The Dread Wyrm

Chapter Thirteen

De La Marche died in the storming of Ticondaga. He didn’t die on the battlements, cutting his way in. He died in the sack, when children were being destroyed and eaten, when men who’d begged for quarter were fed to monsters by cheering sailors, when a hundred atrocities passed in a few beats of a terrified victim’s heart.

De La Marche stood in the yard running slick with fresh blood and tried to stop it, and a stone troll made a pulp of his head. Boglins ate part of him as he lay there and, later, something with too many legs ripped one of his arms off his corpse and took it away into the darkness.

Thorn stood like a great stone tree in the courtyard, watching. He did not move much-a waste of energy. He merely observed. The storming and consequent workings had robbed him of a great deal of his power, at least temporarily, and he had not had the replenishment from Ghause that he had anticipated.

The sack went on around him.

He saw De La Marche protest-saw him stand between predator and prey, and saw him go down. And later he saw the trenoch-a swamp thing-feast on the corpse and take some away for its disgusting young.

Thorn was also digesting a feast, but his feast was one of the mind.

Ser Hartmut came and stood beneath Thorn’s great form. He said nothing, but also watched as men behaved worse than beasts and predators fed.

The garrison of Ticondaga provided a great deal of sport.

And eventually, when the attackers were sated, when even Kevin Orley’s warriors sank on their haunches in disgust or shock or merely fatigue, Ash came.

His presence seemed to fill the yard, and Thorn had the disconcerting notion that the entity was feeding there, too. But he again manifested as a pair of fools, in filthy motley, who spoke with one brass voice.

“Look at them,” he said. He pointed a stick shaped like a snake at where two sailors, Etruscan mercenaries or Galles, were tormenting a man whose screams had almost been exhausted. “Look at them. Give them license, and they show what they really are.”

Thorn didn’t turn his head. “What are they, Master?”

“Worse than anything the Wild ever conjured,” Ash said. “Men are the cruellest and most vile creatures that have ever come to this place. Servants only of their own corruption and wickedness.”

Thorn did not disagree.

“One of my other plans has miscarried,” Ash said. “So I must ask you to march sooner, on Dorling.”

Thorn was still working on the things he’d learned in the moments during and after Ghause’s death. The out-welling of power-the incandescent ops-

He had learned much. And he was still pulling at some of the twisted ends, even as he wove others into new barriers.

In fact, Thorn was busy knotting and splicing around the black hole that stood somewhere in his mind. The cascade of thoughts by which he’d reached certain conclusions was hard to reconstruct, but he knew he’d taken some of Ghause’s memories in his unsuccessful attempt to subsume her. One of them had triggered something.

The black hole in his mind was the same size and shape as the black eggs he carried. It had been put there at the same time, by the same hand.

For the same reason.

He was, himself, incubating something. He had an excellent idea of exactly what that was.

He had begun to take the steps required to deceive his master, and perhaps-to survive.

And more.

“One of your plans miscarried?” Thorn asked gravely.

“I cannot be everywhere,” Ash hissed. “And the bitch Queen and her servants were there before me.” The jesters-shaped like misshapen children with fat bodies and long, thin limbs-both giggled. And spat.

“Can you not?” Thorn asked, trying to mask his interest. He was weaving a net of the insubstantial stuff in which the mind built the palace, and he was endeavouring to use it to build a deception, so that Ash would see only what he expected.

Ser Hartmut grunted. “To whom are you speaking, Sorcerer?” he asked.

Thorn pointed a stony finger. “Do you not see two capering children, dressed in motley?” he asked.

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “I see many terrible things,” he said. “But no jesters.”

Thorn considered this.

Ash said, “No, even I cannot be everywhere. And you must have learned by now how opaque everything becomes-like muddy water-when too many fingers stir it.”

Thorn considered this statement, too. In his head, his will was madly building, throwing up beaver dams of obfuscation behind thickets of deception between his thinking space and the area around the blackness.

“It doesn’t matter much,” Ash said. “I’ve out-witted her anyway, and she’s left with her concentration on the wrong moment and the wrong avatar. So the loss of a few pawns-even my favourites-is no great loss.”

Thorn thought that if the mad jesting twins were, themselves, people, then in fact, Ash was betraying fury, humiliation and loss.

“Be that as it may,” the darkness said. “It’s time to reveal a little more of our hand and limit the damage. Have you seen this?” Ash asked, and disclosed a nested set of workings, a box within a box within a box.

The whole was so labyrinthine that Thorn’s head reeled.

“I had no idea,” he said. “That life was so small.”

“Small, and wild, all the way down to the smallest,” Ash cackled. “And sometimes the manipulation of the smallest is of the greatest moment. On to Dorling, Journeyman!”

Thorn listened to the benighted children cackle and thought, He has, somewhere, lost a battle. And he means to betray me. He is not God, nor yet Satan.

I can do this. Very well.

“We must march to Dorling,” Thorn said to Ser Hartmut. “As soon as we can.”

Ser Hartmut chuckled darkly. “Perhaps when all the women are dead and the fires are out, you’ll get this-horde-to move again. My experience is that most creatures, and not just men, take what they can and return home. Most creatures do not see war as a means to an end. It is merely an end.”

