The Vale of Dykesdale—Bill Redmede
The sun was setting in a sky of gold, and the bronze light suffused everything, gilding the endless forest, bronzing the stones left by ancient glaciers, and burning on the spear-tips of the retreating Army of the Alliance. The golden light set fire to the bright hair of the oldest irks and kindled the fur of the Golden Bears. It smoothed faces deeply creased by terror and fatigue.
Bill Redmede looked down the long column of weary men and a few women and then looked at the strange golden sky.
“Rain?” he asked John Clothyard, who was now, to all intents, his lieutenant. Nat Tyler had left him; killed the king, or so some men said. Ricar Fitzalan had gone east to serve with Aneas Muriens as battle comrades or lovers or both. The Jarsay-born Fitzalan had been a fine leader and the best second a commander could ask for, and Redmede missed him. He missed Tyler, too. Instead he had Grey Cat, who tended to wander off into the woods, and Clothyard, who was solid and dull.
Clothyard was a broad man of middle height, and his looks weren’t helped by a four-day growth of beard.
“Rain,” he responded.
Redmede was so far past exhaustion that he didn’t have to think much about his actions. He put a hand on the bow slung over his shoulder in a linen bag and trotted back along his Jacks. “Rain!” he yelled. “Put your bowstrings in your shirts.”
“Who the fuck are you? My father?” muttered one Jack. In a single summer of constant fighting, the Jacks had dispensed with camaraderie and turned instead to discipline. Some resented it.
“I never wanted to be a goddamned forester,” said another voice. This was directed at the grim reality that royal foresters, the king’s law in the woods, were the traditional enemies of the Jacks, broken men and outlaws, and now they marched together, the last Jack only two paces in front of the first forester. Not one forester or Jack was so dense as to miss the grim irony that in the eyes of the world’s powers, they were exactly the same: superb woodsmen and rangers. Ser Gavin, the army’s nominal commander, had put the two bands together with some hundreds of irk knights mounted on forest elk and irk ponies, an armoured cavalry that could glide through heavy woods with the agility of wild deer. Together, they were a match for almost any forest foe.
“Keep your bowstrings dry,” Redmede repeated as he trotted down the column. Not everyone was surly; Stern Rachel gave him half a grin, but she was mad as a felter and loved war; Garth No Toes hummed to himself as he flourished a little beeswaxed bag.
Most of these men and women had survived the rout after Lissen Carak; had fought at Gilson’s Hole; had marched west again to face Ash and his million monsters. They knew how to survive a little rain.
He told them anyway. Tired people make mistakes.
He forced himself up the rise he’d just descended, looking for the blank exhaustion that was like a sickness; looking for signs of people who hadn’t drunk enough water. His thighs burned, but it was these displays of routine prowess that marked him out, and he knew it.
He reached the top just as Long Peter and Gwillam Stare came over the crest, glanced back into the hell of Ash’s army, and shook their heads.
“We fightin’ agin?” Stare asked.
Redmede shrugged.
“Only have nine shafts,” Stare said.
Long Peter didn’t speak much at the best of times. He kept walking.
“I hear you,” Redmede said.
“Meaning we might fight,” Stare asked.
“Meaning I don’t know a goddamned thing,” Redmede said.
He could see his brother trudging up the hill. The same irony that made the two bodies of men and their decades of enmity irrelevant in the current crisis was sharpened by the two Redmede brothers: Bill, the leader of a rebellion against royal authority, and Harald, his older brother, who had risen to command the foresters. That maturity had brought each to a better understanding of the other’s position might have been the reason that the two bodies could cooperate at all.
“Harald?” Bill said.
“Bill.” Harald nodded. Both Redmedes were tall and ruddy-haired and rough-hewed; where Bill wore the stained, loose off-white wool cote of the Jacks, his brother wore a sharply tailored jupon in the forester’s forest green, although he carried his hat in one hand like a beggar. He stopped at the crest, and his weary men shuffled past; Bill was starting to know their names, and John Hand, tall and strong as an old oak, sporting a knightly beard and mustache, was Harald Redmede’s best officer. He grunted a greeting and kept going, glancing back at the rising tide of bogglins behind them as almost every man and woman did on reaching the crest.
“I heard a rumour we won a big fight in Etrusca,” Harald said. “Heard it this morning from Ser Gregario.”
“I heard that there’s a thousand dead of the plague in Harndon,” Bill said.
“Aye, or three times that.” Harald Redmede leaned on his bow staff.
The first drops of rain fell from the golden sky.
“We winning or losing?” Bill asked his brother.
“Losing,” Harald said. He held his hat—full of berries—out to his brother, who took a handful and ate them, seeds and all; black raspberries, fresh picked.
Bill nodded. “Well, that makes me feel better,” he said.
Both of them looked down the ridge they’d just abandoned without a fight to the enemy, who were already crowding the ground below them; a flood of bogglins, so many that the ground seemed to move with chitonous lava.
The irk knights were the last in the column. Even their magnificent animals seemed dejected; stags with racks of antlers that were themselves weapons walked with their heads down, and their riders walked beside them.
“We’re fucking doomed,” Harald muttered. “Sweet Jesu, I’ll end up being taken for a Jack if I keep on like this.”
Bill Redmede shrugged. “I trust Tapio,” he said. “He’ll see us right.” He didn’t say, The happiest hours of my life were spent in N’gara and I’ll fight for it. N’gara was just a few leagues away, and Ash’s entire autumn campaign seemed bent on taking it.
Harald smiled without mirth. “My brother the fuckin’ Jack believes an elf will save us, and I think that the queen’s commander is a lack-wit. Well played, my brother. We can change off; I’ll take the Jacks, you take the foresters.”
Bill shrugged. “You always was contrary, Harald.” He looked at the looming sky. Thoughtfully he said, “We need shafts.”
“As do we. Best hope the mighty Ser Gavin knows it, too.” Harald shook his head. “If’n we stand and talk any longer, we’ll be eaten alive by bugs.”
The two men turned, and began to trot along to catch their people, who were retreating into the strange, wet, golden evening.
