on a one-mile front, stiffened by wedges of knights who waited behind the embankment of the ancient road.

“I don’t know if this is really their main effort,” Gabriel said to his magisters. “But I’m pretty sure that if we break it, he’ll have to come.”

Edmund was chewing a sausage when the trumpets sounded. There was cavalry moving off to the west, in the fields beyond the ruins of Penrith. He had to assume they were friendly, although there was a steady combat sound from the line of the Lily Burn beyond them.

“They all know to cover their ears?” Duke asked for the third time.

“They know,” Tom said.

The phalanxes of Thrakians covered the front of the gonnes. There were forty gonnes, almost hub to hub, along the line of the raised road. Pioneers had built up dirt and snow platforms behind the great gonnes, the six cannon in the center of the line, so that they had room to recoil fully without rolling off the road.

The crews were standing about; a few played dice or cards. Some jumped up and down, or blew on their hands.

The dark stain spread across the distant fields by the tiny and now extinct hamlet of Woodhull. The stain covered the whole front of open ground while, behind them, more and more creatures seemed to move west, aimed at the place marked on Edmund’s map as Helewise’s Manor.

Duke looked at him, a nervous smile on his face. “Here they come.”

Edmund was finishing his sausage. Since the Umroth, he was less impressed with monsters. He watched them for a while. They had great booming drums, audible already, and they were coming right at him.

“To your gonnes,” he called between his cupped hands. Forty gonnes covered almost a quarter mile of frontage. Each gonne had a stack of shot for the right tube, and bags of appropriate grape shot. Each gonne had a single round marked with the letter M created by the infamous Mortirmir.

Edmund’s mind was much given to calculation, and he wondered how fast a bogglin walked. Four miles an hour? So they’ll be here, one way or another, in fifteen minutes. In range in seven minutes. Point blank in fourteen minutes. One minute in the beaten zone of the grapeshot; time for most of the gonnes to fire twice; a few to fire three times. Say one hundred and twenty rounds of grape, with twenty-four pellets in each. Roughly twenty-five hundred iron balls, five to the pound. But some much more.

Edmund shrugged at the uselessness of calculation. Now in range in six minutes, he thought.

The pressure on the Lily Burn increased with every minute, and now there were forty thousand creatures trying to cross. When they hesitated, Orley reached out and took power from his master and forced them into the icy black water, where they drowned, and the creatures behind them followed them in, and they died, too.

Aneas watched them come in waves, but he left the arrow on his bow unshot.

“Wait,” he called. “Wait until they stop drowning. Don’t waste your arrows.”

Nothing could make it alive across the Flow, and the enemy’s main effort channeled toward the southern ford until Orley flung in his cave trolls and took it.

Then Tapio charged out of the woods. He had, not just his own knights, but hundreds of bears, and irks on foot, and wardens; his name had attracted some of the finest warriors of the Wild, and their wedges burst into the cave trolls and knocked them down in the shallow water and drowned them in the wretched cold mud, or pounded them to splinters with their steel-clad hooves, or simply burst their chests asunder with their lances. A hundred bears died, but the trolls were destroyed or forced back across the river.

Then barghasts came, and wyverns. But the power that mastered them had not troubled itself to coordinate closely, and the weary bears under Blizzard and their kin under Lily stood their ground, clan by clan.

Then it was Bill Redemede’s hour, and the hour of the Jacks. Where the bears and irks could only endure the torment of their aerial foes, the archers could clear the air in a single volley. Even in heavy snow, the massed archery of the rangers and the Jacks flayed the barghasts, who had no armour. Wyverns dropped wing loads of gravel and did damage, but the archers made them pay, made it too dangerous for them, and many dropped their stones into the mere or farther north in the Flow and did no harm beyond smashing the ice.

The woodlands veterans took cover in the trees, right at the edge—two bows behind each, so that every ranger was covered. And for an hour they disputed the fords below the Flow, and the banks of the Lily Burn against five times their number.

The line was restored.

In the south, at the bridge, there were daemons on both sides, and Mogon taunted her enemies, but they could not respond, so heavy was the compulsion on them, and they came on. Mogon was sickened of slaughter, and hated killing her own, but her spells were in vain. She reached into the aethereal and begged for aid.

She had expected the Red Knight, but she found young Mortirmir.

“I need sorcerous aid,” she said.

Mortirmir heard her out.

“We are trying to stretch Ash as thin as we can,” Mortirmir said.

“These are my people,” the duchess spat.

Mortirmir nodded, “On the way,” he said crisply.

A surge of almost incredible power ran through Mogon.

She raised her axe and the power of the choir behind her crushed the net of workings that covered the other Qwethnethogs.

Orley, or Ash, or some other potency struck back, directly at her.

Shields covered her; shields she had never made. She stood a moment, surprised that she was not dead, and struck back. And again. Not with power, but with nuance. Not with lies, but with truth.

The hordes assaulted Albinkirk for the third time that day. Already Ser Shawn could barely stand, and the Prince of Occitan was pale when he opened his visor, and there was blood leaking down his right cuisse. But his squire brought wine, and he and the other Occitan knights sang as the assault came forward.

But this one was different. This time, tongues of fire leapt from the enemy—fifty of them or more—and they smashed into the protections and wards of the ancient town.

And took them down.

The new Bishop of Lorica lay bleeding on the floor of his cathedral of Albinkirk.

Then the men defending the breeches began to die. The fire fell on them, and rolled forward, and the bogglins came in right behind it.

Prince Tancred died there with his household knights, fighting to the last in a shield wall. Ser Shawn was pushed back and back again, and each time he rallied the militia and the chivalry and struck back, until he found that he was standing at the base of the town wall itself.

And that was the second hour of battle.

In the center of a battle that spread over ten miles of front, time was elastic.

Six minutes can be very quick, or very slow. Time to give a wonderful pre-battle speech and drink a little wine, or to pray, or to just stare off into space.

Edmund did all of those things. People cheered his speech, based on the emperor’s: victory, a little loot, all the best things.

Very little came to him when he prayed.

In the end, he stood watching the distant monsters as they came closer to his little line of red flags, and he wondered about it all. The work, and the killing.

All the gonnes were long since loaded. Every gonner was in his place. The porte-fires burned in the still air; forty threads of smoke wound into the freezing air, tiny tendrils that marked each gonne.

