Ash paused in indecision, looking down over his victory. He could sense Tamsin, over on the ridge, trying to keep him off by misdirection; the seductive witch was next. And he could feel something else, beyond the ridge; something strange and powerful. And again, where his creature had just been cut down, there was another he couldn’t identify. Very powerful. Burning like a fire.
In that moment, he identified her, and he screamed with rage and frustration.
Chapter Thirteen
Orcsbane had his orders, and he did not hesitate, despite the trenches filled with enemies and the way the enemy lines crawled with monsters.
He led forty knights and a dozen surviving squires across the trench lines, half of them empty, and cut through the fringe of bogglins that formed at the edge of the second rampart. They appeared and vanished under the hooves of his destrier and they were through, galloping over the shovel-smoothed ground.
A gout of fire blew over them, but their shared shield held.
There was another, and then three forked snakes of purple lightning that scored their hermetical shield and killed a warhorse, leaving the knight to fight, die, and be eaten alone in the falling darkness, because Ser Ricar had his orders and he was not going to fail.
His horse’s hooves began to ring on stone, and he was in the rubble of the abbey’s little town, and then his steed was running up the paved road to the great gates three hundred feet above him. Arrows flew, darts were hurled, but Ash’s legions were hesitant, their master’s intent muddled, and Orcsbane’s band rode on.
A sudden wave of sorcery rose against them at the very edge of the walls—an obliterating mass of power of all colours and intents, unleashed by a horned figure close on the slope as they went past in a shower of hoof sparks.
The sortie gate opened. A single crossbowman emerged and loosed a massive arbalest bolt downslope as Orcsbane pulled savagely as his charger’s bit, pulling the horse back on its haunches.
“Go! Go!” Orcsbane roared.
The slim woman in the black cloak rode directly through the low gate without dismounting, as if into the maw of a monster.
There were daemons coming up the slope, and a cave troll. Lightning played over them, and Orcsbane parried it. Fire fell past them—mundane fire, mere flaming oil, but the burning oil splashed the huge Saurians and the cave trolls generously.
“In!” Orcsbane roared.
Men passed him: a squire, leading two horses, another knight. Then another.
He kept the shield up; he could feel something downslope preparing …
He threw his lance. He couldn’t think of anything else to do, and he needed to interrupt the caster; his lance flew, struck the antlered figure a sideways blow, and the thing turned.
It was another antlered man, and at the sight of him, Orcsbane prepared to sell himself dearly.
In the middle of the burning hell of Penrith, the Duchess Mogon stood with her household, unbeaten, under a shield that glowed emerald in the fire. Her knights were surrounded by the dead. To her left stood the bears—unbowed, dirty, and terrifying to their foes. To her right stood the royal foresters who had survived the dragon’s fire. Mogon was pleased with them; for mere men, they were brave,
But she could feel the black presence coming. She thought perhaps that she was too tired to make him pay; she didn’t even know if it was Ash in person. She only knew that it was the end; that the battle was lost. Her people had given everything for a cause that was now done. To her left, everything was gone; the lines of militia across the fields were swept away, the knights who had charged to the rescue driven back or eaten.
In front of her, Teskanotokex swung back his stone axe and killed another one. Or three.
She nodded.
“You are my brothers and sisters, as much as my nestlings,” she said. “When we fall, may we go together to the swamps of the hereafter.”
They bellowed with more spirit than she had herself. She stood straighter; wished she had her feather cloak to die in.
She leaked a little raw potentia into her people, and then took some herself, like a cake of opium. Her eyes glittered and her crest stood erect again.
Good.
She raised both arms. “Come and face me!” she roared at the darkness.
And the darkness came.
It was big—as big as she—and it had the shape of a man, but like the caricature of a man, or a terrible, humorless joke about a man; the muscles oversized, the penis huge and erect, the antlers contorted, the face savage. It was the figure of a man carved by a sculptor who hated men.
To the great Duchess of the West, it was not a figure of terror. It was more like a clown.