Indeed, over the next day, almost as many creatures of the Wild left his army as joined it. New creatures and bands of men came in every day-Outwallers, bandits, cave trolls, small tribes of boglins under their shamans and many of the bigger creatures, too-a whole flight of wyverns Thorn had never seen before, from far to the north, and a new, strong band of wardens, big, heavily built saurians from north of the Squash Country-hereditary enemies of Mogon’s and her ilk.

Many of the northern Huran who had come as volunteers left; some in disgust, and some merely because they had good loot, or a captive to adopt or torment.

Despite the shifting, Thorn’s host was immense, and the loot of Ticondaga could not hold them long. Nor feed them. Hartmut’s men and the sailors made a camp and fortified it, ate from their own stores and refused to share with any but Orley’s warband.

Orley’s warband were now so well armed and armoured that they appeared a regiment of dark knights with scars and tattoos and deerskin surcoats. Most had heavy bills, or axes, and some carried crossbows as well. Kevin Orley was already a name. Men flocked to his banner now, and he called himself the Earl of Westwall. The armoured fist of the Orleys now floated over the smoking ruins of Ticondaga.

Ser Hartmut was a good teacher in the ways of war, and Thorn listened to him as he planned. Then he ordered his horde to break up-to feed off a larger swathe of the Adnacrags and to inflict more terror and more damage.

“Meet me under the Ings of the Wolf’s Head in five days,” he said, his voice like the growl and roar of summer thunder. “And we will take Dorling and feast again.”

Ser Hartmut organized the men-Galles, sailors, Outwallers, Orley’s warband and all their camp-followers. On their last day at Ticondaga, they were joined-late-by the expected reinforcement from Galle-another hundred lances and a strong company of the routiers with their own captains; Guerlain Capot led the brigans, men as hard and as rough as Orley’s men, and Ser Cristan de Badefol led a hundred Etruscan lances under a black banner. On his armour was the motto “Enemy of God, Mercy and Justice” in gold. It was said he had once been a member of the Order of Saint Thomas.

As soon as he arrived, he approached Ser Hartmut. They embraced-carefully-and de Badefol examined the ruin of Ticondaga.

“I told d’Abblemont that you’d take it,” the Etruscan said. “I brought what I could. There’s a lot of shit going on.”

Ser Hartmut wrinkled his nose fastidiously at de Badefol’s coarseness.

“Oh, don’t be a choirboy,” de Badefol said. “Just before we left port we heard that the King of Galle had been badly beaten in southern Arelat. There’s a rumour up in Three Rivers-since a pair of Etruscan merchants came in-that the Etruscans have asked the Emperor for help, it’s so bad.” De Badefol watched a wyvern taking flight off the water-its great, slow, laboured wings brushing the water at every stretch so that, as it lifted into the grey morning air of the mountains, its wings left a succession of perfectly round spreads of ripples. After sixteen great heaves of its wings it was airborne-just clearing the distant tree line across the lake, where Chimney Point came down from the Green Hills’ side. “By God, Ser Hartmut, I rejoice to see that we are directly in league with the forces of Satan. I’ve always been a devotee.”

“You speak much nonsense and little wisdom, my friend.”

“Does d’Abblemont know we are supporting the very side that makes war on the King in Galle and Arelat?” de Badefol asked.

“I care nothing for that,” Ser Hartmut growled. “I have orders, and I obey them, until they are complete.”

De Badefol nodded. “How very simple,” he said. “Well, my bravos will probably take a few days to-Black Angels of Hell, what is that?”

A few yards away, a pair of boglins emerged from the ground. They had bored through the earth, as they did when it was soft, and now appeared within the human encampment. In moments they’d caught a goat and begun to devour her.

Ser Hartmut drew his sword, which burst into flame. He killed both of the boglins, the sword slicing effortlessly through their carcasses and leaving them in the same unjointed state to which they had rendered the goat.

Within seconds, carrion birds began to descend.

“Where the fuck am I?” de Badefol asked.

“This is the Wild,” Ser Hartmut said. “Best get used to it. Here, one is either predator, or food.”

Sixty miles east of Dorling, the Emperor mounted his horse, took his helmet from the junior spatharios, Derkensun, and his sword from the senior, Guntar Grossbeak, and rode to his officers, gathered to review his magnificent army. Derkensun was still unsure of his rank, cautious in ceremonial. Grossbeak-tall and with fading copper hair and the biggest nose of any man Derkensun had ever met, was a lord, a Jarl. From home. He had no experience in the guard-but a great name as a killer.

Derkensun liked him, but he was a symptom of the imperial army’s greatest problem-too many new men.

The Emperor’s army broke camp and marched in a damp dawn. The Meander flowed on their right and to the south, the outposts of the Green Hills rolled away into long downs, some crowned with ancient hill forts, complex rings of earth, and some with standing cairns so ancient that no man remembered who had built them.

The Emperor watched the head of his army, guarded today by his Nordikaans, each carrying a great axe or a long-bladed two-handed sword, and wearing hauberks to their knees or below-some of steel, some of dull iron, some of bronze. Many of the Nordikaans now sported Etruscan or Alban breastplates over their maille, and some wore the new-style bascinets with maille aventails to pad the axed hafts on their shoulders. Almost every man had acquired full plate leg armour since last year’s bloody victory in Thrake. But the magnificent cloaks on their shoulders were the same, and many helmets glinted gold in the rising sun.

