And then Nita Qwan began to say the prayer; the prayer that Outwallers said for an animal they killed for need.
Go swiftly, brother. I need your skin, I need your meat, I need your bones. I will waste nothing of you. And we will remember you at the fire, in the food and in the clothes and in the flute we play. Go swiftly, brother.
Orley did not go swiftly. To Irene, the torment seemed eternal; she was dashed from tree to tree; her nose broken explosively, and her skin ripped and then her arms finally broken, and she fell like a broken doll in the blood-soaked mud.
She lost consciousness.
But she had protected Nita Qwan with her body, and he hung on for a few more beats of Orley’s heart, and Tapio and Looks-at-Clouds poured their workings into the damaged creature until Orley sagged. And sat, suddenly, tearing at the cord around his neck, and then the storm burst over them, even as Orley died.
Gabriel emerged from the wings of the storm above Ash by a little too much, and behind him, on his right side.
Ash shuddered.
Ariosto needed no urging.
He only said, This was great fun, boss. Thanks for all the sheep.
And he dropped like a stone from a trebuchet, his great golden wings afire in the last of the sunlight, straight onto the back of the Black Drake. And Gabriel threw a great working, a simple burst of light, one of the very first workings he’d ever learned, but thrown on a titanic scale.
The immense dragon began to turn, writhing in three dimensions, the head reaching, reaching back on the sinuous neck …
Gabriel threw all his not inconsiderable ops in a blast of white fire that was not equal to breaking Ash’s invulnerable wards, but where the fire met Ash’s breath, chaos reigned, and men saw stars and deep blackness.
Gabriel had never expected to strike Ash with mere puissance. It was merely another feint in a long line of feints. But he’d blown a hole in the wards and Ariosto screamed through it, talons reaching, reaching …
Gabriel felt a pull, almost as if a hand was reaching to take him from his saddle, and he exerted his will. Not yet, into the dark.
The head snapped away with supernatural speed, the vulnerable eyes the size of a man just beyond the griffon’s reaching talons …
The huge Wyrm rolled to evade the griffon’s claws.
Another feint.
Ariosto turned on a wingtip, inside the circuit of the neck, away from the head. The head was coming around; Ash was in mid-exhalation and the backflow of his malevolence burned the very air, but Ariosto turned and turned, and the golden wings gave one great beat, the griffon lifted its talons and its hind feet so that it was flying along the great black body, inches above the surface of Ash’s back, down the drake’s right side as it rose, curling, like the hull of a black ship.
And Gabriel leaned out like a boy using a lance to strike pegs on the ground. He had the ghiavarina in both hands; Ariosto knew the game, and it was far too late in the game to worry about a fall. He leaned out; Ash turned, and the great wing of the black dragon reached back, cupping the cold air and exposing the wing root, where the massive bones and muscles that powered a creature that could not possibly exist met and knitted; a wing root that was itself only the height of a man or so, and into that wing root went the ghiavarina; a single stroke, the blade, made for this exact purpose, cutting deeper, and deeper, and deeper …
His left hand seemed to immolate, and a huge pulse of power traveled through the ghiavarina …
Gabriel smiled, even as his burning gold skin seemed to float away. It was excruciating and joyful. He could hear singing; he could imagine Amicia’s voice, or Miriam’s …
… and Ash’s head continued to come back, the infinitely flexible neck allowing his head to turn all the way back along the body even as the huge red eyes registered their peril …
In the same beat, the wing root burst asunder, and the breath of extinction crossed the man and his mount, and they were gone.
Blanche was not supposed to ride into the snowy fields of Alba. She was with Gabriel’s last reserve, and she had the key to the gate.
But she couldn’t stop herself. When she was fully armed by Beatrice, who made it clear that she had never, in all her life as a maid, expected to have to buckle armour, Blanche walked out of the empty pavilion of red silk, past the round table that was clear and clean. By Gabriel’s old folding campaign chair there was a silver cup lying on the tent’s carpeted floor; Anne had missed it in the rush to get armed, and Blanche stooped, her breastplate butting into her swelling stomach, and picked it up.
