Like the whisper of rain coming on a summer’s day, he came—a black cloud, a coalescing.
Mag rose on her tiptoes and poured fire into the formation of the monster miles to the north. She loosed her working in the aethereal in the moment that the thing was moving to the real and had a presence in both. It was taking shape—not, as she had hoped, being born, but leaping, fully-fledged, into the world.
Mag stood alone at the centre of an empty fortress of earth and wood, and let slip all the bonds that bound her power. She knew no university laws, and had no memory palace, and her access was direct and uncompromising.
Blue fire leapt into the sky.
Across the swamp, an entire nest’s worth of boglins—an uncountable, crawling mass—prepared the last assault across the low ground. They had rafts and ladders and great hoardings of wild bramble and ropes of vine and grass, and among them were two years of the full crop of the Wild. They had been left with their Exrech to watch the Hillmen—and eat them. And then, when the army’s flank was secure, and their cousins had made a path with their bodies, to storm the forts.
No Hillmen had come.
Almost five miles to the south, the Hillmen had forded the Upper Albin at first light, slipping and cursing on the wet stones and watching the distant tree line for the ambush that they would, themselves, have launched. Late in the crossing, a handful of irks opposed them, and Kenneth Dhu died with an irk’s arrow in his throat. But the big men in their long byrnies got across and scoured the bank, and then they started moving, not west towards their allies, but almost due east and a little north, as if marching to Morea, ever deeper into the marshy low ground. Behind them, the surviving animals of the drove moved with them, parallel but on the eastern side of the river, where there was an old drove road. The horse-boys and a handful of old borderers moved the cattle herd.
When they came opposite the best ford for twenty miles, the Hillmen had already cleared it, striking into the ambush from the flank. Tom Lachlan never shouted his war cry, for his people did their work so suddenly that he never bloodied his sword.
“Now for it, lads,” he said. “Bring the beasties across. Now we avenge Hector.”
And indeed, now they were in the very country where great Hector had fallen, the same streams, and a cloud of faeries came with the morning rain and followed them, flitting about among the long horns of the cattle.
Donald Dhu was stony faced, but he kept running his thumb along the edge of his great blade, and Tom knew a man who’d marked himself for death.
“He was a fine boy,” Tom said.
“This is a daft plan,” Donald Dhu said. “You’re as madcap as your cousin.”
Tom Lachlan frowned. “Tell me that at sunset,” he said.
“It’s that Red Knight of yours,” Donald Dhu said.
“I can thole him,” Tom said.
“Ca’ ye, just? E’en if he’s killing off your own folk to save his?” Donald Dhu glared, eyes red-rimmed.
Tom didn’t snarl. He might have, once. Now he simply looked. “Donald, darlin’, you’ve lost yer fine boy and that’s a cryin’ shame. But if you go on like this, I’ll split yer round head, myself.” He nodded sharply, and drove his horse forward, giving the other man his back.
No man laughed—but Red Rowan and Daud the Cow shouldered their axes and followed Bad Tom, and soon enough the whole force of the Hillmen was pushing as fast as could be managed through the tangled edge of the marsh and swamp.
Two hours later, the beasts pushed out of the swamp. They were, in fact, at the very edge of the grassy meadows where Hector had left his herd a year before. Tom sent two of the younger warriors to have a look, and dismounted, settled his back to a tree, and had a nap. There was a big storm higher in the mountains, and they could hear the snap of lightning, the roll of thunder.
Tom awoke to the feeling he’d slept too long. But his men, almost a thousand of them, were well rested and had eaten a meal, and now he got them mounted and moved the herd back west—now along the line of the old road, through the open woods on either side.
The storm in the hills began to rise to an epic intensity, and it became clear—suddenly, in one single and titanic triple detonation—that this was not nature’s hand, but the power of sentience.
“Tar’s tits,” Donald Dhu swore.
“Move them along,” Tom yelled, and gave a shout. A hundred men took it up—a high-pitched noise between a keen and a yell—and the cattle began to move faster. Here and there, a younger animal, pushed by a stronger, fell, and the herd began to fan out over more forest.
