In the real he said, “Fiat Lux.”
There was a flash. Thunder rolled, and Gabriel still stood in the worlds of the real, shining with unshadowed gold.
From his outstretched hand to the pylons of the gate, and beyond, the earth was clear except for a fine grey dust that lingered, and the sun lit it in brilliant shafts.
Outside the circle of his choice, millions of the worms writhed in the sunlight and could offer no hermetical response.
The gate was clear. The golden pedestal stood where he had expected it to be. Gabriel walked forward, the metal sabatons on his feet crunching against the tiny fragments of desiccated worms as he walked.
Tom Lachlan was beside him, and Sauce. The company was in chaos; intermixed, knights and men-at-arms, archers and pages spread over hundreds of paces of ground, most of them ferociously stomping, cutting, or kicking.
Lachlan looked angry.
Gabriel managed a smile.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” he said. “There’s still an army of bogglins. And the dragon.”
“Oh aye,” Bad Tom said. “Fuck.” He shuddered. “I hate worms.”
Gabriel laughed. It was a good laugh. He hadn’t ever imagined that Tom Lachlan hated anything.
He was still chuckling when he got to the pedestal, and found the key inside his breastplate. He had to drop his gauntlets to fumble it out. His hands were shaking so badly that he had to pause and breathe. His knees were weak; his heart pounded.
All for this, he thought. Please, God, let me have been right. Please. I will not brag or be smug or claim I figured it all out. Just let me be right.
It was the most complex gate yet: six stops on the plaque, and none closed.
But only one of them could be the right one. The green jewel, on the far left; the one already burning, because, of course, the will had been trying to force its way through.
He turned the key.
His shaking hand reached out to press the gem.
It would not push.
Please. Please. Damn it.
Nothing.
An exhausted Mortirmir appeared in his memory palace, standing beside Pru. And there was Tancreda and Petrarcha and the rest of the surviving choir.
“It is locked from the other side,” Mortirmir said carefully. “Miriam must have been holding it against the will all this time.”
Gabriel felt a rush of frustration almost as intense as physical pain.
He put his right hand, physical flesh, on the jewel. Hello? he called into the void.
And Desiderata replied, Gabriel!
Chapter Sixteen
Gabriel felt Desiderata’s response and he almost burst into tears, so great was the relief, the sheer joy.
And the overwhelming feel of triumph.
Under his fingers, the jewel moved.
With a click, the key turned.
By now, Bad Tom had a rough line across the gate: knights and squires, pages and archers, mostly casa; some company; and a handful of mamluks and Etruscan knights and a pair of Gallish knights. The collapse and defeat of the will on their side of the gate had led to some chaotic local fighting, and no group who had entered the fight had emerged unscathed.
“Tom!” Gabriel roared. “The second it’s open, we’ll be fighting the other half.”
“I am …” Mortirmir groaned. “Gabriel. I’m exhausted.”
Petrarcha appeared on a mule. “I am not. I am ready.”
The gate was opening.
“Woodstock,” Gabriel called. “Bring me Ariosto.”
Ash felt the movement of the gate, and knew in his black heart that victory was in his taloned grasp at last.
He was using his superior mobility and his new commanders to rebuild his line and prepare for the last act; the loss of two of his puppets had disinclined him to take a direct role in the end-of-day fighting, but even as the winter clouds rolled in, he used the last of the visibility to identify the pitiful weaknesses of the alliance lines; their grip on the ridge above the road was tight, but in the open ground between Penrith and the woods, their forces were spread so thinly that any attack would break them. To the east, his lieutenant threw assault after assault at the outwalls of Albinkirk. And Orley had pushed daemons right up the slope of the abbey, and now had cave trolls burrowing into the rubble of the collapsed north tower.
Ash’s eye swept the field; at Lissen Carak he saw Ser Ricar Orcsbane sword to stone club with a cave troll, and to the south and east, he saw the bears who had fought all day alongside the Duchess Mogon, now slipping away to the west. This confirmed Ash’s thought that his enemy’s army must break up now; their alliance must be tattered, the internal stresses too great to sustain losses.