Pregnant and wearing armour, Blanche thought.
And behind that thought came legions of other, darker thoughts. They marched like invincible armies at her uppermost mind, and she refused to receive them. Instead, she checked the hang of her unfamiliar sword belt and walked out onto the springy turf of an alien world, where Jon Gang stood with her fine Ifriquy’an charger, who was milk white from tail to nose. Gang gave her a leg up.
She felt like an imposter. She was a laundress. She was certainly no knight.
Gang was wearing a light half-armour. He chuckled. “Cap’n said you’d be riding,” the man said.
Blanche felt herself flush. But Gang’s words gave her heart, and she took the reins. She had been riding for a year; she was competent enough, although she couldn’t imagine riding and fighting, too. Her gauntlets restricted her wrist movements. Everything felt odd.
Her baby kicked.
I am a fool, she thought, and then she rode through the gates and into her own world. She had time to savour the odd violet light of the moment that the portal was crossed, and to feel the disassociation as she entered into Alba, and the baby squirmed and kicked so that for a moment she bent double as if she’d been kicked in the gut.
“Hello in there,” she said calmly. “That’s enough o’ that.”
Jon Gang looked at her.
“The baby,” she said. Her small unborn son or daughter had just crossed all the worlds …
She had a flash of vision, and she retched.
She’d never had a waking dream quite so vivid, and it disturbed her, made her doubt things, so that she looked back through the gate and wondered what …
She took a deep breath and steadied herself, as she always did. She thought for a moment of the laundry in the palace in Harndon. She wondered where the queen was, and whether her sheets were ironed.
“The casa is over here,” Press said. “Top of the ridge.”
They began to ride up slowly. As she passed through the archers, who were lying on their backs or sitting, men and women pointed, and then they began to cheer.
“The empress!” Oak Pew shouted, and they were all coming to their feet.
Off to the west, a wall of black seemed to carry all of the ill-omen that the world could provide. Tall, slate-coloured clouds pregnant with snow rolled toward them, a blanket of cloud and snow that gradually cut off the sun and seemed to cover the world beyond Lissen Carak in a whirl of darkness.
Blanche turned and looked up into the clouds.
The wave front of Ash’s terror rolled down the plain of Albinkirk, but it passed her by; and as she rode up the last of the hill, the company’s archers were closing up and forming their lines, and the lines were coming up the hill behind her like waves crashing on a beach.
Sauce was shouting at Michael, and Michael was ignoring her.
She crested the hill, and there was the dragon. It might have shocked the breath from her, but her vision at the gate had taken away her capacity for shock, and she viewed a dragon hundreds of paces long with the calm of despair. The dragon was black; black as night; black as velvet hanging in a dark closet. The dragon breathed, and men died; or were simply unmade; Ash’s breath was a chaos of destruction, at the edges of his breath, a blue fire burned, but in the very heart of the black flame there was no light, and where it passed, the earth itself had scars and the men and horses were gone.
And Blanche thought, Thi
s is his enemy.
Behind her, the archers were cheering. They could not see the dragon, for the steep summit of the hill; but their cheers were no longer for the empress and her white horse, and she turned her head away from the pale sky and the black dragon, to the dark sky.
And against the dark sky, a golden knight burned like a second sun.
Her heart came into her mouth. Her pulse seemed to resound in the base of her throat, and her cuirass was like an iron band constricting her breathing.
“It’s the empress,” someone said, but she could not take her eyes off him. He burned like a comet, and he was above and behind the vast black wings, and then Ariosto stooped like an eagle carved in gold, and there was an incredible flash of light, and Blanche could not see. She wanted to turn her head away.
But she did not cry out. Instead, she reached into the aethereal and prayed.
Ser Michael watched the golden knight merge with the black Wyrm.
“Oh!” shouted Sauce. “Oh, oh! Get him!”
