Master Pye took his hands from his ears, and blinked many times against the scene burned onto his retinas.
Then he ran lightly, for such an old man, down the steps carved by the falls.
“Would be a funny time to slip an’ fall,” he said aloud. He went all the way to the base of the falls, where the rich green grass was now burned to ash, and rocks themselves were scorched.
He poked his head in through the edge of the falls.
“He’s gone,” Master Pye called.
Ser Ranald pushed through the falls and ran for the steps.
Harmodius surfaced in the real long enough to throw a powerful attack, and then left.
Ash, lost to rage, turned and followed him. Again.
North of Lissen Carak, the white bear’s scouts froze, far out across an autumn marsh, and the white bear’s paws shot up, and every man, every irk, and every warden froze, or went to ground.
“My paws, my claws, they, grrr, see something.” He was as still as a furry statue; Tapio was already down behind a clump of alder, his great white stag flat in the marsh grass. Bill Redmede nodded. He pointed with his left hand; drawing the white bear’s attention to a line of alder clumps and the mouth of the stream.
Redmede could not read a bear’s expression, but he knew careful consideration when he saw it.
“We’re quiet,” he said.
“Humans are all, grak, loud,” Blizzard said. One great shoulder rolled up in a shrug. “Go.”
Redmede waved back at Stern Rachel and Long Peter, and they put arrows to bowstrings and began to slip into the high grass of the marsh, their dirty white cotes almost invisible against the pale gold of the dead grass.
They led the way, moving like wraiths, and then there were more men and women crossing the marsh, and then Redmede went himself, slipping back along the column to gain the best ground, and then moving quickly, his head low.
They moved fast, even when being silent—out across the marsh, over the stream at a beaver dam without a single splash, and then into the Alder brake on the other side and up the ridge. Now with the marsh between them and the irks and bears, they went east into the sun. Redmede spread his arms, palms down; his Jacks began to move into a skirmish line, pairs sticking together closely, moving from tree to tree as they entered the open highlands with the bigger beeches. Autumn had killed the hobblebush; hardly a stick cracked as they went, soft-footed, up the ridge.
Then Grey Cat stood, suddenly, erect. The Outwaller gave a call. Redmede raised his horn; he didn’t know what the Cat was doing, but the Outwaller was half mad and all daredevil, and …
The Outwaller call was answered, or echoed. Eeeeeeaaaaauuuuuuu.
Suddenly the woods to Redmede’s left exploded in Outwaller calls, and there were painted figures rising from the leaves, and stepping out from behind trees, and close in to Redmede a man in red and black paint rose out of a hollow tree.
But Redmede’s initial impression that they were all Outwallers was mistaken; many were, but there were dozens, hundreds of them; he saw the white of his own cotes and the dreaded green of royal foresters and Outwaller paint.
But the man in the red and black paint had dark skin, and a blue stone dagger slung at his hip, and Bill Redmede knew him. He knew them all; he certainly knew old Wart, who was already slapping Stern Rachel’s back.
He was surprised at how much young Aneas looked like his brothers. Though the man had deep lines on his face, as if his youth had been erased.
Bill Redmede wasn’t much for bowing, or authority, but he managed to incline his head in a polite manner.
Aneas Muriens returned the gesture.
Nita Qwan was enjoying the rare embrace of the Faery Knight. Tapio rarely displayed emotion to the children of men, but today, at the edge of battle, a century of rangers and a handful of Outwallers seemed like a gift from his gods of fortune.
Blizzard looked as if he might have to allow himself to be provoked by the accession of so many strangers in his innermost holding, but Lily, who had followed the rangers through a hundred leagues of forest, would not hear of it.
“There is no, rrr, owning!” she insisted. “It is this, mmmm, owning, that makes men so greedy. Let us not bear, grrrrk, its taint!”
Blizzard watched them crossing his marsh; now almost a thousand nonbears. It had just started to snow, a light dusting of snow falling thickly enough to obscure the head of the column.