“Mine,” she called to her knights.
All around her in the rubble, they stepped back.
She raised her great sword-axe and felt the sharper-than-razor flints along the edge of the massive wood core.
It raised a huge axe. “I am the Son of Ash and no steel or bronze weapon will touch me!” he roared.
Mogon licked her beak in derision.
“I am Mogon Texetererch. I am Duchess of the West, and in my caves no cold can come, and my reach is long. My sister Musquogan was duchess before me, and before her my mother, back and back to a time before your master was an evil egg.” Her sword-axe carved a line of fire in the air. “My shen is of stone. Your life is mine.”
“I am not mortal!” roared the beast-man.
“Dream of hell, Son of Ash,” she said.
Then he threw ops.
She parried, tossing his ball of unformed power off into his own legions of imps with contempt.
“Is this a duel of powers?” she asked. “Or can Ash not face me blow for blow?”
Suddenly she unleashed her true power; the lash of her wave front of terror struck him, and in that moment, his spark of humanity failed him, and he was afraid. Terror lashed him, and he quailed, flinching away from her majesty.
And into his moment of failure she struck, once, and her stone axe burst open his chest, cutting down, smashing ribs and severing muscle and tendon and intestine. It was the culminating blow of all her years of training and combat. It was almost spiritually pure; she delivered it without thought, her mind blank, and he raised no defence, and he fell with a single despairing spasm, his face lost its fixed look of rage, and his spirit vanished.
She raised both arms slowly, taunting the cowering bogglins and the enemy Qwethnethogs.
“That is who I am,” she roared into the darkness.
Hawissa Swynford had survived the day in Penrith. She had helped the other foresters hold the edge of the town for hours, loosing her shafts until her back and arms ached and her quiver was empty. Then she had fought with her sword, and when that broke, with a bogglin’s spear.
When the dragon came, she was terrified, but only in a vague, distant way, because she’d experienced so much terror by then that the horror was a dull ache in her head. Luck and nothing more had left her with a blistered face and no worse. Half her regiment had died and she stabbed another bogglin and tried to find time to breathe.
Swynford was an old hand, a northerner with ten years of service. When Hand and Redmede burned, she found herself the senior officer of the survivors; or at least, no one else seemed inclined to give an order.
She might have stood and died in apathy, but for seeing the Duchess Mogon drop the “Son of Ash” like a butcher might kill a pig. The sight filled her with something: spirit, vitality, and maybe hope.
“Arrows,” she spat at Collingford, one of the best of the old foresters she had left. “We need a thousand shafts.”
“If wishes were buttercakes,” he said tiredly.
“Go try,” she ordered. “Get back to the ridge. Find … the Green Earl. Or the Faery Lady. Someone high up who knows where the baggage is. Tell them we ain’t dead. We’re fightin’. We need shafts. Do it.”
He saluted her. Which seemed funny enough that they both laughed.
In the air w
est of the battle, Ash shuddered as if from a great blow. If he had had a god to curse, he would have. The risk of creating these pawns was that their deaths were a blow. Two in one day was a terrible loss. He staggered, and lost altitude.
But in the aethereal the true battle was raging, and there Ash saw and thought that he understood. There, the two legions of the will faced the two choirs from within and without, even as his creature Orley smashed gouts of power into the hermetical fabric of the shields that sustained the abbey against his attacks in the real. It was like a child throwing water at a castle, but the castle was no longer built of rock, but of ice, and the water was slowly melting the walls. Orley was drawing freely on his master’s power, reveling in the impression that it was he, and not Ash himself, who was the greatest warlock in the world.
The castle shuddered again, and again.
The will paused.
For a moment, there was a sort of silence, and the Benedictus of the choir rose slowly; the soprano voices began to rise above the strong alto; the altos began to add their Glorias to the hymn of praise …
The will struck. It struck with a single note, a note of discord that roared with the unison of a single will, and it cut through the aethereal empathy of both choirs, and a dozen women fell dead, their blood boiling in their veins, or frozen solid.
