Prior Wishart bit his tongue on a retort. She saw him do it and wished she hadn’t needed to be so short with him. It seemed to her that every day the men and women around her handled their swords and their workings too willingly-that this tendency to use force marked the human condition more clearly than all the other sins of her race.
In prayer, she had begun to consider if it was men-and women-who were the monsters.
The Prior-whose only experience of the Wild had mostly involved killing it-clenched his teeth but shrugged. “Sister, you have talents beyond most of ours. And without your warning, we’d have no time to make these decisions. Please-assay what you can.”
Amicia smiled. “You must stay well back from me,” she insisted. “When I release them, I guess that the sorcerer will strike at me.”
Prior Wishart shook his head. “Then stay with us, and we’ll fight or fall together.”
Tom Lachlan laughed. “A wyvern and a pair o’ ’ghasts?” he said. “Tell you what, lass. You stay here. I’ll go kill them.” He smiled at her. “I need a bit of a dust-up.”
Amicia shook her head. “No. Please-more killing will not help our cause. And right now the sorcerer is having it all his own way. I know-better than most-what the captain intends. Let me try this.”
“To distract him?” Prior Wishart asked.
“Because it is the right thing to do!” Amicia said, surprised at her own vehemence. “We are religious, not killers like-”
Bad Tom smiled and all his teeth gleamed. “You mean me, lassie? Aye. I’m a killer.” He leaned forward. “I warrant you’ll want me around before this day is older.” He was annoyed, she could see.
She ignored him and his annoyance. Amicia dismounted and walked forward on the path alone. They were on the western road, and she was aware in some distant place in her mind that the gorge and the great falls were only a few miles to the east. But that was not her work, not today or any other day-memories of that Amicia were increasingly difficult to access. She shut them away, or merely forgot them. Something was happening inside her, some cascade of belief and realization.
She banished her doubts and new discoveries, reached out for her sisters at Lissen Carak and then reached into the sky.
She touched the wyvern. Wyverns were, she knew, strong, almost elemental folk-stubborn, and difficult to break to anyone’s will.
This one had been broken-or at least bent. The binding was unsubtle and of immense power. Her answer was more subtle, but the result was never in doubt-no matter how thick a rope is, a knife will cut it. Amicia severed the binding.
The wyvern, six hundred feet above her, turned-and flew away, with a low, deep cry of anger.
The second wyvern she liberated more quickly.
Fifty leagues to the north, while pushing his forces across an Alder break so wide and so tortuous that Thorn feared his army would sink into the mud rather than cross, he felt the opposition.
Ash became next to him, an insubstantial black mist that coalesced into a young child with two heads. “Fuck her and her piety,” Ash screamed in his harmonious chorus of voices. “I hate humans.”
Thorn felt ops torn from him and from the world around them. Trees died. An irk shaman five hundred winters old was leached of his powers and then his soul.
Thorn, I am not yet of this world. Give me your power and I’ll teach this child of men to play with one of my bindings.
Thorn had little choice. But-greatly daring-he attempted to hide potentia in the new place in his head.
Ash cast. It was like the sun setting-beautiful, remorseless, full of awe and wonder. Thorn had never seen a working so puissant and so close up-the calling of a star from the heavens was child’s play by comparison. As he reached the climax, Ash said, “Is she the one, though? Is this the will that has defaced my will?”
Thorn had no idea what that might mean.
Ash said the word. Thorn heard it and for a moment, he looked on the abyss, the dark between the spheres where evil lived and no angel dared fly.
On freeing the third wyvern, Amicia knew her adversary had accepted her challenge. She felt his resistance stiffen through her reversal of the summoning.
She felt the chill, damp air of the counter building in the north.
But she was close to her home-close enough to feel the pull of Lissen Carak and to know the comfort of the choir of sisters who waited there. They were singing. She reached into the flowing stream of their powers and lifted her hands into the air. On her bridge, she stood in the same posture, almost on tiptoe with her hands high above her head.
And as the great summoning, a masterwork, descended on her, she did something new-something that she had never before attempted, or even, before that very moment, thought possible.
Instead of answering power with power, she instead pronounced on the underpinnings of his creation an act of annihilation. She did not shield-she denied. She did not resist-she refuted.
Tom Lachlan sat on his horse watching the chit. A beautiful woman, wasted on the fleshless life of the convent-he could see what Gabriel saw in her. And when she stretched herself to cast her witchery, he almost drooled.
The burst of light took them all by surprise. One moment, she stood quietly, perhaps twenty yards ahead of them, and in another, she burned like the brightest torch imaginable. Just on the edge between one beat of his great heart and another, he saw her-she seemed a second sun illuminating the world, and all the world around them reflected the light of her, so that he could see Wishart’s wisdom and boldness, his own reckless courage, Kenneth Dhu’s boundless generosity, as if they were mirrors of virtue reflecting her greatness.
Wishart said, “Oh, my God.”
The world seemed to invert. For a fraction of a grain of sand of an instant of time, Tom Lachlan and all the knights by him felt as if they had no selves-as if they stood outward on the rim of the sphere, gazing in at the workings of tiny men and monsters, and the inversion was such that men fell to their knees and muttered that they had been one with God.
Even Tom Lachlan.
Amicia, pierced and burning, said, “Black is white.”
Ash roared.
Thorn didn’t cower-his form would not allow him to cower. But Ash’s semblance had changed and he rose like a cloud of fury over Thorn’s twisting stone form.
“Unfair!” he roared. “Thorn-we must move quickly.”
Thorn stood stolidly in water to his stony knees. “In this?” he asked.
The voice of the shadowy dragon ate at him like acid.
“One of them is at the very edge of Being. And she-she Denied me.” Ash’s eyes held not rage but fascination. “I must unmake her before my enemy has a potent ally. Forget Dorling. We’ll have sweeter meat.”
Thorn felt that he was speaking to a mad thing.
But Ash’s voice calmed. The roar of death and the vein of ice retreated and there was intellect and command. “No,” Ash said. “I must consider. I cannot have a foe on my flank-and the Wyrm, contemptible as he is in his bookish indolence, could be a powerful foe. I must force his talons to open. But that woman-a curse on all humans and their endless striving. She will unbalance us all. She doesn’t even know what the game is.”
Thorn thought he knew. And he thought he might know of whom Ash spoke.
And Ash had not detected his hoarding of potentia.
Thorn thought many things, and he kept them to himself.
Amicia found herself on her knees.
For a long, long time-almost an eternity-she had experienced something she could only call the joy of creation.
In her mind, the choir sang on.
One voice was not a woman’s voice, but a man’s.
“Amicia,” he said. “Come back. It is too soon.”