He shook his great white head. “They will come here, rerak! With their ploughs and their swords. I have heard, rrrgrrr. They say they will beat swords into, grrrrr, ploughshares. I say, arrrr, to a bear, rrrr, one form of conquest for another!”
Lily shrugged. “They are dangerous, Blizzard. Their smell makes me, grrrrr, deep in my throat. They killed my mother.” She touched her snout to his. “They are, geerrrak, dangerous allies. But if we, mmmm, hide in our, rrrr, woods and try to, rrrr, fight the world, we will be warming, arrrr, floors across the world, our, grrrr! hides for rugs.”
“They killed your, grrrr, mother, young one? And you, arrrrr, you walk the woods with them?” The older bear nuzzled her.
She grunted, turning away from his advances. “I, grrrr, end the war! Not revenge, and not, mmm, a mating with you, old bear.” She laughed a bear laugh at his surprise, and she put a paw on him. “Listen. Grrr! Some men killed my mother. Grrr! Other men let me go. The world is not simple. Let us help these human love us. Arrrrgrrr?”
Blizzard swiped a paw at her. “So much, grrr, talk, from one so, grrr, young,” he said. And when she loped away, he said, “And, rrrr, beautiful,” and ran a hirsute thumb over the razor-sharp blade of his great axe.
The Army of the Alliance cut west, into the setting sun and the darkening sky. Now, almost three full weeks since the battle of N’gara, the whole sky seemed to mourn the fall of the Irkish citadel and the ruin of their hopes. The setting sun made the western sky into a blazing quilt of reds and oranges and long trails of brilliant whites, like dangling threads, and under all a pall of dark orange like a looming storm. It would, under ordinary conditions, have been a terrifying sky.
Most of the men and women of the alliance were used to it.
To the north of the road, in the closed fields bordered by hedges of the Albinkirk out-towns, companies of bills and bows, or heavily shielded crossbowmen guarded by armoured men with heavy spears, stood their ground against a sudden flood of bogglins and worse. A whole company of Jarsay militia were caught moving by a sudden charge of imps and annihilated in a spray of blood and flesh, and the greyhound-sized monsters fed on the corpses and then on each other in a frenzy of bone and blood as hideous as anything a storyteller could imagine of some distant hell. But in most of the fields, the stone walls and low hedges helped the militia make their stands, and where they failed, a sudden charge by armoured knights could stem the tide or at least buy the militia time to retire.
Most of the fighting to the north was a development of commitments from Lord Gareth’s second line; he was cautious, and fed only as many of his infantry into the fields as were absolutely needed to cover the flank of the advance on the road to Lissen Carak.
When the sun had begun to go down the sky in the west, there were three mighty pulses of light in the west. Just after, Gavin rode back from the edge of the Lillywindle Woods and looked out over the battlefield to the north.
“We’re overextended,” Montjoy said.
As they watched a horde of enemies roll down the distant Kanata Ridge and across the north road, they were joined by Ser Alcaeus. He dismounted and changed to a big stallion, a warhorse, even as he greeted them.
With him were a hundred knights of Liviapolis. Behind him, on the Morea road, could be seen a dense column of men and baggage wagons. Ser Christos was in among the phalanx of the men of Thrake, dismounted, greeting men he knew, men who’d survived the last three weeks in the west, and more.
“We’re too overextended,” Montjoy said again.
“Give us another hour,
” Ser Gavin said. “The woods are a nightmare.”
Montjoy slammed his visor up. It kept falling over his face; the catch had broken in the fighting. “My lord earl; I am struggling to hold Woodhull. Livingston Hall is virtually under siege. The tide is rising, my lord.”
Alcaeus looked blank. “Woodhull?” he asked. “Living-stone?”
Gavin waved a hand. “Livingston Hall is just north of here; look, there, through the trees at the base of the hill. A castle.”
Montjoy shook his head. “A fortified hall at best.”
“It can hold off an army,” Gavin said. “Woodhull; see the steeple of the church? North. Farther.” He pointed beyond the creek at the foot of the ridge, almost a mile distant. The red light glinted on men and steel.