The choirs faltered.
But the older sisters did not falter, and voices carried on, against the slighting note.
Outside, a massive fountain of raw ops plastered itself against the shields by the north tower, and Miriam had to divert some of her choir’s reserve to support the wards …
She could no longer keep all the structures in her head …
It was too complex, too awful, and she had held them together as long as she could, losing a little here, a little there, and watching her own terrified dissimulation from a distance; a memory lost, a hope destroyed, as the will took her one tower of intellect at a time.
In the end, all she could do was pray.
Miriam slumped, blood pouring from her nose and mouth, and for a moment the choir leaders held the weight of the failing structures. And then something, something of an enormity that dwarfed even Ash, lifted a single note.
Far away, an unimaginable distance away, the other half of the will paused, and knew fear.
And in that moment a knight ran down the aisle of the choir, his sword drawn, and behind him, a figure in a long black cloak that flew behind her as she ran, all out, lungs bursting for air, for Miriam’s podium.
All the universe balanced on the edge of a single step, and the woman reached out and scooped Miriam’s wand from her lifeless hand. Her hood fell away and Desiderata stood in Miriam’s place, and the wall of her mind was like a mirror of gold.
“Magnificat,” she said.
And in that moment, the will failed. The half of the will close by seemed to scream, the single note of attack turned to disharmony of despair in a moment, and the choirs of the abbey, beaten a moment before, began to rally as Desiderata’s mind and voice protected them.
Ash saw the abbey’s shields flicker, the wards down, and he unleashed the lightning sword of his thought, not through Orley, but direct from one stretching talon, and the whole north tower blew off its foundations and fell in ruin across the slope of the ridge, crushing a thousand creatures, men and bogglins, trolls and daemons and irks. The chapel shuddered, and the stained glass of the great rose window shattered, and glass fell across the whole floor.
But the woman in the abbess’s chair was unbowed. Her clear voice rose, and Ash could not stop it. The will slid off her mind like a child attempting to climb a wall of glass, and the dragon’s assault did not move her. And the choir began to join her, a voice at a time; some trembling, some strong.
Ash was raining fire on the abbey, and the walls were falling, turned to rubble, but the chapel stood, and Desiderata stood, and then the gate, which had slid open the width of despair, slammed home again with the strength of hope, and the wards, empowered, sprang back.
Far off in the valley of the Cohocton, beyond the Lily Burn, Ash’s great assault had stopped. On a field littered with dead knights and broken crossbows, the men of Thrake stood their ground, and then, in the darkness, their foes backlit by the wreck of Penrith, they locked their shields and began to press forward, step by step, hampered by the dead—a line of dead bogglins like the storm wrack left by a typhoon—step by step, and so great was the press of their enemies that even the hymn to the Virgin sung by five thousand Moreans could not overcome the weight of it, and they, too, stalled.
Then the city regiments charged, the Tagmata who had trained so unwillingly with the sell-sword who was now emperor, and then, into the balance, 1Exrech led the “free” bogglins, who had held the lower slopes of the ridge all day and now pressed home a slight advantage, and somewhere in the flame-lit hell of Penrith, the “Son of Ash” died, humiliated by the duchess, and the enemy line began to fail.
It was no victory. The enemy, disciplined or undisciplined, simply flinched back in the darkness, and no man, no irk, no bogglin, sought to follow them beyond the firelight of the burning town. But Mogon was not dead; her circle of knights was rescued, against all hope, and as the snow began to fall, Alcaeus came up from the victorious right and Gavin approached from the left. There was Tamsin, her emerald gown tinged with soot; she had bags under her eyes and lines on her face like an old woman, and the small choir that followed her all looked aged beyond their years.
With her was the Patriarch of Liviapolis. Alcaeus fell to his knees in the snow, and Gavin thought it politic to join him.
He shook his head. “No, none of that,” he said. “I have come to do what I can, against the direct command of centuries of tradition.”