The Vale of Dykesdale—Ser Gavin Muriens
Ser Gavin Muriens sat heavily on his destrier, feet out of his stirrups to ease his back, great helm and gauntlets on his squire’s saddle-bow, idly picking something wet and grisly out of the spike of his little axe.
He was looking out over the valley that the irks called Dykesdale, watching his vanguard (in this case acting as his rear guard) toil down the far ridge like a line of ants slipping along to a food source.
At his feet, the Vale of Dykesdale stretched for some miles below a long ridge whose top was dominated by old maple and beech trees in the full colour of late summer growth. Many of them had lost their tops, as if a winter ice-storm had swept along the ridge, and there were gaps where men and irks had hewed away patches of wood.
Below, in Dykesdale itself, a crisscross of streams and beaver dams funneled all approaches to the ridge into two main routes: the Dyke, an ancient dam built by long-vanished Giant Beavers, and the Causeway, a stone and earth tribute to the Empress Livia’s failed attempt to wrest N’gara from the irks fifteen hundred years before.
Ser Gavin had chosen it as the ideal battlefield, with Tapio, the Faery Knight, and Mogon, Duchess of the West, and Kerak, her mage, after the two defeats farther west. They had stood here, on the same bare, round crest that the Outwallers called “The Serpent’s Rest,” and looked out over the magnificent country.
“It’s like an impregnable fortress, built by nature,” Gavin had said.
Tapio smiled so that his fangs showed. “It isss an impregnable fortress, oh man. But it wasss built by my kind, to defeat all comersss.”
And Mogon had lowered her great crested head. “Armies founder here, as the wardens know all too well. But our enemy comes in numbers that this place has never withstood.”
“Aye.” Tapio nodded.
Lord Kerak smiled. “You see only defeat. But we have discussed this, Lords of the East. We have slowed him, and made him show us his real warriors, his broken wardens, his hastenoch, his trolls. All I ask is that we make him use his power. Harmodius and Morgon and I have … a surprise.”
“Will it work?” Ser Gavin asked.
“That depends on the depth of his arrogance and some fortune,” the scholar-daemon said. His heavily inlaid beak opened to reveal the purple-pink tongue within—the Warden’s equivalent of a smile.
Gavin was still coming to grips with the idea that the battlefield had been built. “It is all apurpose?” he asked, somewhat awed.
“Every tree, every branch,” Tapio said. “We didn’t build the ssstone caussseway.” His fangs showed. “We jussst left it asss a monument to the ssstupidity of men.”
Tonight, with the sun setting in a ball of fire beyond Ash’s legions, Tapio’s confidence seemed empty vanity. So did Kerak’s.
“We can’t fight many more times, and lose, without the whole will of this army snapping,” he said. “We need a win, even if it is fleeting.”
Kerak shook his head. “In this war there will be no victory, short of a miracle. Tomorrow, if we make a stand here, I will invite the opportunity for a miracle, but that is all I promise.”
Why did I want this job? Gavin said, but only inside his head. He’d already learned the key role of a commander in an alliance is to show relentless good humour and confidence.
So instead of speaking, he looked back west into the setting sun. The light was turning bronze from gold, but the strange metallic quality of the light was unchanged.
As far as Gavin could see, a carpet of moving creatures covered the earth, so that instead of grass, shrubs, and marsh, he could see only a vast blanket of enemies stretching to the horizon.
At his elbow, Tamsin’s voice was soft. “He has emptied every nest along the banks of the West River. Every bogglin. He has stolen the wills of millions of beings and he will use them as fodder for his vanity. Oh, how I hate him.”
“Tomorrow, I will use that vanity against him,” Kerak said.
“From your beak to God’s ear,” Ser Gregario said with his usual humour. “Let’s sleep. Unless you think they will come at us in the darkness.”
Tapio was still watching the endless carpet of foes. “If we lose here, we lose N’gara,” he said.
Tamsin kissed him. “Yes,” she agreed. “I am ready to lose it. Are you, my love?”
Tapio looked at Gavin. “We are all sssupposed to trussst your brother. Perhapsss I do. But even sssuppose that in the end, we triumph. Will there be anything left of my world?”
Very softly, Tamsin said, “No, my love.”
They all looked at her, for she was renowned as an astrologer and prophetess.
She shrugged. “When the gates open, the world changes. It has always been so. I need no wizardry to predict this.”
Gavin shook his head. “Let’s get some sleep,” he said. Far off to his right, the last of the column of rangers arrived at the foot of the great ridge to find rough shelters built of bark, and hot food. And bundles of arrows. There was fodder for man and beast, and fresh water. Everything that the hand of man and irk could do had been done.
“Tomorrow,” Tapio said. “I can feel it. I think we can stop him. My people have never been beaten here.”
Kerak bowed. “Tomorrow,” he said.
Mogon laughed. “In my youth, when this tree was young, I tried to make it up this ridge against you, Prince of irks, and my nest died like bogglins,” she said. “It is really quite pleasant to be on this side. Tomorrow we will win.”
Gavin nodded. “Tomorrow,” he said.
The sun rose somewhere, but over Dykesdale there was first fog, and then light rain, and the light grew very gradually.
Not a man or irk or bear or warden had slept damp, though, and every one had a hot breakfast. When Gavin had eaten his share of oatmeal porridge and bacon, he mounted a riding horse and rode the length of the ridge with Tapio and Ser Gregario. The highest summit, on the far right, was held by Mogon’s main battle; Exrech’s veteran bogglins, and Mogon’s hardened Saurian warriors, demons all, their inlaid beaks and engorged red-crests shining like myths come to life in the grey light of morning. In reserve, two hundred of the magnificent bears of the Adnacrags, the Long Dam Clan inured to war and many of their cousins and outbreeds, their golden fur darkened with damp. Many of them were sporting the heavy maille that the Harndon armourers had made for them over the summer, and almost every bear was wielding a heavy poleaxe as big as a barge pole in their paw-hands. A handful of Outwaller warriors stood with the bears; most of their kin were off in the east or fighting in the north against Orley, and the Sossag, once the mightiest of the Outwaller clans, were now protecting Mogon’s heartland from giant Rukh and yet more bogglins coming along the Inner Sea from the west.