Behind the Emperor’s person, today, rode the Scholae, the elite cavalry of Morea, with horn bows scabbarded by their sides and coats of plates or steel scale over light maille, with gold brocade surcoats and billed helmets, new made in distant Venezia from hardened steel. Each troop of the Scholae rode matched horses; black in the first troop, bay in the second, and grey in the third. The scarlet-clad Vardariotes were already far ahead, moving across the hills in a nearly invisible skirmish line that covered the front and both flanks of the column.

Behind the Scholae rode two regiments of the Emperor’s stradiotes-his semi-feudal cavalry; the men of southern Morea and the men of the city. The northern Morea and Thrake would need a generation to recover from treason, stasis, and battle. But already since last year the stradiotes had changed in armament, and more of them rode larger horses and had heavier armour-made available at very favourable prices by the Etruscan factors.

Behind the stradiotes came a banda of mountaineers from the slopes between Alba and the Empire-tall, strong men and women with heavy javelins and heavier bows. They wore no armour at all beyond skull caps of iron. Many carried small round targets, but none had a knife longer than his forearm. The mountaineers had their own officers, bearded men on small ponies, and they marched quickly enough to keep up with the horsemen.

Behind them came a banda of Outwallers from south Huran, around Orawa, the extreme northern outposts of the Empire. They had come south to Middleburg and many had already shadowed the hosts of the sorcerer. Janos Turkos rode at their head, smoking. They kept no sort of order and sometimes left the column altogether.

Last, in the rearguard, came Ser Milus, with the company’s great banner of Saint Catherine, and with him rode Morgan Mortirmir and fully half of the company, and perhaps half again-Ser Milus had been busy recruiting.

All totalled, the Emperor had five thousand seasoned veterans to march to war in the north. If he was worried, his beautiful, bland face gave none of that away.

The army cheered him, and then turned, almost as one man, and moved off to the west.

Morgon Mortirmir had enjoyed a pleasant semester polishing his skills-really just a few weeks-before the Emperor’s messenger and Ser Milus’s had collided on his inn’s stairs summoning him to war. But he’d learned some fascinating things, and he’d used the first ten days out of Liviapolis on the road to work them into practical designs.

One was a simple hermetical device the size of a tinderbox that allowed a scout, when he pressed a stud, to make a string vibrate on another box held by another scout up to a league or more away. It was imperfect still and Morgon was sure it could be “sensed” in the aethereal, but it put in the Emperor’s hand the ability to see over the next ridge as surely as his scouts could travel there. Morgon had concocted a dozen other devices-most of them intended to protect the column against spies, as the captain had warned him.

Some of them even worked.

The only outward show was that insects had a very hard time indeed getting close to the column, in camp or out of it-a side effect that delighted the soldiers and made Morgon outstandingly popular with the company.

Morgon was musing on the possibilities of a code-something simple-perhaps easily changed-for his communication devices. He had only made six of them-each one took more than a day of work and more than a day of his potentia. Ser Milus and Proconsularis Vlad, the acting commander of the Vardariotes, both requested more devices each day.

The master board-really, an old lute hermetically re-worked to respond directly to impulses from the aethereal-began to emit the notes that meant “alarm.”

“Some kind of attack coming in,” he said tersely. The language of the impulses was still too limited.

Ser Milus gave an order, and the great red company standard was waved back and forth.

Immediately, the column began to deploy. Morgon was far towards the back, well located to see the mountaineers struggling to spread out to the south, looking for cover-the Outwallers running down the banks of the Meander to the north on the same errand, each block covering one of the column’s flanks.

The wyverns came in from the south. They were wary-they flew very low. Given how close they all were to the Circle of the Wyrm, Morgon was surprised that they dared at all.

There were a dozen of them-sleek shapes that flew along the edge of the hills to the south and west of them. Without the warning they’d have caught the whole column in march order, but instead, every archer had an arrow to his string.

But the leader of the wyverns was old, canny, and had much experience of men. And his instructions had been admirably precise. He circled to the east, his own band riding the same drafts he did, well closed up against being located too fast. They circled the last hill and swung out across the valley of the Meander, and Morgon saw the company archers begin lofting arrows-some men loosed far too early, but most of the archers were veterans, not just of war but of this war, and held their shafts.

From the baggage near the rear of the army, crossbow bolts flew.

The great winged creatures banked, coming in along the axis of the column and manoeuvring in the still air to make themselves poorer targets.

The company-deployed to the right and left of the baggage-raised their bows almost together as Smoke chanted ranges-and loosed.

A brave and untried young wyvern crumpled under forty heavy impacts and crashed to earth, bouncing once and ploughing a furrow in the sandy soil until its corpse crashed into a wagon whose oxen were still harnessed. The oxen rolled their eyes and bolted heavily, passing along and then through the archers’ line on the left of the road.

Two more wyverns fell victim to their hate and their feeding desires, disobeyed their chieftain and attacked the disordered archers. In heartbeats, Jack Kaves was dead, and his partner Slacker, and a dozen more archers were wounded and down.

Ser George Brewes bellowed and lashed out with his long spear, and Ser Giovanni Gentile stood by him. One of the younger wyverns took a deep thrust under his neck and powered himself into the air, but the other stayed to fight, and armoured men and women struck it from every side until it crumpled. Tippit and Half-Arse put goose feathers in a third monster, and then the survivors were banking away.

The trailing, wounded beast had trouble getting altitude, and the Vardariotes killed her, riding at breakneck speed under the stricken thing and loosing arrows straight up into her guts until she fell.