Tom Lachlan slammed an armoured fist into his palm. “Damn him,” he spat.
Michael didn’t want to watch, but he did. He watched, and all the rest of them watched. The gold and black merged, and then there was a massive flash of light; men and women and bogglins and irks across the battlefield blinked and stumbled, and then there was a massive concussion wave, and the dragon was falling, its neck seeming to trail behind it, one huge wing falling away and both wing and dragon spouting rivers of black ichor onto the snow below.
Of the golden knight there was no sign.
The earth shook as if an earthquake had hit; Lady Helewise’s chimney collapsed; barns fell across the fields, and fire-damaged walls fell.
The black Wyrm fell across thousands of men and other creatures, and they died.
But the dragon was not dead, and it raised its maimed head and breathed again, shattering the ranks of the surviving Mamluks. It began to roll itself over, to breathe into the waiting lines of Moreans.
Gavin watched the dragon fall. 1Exrech was making scent; bogglins were shaking snow out of their wing cases and getting to their feet.
By Gavin’s side, Tamsin said, “The emperor is gone.”
“He’s dead?” Gavin asked.
Tamsin put a hand on him. “Yes, man.”
Gavin drew the Fell Sword that had been Hartmut’s and spurred his charger toward the dread Wyrm, who lay across the field before him.
Gabriel had always intended to bring the dragon down.
And finally Michael blinked away his tears and turned to his friends. “Now we go and finish it,” he said.
Sauce nodded, her face grim.
Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said, and that was all.
But all of their eyes went to Blanche; slim and white and gold. By chance, or fate, she had ridden in among them and was by the banner. Her face forbade any comment, any show of grief, any condolence.
“Finish it,” said the empress.
The Duchess of Venike stood back from their grim grief and instead led her scarecrows down the hill, to the left, to complete the encirclement. The dragon had fallen half a mile from the base of the hill; the duchess needed no orders to know what happened next.
Michael and Tom and Sauce had a long walk down the hill through the snow. Long, and yet very quick; and already the trumpeter was calling the company to their feet, and to their horses. Everyone was awake, thanks to Blanche; Oak Pew had already rolled out of her cloak, folded it, and had it stowed behind her saddle before Bad Tom was fully in sight. They were just behind the brow of the hill.
A slim, dark man walked slowly out of the gate behind them, bearing in his hands a heavy spear. He walked uphill, toward the trio of officers.
Closer to, Ser Michael saw that it was Master Smythe.
Smythe bowed. And handed Michael a ghiavarina.
“I am almost without power now,” he said. “But this much I can do.”
“Is it … his ghiavarina?” Michael asked.
Master Smythe shrugged. “Yes and no, as always,” he said.
“He is dead, then?” Blanche asked, her voice cold.
Master Smythe nodded. “He is gone, and he will not return as mortal man,” the dragon said.
And then Michael was mounting his warhorse, and grief and betrayal and death fell away from him.
He rode to the side of Conte Simone, and pointed across the field at the great reserve of stone trolls standing like rocks. “Would you open the ball, my lord?” he asked.
“Hah!” Conte Simone said. He threw his sword in the air and caught it. “It will be my delight!”
The knights of the north and east raised their lances and gave a cheer, and the earth began to shake.
Michael trotted back to the wedge of banners at the front of the company and Blanche, sitting like a white fury in their midst.
He looked left and saw Oak Pew and Cully and Tippit and Francis Atcourt, and looked right and saw Toby and Bad Tom and Sauce and Mortirmir and Tancreda. Around him were all the men and women who had marched and fought, and perhaps beyond them, the ones who had died and never left the ranks.
“Let’s go kill the fucking dragon,” Michael said.
There was no cheer. They were silent as they went forward.
They climbed the hill in a single body; knights in front, then armed squires, then pages, then archers. All told, they were almost five hundred lances; two thousand men and women, and a smattering of irks, and a single bogglin.