In the center were the feudal hosts of Brogat and the northern Albin. There was Edward Daispainsay, Lord of Bain, commanding the dismounted knights in the center of the line although his wounds from Gilson’s Hole were not yet fully healed, and Lord Gregario with the mounted knights in reserve. The feudal levies were well armed with spears and armour; they had withstood days of attacks by bogglins without much loss, and they were more confident than most militia. They were beginning to be soldiers.
Tapio commanded the left of the line. There, the ridge was lowest and most vulnerable, and there were the Jacks and rangers; there also were the irk knights, and every irk regardless of gender who could be spared from N’gara. There, too, was Ser Ricar Fitzroy, with the knights of the northern Albin and Albinkirk, as well as fifty or so knights-errant from Jarsay, the Grand Seigneur Estaban du Born with another two hundred belted knights of Occitan, and there stood 1Exrech, his chitonous white armour spotless, at the head of his phalanx of spear-armed bogglins; they held the lowest ground, almost two thousand strong.
All told, they had almost eighteen thousand to face Ash’s million or so creatures. Or odds of roughly fifty to one. Gavin told his allies and his own more human officers that they were fighting for ancient N’gara, to show the irks that men and women could be trusted. But in his heart, Gavin was fighting because his brother had laid out a strategy and expected him to implement it, part of a plan so vast that Gavin could not imagine it would succeed. And yet, despite everything, he trusted his brother.
Gavin trotted his riding horse back up the central ride, the Serpent’s Hill, and dismounted. His page took his riding horse while his squire brought up his charger. A young man he’d never seen before handed him a cup of hippocras and he drank it while he considered the odds. They had to fight; that much had been made clear by his brother Gabriel all spring and summer. Every fight would bleed Ash, and only by fighting for every member of the alliance; the irks, the Jacks, the people of Alba and Morea; only by showing all of them that they could be defended would the alliance be preserved. This was not a war that could be won in an afternoon; Gilson’s Hole proved that. It was a war that might continue for generations.
In Gavin’s ear, Lord Kerak said, “Ready.”
While Gavin had reviewed his dispositions, the battle had begun. The tide of bogglins had rolled across the swamps and the dyke and causeway; had come forward like a seeping tide and splashed against the carefully sited earthen walls, the coppiced trees and “natural” stone features of the Dykesdale ridge.
The tide came in for an hour. Gavin watched, issuing no orders. There was nothing he could do but watch, but he stood as Ser Edward launched a counterattack that cleared the lower line of the center when the Brogat levies wavered. Tens of thousands of bogglins were used as filler by the creatures behind them, trampled to death and then walked over in the swamps.
The fog began to burn off. Off to the north, some low-level workings began to flay the waves of bogglins.
They broke. The tide flowed back; the waves receded into the swamps and ten thousand more bogglins drowned.
Gavin considered a second cup of hippocras and wondered what the hell his brother was doing, wherever he was.
Kerak spoke again from the aether. “Now he sets his will on the bogglins. Now they come again.”
This time the bogglins raced in, heedless of losses or terrain. They skittered over the carpet of their own dead and straight onto the spear points of the Brogat Levy. Below Gavin’s position, men and irks were dying again. His exhausted troops, manning the barriers and thickets, lofted clouds of arrows and stood their ground with sword and axe in hand. A hundred bogglins had fallen for every man; in some parts of the line, a thousand bogglins had fallen for every irk. But the second attack was pressed with more enthusiasm, and the drowned bodies in the swamp were now so thick that the next wave could cross dry-shod.
Off to the right, Mogon’s wardens and Golden Bears had lost less than a hand of their creatures, but even there every bear’s fur was matted and the wardens’ crests already deflated with fatigue. Along the first defence line on the ridge, the stacks of dead bogglins were already so high that the line had to be abandoned.
Out in the marshes, the dead were so thick that the course of the stream had been altered.
The Army of the Alliance was unrolling every scroll on war, and playing them out—ambushes, incendiaries, raids, dashing charges, destructive volleys.
Gavin looked out over the infinite fabric of his foes, and tried to wall off the rising tide of despair.
“Millions,” he said aloud. “But we are slaying mere thousands.”
Tapio smiled grimly, showing his fangs. “Millionsss are made of thousssandsss,” he said. “Hisss lossses are ssstaggering.”
Gavin shook his head. The tide had risen high; the sea of bogglins had swamped the first line entirely and were now facing the second, two hundred paces higher on the hillside. The sound was loud and constant; screams, war-cries, the despair of men wounded and eaten by bogglins, the equal despair of a bogglin whose carapace was penetrated; a week to die or a month, the creature was nonetheless already dead.
And then, like the changing of the light or the dissipating of the morning mist, the great assault failed. It did not fail suddenly; but inch by inch, bogglin by bogglin. Ash could take their minds and conquer their wills, but there came a point when flesh and blood conquered sorcery. Even bogglins had a scent sign for self-preservation.
The sky was turning blue overhead, and smell of bogglin blood was everywhere.
And so the tide went out for a second time.
“Blessed Saint Michael,” Gavin said. Across a nine-mile-wide battlefield, his people had held.
Far away to the west, almost lost in the mist, something rose into the air.
“Here he comesss,” Tapio said. “Pray to your godsss, or whatever else ssseemsss bessst to you, friendsss.” But Tapio was grinning. “We have hurt him.”
In all the other days of combat, Ash had never shown himself; not since Gilson’s Hole had his red-black form risen over a battlefield. His minions, most of them bogglins armed only with their natural claws, had flung themselves forward under compulsion, and Ash had not shown himself, nor, until two days before, had he committed a single wight, troll, or great hastenoch from the deep swamps of the north, not a single wyvern or irk.
These creatures were somewhere far off to the west; so far that no amount of sorcery or scouting could locate them. They were in reserve.
The black speck grew.
Gavin sighed. The real battle was about to begin. And his army was already so far beyond fatigue that the moment the tide of bogglins receded, the knights of the Brogat fell to their knees like monks witnessing a miracle.