The men and women of the company pulled the dead horrors off the baggage wagons, and noted that their talons were smeared in a sticky black mess. Master Mortirmir was summoned, and took samples. It was obviously hermetical, but Morgon couldn’t see what it was for-it wasn’t a poison.

Morgon thought the whole incident a display of the enemy’s foolish vanity-four wyverns was a poor return for two baggage wagons and six dead archers, if considered coldly.

It was hard to consider coldly. They buried the men and the two women who’d died with the baggage, crossbows in hand, and then they drove on. The column marched until noon.

And then, suddenly, horses began to die.

There was no warning. Among the company, it was horses with the baggage that went down first. Almost a dozen in the first minute, black froth coming from their nostrils.

Men went down as their mounts collapsed. The collapses were horrible-well-beloved mounts seemed almost to melt, their skin crawled with some form of death, and then, down they went, never to rise, and as they lay they bloated with terrifying rapidity, their guts stinking as they corrupted.

Morgon was not the only magister with the column, but he was the closest to the first horses to fall. He had the presence of mind to order his own horse-a lithe stallion called Averoes-to run-indeed, he struck Averoes sharply with his scabbard to drive the young horse away. Then he ran towards the nearest rotting animal, already entering into his palace-the palace Harmodius had built.

The checkerboard floor was unchanged, as were many of the other features, but he had changed the chess pieces for statues-thirty-two statues of many of his favourite people from history and his own times, philosophers and rulers and mystics and even musicians.

Again he summoned the black paste that had been on the wyverns’ talons. In the aethereal, it appeared not black but a living purple, like a slime mould. The colour burgeoned with life and hermetical energy.

He had seen this on his first look, but it hadn’t seemed dangerous-Morgon bore down, looking more closely. He had learned many tricks at the university, and one was how to make a lens of air. Morgon adapted it and cast, and instantly found himself the victim of his own workings-the simulacrum of the sticky paste was too coarse-grained a reproduction to examine in the aethereal.

In the real, he emerged, lumbered to a stop from a sprint, and tried not to fall into the fizzing black sludge that had once been Hetty’s second horse. He worked a sample into the air in front of him, cast the lens of air, and then moved it-

The black-purple stuff was alive.

Fifty yards away, Ser Milus was walling the company’s dying horses off from the rest of the army. He had no idea what was killing his horses, but he’d seen enough war to fear infection and the rapid spread of something-some horrible equine plague. Or a curse, or a hermetical working.

The horses at the back of the column were dying, and his own sight told him those at the front were not.

But men were turning and riding back to see.

He ordered men on foot to run forward and order the rest of the army to ride on, and then he thought of Morgon’s box. But by then it was too late, and his beautiful eastern riding horse retched black bile and fell, and Milus was on the ground.

The first horse to fall exploded. And the air filled with fine black spores.

Morgon was less impressed by the spores. Spores he knew how to handle. Morgon raised potentia, made ops, and cast, almost without access to the aethereal or his palace. He could work fire without conscious access to his powers.

The cloud of spores flared and was gone.

Another dead horse exploded, and another.

Mortirmir cast, and cast.

Somewhere between the sixth horse and the ninth, he saw a more elegant solution. He dug the tip of his dagger into the sticky black stuff and used a simple like to like equivocation, and then displaced the stuff with fire.

He had not thought through all the ramifications of his working, and he was shocked to see several horses burn-screaming-or explode into fire without ever seeming to have contracted the plague. He had thought far enough ahead to protect the original sample on the wyvern’s talons.

The rest burned.

An hour later, Ser Milus looked over his rearguard-now fewer than one man in ten was mounted.

They’d lost horses but none of the oxen. They’d lost almost all the company’s remounts and more than half of the war horses.

They were on foot on the rolling, gravelly fields at the foot of the Green Hills.

Milus did what he could, ordering the baggage wagons loaded with armour and weapons, to make his column march faster. The Emperor pressed ahead. Milus had all but ordered him to do so. They had the captain’s schedule, after all.

It was the following morning before they received an imperial messenger, and they could send the word to the other columns. By then, it was too late.

North of Albinkirk, a deep V-formation of barghasts struck Ser John Crayford’s powerful armoured column at last light, just as the camp was being prepared. The bird-like reptiles swept in over the ancient trees… and were met by a rising, steel-tipped sleet of arrows. Three died immediately, and six more of the great avians were badly wounded, and their captain turned away, shrieking his rage. The attack was inept and the humans well prepared.

It was sheer bad luck that the youngest barghast to die fell almost atop the horse lines.

Mag’s response was more effective, but she came to the problem late, summoned in the falling darkness only after the horse herd was infected and the spores were flying. But she, too, solved the spores with a like to like working. She was a far better healer than Morgon, and managed to save more than a few horses already infected. But she had to treat them one by one, and they tended to die too fast for her to be truly effective.

She saved almost seventy-five war horses. They lost almost a thousand animals altogether, and when the sun rose the next day, Ser John was still forty miles south of Dorling, and his whole column was on foot.

“Why not simply set the plague-motes on the men?” Thorn asked-although he already knew the answer.

“Men are much stronger against such sorceries than animals,” Ash said. “And I want the men all together. Their time will come, and they will experience my power. But I will not spring my trap too soon.”

He desires a great battle on his own terms-a great battle in which many will die. And every death will enrich him and his infernal eggs, until they all hatch. Even the one in my head. Thorn considered this a moment.

And then he will manifest, I believe. Is it blood? Is it the fleeing of souls into the aether? What is the source of his power?

