The Dread Wyrm

Chapter Four

The Wild

Nita Qwan and his two companions, Gas-a-ho, the shaman’s apprentice, and Ta-se-ho, the old hunter, spent one of the most comfortable winters of their lives-even a life as long as Ta-se-ho’s-in the halls of N’gara. Food and warmth were plentiful. So was companionship. Gas-a-ho passed in one winter from a gawky boy with aspirations to the rank of shaman to a serious young man with dignity and a surprising turn of mind. Tamsin, the Lady of N’gara, had passed much time with him, and he had benefited from it.

Ta-se-ho had also benefited. He looked younger and stronger, and when the sap began to move in the trees, and when the preparations for war began to grow serious, it was he, despite his age, who sat down in the great hall and suggested that they leave.

“I have heard matrons and shamans agree that the early spring is the most dangerous time to travel,” Nita Qwan said. In fact, he sought nothing but reassurance. His wife would bear their first baby soon, and he wanted to be home.

He also wanted to be away from the endless temptations of the hall-flashing eyes and willing companions and the new seduction of fame. Nita Qwan the warrior. Nita Qwan, the Faery Knight’s friend.

Nita Qwan, Duchess Mogon’s ally.

Ta-se-ho nodded as he did when someone younger made an excellent point. “This is true. The soft snow of spring is the most dangerous snow. Heavy rain on snow is when those walking in the Wild die. Nonetheless-” The old hunter sat back. “It came to me in a dream-that the sorcerer’s people would have an even harder time. The Rukh? They would die faster than we, as the ice breaks and the waters move. His men? His allies? Without raquettes, they are dead. Even with them-this is a time of year when the People can travel. Not safely, but safer than our enemies. We know the ground and the snow and the little streams under the rotting snow.”

Unannounced, Tapio, the Faery Knight, appeared and sat. His recovery from his duel with Thorn had been rapid, but it had left its mark-his face was thinner and one shoulder sat higher than the other.

“Your people, oh man. They will need to move quickly. Sssilently.” He flashed a fanged smile. “Before Thorn can ssseize them.” He nodded to Ta-se-ho. “You think well, old hunter.”

“I had a dream,” Ta-se-ho said with a slight inclination of his head. “I was reminded by ancestors that we used the snow of spring to escape you.”

Tapio showed his fangs mirthlessly. “Perhapsss. Timesss change. Enemiesss change.”

“You killed many of the People, Tapio,” Ta-se-ho said.

Tapio raised a hand and moved it back and forth as if it was a balance point. “And now I will sssave many.” He looked around.

Duchess Mogon, utterly graceful despite the bulk of her big reptilian body, came and squatted down. Lady Tamsin was with her.

She waved a hand, casually, and a glowing curtain of purple fire descended on them.

Mogon gurgled. “It is time,” she said, as if she was answering a question someone had put to her.

“I had a dream,” Ta-se-ho said.

Mogon nodded. “My hearing is not limited to the tiny fraction of the world humans hear,” she said. “Nor am I so very old. You wish to move across the spring snow.”

Nita Qwan thought of his pregnant wife. “He proposes that we move the Sossag people now.”

Mogon shook her head. “My people are all but useless at this time. Until the sun warms the hillside, we have only our human allies to protect our fields.” She showed all her teeth. “Not that we are impotent. Merely that we do not go far abroad.”

Tapio looked at Nita Qwan. “Can you do it?” he asked.

Nita Qwan shrugged, his hands in the air. “Ta-se-ho says we can do it,” he said. “I am not really a great warrior and I know almost nothing about moving at this time of year, except that it will be brutally hard and very cold and wet.”

Ta-se-ho laughed. “When has the Wild been anything but cold and wet for our kind?”

Tapio nodded. “I will prepare you sssome toysss, that may make your journey easssier.”

Nita Qwan bowed. “The Sossag people thank you.”

Mogon snorted. “I will go home in a week or two, when the lake begins to break up,” she said. “Bring the People to me. We will be strong friends.”

“But not your warriors,” Tapio said.

Nita Qwan and Ta-se-ho nodded. “We know what to do.”

The journey around the inland sea was hard. It was so hard that, later, Nita Qwan thought that all his life as a slave had been nothing but a test for the trek.

There were only the three of them and three toboggans. Tapio and Tamsin gave them several wondrous artifacts; a clay pot that was always warm, day and night, and whose warmth seemed to expand or contract depending on where it was-on the toboggans, it was merely warm enough to warm hands, but in a small cave, it was like a large fire. Each of them had mittens, made of a light silky stuff by the lady Tamsin and her maidens, and the mittens were always dry and always warm. Gas-a-ho had a small staff with which he could make fire.

“I made it with Tapio’s help,” he said modestly. “He and the Lady taught me so much.”

Even with these items and several more; even with the best and warmest clothes made by all the Outwaller women at N’gara and with blankets provided by the Jacks and the good wishes of every man, woman, and creature in the fortress-even then, the trip was horrible.

Each day, they walked across soft snow. Their snow shoes plunged into the snow as far as their ankles and sometimes as deep as their knees, so that half an hour into the day, walking was already a nightmare and after eight hours, it was like walking in deep mud. Every stream crossing was treacherous, and required the careful, patient removal of the raquettes, the plunge up to the groin in deep old snow so that each man could cross, rock to rock, on now-exposed streams. Toboggans had to be carried across, and every day the streams rose. Ponds and small lakes were still highways for rapid movement on the ice, but the ice would break soon.

They went as fast as their muscles would allow.

Camps were made in places no sane man would camp in summer-on exposed rocks, in the snow cave created by two downed evergreens, under looming rock faces and in the middle of stands of birch. Fires sank into the snow and vanished unless supported by a lattice of sodden logs. They slept on their toboggans. No one bathed or changed clothes.

Ta-se-ho smoked constantly. But he would not let them give in to fatigue, and when they had turned the corner on the endless swamps and soft snow of the N’gara peninsula, he led them along the edge of the inland sea, where for two days they made rapid time, all but running on the ice.

Until the ice broke and Nita Qwan went in.

They were close to shore, near the end of a day of cutting across a big bay, so far from land that they had passed terrifyingly close to the ice edge and the water. And late in the day, safe, apparently, Nita Qwan had turned aside to piss in the virgin snow, taken a few steps off the beaten snow where their toboggans had passed…

He felt the ice give, saw the snow darken, and then-faster than he’d have thought possible-he was in, all the way in, the black water closing over his head.

He had never been so cold. The water, when he went in, gave a new definition to what cold might be. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. He panicked instantly.

And then he was out again.

Gas-a-ho pulled him out with one mighty heave on his blanket roll, which was buoyant and high on his shoulders. Gas-a-ho had run to him, thrown himself full length on the snow, and grabbed the pack. Ta-se-ho had his feet.

The ice on which he lay made noise, a low grumble like the rage of a living thing, and Ta-se-ho pulled them both back, and back again, and then they were all crunching through the swift-breaking ice over shallow water that did not immediately promise death.

Ashore and exposed to the wind, drowning seemed kinder. And now Ta-se-ho was like a madman, driving them on, making them run, walk, and run again, over and over, along the exposed shore. To their left, the inland sea went on, apparently forever, in an unbroken snowfield. To their right, atop bluffs that lowered over them, were snow-covered trees and naked black spruce that went on to the horizon, a wilderness of trees that seemed to cover all the earth.

When Nita Qwan thought he must be near death, the old man stopped them in a cove that offered some protection from the wind and pulled the cover off his own sled. He took the pot from his sled and carried it to an exposed rock at the base of the tall sand and stone bluffs and placed it gently there.

Almost instantly, it began to give more heat. Nita Qwan fell to his knees.

“Strip him,” Ta-se-ho said gruffly.

“My hands are still warm!” said Gas-a-ho in wonder.

“The greatest gift the Lady could give.” Ta-se-ho did not smile. “He’s far gone. He went all the way in.”

Nita Qwan heard them only from a distance.

He merely knelt and worshipped the warmth.

The wind rose, and icy rain began to fall. They stripped him and only then did the two Outwallers begin to collect materials for a shelter.

Unbelievably, as soon as Nita Qwan was naked, he was warmer-much warmer. He began to wake up.

Ta-se-ho was tying gut to a stake. He looked over. “Did you see the spirit world?” he asked.

Nita Qwan was having trouble speaking. But he nodded.

Ta-se-ho shook his head. “I dreamed all this. You do not die.”

Nita Qwan looked at the old man. “Do you?” he asked.

The old man looked away.

But by sunset, all three of them were warm enough, and dry. A roaring fire lit the edge of the coast and the bluffs behind them, and they made a chimney of hides and the fire came up through it, drying Nita Qwan’s clothes and moccasins.

The next day they killed a deer. Ta-se-ho tracked the buck, and Nita Qwan put an arrow into him at a good distance, earning him much praise from the other two. The old hunter nodded.

“In this snow, I couldn’t run down any of the deer’s children,” he said. He walked with a spear in his hand, but he never seemed to use it as anything but a walking staff. It was a fine spear, made far away by a skilled smith, and the old man had taken it as a war prize in his youth.

Like the spear, the deer was thin, but the meat was delicious, and they ate and ate and ate.

“How much farther to the People?” Gas-a-ho asked.

Ta-se-ho frowned. “Everything depends on the weather,” he said. “If it is cold tonight, we will risk the inland sea again. We must. This is not just for us, brothers. Think of all the people coming back this way. Every day matters.”

Morning saw them rise in full darkness. It was snowing, and coyotes bayed at the distant moon. Tapio had provided them with three beautiful crystal lights, and with the lights they were able to pack well and quickly, but even with light, there were numb fingers and badly tied knots. Each morning was a little worse-each morning, the damp and cold seeped into furs and blankets a little further. Nita Qwan’s joints ached and he was hungry as soon as he rose.

He looked at Ta-se-ho, who bent over, touching his toes-and cursing.

“I am too old for this,” he said with a bitter smile. Then his eyes went out to the hard surface of the inland sea. “Pray to Tar that the ice holds,” he added.

Nita Qwan watched the ice while he ate some strips of dried venison and drank a cup of hot water laced with maple sugar.

“Let’s go,” muttered Gas-a-ho.

Ta-se-ho stood smoking his small stone pipe. He smoked slowly and carefully and watched the lake and the sky, letting the younger men collect the last camp items and pack the toboggan and tying down the hide cover.

“Ready,” Gas-a-ho said, sounding tired already.

Ta-se-ho nodded. He threw tobacco to all four compass points, and the other two men sang wordlessly. Nita Qwan went onto the ice carefully.

But the ice held all day. The clouds were high and solid grey, and snow fell for most of the morning, and then the wind came in great gusts towards evening. They camped in the spruce hedge along the shore, a cold, miserable camp made habitable only by Tapio’s pot. There wasn’t enough wood to make a fire big enough to warm a man. But the pot warmed them, and warmed their water and their venison, and they slept.

They woke to fog. It was deep and bleak, and very cold. Despite the freezing fog, Ta-se-ho led them out onto the ice and again they walked, and walked, heads bowed, backs bent against the strain of towing the toboggans at the ends, walking as swiftly as the snow and ice under their feet would allow them. The fog was thick and somehow malevolent.

Twice that day, the ice cracked audibly, and Nita Qwan flinched, but in both cases Ta-se-ho seemed to commune with it and then led them on. He was aiming for a distant bluff that towered above the lake, visible when the wind shifted the fog, then lost again as the fog came back and covered the sun.

The old man made the other two men uneasy by taking the shortest route, which was across the great north bay of the inland sea. They walked almost thirty miles, the hardest day so far. With the intermittent fog and the flat surface of the inland sea, the day took on a mythical tinge, as though they were travelling across one of the frozen hells that most of the Outwallers feared. The presence of the lake under their feet, the groaning of the ice, the odd sounds in the fog…

From time to time the old man would stop, and turn around. Once he stopped and smoked.

To Nita Qwan, the day seemed endless and the fear increased all day-fear of drowning, fear of being lost. When the fog covered them they had no path and no landmarks, and yet the old man kept walking, barely visible a few yards in front.

Ta-se-ho stopped for the fifth or sixth time.

“Is this a break?” asked Gas-a-ho. He began to drop his pack.

“Silence,” Ta-se-ho said.

They were perfectly still.

The ice groaned, a long, low crunching sound that came from everywhere and nowhere in the frozen, fog-bound hell into which they’d stumbled.

“Something is hunting us,” Ta-se-ho said suddenly.

Gas-a-ho nodded sharply. His face became slack, like a person walking in sleep.

Nita Qwan took his bow from its deer hide case, took his best string from inside his shirt. It had been drying there for two days, and it was warm.

Carefully, trying not to display his near-panic and the trembling of his hands, Nita Qwan strung his bow. He rubbed it a little before he bent it, and he listened as he pressed it down.

It didn’t crack. Either the bow was not so very cold, or he had prepared it well.

The string bit into the grooves in the horn tips, and he was armed.

Only then did he give voice to his fears. “What is it?” he said, watching the fog around him.

Ta-se-ho shook his head. “It is only a feeling,” he said.

Gas-a-ho surfaced from inside his mind. “Flying!” he barked.

His right hand shot up, and a flash of lightning left his hand. It was an angry orange white and it left a dazzle on Nita Qwan’s eyes.

There was a detonation that made them all flinch, following Gas-a-ho’s lightning bolt by about one beat of a scared man’s heart.

Just over Nita Qwan’s head, something screeched.

The old man thrust with his spear-the spear moved faster than sight could fully perceive, and then everything happened at once-Gas-a-ho was down in the snow, blood flowering around him, and there were black feathers in the air around them, and Nita Qwan found himself fitting a broad-headed arrow of irkish steel to his bow. He was conscious that he had already drawn and loosed twice.

“Move!” Ta-se-ho said.

Nita Qwan got Gas-a-ho onto his own toboggan. The younger man was bleeding from a terrible wound right across his back where a talon had sliced through his backpack straps and into the meat of his shoulders. But even as he got the man onto his toboggan and began to pull, the blood flow slowed and then stopped.

Nita Qwan tried not to look up. He got the tumpline and brow band of Gas-a-ho’s ruined pack over the younger man and tied the neatly sliced ends to the thongs that ran the length of the body of the sled.

Ta-se-ho put himself in the straps of the now heavily overloaded toboggan. “I’ll pull,” he said. “You watch the sky.”

Nita Qwan took up his bow.

The old man leaned into the straps and began to run.

Above them, something gave vent to avian rage-a long, slow scream that froze the blood.

“Trees,” Ta-se-ho panted. “We need to reach the trees.”

“How far?” Nita Qwan asked.

The old man put his head down and ran.

It is very difficult to run on snow and ice with a bow in your hand and snow shoes on your feet. Harder to do so and watch the sky above you.

The wind came again-a gust, then a sudden wall of wind, so hard that it seeemed to lift them and move them along the surface of the inland sea. It came from behind them, pushing them forward.

In a hundred heartbeats, the fog began to break for the third time that day. The sun was setting in the west-already, the day had a red tinge.

The tree line of the shore was only half a mile away.