The Vale of Dykesdale—Ash
Ash surveyed his foes with an impatience and annoyance that had become his constant state since being “embodied” in this, his chosen avatar. Annoyance, and fatigue. He had forgotten fatigue in the aethereal.
“Stupid children,” he said aloud.
He’d flung his almost limitless supply of animated chiton at their battle line in hopes that someone among his “foes” was bright enough to get the message and surrender, or skitter off into the woods. Time was growing short; the stars were moving, and his timetable was actually endangered. His “allies” in the sea required an enormous investment in will and time and immaterial power; but he needed them in place to wall off his competitors in Antica Terra.
That left him alone in Nova Terra; alone except for one rival of his own race and a host of smaller foes. Since none of these foes could possibly know what the game was, and how great the prize, except just possibly the old irk Tapio, he was annoyed that they even played at resisting him.
It is Lot, he told himself. Lot is using them as I use the bogglins, and to the same end. Stupid boy. He is far too late entering the game, and all his allies are too self-willed and too independent. But I still need to finish him, and quickly.
Ash had long since decided to have no allies at all—only slaves. It saved time and explanations. Even Thorn …
For a moment, the mighty Ash allowed himself to miss Thorn. But Thorn had not been loyal; Thorn had wanted too much of his own power. Like Orley.
Ash pondered the problems of metaphysical logistics; he had in his own right an enormous reservoir of power; his connection to the immaterium was nearly perfect, although never as perfect as it had been before he had made himself corporeal. And he had a strong connection to Thorn’s fortress at Lake-on-the-Mountain. Beneath it was one of the purest fountains of ops anywhere in the real, an out-welling that amounted to a tear in reality’s fabric; a tear someone had made in a war ten thousand years ago. He sucked at it like a baby on a teat, and used it to power the binding of millions of wills. Those bindings required two things he now had in short supply—his own will, and his time.
He hated time. He wasn’t used to it; it wasn’t “natural.” But he understood it well enough, and it ticked away with the movement of the stars only he could see, and pressed against him like an infinitely powerful phalanx of foes, and the onward press of time forced his talons.
And his tiny, contemptible foes had hurt him. He bore wounds on his immortal hide; signs of failure, signs that wrenched at his vanity as much as they caused physical pain. Pain. Another aspect of the material that he had forgotten.
Yet there was power—power to work his will—not through shallow intermediaries and foolish acolytes, but directly, as it had been in the beginning. He rose slowly over the battlefield on the cool autumn air and prepared a mighty working; something beyond the comprehension of most of the mortals below him. Not just a blow in the physical, but a message.
Surrender. Despair. Leave and let me have my way.
As a creature to whom the aethereal was a natural state, he merely willed and his will made manifest, and the world was affected.
But his thoughts, especially those of Lot, moved him and he twinned his consciousness so that a second Ash could, with only a slight diminution of his main effort, begin casting a delicate web, a tracery of aethereal strands to locate Lot wherever he moved in the real. And such was the dichotomy of Ash’s innermost mind that he didn’t admit to himself that he’d learned the technique from combatting the human mage, Harmodius. Even as he was aware that his failed assault on Desiderata had armed his enemies against him, and that he had, himself, betrayed Thorn, and not the other way around. A mighty mind has many holes and many traps and many concealments.
And self-knowledge had never been Ash’s strongest trait.
Instead, Ash balanced his expenditure on his Eeeague allies, strengthened the bonds that held the Orley and his creatures to his will, caressed the winds of scent and power that made a million bogglins his slaves, and relished the unfolding of a human betrayal he had motivated in the south, where, despite his own contempt for all men, Ash sought to destroy the magister Harmodius before he could reunite with his other allies. Because Harmodius was a foe. As was the human Morgon; so much potential there, but duped into the pit of Antica Terra. Let the mighty Morgon face Ash’s foes. That was a delicious victory. Perhaps he would defeat the elusive shadow; Ash allowed himself to laugh aloud. Or shadow would defeat him. Or rebel.
Shadow, rebel, will, Lot. Ash had played them all; all the rivals who mattered. Of them, he only feared the will.
Ash thought all these things and a hundred more while simultaneously plotting and commanding both his physical and his sorcerous assaults on the immediate battlefield. The bogglins flowed forward to their necessary deaths and his real troops, the troops he would need for the true contest when the gates aligned, came from their staging areas and began to move to the battlefield. With a beautiful economy that won Ash a bit of grudging self-admiration, he used the energy of the deaths of his first bogglins to power the Wyrm’s way working that moved a whole century of black-stone cave trolls straight into the center of the enemy, wreaking havoc. He’d never shown this tactic before; the result was immediate and spectacular, as a generation of Brogat knights were winnowed like ripe wheat.
But they died where they stood, and a dozen of his precious tolls became splintered rock.
What annoyed Ash most was this constant waste of resources. His were enormous but limited; his time was running like blood from a gaping wound, and his awareness of time was like pain; so very different from the way time molded itself when he had been outside it. He had things to do, and fighting bloody Tapio for this useless ridge was annoying. Annoying was the perfect word.
It was time to use his powers, because he was in a hurry and his beautiful trolls were dying.
Gavin watched the gradual defeat of his center with weary fear. In his ears, the two available great sorcerers and dozens of Morean and Irkish and Alban mages conversed rapidly, and he ignored them, watching instead as Ser Edward Daispainsay pounded a troll to the ground with a set of flawless strokes of his great hammer and then led another countercharge; farther north along the ridge, Ser Gregario, Lord Weyland, charged into the flank of the trolls with the mounted chivalry of the Albin, and the trolls were annihilated. But the damage was done; the whole second line would be lost, because subtle tactics were of no use against a million bogglins.
“Christ, he almost broke us in one assault!” Gavin said. “Where did the trolls come from?”
At his side, Tapio shrugged. “He hasss begun to ussse hisss actual army,” he said. “He moved the trollsss by sssorcssery.” He sounded smug. “Thisss tellsss me he mussst hurry,” Tapio added.
