Inwardly, he frowned.
“When did I become so simple?” he asked the air around him.
“Be content,” Ash said at his elbow. The entity was cloaked in flesh—he appeared as a man, a very old man, in a body taut with use and muscle. His skin was jet black—not the black of Ifriquy’a or Dar as Salaam, but a colour like lamp black. He wore the simple clothes of a peasant, but all in dirty grey. He had a scythe in his hand, and an hourglass.
Thorn watched the night. “You have a new guise,” he said with distaste.
Ash snorted. “A very old guise.”
“Are you like some rich girl of Harndon, with a different dress for every suitor?” Thorn asked.
Ash seemed to think for a moment. At least, his face did not move. The silence lengthened and Thorn began to feel he was not going to be answered. This had happened frequently—it was one of the ways Thorn had arrived at the realization that he was a tool and not an ally.
Ash hissed. “It might appear that way,” he admitted.
An old teacher—back in the mists of time before Thorn, when he had been a boy and a human and a scholar—a teacher had told him never to ask a question to which he did not want to know the answer.
Where did that come from? Thorn asked himself.
But he asked anyway.
“Or is the way in which we perceive you shaped by our own—beings?” Thorn asked.
Ash laughed. It was not, for once, derisive or contemptuous. It was rich, and flavoured with humour and delight. “You are an apt pupil, sorcerer. In truth, to my eye, I am always the same. It is you—the sentients—who try to force me to the moulds of your minds.”
Thorn was not afraid of the night or the abyss. He looked into Ash’s eyes. “With people, and animals—if enough people call a dog cur, he’ll learn to bite.”
Ash inclined his head. The movement seemed genuine. “An eternity of striving, and I have one convert,” Ash said. “Well… perhaps two or three. Yes—even I am manipulated by the beliefs of those around me. As are you and every other sentient.”
Thorn looked at the stars. He pointed at them. “And those? Are they, as astrologers maintain, the pinpricks of light from other spheres—an infinity of spheres?”
Ash sighed. “Thorn, if I told you all I know, you would whip me with thongs of fire.”
Thorn nodded. “You quote scripture.”
Ash laughed—and this time it was derisive. “Everyone quotes scripture, Thorn. Or writes it to suit themselves.”
“Will we take Ticondaga?” he asked.
Ash frowned. “Yes. Your plan—which is far too complex, too devious, and too bent on your ideas of vengeance—is a delight, and it will succeed. There is no mind in all this sphere—except mine—that can comprehend what you plan.”
“You flatter me,” Thorn said.
“Of course,” Ash answered. “If you insist on treating me as a mentor, eventually I will behave like one.”
“And after?” Thorn asked.
Ash might have shrugged. The old man’s shoulders twitched. Perhaps he laughed. “We conquer this world, I break my bonds, and then we move through the portals to others, and take them, and eventually you gain enough in power to betray me, and we fight. And I destroy you utterly after we lay waste to the cosmos.”
Thorn nodded, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “And you are sure that it is you who destroys me?” he asked.
Ash laughed. “There is no sure, in all the multiverse,” he said.
Thorn shook his great stone head. “Lord, all this badinage aside—Ghause kills the Queen. I kill Ghause. The King—”
“I have seen to the King.” Ash nodded. “Ten times over.”
“Ticondaga falls—surely they will all unite against me.” Thorn was a better strategist than he had been. He saw the consequences clearly. War and strategy and the dealing of minds, one with another—he no longer disdained these as beneath him. Besides, the more time he spent on them, the more they seemed to have laws like the laws of the hermetical.
Ash nodded. His voice was easy, lulling, like a mother’s speaking to a child. “Yes—it is good to see all the futures. But that is not a realistic one. I have sowed dissension for fifty years ready for this moment. Will the lamb lie down with the lion? Will the Galles ally with the Albans they have just tried to destroy? After Ticondaga, they will fall—Middleburg, Lissen Carak, Albinkirk, Liviapolis and Harndon and Arles in Occitan. And in the old world, as well, until we hold all the portals and all the points of power.”