Tom wished for wings, so he could fix a location for himself—but then, as if granted a dream by a god, he saw a giant maple tree with a vast bole and a huge bulging projection—a tree he knew well, that his people all called the Forest God. The tree was ancient and the bole a landmark well-known, and he grinned.
Something fell gave voice. It was shrill, and high, and utterly without pity for man. It shrieked of the dark when there were no stars, of aeons of time before the hand of man came to mar the earth—and even the Hillmen were afraid.
Most of them.
Although that shriek was a mile away or more, Tom Lachlan drew his great sword.
Then he turned to the horse-boys in the drag, raised his horn, and blew.
They answered with shouts, horns, and whips.
In twenty beats of a man’s heart, the herd went from swiftly trotting individual beasts to a live thing of great mass, and a single will. It was panicked.
It ran.
More than a long bowshot wide, filling the woods from side to side, the herd ran west up the line of the road.
Ash rose, delighting in the rush of damp air beneath his wings, free for the first time in an aeon—embodied, and full of power and vitality—and cast a working almost contemptuously into the mortals to his front as he cleared the ridge, and destroyed half a thousand years’ worth of N’gara irks. The red of his fire and the footprint of his destruction rooted the company and terrified even his own army.
He remembered breath, and he breathed.
He turned, almost lazily, and Mag’s blue fire struck him in the side, under his right wing as it rose for more altitude—
His scream killed. His rage was palpable—red fire swept along the ridge. Men died—Cuddy and Tom Lantorn and Dagon La Forêt and Tancred di Piast, boiled to death in their armour, killed almost instantly as a hundred company lances died. Then his wound turned him south and east and his rage-fire passed over the red-crested daemons and into a cohort of trolls and down the helpless ranks of Outwallers preparing to retake the heights, eliminating them in four heartbeats the way a forge eats coal.
But Mag’s fire still burned him. It did not stop—it was not a simple missile of elemental fire, but a master craft of cold anger and human subtlety by a woman who could plan and execute every stitch in an embroidered coverlet. She had not forgotten anything.
Shaken, Ash banked, and went for her. In the aethereal, he reached for her and found—another golden wall. He roared, and threw pure ops at her—great uncontrolled balls of the stuff, and she stood his assault undiminished, and then struck him again.
This time, he had her measure, and turned all but the slightest singe of her strike.
Four miles were nothing to his great wings—less than a minute. But for a minute she stood the whole force of his will, the whole of his wrath, the overwhelming and yet impotent force of his unchanelled might.
For that minute, Mag’s fire burned in his side, and she struck back six more times, at an increasing tempo.
Almost, he was afraid.
But in time—seventy beats of his great wings—he was above her, and in a single hiss of his bright breath she was burned to ash, her shields overcome, her will extinguished.
He had come far down in the air, from the heights above, and now that he was almost at the level of the river he could see the rout of his rearguard—something had smashed his boglins flat.
&nb
sp; But there were always more of them. The woods were still full, despite the triumph of some maggot lordling and his cattle, and he turned on one wingtip and roared his destruction into the upper camp, and Lord Wayland was burned, and the Grand Squire was badly scorched, and two hundred knights and half a generation of Brogat farmers died, breathing fire into their lungs.
He winged back over the battlefield west of the Hole and breathed again, and a generation of Hillmen cattle died, roasted. And then he turned to find the men. In his rage, he turned, and burned, losing altitude with every strike, until his vast wings blotted out the sun and he seemed to skim the very tops of the trees.
Tom Lachlan raised his sword over his head as the dragon appeared like a dark storm over the treetops, and suddenly there were faeries all about him.
The dragon was bigger than a castle. It was longer than the biggest building in Liviapolis—and it flew, like a great warship in the air, and it pushed before it a prow of invisible terror consequent to its size. Red Rowan and Willie Hutton, hard-faced killers, fell on their faces, Daud the Cow’s great axe fell from his nerveless fingers, and Donald Dhu cursed God, but Tom Lachlan raised his head.
