Silence.
“Good. Company will wheel to the right by subsections forming a column of fours. March.” The company’s many subsections made quarter wheels, so that the whole manoeuvred like Moreans from being a long line three horsemen deep to a column four wide facing off to the right, down the road.
“Halt,” he called, and each section alligned itself.
He raised his hammer over his head and winced. Most of his body hurt this morning. He shook his head and lowered the hammer.
The captain rode to the head of his column, where Toby and Nell and the rest of the casa waited. To the east, the sun crested the mountains of Morea. Ser Michael cantered up.
“The prince hasn’t even awakened yet,” he said.
The captain nodded. “Then we leave him behind.”
Ser Michael nodded. “That’ll go over well,” he said.
The captain frowned and raised his hammer again. “March!” he roared.
Chapter Thirteen
De La Marche died in the storming of Ticondaga. He didn’t die on the battlements, cutting his way in. He died in the sack, when children were being destroyed and eaten, when men who’d begged for quarter were fed to monsters by cheering sailors, when a hundred atrocities passed in a few beats of a terrified victim’s heart.
De La Marche stood in the yard running slick with fresh blood and tried to stop it, and a stone troll made a pulp of his head. Boglins ate part of him as he lay there and, later, something with too many legs ripped one of his arms off his corpse and took it away into the darkness.
Thorn stood like a great stone tree in the courtyard, watching. He did not move much-a waste of energy. He merely observed. The storming and consequent workings had robbed him of a great deal of his power, at least temporarily, and he had not had the replenishment from Ghause that he had anticipated.
The sack went on around him.
He saw De La Marche protest-saw him stand between predator and prey, and saw him go down. And later he saw the trenoch-a swamp thing-feast on the corpse and take some away for its disgusting young.
Thorn was also digesting a feast, but his feast was one of the mind.
Ser Hartmut came and stood beneath Thorn’s great form. He said nothing, but also watched as men behaved worse than beasts and predators fed.
The garrison of Ticondaga provided a great deal of sport.
And eventually, when the attackers were sated, when even Kevin Orley’s warriors sank on their haunches in disgust or shock or merely fatigue, Ash came.
His presence seemed to fill the yard, and Thorn had the disconcerting notion that the entity was feeding there, too. But he again manifested as a pair of fools, in filthy motley, who spoke with one brass voice.
“Look at them,” he said. He pointed a stick shaped like a snake at where two sailors, Etruscan mercenaries or Galles, were tormenting a man whose screams had almost been exhausted. “Look at them. Give them license, and they show what they really are.”
Thorn didn’t turn his head. “What are they, Master?”
“Worse than anything the Wild ever conjured,” Ash said. “Men are the cruellest and most vile creatures that have ever come to this place. Servants only of their own corruption and wickedness.”
Thorn did not disagree.
“One of my other plans has miscarried,” Ash said. “So I must ask you to march sooner, on Dorling.”
Thorn was still working on the things he’d learned in the moments during and after Ghause’s death. The out-welling of power-the incandescent ops-
He had learned much. And he was still pulling at some of the twisted ends, even as he wove others into new barriers.
In fact, Thorn was busy knotting and splicing around the black hole that stood somewhere in his mind. The cascade of thoughts by which he’d reached certain conclusions was hard to reconstruct, but he knew he’d taken some of Ghause’s memories in his unsuccessful attempt to subsume her. One of them had triggered something.
The black hole in his mind was the same size and shape as the black eggs he carried. It had been put there at the same time, by the same hand.
For the same reason.
He was, himself, incubating something. He had an excellent idea of exactly what that was.
He had begun to take the steps required to deceive his master, and perhaps-to survive.
And more.
“One of your plans miscarried?” Thorn asked gravely.
“I cannot be everywhere,” Ash hissed. “And the bitch Queen and her servants were there before me.” The jesters-shaped like misshapen children with fat bodies and long, thin limbs-both giggled. And spat.
“Can you not?” Thorn asked, trying to mask his interest. He was weaving a net of the insubstantial stuff in which the mind built the palace, and he was endeavouring to use it to build a deception, so that Ash would see only what he expected.
Ser Hartmut grunted. “To whom are you speaking, Sorcerer?” he asked.
Thorn pointed a stony finger. “Do you not see two capering children, dressed in motley?” he asked.
Ser Hartmut shook his head. “I see many terrible things,” he said. “But no jesters.”
Thorn considered this.
Ash said, “No, even I cannot be everywhere. And you must have learned by now how opaque everything becomes-like muddy water-when too many fingers stir it.”
Thorn considered this statement, too. In his head, his will was madly building, throwing up beaver dams of obfuscation behind thickets of deception between his thinking space and the area around the blackness.
“It doesn’t matter much,” Ash said. “I’ve out-witted her anyway, and she’s left with her concentration on the wrong moment and the wrong avatar. So the loss of a few pawns-even my favourites-is no great loss.”
Thorn thought that if the mad jesting twins were, themselves, people, then in fact, Ash was betraying fury, humiliation and loss.
“Be that as it may,” the darkness said. “It’s time to reveal a little more of our hand and limit the damage. Have you seen this?” Ash asked, and disclosed a nested set of workings, a box within a box within a box.
The whole was so labyrinthine that Thorn’s head reeled.
“I had no idea,” he said. “That life was so small.”
“Small, and wild, all the way down to the smallest,” Ash cackled. “And sometimes the manipulation of the smallest is of the greatest moment. On to Dorling, Journeyman!”
Thorn listened to the benighted children cackle and thought, He has, somewhere, lost a battle. And he means to betray me. He is not God, nor yet Satan.
I can do this. Very well.
“We must march to Dorling,” Thorn said to Ser Hartmut. “As soon as we can.”
Ser Hartmut chuckled darkly. “Perhaps when all the women are dead and the fires are out, you’ll get this-horde-to move again. My experience is that most creatures, and not just men, take what they can and return home. Most creatures do not see war as a means to an end. It is merely an end.”
Indeed, over the next day, almost as many creatures of the Wild left his army as joined it. New creatures and bands of men came in every day-Outwallers, bandits, cave trolls, small tribes of boglins under their shamans and many of the bigger creatures, too-a whole flight of wyverns Thorn had never seen before, from far to the north, and a new, strong band of wardens, big, heavily built saurians from north of the Squash Country-hereditary enemies of Mogon’s and her ilk.