The great bluff towered over the lake, a pinnacle of stone that rose many, many times the height of a man. Up close, even in a state of fear, Nita Qwan could see that the whole pinnacle of stone was carved-or perhaps moulded. It was fantastically complicated, even from this distance a terrifying, massive evocation of fractal geometry.

But more immediate was the pair of black avian shapes wheeling in the air above and behind them. They were half a mile away, too.

The two men ran on.

The two predators banked and came on again.

Nita Qwan turned, saw their intention, and planted three shafts in the snow beside him.

He loosed his first shaft when the range was too long. His second shaft vanished into the air, and he had no way of judging his aim. His third shaft went into one of the great black monsters.

The fourth shaft…

At this range, he could see that the nearer creature had a great deal of trouble remaining airborne, and had Ta-se-ho’s spear deep in its side and a long burn mark.

The farther creature had a beak full of teeth-an unnatural sight that chilled the blood. It projected a wave-front of fear that caused Nita Qwan to lose the ability to breathe. But he got his fourth arrow on his bow, raised the shaft…

He loosed, the toboggan pulled by the old man seemed to explode, and Ta-se-ho leaped like a salmon.

His shaft vanished, black against black, into the mess of feathers on the farther monster’s breast.

Orange lightning played over it.

Ta-se-ho caught his spear-shaft. He was dragged-he was flying for a hundred paces.

The barbed spearhead ripped free of the great black bird even as it turned its teeth on the old man.

He fell.

Blood vomited on the snow-the bright orange bird blood fell like rain.

The great black thing fell onto the ice.

The ice cracked and broke.

Nita Qwan could spare the old man no more attention. The mate of the fallen creature turned for another pass.

Nita Qwan undid his sash, dropping his heavy wool capote in the snow. Then he took four more arrows from his bark quiver and pushed them into the snow.

“I can’t hold the wind,” Gas-a-ho said, as clearly as if they’d been having a conversation.

Nita Qwan registered that without understanding.

His adversary levelled out, wing-tips flexing up and down in the cross-breeze.

As fast as he could, Nita Qwan loosed all four arrows into the oncoming monster’s path.

The second one scored into a wing, and the giant bird seemed to lose fine control over its flight. It screamed, and the third arrow struck its breast-it paused, and the fourth arrow missed.

It passed well to the north of them, low, over the land, and kept flying.

The ice was breaking behind them.

“Save him,” Gas-a-ho said. “I will hold the ice.”

With one last glance at the sky, Nita Qwan threw his bow down atop his friend and took a hemp rope from his toboggan. He ran across the groaning ice towards the black water and the orange blood like fish roe on the snow. The setting sun threw a red pall over the whole ice field.

Ta-se-ho was alive. He wasn’t swimming or floating.

He was walking.

They were deep in the bay, but the black water was only a hand-span deep here, and the old man was slopping along, and cursing.

Again, they built the biggest fire that they could. By luck, or the will of the spirits and gods, Nita Qwan found a whole downed birch tree nearly free of snow. While the wounded Gas-a-ho and the old man curled around Tapio’s pot, Nita Qwan broke and stacked birch as fast as his frozen fingers and exhausted, post-combat muscles would allow. He stamped the snow flat, laid old rotted logs on it, and built a fire.

Ta-se-ho nodded. “That fire will tell every living thing on the inner sea we are here.”

Nita Qwan paused, his tinder box in hand.

Ta-se-ho shrugged. “I’m wet through and he’s lost a lot of blood. We can die right here, in a couple of hours, or risk the fire.” He shrugged.

But even frozen and afraid, they did not lack cunning. Nita Qwan’s hastily chosen campsite was close to the base of the spire of worked rock, in what was virtually a chamber cut into the living rock, closed on three sides. It took him four tries to get his tow to burst into flame, but he did-and he got a beeswax candle lit in the still air, and then put the flame to a scrap of birchbark.

In minutes, he had his companions stretched out under the canopy of a whole tree fire, the heat over their heads too much for a man to bear. The only way to be near it was lying flat, and the stone walls around them reflected the heat.

Nita Qwan bent over Gas-a-ho, but the younger man managed a weak smile. “I’m patching,” he said.

Ta-se-ho nodded. “Leave him, Nita Qwan. He’s deep in his art. Now that he’s warm, he’ll have more spirit.”

“Will the fire bring more foes?” Nita Qwan asked.

Ta-se-ho made a face. “We are at the base of the Tu-ro-seh. We will have strange dreams tonight.”

Nita Qwan shifted-his back was actually against the carved monolith. The carving was both bold and minute, and went in long whorls with no symmetry up the sides-but the closer that he focused on it, the more he saw. His eyes began to follow-

“Do not look too closely,” Ta-se-ho said.

“Who made it?” Nita Qwan asked.

“The Odine,” replied the hunter.

Nita Qwan shook his head. “I am new to the People, Old Hunter,” he said. “Who are the Odine?”

“Better ask, who were they?” Ta-se-ho said. He got out his pipe and began the lengthy process of filling and lighting it. There was silence punctuated by the exuberant sounds of birch burning. The smell was delicious-the very smell of warmth and comfort.

In the firelight, the shapes on the monolith seemed to move. The illusion was greater than it should have been. The surface of the stone appeared to have a million snakes crawling over it, and each snake to be covered with worms, and each worm with centipedes, and each centipede with some tiny creature-on and on.

“Do not look too much,” Ta-se-ho said again. He leaned back, fumbled for a burning stick, and found, like thousands of men before him, that a large fire is the worst place to light a pipe.

Finally he found a burning twig.

“Do you know how the People came here?” he asked.

Nita Qwan knew the legends of his own people. “My people-in Ifriquy’a-say that the black seas were parted and our people were led across the dry sea bed to our new home.”

Ta-se-ho nodded. “Too short to make a good story. But a good idea for a story.” He busied himself inhaling smoke.

“The earliest legends of the Sossag people are about the Odine. The Goddess Tar brought us here to defeat them. And we did. We destroyed them all-every tentacle and every worm.” He nodded. “The north is studded with their monuments and their tunnels.” He leaned back and exhaled smoke. “This is the tallest. The old women say that there is a city under our feet. Many who seek wisdom come here for the dreams of the old ones.” He nodded. “I did.”

“What did you dream about?” Nita Qwan asked.

The old man smoked quietly. “Awful things,” he said eventually. “Nothing from which to take a name, or follow a path.” He shrugged, and lay down. “But most of the Wild fears these places. Only men are too stupid, or too ill-attuned to stay near them. So perhaps the Odine are not dead, but merely sleep.” He grinned.

Nita Qwan took a deep breath. “You are mocking me,” he said.

Ta-se-ho shrugged. “Everything in this world is terror,” the old man said. “If you care to see it that way. We should have died on the ice. We’re not dead. Let that victory steady you. You worry too much.”

“We should have died,” Nita Qwan agreed. “What saved us?”

The old man tamped his pipe, and his eyes glittered across the fire. “Gas-a-ho, first and most. Even when he had his shoulders ripped open, he was casting. He brought the wind and took away the fog.”

Nita Qwan had guessed as much.

“And sheer luck. Or the will of the spirits, if you believe in such things.” The old man took a deep drag on his pipe.

“Do you believe in such things?” Nita Qwan asked.

“I think we shape our own luck,” the old man said. “With work. And practice. And care. A chance for life to a trained man is just another death to an untrained man-yes? Good shooting today.”

Nita Qwan all but blushed. The old man never praised.

“You could have died. Jumping for the spear-the salmon’s leap.” The words spilled out of Nita Qwan. “It was magnificent!”

The old man allowed a slow smile to cross his face. “It was stupid,” he said. “I should have died.” He laughed. “But instead, I flew like a bird!” His high-pitched laugh went out into the night. “I nearly shit myself when my feet left the ground.”

“Why’d you do it?” Nita Qwan asked.

“The spear. I love that spear.” The old man shook his head. “An old woman made a prophecy about it once, and look, she was right. She said one day the spear would fly away without me and I’d have to catch it. I thought she was talking about something deep and symbolic.” He shook his head. “Want some pipe?”

Nita Qwan’s dreams that night were more terrifying than anything he had actually experienced, and his only explanation later was that he had dreamt that he was being digested in the belly of a whale or a snake-his skin slowly flayed away by slime.

He was stunned, on waking, to find himself whole.

He had to pack for the other two, but there was still wood and he built up the fire in the late night darkness until it crackled again. Then he made breakfast. Gas-a-ho was alive, breathing deeply, the wound on his shoulders knitted and dry. Ta-se-ho was snoring, and from time to time he seemed to be fighting something.

Despite days of fatigue, Nita Qwan felt no temptation at all to return to sleep. So, as the light grew outside, he packed the toboggans.

Finally he woke his friends. Gas-a-ho stunned him by getting to his feet.

Ta-se-ho groaned. “Tomorrow will be worse,” he muttered. “Oh, to be young again.”

As the first orange rays of the new sun lit the landscape around them they were headed inland through what seemed like an endless alder thicket. It took them an hour to go a mile. The spire towered behind them.

“When did the People destroy the Odine?” Nita Qwan asked, as they emerged from the alder belt into an open woods of beech and spruce.

Gas-a-ho turned. “Ten thousand winters ago,” he said. The words passed, and echoed among the trees.

Nita Qwan almost stopped in shock. “That is a very large number.”

Gas-a-ho shrugged. “These are the things that the shamans know,” he said. “We defeated the Odine at the behest of the Lady Tar. And now we keep them under their stones.”

“Did you have bad dreams?” Nita Qwan asked.

The snub-nosed youngster gave him an impish smile. “No. For the shaman born, the places of the Odine are places of rest and power. That is why we are taken to them as children.”

Nita Qwan shook his head. “Why did the People kill the Odine?” he asked.

Gas-a-ho looked at Ta-se-ho. “I don’t know. Do you?”

The old man was sniffing the wind like a coyote. He turned. “Why does anything in the Wild kill anything else? Mating, food, territory.” He shrugged. “The way of the world. This world, anyway.”

Nita Qwan laughed. “You have just reduced all the glorious legends of every people in this world to mere greed. And conquest. Like animals,” he said.

Ta-se-ho grunted. “Ask me when my joints ache less and I’ll tell a better story,” he said. “Now let’s go.”

Forty hours later they stumbled into their own village. It now had a tall palisade, big saplings driven deep into the earth and briars and raspberry brambles woven about them to make a barrier impassable by men or most animals. The palisade was tall enough to tower above the snow.

Nita Qwan had feared that the village would be abandoned-that everyone would be dead, frozen corpses in the snow, surrounded by blood kept fresh by the cold. He’d dreamed of it since leaving the tall Odine spire. But they were met by flesh-and-blood men and women.

Nita Qwan’s wife embraced him, her tummy so round that he had trouble reaching past it to kiss her. Kissing in public was seldom seen among the People, and she-once the purest of vixens-was scandalized.

But he was still the ambassador. He left her to go to Blue Knife, the paramount matron, and her circle. Together they went into a long house that smelled of juniper and birch and fifty people who didn’t wash enough. Good winter smells, for the Sossag.

“Tell us,” Blue Knife said without preamble.

“We have an alliance with Mogon,” Nita Qwan said.

All six women smiled in immediate relief.

Nita Qwan held up his hand for silence. Ta-se-ho pushed into the long house with Gas-a-ho at his heels.

“We did not go to Mogon’s caves. Instead, we went to N’gara.” He tried to look impassive.

Blue Knife nodded. “Please explain,” she said carefully.

Nita Qwan nodded. “Ta-se-ho found evidence that Mogon was ahead of us-that the great duchess herself was en route to N’gara. We followed her there.”

Blue Knife exchanged a glance with Amij’ha and Small Hands. “Tapio Haltija is an ancient enemy of the Sossag people,” she said.

“Yet you included him in the names, when I was sent,” Nita Qwan said.

“We did,” Blue Knife conceded.

“We wintered in his hold. There we found healing, and allies.” Nita Qwan reached into the quilled bag made of the whole skin of a badger that he had worn slung around his body for months. From it, he withdrew the pipe he had been sent to take to Mogon, Duchess of the Western Swamps.

“I took this pipe to Mogon. And she has accepted it. I took this pipe to Tapio, our foe, and he has also accepted it.” He reached into the badger skin pouch again, and withdrew a belt. It was as wide as a man’s head, and as long as a man’s arms spread wide-thirty-three rows of wampum beads, each bead the size of a pea. It glimmered like pearl and mother of pearl in the soft light of the long house.

The matrons all sighed softly.

“Tapio and Mogon and the Jack of Jacks and a witch-boglin creature from the west have all made this belt with us,” he said. “And so have the Bear people of the Eastern Adnacrags.”

For each people as he named them, there was a diamond in glittering white wampum set in the darkness of the purple, which seemed black in the long house.

“If you take this belt, we will be six nations of free peoples against Thorn,” he said. “Tapio charged me to say the name.”

Blue Knife nodded. “And you have not said the name until now?”

He shook his head.

“So now Tapio knows the belt has reached us. And indeed, we have also said his name three times.” She looked at Nita Qwan. “My son, you have done well-whatever comes to pass, you have performed the charge that was laid on you. I take the pipe from you.” She reached out and took it.

He bowed.

“Ta-se-ho, what think you?” she asked.

The old hunter grunted and sat crosslegged. “I think it is cold and wet out there, and I am too old for it,” he said. “And I think he has done well. All three of us did well to get here alive. I saw Rukh sign in the snow.”

“The Crannog people are moving against us already,” Blue Knife acknowledged. “But the Horned One and Black Heron’s warriors led two of them to their deaths in the snow just four nights ago.”

Ta-se-ho nodded. “Mogon said, come to me. I have more trees and fields than my warriors need or want, and we are far from the sorcerer.”

Nita Qwan nodded. “Tapio said we should travel now, because none of the sorcerer’s monsters love the early spring.”

Blue Knife paled. “Nor do the Sossag people love the early spring. I teach my babies to stay inside and wait for the sun and the dry ground.”

Ta-se-ho nodded. “There are many wisdoms. But if we leave tonight-”

Every woman’s head came up.

“-we can travel at least two days on the ice,” he said. “And when the ice breaks up…” He shrugged. “The Rukh will never find us, much less catch us. Let the sorcerer chase us if he wishes. If his hate for the Sossag is that strong…” He moved his hand. His hand implied that they were already doomed, if this thing was the case.

“Tonight?” Blue Knife asked.

Ta-se-ho spoke with authority. “Tonight, or never,” he said. “My left knee says we will have three cold nights. And then the thaw. Does anyone deny this?”

Blue Knife shook her head. She turned to the other matrons. “It is now,” she said. “Take only what can be taken.” She turned back to the old man. “Children and old people will die.”

Ta-se-ho nodded. “I know. But otherwise, the People will die.”

When the other matrons were gone, Blue Knife leaned to Nita Qwan. “There is something you are not telling me,” she said.

Nita Qwan nodded. He looked into the air above him for moths.

Blue Knife understood. She sent a young girl with stark red hair-a new captive, or an escaped slave-for the Horned One, and he came.

