“Boys and girls are tired,” he said. “And what do you think o’ that?” he asked, pointing at a dust cloud at the gate.
“I’m putting the company into reserve,” Gabriel said. He waved to one of the imperial messengers and snapped orders.
Michael rode along the left of the army, watching the Etruscans form from their columns and then link their lines, the whole as they began a great turning action toward the now visible gate pylons, a little more than a mile away. Sauce gave orders as effortlessly as Gabriel.
“You are having too much fun,” Michael said.
“Yep,” she answered. “I thought I wanted to be a knight. Turns out I wanted to be a great captain.
He had nothing to add, so he watched.
A messenger cantered up. “Lord Michael?” she asked. “The emperor asks for the casa to take the center of the line. And for you to attend him.”
Michael looked left, along the line; then he turned and rode toward the center. The whole of the imperial army was moving forward, the wings closing as they had practiced, the center pressing ahead slowly. Michael rode to Bad Tom.
“Gabriel wants us in the center,” Michael said.
“Aye,” Tom said. “Already heard. Watch this.”
Even as Michael watched, the casa began to mount the horses brought forward by pages and servants, and suddenly they were four lines of mounted men and women, their armour glittering in the brilliant sun.
Behind them the Mamluks came forward, closer and closer.
The casa began to file off from the left of sections. As they filed off, mounted, they passed to the left of sixty-man sections of Mamluks, who passed through them, moving forward, so that in the twinkling of an eye, the casa was in the second line.
Payam saluted with his long, curved sword. “Odine,” he said. “I can smell them.”
“This is it,” Michael said.
Tom nodded, as did Payam.
The center halted.
The wings continued to move in, overcoming knots of resistance. The Beronese chivalry charged, annihilated a mob of not-bogglins, and rallied.
Tom Lachlan appeared in the command circle.
Mortirmir was on horseback, his feet out of his stirrups, his hands at his sides. He looked terrible, but the ops rolled off him in waves.
And then, very suddenly, his eyes opened, and he looked directly at Gabriel.
“There it is,” he said. “The will.”
Far off, almost at the edge of the gate, something was rising.
A mile is a long way. Across a battlefield, few things register at the range of an imperial mile; people are like a stain of colour, blocks of men big enough to take kingdoms are smaller than fleas. A fleet of ships can vanish in the haze, a mile away. A dragon looks like a bird, a mile away.
Something like a living mountain began to shamble erect. A mile away, it was huge.
His voice matter of fact, Mortirmir said, “That is it.”
“It’s in the gate,” Gabriel said.
“I think we’ve failed to put the facts together correctly,” Mortirmir said. “I’m willing to wager that it is stuck in the gate. Where the dragons trapped it, a thousand years ago.”
Gabriel was watching it in horrified fascination. “But …” He paused. “No. I see it. Its head is in Mistress Helewise’s back garden and this is the arse end.”
Michael smiled. So did Tom Lachlan, and Zac, and a dozen other men and women around the emperor.
“It’s trying to take control of the gate,” Mortirmir said.
Gabriel smiled. “And it hasn’t yet!”
“QED,” said Mortirmir. “Lissen Carak is still fighting.”
Gabriel’s bay turned in a circle as he looked around at his officers.
“Damn it,” he said with as smile. “We can win this, my friends.”
Michael glanced at Tom.
“Ye sound as if ye didn’ae believe it, your own sel’?” Tom asked. He laughed.
The horrendous compendium of worms writhed a mile away.
“Mortirmir?” Gabriel asked.
“My rede would be to press it hard in the real, as we did the Umroth. When it responds, I’ll …” Morgon shrugged. “I’ll hope to do better than last time.”
“Same massive wave of coercion?” Gabriel said.
Mortirmir shook his head. “The will is to the rebel as ten is to one,” he said. “But the will has never been a man, nor understands hermetical science.”
Gabriel nodded. “Form the choir. Get me Edmund Chevins.”
