Blanche took the Queen water—while she poured, she realized that by Matron he meant the Queen. The wet nurse had just brought her the baby.
The Queen looked at the bear—old, and his fur grey with age. “Will you sit with me and give justice?” she asked.
“That would be fair,” the bear replied.
Even Mogon nodded.
Harmodius cleared his throat. “This cooperation—a little late in coming—is splendid. But we all know we must stand together.”
“Tell your tale, old man,” Ser Gabriel said. He said it with a smile, but Blanche could see there was something between them.
Harmodius bent his head. “First, we must do what we did at Lissen Carak—all of us who work with power.”
He and Gabriel locked eyes.
“You put a high bar on trust, old man,” Ser Gabriel said. “But you can come to my house anytime.”
The Queen smiled. “I am willing,” she said.
And then, one by one, they all fell perfectly silent. Blanche watched as their faces changed—not slack, but alert, like people in prayer. Harmodius, the Red Knight, the Faery Knight, the Queen, the Prior, the Bishop of Albinkirk, Mogon, the younger bear, Lord Krevak—one by one, they fell into contemplation.
A golden nimbus, almost like a rising fog, seemed to fill the hall. It covered the floor and then rose slowly to the rafters—slow, unobtrusive, like water filling a pan. Blanche played with a little of it.
Ser Pavalo drank water noisily and sat.
Lord Gregario—a famous swordsman—smiled at the tall warrior from Ifriquy’a. “That is a most marvellous sword, ser knight.”
Ser Pavalo nodded. “I show it?”
In the midst of a conference to decide the fate of nations, Lord Gregario, the squire, and Ser Pavalo began to talk about swords.
Men, thought Blanche.
The old bear gave her a look as if he shared her thought exactly.
They gathered in Harmodius’s palace.
“Here, I will say what I have to say. I will not say that our enemy cannot listen to this—only that if he can, after all my precautions, we never had a chance.” Harmodius shrugged.
Gabriel found himself sitting in a comfortable chair immediately by the old man.
He smiled at Harmodius, who, in the aethereal, still looked like a young Harmodius and not a modified Aeskipiles. The others took seats—Mogon occupied a great throne of ivory that contrived not to eclipse Desiderata’s plain chair of gilt wood.
Desiderata tossed her hair. “Now we are met, let mirth abound,” she said.
Tapio sat crosslegged, and the white gwylch didn’t seem able to sit at all.
Desiderata raised her voice. It was an old song—one of the festival songs.
“Now we are met, let mirth abound, now we are met, let mirth abound.
And let the catch! And let the catch! And let the catch and toast, go ’round!”
She sang, and they joined her—even Mogon, even Exrech, so that, despite different languages, their polyphony rolled up into the aethereal. A golden-green radiance suffused Harmodius’s inner mansion, and a great shield snapped into place.
“A potent working,” Mogon said.
Harmodius smiled. “That bodes better than I might have hoped,” he said. “Your grace, you have come far.”
“I have been sore tested,” Desiderata said. She shrugged, and a hint of her former self raised the corner of her mouth in an impish smile. “Come—even here, time dogs us. Tell your tale, old master.”
Harmodius sat back. “Very well. Some you all know, and some you know parts of, or have seen only through a glass darkly, and even now, I am not sure that part of what I say is not pure fabrication, justification, embroidery. Let me say first—because all of us work in this power—that all of us know that belief and being and becoming and power can be one thing, the same thing, and that renders the process of remembering and history almost impossible.”
Gabriel found himself nodding.
“Very well. We all inhabit a sphere—a great bubble of…” Harmodius laughed. “Of reality, let’s say. Existence… yes? Some of the Wise hold it to be one single bubble, and others say there are seven spheres, or eight, or nine, each inside another. Yes?”
“And outside, God’s heaven,” Desiderata said.
“No, your grace. Forgive me, but, outside, a sort of chaos of nothing. Very, very like our own aethereal. That’s for another time. For us, what matters is that beyond this chaos are other spheres. Like ours.”