“We are to leave tonight? Across the ice?” he asked.

“You foresaw it,” Blue Knife said.

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t piss me off,” the shaman said. He grinned like a false-face mask at Nita Qwan. “My wife says you’ve done brilliantly. My apprentice seems to be stronger than I’ve ever been. Perhaps I should go and spend a summer ramming all the Dulwar girls at N’gara.”

Blue Knife smiled. “I’m sure your wife will say yes if you put it that way,” she said. “Nita Qwan is hesitant to tell me something. He looks for moths.”

The shaman nodded. He pulled out a little drum and began to beat it a-rhythmically. Then he began to sing-tunelessly.

Even then, Nita Qwan bent over and whispered into Blue Knife’s ear like a lover.

Three times he whispered. Each time she asked him a question. Finally, she sat back.

“He asks much, our people’s most ancient enemy.” She looked into the long house fire.

“But it is right at many levels,” Nita Qwan said. “And now-tell me what of my brother, Ota Qwan?”

She met his eye. “He is dead.”

Nita Qwan blinked. “The sorcerer killed him?”

She shook her head. “He calls himself Kevin Orley now. He has taken many towns in the south and east. He has sent us his command-that we give him men and food.”

Nita Qwan sighed. He sighed for Ota Qwan-so many men in one skin. The name Kevin Orley meant nothing to him, but he thought that he understood. Ota Qwan had been lost to the sorcerer-as the matrons had intended.

“So,” Nita Qwan said. “We must provide men. How many warriors?”

“Kevin Orley demanded one hundred from the eight towns of the People,” Blue Knife said. “He demanded you.”

Nita Qwan set his face. “It is as Tapio said,” he admitted.

Blue Knife nodded. “So-we will send our best young men to the sorcerer while we run, naked, to the west. This could be a plan for Tapio to have his revenge on us.”

Nita Qwan shrugged. “I speak with caution, as I am young and new to the Sossag people. But Tapio has no need of revenge, as my understanding is that he defeated us soundly and drove us from our homes. And much time has passed since then. And the Lady Mogon guarantees our survival.”

“Yes,” Blue Knife said. “Yes, I agree that all these things are likely. And yet-and yet, younger brother, what I would not give, right now, to have the hardest decision of my summer be the choice of day to pluck the corn.” She sighed. “Go and pack. Be careful. Your wife will deliver in the snow if she is unlucky.”

“I fear I have burned too much luck in the last week,” Nita Qwan said. “You will send me with the warriors to the sorcerer?” he asked.

“When we reach the carrying place where the Great River flows into the inland sea-then I will send you away. You will lead the warriors who go. You will tell Kevin Orley of the terrible winter we have had, and the whole villages we lost to the Rukh.” She smiled grimly. “I am sorry, Nita Qwan. But we will work hard to save your son’s life.”

His son-the matrons thought he would have a son!

And they would work hard to preserve the boy-

– because his father would be dead.

He rose. “I understand,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Blue Knife said. “My only goal is to preserve the People.”

Seven hours later, as the sun set in a spray of red fire in the west, the whole of the Sossag people, all six surviving villages, almost two thousand men and women and children, headed west into the setting sun. They had sledges and toboggans and a few had big travois, and they moved in a chaotic way that belied great discipline, each family leaving a few minutes apart from the next, all taking slightly different routes out to the inner sea-some families travelled a whole day inland, and some went straight downstream to the ice.

The People fled. As they fled, they formed not a column but a wave front, because like animals migrating, they took courses that meant that despite any disaster they could imagine-the Rukh, a sudden thaw, the end of the ice-some of them would survive.

They moved as quickly as they could. And every warrior on every route but one stopped and cracked any ice sheet he could after he’d crossed it.

Ta-se-ho stood in what had been the town’s central space with Nita Qwan and Gas-a-ho. They were the last to depart-Small Hands and her family were already well along to the west.

“Now you have power,” Ta-se-ho said.

“Not for long,” Nita Qwan said.

Gas-a-ho snorted.

Ta-se-ho shrugged. “You have it. The People have given it to you and you wear it well.” He turned his face away. “Babies and old people will die.”

Nita Qwan nodded. “I know.”

Ta-se-ho grunted and lit his pipe. They passed it back and forth for a long time.

“Never forget,” Ta-se-ho said. “And you will never become Kevin Orley.” He put his pipe away. “I’m too old for this.”

And then the three men began to walk west.

Ticondaga-Ghause Muriens

Ghause wriggled into her shift, her haunches cold from working naked in her casting chamber exposed to the chilly mountain air. Outside, snow was drifted six feet high or more against the fortress’s impregnable walls and filled its ditches.

Her husband watched her. He was fully dressed, sitting comfortably in a low armchair that folded for easy stowage. Most of the castle’s furniture was one form of camp furniture or another. The Muriens were a military family.

“I thank God on my knees every day,” the Earl of Westwall said, “that my wife had the sense to sell her soul to Satan for beauty. Christ crucified, woman. How do you keep yourself so?”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said, but she didn’t purr or wiggle her hips. It was too damned cold. “Do you know that when I rode south to Albinkirk, there were flowers?”

The earl shrugged. “It was one hell of a winter, and I use the term hell advisedly. Cold as a witch’s tits.”

He moved so fast, and he was so quiet, that despite the straight line, she was surprised to feel his warm hands on her breasts.

But the surprise was a pleasant one. She turned and raised her mouth to his, slid a hand down into his braes with the expertise that comes of knowing another person’s body as intimately as you know your own.

Not that the earl’s body was particularly challenging…

She made him work for her pleasure and then returned the favour-an hour that left her pleasantly tired and filled with unworked potentia. She drank hot wine and stared out into the first blue sky she’d seen in many weeks.

“Penny for your thoughts?” murmured her husband, his hand running over her stomach.

“Stop that,” she said. “Be gentle or be firm.”

He hated it when she told him how to touch her-had hated it for thirty years. He swung his bare feet off her bed and cursed the cold floor.

“I’m thinking of the King,” she said pensively.

“Your brother,” he said.

She shrugged. “Do you have any news?”

“Beyond that he’s gone mad, let the fucking Galles into his court and attacked his own nobles?” The earl shook his head. “Galles in the south and this sorcerer as a neighbour. How bad is this summer going to be, wife?”

She stretched. “Bad,” she said.

“This sorcerer…” he began.

She shook her head slightly.

“You think he’ll come for us,” the earl said. He was getting into his braes.

“I do. And Gabriel does.”

“That milksop. I don’t care what you claim he’s done-he’s hiding behind Gavin. He could no more lead an army than fight with a poleaxe.”

She smiled. “You are seldom a fool, husband. But in this-I saw him fight with a poleaxe.”

“Huh,” he muttered. “He’s late to it, then,” the earl said.

She shrugged.

“Anyway, what does he know of the summer?”

Ghause sank back onto the goose feather bed. “I told you. All of them wanted him to be captain of the north.”

The earl shook his head in ill-tempered wonder. “In place of me. In my God-damned place.”

“Sweet, it is a compliment to have your firstborn appointed to a high command.” She rolled to face him. Many fifty-year-old women might have hesitated to discuss high politics while naked. Ghause was not one of them. “Don’t be a child.”

He laughed. “Me? You want him as your captain because he’ll do your bidding. But when the Wild comes over the border, I’ll not be following the orders of your effeminate son.”

She smiled. “Mine. Not yours?”

The earl shook his head. “My seed, perhaps, but none of my blood, I swear. That one is all eldritch potions and cobwebs.”

“Parthenogenesis,” she said quietly.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“An Archaic word for a maiden making a child all by herself,” Ghause said. “What do you think my brother is doing with his Queen?”

“Christ only knows,” the earl said. He had his shirt on and his hose, and was buckling his garters. He didn’t have access to her sorcerous arts and he was five years older than she, but he still carried himself like a king, had solid muscles front and back, and when he buckled the garters below his knees, his calves were as good as any young gallant’s. “I had a messenger bird from a friend in Harndon who says he’s going to try her for adultery.”

Just for a moment, despite all her plans and all her vows and her desire for revenge, she felt for the Queen in Harndon. She felt something like kinship with her.

Not that her feeling of kinship would keep her from killing the Queen and her unborn child. Merely that she knew what he was, and that he was now, in a more elaborate way, doing to his young Queen what he had once done to his sister.

“Weak fool,” she said. “Weak, stupid, vicious and indecisive.”

The earl nodded. “But a damned fine jouster,” he said. “You hate him. You always have.” He narrowed his eyes for a moment. “We could have him killed.”

Ghause leapt from the bed and kissed him. “Sometimes, I actually love you. But no. By all the dark powers, husband-do you know what would happen if he were to die now?”

The earl shrugged. “War? Chaos? Nothing to us. In fact, it would be a better environment to build our own kingdom. If Gabriel is to be trusted.” His tone suggested that he was unlikely to trust the younger man with anything.

She frowned.

“Just because it doesn’t fit with your fiendish plots doesn’t mean that we can’t use it,” he said. “Listen, my lady. All our lives together, we’ve gone hand in hand-and kept our own secrets. I am content with that. In this instance, he’s a fool, and he’s threatening me with war. If he were dead-”

“The Galles would take his place. They’d use the girl-Queen as their pawn, and suddenly we’d be crawling with them.” She pulled a heavy wool-velvet robe over her naked body and rang for more wine.

“The Galles, my spies tell me, have troubles of their own,” he said. “Let’s just kill him.”

Ghause grew annoyed. “No,” she said.

“Because you have some plot already in motion,” her husband said.

“Yes!” she spat.

He laughed. “And all I get to do is fight the fucking sorcerer,” he said.

She shrugged. “Not even that, I fear,” she said. “His sorcery is too much for your army. And now he has an army of his own. Bide. Hold the castle and he will have other problems. He’s made two great enemies, and his time is running out fast.”

The earl sighed. “Woman, I am no more your tool than you are mine. ‘Bide’ is not a companionable word. Spring is coming-”

“And so is the sorcerer,” she said. “He is coming, and we will need all our strength to hold here until our son comes.”

The earl pursed his lips, rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Ah. Like that, eh? So we’ll have the fight here?”

She smiled delicately.

“Christ, woman, I’m your husband and your partner in a hundred crimes. You might tell me what you have planned!”

She leaned over, her eyes fixed on his. She leaned closer and closer, and then her pointed tongue flicked out like a cat’s and licked his lips.

“I might,” she whispered. “But that would spoil the surprise.”

Later, while forty knights pounded the pells in the courtyard and while the foot soldiers did their spear drill, she watched the Queen in a ball of rock crystal that was, to her certain knowledge, more than three thousand years old-perhaps as many as fifteen thousand. Some things were beyond her range of skills or belief. She suspected that it had been made by something truly alien, because when her concentration slipped, she could hear its makers haunting, a-rhythmic songs. And see them slipping like wraiths of slime through the caverns beneath the earth.

But she was many times the mistress of the stone, and she drove it south and east until she had the Queen, deep in her dungeon under the earth.

She missed her youngest son, Aneas. Without him she had no one with whom to discuss her plots. He was still near Albinkirk, serving with the field army. A knight on errantry. She’d watched him in the stone-fighting, flirting with a girl. The girl and her mother both looked familiar. She was pretty-

Ghause put a hand over the stone, and moved it and her will.

She watched the woman, whose hair was lank and whose lips moved constantly. Ghause watched her for a long time, trying to decide whether the woman had lost her wits or was acting. It was hard to know.

If her brother was going to kill his own wife, there was no need for Ghause to use the massive working on which she had laboured for eight months. The young Queen’s hermetical defences were formidable-doubly so, as she had clearly been trained by Harmodius. Ghause knew that to kill her unborn baby, she would have to strike massively and accurately and all at once. There would be no second chance.

But it would be delicious if, instead, he killed her himself. Deluded by evil gossip into believing his wife untrue-what a fool.

She smiled at the purity of her revenge. And how it dovetailed into her other plans.

After all, what had the prophecy said?

“The son of the King will rule all the spheres.” She smiled, and her heart raced with anticipation. She would turn his actions against him, rob him of a legitimate son and make her own sacrifice worth… everything.

But she still felt something for his Queen. When she had been green and beautiful, she had felt nothing but jealousy and malice for her-but now, watching her hang her head and mumble, seeing her soiled kirtle and the weight of oppression and betrayal on her young shoulders…

“I’m sorry for your baby,” Ghause said aloud. “But I’ll avenge you, too.”

Babies reminded her of how they were made, and she moved the stone’s view-moved it back and forth over the fields, adding first one guiding spell and then another.

She saw things that surprised her. She saw the Queen’s brother riding across the fields of the Albin. She thought it odd that he should be north of Harndon.

She followed her guiding spell north, and further north, and found her target. She glanced at her sons-Gavin was a handsome devil, and Gabriel looked like an archangel on a binge. She smiled.

And moved on to the nun. Sister Amicia.

Ghause had planted suggestions on the nun since the first time they’d met. She approved of the woman-liked her good sense and the width of her hips and her sense of humour. Gabriel needed a noble wife to bear him a son-to be, in time, Queen.

The little nun was not that woman.

But she would be the right ally, and the right mistress. And the right tool of control.

And she had power-deep, strong, well-trained power that grew and evolved almost before her eyes.

“You remind me of me,” she said aloud. And knowing that link between them, she made a very subtle working-the sort of working, in fact, that she might cast on herself. She had done it once before, to render the distasteful more acceptable.

And now she passed her working carefully through the stone. She watched it strike home on its intended victim the way an archer watched a shaft shot high and far.

She smiled.

A hundred leagues north and west of Ticondaga, Thorn stood in his place of power, watching Ghause in the space between his raised hands. He was not wearing his human form, but a new stone form-a carefully evolved form of discs and whorls and stone coils that were laced together with cartilage and muscle taken from many sources. Thorn had all the bestiary of the earth at his disposal, now. He used it with brilliance and imagination and a certain dark elegance.

His new level of understanding the shifts of being that could be contained in his concept of reality-to put it loosely-included the knowledge that he could build into his power a subordinate working of enormous complexity that would continuously monitor and alter his form as circumstance required, even as he moved and shifted and had different requirements. So he could make his form of stone, and make the stone move. While this required a constant expenditure of ops, it also rendered him nearly invulnerable.

He had another form-he was already working on generations of them-in which he was almost entirely energy and smoke. But it was still too vulnerable to use except in special circumstances.

None of this crossed his conscious mind. Instead, he held his stone arms aloft effortlessly and watched Ghause practise her art. He watched her watch the Queen with growing frustration, having watched her prepare her spell for a hundred days and nights.

He had prepared his own working. Indeed, all his own plans now hinged on hers, an ironic twist that delighted him and annoyed his mentor immensely.

That, too, was good. Thorn was tiring of being Ash’s tool. He had probed the black space in his head thoroughly. He had spent considerable time rebuilding what he felt might be missing of his own thoughts and perceptions. He made some slight experiments in hiding things from the black space.

He had re-discovered how much he detested moths. And he had doubts.

Irony was not something that the master sorcerer could share either with his tools or his allies. An inconvenient impasse had been reached.