Thorn stood, transfixed by the note of falsity he had just heard. He blessed his face of stone and the magical enhancements on his body. He did not tremble, and he did not give away so much as a twitch of his fingers.
But he detected in that moment that Ash had a plan for the time after Ticondaga.
And it did not include Thorn.
Ash chuckled. “Why would I betray you? You are my chosen avatar in this sphere. I cannot win here without you. I’ve put a great deal of effort into you. You might say,” Ash chuckled, “that I’ve put all my eggs in one basket.”
Thorn’s intellect struggled to understand what he might mean. Or what he might want. “You are blind to some things,” he said, accusingly.
Ash turned and looked at him. Thorn had a momentary frisson of terror.
Then Ash said, “I admire your black moths. Very clever.”
Thorn sighed like a winter breeze on desiccated leaves. “One of them cleared an entire village—and left no evidence of its passage.”
“And another was killed by a squaw with a stick,” Ash noted.
Thorn nodded. “My assassins will come out of the darkness after midnight. The generation I have sent to kill the Dark Sun—they should be almost immune to normal men. They exist more in the aethereal than the so-called real.”
Ash pondered the stars. “You will waste your pets on this mortal you feel challenges you, but I tell you, he is nothing. He does not even enter into my calculations.”
Thorn paused. “Really?” he asked.
Ash shook his black head. “He is nothing—a boy puffed with vanity and pride of birth. You react to him because he has all the things you did not have—wealth and power and good looks. If I am to be your mentor I must make you understand this. I can scarcely follow him in the aethereal, he is of so little account.”
Thorn frowned. “That makes no sense. He burns in the aethereal like a sun.”
Ash flicked his scythe. “You exaggerate.”
Thorn was silent. Trying to make out what Ash might mean—or what he might have just given away.
“After Ticondaga, none will stand against you,” Ash said.
Thorn thought, So you keep saying.
Liviapolis—Morgon Mortirmir
Deep in the university, at Liviapolis, Morgon woke to find that Tancreda had, after all, stayed with him. Her brother was snoring on a chair. She had brought him the manuscript he needed, and he’d begun to read—
More immediately, Tancreda was draped across Mortirmir, who was lying on a bench with a pair of Venike-made lenses in his right hand and a little known treatise by one of the magisters of the past called Optika in the other. He carefully dropped the book and the lenses to the floor.
Her hazel eyes opened.
“You are very beautiful,” he said.
“Could I just once be very intelligent, or elegant, or perhaps stubborn or clever?” she asked sleepily. “Must it be beautiful? Always?” She narrowed her eyes. “Who found the manuscript on lenses? Mmmm? Was that beauty?”
Mortirmir glanced at the brother, and then, greatly daring, leaned over her and put his mouth on hers. He winked in his head at the absent shade of Harmodius.
Her lips remained tightly closed until the tip of his tongue licked them lightly, and then they sprang open—a delicious parting that left him giddy.
She moaned deep in her throat like an angry cat. But she was not angry, and she writhed across him until she’d shifted
her weight and put an arm behind his head.
The hand on her neck probed a little and found even more luxuriant softness—she shifted again, her lips changing from left to right across his, and her tongue—
Suddenly she sat up. “You are not dead!” she said. “The working!”
For the first time since he was granted powers, Mortirmir cursed all of hermeticism.
Chapter Five
The Albin
Amicia spent their first day on the road reassuring herself and her sisters that she was not leading them to temptation, or even humiliation and death. Riding with the Red Knight and his household—who were, however she might wish to describe them, sell-swords and mercenaries and not knights errant—terrified her two companions.