Yet something in his head was not right; his connections to his out-consciousness seemed frayed, and full of disorder, and he kept thinking of Thorn …
Why had he discarded Thorn?
And then the gate began to move. There was a sort of choked scream in the aethereal and his ally began to shout, to give orders; there was a sudden frenzy of Odine chittering in the aethereal, near and far off to the north.
Now the gate would open, and his “allies” would come through, and it would be complete, and infinitely more powerful. He would be threatened. Or defeated. By the Odine.
But of course, he had planned for this, and the Odine had served their purpose.
Ash had known this moment would come. He had made his preparations; so much simpler, because war in the aethereal was in many ways more natural and cleaner than war in the real.
Ash leapt across the nonspace of the aethereal, and sank his hermetical fangs deep into the Odine’s aethereal throat.
His betrayal was immediate, the surprise complete. The Odine, the one holding the gate, seemed distracted, even as he sucked its life away; its distant sister, the will north of the Inland Sea, shrieked in rage and swore revenge.
Ash bore down, even as the Odine under his assault began to crumple. Its collapse was ridiculously quick, and he wondered if he had misjudged its power in the first days.
The gate swung fully open in the timeless time of the aethereal.
Chapter Seventeen
Tom Lachlan sprang through the gate with the whole line at his back, and with Petrarcha pouring ops into the casa’s great golden shield as they advanced, and a firework of potent sorceries rolled off the old scholar as he went forward just behind Cully, his head up and his hands opening and closing like a puppet master working marionettes. It was dark, and there was snow in the air, and Tom had somehow expected to arrive in the cellars below the abbey; instead, he was fighting between two great bloodstained pylons of yellow-white, his sword flickering effortlessly through crowds of unmotivated not-dead.
On the other side of the gate, where it was warmer and the sun shone, Ser Michael was rebuilding the army in a parade ground voice. The gate gapped, with a vision of snow-laced darkness, just as, a hundred paces away, Tom Lachlan’s fight was illuminated strangely by the sunlit day pouring through the gate behind him, lighting the falling snow in a most unnatural way.
The will collapsed, its constituents struggling for supremacy. Thousands of worms and larvae fled, on the ground, virtually vanishing into the falling snow.
Petrarcha cast a rolling fire that cleared the ground of both snow and Odine, at least closer in.
In the aethereal, Ash reached out and began to subsume the power of the massed wills of the Odine. He needed the power, to replace all that he had used and squandered, but the subsumation of the scattered wills of the Odine was not like taking a single defeated entity, and it took time.
Blue Berry of the Long Dam Clan had fought all day, and her fur was clotted with blood and other fluids, and her gold was dimmed to a dingy brown, and she had a bad wound all down her left side, the slash of a cave troll’s stone axe. But she and her clan had stood their ground with the duchess and held her flank until the very end.
And the men had come, and freed them from the trap.
> It was all very well for men to offer them food, and she ate well, but as the darkness deepened, she wanted trees over her head, and to be away from the open sky and the falling snow, which made her, and all her kin, sleepy. Together they loped west, their axes on their backs, into the debatable ground between Penrith and the woods. There were men there, where the ancient road rose up four feet above the fields on either side; and Blue Berry could see other men landing from boats to the south, and more snow coming into the east. But she craved the safety of the woods, and she and her clan went into the open trees at the edge, where in better times men kept pigs and all the undergrowth was clear; and when she was under the branches of the huge old maples, she relaxed.
But she kept going, moving carefully, because the woods were not clear of enemies and the fields to the east were now beginning to fill with bogglins and worse. Blue Berry led her bears north, avoiding combat; looking for a huddle of fallen trees or a little cave to spend the night.
After an hour of steady moving, she found a fire, and a little cautious exploration showed that there were men at the fire. Blue Berry had little trust in men, but much experience, and she liked the look of the two caves the men had found.