Thorn’s ally had gathered his army of unwilling slaves and his professional soldiers and the thin trickle of reinforcements he had received from Galle and moved them to the head of the lake above Ticondaga. Thorn’s own servants-Kevin Orley not least among them-had joined the Black Knight’s army.

Thorn took himself to them, his preparations complete. He crossed seventy leagues of virgin wilderness in the blink of an eye. He had learned to make the Wyrm’s way-to make a hole in his reality, and to travel through it.

He had learned so many things that sometimes he feared that at the moment of truth, he would not be able to find all his powers and employ them.

Nonetheless, he appeared in the camp of the Gallish army on the day he had planned.

If Ser Hartmut was appalled to have a giant stone golem of interlocking helixes appear in front of his great black silk tent, he gave no sign. Instead, he nodded to a squire. “Wine,” he said. “And a long spoon.”

Thorn might once have laughed, but almost all of the human had been burned out of him, leaving little beyond ambition and a thirst for knowledge. “I am here,” he said. His voice was deep, menacing, and alien, and his accent sounded curiously like the northern Huran.

Ser Hartmut nodded. “Then we can march on Ticondaga. It is only a matter of time before the earl’s patrols find us.”

Thorn did not move a pebble. “He will not find you.”

Ser Hartmut looked around. He motioned for De La Marche to join them. He took wine from his squire, and waved the boy away. “Find Ser Kevin,” he said.

Thorn might once have chuckled. “Ser Kevin.”

Ser Hartmut did smile. “I took the liberty of knighting him,” he said. “And providing him with some of the items of harness you had neglected to provide.”

Thorn considered a variety of responses, and Ser Hartmut’s desire to manipulate the Orley heir was transparent. But as he was finding more and more often, he didn’t care enough to make a response.

Ser Hartmut didn’t pretend to have a command council any more than Thorn himself. Having summoned the leaders, he now shrugged. “When do we march?” he asked.

“When I say,” Thorn answered.

“I have reconnoitered Ticondaga twice,” Ser Hartmut said. “Even with trebuchets and all the power of your ops, it will be a hard nut to crack. It will take all summer, unless I miss my guess.” His outthrust jaw suggested an uneasiness that Ser Hartmut seldom displayed.

He fears the reports he hears from Galle, Thorn thought. Well he might. But his power and his soldiers and his talent will all be here, serving me. Irony piled on irony. Thorn had begun to see deeply into Ash’s intricate plotting, and he had begun to be able to detect the malice-the deadly humour-of his vast mind.

Thorn thought that malice and humour might be his master’s very weakness, too. But he tried never to let such a thought lie outermost in the many layers of his own thoughts, and when he could not help but think such, he whirled it away into a labyrinth of deceptive analysis.

“No,” Thorn said over the multi-voiced conflict of his own divided mind. “No. The siege will not be that long.”

Ser Hartmut bowed cordially to Kevin Orley, who bent his knee in return like a Galle. Thorn frowned inwardly to see his creature subservient to a mere man.

Ser Hartmut shook his head very slightly. He was in full harness, the rich black of his armour shining with oil and careful maintenance. Kevin Orley was his complement, in a plain harness of unmatched, very plain steel which had been carefully oiled.

Orley stood differently. Thorn watched him carefully. Time passed differently for a hermetical master than for a mere ephemeral, yet Thorn thought perhaps Kevin Orley had experienced more than he.

“You have learned something new,” he said.

Orley met his eye. “I am beginning to learn discipline,” he said.

Ser Hartmut permitted himself a smile.

“As a captain?” Thorn asked.

“I can only discipline others if I have discipline myself,” Orley said.

“And you are a knight now,” Thorn said.

“I have that honour,” Kevin Orley said, his voice even.

“I was not asked,” Thorn said.

Ser Hartmut frowned. “It is traditional, when launching a great endeavour, to make knights.” He didn’t move or touch his face or wriggle or blink like lesser men. Thorn found him fascinating-a man who had voluntarily expunged so much of his humanity, yet had no access to Power. An enigma. With a magical sword of incredible power.

Thorn turned his body, the stones protesting as his unconscious hermetical working powered the stone into shape after shape, a smooth transition in many dimensions. “And you, De La Marche?” he asked. “Are you now a knight?”

De La Marche had begun life as a sailor, and risen to command. He was a merchant, a ship-owner, and a trusted servant of his king. But not a knight.

The merchant-adventurer looked away.

“De La Marche has declined the honour of knighthood at my hand. He holds himself unworthy,” Ser Hartmut said. Ser Hartmut’s feelings were naked for a second, and Thorn could see the man’s rage.

Even Thorn, at the apogee of his power and very close indeed to his goal, felt something closely akin to relief to see that Ser Hartmut was human enough to be enraged. And that De La Marche’s refusal had hurt him.

Thorn would have expected De La Marche’s refusal to cost the man everything-his life, reputation, honour, family. Ser Hartmut did not seem like the type to take a small revenge. But this sort of petty interaction was beneath Thorn now. He understood the great Powers better every day. As they evolved and developed, they lacked the time-or the potentia-to delve into petty matters. Great power required intense absorption. It left little time for revenge.

Petty revenge, anyway.

“Tell me when we will march,” Ser Hartmut said again.

“In two days, we will have the whole of our strength,” Thorn said. “Perhaps the Sossag will send their hundreds, or perhaps they will not. Either way, two days or perhaps three will see the last of our human soldiers. But I have other allies and other slaves-aye, and other avenues of attack.”

“And other enemies,” Ser Hartmut said.

Thorn swivelled back to face the Black Knight. “Other enemies?” he asked.

“The bears,” Ser Hartmut said. “I am told by Ser Kevin that the bears will stand against you.”

Thorn would have shrugged. “We will have twenty thousand boglins,” he said. “And ten thousand men. And hundreds of other creatures.” His black stone eyes swept over them. “We will crush the bears if they are foolish enough to fall under our claws. Otherwise, we will ignore them and take their vassalage later.”

“You avoid the question,” Ser Hartmut said.

Eventually, I will have to dispose of you. You, and Orley and the rest. All so greedy. Perhaps I should make De La Marche my ally.

“In two days, we will march. We will collect our allies from the north as we move-they will catch us up.” Thorn nodded. “I will cover us in a cloud of unknowing, and we will move as close to Ticondaga as my powers will allow.”

“And when will we strike?” Ser Hartmut insisted. “We’re one day from Easter.”

De La Marche spoke for the first time. “The ice isn’t off the lakes yet, and the woods are still full of snow.” He did not look fully at Thorn. “None of our men wish to march in this.” His voice all but begged. “Let the men celebrate Easter in peace.”

Ser Hartmut laughed. “I did not learn to win wars by doing what is easy.”

“Men will die in those woods,” De La Marche said.

Ser Hartmut shrugged. “None of them are any consequence to you or me or Master Thorn,” he said.

“We don’t have enough raquettes for all the sailors and the men-at-arms,” De La Marche said.

Ser Hartmut nodded. “Only the scouts will need them,” he said.

De La Marche looked at Thorn for a fraction of a heartbeat. “Our wizard will melt us a road?”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “No,” he said. “Our Huran captives-those ones who will not submit-will walk ahead of us.” He waved one iron-clad hand. “They will tramp the snow flat. And cut the trees and make a road, all the way down the western shore of the lake.”

De La Marche took in a great breath. “And where will they camp?” he asked. “With our men?”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “Camp? They will work until they die. And then we will send more ahead of us.” He waved his hand. “They are not Christians. Not subjects of my King. They’re not even really people. Let them die.”

De La Marche sighed. “You will walk three thousand women and children to death to build a road for your army?” he asked.

Ser Hartmut nodded. “They defied me,” he said. “Now they will pay. This is absolutely within the Rule of War.”

De La Marche looked back and forth between Ser Hartmut and Thorn. “Of the two of you, I doubt that I can tell which is the worse,” he said. “I will go and walk the snow with the poor savages you send to their deaths. I cannot live and watch you do this to them.”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “Do not, please, be a sentimental fool.”

“I am a man,” De La Marche said. His tone said what his words did not.

Even Thorn felt a tiny pinprick of anger in reponse. “We act on a stage so vast that you cannot perceive it,” Thorn said. “Already my forces are south of Albinkirk, pinning our foes in place. A few Outwallers more or less-”

De La Marche nodded. “I thank God I do not perceive what you can,” he said. He turned rudely and walked away.

Ser Hartmut turned to his squire. “Take him. Beat him unconscious and have him bound. Do not let his sailors see you do it.” His squire walked away into the snow, and Ser Hartmut turned to Thorn. “He has become a fool. But if I allow this idiot martyrdom, his sailors will be wasted. They will not fight well, and they are my best troops, in a siege.”

Thorn was weary of the whole matter and all the petty inversions that went with human interaction. “Two days,” he said.

Ser Hartmut nodded. “Two days.”

Ser John Crayford awoke in a strange place. It took him a long moment to identify where he was. The ceiling was white, and had a spider web of cracks around a marvellous old beam that had been carved in whorls like a hundred intertwined dragon’s tails. His eye followed the whorls and the cracks.

There were two narrow windows with archery shutters-thick oak shutters that let in very little light. Each was pierced with a cross, so that either a longbow or a crossbow could be used on attackers.

As he looked at the windows, he knew where he was. Close by his right arm lay Helewise, naked. She was not asleep.

“Did I snore?” he asked.

She laughed. “Only when you were asleep,” she answered.

“You were going to send me away when we finished.” Ser John smiled.

She smiled back. “I’m an old woman,” she said. “And yet I’m not sure that I am finished, even yet.” She leaned over and threw a leg over his, and they kissed-the warmth, the foul to fair kiss of morning, a night shared.

Instantly aroused, Ser John laughed in his throat. “And last night you put out the candle,” he said.

“Not every man is full aroused by sagging breasts and widening thighs,” she whispered.

“Why are women so cruel to themselves?” he asked.

“Why, we learn it all from our lovers,” she said. But she took the strength of his arousal as compliment enough.

They played the music again, as they had played the night before, although Ser John was more conscious of the noise the bed frame made this time-so conscious that he began to flag, and then to move softly. But he suited her so well that at last she made a sound somewhere between the contentment of a cat and the cough of a leopard-a surprising, unladylike sound.

And then she laughed.

“Imagine, a prisoner of the pleasures of lust at my age!” she said.

“Will you confess it to the little nun?” he asked.

“Would that embarrass you, bold knight?” she asked in return. She put a hand on his chest-and pushed. “Do you think any woman in this house doubts where you spent the night? There’s no hiding anything in a house of twenty women.”

Ser John looked abashed. “I thought-”

Helewise rose. She threw back a shutter. “Wilst marry me, Ser John?” she asked.

Ser John, looking at her in the stream of sunlight, thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful. “I would be most pleased to marry you, lass,” he said.

“And all your other wives?” Helewise asked. Under the banter, he could hear a more sober note.

“Nay-I have no other lovers,” he said. “Mayhap ten years gone, there was a head on my pillow some nights.”

“Ten years?” she asked. She had a robe on now. “No wonder you find me beautiful.”

She stepped out from behind her screen. “I mean it, John. I’m no light o’ love and I have a daughter who’ll know by evensong what her mother did this night. Plight your troth-or don’t come into my bed again.” She flung her hair and gave him an odd look. “My daughter is flirting with your Red Knight’s youngest brother-you know that? If I play the fool with you…”

Ser John sat up. He shook his head. “I might say that I didn’t push you here, my lady.”

“Nor you did. I am a lustful mortal, as God made me.” Helewise stretched. “But I’ll not make a slut of my daughter through misjudgment.”

Ser John rose, naked and more grey than brown, and kissed her. “Hush, lady. I don’t need threats or admonitions.” Naked, he knelt at her feet. “I beg you to marry me and be my love.”

She smiled. “Oh, John.” She bent to kiss him. Her robe fell open to the last button and her earthy smell hit him.

“Mercy,” he said. “I’m an old man. I might die.”

“The old plough runs the deepest furrow,” she whispered.

“You made that up,” he growled back.

Later, dressed and armed, he met his escort-knights and squires of far-off Jarsay-in the yard. The younger women of the manor all seemed busy with laundry-busy in a way that required their presence in the yard. He smiled beneficently as one does when all is right with the world, and he noticed with some amusement that many of the younger men in armour would not meet his eye.

His squire, Jamie the Hoek, had his great horse saddled and everything prepared just the way he liked it. From a gawky adolescent who knew little or arms and nothing of horses, Jamie had grown into a tall man of gentle manners who was welcome wherever he went-and was the best squire a knight could ever want. He was quiet, he worked very hard, and he had learned every skill of management, maintenance, repair and replacement that a squire might ever need to know. He could sew. He could even do a little embroidery. He could take the dent out of a helmet.

He could kill a boglin while covering his master’s side.

He bowed. “Ser Captain, we understand congratulations are in order.”

Ser John bowed back. “Gentles, you have the right of it. Lady Helewise and I will be wed at midsummer.”

Now all the young men met his eye, and his hand was shaken, and he thought, What a nice lot of boys these are. We were a rougher crowd in my day. He’d taken a few days to warm to Ser Aneas-a cold young man-but the boy’s infatuation for Heloise’s daughter Philippa was-charming.

The youngest Muriens received a stirrup cup from his lady love.

“I think it’s horrible,” she said. “My mother-at her age!”

Aneas Muriens had a different kind of mother. “I think it-splendid,” he said.

Philippa gazed at him a moment. “You do?” she asked.

They looked at each other so long that other knights chuckled, and Ser John had to clear his throat.

Long before the sun reached the apex of her travels across the sky, Ser John led his company out of the restored gates of the manor and past the new stone barn that the master masons were just completing. It had been warm enough for foundations to be dug, and new stone barns were rising across the whole of the area west and south of Albinkirk to replace the wooden barns burned the year before.

They rode north through the countryside, passed over two streams in roaring full spate by means of careful scouting and a willingness to get very wet. A dozen huntsmen-all professionals-rode well ahead, and they paused to look at every track on the road, or rather, the mud slide that passed at this time of year as a road.

Early afternoon. Birds sang, and the spring flowers were in full bloom, and Ser John, who had in truth missed a great deal of sleep the night before, began to feel its lack. He turned to say something about a nap to Jamie, when he saw one of the huntsmen coming along the verge of the road where the ground was harder. The man had his rouncy moving at a trot-when the ground was hard, he cantered.

Ser John had faced the Wild on too many patrols. “Gauntlets and helmets!” he called. “Lace up!”

Most of the southerners had learned to ride with their steel gauntlets on their hands, but very few men liked to ride about wearing their helmets.

The squires and pages handed out lances-fifteen-foot spears tipped in hard steel.

“Let’s go!” Ser John said, fatigue temporarily forgotten. He led the column along the edge of the road, single file-an invitation to ambush except that he’d seen his own scouts work the apple orchard on the other side of the lane’s wall.

He met the huntsman at the corner of the old wall.

“Boglins,” the huntsman panted.

“Where away?” Ser John asked. “In broad daylight?”

The huntsman shrugged. “Saw ’em mysel’,” he said. “Away over past the Granges.”