Mogon nodded—Desiderata put her hand to her throat.
Gabriel rubbed his beard and considered.
“Of these spheres we know almost nothing,” Harmodius said. “And what we know is tantalizing, irrational and contradictory.” He shook his head. “I digress. What makes our sphere unique—I hesitate even to say this much—is that it is some sort of nexus for all the others, or some others, and perhaps merely a large number. And therein lies our story and our fate. We are the crossroads.”
Gabriel found Harmodius looking at him. “You are unsurprised.”
“We shared the same head during all your research in Liviapolis,” Gabriel said.
Mogon shifted her bulk. “This is no news at all to the Qwethnethogs.” She nodded as her crest, inflated when tense, subsided like a fashionable beret. “We came here from somewhere else. Every birthling knows it.”
Harmodius nodded. “There are two major pieces to my story. One—we are a crossroads. The other—we are pieces in a chess game.” He waved his hand. “The two fit together to explain everything we see around us. We have sixty races that compete for resources. We know of peoples exterminated—we have the rubble of their works, and in Liviapolis, even records of some of their science.”
Mogon nodded. “The Odine.”
Harmodius sighed. “The Odine are but one, and I would not count them destroyed. But they are perhaps the most obvious. Let me make this quick. Powers—great Powers—vie to take and hold our crossroads. They bring the races bound to them to do the heavy fighting. To hold the ground, as Gabriel would say.”
“Why?” Gabriel asked. “I mean, what’s the prize? More slaves?”
Mogon sat slowly back. “Yes,” she said. It was not an answer to Gabriel, but a comment. “Yes, this is shockingly simple. Of course.”
Harmodius nodded. “Another of my order, a great man, far, far away in Dar as Salaam, has more access to the oldest of man’s records than I.” He looked around. “And older records still, not made by men. This is his life’s work,” he said, and produced, in the aethereal, a scrap of memory parchment.
“Five names. Five of perhaps seventeen creatures whose powers are like gods. Little, petty, scrapping gods.” He held the list out.
Gabriel read them all at once, as one did in the aethereal.
Tar
Ash
Lot
Oak
Rot
“These are not true names,” Desiderata said. The names shook her—it was written on her face.
Harmodius shook his head. “I think we know them all,” he said.
Gabriel sighed. “Do they divide up into good and evil?” he asked. His tone was sarcastic, and the Faery Knight laughed and slapped his thigh.
“They all use the same tactics of manipulation and gross coercion,” Harmodius said. “Draw your own conclusions.”
Gabriel thought of Master Smythe. “I would merely emphasize that my side has a smaller body count and tends to minimize—negative outcomes.”
“One of them is more honest than the others,” he said.
Harmodius shrugged. “My order has made a choice: to fight them all.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “How’s that going for you?” he asked. “That sounds like a typical un-pragmatic solution—something from a classroom. Noble, and doomed. I grant you their power. If they are divided among themselves—surely the classical solution is to use them against each other?”
The Faery Knight stretche
d his immortally long legs and shook his head. “This is either brilliant or rampant madness. Ser Gabriel, what makes you think these great powers, who are to us like gods, can be manipulated?”
Gabriel looked not at Harmodius, but at the Queen. “Are they all great dragons, do you think? The four, or the seventeen?”
Harmodius nodded. “We think they are all dragons.”
Gabriel sat back. “This is the fascinating cutting edge of hermetical philosophy, no doubt, but—when we fight—” He looked around. “We’re fighting Ash. Ash, making a bid to manifest directly into our sphere, and control the gates directly, one of which—perhaps the single most important one—is under Lissen Carak.” He frowned. “Ash is a dragon?”
“Lissen Carak was the home and sacred ground of my people,” Mogon said.
“And before that the Odine, and before them the Kraal, and so on and so on.” Harmodius raised a hand. “If we do nothing, the cycle continues forever.”