Far out on the fields, a little under a thousand paces away, a line of bogglins passed the red flags.

Edmund didn’t think he had to give an order. All the captains were watching the flags. Every type of gonne had a different range.

The waiting lasted so long that Edmund wondered if they really were waiting for his word.

And then the captain of one of the great cannons put her porte-fire down.

The gonne roared.

Nine hundred and seventy paces downrange, the ball slapped through two bogglins, shattered the mandibles of a third, disemboweled the fourth and fifth, and then fell toward earth, removing double-jointed legs on its way. It skipped on the frozen ground and ploughed through two more creatures, took off three or four legs, and then skipped again and began to roll, removing limbs. The ball weighed thirty-six pounds, and it left a furrow of death and dismemberment and pitiful sound behind it as it rolled and rolled through the packed creatures. They had no way to stop it except with their bodies.

Even as it killed, the next cannon fired, and then the next.

Gabriel saw the flashes and then heard the thunder as the great gonnes fired along the road. The damage they wreaked was like the attack of wyverns, visible from a mile.

As if summoned by his thoughts, wyverns rose from behind the vale of the Lily Burn and began to converge on something. Sythenhag’s brood rose into the air from the Lily Burn bridge, followed by three more Adnacrag clans. Yet, as if by agreement, the wheeling predators didn’t meet; instead, each attacked the other’s infantry.

Gabriel sighed.

The firing of the gonne line had become general.

From the left end of the enemy horde in the center, a flash of violet light. One of the falconets was hit; twenty men and women died by fire.

Gabriel raised his baton.

Now, he said in the aethereal.

Across the battlefield, from the Lily Burn to Albinkirk, the alliance magisters dropped their cloaks and cast. From Gabriel’s vantage, great bubbles of translucent light, like glass Christmas ornaments, sprang up all along the line; mostly gold in various hues, but one red, where the Patriarch cast his own strange style, and many green, especially on the Lily Burn.

The gonnes were firing steadily now, a constant rumble and roar. Their firing lit the main battle with an arcane glow from within, pulses of light like fireflies.

At the ford below the Flow, Orley grew impatient. He summoned his surviving trolls and the best of his daemons; he called his wyverns and his hastenoch. And as they closed at the ford, already choked with dead, with the steel-tipped shafts of his enemies falling like snow, he unleashed his borrowed powers, cutting a swathe through the bears and Tapio’s ancient irks. Tapio slashed back, as did Aneas, and Gas-a-ho and Looks-at-Clouds and a dozen other, lesser shamans.

Looks-at-Clouds began to unleash clouds of terror amid the waiting monsters, frightening them into fighting each other.

Into the chaos and death, the cold and icy mud, Orley led his monsters.

Aneas, casting, went to meet him. He had layers of protections, and he used the golden buckler on his arm to cover anything that leaked through his shields, and then he threw everything he could think of: deception, manipulations of nature, a bolt of lightning conjured from the approaching storm front.

Orley parried them or ignored them. He was on the banks of the stream, and then his cloven feet were in the inky water.

Their shields met in a shower of sparks. Irene shot over his shoulder, and her shaft bounced off Orley’s hide, the shaft of the bolt shattering, and then Orley’s axe swung, and Aneas leaped clear.

Aneas threw his last major offensive preparation—three bolts of white levin—as he slipped under the antlered monster’s guard, so that his fingers were all but touching Orley’s breast.

The Son of Ash was not even singed.

Aneas rolled; not fast enough, and he took a wound. He took his pipe tomahawk from his belt as he came to his feet and threw …

And hit. The blow staggered his enemy, but then Orley had his balance. He cut back as if balance was nothing to him.

Aneas twisted, caught it on his golden buckler.

Blizzard came up, axe back.

Nita Qwan shot at Orley from very close by; the flint-headed arrow pounded home in Orley’s flesh, but had no immediate effect, although there was a trickle of very red blood.

Blizzard struck, rocking the dark captain. But Orley turned and smashed a fist into the bear’s jaw, breaking it and knocking the bear into the mud.

Aneas had two wounds: one in his thigh, and a heavy cut in his left arm that showed fat and muscle whenever there was a pause in the blood flow. But he was damned if he was letting Blizzard die, and he stepped close, short sword in his hand, turned his enemy’s axe, and cut into his calf. The blow was clean, and well powered, and it bounced off Orley’s flesh as if Orley were made of oak. Then Aneas moved off line, to his strong side, covered by the buckler of light, but the blood was flowing from his arm, too fast, and he was scared, and the axe cut back; he was off balance, and the axe severed his buckler arm above his hand and his blood fountained. He raised his spurting arm and splashed blood across his enemy’s face.

He cast then, covering the wound, but he had no buckler, and he could only stumble back on his increasingly weak legs. Irene shot again, from his right, and bought him a breath. Blizzard tried to rise on a broken leg and failed.

Gas-a-ho tossed a handful of smoke, and the smoke gathered around Orley like a swarm of bees and went for his eyes, but Orley’s lance of fire licked out, catching Gas-a-ho virtually undefended. The shaman dropped.

Looks-at-Clouds was coming from farther downstream, a line of lightning connecting hir to Orley, and hir shield of intertwined vines of green and gold fell between Orley and his prey.

Orley batted hir shield aside and raised his axe.

Irene was spanning her crossbow. She couldn’t tear her eyes away as the malevolent thing’s axe went back.

Nothing could save him.

The axe fell like a bolt from the darkness, and Aneas’s head parted from his shoulders and his blood soaked the ice at the edge of the stream, and Orley roared, still trying to wipe his enemy’s blood from his eyes.

Gabriel felt his brother fall out of the choir, and Gas-a-ho, too. And on the other flank, he felt the weight of the assault on Albinkirk.

Gavin looked at him.

“It’s a race now,” Gabriel said. “Whether they can collapse our flanks, or we can eat their center. A contest of wills.” He blinked. “Aneas is dead.”

“Jesus,” Gavin said.

“Steady,” said the emperor.

At his feet, the vast and terrible legions flowed over the fields of Albinkirk, and the workings of a century of dark sorceries played over the gilt and green and red baubles of the alliance shields.

The gonnes roared on, ripping the dark cloth of the enemy and leaving eddies and ripples of death and blood. Irks older than the oldest maples were struck dead by a weapon that flew so fast as to seem like hermeticism or sorcery, except that it left no trace in the aethereal and no enemy could raise a shield fast enough to respond.