Gavin took a deep breath and wished his brother were there. “I hope you are right.”
“Here he comes,” Kerak said in his ear.
“He’s casting,” said Master Nikos, the former master grammarian of the university. He sounded satisfied.
“Now we will see something,” Kerak said.
Miles away and high above the battlefield, Ash detected the emanations of a dozen casters in the aethereal. Even as he knit his heavy magic, a massive working even for him, he lashed out against all twelve in a single pulse like a leven bolt the colour of dried blood that left patterns in the cloudless sky.
Tamsin hummed to herself as the brown bolts rolled across the sky. Her emanations were all constructs; in fact, they were reflector-beacons for actual casters located elsewhere. Before the lightning, almost as fast as thought, burst in pinpoint explosions of wood splinters and sulphur and raw ops, Tamsin had tracked each of them back to their point of origin and passed that vector to Kerak, who wove a diagram and passed it back—all in aethereal time.
As the sound of the explosions rolled along Dykesdale, Lord Kerak and the choir of mages of the allied army cast.
Even as they cast, Ash recognized both their method of observation and their method of detection and reacted, shed any working that he no longer needed and protected himself so that their mighty attack detonated in empty air.
But he clung to his enormous working, reaching far out into the aether itself for the ancient stones that rode there, moving along the star paths beyond the ken of any alive in the world of Alba. In the nigh infinite lore stored in his huge brain, Ash knew that the hollow rocks had been made by the Rhank aeons before, in an attempt to evade the gates and attack through the aethereal into reality. Perhaps fifty thousand years ago.
He took eight of them and started them on their way.
Kerak left the choir. There it was. Exactly as Harmodius had predicted; when pushed, Ash was going for the largest, heaviest, most spectacular magik. And fortunately, Thorn had used this one repeatedly, although its power and details were beyond any mortal caster.
Casting was beyond them. Interfering was not.
Kerak entered his memory cave, and was bathed in the warmth of a queen-mother’s love in his memory, and standing there, strong, secure, amid his own kind, he pulled from their nest a selection of memory larvae and swallowed them; and then plucked a single great albino bat that hung from the roof. This he patted, murmuring endearments, and then, tying symbolism to intent, he threw the little mammal, favoured pet of his kind, into the aethereal, and it flew.
Under the cover of a phalanx of attacks and a barrage of aggressive workings, Kerak’s subtle working of will climbed away into the aether, following the broad path of potentia left by Ash’s massive spell, homing in on the heavy scent of power.
Kerak watched it climb away and then went back to the choir.
“Done?” Nikos asked.
“Away,” Kerak said.
In the aethereal, the bat rose, faster than a real bat, and its white shape smoothed out as it rose; from bat to owl, and from owl to arrow. And once it was an arrow, it flew like an arrow, but the head was heavy with design and art and the tail powered itself with constant emissions into the real.
It was Kerak’s most extensive adventure into the world of the human ars magika as discovered by young Mortirmir and Master Nikos and the university, and it was the most complex single working any mortal, human, irk, or Saurian had attempted since the empire fell. But the Saurian mind excelled at holding layered, complex images, and this one was so complex that it seemed possible it would simply fail because he’d dropped a stitch.
“Break,” he whispered into the Green Earl’s ear. “This is the time.”
“Break,” Gavin ordered. He’d prepared all his commanders for this; the moment would come when they would run. They all knew.
His trumpeter blew a single, long call, and as one, thousands of men, irks, bears, wardens, and bogglins turned and began to run back over the ridge. The knights of Brogat took losses breaking contact; in the center, brave pages pushed forward with their master’s horses so that the knights could mount and run, and some of them died. All across the ridge, the Allies turned tail, and slipped east, over the ridge, abandoning the best defensive position in all of Nova Terra.
For almost a minute in the real, sparks and bolts crisscrossed the air over the battlefield. A Morean mage died with his blood boiling in his desiccated veins, and Lord Kerak’s second apprentice, Mehghaigh the Black, exploded like a tree struck by lightning, leaving Kwoqwethogan, Mogon’s sorcerous brother, to hold the choir together. It was the heaviest load of ops he had ever carried.
He held.
Well to the east, the choir of Lissen Carak sang, and the potentia they purified passed west into the hands of Lord Kerak, whose golden and green shields rose over the ridge and held, and held, and held.
Ash flew closer; his response time decreased, and the rate of his attacks rose, so that a series of red, green, and brown lines seemed to connect him to the glowing dome over the ridge. His talents showed him the rout of the enemy army, but despite his near infinite puissance, each time he reached into the aethereal to divide and conquer the choir of magisters opposing him, he took wounds. He could reach deep into the maw of the aethereal and find an Alban mage by the fire of his soul, and he could strike, but even for his ferocious intellect and mighty will, such a focus left him blind to the assaults of the myriad casters opposing him. He was balked like a cat who has caught a mouse and cannot kill it. Or to be more accurate, a cat who has found a tribe of mice and cannot kill them all.
The irony was not lost on him. His adversaries were using the same tactic on him in the aethereal that his legions of bogglins were practicing in the real, and for a moment he faltered, appalled at the sheer number and diversity of the hermetical talents displayed against him. Four of them were of considerable power and not to be ignored; but the vast choir of their supporters tore at Ash’s certainty of victory.
Uncertainty fueled his rage, and rage remained Ash’s favourite reaction. Fire flew. His talons glowed, he breathed death, and his assault rose to a climax against the choir’s wards.
Of course, that was a distraction anyway. The real weapons were on the way. Ash loved the levels of his deception and he exhaled death with satisfaction.
Far out where the edge of the real touched the first terrifying wisps of the aethereal eight great rocks, or castles, or ships, remnants of a war fought so long before that only two of the races that had fought the war survived to tell the tales, tipped past the point where they might have slipped back into the ebbs and tides of the aethereal where they were at home and began their long, spinning fall into the real. Long, and not long; as the rocks (if rocks they truly were) teetered on the edge of the real, stars were born and died, and eventualities became impossibilities, and the infinite struggled with the finite.
All overcome by the will of Ash.