An hour later, and the army was halted in a rough semicircle facing the writhing titan at a range of roughly a thousand paces.
“It does appear pinned in place,” Mortirmir said. They had survived a probe of coercion; the casa, having experienced the mass despair before, stood their ground, gritted their teeth, and tried not to think.
Gabriel did the same as he witnessed, again, his abject failure on every front.
The gonnes rolled forward.
“Can you hit it?” Gabriel asked Edmund Chevins.
He bowed. “My lord, I expect we’ll hit it with every shot. It is … very … large.”
“Then what happens?” Ser Michael asked. He was dismounted. Every one of the emperor’s comitatus was dismounted with their lances behind them, and the fractal forest of white faery leaves was already before them, hiding the worst horrors of their enemy.
“Then we teach it a basic law of war,” Gabriel said.
Michael turned. “God, I love it when you claim there are laws. What law of war?”
“You can’t hold ground with magic,” the emperor said. “You can kill things, but you can’t take ground, or hold it. See that tower of worms? That’s not a monster. That’s an absence of effective infantry.”
Michael looked at the thing. It had no great fangs, no glowing eyes, no face of any kind. No thousands of legs, no body hairs.
Merely billions of worms writhing together.
“Jesus, I hope you’re right,” Michael said.
“I hate it when you call me Jesus,” Gabriel said with his old, blasphemous smile. “Gonner?”
Edmund bowed.
Gabriel took his ghiavarina in hand and walked to the very center of the casa, and shoved into the front, with Anne against his back and Cully ready to loose, down the open file. He had ten monster killers in the ground beside him. Every casa archer did.
Edmund walked to the right, to his gonnes. He and Duke slapped hands, and then Edmund crouched over his trail, had a peek, and muttered, “Here goes nothing.”
His porte-fire went down, and he slipped sideways, out of the way of the recoiling wheel.
Five hundred and twenty-one paces away, the first iron ball smashed into the Odine. It passed all the way through the thing, crushing individual worms, and exploded out the far side in a gout of semireal worm paste.
The second gonne fired; Duke’s body nimbly avoided the wheel as it passed him, and Edmund’s loader was already putting a wet sheepskin sponge down the smoking tube. Giron le Courtois, a Galle, was just putting his porte-fire down.
The third gonne slammed out.
Sulphur powder smoke drifted over Gabriel’s position.
The Odine raised a massive shield in the real.
“Here we go,” said Mortirmir.
“Gonne one,” Edmund said.
Bam.
In the aethereal, a short, vicious war was played out in which the coercion tried to control Edmund; Mortirmir tried to open a hole in the shield, and both failed.
“Gonne two,” Duke called. Edmund was retching; he felt defiled.
Bam.
The wave of coercion played about the casa; Tom Lachlan had doubts, and Cully relived something he’d done, once, to Sauce. Michael heard his captain remind him of his many shortcomings. Oak Pew drank herself to death. Urk of Mogon missed with every arrow and Mogon stripped him of her scent.
The iron ball ripped through a perfectly timed hole in the worms’
casting and a gout of superheated white mush erupted on the thing’s far side.
It went for Mortirmir in the aethereal, and the whole choir covered him, but he choked in his own inadequacy, and fire raged along the edge of the fractal shield and it collapsed, leaving another, golden shield in its place.
“Tom,” Gabriel said. “We are going to have to do this on foot. The old-fashioned way.”
“Now y’er fewkin’ tellin’ me a story I want to hear,” Tom said. “Prepare to advance!”
The new trumpeter played, and a dozen horns took up the sound.
The casa began to walk forward.
Fifty paces to the rear of the casa, Ser Milus squinted and then shrugged.
Sauce appeared at his shoulder. “You goin’ forward?” she asked.
The casa’s shields crackled and a huge hole appeared. Hand gonners died. Horses shied in the Vardariotes. The Nordikaans were down to only a few, under Thorval Armring, now Spatharios, and he went forward as if he had two hundred axe-brothers with him and not sixty.