Why can he not see the Dark Sun?

If I were close enough to the Dark Sun…

Thorn passed the time, as he moved his army of the Wild south in the thick, wooded hills and swamps of the southern Adnacrags, in moving things and creatures on the so-called Wyrm’s Way. On his fourth attempt, he stood holding a turtle egg in his hand, and when he arrived at the end of his displacement, his hand was empty. The turtle egg lay in a pool of yellow yolk where he had been standing. He had successfully left it behind.

A raven swept in and began to eat the egg.

A raptor fell from the sky and drove the raven off the egg and began to eat it.

A barghast fell silently on the red-tailed hawk, slew it and began to eat it. When the barghast was done, it ate the egg as a dessert.

Thorn nodded.

The risk was, on the one hand, incredible, and on the other, almost banal. Ash surely intended his demise-in fact, he suspected he was nothing but the edible outer parts of the egg.

Not far to the west, the dark-bearded magister rode to the gates of Lissen Carak, and tapped gently with his staff. Behind him, the plain by the river-burned flat by last year’s battles and now choked with raspberry bushes and alder clumps-was trampled by the Faery Knight’s chevauchée. Out on the plain were four hundred irkish knights, in magnificent harnesses of bronze and gold, some riding stags while others rode horses. Behind them came Bill Redmede and three hundred Jacks and, behind them, a veritable tide of boglins. The rear was brought up by magnificent, alien bands of Outwallers in war paint and more irks, these tall and thin as ash trees, carrying heavy axes on their bronze-byrnie’d shoulders.

When her door warden and her sergeants informed her, Miriam went to the gate in person. She went out on the hoardings alone, covered by a pair of crossbowmen in each of the gate towers.

She did not recognize the man below her outside the portcullis at all. He had black and grey hair and a heavy face with a long, aquiline nose. He rode a bony horse.

“I am the Magister Harmodius,” called the man on the bony horse.

“You’ve changed, then,” she said.

“Yes,” Harmodius said, as if impatient. “I’ve changed bodies.”

“And sides, I suspect,” Miriam said.

Harmodius shook his head. “We have fifty prisoners we wish to release to you. They have not been harmed.”

The garrison of the Westwall castle was marched up to the gate, bedraggled and terrified. They’d lived some days in an army composed of rebels and monsters, and they had, with some justice, expected to be eaten.

“And then you’ll be on your way?” Miriam asked, hiding her fears.

Harmodius, if it was indeed the magister, shook his head. “We are for our own purposes,” he said.

“You are not welcome,” Miriam said. “We hold this fortress for the King. If you make war on the King, get you gone.”

Harmodius raised his hand. “Hear me, Miriam. We are not in open conflict with any force. The Faery Knight has marched to save some of his own people. They must be nearby. Let us only find them and shelter them, and our thanks will be yours forever.”

Miriam shook her head. “You have betrayed your King and your God,” she said. “Even now, these dreadful things feast on the dead at Ticondaga. And you have the effrontery to suggest that we let you camp on our plain? I cannot stop you, but by the God I worship, traitor, when you come for this fortress I will make you and your dark master rue it.”

“Wait!” Harmodius begged.

But Miriam was gone from the battlements. The dark stone echoed his words, and they were lost in the air.

“Damn,” he muttered.

Just south of Albinkirk and Southford, three barghasts and a pair of wyverns circled endlessly like late-summer deer flies over the tree-shaded paths at the northward end of the Royal Road.

Amicia detected them after morning prayer, shortly after her first communion with the choir of her sisters at Lissen Carak in many days. By mid-morning she felt them as a presence-not particularly malign, to her new consciousness, but most definitely hostile. She enlightened Ser Thomas and her escort of knights of the Order.

To Prior Wishart, she said, “I would like it if you would allow me to try my own way on these creatures before you turn to violence.” She reached through her many links to Sister Miriam, as well.

Prior Wishart bit his tongue on a retort. She saw him do it and wished she hadn’t needed to be so short with him. It seemed to her that every day the men and women around her handled their swords and their workings too willingly-that this tendency to use force marked the human condition more clearly than all the other sins of her race.

In prayer, she had begun to consider if it was men-and women-who were the monsters.

The Prior-whose only experience of the Wild had mostly involved killing it-clenched his teeth but shrugged. “Sister, you have talents beyond most of ours. And without your warning, we’d have no time to make these decisions. Please-assay what you can.”

Amicia smiled. “You must stay well back from me,” she insisted. “When I release them, I guess that the sorcerer will strike at me.”

Prior Wishart shook his head. “Then stay with us, and we’ll fight or fall together.”

Tom Lachlan laughed. “A wyvern and a pair o’ ’ghasts?” he said. “Tell you what, lass. You stay here. I’ll go kill them.” He smiled at her. “I need a bit of a dust-up.”

Amicia shook her head. “No. Please-more killing will not help our cause. And right now the sorcerer is having it all his own way. I know-better than most-what the captain intends. Let me try this.”

“To distract him?” Prior Wishart asked.

“Because it is the right thing to do!” Amicia said, surprised at her own vehemence. “We are religious, not killers like-”

Bad Tom smiled and all his teeth gleamed. “You mean me, lassie? Aye. I’m a killer.” He leaned forward. “I warrant you’ll want me around before this day is older.” He was annoyed, she could see.

