She raised no shield in her instant to act. Instead, she cut him with an image-an erotic image, powered by her rich imagination and all her phantasms, full of the smells and tastes of sex.
Thorn roared. The sound shook the walls-soldiers hid their heads or trembled.
Cracks appeared in the stone of his skin, and moisture poured forth.
Damaged, he lashed back with hate.
Her laughter was extinguished as he killed her in one mighty blow, the working like a stone fist of ops carefully tended for the moment-
But not for this moment. Thorn stood in the fastness of his dark palace. His frustration was immeasurable. He collected his stored ops, the power he had saved to battle her, and cast it at the great gates of Ticondaga. The gates exploded in a hail of stone and concrete and lethal wood splinters. Heedless of his own Wild infantry or the Galles and Outwallers who thought him an ally, he began to call down the stars themselves from the heavens and hurl them at the fortress, and his aim had only grown more accurate since the taking of Albinkirk.
Like a fist of God, the first rock struck the high tower from which Ghause had cast, and blew it to atoms, leaving only a glow of incredible heat and glasslike slag where her corpse had been cooling in the high tower.
Aneas had enough talent to know the breath when his mother died-and to know what it meant.
He was in the inner yard, by the doors of the great hall, and he had a dozen veteran men-at-arms to hand.
“Follow me,” he said.
Muriens men-at-arms didn’t ask questions.
The Earl of Westwall had trouble with his eye-double vision, rather than no vision. But he armed as soon as his men told him of the size of the assault, and he was waiting in person when the gates were blown in by sorcery.
He was knocked from his feet. And as he struggled to rise to his knees, he knew she was dead. Nothing but her death would have allowed the spells on the gates to give way.
He would have cried. But there was no time. Stone trolls were coming up the ramp of rubble that had once been the gatehouse.
“You old bitch,” he said with enormous fondness. And went at the trolls, and his death, with a high heart.
Gabriel had never been in this kind of sorcerous duel before. Neither, he suspected, had Harmodius-no help was coming from that quarter.
The spear cut the curse the way a heavy, sharp knife would cut a tapestry-with immense difficulty. The curse seemed to rip more than cut. The felt analogy was shredded into tougher filaments that tried to bind the spear in place. Further, tendrils of the curse gathered to him-his aethereal legs were matted with the stuff.
He cut back on a new line, amazed that the feeling of powering the cut with his waist and shoulders was exactly like using the weapon in the real and then such thoughts were lost in the heart-breaking futility of the third, weakest cut.
The curse was clearly winning.
It didn’t seem to do him any harm.
So he stopped fighting, pointed the spear at the heart of it, and spoke one word in High Archaic.
“Fume.”
If Amicia preferred God’s power to his, he’d use it himself.
The curse burned. It burned best where he had cut it with the spear.
A tendril of the curse drifted across his eyes and another across his mouth even as he poured power into the fire. He tried to move the spear, but it was locked in place, a thousand black ribbons criss-crossing on the haft.
He brought his first casting-the shield-to his face, and the energy forced the tendrils away. He took a breath and cast, imagining his memory palace to find a piece of Mag’s superb ice bridge working and throw it into the curse.
Water, fire and ice.
It was one way to unmake felt.
Amicia felt Gabriel leave her, and then she was with Desiderata in a castle of golden bricks with walls as tall as ten men and lofty towers.
“Why didn’t he come with us?” Desiderata asked. “I could use his strong arms on my battlements.”
“He always has to do things himself,” Amicia said.
The wave of black water crashed against the stone palace. It was clever, the water-it went over the battlements and the towers, filling the courtyards and the spaces between.
But it could not enter the citadel, and it could not seem to undermine the walls.
Amicia raised a shield of brilliant gold, and another of sparkling green-no mean feat in the aethereal itself.
The magnificent golden outer wall collapsed.
“Oh, my God,” Desiderata said. “Oh, blessed Virgin-this is not the dark lord of the dungeon.”
The aethereal ground on which the golden walls rested began to erode away, disintegrating like the dream it was.
Amicia was beyond anything of her experience of the hermetical-or anything else. She could only bow her head and pray.
And continue to flood her shields with all the power that she possessed.
The citadel walls began to collapse from the bottom.
“My baby!” screamed Desiderata. She reached out, and put her hands on the walls of her palace and held them with her own will, commanding their obedience, and she began to build a flood of gold to link them.
The black water leached through the widening cracks and puddled on the new golden floor-and began to rise.
Outside was a gale of laughter.
Desiderata raised her head and her eyes met Amicia’s with no fear. Only pride.
“There he is, come to see my fall,” she said.
Between sleeping and waking…
Gabriel moved the spear easily, back and forth, and hunks of the curse like dead goat-hair fell away.
It was a waste of will, however, as the curse was suddenly dead, unpowered. Impotent.
Or complete.
Gabriel retreated like a beaten army-but one with its rearguard intact. Or that was his analogy, and analogies matter in the aethereal. He chose to retreat through the door of his palace, because he could see nothing but the tattered remnants of the curse around him-no Amicia, and no Queen.
The door was shut. He had a moment of panic before he realized that, almost by definition, he had the key. He opened it, and there was Pru.
He slammed the door shut, and leaned against it, spear in hand. “Told you I’d be back,” he said.
Prudentia, who always rose to his arrogance, said nothing. Only, when he’d breathed a few times, she said, “You should know. Your mother is dead.”
Of course she was dead.
The curse was unpowered.
A host of thoughts came into his head, and filled it.
The back of her hand struck him. “Are you an idiot?” she screamed.
Her hands folded across his back in a warm embrace.
Crouching over Prudentia’s body.