They crested the hill from which they had watched the duel with the dragon, and the battle lay before them. The snow was falling; the wind was ripping over their shoulders and driving the snow, and they, like their fallen captain, came on the wings of the storm and it drove them in its fury.
There was half a mile of snowy battlefield between them and their prey; a field still crowded with foes. But on that day, they faced nothing; no fallen man nor irk nor daemon nor bogglin would stand, and many creatures quailed and slipped away, or ran. Because like many creatures of the Wild, the company now exerted a wave front of fear.
The wind howled. The snow fell. The company marched on, their banners streaming in the wind so that the banner bearers could scarcely hold them, and Blanche’s golden hair burst from her cap and snapped behind her as if she were a living banner.
The company rode across the great field as if riding to a pay parade.
About five hundred paces from the fallen dragon, Mortirmir raised his arms, and a huge ward sprang into being, red and white and green like the banners of the company.
Ash rolled, and breathed. And his breath was black, and it sublimated acres of snow, and struck Mortirmir’s impudent wards like a blacksmith’s hammer, and the wind howled, the wall of steam rose …
… and from the curtain of steam and snow emerged the line, unbroken, untouched, five hundred lances long; each banda covered in its own opalescent shell, as if Mortirmir, unsatisfied, was still touching up the exact colour and transparency of his wards and covers.
Ash breathed again. The ground between his claws was already black, and would not grow a crop for five generations.
Mortirmir’s wards held. They were far more than his own; as Ash focused the whole of his terminal will on the company, so Mortirmir had the support of the whole of the choir of the alliance. But he was the conductor, and he played his part with a dark delight. He might have begun throwing ops from the hilltop.
But he had no intention of denying his friends their part.
One hundred paces from the vast beast, now on its forelegs and dragging itself along, the entire company and the casa dismounted. Pages came forward and took horses who were as calm as they might have been in a pasture, because the casters had them covered.
The horses were not terrified.
The four ranks closed forward as if they did this every day, because, in fact, they did.
And the old officers clustered in the center, by the banners; Michael in the lead, and Tom an
d Sauce at his shoulders, and behind them, Atcourt and de Beause and Milus and all the others.
And then they went forward into the dragon’s fire.
Gavin galloped across the wasted land and into the snowstorm. His horse seemed to float beneath him. Once the mighty stallion stumbled, and he never knew why, and then he could see the black shape, the sinuous neck, the claws and the wing dragging across the fields.
Gavin could see the dragon breathe and breathe again, then over its back he saw the very tops of three great shields of puissance and he laughed.
Then he set his shield and put spurs to his borrowed horse.
When the company’s Fell Spears were twenty paces from the black wall of the dragon’s looming, scaly hide, Mortirmir let go. The Patriarch, the Queen of Faery, the Lady of Alba, the choir of Lissen Carak, the will of Looks-at-Clouds, and even the least novice among the choir.
And Morgon did not push it all into a single bolt. Instead, he divided the power among his choir, so that the vise of their combined vengeance closed on Ash from every direction.
The black Drake’s will held.
But in the drgaon’s head, the soul of Harmodius and the revenge of Thorn unleashed a last assault. And then, in that very moment, the spears began to cut through his wards in the real. Only then, at the bitter, bitter end, did Ash begin to see how deeply the insects loathed him; even as he tried to roll and crush them, he knew that his wards were down, and the tide of fire was rising against him, and this was his end …
In the end, it was Tom Lachlan, and Sauce, and Michael and Gavin.
They cut through the wards as if exercising in a castle yard; the ghiavarina burned like blue lightning, and the black shield parted, and Michael was facing the wall of scales and dark flesh of the dragon’s neck.
He passed into a back-weighted garde, and struck. Michael’s ghiavarina was the first weapon to bite the flesh of the dragon. His slash went four feet deep into its neck; a neck many times that thick.
Then Sauce’s beautiful sword from Firensi flashed in.
Hartmut’s sword burned in Gavin’s fist.