The wave front of the bogglins came to the irrigation ditch, once a tiny stream, that ran across the fields north of the road. It was lined in dark grasses and sunk five feet below the level of the fields, and it was invisible to those who did not know it was there.

The bogglins began to fill it with corpses.

They keened in despair, and the gonnes ripped away their lives.

But Ash had prepared for this. Trolls came forward from the reserve and threw bridges across, slabs of slate, and the irks and bogglins flooded forward.

“Grape!” called Edmund. His first command.

Ultima Ratio was a great gonne. She took a thirty-pound load of half-pound iron balls and, in addition, a six-pound load of lead balls, ten to the pound. Her gonne captain saw her loaded with love, and then depressed the muzzle so that the load of grape would strike just at the leading edge of the now charging mass of bogglins.

Ultima Ratio fired. Less than a third of a second later, sixty half-pound balls struck, all together, spread about eight inches each from the other over an ellipse fifteen feet long and seven feet wide. Everything in that ellipse died, and then everything behind it to a depth of forty feet, and then the balls began to bounce off the hard ground.

Off to the left, Duke, captaining his favorite gonne, put his sights on a cave troll three hundred paces away and slapped his porte-fire down.

The cave troll dropped like a sack of wheat, its torso penetrated in the front and exploded out the back from the pressure, spraying the stone troll behind him with a lethal hail of shattered stone.

Another discharge from the second cannon, and a dozen more cave trolls became sticky gravel.

In front of him, the Taxiarchoi were ordering their spearmen to stand up. They took their great round shields on their shoulders and began to lock up, eight deep, so close that an imp could not run through their legs.

The enemy was one hundred paces away.

The gonnes were four feet above them, and their sound was deafening.

The firing roared on, and on, and the enemy, driven by the will of their dark master, ran forward into the hail of shot. They died, and died; they fell over the entrails of their mates and they crawled through the mud of their own juices in the deep soil, and they slipped in the snow, but every heartbeat brought them closer to the unflinching line of the Morean spears.

The spears came down, all together and the wall of spear points faced the oncoming warbands.

Ash’s attack was spread across the fields of Penrith; his slaves, the subjects of his will, filled almost a square mile with desperate, terrible creatures. The gonnes had killed a little fewer than one in twenty of them.

But they had no formation, and the rips and tears inflicted by the great iron balls were irreparable; the creatures who survived the bombardment were more interested in closing with their enemies than in any formation.

And then the choir of alliance magisters began to cast.

From the glowing bubbles emerged streams of light; cascades of stars; balls of lightning. They targeted anything that had previously targeted them, and their calculations were remorseless; in the aethereal the daemons and irks and wights who could harness ops were identified, coded, and passed as targets to the dozen casters who specialized in this.

The center of the Morean line began to cheer first. They saw as the whole ink-black shield covering their foes burst, lashed with lightning, and collapsed, so that a web of fire fell into the center of the enemy and there was a terrible popping sound and the screams of the wounded and maimed floated in the cold air.

Then the Brogat Milice, off toward Penrith, who’d stood a whole day of attacks with little or no hermetical cover and then stood their ground all night against not-dead, began to roar their approval as a curtain of rose-gold closed over them, and a cyclone of raw ops burst over their enemies.

The fastest bogglins were dying on the spears of the Thrakians.

For the rest, their shields and covers and protections and wards were being stripped away, their casters butchered.

And off to the left of Penrith, the earth began to shake.

There was almost a mile of open ground to the east of Penrith. There had been almost no fighting there; Ash’s great effort had almost ignored it. Farther east, Mogon and her people struggled to hold the bridge over Lily Burn.

Battles have strategies, and times, and places. Mogon had won hers. Orley would force the line of the Lily Burn, but it was too late.

Because in that mile gap waited Pavalo Payam and five thousand Mamluks, and Lord Gregario and all the chivalry of Alba who could be mustered, and Du Corse and all the knights of Galle. All told, there were twelve thousand armoured men and women, behind four great standards.

The Mamluks had all dismounted at sunrise, laid their prayer rugs on the snow, knelt, and prayed. And then they stood by their horses while the Christian priests moved along the lines of knights, and the knights and squires took their communion in their mouths and prayed.

And when Edmund’s gonnes were belching grape, they all mounted, so that it might have appeared that a ripple of light almost a mile long was flickering in the fields of snow.

Payam’s men, the best horsemen and the best drilled, had the hardest task, the outside of the wheel, the wheel of a line a mile long. It took them long minutes while the gonnes fired, while Thrakians died, and trolls, and irks and bogglins and men and women died, and then they were in place, swinging like a great door against Ash’s mighty center.

Payam raised his golden lance.

The Mamluks gave a great shout.

The Galles answered it.

A single trumpet sounded, and the whole line began to rumble forward into the flank of Ash’s attack.

Gavin turned to speak to his brother, and found that he was gone.

So was Ariosto.

“So this is the battle,” he said to no one in particular. On the hill, unengaged in all the carnage, there stood 1Exrech’s legions, and some Albin militia, who were delighted by their role as spectators, and a hundred knights kept as his last reserve: Ser Ricar and the royal household.

Gavin walked over to 1Exrech, his sabatons gathering snow. To the west, the storm line was sweeping over Lissen Carak. A wind was picking up.

“Let’s attack their center,” Gavin said.

“Concur,” 1Exrech said. He made the mandible sign of pleasure.

The spear bogglins lowered their spears.

“We will cover you,” Gavin said. He waved at the knights. Ser Ricar slapped his visor down, and the household knights gave a cheer.

“Good,” said the wight.

Gavin was shocked at how many of them there were. And they kept coming, marching over the hill. He was leaving Albinkirk to its fate. But for once he agreed with his brother. This was the battle.

This was their last throw.

Well to the north, safe from harm, Ash circled the highest peaks.

His slave sorcerers were being smashed flat.

It was time to exert himself.

Because if you want something done right, you must do it yourself, Ash said inside one of his many minds.

Things were dark and muddled in there, and for the first time, he began to really wonder why.

It took a moment’s attention. He was flying south, and the last of the Adnacrags was passing under his wings. The storm front would have an effect; it was huge, swollen with the dark dust of the western volcanoes by a delicious irony that he savoured even as he sent a ghost of himself dashing through all the corridors of his mind …

Harmodius. He is here, and he has hurt me.