Gavin then waved his hand at the Lissen Carak road, running not-quite-straight from the southern edge to vanish in the woods to the west. Halfway from the Albin Ridge to the woods’ edge, there was a fine stone church and a small walled town. “Penrith,” he said. “Right now, it’s being held by royal foresters and some Moreans and all our wardens and bears, under the duchess. She’s keeping the road open for us.” He looked at the imperial troops coming up behind them, and at the distant edge of the woods to the west, where his knights had vanished. “We don’t need to hold all the ground,” he said. “Hold the towns, and we’ll retake the ground between at will. So far, there’s nothing out there that can stop a charging knight.”
“So far,” Gareth Montjoy muttered.
Harmodius was almost done; almost out of both ops and options. He’d been clever; he’d been magnificent; he’d been subtle.
Now he was just tired. It was time for his last trick.
When Ash eventuated, very close, Harmodius held his shields and took the whole brunt of the dragon’s wrath, the light dusting of snow vaporized, the hills beneath him melting to slag.
He took the last of his enemy’s effort and followed it back, as quick as an angler taking a trout on a wild stream. Except that instead of reeling in his great fish, he was reeled in; his consciousness snapped back along the line of his enemy’s casting. It was Thorn’s working; the irony was not lost on his former pupil.
And like that, he was aboard. That was how Harmodius thought of it, in the fastness of his own essence; he was a lone pirate, boarding a vast ship.
The halls of the dark temple that was the mind of Ash went on for infinity, and the walls were written in an endless script, an alien hand that confused and frustrated thought even from a glance.
It was not like taking the mind of Askepiles, with its wheels and levers. Whatever he had expected, it was not this: the endless corridors of madness. He had expected to confront his great enemy for one last fight; instead, he was alone with uncountable internalized truths and overwritten falsehoods and a vista of stony darkness and abandonment.
Harmodius drew a Fell Sword from within himself. His right hand burst into life; light shone, where only darkness had ruled for aeons.
Harmodius took the sword and slashed it along the tiny lines of script that seemed to ebb and flow in three or more dimensions on the wall. The spot was not carefully chosen; Harmodius was aware that at any moment, out in the real, his borrowed body might be killed; if not by some hammer-like blow of ops, then by superheated steam or molten rock.
His sword went through the wall like a sharp knife slices the belly of a fish; slowly at first; then deeper, then gliding easily, almost without friction.
Once he had it deep, he began to walk along the apparently infinite corridor, dragging the Fell Sword through the entrails of Ash’s thought.
He couldn’t help himself. He began to laugh.
He allowed some of Thorn to surface, to see what they were doing, and Thorn laughed, too.
And then they began to vandalize Ash’s subconscious.
Ash had lost his enemy; and he turned away in the air above the dark hills, his great eyes searching the path of steaming ruin left by his breath, but he could see no sign. His adversary might have translated again; or might be dead.
Ash was confused, because there at the end, his adversary’s casting had more and more resembled that of his acolyte, Thorn, whose passing Ash regretted the way an old woman might regret a lost love, with unrealistic half-memories of splendour.
But even while the part of him devoted to immediate combat turned and searched, his consciousness had other demands on it, and he passed one more time along the line of hills, breathing unquenchable fire into the dark and snowy woods and rising on a wave of heat to look north, to the walls of Albinkirk.
His great armies were in disarray, but his plans were maturing. The armies of men were contesting the areas around the gate. His slaves needed orders. The will was utterly distracted, its full attention on forcing the gate.
Best of all, Orley and his little army were entering the field from the north; inconsequential in their numbers, but Ash had prepared five commanders for this very moment, and he reached out through the aethereal and filled them with purpose, examining, analyzing, passing information and command to each.
Every one had a chosen bodyguard of antlered knights. Each of them could run all day and all night, at the speed of a horse.
Ash sent one south, to his army of bogglins on the south side of the river. He sent another south and east, to lead the attack on Penrith, the obvious key to the army of men. A third he sent to crack the walls of Albinkirk. Orley himself he sent to attack Lissen Carak in the real; a necessary component to Ash’s end game. The last of them, neither the least nor the greatest, Ash sent to the head of his legion of black trolls; the stone trolls of the highest mountains. To go to them, and stand silent.