“Fascinating,” Gabriel allowed. “But not immediately affecting my dispositions.” He made a face. “Except that it’s clear that he wants to fight at Albinkirk—he or Thorn or whoever controls that horde. And because he wants to fight here, I’m tempted to fight somewhere else.” Gabriel leaned forward. “Does your Ifriquy’an know more gates? I would give a great deal to understand the geographia of this aethereal battlefield. If I’m understanding this at all.”
Harmodius nodded. He withdrew a second sheet of the memory parchment. “Lissen Carak, as we all knew or at least guessed. In the Citadel of Arles, in Arelat.” He nodded to the Queen.
Gabriel flinched as if he’d been bitten. “Of course!” he said. “I was there. The King of Galle tried to take Arles by treachery—a long tale. But I was there. I knew something felt—hollow.”
“Hollow?” the Queen said. “I, too, know a place that feels hollow in my soul.”
“I believe there’s a lost gate under the palace in Harndon.” Harmodius exchanged a long look with the Queen.
The Queen leaned back and let go a breath. “There is something there. An emptiness.”
Harmodius nodded. “Let us say Harndon. Assuredly there is one in Dar as Salaam. I have felt it myself. In fact, it set Al Rashidi on his investigations, almost a hundred years ago. And of course, once you understand the game and the pieces, the whole of the Umbroth Wars make sense. The not-dead are just someone else’s tools to take the gate.”
Gabriel began to rock back and forth like a small child.
“Arles. In Arelat. Where the King of Galle has just, according to the Etruscans, been badly beaten by a mighty army of the Wild.” Gabriel steadied himself.
Prior Wishart’s face grew still, though even in the aethereal his fear showed.
The Queen looked from one to another.
“Umbroth Wars, gentles?” she asked.
“Almost a hundred years of attacks by the not-dead and the one we call Necromancer on the people of Dar as Salaam, the Abode of Peace,” Harmodius said. “Before the attacks started, there were green fields. Now there is desert.” He looked at Gabriel. “Rashidi says there are seven gates in this sphere. Or, to be complete, he says there are at least seven gates. And to that I must add that the terrain of today need not be the terrain on which the gates were set. This contest is so old that there might be gates under glaciers, inside volcanoes, or under the sea for all I know.”
Prior Wishart drew a deep breath. “How long ago were the gates built?” he asked.
Harmodius didn’t answer at first. He looked from one to another to another, around the circle. None flinched. The Faery Knight grinned and showed his teeth.
“You might have been a mountebank,” the Faery Knight said. “Jussst tell them!”
“At least thirty thousand years,” Harmodius said.
The bishop sighed. “My scripture tells me that the earth is between six and seven thousand years old,” he said.
Harmodius shrugged. “It might simply be wrong.”
The bishop acknowledged this with a nod.
“It might refer to somewhere else,” Gabriel said. “We are no more from here than the Duchess Mogon.”
“Thirty thousand years is a long time,” the bishop said.
Lord Krevak nodded. “Even to my people, that is too long.” He shrugged. “Too long to take seriously.”
Desiderata glanced at her captain and then leaned towards Harmodius. “I see how this could forever alter everything. But I do not see how it alters the next few days. Is there a weapon? A way to prevent this manifestation?”
Mogon now spoke. “No—I see it. Manifestation is power and weakness.”
Harmodius nodded. “If Ash is here,” he said, “he is not anywhere else, and when he is entirely here—” He paused. “Then I think he can be destroyed. Only when they distribute themselves are they immortal. And less powerful.”
Gabriel nodded. “Now I am not yawning. You want to kill a god.”
“It will be very difficult,” Harmodius said.
Gabriel winced. “We’re going to be pinched hard to win a simple field battle to protect our crops against heavy numbers and better levels of ops.”
“That part I leave to you,” Harmodius said. “Our battle will be fought here, in the aethereal, and it will all be about misdirection.”
“Mine, too,” Gabriel said. “I feel I need to remind you all of something.”
“Speak, man,” the Faery Knight said.