She ignored him and his annoyance. Amicia dismounted and walked forward on the path alone. They were on the western road, and she was aware in some distant place in her mind that the gorge and the great falls were only a few miles to the east. But that was not her work, not today or any other day-memories of that Amicia were increasingly difficult to access. She shut them away, or merely forgot them. Something was happening inside her, some cascade of belief and realization.

She banished her doubts and new discoveries, reached out for her sisters at Lissen Carak and then reached into the sky.

She touched the wyvern. Wyverns were, she knew, strong, almost elemental folk-stubborn, and difficult to break to anyone’s will.

This one had been broken-or at least bent. The binding was unsubtle and of immense power. Her answer was more subtle, but the result was never in doubt-no matter how thick a rope is, a knife will cut it. Amicia severed the binding.

The wyvern, six hundred feet above her, turned-and flew away, with a low, deep cry of anger.

The second wyvern she liberated more quickly.

Fifty leagues to the north, while pushing his forces across an Alder break so wide and so tortuous that Thorn feared his army would sink into the mud rather than cross, he felt the opposition.

Ash became next to him, an insubstantial black mist that coalesced into a young child with two heads. “Fuck her and her piety,” Ash screamed in his harmonious chorus of voices. “I hate humans.”

Thorn felt ops torn from him and from the world around them. Trees died. An irk shaman five hundred winters old was leached of his powers and then his soul.

Thorn, I am not yet of this world. Give me your power and I’ll teach this child of men to play with one of my bindings.

Thorn had little choice. But-greatly daring-he attempted to hide potentia in the new place in his head.

Ash cast. It was like the sun setting-beautiful, remorseless, full of awe and wonder. Thorn had never seen a working so puissant and so close up-the calling of a star from the heavens was child’s play by comparison. As he reached the climax, Ash said, “Is she the one, though? Is this the will that has defaced my will?”

Thorn had no idea what that might mean.

Ash said the word. Thorn heard it and for a moment, he looked on the abyss, the dark between the spheres where evil lived and no angel dared fly.

On freeing the third wyvern, Amicia knew her adversary had accepted her challenge. She felt his resistance stiffen through her reversal of the summoning.

She felt the chill, damp air of the counter building in the north.

But she was close to her home-close enough to feel the pull of Lissen Carak and to know the comfort of the choir of sisters who waited there. They were singing. She reached into the flowing stream of their powers and lifted her hands into the air. On her bridge, she stood in the same posture, almost on tiptoe with her hands high above her head.

And as the great summoning, a masterwork, descended on her, she did something new-something that she had never before attempted, or even, before that very moment, thought possible.

Instead of answering power with power, she instead pronounced on the underpinnings of his creation an act of annihilation. She did not shield-she denied. She did not resist-she refuted.

Tom Lachlan sat on his horse watching the chit. A beautiful woman, wasted on the fleshless life of the convent-he could see what Gabriel saw in her. And when she stretched herself to cast her witchery, he almost drooled.

The burst of light took them all by surprise. One moment, she stood quietly, perhaps twenty yards ahead of them, and in another, she burned like the brightest torch imaginable. Just on the edge between one beat of his great heart and another, he saw her-she seemed a second sun illuminating the world, and all the world around them reflected the light of her, so that he could see Wishart’s wisdom and boldness, his own reckless courage, Kenneth Dhu’s boundless generosity, as if they were mirrors of virtue reflecting her greatness.

Wishart said, “Oh, my God.”

The world seemed to invert. For a fraction of a grain of sand of an instant of time, Tom Lachlan and all the knights by him felt as if they had no selves-as if they stood outward on the rim of the sphere, gazing in at the workings of tiny men and monsters, and the inversion was such that men fell to their knees and muttered that they had been one with God.

Even Tom Lachlan.

Amicia, pierced and burning, said, “Black is white.”

Ash roared.

Thorn didn’t cower-his form would not allow him to cower. But Ash’s semblance had changed and he rose like a cloud of fury over Thorn’s twisting stone form.

“Unfair!” he roared. “Thorn-we must move quickly.”

Thorn stood stolidly in water to his stony knees. “In this?” he asked.

The voice of the shadowy dragon ate at him like acid.

“One of them is at the very edge of Being. And she-she Denied me.” Ash’s eyes held not rage but fascination. “I must unmake her before my enemy has a potent ally. Forget Dorling. We’ll have sweeter meat.”

Thorn felt that he was speaking to a mad thing.

But Ash’s voice calmed. The roar of death and the vein of ice retreated and there was intellect and command. “No,” Ash said. “I must consider. I cannot have a foe on my flank-and the Wyrm, contemptible as he is in his bookish indolence, could be a powerful foe. I must force his talons to open. But that woman-a curse on all humans and their endless striving. She will unbalance us all. She doesn’t even know what the game is.”

Thorn thought he knew. And he thought he might know of whom Ash spoke.

And Ash had not detected his hoarding of potentia.

Thorn thought many things, and he kept them to himself.

Amicia found herself on her knees.

For a long, long time-almost an eternity-she had experienced something she could only call the joy of creation.

In her mind, the choir sang on.

One voice was not a woman’s voice, but a man’s.

“Amicia,” he said. “Come back. It is too soon.”

Miriam reached out with the power of the choir at her back and found her allies-odd allies. The faery folk and the magister had formed their own choir-an earthy green chorus, like a well-toned tavern revel compared to her beautifully ordered schola. But effective, despite singing carefully and softly in the aethereal, merely shaping and supporting her own with immense subtlety.