Ser John looked under his hand.

“Big band-fifty or more. Running flat out-you know, so their wing-cases stand up.”

“On me!” Ser John roared. He turned in the saddle and caught Lord Wimarc. “Take the squires and sweep the hillside,” he said. “All the way down to the creek past the Grange. You know the ground?”

Lord Wimarc nodded. Since the death of his knight, he had withdrawn on himself, and his eyes were sunken and he had dark smudges under his eyes, but he was alert enough. “Aye, Captain,” he said.

“If you catch them, dismount and hold them. Don’t let them get at your horses.” Ser John waved to the other squires. “Jamie, stay with me. The rest of you-follow Lord Wimarc.”

As he turned his horse on the muddy ground, the scent of new grass and mud gave him a flash of Helewise, above him, her breast…

He flushed and focused on the reality of a warm day and a tired horse.

Off to his left he saw Lord Wimarc stand in his stirrups. The man’s lance tip moved.

There was something on the hillside.

An explosion, like lightning-a ball of lightning…

Then the crack of a distant whip and one of the squires and his horse were a butcher’s nightmare in an ugly instant.

“Blessed Saint George,” muttered the knight behind him.

Ser John balanced on a sword’s edge of indecision-he didn’t know what he was going into, but he knew as sure as he was a sinful man that halting to figure it out would cost him men and horses.

He thought about his lady love, and laughed aloud as the thought stiffened his spine as if he was fifteen years old and had just seen breasts for the first time.

“Forward,” he roared.

His ten lances, shorn of their squires, rode single file around the corner of the tall stone wall and the whole of the hillside came into view-a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching away for more than a mile, and a thick fringe of trees at the top of the next ridge, like hair on top of a balding man’s head.

As soon as he took in the terrain, he knew that the enemy was beyond his own forces.

Almost at his feet, a mere bowshot away, was a pack of the new imps. Ser John had never seen them, but one of the Red Knight’s squires-Adrian Goldsmith-had a talent for drawing, and had rendered the lithe creatures, like greyhounds from hell, in livid detail. All the company men said they were as fast as anything in the Wild, and that they went for horses.

Even as he watched, the dread creatures turned like a flock of birds and started across a newly turned field towards him. At his back were ten knights, ten archers and ten pages.

The field was muddy, the earth heavy with melted snow and spring rain, black and shiny.

There was a narrow ditch by the verge of the road. Behind them was the high stone wall of some farmer’s apple orchard. It was too high for a mounted man to get over.

He gave the order before he knew what he’d committed to.

“Dismount!” he called, pulling up. “Horses to the rear-all the way back to the last farmyard, Rory!” he called to the oldest page, who was as white as a sheet.

He slid out of his saddle as the imps came on at the speed of an arrow from a heavy bow.

Even as his feet touched the ground and he seized his fighting hammer from his saddle bow, he wondered if he had made a poor decision. If they would be in among his horses before-

“On me!” he called. “On me! Archers in the second rank!”

It was all glacially slow.

But God was merciful. The imps-even the horrifying imps-were slowed in all that mud.

They seemed to flow over the field, though, and there were more of them-and more still flowing out of the far hedgerow.

“Let us ha’ three arrows in front o’ ye,” said the archer at his back.

Rory had just taken Iskander’s reins and was taking him to the rear, the war horse rolling his eyes and looking for something to kill. Ser John gave him a parting slap on the rump and stepped back.

“Three shafts!” roared the master archer-one of the company men.

The imps were a hundred yards away. They covered the earth like a pale green carpet of teeth and sinew. There had to be five hundred of them.

“Loose!” called the company man.

“Loose!” he said again.

“Loose!” he said again.

Three arrows in as many breaths. The imps were still far distant.

“Keep shooting,” Ser John said. “Rory-get to the farmyard and send for help.”

Rory, now mounted on Iskander, saluted.

Send someone to bury us.

Behind the wave of imps was a group of boglins, all pushing through and under the hedgerow. His tactic had worked beautifully-they had cut the enemy off.

He wanted to choke the huntsman. This wasn’t a raiding force, but a small army. The sparkle of magic on the far hillside told him that the enemy had a sorcerer of some sort, too.

The company archers were a blur of speed, their arrows leaving their bows as fast as their arms could move, their grunts rhythmic and almost obscene, like the rhythm of the old bed the night before.

“Loose!” grunted the old bastard in front of him.

“Loose!” he said again.

“Exchange ranks!” Ser John roared.

The archers dived for the rear, putting a wall of flesh and steel between them and the imps.

“Over the wall!” called the old man.

Most of the archers had no harness beyond elbows and knees and bascinets. The imps would flay them alive.

An incredible number of the imps were already down. Worse, the ones pinned to the ground by the heavy shafts were dragging themselves towards the fight.

Ser John set his weight without conscious thought, pole-hammer across his thighs, in the bastard guard.

The imps had to leap the ditch to reach them.

He killed two or three before one knocked him flat by momentum. But they were small and his faceplate and aventail kept him safe in the panicked seconds he was flat on his back. He drove his dagger into one-where had that come from?-got to his knees, and punched another with his steel fist. Something had his ankle, but that ankle was fully encased in steel.

He drew his sword, stabbed down into the thing on his ankle, cut roundhouse to clear a space.

An arrow clanged off his helmet. In the fall, his head had moved inside the padding and his vision was imperfect. He swung again, re-set his feet and got a hand up to push his helmet back on his head. There were two of them on his legs and one going for his balls, which had no armour. He shortened his grip, one hand on the hilt, one on the middle of the blade, and stabbed down, and down, and down, backing as he did, until he cut the creatures off his legs and killed them with blows to their spines.

The archers were now sitting atop the apple orchard wall, shooting light arrows straight down into the fight and killing many. Their arrows decimated the imps, but the dog-like reptiles still came on over their dead, like carrion crows on a corpse.

Ser John knew he had men down. There was too much room to swing his sword.

He cut-left, right, controlled swings into guards to clear the ground around him, but the monsters were not like human opponents who would give ground. They merely came on. The result of his swings was the three of them got under his guard, one hanging from his left wrist. He dropped the sword, broke the back of the one on his armoured wrist and then kicked his steel feet clear of them, thanking God for his sabatons.

His back grated on the stone wall. He had nowhere left to retreat to. A sword clicked into his right arm harness, and an imp fell away dead. He saw the familiar green and gold of the Muriens arms.

His dagger was dangling from the chain at his wrist and he got it back, buried it in an imp that was trying to bite him.

The arrows sliced down in front of him like a protective curtain. Out in the fields across the valley there was suddenly a light show-gold and green and purple and black.

A horn sounded. It was not a human sound. The horn blew over and over like a human hunting horn, but its tone was deep and booming and had the knell of doom to it.

Ser John got on with the business of killing. He pushed off the wall, accepted the price of friendly arrows slamming into his helmet, and he used his long dagger like a two-handed pick, his strikes accurate, his movements increasingly spare as he found the right way to fight the imps, using his armoured ankles and feet as a lure to draw them into the range of the dagger’s bite, defending his groin carefully.

One of the Morean knights-Ser Giannis-had a spear with a long blade, and he was untouched in the centre of a whirl of death, his weapon passing back and forth, back and forth, stabbing and cutting. Farther along, one of the company knights, Ser Dagon la Forêt, used a poleaxe with equal artistry. Ser Aneas fought with a weapon in each hand, like a dancing master, except that he seemed to clear more space than most. One of the Jarsay knights was down and messily dead, and another had a dozen of the things on him like limpets because he wasn’t wearing proper maille.

Ser John went and cleared the imps off him like a father getting leeches off a child. The imps were thinning.

Behind them were boglins. Despite eight knights and a dozen archers, the boglins kept coming. Ser John was so full of combat spirit, fear and elation at being alive that he didn’t understand what was happening. He took a moment after the last imp was killed-Ser Dagon stepped on its head-to retrieve his pole-hammer.

Sixty boglins were no match for eight knights. But they still came on.

“Shoot them!” Ser John panted.

“No more arrows, Cap’n,” said a voice above his head. “Sorry, boss.”

Indeed, the whole area of the fight with the imps was like a field of stubble, except that the stubble was heavy war arrows shot almost straight down and standing in clumps where the fighting had been fiercest. A dozen men had loosed more than four hundred arrows in three minutes. Their entire load-almost forty a man.

The boglins were wallowing through the mud. Behind them, something bigger broke through the hedgerow. There was a flash of green fire, an explosion of mud, and a hole as long as a horse opened. Boglins poured through-as did daemons.

Ser John shook his helmeted head and tasted the sour air inside his bascinet. “Fuck,” he said.

The boglins were so hampered by the mud that they’d have all been killed by the archers-had there been any arrows.

“Fuck it,” the older man said and dropped over the wall. He began to pluck arrows from the ground-in a moment all the archers were there.

“Never get up the fuckin’ wall again, mark my words,” muttered the older archer.

The shorter Morean knight had a bottle of wine, of all things. He handed it to Ser John, who had a pull and then gave it to the old archer.

“Now that’s right decent o’ you, Ser John.” He took a drink and handed it on.

He had a dozen muddy arrows in his belt.

The boglins were seventy yards away and looked exhausted, their wing cases half open and their vestigial wings hanging loose.

The archers began climbing back up the wall. Only one man could make it-their arms were tired-and he had to rig a rope.

The older archer loosed his dozen arrows into the boglins as they plodded on through the mud. So did the other archers as they waited their turn to climb.

The boglins lay down. Behind them, the mass of creatures-boglins and daemons-did not come forward. They began to move west, sliding along the hedgerow. At the burning hole, something big, like a cave troll, only darker, emerged. But its entire attention was focused down the hill, or across the valley.

Only then did Ser John understand.

“There’s someone else behind them, harrying them!” he shouted. “Saint George and Alba! Christ and all his saints, lads! Ser Ricar must be behind them!”

Indeed, only now did he hear the roar-the waterfall-like rush of sound of combat. Ser John reckoned that the whole of the far hedgerow must be engulfed in fighting. He looked left and right.

The enemy force below him in the muddy field was now all moving west, many of the creatures crouching low to the ground. They were leaving a trail of stolen objects behind-a quilt, a blanket, shoes, a girl’s doll and an apple basket. Somewhere they had struck a human settlement and left nothing but death behind, and now…

The shapeless black thing in the hedgerow gap whirled and cast. Ser John saw it-saw the casting-and then he was flat on his back again.

But he was mostly unharmed. He got up heavily, head throbbing and his neck feeling as if it would never be right again. The sigil he wore on his chest-the gift of Prior Wishart of the Order-burned as if heated on a stove. But he was alive.

He thought that the creatures-stripped of their imps-were near panic. But the hammer-like charge of his knights would slow to nothing in the same mud that had mired the imps.

He looked up. “What’s your name, Master Archer?” he called.

“Wilful Murder. Sir.” The man shrugged, as if acknowledging that it wasn’t a typical name.

“Can you hit them from here?” he asked.

Wilful Murder grunted. As if against his better judgment, he jumped down from the wall-again.

“Long shot,” he said. He drew to his ear, his right leg sinking as if under great weight, his whole body rocking as his heavy back muscles engaged. He loosed high, his body bent forward into the bow.

His arrow fell into the mob at the base of the field like a thunderbolt.

Heads turned.

“If you can reach out and touch yon then do!” Wilful called. “Otherwise, stay the fuck up on the wall.”

Three men jumped down. They looked scared. A fourth man looked down the field for some heartbeats, shrugged, and dropped off the wall in turn. He began to prowl the ground for arrows.

“I need a lighter shaft,” he said as he pushed past Ser John.

The handful of arrows had no obvious effect. The archers had to make too much effort to loose fast-each shaft took long seconds to pull and aim, and all of them flexed their right arms between pulls.

Then the heavy arrows were plunging, one every few heartbeats, into the mass of boglins at the base of the field.

Ser Giannis came over and opened his faceplate. “I have never faced this-this…” His face did an odd thing.

“The Wild,” Ser John said as kindly as he could.

“Yes,” Ser Giannis said. “Yes. But I think…”

Ser John was trying to get a sense of what was going on beyond the next hedge.

“I think that if the archers kill enough of them, the rest will charge us. Yes?” Ser Giannis pointed his elegant, ichor-caked spear down the field.

Ser Aneas laughed mirthlessly. “Many things my master-at-arms told me make sense now,” he said.

A long bowshot away, one of Wilful Murder’s arrows struck a daemon in the head, plummeting almost straight down. It went into the skull and struck the great creature to the mud, full length, like a blow from an angel.

The growling, roaring, crashing sound was closer.

The great horn spoke again-three long blasts.

“What the hell is that?” asked Ser Dagon.

A flash of metal in the gap in the hedge. Flash, flash.

Three long, deep blasts from the huge horn.

Again, there was an explosion of purple-red light, this time at the corner of the field. Fire licked at the hedgerow.

Three green balls of fire materialized in the air at half-heartbeat intervals and struck.

There was an explosion-another-then another. Like spring trees full of sap and struck by lightning, each sharp crack deafened the men at the top of the hill and blew new rings of blood and bone into the sunny sky.

Ser John found he was down on one knee, his ears ringing despite a fully enclosed helmet and heavy wool-stuffed helmet liner. There was a dazzle of spots in front of his eyes.

There were a lot of dead boglins at the base of the field. Even as he watched, the arm of a daemon, torn from its body, fell back to the earth.

The black thing now moved as if it was four legged and not two legged. It vanished through a new gap in the hedge.

Another flash of steel, and Ser John was fairly sure he was looking at Lord Wimarc, dismounted, about three hundred yards away. The boy had superb armour and something, even at that range, suggested him and his slim, upright posture.

Not for the last time, Ser John watched, wondering what in hell was happening.

“I think we’re out of the fight,” Ser Dagon muttered.

Ser John got back to his feet. His lower back burned with fatigue and he was soaked through with sweat-and cold.

“Master Archer!” he called.

“Which I’m right here, your honour,” Wilful Murder muttered. “And not deaf, neither.”

“Send an archer for the pages and the horses,” Ser John said, unaware that he was shouting.

Jamie the Hoek coughed. “I’ll go, Ser John,” he said. “My horse is just around the wall-if Rory left it where he said he would.”

“If the imps didn’t get him,” spat one of the knights. Ser Blaise was dead-and partly eaten. The young Jarsay knight, Ser Guy, had six wounds, all where the imps had gotten into his groin and armpits. He was fading fast.

The poor boy was weeping with pain. His arms were barely attached to his body. His legs-his entire lower torso was ruined. Shock could not do enough to protect him from what had happened to his body.

Ser John knelt by him and put a hand on his cheek.

The boy screamed. Something in him had changed, or the full realization of his fate had come to him, and his weeping sobs gave way to bitter screams.

Three hundred yards of mud away, Lord Wimarc waved. And began to trudge, not towards them but along the edge of the hedgerow. He was clearly following the defeated warband of enemy raiders.

“He’s clean mad,” muttered Ser Dagon, who was doing his best to ignore the young knight dying horribly at his feet.