And so has Thorn …

Just south of Helewise’s manor house there were fields full of stubble, the wheat already harvested and gleaned, and beyond them a hill, the tallest hill for a mile or so, which gave the manor its name: Middle Hill.

The Duchess of Venike had rolled the scarecrows up the hill in the darkness, after finishing the force they found to the north, and then she’d cleared the hill with her marines. Sauce had fed her troops as the morning began to brighten, and she held a frontage almost a mile wide, centered on Middle Hill. On her left, Conte Simone and his Beronese waited under the eaves of the forest with the Almain cavaliers and the other men and women from far off in the north of the Antica Terra. The hill was held by the scarecrows, who were, this morning, living proof that the army’s arsenal and logistics continued to function, as, while they stood in their ranks, wagons pulled in behind them and the front ranks began to don maille collars and breast plates made in Vrescia and Venike and now finally arriving.

Behind them, around the gate, the company waited. Most of them were lying in ranks, on their packs, asleep, with their military cloaks over them against the snow. The casa waited with the company, and the officers of both gathered in knots, and then, against direct orders from Gabriel, began to drift up the hill to have a view.

Because Middle Hill stood like a tower on a flat plain, and the view was wonderful and terrible, horrific and awesome.

Bad Tom stomped up the long hill, already out of sorts because he’d discovered that his emperor was away, aloft on his flying beast, and not with his household, where Tom Lachlan wanted him.

Ser Alison trudged up the hill, eager to fight.

Ser Michael trudged up the hill, dejected to find that on the day for which he had helped prepare for so many years, his was such an inglorious role. And trying to ignore that he was secretly delighted to be safe, with Kaitlin safe, and their child safe, on the other side of the gate. And angry at his father’s treason, and saddened by it, too.

And then the three of them crested the hill.

Round hills can have several crests; a sort of dividing line at the top is what most people think of as the crest, the top. But to a soldier, the most important crest is the point from which you can see down the far slope; see, shoot, inflict death. Often from the very top, you cannot see more than a few yards, and then some far-off point. But from the military crest, you can see everything.

The scarecrows had just staved off an uncoordinated attack. They stood, as solid as a wall of steel, and the ground between them and the military crest was littered with dead irks. Many were alive; some screamed out the last of their near immortality; an irk woman in beautiful maille lay curled around her mortal wound, weeping.

Giselle, the duchess, walked over as the company’s officer cadre crossed the back of her position.

“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. In her hands was a short, heavy spear with Mortirmir’s mark on the beautiful blade. “We just had a little entertainment.”

Tom Lachlan was looking down into the beautiful eyes of the dying irk. Then he knelt, cradled her head, and cut her throat with his eating knife, which he kept razor sharp.

In a moment, the look of pain faded from her eyes.

“I may yet be sick o’ war,” he said harshly.

Sauce was walking forward, picking her way among the dead, who lay thick in front of the pikes. “Oh yes, you’re a big softie, you are,” she muttered. She used the needle-sharp butt of her own fighting spear to finish any wounded she passed; she was fastidious about it, but her face registered nothing but the annoyance of a woman who had to clean her spear later.

Michael followed them. He didn’t even really see the carpet of dead.

His eyes were on the battlefield.

All the ground from Middle Hill to the Albin Ridge, almost three miles distant, was covered in battle. Most of it was full of Ash’s great assault; far to the south, the long line of magnificent, glowing hermetical shields glowed and shifted and sparkled in the red, red sun, and up on the Albin Ridge, there was a towering ward of green that glowed as if it was alive and crackled with lightning like a spring storm.

And almost at his feet, the massed cavalry of the alliance had just started their charge.

“Fewkin’ hell,” said Tom Lachlan. “He left us out. I want to be there!”

Michael looked over the battle he had helped plan. “He wanted us here,” he said.

Sauce shook her head. “Sweet Saviour of man,” she said, and touched the cross on her breastplate. “Payam is going to break their center.”

Indeed, the alliance cavalry, by good fortune and careful planning, was attacking into a maelstrom of disorganization and hermetical failure; the dark shields were falling all across the three miles of the enemy front, and lashes of fire and ice and lightning and earth and pulses of superheated air wreaked catastrophe among Ash’s creatures. And into this struck the heavy cavalry of seven nations on a front almost a mile wide.

“I want to be there,” Tom Lachlan said wistfully.

Michael nodded. “We’re not done, Tom,” he said.

And behind them, the wall of the storm front had passed Lissen Carak, where the garrison stood, fighting utter exhaustion; where Desiderata stood, looking fifty years old, in her chapel, and defied Ash yet again.

“Break! Why will you not break!” screamed Ash.

“You trained me too well,” Desiderata replied.

And by the gate, No Head shook his head. He was smoking with his mates.

“Greatest battle in the history o’ the world,” No Head said. “And we’re in fucking reserve. I can’t even see what’s goin’ on.”

Tippit frowned. “Ha’e you lost yer noggin?” he asked. “Biggest battle in the fuckin’ history of the fuckin’ world, and we ain’t in it. An’ we get paid, any road. So shut yer gob. No one likes to fight.”

“Tom Lachlan does,” muttered Smoke.

“True. No one likes to fight ’cept Bad Tom and Sauce.” The pipe was passed. A flask of wine was going around, exceptional wine. Cully had brought it, and everyone knew it was the captain’s.

“It ain’t right,” No Head insisted. “We fought all the battles. We faced all the fuckin’ foes. This is the end. Win or lose, and I say win.”

“Do ye now?” Tippit asked, knocking the pipe out casually on the wood of his bow. “Sure we ain’t here to stop a rout?”

“I can’t see, but I ha’e ears. Cavalry is charging. Deed is done. Haven’t launched a shaft.” No Head shrugged.

Smoke shook his head. “You know what Wilful would say if he was here?”

“Pass the fuckin’ pipe? Don’t hog the wine?” Tippit said.

Smoke waved over the hill. “Nope. He’d say the most powerful warlock in seven worlds spent all his spare power on magicking our steel. An’ not for nothin’. He’d say, it’s not over until it’s over. He’d say, we’re being saved to face the fuckin’ dragon.”

That brought a moment of silence.