And the stones became manifest, and began to fall. Sometimes this could happen naturally; it was where star iron came from, as any smith or magister knew. But there was nothing natural about Ash’s calling. Eight great bodies from beyond the edge of reality began to fall to earth, carefully aimed by Ash’s malevolence.
Yet in the long but finite instant in which they tipped into reality, Kerak’s working opened and burst into effect from the body of an arrow of thought to a becoming like the wings of a flock of very complicated butterflies; from an arrow, his working became a shield, or rather, a set of shields each fluttering subtly at the very edge of the real.
Each of the falling meteors struck one of the butterfly wings, and was altered very, very subtly.
And then they fell like Lucifer’s angels. As they fell through the outer reaches of the real, they gathered contrails that appeared to the mortals below like pointing fingers.
Ash turned away from a new wound that burned deep in his right side. He was only a mile from the enemy ridge, and now his workings were bubbling along Kerak’s glowing shields. He was burning through the shields but they were still holding; indeed, Ash’s last emanation of blue fiery rage had immolated a dozen ancient bears and as many wardens, a terrible blow to the Allies. Flint, oldest of bears, died there, and the eldest of his clan with him.
And still the choir’s layered shields held. Royal foresters lay dead in charred heaps; the northern Brogat would have a thousand new widows; and yet Ash could not pull down the shields.
None of it mattered, because his very presence was a deception.
Ash turned and raised his long head on his sinuous neck to see the glory of his skill. One part of his intellect had counted down to the moment where his meteors would impact; he glanced round to see a distant contrail as a volley of sorcerous attacks forced his focus onto survival; he slew the least of the hermeticists attacking him and turned to see eight lines in the sky.
Something was wrong.
He didn’t even have time to think.
The concussions were titanic. Each meteor struck the earth like a great fist from the heavens, and each, perfectly aimed, burning from a thousand miles of friction, fell along the Vale of Dykesdale and not onto the Dykesdale Ridge as Ash had planned.
Something had altered their paths; some by a few hundred meters, and two of them by miles.
One missed him by the length of one leathery wing, and suddenly Ash was fighting for his life; the near miss created a hurricane of air-currents that tore at his left wing, and then the explosions …
Ash spent all of his hoarded potentia to ride the cyclone winds and not have his vast wings ripped from his suddenly frail body, and even as the titanic blows struck across the sky, he was rolled, and the unhealed wound dealt him by an unsealie weapon months before burst asunder and his hot ichor flowed.
But Ash’s roar of anger was lost in the chaos of a false dawn.
He reached into the aethereal and drew power from the north.
Six meteors struck in a line along the marshes. Every tree on the nine-mile ridge was blown flat; a million years of tree life exterminated in an instant, and the heat of the impact started fires that would burn for days.
Half a million boggles died in a single beat of their collective hearts. Off to the west, Kerak’s redirected meteors missed the very heart of Ash’s real army and still annihilated hundreds of wyverns and trolls, started forest fires, and turned a whole broad lake to a rising column of steam visible from Harndon. A river’s course was forever altered; the crust of the earth was ruptured along the floor of Dykesdale. Red lava flowed, and the bodies of the dead became ash, literal ash, rising into the heavens to choke the sun.
But despite Kerak’s best efforts, none of the meteors struck the dragon.
The two he had directed at Ash’s reserves struck together, so close that they, too, blew a hole in the hard outer shell of the world, and a fiery chaos erupted. A mountain was born from the fire.
Every man or irk who had lingered on the western face of the ridge; trapped in combat, or too brave or foolish to run, or willing to sell their lives as rear guards to save their friends; all died. There fell Ser Edward, holding back the trolls so that his knights could escape, with all his squires, and there fell a dozen wardens, old souls who had roamed the north woods, covering Mogon’s escape.
And the survivors on the reverse slope might, at least in the first moments, have preferred death. The sky went dark; the sun was shadowed, and the air was full of smoke; even the wardens lost their hearing from the cataclysmic concussions, and most men could not hear well for days. Every horse bolted, despite careful precautions. And then the sky began to fall; first dust, and branches of trees, and splinters, and then rocks, and then more dust, and some bits of bogglins. Men were killed right through their armour; a falling rock could kill an armoured horse and his rider in one blow.
Tamsin, who had lived a thousand summers and seen many things, had never imagined the aftermath of the strikes, and she watched in utter horror as the malevolent rain flayed the Allies. She and Kerak raised shields to ward their people in the real—
And then Ash struck.
The choir was in chaos, and unprepared, and for eternal moments Tamsin and Lord Kerak tried to hold their adversary by themselves.
Far away in Lissen Carak, the choir raised its voices all together; Miriam’s high alto and Amicia’s low alto and over them all, a young novice’s magnificent soprano raising their praise of God to heaven. Amicia spread her arms, and the glow of golden light that suffused her began to intensify.
The choir’s power grew. The power passed west to Kerak and to Tamsin.
Ash could no long ignore the immanence of Amicia. It was a crisis for which he was prepared, and yet unprepared.
“Damn,” muttered Lord Kerak, and he was hit as Ash’s power began to leak through his mind, unable to hold the power of the choir and the power of Ash in his head. In no time he was dying, but the Army of the Alliance lived, and Ash turned, rushing east to try to prevent a disaster to all his plans, and he cursed, his curses palpable, abandoned any immediate hope of destroying the Allies, and cast from the ops he sucked from the fountain at Lake-on-the-Mountain and he took the wyrm’s way to Lissen Carak in a single mighty effort of will.
Tamsin herself left her fortress and stepped through reality to save Kerak. She reached as far down Kerak’s lifeline as she could, trying to save the ancient Warden sorcerer, greatest of his kind and perhaps as great as Harmodius himself.
Kerak’s physical body lay in a crumbled heap in the midst of the Whale’s Jaw, a huge rock outcropping on the reverse slope of the ridge where two ley lines converged, hiding him in the aethereal. Tamsin stepped through reality even as she reached far into the aethereal, but Kerak was far beyond her, his fading self already almost gone even from the farthest halls and tunnels of his great and Wyrm hole–like memory palace.
