The cloud of spores flared and was gone.
Another dead horse exploded, and another.
Mortirmir cast, and cast.
Somewhere between the sixth horse and the ninth, he saw a more elegant solution. He dug the tip of his dagger into the sticky black stuff and used a simple like to like equivocation, and then displaced the stuff with fire.
He had not thought through all the ramifications of his working, and he was shocked to see several horses burn-screaming-or explode into fire without ever seeming to have contracted the plague. He had thought far enough ahead to protect the original sample on the wyvern’s talons.
The rest burned.
An hour later, Ser Milus looked over his rearguard-now fewer than one man in ten was mounted.
They’d lost horses but none of the oxen. They’d lost almost all the company’s remounts and more than half of the war horses.
They were on foot on the rolling, gravelly fields at the foot of the Green Hills.
Milus did what he could, ordering the baggage wagons loaded with armour and weapons, to make his column march faster. The Emperor pressed ahead. Milus had all but ordered him to do so. They had the captain’s schedule, after all.
It was the following morning before they received an imperial messenger, and they could send the word to the other columns. By then, it was too late.
North of Albinkirk, a deep V-formation of barghasts struck Ser John Crayford’s powerful armoured column at last light, just as the camp was being prepared. The bird-like reptiles swept in over the ancient trees… and were met by a rising, steel-tipped sleet of arrows. Three died immediately, and six more of the great avians were badly wounded, and their captain turned away, shrieking his rage. The attack was inept and the humans well prepared.
It was sheer bad luck that the youngest barghast to die fell almost atop the horse lines.
Mag’s response was more effective, but she came to the problem late, summoned in the falling darkness only after the horse herd was infected and the spores were flying. But she, too, solved the spores with a like to like working. She was a far better healer than Morgon, and managed to save more than a few horses already infected. But she had to treat them one by one, and they tended to die too fast for her to be truly effective.
She saved almost seventy-five war horses. They lost almost a thousand animals altogether, and when the sun rose the next day, Ser John was still forty miles south of Dorling, and his whole column was on foot.
“Why not simply set the plague-motes on the men?” Thorn asked-although he already knew the answer.
“Men are much stronger against such sorceries than animals,” Ash said. “And I want the men all together. Their time will come, and they will experience my power. But I will not spring my trap too soon.”
He desires a great battle on his own terms-a great battle in which many will die. And every death will enrich him and his infernal eggs, until they all hatch. Even the one in my head. Thorn considered this a moment.
And then he will manifest, I believe. Is it blood? Is it the fleeing of souls into the aether? What is the source of his power?
Why can he not see the Dark Sun?
If I were close enough to the Dark Sun…
Thorn passed the time, as he moved his army of the Wild south in the thick, wooded hills and swamps of the southern Adnacrags, in moving things and creatures on the so-called Wyrm’s Way. On his fourth attempt, he stood holding a turtle egg in his hand, and when he arrived at the end of his displacement, his hand was empty. The turtle egg lay in a pool of yellow yolk where he had been standing. He had successfully left it behind.
A raven swept in and began to eat the egg.
A raptor fell from the sky and drove the raven off the egg and began to eat it.
A barghast fell silently on the red-tailed hawk, slew it and began to eat it. When the barghast was done, it ate the egg as a dessert.
Thorn nodded.
The risk was, on the one hand, incredible, and on the other, almost banal. Ash surely intended his demise-in fact, he suspected he was nothing but the edible outer parts of the egg.
Not far to the west, the dark-bearded magister rode to the gates of Lissen Carak, and tapped gently with his staff. Behind him, the plain by the river-burned flat by last year’s battles and now choked with raspberry bushes and alder clumps-was trampled by the Faery Knight’s chevauchée. Out on the plain were four hundred irkish knights, in magnificent harnesses of bronze and gold, some riding stags while others rode horses. Behind them came Bill Redmede and three hundred Jacks and, behind them, a veritable tide of boglins. The rear was brought up by magnificent, alien bands of Outwallers in war paint and more irks, these tall and thin as ash trees, carrying heavy axes on their bronze-byrnie’d shoulders.
When her door warden and her sergeants informed her, Miriam went to the gate in person. She went out on the hoardings alone, covered by a pair of crossbowmen in each of the gate towers.
She did not recognize the man below her outside the portcullis at all. He had black and grey hair and a heavy face with a long, aquiline nose. He rode a bony horse.
“I am the Magister Harmodius,” called the man on the bony horse.
“You’ve changed, then,” she said.
“Yes,” Harmodius said, as if impatient. “I’ve changed bodies.”
“And sides, I suspect,” Miriam said.
Harmodius shook his head. “We have fifty prisoners we wish to release to you. They have not been harmed.”
The garrison of the Westwall castle was marched up to the gate, bedraggled and terrified. They’d lived some days in an army composed of rebels and monsters, and they had, with some justice, expected to be eaten.
“And then you’ll be on your way?” Miriam asked, hiding her fears.
Harmodius, if it was indeed the magister, shook his head. “We are for our own purposes,” he said.
“You are not welcome,” Miriam said. “We hold this fortress for the King. If you make war on the King, get you gone.”
Harmodius raised his hand. “Hear me, Miriam. We are not in open conflict with any force. The Faery Knight has marched to save some of his own people. They must be nearby. Let us only find them and shelter them, and our thanks will be yours forever.”
Miriam shook her head. “You have betrayed your King and your God,” she said. “Even now, these dreadful things feast on the dead at Ticondaga. And you have the effrontery to suggest that we let you camp on our plain? I cannot stop you, but by the God I worship, traitor, when you come for this fortress I will make you and your dark master rue it.”
“Wait!” Harmodius begged.
But Miriam was gone from the battlements. The dark stone echoed his words, and they were lost in the air.
“Damn,” he muttered.
Just south of Albinkirk and Southford, three barghasts and a pair of wyverns circled endlessly like late-summer deer flies over the tree-shaded paths at the northward end of the Royal Road.
Amicia detected them after morning prayer, shortly after her first communion with the choir of her sisters at Lissen Carak in many days. By mid-morning she felt them as a presence-not particularly malign, to her new consciousness, but most definitely hostile. She enlightened Ser Thomas and her escort of knights of the Order.
To Prior Wishart, she said, “I would like it if you would allow me to try my own way on these creatures before you turn to violence.” She reached through her many links to Sister Miriam, as well.