“Mark my words,” they all said together, but no one laughed.

To all things, and all plans, there comes a day and a time, and a moment. Some never come to fruition; some plans eventuate in forms that are barely comprehensible to their designers, or bear fruit long after the initiator is cold clay.

But to the lucky few that see great plans bloom under their own eyes, there is sometimes a moment when all is laid bare; when success is there to be grasped, and for the very most fortunate, there is a moment to savour the eternal moment of victory.

And so it was given to Gabriel Muriens, high in the air over Lissen Carak. Below him, the storm, and beyond it, the success of the arms of the alliance. And Ash rushed into the maelstrom of defeat, in his last error, desperate to restore the balance of a battle already fatally lost.

And indeed, to Gabriel, in that moment, came the knowledge of victory; that even if Ash achieved the destruction of every knight, every Mamluk, every militiaman and Thrakian spearman and free bogglin on the field, he would never take the gates. His day was done.

Ash had failed. And now he intended to take them all with him into failure, and that had to be prevented.

Gabriel reached into his memory palace, and motioned to Prudentia. “Banish the little working,” he said.

“It is time,” she said. She smiled.

In the real, Mortirmir’s disguise vanished, and Gabriel’s golden flesh burned like the fire of the sun.

Gabriel took as long as a man might pray the paternoster to savour his victory.

And then Ariosto took them across the line of the snow, and all the high thoughts fled as Gabriel rode a wild beast through the very edge of the storm.

To Michael and the rest of them on Middle Hill, it was as if night was falling again, the storm front was so dark, and onto the fields of battle, coming from the north and flying very low, came the monstrous presence; the wave front of terror, the real presence of Ash, hundreds of paces long, his head alone the size of a tower, his neck, thin at a distance, still as thick as the height of three men; his body as long as a ship, or even two ships.

And his terror had no allies; his own slaves ran, and so did many Mamluks and belted knights. Pavalo Payam stood his ground, and the horse under him, but many horses lost their wits and bolted for the woods, and even the Thrakian veterans of twenty battlefields knelt and hid their heads from the Black Drake in the sky.

To Gavin, the Black Drake looked so vast that it seemed impossible. He did not lower his head; even as the bogglins in front of 1Exrech’s bogglins gave way, and the free bogglins fell on their faces in the snow churned to slush, and all hope fled, Gavin watched the dragon. He was afraid, but he had been afraid ever since he had lost a fight with a Gallish knight in an inn yard, and his humility was finally greater than his pride.

And so he saw a golden spark against the black wall of the oncoming snowstorm. The light was like a meteor, and it burned like a little sun.

Even at this distance, it resolved into a golden griffon, and on the back of the griffon was a knight all in gold and red. For a moment he hung like a sigil of chivalry in the dark air over the battlefield, and then the griffon stooped on its dark prey, and the wild screech of its war cry carried over the battlefield.

On the Lily Burn, Irene shot her last bolt and stood with her back to one great maple and her cheek to another. Orley still raged among the brave Gallish knights and the rangers and Outwallers and bears who tried to hold the ford; a dozen Golden Bears lay dead, and his antlered men were crossing the mucky water on the corpses of their own dead, and behind them the whole host of Lissen Carak’s former besiegers clamoured to follow.

Irene thought, Not all stories end happily. She wanted to cry.

But she didn’t. Despite the end of all her hopes, she was a creature of duty, and despair was a waste of time. Instead, she dropped her now-useless latchet and drew the short, heavy sword that Ricar Lantorn had given her.

Lantorn himself put a hand on her shoulder. “No blade touches yon,” he said. “Don’t waste yersel’.”

And there, suddenly, was Looks-at-Clouds. “Do not die, Irene, merely because he died,” s/he said. “Let us end this Orley instead.”

Looks-at-Clouds cast, and cast again, throwing fire and ice into Orley’s creatures. S/he tripped and baffled, rose and dashed, and bought the rangers another breath, and another.

And finally, s/he caught Orley’s attention. The huge dark stag-man rose on his hind feet, fire flickering from his human hands, and behind him, a new, dark wind whipped snow at Looks-at-Clouds and into the face of the rangers as the storm broke on them.

Orley stepped into the edge of the woods, hands weaving blue fire, and he borrowed more of his master’s power. But he was still blinded by Aneas’s blood and Gas-a-ho’s viscous smoke.

Redmede put a clothyard shaft into the black torso just above where a man’s heart would be. His shaft stuck, and Orley shuddered, but he came on, and Redmede turned and ran deeper into the wood.

Almost blind, Orley blundered after him …

Nita Qwan dropped on him from a tree. The Outwaller fell, and got his legs on the massive shoulders, staggering Orley. He took the blue knife from his sash and slammed it into his brother’s neck with all his might, and the blade snapped against Orley’s potency.

Orley staggered back, slamming Nita Qwan into the trunk of a tree. Ribs broke.

Fast as the wrestler he was, Nita Qwan threw his prisoner tie over his brother’s head. The rope had been woven by his wife, of her own hair; he’d used it to climb walls, to hang laundry, to drag a dead deer.

Now he used it as a garrote.

He slipped his legs off Ota Qwan’s shoulders, if there was indeed any of Ota Qwan left, and he dropped, holding the rope. And then despite the massive pain in his sides and lungs, he kicked out, spinning, so that the rope tightened inexorably.

Orley, or Ota Qwan, or the Son of Ash, slammed him into another tree. But now other hands were on his; Irene had leapt and caught the strangling rope, and Looks-at-Clouds was raining something on the dark captain’s front, and Redmede hacked at him with his sword, and Lily, the bear, pounded the sorcerer’s body with her talons, and he staggered, and staggered, and Nita Qwan hung on. Around them, the rangers surged forward, covering the fight; to the left, Tapio’s knights flung their exhausted mounts forward, and the Fairy Knight himself put his lance in Orley’s chest. It did not kill Orley, but slowed him.

And then Nita Qwan began to say the prayer; the prayer that Outwallers said for an animal they killed for need.

Go swiftly, brother. I need your skin, I need your meat, I need your bones. I will waste nothing of you. And we will remember you at the fire, in the food and in the clothes and in the flute we play. Go swiftly, brother.

Orley did not go swiftly. To Irene, the torment seemed eternal; she was dashed from tree to tree; her nose broken explosively, and her skin ripped and then her arms finally broken, and she fell like a broken doll in the blood-soaked mud.