“Oh, Kerak,” Tamsin said, or something equally foolish. Tamsin and Kerak had been allies and foes many times in many contests; now, at what she knew to be the end of her age, she would have traded every knight and archer and every irk in the Army of the Alliance for Lord Kerak, her peer and friend.
She knelt in the darkening cave of his memory palace, and bowed her head. And ash and grit fell on her from the lowering sky.
Far to the east, in the darkening sky over the great abbey, Ash poured fire onto the battlements to no effect. He cursed, and raved; a thunderstorm, feeding on his excess and rich in volcanic ash, burst over the high castle. He was unwise in his expenditures, and his will lost adherence, and still he could not penetrate the choir’s canopy of resistance.
And then, to his embodied senses, chaos came. The roof of the abbey’s central church did and did not open; and the simultaneity of the two realities, invisible to mere mortal observers, terrified Ash. And from the paradox arose Amicia crowned in golden glory, and against her will of shining adamant gold Ash did not try his own, but turned, too late to stop what he could see, and he fled into the near aethereal. He could only see her as a new and potent adversary, but perhaps not yet a contestant. Not yet. Not this epoch, not this aeon.
Nonetheless, in her moment of apotheosis, he fled before her.
Pass me by, he said quietly. Another day I will eat you.
Light gathered in the shadowed remnant of Kerak’s palace.
Tamsin knew it was time to leave, but the sudden accession of light gave her hope.
And then, above her, an immortal appeared, holding Kerak as if the great Saurian were a toy. Tamsin raised her eyes to see that it was no angel, but Amicia, like a living statue of solid, glowing gold, and her eyes were too bright for even Tamsin to meet.
“Now, Faery Queen, fear no evil,” she said. “This one goeth to my house, which indeed has more rooms than any mortal could imagine. But listen! I speak with the last breath of my living. The undead dragon Rhun is falling to his last death; Gabriel is victorious in the Antica Terra. All the world is balanced on the razor’s edge.”
“Counsel me!” Tamsin begged.
“Save Lissen Carak,” Amicia said. Then she blinked. “Or not.”
Then she smiled the warm, rich smile that Tamsin remembered from the Inn of Dorling.
And she and the glowing form of Kerak vanished into the darkness.
Tamsin tore herself from her friend’s silent palace, taking with her a web of workings she didn’t understand, and—
Found herself standing amid the great stones of the Whale’s Jaw. Kerak’s body was gone.
Tamsin fell to her knees.
A mile to the east, in a sheltering stand of ancient beeches, Tapio and Ser Gavin were gathering the army. Mogon knew of Kerak’s death and of Flint’s; the loss of two powers of the Wild was a heavy blow, and for Gavin, the loss of the Lord of Bain and his retinue was as bad. A terrible wind gusted from the west with a smell of burning and corruption, brimstone and heavy treacle. The sky was dark, the sun aglow like a distant fire on a dark night.
“We can’t make another stand,” Gavin said. His archers looked haunted in the queer brown light; they flinched every time something fell through the treetops. The N’gara Jacks looked as if they had been beaten with sticks; the royal foresters were slumped with their packs on, as if they had been struck by lightning.
In fact, they had been struck; they had watched fifty old comrades immolate and scream to their horrible deaths.
Tapio sighed and looked west. The sky was blood orange at the base of the horizon, and the air was stifling and close, like an old house with the windows closed. There was hot ash falling from the sky.
“If we have lossst my lady Tamsssin, we are indeed doomed,” Tapio said.
“Tamsin is right here,” she said, kissing her love. She appeared as a beautiful mortal woman, in a red houplande with a gold belt of heavy plaques.
Men looked up.
“Lord Kerak is dead,” he said. “I saw his soul in the arms of Sister Amicia.”
No one spoke.
Tamsin bowed her head, and then raised it. Her fanged mouth opened and she sang like a minstrel, “The impossible is now everyday. I have called down fire from the sky, and I have seen an angel of the Lord, and she was the embodiment of a nursing sister named Amicia, and she took Kerak away to heaven. Or so it appeared to me. Is she the Lady Tar? Your confusing Virgin? Or now a God unto her own right?” Tamsin shrugged. “We live in a great tale. Let me say only what I saw. She told me that Gabriel has triumphed in the East; that the dragon Rhun is destroyed. And that we must protect Lissen Carak.”
Tapio looked hard at the magister. “A glowing angel of their god told you this, my love?” He was curious. Cynical, perhaps. “Lissen Carak? Not N’gara?”
“She said, ‘Save Lissen Carak … or not.’”
Tapio laughed without bitterness. “No ambiguity there, my love.”
Tamsin looked at the ground in weariness. “I would trust her,” she said simply.
Ser Gavin looked over the army, such as it was. “It is two hundred hard leagues to Lissen Carak,” he said. “Fifteen days. Without rest.”
Ser Gregario had come up, eyes red. “It’ll take us that long to unfuck all this,” he said. “And none of these lads and lasses will be any good in a fight for a long time.”
Tapio looked at the human, and looked, too, at Bill Redmede, who looked sixty years old and not thirty. Redmede nodded. He was having trouble hearing what the others were saying.
“If we retreat, N’gara will fall,” he said.
“Can’t you … hide it?” Gavin asked.
“No,” Tapio said. “Not from Asssh. Not anymore.”
“Three times we have stood, and three times been defeated,” Gavin said.
“This was no defeat,” Tamsin said. “Hear what I sing. We have dealt Ash a blow that may prove mortal.”
Tapio shook his head. “Even ssshorn of hisss insssane horde of bogglinsss, he is puisssant beyond our bessst effortsss,” Tapio said. “And now you have taught him to take our sssorcccerersss ssseriousssly.” He turned and looked at Gavin and his dark eyes glinted. “I would hold my N’gara. I would hold it and send you all to your devil.”
Tamsin shuddered in the strange light. “No,” she said.
“No, my love?” Tapio shook his head. “Together we could stop Asssh. Or at leassst hold N’gara.”