She motioned with a paw and her warriors went flat in the snow. Then she approached carefully, until she was challenged by a sentry, a young knight with a heavy crossbow cradled in his freezing-cold arms under a heavy cloak.
“Halt!” the young human cried. “Identify yourself.”
She gave a growl. “I am Blue Berry of the Long Dam Clan,” she said. “I have fought all year alongside men.”
“Galahad!” roared the boy.
Before the ice on her paws between her long toes could harden uncomfortably, another man came. He bowed to her, and she thought she might recognize him.
“I knew Flint,” he said. “I am Ser Galahad d’Acon.”
“Ah, the gallant Galahad,” purred Blue Berry. “I come to share, grrrr, your caves.”
Gabriel nodded. “Come and join us.”
The crowd of fighters who had cleared the gate were tired, and Bad Tom pulled them back; he had not lost a one, but he was troubled by the worms and the snow.
Ser Michael replaced them with the scarecrows. The whole phalanx came through the gate very quickly and formed a hollow square, covering the opening of the gate.
The snow squall ended. Moonlight fell on snow; to the west, a long line of clouds marched in, presaging worse weather, but for the moment, there were stars.
The Duchess of Venike shrugged into a fur-lined khaftan held by her servants. Edmund Chevin’s hand gonners were filing through the gate and gazing around in astonishment, and then Ser Michael was there with her, and Sauce.
“It is fucking cold,” muttered Sauce. “Hello, honey,” she said, kissing the duchess.
Michael bowed.
Sauce stepped back, snapping orders, as the Venikan marines began to move through the gate, followed by her other Etruscan infantry.
“The emperor will come through in person in a few minutes,” Michael said. “We’ll eat and sleep in shifts—back there. It’s too damned cold here.” He was already shivering.
The duchess nodded. “How long?” she asked.
“Two hours,” Michael said. “Tom Lachlan says to watch for worms and not-dead.”
The duchess nodded. “Can I take some ground?” she asked. “There’s a house over there, and farm fields, and a hill …”
“We need someone who’s been here before,” Michael said. He shivered again.
And then the emperor was there; he came through the gate on foot, and Anne Woodstock was leading Ariosto, who was beaming at her.
“I’ve been here before,” Gabriel said. “This is Lady Helewise’s back garden; what a lot of blood. You can tell Tom’s been here, can’t you? Giselle, there’s a ridge just there, to the west. Take it and clear all the ground from there to here. Sauce? I’m going for a fly. Don’t lose the gate. And someone stay awake; I’ll want a drink when I come back.” He grinned. “We did it!”
He swung up into the high-backed saddle. He was grinning ear to ear, and Sauce found that she was grinning, too.
“We did it,” she shouted at him.
“We certainly did,” he said, and then the griffon leapt into the freezing air.
Outside Lissen Carak—Gavin Muriens
It was colder atop the ridge than down in the valley, but the view was better. Gavin was very cold, and he had no one to blame for it but himself; his cloak was somewhere with the camp, away down by Southford.
But there was a line of huge fires along the top of the hill, as much to rally the army as to warm it, and he had a stool, and he sat with his back to one fire and his face to the battlefield. Now that the snow squall had passed, he could see Penrith, still burning, in the distance; closer in, he could see the smoking ruins of Woodhull to the northwest, now full of bogglins, and the church steeple of Saint Mary’s almost due north, at Ambles Inn. He could not find the inn itself. At the foot of his ridge, directly to the north, lay Livingston Hall, which had been the scene of brutal fighting since late afternoon; even now, another clutch of daemons attempted to storm it in darkness.
The Prince of Occitan was there in person. It would hold, or all the world would fall.
And behind him were the suburbs and walls of Albinkirk, and the enemy had made two attempts on it since darkness. So the enemy held a huge semicircle, from Penrith to almost Southford. Gavin was surprised, and pleased, to find that the enemy’s army was almost countable; he reckoned it not in numbers but in frontage. Today they’d stretched Ash’s forces over almost fifteen miles, and in that kind of fighting, good armour and good training had repeatedly overcome ferocity and predation.