She lost consciousness.

But she had protected Nita Qwan with her body, and he hung on for a few more beats of Orley’s heart, and Tapio and Looks-at-Clouds poured their workings into the damaged creature until Orley sagged. And sat, suddenly, tearing at the cord around his neck, and then the storm burst over them, even as Orley died.

Gabriel emerged from the wings of the storm above Ash by a little too much, and behind him, on his right side.

Ash shuddered.

Ariosto needed no urging.

He only said, This was great fun, boss. Thanks for all the sheep.

And he dropped like a stone from a trebuchet, his great golden wings afire in the last of the sunlight, straight onto the back of the Black Drake. And Gabriel threw a great working, a simple burst of light, one of the very first workings he’d ever learned, but thrown on a titanic scale.

The immense dragon began to turn, writhing in three dimensions, the head reaching, reaching back on the sinuous neck …

Gabriel threw all his not inconsiderable ops in a blast of white fire that was not equal to breaking Ash’s invulnerable wards, but where the fire met Ash’s breath, chaos reigned, and men saw stars and deep blackness.

Gabriel had never expected to strike Ash with mere puissance. It was merely another feint in a long line of feints. But he’d blown a hole in the wards and Ariosto screamed through it, talons reaching, reaching …

Gabriel felt a pull, almost as if a hand was reaching to take him from his saddle, and he exerted his will. Not yet, into the dark.

The head snapped away with supernatural speed, the vulnerable eyes the size of a man just beyond the griffon’s reaching talons …

The huge Wyrm rolled to evade the griffon’s claws.

Another feint.

Ariosto turned on a wingtip, inside the circuit of the neck, away from the head. The head was coming around; Ash was in mid-exhalation and the backflow of his malevolence burned the very air, but Ariosto turned and turned, and the golden wings gave one great beat, the griffon lifted its talons and its hind feet so that it was flying along the great black body, inches above the surface of Ash’s back, down the drake’s right side as it rose, curling, like the hull of a black ship.

And Gabriel leaned out like a boy using a lance to strike pegs on the ground. He had the ghiavarina in both hands; Ariosto knew the game, and it was far too late in the game to worry about a fall. He leaned out; Ash turned, and the great wing of the black dragon reached back, cupping the cold air and exposing the wing root, where the massive bones and muscles that powered a creature that could not possibly exist met and knitted; a wing root that was itself only the height of a man or so, and into that wing root went the ghiavarina; a single stroke, the blade, made for this exact purpose, cutting deeper, and deeper, and deeper …

His left hand seemed to immolate, and a huge pulse of power traveled through the ghiavarina …

Gabriel smiled, even as his burning gold skin seemed to float away. It was excruciating and joyful. He could hear singing; he could imagine Amicia’s voice, or Miriam’s …

… and Ash’s head continued to come back, the infinitely flexible neck allowing his head to turn all the way back along the body even as the huge red eyes registered their peril …

In the same beat, the wing root burst asunder, and the breath of extinction crossed the man and his mount, and they were gone.

Blanche was not supposed to ride into the snowy fields of Alba. She was with Gabriel’s last reserve, and she had the key to the gate.

But she couldn’t stop herself. When she was fully armed by Beatrice, who made it clear that she had never, in all her life as a maid, expected to have to buckle armour, Blanche walked out of the empty pavilion of red silk, past the round table that was clear and clean. By Gabriel’s old folding campaign chair there was a silver cup lying on the tent’s carpeted floor; Anne had missed it in the rush to get armed, and Blanche stooped, her breastplate butting into her swelling stomach, and picked it up.

Pregnant and wearing armour, Blanche thought.

And behind that thought came legions of other, darker thoughts. They marched like invincible armies at her uppermost mind, and she refused to receive them. Instead, she checked the hang of her unfamiliar sword belt and walked out onto the springy turf of an alien world, where Jon Gang stood with her fine Ifriquy’an charger, who was milk white from tail to nose. Gang gave her a leg up.

She felt like an imposter. She was a laundress. She was certainly no knight.

Gang was wearing a light half-armour. He chuckled. “Cap’n said you’d be riding,” the man said.

Blanche felt herself flush. But Gang’s words gave her heart, and she took the reins. She had been riding for a year; she was competent enough, although she couldn’t imagine riding and fighting, too. Her gauntlets restricted her wrist movements. Everything felt odd.

Her baby kicked.

I am a fool, she thought, and then she rode through the gates and into her own world. She had time to savour the odd violet light of the moment that the portal was crossed, and to feel the disassociation as she entered into Alba, and the baby squirmed and kicked so that for a moment she bent double as if she’d been kicked in the gut.

“Hello in there,” she said calmly. “That’s enough o’ that.”

Jon Gang looked at her.

“The baby,” she said. Her small unborn son or daughter had just crossed all the worlds …

She had a flash of vision, and she retched.

She’d never had a waking dream quite so vivid, and it disturbed her, made her doubt things, so that she looked back through the gate and wondered what …

She took a deep breath and steadied herself, as she always did. She thought for a moment of the laundry in the palace in Harndon. She wondered where the queen was, and whether her sheets were ironed.

“The casa is over here,” Press said. “Top of the ridge.”

They began to ride up slowly. As she passed through the archers, who were lying on their backs or sitting, men and women pointed, and then they began to cheer.

“The empress!” Oak Pew shouted, and they were all coming to their feet.

Off to the west, a wall of black seemed to carry all of the ill-omen that the world could provide. Tall, slate-coloured clouds pregnant with snow rolled toward them, a blanket of cloud and snow that gradually cut off the sun and seemed to cover the world beyond Lissen Carak in a whirl of darkness.

Blanche turned and looked up into the clouds.

The wave front of Ash’s terror rolled down the plain of Albinkirk, but it passed her by; and as she rode up the last of the hill, the company’s archers were closing up and forming their lines, and the lines were coming up the hill behind her like waves crashing on a beach.

Sauce was shouting at Michael, and Michael was ignoring her.

She crested the hill, and there was the dragon. It might have shocked the breath from her, but her vision at the gate had taken away her capacity for shock, and she viewed a dragon hundreds of paces long with the calm of despair. The dragon was black; black as night; black as velvet hanging in a dark closet. The dragon breathed, and men died; or were simply unmade; Ash’s breath was a chaos of destruction, at the edges of his breath, a blue fire burned, but in the very heart of the black flame there was no light, and where it passed, the earth itself had scars and the men and horses were gone.