“By the oath we swore to you, Wyrm! Now I demand ye! Avenge my kin! We stand inside the Circle!” he roared.
His voice was unheard in the wind of Ash’s passage—unheard, but not unfelt. He stood his ground, almost alone, against a creature a thousand times his size. But all around him came the faeries—a rush of them, like a coloured wind—and they suddenly flared like fire in new birch bark—exploding in all directions.
Hector’s voice said, Avenge me.
It was merest chance—or the will of God—that the dragon had just spent its breath, and was inhaling—and looking for a far more fearsome foe than the single, puny man. His great wings beat, he raised his head, and he flinched, unwitting, from the burst of colour and potent souls that the faeries mimicked—and his armoured belly almost touched the ground along the road as he tried to rise.
Bad Tom leapt from the back of his horse as high as he could reach, and his great sword, given him by the Wyrm, struck. The winged faeries bore him up for five beats of his great heart. The wound should have been no more than a flea bite to a man, but Tom’s arm was strong and his eye sure, and the great blade went deep and cut forty feet of belly flesh as the dragon swept on.
Tom fell to earth and rolled. Then he was back on his feet, sword over his head as great gouts of black blood fell to earth. He roared, “I hit the thing!” and then, “Lachlan for Aye!”
But the dragon had a new prey in his mind, and swept away. Because in answer to Tom Lachlan’s call, another great dragon was rising over the battlefield.
There was nowhere on the battlefield of Gilson’s Hole that men like Nita Qwan, moving carefully from tree to tree on the ever expanding envelopment of Thorn’s column—or boglins, like Sleck, now trying to keep his feet in the push to save the ridge top, or irks like Tilowindle, trying to make sense of the death of everyone about him, or bears like Flint, paw to claw with a stone troll at the very crest of the great ridge—nowhere that they could not see the two dragons rolling in massive aerial combat over the battle below and around them. Ash glowed black, and a blue fire still burned, undimmed by Mag’s death, and the smaller, sleeker Wyrm of Ercch, steel grey and brilliant scarlet, turned inside Ash’s bulk.
Both vast behemoths breathed, and the sky caught fire.
Thorn grunted as the Red Knight’s spearhead penetrated deep into his fiery shadow form, and he stumbled.
Then, with a twist, as the Red Knight prepared his last working, Thorn tore the spear from his cloak of shadow, dripping fluid, and cast it aside.
“My heart is not there, either,” he said, but his voice was ruined, and he stumbled forward.
“Simple lightning,” Gabriel said to Prudentia.
She obeyed. The statues whirled and the astrological signs lined up.
“Watch,” he said.
Catching up the thread he’d saved for weeks—the connection that had tethered Thorn to his great moth—Gabriel passed his simple working down it, like water down an aqueduct to a thirsty town.
“Like to like,” he said.
Thorn shuddered as the damage ripped through him under his shields, and fell, and his great wings of fire smote the earth, and the leaf mould caught—smoke rose from his ruin, and there was a scream like that of a woman giving birth and when Gabriel pushed forward Thorn’s form had vanished. But his staff fell with a sharp clatter, and his fiery wings burned a moment longer and then went out.
Gabriel put a hesitant foot on the staff—unsure of his victory—in the very moment that Ash struck the Faery Knight’s end of the line. The great serpent’s fire fell to earth and all but blinded him, and then he’d raised his shields—three of them—and covered the household and part of the red banda as the monster’s fire swept the ridge, killing a fifth of the company in four beats of his heart and then sweeping unchecked into the south. Gabriel was knocked to one knee by the sheer power of the bombardment of ops. But then the dragon turned away south, and he pushed his tired legs to lever his armoured body up. He could feel the sweat of fear like a cold, slimy hand on his back and guts. Something was wrong.
He was a few strides from the top of the ridge, and he ran forward, scooping his spear off the ground and discovering—to his shock—that his left hand was—gone. Along with much of his forearm. Simply—gone.
He fought the shock. It was all shock—the size of the dragon, his hand…
At the top, he could see.