The other squires began to appear-Tomas Craik and his brother Alan and all the rest of them, trudging wearily in good harness.

“Achilles and Hector together couldn’t ha’ driven all they off that land,” said Ser Dagon.

The boy was shouting his screams now.

“I think our squires have the most honour in this fight,” Ser John agreed. He wished he could get up. He wished the boy would die. He wished that there was something-anything-he could do.

He made himself pray, which was hard with the accusations of the boy’s screams so close to his head.

There was another roar-the horn sounded again, one long wind, and suddenly the air was full of ops. Workings flew past, balls of fire of various colours flying back and forth.

“Christ and his phalanx of angels,” muttered Ser Giannis.

“Haaaaarrrrrhhhhh!” screamed the mass of pain and fear that had once been a knight of Jarsay.

Ser John picked him up, intending to crush him in an embrace. But Wilful Murder was there first. He leaned down as if tying his shoe and casually drew his ballock dagger across the young knight’s throat.

“Go fast, boy,” he said.

Ser John let the boy’s blood flow down the front of his breastplate. He met the archer’s eyes, and the man shrugged.

“Someone had to,” Wilful Murder said.

And then Rory was back with the war horses.

Ser John looked around, wondering if he looked as tired and haggard as Ser Giannis or Ser Dagon did.

“I’m of a mind to find out what happened, and mayhap play a role before the sun sets,” Ser John said. “But every man here has earned the right to say he has done enough.”

The other seven knights looked at him-covered in their comrade’s blood-and shook their heads.

“Let’s go kill them,” said Ser Dagon.

The road ran parallel to the fight for another half mile. Below them, as the spring sun began to set, they could see shapes moving across the cleared ground. Some of the hedged fields were quite small and Ser John didn’t know the area well enough to guess which lane would get him a view of the fight-if any.

But as the sun’s rays turned from gold to red, one of the huntsmen galloped up and pointed his crossbow south across the fields. “Past the farm gate,” he said, and they rode. An hour of picking their way along the road and stopping frequently to watch or listen had allowed all the archers to catch them up, mounted on their smaller horses. The pages brought up the rear.

Ser John was the first through the gate. It was a fine farm with a good stone house like Helewise’s, only smaller, and it had been spared by the last incursion of the Wild. Draper or Skinner-he knew the folk here.

Old Man Skinner stepped out of his door, a heavy arbalest cocked in his hand. “There’s boglins in my lower orchard,” he said. “I’ve been potting ’em for an hour. Took you lot long enough-Christ on the cross, you look rough, Ser John!” he said in sudden wonder. “Just my mouth a flappin’. I mean no harm. Water your horses-I’ll get water in the trough.”

And indeed, the horses needed water and a rest from men on their backs, and Goodwife Skinner, a big heavy woman with beautiful eyes and a no-nonsense face doled out sweet buns and tart cider. Men drank it without removing their blood-soaked gauntlets or gloves. Ser John looked about him, and they were all blue-red-black with ichor and blood and mud.

The horn-that horn would haunt his dreams-sounded very close.

“Get inside and bar your doors,” Ser John snapped, pushing Goodwife Skinner into her kitchen door.

“An’ don’t we wish we could come in wi’ you?” muttered Wilful Murder.

“To horse!” Ser John shouted.

His great war horse-the best he’d ever owned-seemed to give a human groan as he mounted. He trotted the horse past the barnyard and the farmer met him there at the corner, his heavy weapon spanned and ready. The farmer ran to the next gate and paused, looked around carefully and then opened the gate. He stepped through.

Ser John rode right by him. He wasn’t sure why he did it, except perhaps the sense that it was his job to protect the farmer, not the farmer’s job to protect him.

He felt the enemy through his horse before ever he saw them. They were in the next field, near the base of the valley. They’d come miles north and west, now-Lissen Carak would be only a dozen more miles that way. The edge of the woods was only a mile or two to the north, if that. That’s where the raiders were headed.

Ser John went through the gate, past the farmer, and then trotted up the muddy field. He could see his enemy through the next gate.

The closed field in which he was riding was unploughed, or his horse would have sunk to the fetlocks. But there were only two gates-the one he’d passed through, and the one ahead.

He rode up to the gate. A gout of black fire struck it just as he reached it and it blew clean off its hinges and collapsed.

The four-footed black thing was loping towards him over an unploughed hayfield. Ser John didn’t think. He just slammed down his visor and touched his spurs to Iskander, who responded with all the noble heart any knight could ask from a horse, exploding forward despite the soft, treacherous ground.

The huge black creature-it was almost amorphous, it moved so fast-reared up.

It was a troll.

It cast.

The sigil on his chest felt as if it was melting and running over his skin, and he shrieked, but he and his horse rode through a cloud of black-blue fire and he dropped his lance point a hand’s breadth-

His lance caught it in the centre of the head. Even a ten-foot-high stone statue would be damaged by a war horse and rider powering a heavy lance. His strike was so sure, so exact, that his lance tip caught on its brow ridge and bent-and broke.

But the black troll went crashing down.

Ser John never had to give his horse a lead-he was turning as soon as it felt his weight change. He was naked, his back to his enemy-he saw a dozen daemons, streaked with mud and blood, running at him and, behind them, boglins and behind them, at the far edge of the field…

A flash of bright gold in the last of the sun.

He shook his head and drew his sword, prepared to sell his life dearly.

The great black stone troll was sitting, legs splayed, like a ten-foot child who had hurt itself.

It shook its head-paused, shook again…

Ser John smiled grimly. Iskander couldn’t manage more than a stiff trot, but he powered by, put a fore-hoof into the troll with the ringing sound of iron-shod hooves on stone and then Ser John’s war hammer fell with all the power of his shoulders on the thing’s fractured head.

Instead of dying, it reached out, almost casually, and slammed Ser John out of the saddle, breaking his left arm and dropping him behind his horse. Ser John had time to see that his left vambrace was crushed.

He lay in the mud and waited to die. He couldn’t raise his head.

Over his head, sorcery flew. He caught a piece of something and was showered in mud, then a wave of incredible heat passed over and he tried not to breathe.

Heavy arrows began to fall. He saw two come down, but he had trouble moving his head-some muscles in his back were damaged, or perhaps he was gutted and dying. It was hard to tell. There was no pain, even from his arm, so he knew that he had no way to tell.

And then, silence. He could hear very little inside his helmet. But he could feel the ground move as something big came up the field. His uninjured right hand went for his dagger.

It was heading for him.

Deep in Ser John’s throat was a whimper, and he knew if he let that whimper out, it would be the way he died. So instead, he tried to see Helewise-see her wonderful naked body, see the cheerfulness of her, the fullness-

Helewise’s breasts were a better thought with which to die than brother Christ, whatever the priests said.

The thing was coming. The ground shook.

He couldn’t do it. His eyes opened.

Over him was a great furry creature covered in mud. It looked like a giant rat, but in a flicker of thought he knew it for a very dirty Golden Bear.

He exhaled.

The bear leaned over him. “You-again?” it asked, its voice deep and raspy and majestic.

Ser John thought he might laugh forever. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said.

The day was not yet over, but it had ended for Ser John. The pages and archers had to fight off a pair of bargests that came-too late to turn the tide of the rout-out of the setting sun. They caught the pages on horseback and killed two, but their interest in feeding on the horses gave the archers time to drive them off.

Ser John lay in the roots of a great tree, his back against its old bole. They were just at the edge of the woods.

The old bear was as tall as the troll, and just as heavy. He wore a great bag dense with red and black porcupine quillwork, and had an axe-a heavy soldier’s axe-from far-off Etrusca.

He sat-very like a man-back curved in fatigue, legs splayed. A very cautious Jamie the Hoek brought the bear water.

“I am called Flint,” the old bear said.

Around them, in amongst the old maples at the edge of night, moved two dozen other bears. Even covered in mud-and they were caked in the stuff-they gave off the occasional gleam of gold.

Ser John extended his good hand. “I’m Ser John Crayford,” he said. “The Captain of Albinkirk.”

“You are the lord of the stinking houses,” the bear said.

Ser John swallowed his pain. “I suppose. And you?”

“I lead the Crooked Tree clan,” Flint said. “I have for fifty summers.”

“You saved us,” Ser John said.

“More than you know!” Flint nodded. “But in the winter, you and the Light that Shines came to the deep woods and saved me. And many of my people.” He looked away-again, a very human head movement, but Ser John could not read the thing’s face. “That was an army-going to raid all the way around your stinking houses.”

Ser John bit his lip. When he could master the pain, he said, “Yes.”

“The sorcerer is marching on Ticondaga with all his force,” the old bear said. “We have refused to submit. But most of my people hate men-all men-more than they hate the sorcerer. Or at least as much.”

Another bear came and squatted by the old bear. Ser John had the sense that the second bear was much younger-lithe, almost thin from winter.

“We awoke to find his spies in our dens. He had massacred a clan, merely to show that he could.” Flint seemed to be talking to himself.

“How can I help?” Ser John asked.

The old bear looked at him, its muzzle weaving side to side. “Let us pass west,” he said. “We have friends to the west.”

“The Abbess?” asked the wounded knight.

“Is the Light that Shines not one of her mates?” asked the old bear.

Ser John groaned with a desire to laugh that conflicted with his obviously broken rib. Or ribs.

“The Abbess is a nun. Nuns are women who do not take mates.” Ser John took a careful breath.

“Yes-some bears are the same, loving only their own, she-bear with she-bear,” Flint said.

Ser John nodded. “Yes-but no. They take no mate at all.”

“I have heard of this,” said the old bear. “But assumed it was just one of those rumours of hate that young people concoct. You mean some humans choose not to mate at all? What do they do in spring? Hibernate?”

Ser John took another careful breath. “You speak the tongue of the west very well, for a bear.”

“Some of us meet with men,” the bear admitted. “At N’Pana, or even Ticondaga.” The bear growled. “We do not work with fire, but a steel axe is a fearsome thing indeed.”

“Then-if there is trade, you must know something about us?” the man asked.

The bear growled. “More than I’d like. Can you give us passage west? On the road, and safe from your people?”

Ser John sank back onto the bole. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Will you tell me what you know of the sorcerer?”

The bear got up on all fours. “I will tell you much. How badly hurt are you? Your outer shell is unbroken.”

“I am hurt,” Ser John admitted.

Jamie the Hoek came back out of the near darkness. “I thought you might like this,” he said, handing the bear a pot.

The bear sat, much like a stuffed bear in a toy shop, legs again splayed. It put the pot between its paws and pulled off the top.

“Wild honey?” it said in a tone of pure greed.

Jamie, the perfect squire, smiled, and his teeth shone in the dark. “I thought you’d like that,” he said again.

The bear lifted a sticky snout from an empty pot a little later, and growled.

Ser John was losing his ability to remain awake, but he tried to be courteous. “Lord Wimarc can escort you,” he said. “We have an army on the road to Lissen Carak. Lord Wimarc will see you get safe passage. You may want to go through the woods though…”

The bear licked its obvious teeth and nodded at Jamie the Hoek. “I may have to change my opinion of men,” it said.

Liviapolis-Morgon Mortirmir

Morgon Mortirmir had moved up in the world-far enough to be trusted with real research.

Unfortunately, he’d only exchanged one set of irritable magisters for another.

Still, life was better. He stroked his fashionable short beard, thinking of Tancreda Comnena, who still sometimes called him “plague.”

Who was no longer planning to become a nun. They had an understanding, although her side of the understanding seemed mostly to have an unlimited licence to tease him.

Then he realized with annoyance that he was rubbing his short, pointed beard with the ink-stained fingers of his writing hand.

“Son of a bitch,” he swore. He was tempted to drama-to hurl something-but his left hand was resting on a recently recovered thousand-year-old manuscript from somewhere east of Rhum and his right hand held an artifactualy-charged ivory pen, and he could spare neither.

He compromised by swearing. He was getting better at swearing. As long as he didn’t blaspheme, the Master Grammarian, who still directed his studies, turned a blind eye.

He looked at the manuscript again. It was very old-probably far older than it appeared. On the surface, it was yet another re-hash of Aristotle. An astute Etruscan collector had noted some capitals-carefully illuminated-in an older hand, and had taken a magnifying glass to it.

It had been scraped clean somewhere in the east, a thousand years ago. Long before the Wild’s hordes had swept across the Holy Land and destroyed every sign of man-back when Demetriopolis and Alexandria Fryggia were thriving cities and not horrifying necropoli where only the not-dead and the boldest or most desperate adventurer or scriptorium-collector dared go.

Morgon was determined that someday, when his powers were fully developed, he would assay Demetriopolis and Ptolemaica himself. The library had once been the world’s greatest. The Suda, a collection of what appeared to be librarian’s notes on the collection, even claimed to have had manuscripts-scrolls-from other spheres. Other spheres! His thoughts went off into a whirlwind of supposition, creation and destruction like an intellectual ouroboros.

But the reality of the manuscript under his elbow drew him back. Hidden under the ancient Aristotle was something far more wonderful. It was, in fact, an Archaic essay on farming. Embedded in it were six workings, none of which had been deciphered by the Grammarian. He’d handed the whole amazing relic to Morgon with the words “You’re a genius-see if you can do anything with this.”

Morgon had spent every hour of the last forty on one passage three paragraphs long.

He had every word of the Archaic deciphered.

He had all the traditional grammatical parts of a working-the opening, which was sometimes an invocation and sometimes an enhancement of memory; the orologicum, a modern term for the process by which any one working accessed the power available from ops and potentia; and the trigger, which had a variety of elegant names in Low Archaic and usually a single High Archaic word.

He had that.

He knew the purpose of the working, as well. Flavius Silva’s Low Archaic was not on order with some of the other recently rediscovered ancients, but his words were easy enough to read, and Morgon had gone a step further by asking Tancreda to translate the whole passage, as she was a far better linguist than he.

“For the remedy of bad water for stock. Being that too often the farmer must use what water there is, whether that water be cool, flowing, and clean, or whether the farmer face a long summer and dry, and needeth to have his animals take even that which is green and full of filth.”

Morgon could see it well enough.

And the trigger was Purgo.

So-a single word, usually very powerful. The underlying working was very complex. Complex, with a simple trigger-very powerful.

Yesterday, far more awake, Morgon had worked it, with Tancreda standing by (and her brother, too-Morean noblewomen did not spend time alone with male students for any reason) on a glass of hideous, dirty water, green with some sort of an algae bloom that was particulate in nature.

He mastered the working, powered it, and felt the ops inhabit the working and give it life.

And then-nothing. The water in the glass remained a lurid green, like an advertisement for the enmity of the Wild to the works of man.

He cast it three times, the third with Tancreda’s brother, an apprentice of the first year, barely able to summon a candle flame, measuring the working’s energy before and after ops.

Stefanos shrugged. “You cast a great deal of ops,” he said.

Morgon had shaken his head.

Now, a day later, and so tired that he could barely write out his notes, he had an idea. The idea was foolish, but Tancreda told him he was a fool all the time.

She was close behind him, insisting that he stop and take a meal.

He shook his head. “In a moment,” he said. He lifted the lurid glass of slime-and drank it.