And Blanche thought, This is his enemy.

Behind her, the archers were cheering. They could not see the dragon, for the steep summit of the hill; but their cheers were no longer for the empress and her white horse, and she turned her head away from the pale sky and the black dragon, to the dark sky.

And against the dark sky, a golden knight burned like a second sun.

Her heart came into her mouth. Her pulse seemed to resound in the base of her throat, and her cuirass was like an iron band constricting her breathing.

“It’s the empress,” someone said, but she could not take her eyes off him. He burned like a comet, and he was above and behind the vast black wings, and then Ariosto stooped like an eagle carved in gold, and there was an incredible flash of light, and Blanche could not see. She wanted to turn her head away.

But she did not cry out. Instead, she reached into the aethereal and prayed.

Ser Michael watched the golden knight merge with the black Wyrm.

“Oh!” shouted Sauce. “Oh, oh! Get him!”

Tom Lachlan slammed an armoured fist into his palm. “Damn him,” he spat.

Michael didn’t want to watch, but he did. He watched, and all the rest of them watched. The gold and black merged, and then there was a massive flash of light; men and women and bogglins and irks across the battlefield blinked and stumbled, and then there was a massive concussion wave, and the dragon was falling, its neck seeming to trail behind it, one huge wing falling away and both wing and dragon spouting rivers of black ichor onto the snow below.

Of the golden knight there was no sign.

The earth shook as if an earthquake had hit; Lady Helewise’s chimney collapsed; barns fell across the fields, and fire-damaged walls fell.

The black Wyrm fell across thousands of men and other creatures, and they died.

But the dragon was not dead, and it raised its maimed head and breathed again, shattering the ranks of the surviving Mamluks. It began to roll itself over, to breathe into the waiting lines of Moreans.

Gavin watched the dragon fall. 1Exrech was making scent; bogglins were shaking snow out of their wing cases and getting to their feet.

By Gavin’s side, Tamsin said, “The emperor is gone.”

“He’s dead?” Gavin asked.

Tamsin put a hand on him. “Yes, man.”

Gavin drew the Fell Sword that had been Hartmut’s and spurred his charger toward the dread Wyrm, who lay across the field before him.

Gabriel had always intended to bring the dragon down.

And finally Michael blinked away his tears and turned to his friends. “Now we go and finish it,” he said.

Sauce nodded, her face grim.

Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said, and that was all.

But all of their eyes went to Blanche; slim and white and gold. By chance, or fate, she had ridden in among them and was by the banner. Her face forbade any comment, any show of grief, any condolence.

“Finish it,” said the empress.

The Duchess of Venike stood back from their grim grief and instead led her scarecrows down the hill, to the left, to complete the encirclement. The dragon had fallen half a mile from the base of the hill; the duchess needed no orders to know what happened next.

Michael and Tom and Sauce had a long walk down the hill through the snow. Long, and yet very quick; and already the trumpeter was calling the company to their feet, and to their horses. Everyone was awake, thanks to Blanche; Oak Pew had already rolled out of her cloak, folded it, and had it stowed behind her saddle before Bad Tom was fully in sight. They were just behind the brow of the hill.

A slim, dark man walked slowly out of the gate behind them, bearing in his hands a heavy spear. He walked uphill, toward the trio of officers.

Closer to, Ser Michael saw that it was Master Smythe.

Smythe bowed. And handed Michael a ghiavarina.

“I am almost without power now,” he said. “But this much I can do.”

“Is it … his ghiavarina?” Michael asked.

Master Smythe shrugged. “Yes and no, as always,” he said.

“He is dead, then?” Blanche asked, her voice cold.

Master Smythe nodded. “He is gone, and he will not return as mortal man,” the dragon said.

And then Michael was mounting his warhorse, and grief and betrayal and death fell away from him.

He rode to the side of Conte Simone, and pointed across the field at the great reserve of stone trolls standing like rocks. “Would you open the ball, my lord?” he asked.

“Hah!” Conte Simone said. He threw his sword in the air and caught it. “It will be my delight!”

The knights of the north and east raised their lances and gave a cheer, and the earth began to shake.

Michael trotted back to the wedge of banners at the front of the company and Blanche, sitting like a white fury in their midst.

He looked left and saw Oak Pew and Cully and Tippit and Francis Atcourt, and looked right and saw Toby and Bad Tom and Sauce and Mortirmir and Tancreda. Around him were all the men and women who had marched and fought, and perhaps beyond them, the ones who had died and never left the ranks.

“Let’s go kill the fucking dragon,” Michael said.

There was no cheer. They were silent as they went forward.

They climbed the hill in a single body; knights in front, then armed squires, then pages, then archers. All told, they were almost five hundred lances; two thousand men and women, and a smattering of irks, and a single bogglin.

They crested the hill from which they had watched the duel with the dragon, and the battle lay before them. The snow was falling; the wind was ripping over their shoulders and driving the snow, and they, like their fallen captain, came on the wings of the storm and it drove them in its fury.

There was half a mile of snowy battlefield between them and their prey; a field still crowded with foes. But on that day, they faced nothing; no fallen man nor irk nor daemon nor bogglin would stand, and many creatures quailed and slipped away, or ran. Because like many creatures of the Wild, the company now exerted a wave front of fear.

The wind howled. The snow fell. The company marched on, their banners streaming in the wind so that the banner bearers could scarcely hold them, and Blanche’s golden hair burst from her cap and snapped behind her as if she were a living banner.

The company rode across the great field as if riding to a pay parade.

About five hundred paces from the fallen dragon, Mortirmir raised his arms, and a huge ward sprang into being, red and white and green like the banners of the company.

Ash rolled, and breathed. And his breath was black, and it sublimated acres of snow, and struck Mortirmir’s impudent wards like a blacksmith’s hammer, and the wind howled, the wall of steam rose …

… and from the curtain of steam and snow emerged the line, unbroken, untouched, five hundred lances long; each banda covered in its own opalescent shell, as if Mortirmir, unsatisfied, was still touching up the exact colour and transparency of his wards and covers.

Ash breathed again. The ground between his claws was already black, and would not grow a crop for five generations.