“Since noon, he has kept us in the battle,” Tamsin said. “Never have I felt so much love for any Christian.” She smiled, and her fangs showed.
“Nor I for any faery,” the Patriarch said.
Ser Gavin waved for drink, and Grazias, who had survived the day, and who bid fair to be the best squire Gavin had ever had, produced a flask of Candian wine and began to hand it around, so that in ten sips of liquor, the Queen of Faery, the Earl of the North Wall, the Patriarch of Liviapolis, and the Duchess Mogon drank with Alcaeus and 1Exrech and Lord Gregario and Ser Shawn and Donald Dhu.
The last swig Ser Gavin handed to his squire.
“Here,” he said. “Finish this.”
Grazias looked around the firelit circle, and took the bottle. He bowed, and drained it.
“Kneel,” Gavin said. He knighted the young man in one blow to the shoulder, and turned to face them.
“We haven’t won,” he said. “In fact, we probably can’t do that again. I’m still unclear why Ash so spectacularly failed to capitalize on his advantages.”
“We haven’t lost yet,” Alcaeus said. “And Ser Ranald is beginning to unload at Southford.”
Ser Shawn nodded. “Albinkirk proper is under attack,” he said.
“Where the hell is the emperor?” Gregario asked. “He said he’d be here two days ago.”
Tamsin’s eyelashes fluttered.
“I wish I’d seen you drop the daemon,” Shawn was saying to the duchess.
“I’ll dance it for you, man,” she said.
Over fifteen miles away, there was a titanic explosion. The earth rumbled, and there was a spray of light into the air, so that for a moment, every man and woman and Qwethnethog cast a dark shadow on the new-fallen snow.
Tamsin stood up straight. “Desiderata is in Lissen Carak,” she said. “She is facing Ash.” She narrowed her eyes. And then closed them. “The will is failing.”
The distant lightning played on the abbey like a storm in the mountains. They watched it, mere spectators.
“So,” Gregario said. “Tomorrow?”
Ser Gavin shrugged. “Today worked because we had a ton of luck and a very simple plan,” he said. “And we lost ten battles’ worth of people. Can w
e even fight again tomorrow?”
Alcaeus shrugged. “My people only fought in the last hour, and they were victorious,” he said. “Even now, a man is saying he had a vision of the Virgin.”
“My people are mostly dead,” Mogon said. “I pray that the Sossag have been loyal, and my eggs and nests are safe, or we are done as a people.”
Gregario frowned. “My knights are exhausted. I’ve lost a third of my horses.”
1Exrech nodded. His voiceless voice clicked. “Wine excellent. Fight tomorrow.” His mandibles opened halfway, a fairly horrible sight that allowed those standing near him to see straight down the hairs of his outer throat to his first stomach.
The wight belched. He clacked his mandibles. “Every hour, the scent of truth brings me recruits. Tomorrow, I will have twice what I had today. Ash is not strong. We, together, are strong.”
Gavin looked around at all of them. “That is it exactly, damn it.” He laughed. “The one thing we seem to be good at is staying together.”
“Say rather, the one thing at which we have excelled is distracting Ash,” Tamsin said. “Nothing I could have planned, no wile or deception, could have been as effective as our chaotic probes.” She shrugged. “I have almost nothing left. But if that was our last day …” She managed a smile.
“Where is Tapio?” Gavin asked.
“Close,” she said with a smile. “Close enough that I hope to see him, ere the end.”
“The end?” Gavin asked. “I don’t think so.”
They all looked at him.
Gavin shrugged. “You don’t know my brother,” he said. “If he says he’s coming, he’s coming. If he has to march through hell to reach us, he will. If he has to war down Satan, he will.”
Gregario laughed. “Damn, I love your faith. I just wish he’d get on with it.” He looked around. “Anyone have more wine?”
And Tamsin nodded. “I have no faith, man, except in my Tapio. If Gabriel does not come now, we can only make a song.”