Tancreda tried to dash it to the floor. “Oh, by the risen Christ, you will turn into something damned. At the least, you will never kiss me with that mouth again. Oh, my God. Stefanos, fetch a doctor-no, the Grammarian.”

As if summoned, the Master Grammarian appeared at the door. “What has happened?” he demanded.

Mortirmir shrugged. Were his guts churning? Did he imagine that?

“He drank the water,” Stefanos said. “Sir,” he added a little too late.

“Water?” the Master Grammarian asked, but he was not a master magister for nothing, and he picked up the clawed-foot glass and examined it. “Algae-a form of plant-did you know that?”

“I thought it might be an animiculus,” Mortirmir said.

“Why did you drink it?” demanded the Grammarian.

“I learned the working. It is supposed to purify water. Power goes in-quite a lot of power. But the water does not appear to change.” Mortirmir shrugged.

“You can purify water by boiling it,” the Grammarian noted.

Morgon stopped looking at his hands and thought. He looked at the Grammarian. “In which case, the water is purified, but the solids-mud, particulate matter, animaliculae-remain.”

The Grammarian nodded. “Yes.”

“And so with this working, but there is no warmth. I drank the water to ascertain the effect-whether it was, in fact, purified.” He shook his head. “It certainly tastes like raw bile.”

The Grammarian nodded. “Sensible, in an insane, over-tired way. Have me summoned if you fall sick.” He walked out through the door.

Tancreda shook her head. “You will be sicker than all the sick dogs,” she began.

Mortirmir shivered. But the process was on him-he ignored the lovely Despoina Comnena to pick up the magnifying glass he had used on the manuscript. Instead, he looked at the algae in the glass. Magnified, it was even more horrible.

But his idea bore no fruit. He looked and looked, but there were no malevolent darting shapes living in the weed-or the corpses thereof, which might have justified the expenditure of ops.

He was two hours into the creation of an enhancement working to create a lens of air when he realized that he knew nothing of lenses.

Tancreda rolled her eyes. “I will go to the library again,” she said. “Why not just ask a glass grinder?”

Morgon slapped his knee. “Brilliant!” he said, and was out the door with neither purse nor cloak.

In the emptiness of his absence, Tancreda turned to her noble brother. “You see why I love him,” she said.

He shrugged. “No. He’s quite mad.” He looked out into the street, where Morgon was running-long legs stretching as if in a sprint in the hippodrome.

Tancreda pulled on a cloak, found her talisman for the library, and pulled on a hood and a mask. “No. He doesn’t always communicate well, but he’s not mad.”

“Why the sudden fascination with lenses? We were reading Old Archaic, and then-zip! That’s all done.” Stefanos laughed. “Like a small child.”

“He can be hard to follow,” Tancreda admitted. “But if I read him aright, he decided that the working does function, and that it is killing or removing or perhaps summoning something very small indeed. And now he needs to create the means to observe and prove his theory. Hence the lens.”

Stefanos looked at her a moment. “You understood that from what-his grunting?”

Tancreda shrugged. “Give me twenty ducats. Yes-and the way his hand moved on the passage, and the way he picked up the glass. Yes.”

“You’re as mad as he,” her brother said. “And don’t imagine I don’t know you’ve kissed him, you wanton.”

The last was said with less venom than might be imagined.

“I still know where you keep your little Ifriquy’an,” Tancreda said with equanimity. “So we’ll have no holier than thou here.”

“You can’t marry him,” her brother said. It was more a question than an answer. In fact, he whined it.

“I can, and I will,” Tancreda said. “You’ll see.”

Stefanos had been seeing his sister get her way on all things since he was born. He didn’t doubt her.

“Family dinners…” he moaned.

But the door slammed, and she was gone, leaving the young man alone with a fabulously ancient manuscript, a cat, and a glass of algae.

He patted the cat.

Two hundred leagues further west, an old man made a solitary camp where the mighty Cohocton met with the Dodock coming from the hills to the south. He moved stiffly, unpacking his mule and laying things out, then carefully feeding his fine riding horse and big mule. By the time the two animals were fed and calm, it was dark, and his fire of birch and dry maple was the only light-or warmth-for many miles.

He warmed his hands for a while and then fried some bacon in a small iron skillet with a folding handle.

The horse began to be restless.

The old man finished the bacon. Then he raised his head and looked into the darkness as if he could see into it.

After a while, he went to the bags that the patient mule had carried all day, opened one, and took out a bottle of red wine. It was an incongruous thing in such a rough camp-the old man had no tent, no bed, and no cups.

After a moment he produced a pair of horn cups.

He went back to his fire and built it up. He produced a folding brass candlestick-cunningly wrought-put a beeswax candle into it and lit it with a snap of his fingers.

A puff of wind blew it out.

He relit it. When he turned his back, it went out again.

He growled. Walking carefully in the darkness, he went over to the downed birch tree-the reason he’d chosen this site to camp-and stripped a long curl of bark.

He went back to his candle stick and made a wind shade from the bark, and then relit the candle with another snap of his fingers.

Then he sat on his rolled cloak and ate his bacon.

When he was done, he looked around carefully-again-and then took his small iron skillet down to the brook and washed it with sand and small pebbles. The horse snorted.

The old man went back to his fire, threw on a pair of small birch logs, and settled comfortably into a tree’s roots to rest. He looked at the stars, and at the moon high above him.

He couldn’t help but smile.

Carefully, he took a small pipe out of his purse, took tobacco from his hunting bag, and packed his pipe.

“A new vice,” he said, the first words he’d said in days. “Well, well.”

He was a handsome man, and not so very old, at that. He had heavy dark brows and salt and pepper hair tied back in a rough queue with deer hide thong. He wore a fine red caftan of wool lined in silk, and under that a good linen shirt, and he had Alban-style braes and hose and wore leather boots that would have reached his thighs if he had not rolled them down to his knees.

A long sword rested against the tree by his head.

He packed the pipe carefully, and then lit it from a coal at the outer edge of the fire. Sucked the smoke into his lungs and coughed.

Blew a tentative smoke ring.

“Come and have a cup of wine,” he called suddenly.

Or maybe I’m just going mad, he thought.

There was a rustle by the stream. The babble of the brook covered many sounds but didn’t cover them all.

His new body had wonderful hearing compared to his old body. And was particularly good at waking up without stiffness.

“Isss it good wine, I wonder?” asked a voice from beyond the fire.

“It is,” the man said. He waved to the cups. “Would you pour?” He put the long-stemmed pipe to his lips and drew, then gradually blew the smoke out. It billowed in the light of the fire, seeming to flow and spread like water.

When a breeze blew it away, there was a man-or rather, a human-like figure-standing by the fire. He was dressed all in red; red hose, red pourpoint, laced in red and tipped in gold.

By the stream, a dozen faeries hovered, burning in their incandescent wonder.

The old man-not so old-drew in more smoke. “Good evening,” he said.

“A merry meeting, and you a mossst pleasssant tressspassser,” the figure said. “But the wine isss good.”

“I am sorry for my tresspass,” said the man with the pipe. He waved it. “I have done little damage except burn some downed wood. I have not hunted.”

The other man tinkled slightly as he moved-his clothes had tiny golden bells attached, and when they rang, the faeries laughed. “You might be consssidered a good guessst in better timesss,” the figure said. The firelight revealed the inhuman perfection of his face-he was an irk.

“Do I have the honour of addressing the Faery Knight?” asked the man.

“You do! The sssmell of your wine drew me asss sssurely asss an incantation and the calling of my true name!” The irk laughed.

“I don’t know your true name, and I wouldn’t say it aloud if I did,” said the human. “But I was once told that you liked good wine. And Etruscan reds must be a trifle thin on the ground out here.”

The irk laughed-and drank. “It isss very good. Perhapsss I will let you live-even let you hunt. The caribou will move in a few weeksss. I could ssspare a half million or ssso of them.”

The man’s eyes moved. “Caribou,” he said aloud.

The Faery Knight nodded. “Ssso many all move at onssse that no forssse of man or the Wild can crosss their path. Millionsss and millionsss, all trekking north.” He shrugged. “Almossst I could put a name on you. Who told you I liked wine?”

“The King of Alba,” the man said.

“Ah. I pity him. A weak man and yet so ssstrong.” The irk shrugged. “I liked hisss father better, but they come and go ssso ssswiftly.”

The human was sucking on the foul smoke at the bottom of the pipe. He tapped it out on his boot sole.

“You do not fear me,” said the irk.

“Should I?” asked the man.

“Do you want sssomething? The wine isss very good.” He held out the horn cup. “May I have more?”

“Take the bottle if you like,” said the man. “Though in truth, I’d be cheered by a cup myself. Will you go to war with Thorn?”

The irk did not betray startlement-but he did move. “I do not dissscusss sssuch thingsss with chanssse met ssstrangersss.” Suddenly the irk was covered in a bubble of fire.

The man shook his head. “Truly, I mean no harm. Indeed, I’ve come to offer my fealty.” He nodded. “For a time.”

The red-clad irk let down his shield, poured wine into both cups and held one out to the man. “The lassst time I sssat with a man in thessse woodssss, Thorn attacked me.” He frowned. “I did not come off bessst.”

The man took a cup of wine from the irk’s outstretched hand. “We must see to it that doesn’t happen again,” he said. “But Thorn is not the real enemy. Thorn is only another victim.”

“You have sssaid hisss name often enough to invite him to your fire,” the Faery Knight said.

The human nodded. “He will not come. He will not even attempt to contest my passage. In fact, he can neither see me, nor hear me, even when I say his name.”

The irk nodded and knocked back his wine. “Then I know who you are. I congratulate you on being alive.”

The man smiled. “It is rather delightful.”

The Faery Knight laughed-all the faeries laughed by the stream. “Perhapsss that isss how we will pick up the sssidesss for this fight,” he said. “Not good againssst evil, but merely thossse who find thisss world a delight againssst thossse who find it a burden. Thorn feelsss the world isss dark and grim.”

“God knows he does his best to make it so. Very human of him,” said the man.

“In the woodsss, it isss sssaid that you are on the dark path,” the Faery Knight said.

The human shrugged. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he said. “Perhaps I’m on it. But I have a goal, and an enemy. I will fight until the fight is over, or I am beaten.”

“Ssso,” the irk said. He poured more wine. “You know the truth.”

“I know a truth,” said the man who had once been Harmodius.

They touched their cups.

“I will ask no vasssalage of one ssso puisssant asss you,” said the irk. “We will be alliesss.”

Harmodius touched the rim of his cup to the other. “Well met by firelight, my lord. We will be… alliesss.”

Bill Redmede was preparing for war. He and his Jacks-those who had survived the long march-had to make many things themselves that they’d always bought or stolen. Arrows first and foremost, but also clothes and quivers. Hard leather purses were replaced with softer Outwaller bags and wool hose with leather stockings of carefully tanned deerskin.

Most still had their white cotes, now stained and worn to a hundred earthy hues.

Bill watched them work-watched them loft shaft after shaft into the stumps he’d prepared for them, led them on runs through the woods with targets to the left and right. Winter had made them fat. But it had also made them steadier. Most of the men and not a few of the women had found mates among the Outwallers, almost as if a suggestion had been planted among them that they sink roots. Weddings-with no priests-had been celebrated. More than a few bellies were round, since Yule.

But since the snow began to retreat into the wood lines, and then to melt away altogether-since Nita Qwan’s departure east, and then, ten days later, the sudden breakup of the ice-all the Dulwar and all the other Outwallers who lived around N’gara began to train their warriors, and Bill Redmede’s people joined in with a will. And they learned from the Outwallers, too-how to throw the small axes the Dulwars all carried, men and women, too, and how to make lighter arrows of the cane that grew around the inner sea and at this time of the year was standing, dried and ready to be harvested.

But Bill had agreed to the alliance. He knew what was coming, and what was expected.

Most of his men were going to war, and a few women, too. Bess was heavily pregnant, but grimly determined until the whole body of the Jacks voted together that no pregnant woman should come to the war.

“If’n we’re all killed,” Jamie Cartwright said, “you gels will keep our memory alive.”

Bess cursed and didn’t speak to anyone for a day.

Tapio-the Faery Knight-came and sat with her. She was always delighted to see him, as if he was an angel or a god.

He took one of her hands. “Besss,” he said. “If we triumph you will have misssed nothing but violenssse.” He shrugged. “But if we fail, I promissse you that our enemy will come here all too sssoon, and you and Tamsssin will have your belliesss full of fighting.”

But even to the Faery Knight, she frowned. “I didn’t become a Jack to get left behind because my body was full of a man’s seed,” she spat.

“I’m sssure there will be more war, asss sssure asss the sssun will ssshine,” he said with a twisted smile. “All the creaturesss of thisss world make war. It isss what we have in common.” He rose with an elegance no human frame could match, like a sinewy serpent.

So Bess straightened arrows and made the pine pitch resin that they used to help bind the heads to the shafts, and while the Outwallers did their war dances and Mogon’s wardens came in from the north and Exrech’s people swarmed in from the far west with tales of war and flood behind them, the Jacks completed their preparations, loaded their bags with food, and contemplated their allies.

Fitzalan had a new beard and a new, more mature manner. He didn’t attack everything he saw anymore. He had an almond-eyed Outwaller woman named Liri from far to the west, where they said there was a river as broad as a lake. Her people were called Renerds, and their skin was a golden red, their eyes and hair much the same.

Or perhaps she had him. She seemed the more imperious of the two.

Two nights before the whole of the Faery Knight’s army was due to march east, he held a great council in his hall. Harpers sang of wars from the past. No song was of glory, and most were of defeat and pain, the agony of loss, the despair of a bad wound. The music was haunting and beautiful.

Bill Redmede sat thinking of his distant brother. And of the Kingdom of Alba.

Of how little it all meant to him, now. He smiled grimly as he realized what Wat Tyler had known at midwinter.

To Redmede, this hall, N’gara, and its disparate inhabitants, had become home.

He twisted his mouth and glanced at Fitzalan, who was sharing a long stone pipe with Aun’shen, one of Mogon’s lieutenants. Some of the great wardens smoked. Some also ate their meat raw.

Living at N’gara was predominantly a matter of not being offended by the alien behaviour of others.

“The comrades might get more spirit from happier songs,” Redmede said.

Fitzalan shrugged. “They’re true songs, those,” he said.

Lady Tamsin appeared out of the air, or so it seemed. “The irks send warriors away with a reminder of where they go and what they leave behind,” she said. “Perhaps for your kind, with the life so short, there is less to lose. Yet this seems to me odd-I would think that with the life so short, your people would be more careful of it.”

Redmede found it hard to look at Tamsin for any length of time, so he tore his eyes away and looked at the harpers on the dais instead. Behind them, on the tapestry-that-lived, spear-armed warriors were cut down by humans in strange armour. Redmede had seen the armour somewhere before-on old statues outside Harndon. Archaic armour, helmets with crests, big rectangular shields. The legions.

Just when you thought you might understand the irks, or you thought they were just folks, they’d remind you that the older ones had been alive for a thousand years or so and remembered things that were long forgotten by most humans. Even in books.