Supporting her.

She reached out-mind to mind, image to image, and boldly she went into Harmodius’s palace, where she was pleased to see he was still a handsome young man in velvet.

“It is a sin to seize another’s body,” Miriam said. “That seems a rude way to begin, but that’s who I am.”

Harmodius nodded. “Well, Madame Abbess, would you think better of me if I said he was dead when I took it? Of course, I would then have to confess that he was only dead because I stormed him from within and killed him in his own palace.”

Miriam shuddered, even in her own place of power. “That’s impossible.”

But suddenly they were in her place of power, and he was seated on a kneeling bench in his crimson velvet. “No, quite easy, Miriam,” he said. “Really, you must accept that I mean no harm because if I meant harm, I could effect it.”

Miriam nodded. “May I ask you politely to leave?” she asked. “And then perhaps we might build trust towards a meeting.”

Harmodius smiled. “I’d like to say we saved your girl,” he said. “But whatever happened out there was none of our doing. She’s on the edge of Becoming.”

Miriam put a hand to her metaphysical throat. “What?”

Harmodius shrugged. “You’ll see,” he said.

Back in the real, Harmodius was sitting with a pipe, forgotten, across his lap. The Faery Knight sat on a stool made of antlers-not dispensing justice or even holding court, but instead sewing on his deerskin hose.

“He’ll come for her,” the Faery Knight said. “Ssshe will be too great a temptassshion for him, and too great a potential threat.” He nodded in approval. “Ssshe isss very dangerousss.”

Harmodius rubbed his thumb along the sticky black tar that had formed on his pipe. “She will change his plans. Whatever they are.” Harmodius smiled-and just for a moment, it was the chilling smile of Aeskepiles. “And whatever else it means, it will hold him focused on her.”

The Faery Knight winced as he put his needle into his nearly immortal thumb. But he met the magister’s eye. “You intend to take him on?”

Harmodius frowned. “We’ll see.”

“He’ll kill you,” the Faery Knight said. “I have fought thisss foe before. Never direct confrontation. Alwaysss the indirect approach.”

Harmodius rose to his feet. “I hear you.”

“You would be a great losss, mortal.” The Faery Knight put out a hand, a very human gesture.

Harmodius nodded. “We’re going to take losses.”

An hour later, the Abbess sent them a copy of an imperial message warning of a horse plague delivered from the sky. The warning was timely-and the intent friendly. When the barghasts struck, they found a roof of ops bound white-hot air that burned their feathers and frightened them-and the choir within Lissen Carak turned them as they rose away.

“Now he’sss ssseen usss,” Tapio said bitterly.

“Not if my new friend Miriam stripped off his spies fast enough,” Harmodius allowed. “But we can’t chance it. Best assume we’ve been discovered.”

That night, Abenaki scouts to the north of Lissen Carak-out beyond Hawkshead-found the Black Mountain Pond clan and a great rout of bearish refugees moving slowly. They were pressed-at their backs was a tide of other creatures, old and new.

“We’ll have to fight,” Tapio said. He looked at the human magister. “Jussst to cover them.”

Harmodius nodded. “It is too soon, and in the wrong place,” he said. “Perfect.”

Hundreds of leagues to the south, in Harndon, the Archbishop of Lorica sat in a chair at the foot of the royal dais. Bohemund de Foi was in the full regalia of his office, despite recent defeat and the obvious defection of most of the Gallish knights, who were already negotiating with traitors to secure ships to carry them back to Galle.

The Archbishop was not yet ready to concede the game, and he was not without resources. He had a servant summon his secretary, Maître Gris, who came in his monkish robes.

“Eminence,” he said with a bow.

The archbishop nodded. “I need Master Gilles. And, I think, it is time we made more use of your friend.”

Maître Gris frowned. “I cannot summon him like a servant,” he said.

The archbishop frowned. “But he is a servant. Fetch him for me. I want him to kill this Random.”

Maître Gris bowed again. “As you command, eminence. But messages to this man sometimes take time.”

“Then you should stop talking,” the archbishop shot back. “I am impatient.”

When Master Gilles arrived, he was covered in charms. The archbishop glanced at him and raised an eyebrow. “You appear ridiculous,” he said.

Master Gilles was clearly terrified. “I am alive,” he said. “We have very powerful enemies.”

“And allies,” the archbishop said. “I want you to dispose of several people, beginning with that treacherous sell-sword.”

“The Red Knight?” Master Gilles shook his head. “He is beyond me.”

“No, you fool. I will leave him for my ally. But I mean Du Corse.” The archbishop snapped his fingers at a servant.

The liveried servants of the palace were all members of the Royal Household and all too aware that there might be a new king, that the queen was alive, and that de Vrailly was dead. The service was deteriorating. There was rebellion in the corridors, and the archbishop knew that only fear would keep them docile.

The archbishop glanced back at Amaury, his captain. “Take this one and whip him until his manners are better,” he said.

Captain Amaury nodded, struck the boy to the floor with his armoured fist, and two purple and yellow halberdiers seized the boy and dragged him out.

“You want me to kill the Seigneur Du Corse,” Master Gilles said quietly.

“Yes,” the archbishop said.

Master Gilles bridled for a moment, and then shook his head and sighed. “Very well, eminence. I will need an item of his clothing.”

“I anticipated your request. I have a cap he wore but two days back.” The archbishop handed the cap, still stained with sweat, to the magister.