Mortirmir’s wards held. They were far more than his own; as Ash focused the whole of his terminal will on the company, so Mortirmir had the support of the whole of the choir of the alliance. But he was the conductor, and he played his part with a dark delight. He might have begun throwing ops from the hilltop.

But he had no intention of denying his friends their part.

One hundred paces from the vast beast, now on its forelegs and dragging itself along, the entire company and the casa dismounted. Pages came forward and took horses who were as calm as they might have been in a pasture, because the casters had them covered.

The horses were not terrified.

The four ranks closed forward as if they did this every day, because, in fact, they did.

And the old officers clustered in the center, by the banners; Michael in the lead, and Tom and Sauce at his shoulders, and behind them, Atcourt and de Beause and Milus and all the others.

And then they went forward into the dragon’s fire.

Gavin galloped across the wasted land and into the snowstorm. His horse seemed to float beneath him. Once the mighty stallion stumbled, and he never knew why, and then he could see the black shape, the sinuous neck, the claws and the wing dragging across the fields.

Gavin could see the dragon breathe and breathe again, then over its back he saw the very tops of three great shields of puissance and he laughed.

Then he set his shield and put spurs to his borrowed horse.

When the company’s Fell Spears were twenty paces from the black wall of the dragon’s looming, scaly hide, Mortirmir let go. The Patriarch, the Queen of Faery, the Lady of Alba, the choir of Lissen Carak, the will of Looks-at-Clouds, and even the least novice among the choir.

And Morgon did not push it all into a single bolt. Instead, he divided the power among his choir, so that the vise of their combined vengeance closed on Ash from every direction.

The black Drake’s will held.

But in the drgaon’s head, the soul of Harmodius and the revenge of Thorn unleashed a last assault. And then, in that very moment, the spears began to cut through his wards in the real. Only then, at the bitter, bitter end, did Ash begin to see how deeply the insects loathed him; even as he tried to roll and crush them, he knew that his wards were down, and the tide of fire was rising against him, and this was his end …

In the end, it was Tom Lachlan, and Sauce, and Michael and Gavin.

They cut through the wards as if exercising in a castle yard; the ghiavarina burned like blue lightning, and the black shield parted, and Michael was facing the wall of scales and dark flesh of the dragon’s neck.

He passed into a back-weighted garde, and struck. Michael’s ghiavarina was the first weapon to bite the flesh of the dragon. His slash went four feet deep into its neck; a neck many times that thick.

Then Sauce’s beautiful sword from Firensi flashed in.

Hartmut’s sword burned in Gavin’s fist.

But it was Tom Lachlan, Bad Tom, who feared nothing, who shouldered into the grim wounds and cut deeper. He pushed past Michael, and entered into the dragon’s black flesh; the burning ichor fell on him, and he cut with the blade he’d taken from another dragon, and he roared “Lachlan for Aa!” with each cut.

And Sauce, for once, followed his lead; her cuts were neat, precise, and chunks of the dragon’s neck fell at her feet, and Gavin was by her, and Michael pushed in with them, opening the hole like a sailor flensing a whale. Michael’s spear burrowed into the dragon’s side, as a stream of magicked arrows rolled from Cully’s fingers, and even in a wind like a hurricane and a wall of snow the great bows loosed and spat, and the shafts, arcane and deadly, plunged deep into the flailing thing’s hide.

Perhaps it was Urk of Mogon who first struck one of the great red eyes. Or perhaps it was Tippit or No Head or Long Paw. But by the time that Tom Lachlan was swinging his sword like a woman splitting wood, by the time that Michael was black with ichor, his hands burned raw even under the weight of twenty amulets, by the time that Philip de Beause was shoulders deep in the very flesh of the dragon, and Gavin was almost drowning in black blood, it was blind, and it had ceased to cast. Gouts of fire and ops struck it; the last tatters of its defences fell away, never to recover, and it was naked to its enemies, and now they were without mercy.

The whole line of the company pressed forward into the black shield.

A vast rainbow of light began to rise from the valley of the Lilly Burn, and float like a child’s dream of a cloud across the battlefield. Thousands of faeries; perhaps millions of them. Their fury of colours and lights swirled amid the storm.

Blanche was walking with the banners, and Francis Atcourt clearly wanted to go forward, to strike a blow, and she drew her own sword. She looked over her shoulder, and there was another figure in armour pushing at her shoulder, and she went forward again, into the black shield. Arrows flew over her, and she didn’t have a helmet, and she was empty of fear, terror, joy, or even the lust for revenge.

“Keep pushing!” said the shrill voice behind her.

Blanche glanced back and saw Clarissa, the Queen of Arles, flushed, and with her shoulder in Blanche’s back.

Blanche had a sword in her hand. She went forward with the line. No one tried to stop her, and when the black shields parted, she went forward with the banners, and her lithe sword, marked deeply with Mortirmir’s M, slashed a strip off the black hide with eight hundred other swords.

And deep in the cave of black flesh, Tom Lachlan roared “Lachlan for Aa!” again, and struck, and more black flesh rolled away; Sauce cut up, sottano and the ghiavarina, almost a live thing, cut high, mezzano as if slicing a curtain, and another panel of flesh fell away, and there was white bone.

The spine.

Bad Tom paused, faced with the reality of the thing.

A grin covered his face.

“HECTOR! I AVENGE THEE!” he roared, and cut into the bone of the dragon’s spine.

And then they were covered in faeries; the tide of colour descending on the dying dragon, leaching his black and taking him for their own.

When the fortress of his mortal immanence was no longer practicable, Ash fled to the high aethereal, to wait another hundred aeons, grow new allies, and …

He was not alone. Even as the hideous faeries stripped his essence like hermetical heyaenas on a carcass, he was naked on the endless plain, and he was not alone.

There in the aethereal stood an infinite tide of figures of gold, more than an army of bogglins; and each of them imbued with the shining gold of transcendence, rank upon rank, like a phalanx of angels. Some he knew; most be knew not; and at their head, the golden figure of a knight. His nemesis the Red Knight, at the head of the phalanx; men and women, irks and wardens, rank on rank his victims and his enemies and all the others; men and wardens, women and irks blazing like suns.

And on the glass-covered floor of the chapel of the abbey of Lissen Carak, Desiderata raised her hands and said, “Te Deum.”