“No orders,” Milus said with a shrug.
“I’m ordering it,” Sauce said. “Forward.”
The gonnes fired again; bam bam bam.
The casa was already two hundred paces away when the company rumbled forward.
“This is gonna suck,” Tippit muttered. He looked up at the vast puissance of the worm.
“Always does,” Smoke agreed.
Mortirmir was deep in his palace. He was waiting for the waves of emanation off the enemy, and then working to cancel them, not with blunt defences like shields, but at their roots.
He was learning the hermetical language of the Odine. It was very like the language of the rebel, and yet different. Rigorous. Pure. Undiluted.
A little naive.
He could feel it planning, preparing, building power.
He tried sabotaging a thought, and failed; it ignored him.
He lost the initiative and spent a great deal of his choir’s ops on defence. He wasn’t altogether successful and lost almost a hundred people, and the will pounced. It knew the code by which mere humans lived, and it assaulted Mortirmir with a wave of revulsion and self-loathing based on his failure, his love of his fellow men, his betrayal of their hopes.
The Odine was as mistaken as the man had been. Mortirmir was not very interested in people. He protected them because by doing so he could win, but he could sustain losses and still win, and the coercive attack washed over him. And in it he found information. He changed his own message; he fine-tuned the choir’s shields and exchanged, at the speed of thought, some ideas with his wife and with Magister Petrarcha.
The gonnes fired in the real. They were working; the will feared them. Even though their immediate effects were infinitesimal, Gabriel had correctly assessed that the will must view the world in very long aeons. The will could not afford a siege of its puissance by gonnes.
The will shielded itself. But the kinetic force of the gonnes was huge, and required a massive manipulation of potentia and thus a huge display of information in the aethereal, and Mortirmir watched, manipulated, and unleashed.
He failed, and the balls were stopped on the magnificent shield that towered over the thing.
It struck back.
In the real, the will’s counterstrike fell like a sheet of lightning two hundred paces long, and it burned through the casa’s shields in a dozen places. Comnena fell at the head of the Scholae, burned down one side of his body and saved only by one of Mortirmir’s finest amulets, and behind him, a hundred gentlemen of Liviapolis were burned to death in an instant.
Count Zac died as the air in his lungs ignited. Forty Vardariotes died with him, and the white lightning played over into the hand gonners, killing a dozen Venikans and an Ifriquy’an.
The casa went forward into the fire.
The company followed. Out on the flanks, men and women began to edge forward because courage is infectious and because there were no orders not to. Sauce was now at the head of the company; Conte Simone was not a man to wait while others did the fighting, and the duchess, on the far flank, walking easily at the head of her scarecrows, thirsted for vengeance against this very monster, the personifier of her fears, the epicenter of her nightmares.
The scarecrows went forward.
But in the center, the casa covered ground; they were less than five hundred paces from the great worm of worms now, and they began to pick up speed because they were afraid, and they all, collectively, wanted to get it over with.
The gonnes fired again.
The will responded, concentrating its efforts directly at the gonnes.
But this was the attack that the choir had anticipated, and now it struck shield after shield, knocking one down only to meet another. The gonnes had been a trap; Mortirmir had expected the will to attack them first.
Now Mortirmir had the initiative, and not a single gonner was killed.
Mortirmir recast shields, along with a dazzling array of attacks: balls of spectacular fire, bolts of lightning in various colours, a driven wind of colours from beyond the human spectrum of perception, through the rainbow and beyond again.
The will stopped them.
In the real, the world beyond the shields was a rolling cacophony of noise and light.
Anything you could do to distract it would be appreciated, Mortirmir said inside Gabriel’s palace.
People were down. There were gaps in the casa; the Scholae had stopped advancing altogether. The Vardariotes were unable to continue forward and began, despite Kriax’s entreaties, to run. Edmund’s hand gonners were wavering, unable to see beyond the ends of their weapons.