“May I ask why?” the older man asked.

“He has disobeyed me repeatedly. He has led the revolt of the good knights against the wishes of Mother Church and against me. He signed a craven compact with the rebels when our army was the larger and would have won a straight fight in the field, or at the very least held the bridges while we rebuilt. And now… now he will not even aid me in holding the royal palace. He believes he is in a state of peace with the rebels. I am not. I will hold this citadel until my last breath. And when Du Corse is dead, by the will of God, the other knights will return to their allegiance. When my spy kills Gerald Random, I will have the city back in my hand in an hour.” He nodded sharply and considered what he might have to do to summon his secret ally. He looked up, and Gilles was still there.

“But mostly, Gilles, because I order it, and you will obey.” The archbishop smiled. “Now scuttle away and execute my will.”

It was clear that the magister was going to waste his time in protest. The man bowed. “But…” he began.

Whatever he was intending to say was lost when the servant’s door opened, and in came Maître Gris. With him was a man in green and black, a nondescript man of middle height with a cloak on his left arm and a pointed cap like a falcon’s beak on his head. He was arm in arm with the monk, a surprising bit of familiarity.

Maître Gris bowed. His bow was stiff.

“Not so difficult to find, after all,” the archbishop said sharply.

The stranger smiled. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I was already in the palace,” he said. “I have business here, anyway.”

The two of them crossed the floor to the middle of the room, where Master Gilles still stood. The new man bowed very slightly, the cloak fell from his arm, and he spun as he raised his right hand and Master Gilles staggered back, gave a short scream of despair, and fell, clutching his stomach.

Without pausing, the new man’s leg shot out and he rolled Maître Gris, swept his legs and dropped him on his face, with his right arm already dislocated behind his back. The monk gave a tortured scream. The green and black man kicked him with precision.

Unhurried, the black and green stranger stepped over the thrashing monk and pointed his left hand unerringly at the archbishop. Something metal winked in his hand.

“I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced, eminence. I am Jules Kronmir, and for some days now I have fed poisoned information to your people… mistaken estimates, foolish inflations and downright lies. It has been great fun, and I confess that I feel at this late date that I can claim almost complete credit for the collapse of your forces. Because of me, you halted at Second Bridge when a quick pursuit might have destroyed the Red Knight, and because of me, de Vrailly pushed forward later, when it was the wrong move, and because of me, the city rose behind you.” Kronmir was very close to the archbishop. “Ah, and because of me, your captains hired my people and my friends as Royal Guards.” He laughed.

His eyes flicked to the two purple and yellow guards as they moved. They were unsure of themselves, halberds leveled but still out of distance to confront or attack the intruder.

He winked at the nearest. “What you gentlemen need to ask yourself is what, if anything, this useless sack of flesh has ever done for you? I would suggest that the answer is not enough. Even now, the corridors of this palace are being taken by the guilds. I recommend that you both lay down your arms, and surrender, and perhaps I’ll arrange for you to have a future.”

Both men placed their halberds gently on the marble floor.

“Cowards!” the archbishop spat. “Gilles!”

Kronmir smiled. “Master Gilles has several inches of Witchbane in his gut. I suspect he will recover in time, but he will not be casting any time soon. As for you-” Kronmir’s voice dropped to a croon, like a mother singing a lullaby. “I wanted you to hear how easily I defeated you. After that, you die, and, I suspect, burn forever in hell.”

The archbishop began the invocation of his ally.

The small steel ballestrina coughed. A six-inch steel dart went straight through the archbishop’s skull, killing him instantly. The range was four inches, and the poison on the dart was wasted.

The archbishop’s body fell forward, and his mitre fell to the floor with a silken rustle. The two purple and yellow thugs were kneeling on the floor.

Kronmir looked around, admiring his effect. Then he stepped up to the great arched window, leaned out, and jumped for the moat, his precious ballestrina clutched close.

Before Maître Gris could drag in another sobbing breath, a dozen Guild crossbowmen burst in through the main doors and rushed the room. They were on edge, weapons cocked and their captain had a drawn and bloodied sword, but they were steady enough that they did not shoot the two disarmed haberdiers.

“By the rood!” spat the captain, a heavy man from the Butcher’s Guild. “The bloody archbishop is dead!” He touched the magister, who lay sobbing on the floor. “Christ!” he muttered. “Witchbane!”

But despite the blood and the misery, the captain sounded relieved, and so, ten minutes later, was Ser Gerald Random now in full possession of the palace. He looked down at the archbishop’s rapidly cooling corpse.

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” he said. “Take the others, and keep them under guard.”

Less than fifty paces away, Jules Kronmir was climbing out of the moat in broad daylight, the least elegant part of his plan. But he made it over the low retaining wall into a cart where Lucca, his best blade, waited with dry clothes in a tinker’s donkey cart.

“What now, boss?” Lucca asked.

Kronmir had on a dry shirt and hose. He leaned back against the wall. “I think we’d like a ship,” he said. “To Venike. I am only guessing. But employers like it when you plan ahead.”

Lucca looked around as if a horde of boglins had just appeared. “Venike? Is it that bad? Are they on to us?”

Kronmir laughed. “There is no longer a ‘they’ to be ‘on to us,’” he said. “Our side is in possession. And all the dirty work is done.” He took the flask of wine that Lucca offered him, drank some and smiled his approval.

“Possibly my best work,” he added.