Gabriel looked around. “As a knight it is my duty to protect the weak. My first duty. You may be right, but please, old man, admit that you may have all this backwards. My duty is to protect the peasants in the fields, the merchants, the women bearing babies.” He looked around. “I agree that the game of gods should stop. I hate it. But men play it and wardens play it and dragons play it and wyverns and bears. It is not nearly as simple as killing a god. So let us focus, your grace and my lady and lords—on beating Thorn.”
The Faery Knight nodded agreement. “We may not even be on the right side,” he said. “We may be too puny to even understand the sides.”
Gabriel smiled at him. “I can tell a good company by riding through the streets of their camp—once. Let me meet one whore, one servant, and I know their captain.” His eyes narrowed. “I will not debate theology with you, my lords. But I know Ash by his works. I know two of these others—and whatever they may intend…” He shrugged.
“They run better companies?” the Faery Knight suggested.
“Just so,” the Red Knight agreed, and they shared a brief smile. “I only mean this, Harmodius. You want to destroy a race of gods so that we can be free. I say—a pox on it. I serve the Queen and the Emperor and my own interest—everyone serves someone. Let our lords be just and generous, and we prosper.”
Harmodius growled. “There speaks an aristocrat who has never known the lash.”
Gabriel spat. “You lie.”
“You—you, of all creatures, will forfeit your freedom?” Harmodius shook his head. “I think it is you who lies.”
“I say, fight one battle at a time and do not rule out any ally.” Gabriel put a hand to his head—a familiar headache.
“I say, they are false allies and will enslave us, generation after generation and you mortgage the future to win a battle today.” Harmodius was adamant. “They are all equally our enemies.”
Desiderata sat wrapped in thought. Gabriel could guess what had cut her. The others considered, each in their own way.
Gabriel took a deep aethereal breath. A meaningless symbol of a breath—a conversational habit.
“There must be other Powers,” he said.
Harmodius nodded. “The Necromancer is one. The being Rashidi identifies as Rot is another. Who I suspect is leading the assault in Galle. Or managing it.”
“Dragons?” Krevak asked.
“Not all Powers are dragons,” Exrech said. “At least one Kraal still bloats the earth.”
“Thorn seeks to become a Power.” Gabriel raised an e
yebrow.
Harmodius nodded heavily. “And Sister Amicia is on the very verge of becoming one.”
“Like the dragons?” Gabriel asked.
“I don’t actually know,” Harmodius admitted slowly. “Al Rashidi doesn’t know either.”
Desiderata raised her head. “This is too deep for me,” she said. She looked at the Bishop of Albinkirk.
He smiled. “That God’s will and love extends to every level of the cosmos comes as no surprise to me,” he said. “Beyond that, I would not comment, except to say that to plot the death of a creature, however powerful, who has done you no harm is awfully like murder, however you may see the consequences for future generations. But then, I am but a priest, and I fear that even violence in the defence of the weak is—sin. Murder.”
The Faery Knight looked at him in wonder. “Are there other children of men who think as you do?” he asked.
The bishop nodded. “A few. We call ourselves Christians.”
The Faery Knight laughed.
Even Gabriel had to laugh.
Harmodius nodded like a man waking from sleep. “Your grace—I know this will be painful. But my sense—from stories I have heard, and your very presence—is that you have already faced our foe. Directly. In the aethereal.”
Desiderata appeared as she always had in the aethereal, as a beautiful young woman in a kirtle of gold, barefoot, with a ring of daisies in her hair and a belt of them around her waist. In the aethereal, she seemed both wanton and matronly, the very embodiment of woman’s power.
Now Gabriel, who had healed her and knew her aethereal and outward self, looked at her and saw how clearly her ordeal in Harndon had marked her. In the aethereal, she still wore the form that she had had a year ago in the real. But pregnancy and torment had put crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes and a different colour in her face. She had more gravity—more presence—than she had a year ago. But he would never have noticed the difference until he saw her golden form in the aethereal.
She did not smile. But nor did she wince, or stumble.
“I have faced Ash,” she said quietly.
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