But now they were being pushed into shorter lines. Tomorrow, Ash would come with his terrible fire, and Gavin would have no response.
“What I want to do,” the Green Earl said, “is attack.”
“Attack?” Gregario asked. “Aren’t we a little thin on the ground?”
“It worked today,” Gavin said. “Listen, if 1Exrech turns around and faces the other way, he’ll be looking out toward the walls of Albinkirk. He could cut the enemy off; force Ash into a fight under the walls.”
“Where our folk are protected from most of his sorcery,” Gregario said.
Mogon nodded. “How do you people deal with this cold?” she said slowly. “I should have stayed in the burning town and spent the night killing bogglins. Freezing to death seems a poor way to go.”
A cup of steaming apple cider was put in Gavin’s hand.
Lady Tamsin was smiling like a girl at Christmas. She grinned at him, her fangs showing.
“You look better,” Gavin said.
“Wait,” she said.
He drank the cider. “Anyone want to comment on my attack?”
“It’s an excellent idea,” a voice said.
Gavin knew that voice. He rose, cold forgotten, and whirled into a steel-clad embrace.
“You bastard!” Gavin said, pounding his brother’s back.
“Probably,” Gabriel said.
At Lady Helewise’s manor house, the duchess and Sauce had a brief discussion, and then the scarecrows formed with crossbowmen on either flank and crunched off across the snow, headed north. Almost immediately they came across irks and bogglins, also moving. Sauce threw in some of Conte Simone’s knights, and the thing was done; the bogglins fled, and even the irks ran, panicked, scarce believing what had suddenly come at them out of the snow.
They fled away north, into the eaves of the great wood along the Lily Burn, and there they rallied, for they were a great host all by themselves, and there they prepared to counterattack.
But Galahad’s sentries were alert, and his camp turned out, unaware of how close they were to the center of events. The fugitives tried to overrun the men and bears by sheer numbers. The fighting along the northern Lily Burn became general in the frozen dark.
Tapio and Bliz
zard and Aneas gave up trying to get into Lessen Carak before they really made an attempt; the enemy were so thick in the lines that Tapio allowed Blizzard to lead them east, to the Lilywindle, and before darkness they were at the new bridge at North Ford, which marked the uttermost northern limit of the world of men, and the southernmost border of the Wild, at least in these parts.
“There used to be a trail along the banks of the Lily Burn,” Blizzard said.
Now Nita Qwan stepped forward. “I was here three years ago,” he said. “If I do not lose my way in the snow, I know where there’s a trail just the other side of the bridge.” He shook his head ruefully. “I feel I have come full circle,” he said.
Tapio shook his head. “But why?” he asked.
Magister Nikos pointed. “Because the greatest battle of our lifetimes, even yours, my prince, is being fought right there.” He pointed south and east. “Desiderata is holding Lissen Carak. The real fight will be in the fields below Albin Ridge.”
“I want Orley,” Aneas said.
“I want victory,” Tapio said. “I want thisss to end. I want Tamsssin in my arms.” He grinned, and his fangs showed. “I want to kill Asssh.”
They started south, moving single file along the path of the Lily Burn in the moonlight. Aneas was tired, but he had now been tired for so long that he couldn’t really remember any other way to be; Irene cradled her crossbow in the moonlight. Her heart was hammering, wondering, as she was wont to, whether she really loved this or had made herself love it; and ahead of them, Tapio rode on his great elk, singing quietly to himself of his lady Tamsin.
When they had gone a mile, there was a sharp snow squall, and Tapio felt something like a blow in the aethereal. He motioned, and all his people dismounted and lay with their mounts in the new snow; but the feeling passed, and Tapio wanted, with all his heart, to go into the aethereal and find Tamsin, and see what he could see. But this force, even this small force of men and irks and bears, might yet have a role to play, and he kept them quiet and secret, forbidding his knights access even to the simplest of warming spells.