At his feet writhed the vast bulk of an army still many times bigger than his own—already beaten to the ridge top, it had just been flayed by the dragon, who had cut a wider swathe through his own unprotected ranks than he had done to the company. His army had islands of hermetical defence—the Faery Knight, Duchess Mogon, Harmodius, Lord Krevak, Morgon Mortirmir and the Red Knight himself had all covered portions of their line.
“Oh, my God,” Gabriel said aloud. Even as he spoke, the dragon was struck—burned blue, and turned away, flying down the ridges and south.
To Mag. Gabriel knew what she had done—what the inevitable outcome must be—and he stood, transfixed, for most of the minute in which she held her own against a god. He watched the dragon dwindle, the fire burn, and saw each beat of the thing’s mighty wings as a sign it had failed to take her.
And then he awoke—he must use the time she gave, or it was for nothing.
“On me!” he roared. “Ganfroy!”
Ganfroy was a broken doll cast down on the rocks, never to rise again. His trumpet was bent under him.
Gabriel raised his own ivory horn and blew.
And they came.
Danved came, his sword broken in his hands, and he stooped and plucked a stone-headed war hammer from the corpse of a red-crested daemon. Bertran came with the standard and Francis Atcourt and Phillipe de Beause followed him. Cully came and Toby pushed himself off a rock and Cat Evil and hollow-eyed Diccon who had loved Nell and knew where her corpse lay, and Ricard Lantorn, painfully aware his brother had burned to death almost at his side, and Flarch, and Adrian Goldsmith and even Nicomedes—they all came and forced themselves into ranks, even as the pages brought forward the horses.
On the left, he could see Ser Michael, pointing down the hill. On the right, Ser Milus had lost half his lances in a single, devastating moment, and the white banda on the right had halted—shocked.
Milus went into the charred corpses of his men, and took up the pole on which the company’s old Saint Catherine had hung. And by some virtue—some working, some ancient rune—it still hung, so that when he raised it, grey ash flew, and the silk banner licked out like a tongue of flame.
There was a thin cheer. It was not much of a cheer, but in the circumstances—
Gabriel ran forward, ignoring the loss of his left hand. There was no pain, and very little blood. So far.
He turned, and raised his spear—and p
ointed it, one-handed, into the enemy below.
“Now!” he said. “Thorn didn’t beat you and the dragon couldn’t kill you, so now we are going to WIN.”
And instead of waiting for the enemy to come up the ridge, or even to see the result of the aerial combat, the company and their allies went down into the maelstrom of battle under the shadow of death and, when they struck, the monsters flinched.
Hartmut couldn’t take his eyes from the two dragons.
The rise of their great monster should, surely, have been the end of the conflict. But now—now, as their enemy came down the ridge to his waiting spearmen—he saw how much devastation the black dragon had wreaked. In stealing flesh, he had all but destroyed the vanguard that should have formed the left of the line, and his fire had blasted the daemons on his right and a thousand other creatures.
Thousands of boglins were locked in a vicious, chitinous battle at the crest of the ridge to his far right, and there—at the ridge’s steepest, stoniest top—great bears and stone trolls were locked in the static agony of melee.
To his own left, the enemy’s irks had begun to crest the ridge, and from beyond them an Outwaller arrow fell harmlessly among his men.
Despite everything, it was still in the balance. His men were well ordered, and fresh enough.
“Up the hill!” he called. “Straight into them.”
The brigans levelled their spear points, and began a slow march up the hill. The sailors loosed a volley of bolts.
He was facing men. He could see them—good plate armour, and good swords, and he grinned. Nothing about men ever made him afraid, and he drew his sword. As it burst into flame, his people cheered. Ser Cristan pointed at the burning sword and roared a challenge. Ser Louis began to move his mounted knights to fill the open ground to the left—to clear the enemy Outwallers.
Hartmut thought—I have them.
To his left, the enemy Outwallers began to sprint forward. They were bypassing him, which gave him an instant of puzzlement, and they were moments from being overrun by Ser Louis and the cavalry. But even as the sailors poured another withering volley into the armoured men on the slopes above, they paid a terrible price as the longbow arrows fell amongst them…
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