Sister Mary was a tall, quiet girl with a brilliant mind and a straight back and a fine voice, both in the aethereal and in the real. She was young to be travelling, just seventeen, and her day-to-day struggles with the temptations of the world were palpable—sometimes amusing, and sometimes terrible. She was pretty, and afflicted with a need to be seen as pretty that conflicted with her quiet, and very genuine, piety. She was a poor rider, a peasant born, and she suffered from the youthful urge to refuse help. Her straight blond hair and ice-blue eyes were widely admired among the captain’s men.
Sister Katherine was warmer, with curly red hair and a vicious sense of humor. She was the oldest of the three, a mature thirty, and she had born and lost a child as a young woman. She was noble born—and had worked away the pride of her birth on stone floors and a hundred forms of penance and laundry.
It hadn’t been entirely successful.
In truth, both women had been handed to Sister Amicia as supports, but also as projects. Sister Katherine had a reputation for arrogance, and Sister Mary for wantonness.
It was, Sister Amicia thought, as if Sister Miriam was challenging her.
Despite which, the three had gotten off to a fine start. Healing knights and clearing boglins and hearing confessions had all been adventures, and the three had shared enough adventures in their first weeks together to create a bond that gossip and the stresses of castle or convent life might never have allowed. When Sister Mary paused by a pane of glass to look at her reflection, Amicia made no comment, and Sister Katherine’s rosary of coral and gold drew no comment either.
The first day on the road had been difficult enough. Sister Mary usually walked or rode a donkey, but the column bound for the tournament was moving too fast for her, and she was mounted on one of the company’s spare horses, and suffered cruelly from the first halt on. As a trained physiker and a hermeticist, she had an arsenal of cures she could deploy, but as a young woman, she bit her lip and endured and muttered darkly until Sister Amicia put a hand on her to steady her, and pushed ops into her thighs.
“Am I so obvious?” Sister Mary asked.
Amicia laughed. “Yes,” she said.
Sister Katherine, on the other hand, was in her element—she was on a fine eastern mare, and she rode better than some of the soldiers.
“Tonight, if you’ll allow it, I’ll split my kirtle and ride astride,” Sister Katherine said. “I can do yours and Mary’s, too.”
Sister Amicia sighed. Katherine was always at the edge of the allowed, looking for a way outside. “I’m not sure the world is ready for nuns who ride astride,” Amicia said.
“By our lady, Sister—you say mass, they threaten you with heresy, and you are worried by riding astride?” Sister Katherine pouted.
The Red Knight, fully armed and wearing a scarlet surcoat of silk, shot with gold thread, trotted down the column with Toby, his squire, and Nell, his valet, at his golden-spurred heels. He was making his way down the column slowly—inspecting it. The three women had lots of warning.
The rain was sporadic. “Once your skirts are soaked, the thighs will hurt all the more,” Katherine said. “And astride will be easier on Mary. This is no way to ride.” She had to raise her voice to be heard. They were entering the great gorge of the Albin River.
Immediately behind the three nuns was the escort of Thrakian knights led by Ser Christos. He was smiling broadly when Amicia looked back. He had water dripping down his grey-black beard and he bowed his head. He called something in Archaic and his knights and stradiotes straightened up. A servant handed a linen rag forward, and all of them began wiping each other’s metal dry.
A watery sun emerged from the clouds as they turned east, climbed a low ridge, and suddenly the world seemed to drop away before them. Around them, the Brogat rolled away in a series of hilly landscapes—to the west, the hills rose towards mountains currently hidden in rain. But the hillsides were already lush and green in early April, as if to belie the last days of Lent.
But to the east, the great river rolled in its deepest gorge before emerging into the plains of the Albin. The gorges of the great river were spectacular, and thousands of years of spring run-offs as strong or stronger than this year’s had carved a mighty channel through the low hills of the central Brogat. Far below them on their left, the river charged along, muddy and green-brown with ice-cold snow melt and old leaves and new-swept loam all rolling along at the speed of a cavalry charge. The river was, in fact, so loud, and the walls of the great gorge echoed the river so well, that conversation was difficult.