“No,” she said. “It is a fine dream, but when we entered this war, we risked all we have. Now the bet comes due.”
Tapio grunted. “We are losssing. Perhapsss we have already lossst.”
“Yes,” admitted Tamsin. “And we lost Amicia and Kerak in one day. We will never be a choir like this again.” She sighed. “Unless Harmodius and Desiderata come.”
“Next time Ash will come with caution and sssubtlety,” Tapio said. “And you will die, Tamsssin.”
Men shuffled and one spat. Ser Gregario fiddled with his sword, and Ser Gavin wished he were good at speeches.
Bill Redmede spoke cautiously. “What does it mean that Ser Gabriel is victorious?” he asked so quietly that other men, deafened by the concussions of the falling rocks, made him repeat himself, and he flushed.
“So the Red Knight won?” he barked more loudly. “What does that mean?”
“It means he’s drinking good red wine in Etrusca while we face fucking Ash,” muttered Ser Gregario.
“It meansss he hasss traded my N’gara for Arlesss,” snapped Tapio.
Tamsin nodded. “Yes. If we wish to save Lissen Carak, we must leave N’gara.”
“The gates align, or open, or what have you, in twenty-three days,” Gavin said. “Whatever happens …” Gavin closed his eyes, and opened them again. “We’re on our own.”
Tamsin raised her hands despite her weariness. “Listen; our workings, and Ash’s, have turned Dykesdale into a carbonized desert with a pool of molten rock at the bottom. We have a day; perhaps two. We can break off, move east, and … begin laying traps and ambushes. Every day.”
Tapio looked away.
Bill Redmede looked at his brother. “Twenty days?” he asked.
Harald Redmede was captain of the royal foresters, the hardest man in the woods, some said. “You only die once,” he said, and spat. It wasn’t contempt; his mouth was full of wood ash.
“And then we try and hold Lissen Carak,” Gavin said, thinking it over. “Sweet Christ. With the twelve thousand we have left? Mayhap?”
“Yer brother held it wi’ five hunerd,” Redmede the elder said.
“The king came and rescued us,” Gavin said.
Tamsin nodded. “We will have to pray for Harmodius and Desiderata this time.” She paused, opened her mouth to speak, and then said nothing. She looked at Tapio.
Gavin looked back to the east. “The Prince of Occitan and the Count of the Borders are raising the royal army in the east,” he said. “We are not alone.”
“You are asssking me to give all I have,” Tapio said. “To sssave the world of men.”
Gavin drew himself up. He was still the Green Earl; he was far from beaten. “I have lost Ticondonaga,” he said. “When we are victorious, I will rebuild it. I pledge the Kingdom of Alba to rebuilding N’gara.”
Tapio nodded slowly. Then he raised his arms as if invoking the aid of heaven.
“It isss done,” he said.
Tamsin vanished.
“Tamsssin hasss taken our people and run,” Tapio said. “Now let usss take the time we have won, and not sssquander it.”
Gavin nodded. “Break and run,” he said.
Weary men and women clambered to their feet, and hauled their mates up; men donned packs. Bess was with the matrons; Bill Redmede missed her, but he got his pack on his shoulder. Bill wondered if it was symbolic that the Jack’s white wool cotes had grown to a colour more like summer green, and the crisp dark green cotes of the royal foresters had bleached in the sun to a colour lighter than the leaves of a summer oak, so that the two were nearly indistinguishable in the shade of the old beech trees.
“I’m tired of getting beat,” Redmede said to his brother. He was too loud; no one could hear well, and the dark sky frightened everyone.
Ser Gavin heard him, and he looked down and his smile was tired and grim. “Fight, get beat, rise up, and fight again,” he said. “That’s our job.”
Some men laughed, and some muttered darkly, but authority called; sergeants and vintners ordered men into lines or columns, and despite everything, a rear guard of Jacks and foresters and Irkish knights was formed and, as if daring fate, went back up the ridge above them.
Gavin found his heart rising. “Damn,” he said. “Damn me. We aren’t beat yet.”
Tapio nodded. “Indeed,” he said. “We mortals are not ssshort of courage. Perhapss it isss becaussse we die so fassst anyway.”
Behind a screen of rangers, the Army of the Alliance of Men and the Wild formed into columns and tramped off into the last light along the very same trail that Bill Redmede’s shattered Jacks had traversed in the other direction just a year before.
Grey Cat, the wiliest of his hunters, grinned. “Just eight days to the Cohocton Country,” he said.
Redmede took a long pull at his nearly empty canteen and spat. “I’m too fuckin’ old for this,” he said.
Gavin had a notion, as a squire brought him a horse, and he played with his stirrup leathers while he refined it.
“Where is Lady Tamsin?” he asked Tapio.
“Clossse,” Tapio replied. “She isss doing what can be done for N’gara.”
“I need her,” Gavin said.
Almost instantly, the Lady of Faeries appeared.
“If we could hide,” Gavin said to the Lady of Illusions, “we might avoid some fights we would surely lose.”
She nodded. “This is both subtle and good,” she said. “And we can use this ugly darkness against our enemy.”
Then Tamsin and Tapio stood together for so long that the last tail of the army passed them, marching east into the twilight, lit by mage lights and will-o’-wisps. They stood like statues, and then, together, they faded into a more-than-twilight obscurity and were gone, not suddenly but very slowly, like the colour bleaching from wool in a tub of laundry.
When Syr Ydrik and his hunters rode by on their tall war elk, they saw nothing of the magister or the irk queen, and a dozen veteran rangers passed east and could find no trace of the army they had so lately left.
Gavin kept the column moving all through the night, through exhaustion and near mutiny, to fresh water and another strong camp. He dismounted, took a message from the latest imperial messenger bird, wrote out a long response about the battle just fought, and directed the Abbess Miriam to take command of the peasants of the North Albin and begin digging trenches. And as he rode east, he looked at the stars, and wondered if the same stars were rising over his brother and the company.
He scratched the scales that now covered most of the left side of his body, and wished the Red Knight would appear. Or send a messenger bird, or something.
“Where the hell are you?” he asked the eldritch sky.