Nor did they remember events the same way.

Redmede kept his eyes on the musicians. “Few of us are careful of life, my lady.”

“For your own sweet Bess’s sake, and all her kisses, mortal, the least you could do is bring yourself home.” She smiled sweetly, like all the young women in all the passionate springs of the world rolled into one woman with pointed teeth. “Forget about glory. Go late, fight briefly, leave early and come home alive.”

Bill Redmede laughed. “Lady, you incline me to desert.”

Tamsin spread her hands. “War is a monster that eats the sentient races. I would counsel any friend to avoid him.”

Bill Redmede nodded. “But who will stop the power of the sorcerer? Who will save the bears in the ’Dacks or the serfs in the fields?”

She nodded at the tapestry-that-lived. “Perhaps they should save themselves,” she said. She raised a hand. “Peace, friend. You can make no argument that will reconcile Tamsin to the loss of her lord to war.”

But in the council, the Faery Knight stood alone in the soft light on the dais, in his red clothes of leather and spidersilk. He spread his hands for silence, a gesture so evocative that all those in the hall fell silent, the boglins and the marsh trolls and the Golden Bears, the wardens and the irks and the men.

“Tomorrow we march to war,” he said. The hall was silent. Not a fly buzzed, not a moth moved on silent wings.

“We do not march to conquer. We will fight only to protect our friends. Speed will be our armour, and silence our shield.” He spread his arms wide and a glowing vision of the hills at the foot of the western Adnacrags appeared as if seen from a great height.

“West of Lissen Carak is the wall,” he said. “It runs north to south here in the foothills.” He pointed to the towers on the wall. “We will need to pass the wall here. There is a royal garrison, which we will destroy.” He smiled, showing his fangs. “We have never believed that this land belonged to the so-called King of Alba anyway.”

Some of the Jacks roared their approval. Others looked troubled.

“Once we pass the wall, we will have to move quickly. Several clanss of bears are moving toward us, and we must cover them and protect them.”

“Where’s Thorn?” bellowed a warden. She was Mogon’s niece, Tremog. Her blue and white crest stood almost erect on her head.

Tapio nodded. “It is safe to call him by name here,” he said, and he exchanged a glance with a tall, thin, dark-haired man who sat on a chair on the dais. “Although once we march, I ask that no member of our alliance mention his name. We wish to pass the outer wards of Alba undetected, and his spies are everywhere.” He glanced again at the dark-haired man, who rose.

He spread his hands and spoke in a soft voice that nonetheless carried to every corner of the hall.

“Thorn is now marching to the siege of Ticondaga,” he said. “Today he fought a battle on the road his slaves have made. The Earl of Westwall ambushed the sorcerer. Unfortunately, Thorn now has good professional military advice, and the earl’s success was limited. Tomorrow, at the latest, he will invest the fortress.”

“Will we fight him?” Tremog asked.

The dark-headed man looked to Tapio, who shrugged. “It is very difficult to see when too many Powers become entangled,” he said with brutal honesty. “We lack the numbers or the hardihood or the sorcery to engage his main army in open battle, but if he chooses to fight us, we will be like coyotes at his heels.”

Tremog’s crest went down, and she seemed to tremble. Redmede knew that this was a warden sign of uncertainty, not rage.

“If we lack the force to meet him head to head, why send an army at all?” she asked.

Tapio nodded. “War is more than battle,” he said. “War is food and drink and disease and patience and anger and hate and cold and stealth and terror as well as sweet silver and bitter iron and the glitter of arms in the sun or under the moon. We take as many blades as we can spare, and as many as we can feed, and as many as we can move quickly. Thorn has many times as many fighters. Can he feed them? Can he control them? Will other forces come into play?”

The man nodded. “At the very least, we will rescue the bears. Then, perhaps we will withdraw. Perhaps we will seek allies among Thorn’s other enemies.”

Tremog’s tooth-lined maw spread wide and she gave a roar-what passed for laughter with the wardens. “You mean you do not trust us with your clever plan,” she said. “Just say that and be done. What are we, the children of men, to lie to each other? You are our lord paramount. If you keep your own counsel, so be it. The worst we’ll do is-wander off.”

Many creatures laughed.

And Tapio laughed with them. “I have indeed been in too many councils of men,” he confessed. “It is true that I have thoughts in my mind that I do not choose to share. But in the main, this is all of my counsel-that we pass the wall, collect the bears, and see what there is to be seen. Our retreat will be secure, and we have enough force to give Thorn real pause.”

“You and this man speak as if you can see Thorn’s forces and he cannot see ours!” said the bear. She took her great furry feet off the stone table and sat up. “Thorn is very powerful. How is it that he cannot see us?”

The dark-haired man smiled. “Suffice it to say that he is unlikely to look anywhere but here for Lord Tapio,” he said.

“But when he does he will see us very quickly,” Tapio insisted.

“Hence the secrecy,” Redmede said. “Who is this gentleman?” he asked.

“I was dead,” the dark-headed man said. “And since I desire not to be dead again soon, I won’t reveal myself just now. But I will in time, and I promise you I won’t betray you, any of you.”

Tremog nodded. “The promises of men are very weak,” she said. “But men learn wisdom in the Wild.”

“And what of the west?” Many heads turned, and Liri, the beautiful Renard woman, stood. “I speak for no one by myself-but my people walk in the lakes, and I was sent here with a warning.” She smiled at Fitzalan. “Pleasant as my winter has been-”

The Faery Knight inclined his head. “Lady of the Renardsss,” he sang in his faery voice, “I have no easssy anssswer to sssoothe you. The whole of the wessst isss moving. Beyond the great river, a hundred hivesss of boglinsss are ssspewing forth warriorsss-”

The wight, Exrech, rose from his alien crouch by the table and unfolded like a pocket knife to his full height. His white chiton armour and elongated, insectile head were the most alien things in a hall of aliens, and made Mogon’s great saurians seem comforting and familiar.

When Exrech spoke, he did so by a mixture of exhalation, like a mammal, and the movement of his joints and wing cases that provided the hard consonants. They also provided popping and scratching noises that were-disconcerting.

He was unaware of the uneasiness he generated just by-being.

“I can speak of the west,” he said in his flat, un-human delivery. “Our enemy-our true enemy-works his will on the Delta Hives and leaves our hives alone. Too often has he called on us for war. Our contract with him is expired. I cannot say more. But the west is moving-this war to which we go is only a tithe of what is coming.”

The Faery Knight bowed. “Of all of us, it is possible that this wight and his people are the bravest, marching all the way east to our support when their own homes are at threat.”

“Our contract with the sorcerer is at an end. He used a false scent and must be punished.” Exrech seemed to shiver, and his body emitted a rustling sound like leaves.

“What will protect us here?” Tamsin asked.

“Sssmoke and misssdirection,” Tapio sang. “And twenty million caribou.”

Exrech raised his mandibles, a sign Bill Redmede had come to understand was agreement. “The river of hooves!” Exrech said. “No creature of the Wild-not even a thousand human knights-could cut a path across the river of hooves.”

“Ssso for sssix weeksss, thisss peninsssula isss sssafe,” the Faery Knight said.

That night, Thorn watched the heavens as Tapio Halij shielded his hold. It was a mighty working-almost as if he was moving his whole fortress into another sphere, the working was so deep and mighty.

It was a very odd choice, on the surface-a declaration of power that left Thorn in no doubt that the Faery Knight distrusted him and expected attack. But the more he contemplated the action, the more it appealed to his sense of his own power. Tapio was only confirming what Thorn knew-he was the mightier of the two, even if he lacked the power to destroy the old irk. So he drew into his shell like a turtle, secure that he could not easily be attacked.

“Fool,” Thorn said. “After I take Ticondaga, I will be like a god.” He tasted the moment at which he would subsume Ghause, and he shuddered as the excess of spirit passed down his animated limbs. In as much as the great sorcerer could feel pleasure, the notion of the absolute subjugation of Ghause-her extinction and his accession to her powers-gave him immense pleasure.

Inwardly, he frowned.

“When did I become so simple?” he asked the air around him.

“Be content,” Ash said at his elbow. The entity was cloaked in flesh-he appeared as a man, a very old man, in a body taut with use and muscle. His skin was jet black-not the black of Ifriquy’a or Dar as Salaam, but a colour like lamp black. He wore the simple clothes of a peasant, but all in dirty grey. He had a scythe in his hand, and an hourglass.

Thorn watched the night. “You have a new guise,” he said with distaste.

Ash snorted. “A very old guise.”

“Are you like some rich girl of Harndon, with a different dress for every suitor?” Thorn asked.

Ash seemed to think for a moment. At least, his face did not move. The silence lengthened and Thorn began to feel he was not going to be answered. This had happened frequently-it was one of the ways Thorn had arrived at the realization that he was a tool and not an ally.

Ash hissed. “It might appear that way,” he admitted.

An old teacher-back in the mists of time before Thorn, when he had been a boy and a human and a scholar-a teacher had told him never to ask a question to which he did not want to know the answer.

Where did that come from? Thorn asked himself.

But he asked anyway.

“Or is the way in which we perceive you shaped by our own-beings?” Thorn asked.

Ash laughed. It was not, for once, derisive or contemptuous. It was rich, and flavoured with humour and delight. “You are an apt pupil, sorcerer. In truth, to my eye, I am always the same. It is you-the sentients-who try to force me to the moulds of your minds.”

Thorn was not afraid of the night or the abyss. He looked into Ash’s eyes. “With people, and animals-if enough people call a dog cur, he’ll learn to bite.”

Ash inclined his head. The movement seemed genuine. “An eternity of striving, and I have one convert,” Ash said. “Well… perhaps two or three. Yes-even I am manipulated by the beliefs of those around me. As are you and every other sentient.”

Thorn looked at the stars. He pointed at them. “And those? Are they, as astrologers maintain, the pinpricks of light from other spheres-an infinity of spheres?”

Ash sighed. “Thorn, if I told you all I know, you would whip me with thongs of fire.”

Thorn nodded. “You quote scripture.”

Ash laughed-and this time it was derisive. “Everyone quotes scripture, Thorn. Or writes it to suit themselves.”

“Will we take Ticondaga?” he asked.

Ash frowned. “Yes. Your plan-which is far too complex, too devious, and too bent on your ideas of vengeance-is a delight, and it will succeed. There is no mind in all this sphere-except mine-that can comprehend what you plan.”

“You flatter me,” Thorn said.

“Of course,” Ash answered. “If you insist on treating me as a mentor, eventually I will behave like one.”

“And after?” Thorn asked.

Ash might have shrugged. The old man’s shoulders twitched. Perhaps he laughed. “We conquer this world, I break my bonds, and then we move through the portals to others, and take them, and eventually you gain enough in power to betray me, and we fight. And I destroy you utterly after we lay waste to the cosmos.”

Thorn nodded, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “And you are sure that it is you who destroys me?” he asked.

Ash laughed. “There is no sure, in all the multiverse,” he said.

Thorn shook his great stone head. “Lord, all this badinage aside-Ghause kills the Queen. I kill Ghause. The King-”

“I have seen to the King.” Ash nodded. “Ten times over.”

“Ticondaga falls-surely they will all unite against me.” Thorn was a better strategist than he had been. He saw the consequences clearly. War and strategy and the dealing of minds, one with another-he no longer disdained these as beneath him. Besides, the more time he spent on them, the more they seemed to have laws like the laws of the hermetical.

Ash nodded. His voice was easy, lulling, like a mother’s speaking to a child. “Yes-it is good to see all the futures. But that is not a realistic one. I have sowed dissension for fifty years ready for this moment. Will the lamb lie down with the lion? Will the Galles ally with the Albans they have just tried to destroy? After Ticondaga, they will fall-Middleburg, Lissen Carak, Albinkirk, Liviapolis and Harndon and Arles in Occitan. And in the old world, as well, until we hold all the portals and all the points of power.”

Thorn stood, transfixed by the note of falsity he had just heard. He blessed his face of stone and the magical enhancements on his body. He did not tremble, and he did not give away so much as a twitch of his fingers.

But he detected in that moment that Ash had a plan for the time after Ticondaga.

And it did not include Thorn.

Ash chuckled. “Why would I betray you? You are my chosen avatar in this sphere. I cannot win here without you. I’ve put a great deal of effort into you. You might say,” Ash chuckled, “that I’ve put all my eggs in one basket.”

Thorn’s intellect struggled to understand what he might mean. Or what he might want. “You are blind to some things,” he said, accusingly.

Ash turned and looked at him. Thorn had a momentary frisson of terror.

Then Ash said, “I admire your black moths. Very clever.”

Thorn sighed like a winter breeze on desiccated leaves. “One of them cleared an entire village-and left no evidence of its passage.”

“And another was killed by a squaw with a stick,” Ash noted.

Thorn nodded. “My assassins will come out of the darkness after midnight. The generation I have sent to kill the Dark Sun-they should be almost immune to normal men. They exist more in the aethereal than the so-called real.”

Ash pondered the stars. “You will waste your pets on this mortal you feel challenges you, but I tell you, he is nothing. He does not even enter into my calculations.”

Thorn paused. “Really?” he asked.

Ash shook his black head. “He is nothing-a boy puffed with vanity and pride of birth. You react to him because he has all the things you did not have-wealth and power and good looks. If I am to be your mentor I must make you understand this. I can scarcely follow him in the aethereal, he is of so little account.”

Thorn frowned. “That makes no sense. He burns in the aethereal like a sun.”

Ash flicked his scythe. “You exaggerate.”

Thorn was silent. Trying to make out what Ash might mean-or what he might have just given away.

“After Ticondaga, none will stand against you,” Ash said.

Thorn thought, So you keep saying.

Liviapolis-Morgon Mortirmir

Deep in the university, at Liviapolis, Morgon woke to find that Tancreda had, after all, stayed with him. Her brother was snoring on a chair. She had brought him the manuscript he needed, and he’d begun to read-

More immediately, Tancreda was draped across Mortirmir, who was lying on a bench with a pair of Venike-made lenses in his right hand and a little known treatise by one of the magisters of the past called Optika in the other. He carefully dropped the book and the lenses to the floor.

Her hazel eyes opened.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Could I just once be very intelligent, or elegant, or perhaps stubborn or clever?” she asked sleepily. “Must it be beautiful? Always?” She narrowed her eyes. “Who found the manuscript on lenses? Mmmm? Was that beauty?”

Mortirmir glanced at the brother, and then, greatly daring, leaned over her and put his mouth on hers. He winked in his head at the absent shade of Harmodius.

Her lips remained tightly closed until the tip of his tongue licked them lightly, and then they sprang open-a delicious parting that left him giddy.

She moaned deep in her throat like an angry cat. But she was not angry, and she writhed across him until she’d shifted her weight and put an arm behind his head.

The hand on her neck probed a little and found even more luxuriant softness-she shifted again, her lips changing from left to right across his, and her tongue-

Suddenly she sat up. “You are not dead!” she said. “The working!”

For the first time since he was granted powers, Mortirmir cursed all of hermeticism.