It stunned the senses—the drop was two hundred feet and more to the channel below and the mad rush of the water and the wet grey rock and the white birches and the green of the leaves. Amicia found she had to remind herself to breathe, and when she turned her head from the drop, he was there.
He was smiling happily. He took a deep breath himself, looking out over the canyon and the river, and then he met her eyes. His smile didn’t change. Before she could stop him, he took her bridle hand, kissed it, and passed her.
The path along the gorge was too narrow for Amicia to turn her horse easily, and she’d only bring chaos to the column. She rode on, turning in her saddle to look. But he was pointing out something on Sister Mary’s saddle to his valet, and the young woman slid from her saddle and took Mary’s horse’s head.
He caught her eye again. His smile returned. He simply pointed and moved his hand—one of the company’s signals that she knew from the siege. Move.
She saw no reason to disobey, so she turned to face forward, to the immense relief of her mount. They began to pick their way along the most spectacular view she had ever seen.
Under foot, birch and beech leaves sodden with rain made a brown-gold contrast to the green leaves above, and even as she raised her head from her noon prayers, the sun, brightening, kissed her with its warmth and she rode easily, thanking God from her very soul for the perfection of the day and the beauty of the view.
They rode along the gorge for three magnificent miles, and then the trail re-crested the ridge to their right and went a little west and down slope, leaving the roar of the water far enough east that normal conversation could commence.
There was an old wagon circle, well used and with twenty big firepots recently cleared at the base of the ridge, where a fine stream hurried to meet the great river to the east. A pair of stradiotes was there with most of the squires and valets. The wagons were already parked, and the captain’s pavilion was already up.
It was only just after noon. But Amicia put a hand in the small of her back and was glad to stop. She found the captain’s squire giving orders and approached on horseback.
“Eh, Sister?” he asked. “Cap’n says to offer you and your sisters a cup o’ wine while the tents go up.” He waved to the pavilion, where Nell was pouring wine for what appeared to be a large party. Two long tables had been constructed, and places set for twenty.
Amicia considered refusing, but one look at Sister Mary eliminated all thoughts of rebellion. She had chosen to travel with him, and she was going to have to see him every day.
The column had become quite strung out in the gorge. It took an hour for the last part of the rearguard to come up—more o
f Ser Christos and his stradiotes.
Sister Mary was already asleep in her folding chair. Sister Katherine went to make sure they had a tent of their own.
Amicia sipped her wine. After a little while, Ser Thomas Lachlan came and sat by her.
“Where are the herds?” she asked.
Ser Thomas laughed. “On the west road,” he said. “Only the Red Knight would lead his party through the fewkin’ gorge.” He smiled. “There’s a perfectly good road, just one more valley over west, like.”
“Why the gorge, then?” Amicia asked.
Ser Thomas laughed. “You, I reckon,” he said. “He’s mad for ye—you know it, aye?”
Amicia found that despite her best intentions, she was blushing furiously.
He grinned at her. “I’m fer thinkin’ you’re not so agin’ it as you seem.”
Amicia drank a little more wine than she’d intended and coughed.
“Ah, well.” Ser Thomas nodded. “I’m an old busybody.” He leaned back, all six foot four of him. “Did ye like the gorge, lass?”
Amicia nodded. “I loved it. The rush of the water—the depth of the gorge. Magnificent.”
Ser Thomas made room for Ser Gavin and Ser Michael as they entered. They bowed to her and talked in whispers because of the sleeping Sister Mary—all except Ser Thomas Lachlan, who didn’t seem to have a whisper.
Outside the pavilion, a cultured voice laden with sarcasm asked, “What’s our lord and master doing now? Finding minstrels to play for his lady love?”
She heard Toby say something softly.
The cultured voice said, “Oh, my God.”
Chris Foliak, still in his arming clothes, stepped into the pavilion out of the spring evening. He was beet red, and when he saw how red Amicia was, he turned even redder.
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