Because Ash had learned that reserves were the key to battle. And although he couldn’t foresee a need for such a mighty reserve today, he knew that victory today only meant that there would be other days and other foes among the million spheres.
But his plan was working; his slaves were holding together, and he had what he needed to destroy the surprisingly potent alliance and then clear the Odine off the gate. His “allies.” The moment the will showed weakness, he meant to finish it. He didn’t need them to win; he just needed them gone.
He missed Thorn; the closest thing to a confident he’d ever had. He wanted to gloat. There was no one with whom to gloat. Still, as the dark air rushed under his wings, he burned with maleficent glory.
“I will make war on heaven,” Ash told the destruction beneath his wings. “I will change everything.”
The bells atop the abbey at Lissen Carak were just ringing for four o’clock when Ser Gavin entered the woods that grew, deep and dark, on either bank of the Lily Burn. There were corpses in the road, and he paused, looking down at a shaman of the adversariae, dead with a black lance through her, surrounded by her bodyguard.
Ser Gavin paused, flipped up his visor, and drank from his canteen.
Grazias, his squire, took the canteen and drank some himself. Other men-at-arms, most of them northerners from the Albinkirk garrison, drank in turn. They were watching the woods. Nothing happened, but they all knew that the alliance battle lines were porous and fluid and they could meet enemies at any moment.
“Warhorses,” Gavin said. He slipped down from his favourite riding horse and mounted Bess, his great roan. She grunted.
He liked Bess, but he wasn’t sure she’d survive the hour. She’d been waiting for him in Albinkirk, and she had a blanket of double maille and a magnificent caparison with his arms, green and gold, emblazoned, so that she was brighter than his banner, which Grazias had.
He smiled. He’d always enjoyed being a popinjay bragging with the brilliance of his accoutrements, just like his brother. And his father.
Grazias offered him a pair of gauntleted hands to get up on Bess, but he leapt—his boyhood trick—caught the war saddle’s pommel between his hands, and scissored his legs over the high back and into the depths of the saddle.
Bess grunted, and then let out a far
t. Her breath steamed in the cold air.
Gavin rode back along the little column; about two hundred knights and armoured squires. He made a joke, slapped a back, and exchanged a hand clasp.
“Gentlemen!” he said. “This is why we are knights. So that on a cold autumn day, when all is dark, someone does the fighting. Today is the day. We can win this. Fear no evil. Fear no magistery. Kill whatever passes beneath the hooves of your horse, and we will, God willing, have the victory.”
Men cheered.
They didn’t know him. He’d lost all his own knights and men-at-arms in the fighting in the west; when he used his own household as the reserve, time after time.
They didn’t need to know that. Because they were about to be the fire brigade again. Tamsin said something was wrong, on the Lily Burn.
“Let’s go,” Ser Gavin called, and the column, now mounted on warhorses, went forward, their harness jingling. A little snow began to fall and the light was fading, developing a silvery shimmer.
They rode forward a half a mile without meeting any opposition, and then they hit a mob of bogglins, right on the road, and Gavin snatched his war hammer off his pommel and beat a couple of them to death, cracking their skulls, while Bess made a liquid ruin of another dozen under her hooves.
They had been feeding on a Knight of the Order and his horse, and there was another, and then another.
“Look sharp!” Gavin called.
His column trotted along.
He began to see movement in the woods to his right, and then to his left.
He ordered his rear to move up, and two dozen knights led by Ser Galahad d’Acon moved out into the woods and there was fighting immediately, but the big horses moved easily through the dead foliage and open trees, and bogglins died.
Even with his visor closed, Gavin could hear the fighting. It was all along the line of the stream; he knew these woods and he knew the sounds. And the presence of bogglins in the woods meant that the enemy was leaking around both ends of the alliance line. He had to guess; it was getting dark; this was their only chance.