But …
Even as Gabriel prepared himself in his palace, the Saint Catherine came forward, the company dividing along the middle to pass on either side of the casa. They were less than a hundred paces from the maelstrom of chaos.
Gabriel, despite his fears, prepared to cast. He went into his palace and saluted Prudentia.
“You are very close now,” she said quietly.
“My friends are dying,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He pointed to three simple sigils.
“Allow me,” she said. “You really should not power anything just now.”
Gabriel stepped back out of the line in the real and augmented his voice.
Archers! he called.
Knights! Forward!
Then he pushed past Woodstock and went forward into the storm. He could not see that the Etruscans and the scarecrows were also pushing forward. He couldn’t see that Cully was loosing heavy arrows behind him, aiming high at a conglomerate of terror that towered over them. He couldn’t see Tom Lachlan or Michael or Sauce or Francis Atcourt or any of the rest of the men and women he’d led for years.
But he knew they were there.
And together, they went forward.
The shield of the Odine was like a wall of soft clay—clinging, cloying, sickening, an assault on every sense. But soft.
The ghiavarina cut it like butter, and Gabriel was momentarily reminded of fighting his mother’s curse of black felt, except that every stroke of the weapon took his deeper and opened a hole.
And then he could see the mountain of worms on the other side, a thousand thousand ravening mouths. He set himself and cut, even as the first worms began to turn on him. Two paces to his right, Bad Tom’s sword burst through in a spray of fire and even in the hell of the Odine’s maw, Gabriel heard, “Lachlan for Aa!”
Then he was cutting. It was like exercise; like cutting at air, except that the worms themselves had the same consistency as the shield, and they fled him and Lachlan, the wall of mouths and glistening grey bodies writhing away.
Lachlan, as casually as if he were fighting in a tournament, spared two blows to widen the rift in the shield.
Gabriel cut to his left, opening the tear wider.
Mortirmir couldn’t handle the ferocity of the attacks.
But he did
n’t have to. He wasn’t alone, and Tancreda spun her web faster than a hermetical spider while Magister Petrarcha wove a fabric of deceit and reconciliation. A Morean magister dropped, exhausted, and was killed; the choir faltered, and the shields flickered. Women died, and men. Irks died.
But …
The choir held. The will was distracted; swords were eating at its base in the real, and its shield of flexible adamantine had become porous. It began to change its priorities, and orders flowed through the aethereal as its millions of component beings demanded, ordered, shouted, received …
Mortirmir found what he sought; and in the haze of communications that the Odine used to master themselves, he and his choir deciphered. Analyzed.
Prepared.
If the duel had been with swords, then all the attacks, all the lightning, all the fireballs, all the swords would have been an attack in an outside line.
A feint.
Mortirmir gathered every shred of power remaining to his choir.
His chessboard was empty. His wall of diagrams was complete. He didn’t even have time to savour the moment at which he was either triumphant or annihilated.
He cast. A single pulse, a single ray of light. Or perhaps a single musical note. Or perhaps a single colour. A texture. An emotion.
He cast it on what he had perceived as the moment in the spectrum wherein the Odine’s components communicated, and he sustained it .…
In the real, the worm of worms began to collapse like an undermined tower in a siege; slowly at first, like a wounded man subsiding, and then …
… then the worms were everywhere, writhing like larvae, mouths pulsing. Swords took a few; arrows snapped through the air and nipped others, but the effect was like that of a single gardener attacking a forest. And the knights and men-at-arms were buried in the collapse, the grotesque unmaking of the Odine into its components, but the components themselves were still deadly.
Gabriel felt the dissolution and knew, too, that the moment had come.
He went into the palace.
“Don’t!” Pru said.
He spun, pointing. Spun again, and siphoned the gold of his own burning will into his working. Complex, layered, with limitations and stops and buffers he’d learned and mastered until he raised one arm.