Gabriel found Harmodius looking at him. “You are unsurprised.”
“We shared the same head during all your research in Liviapolis,” Gabriel said.
Mogon shifted her bulk. “This is no news at all to the Qwethnethogs.” She nodded as her crest, inflated when tense, subsided like a fashionable beret. “We came here from somewhere else. Every birthling knows it.”
Harmodius nodded. “There are two major pieces to my story. One-we are a crossroads. The other-we are pieces in a chess game.” He waved his hand. “The two fit together to explain everything we see around us. We have sixty races that compete for resources. We know of peoples exterminated-we have the rubble of their works, and in Liviapolis, even records of some of their science.”
Mogon nodded. “The Odine.”
Harmodius sighed. “The Odine are but one, and I would not count them destroyed. But they are perhaps the most obvious. Let me make this quick. Powers-great Powers-vie to take and hold our crossroads. They bring the races bound to them to do the heavy fighting. To hold the ground, as Gabriel would say.”
“Why?” Gabriel asked. “I mean, what’s the prize? More slaves?”
Mogon sat slowly back. “Yes,” she said. It was not an answer to Gabriel, but a comment. “Yes, this is shockingly simple. Of course.”
Harmodius nodded. “Another of my order, a great man, far, far away in Dar as Salaam, has more access to the oldest of man’s records than I.” He looked around. “And older records still, not made by men. This is his life’s work,” he said, and produced, in the aethereal, a scrap of memory parchment.
“Five names. Five of perhaps seventeen creatures whose powers are like gods. Little, petty, scrapping gods.” He held the list out.
Gabriel read them all at once, as one did in the aethereal.
Tar
Ash
Lot
Oak
Rot
“These are not true names,” Desiderata said. The names shook her-it was written on her face.
Harmodius shook his head. “I think we know them all,” he said.
Gabriel sighed. “Do they divide up into good and evil?” he asked. His tone was sarcastic, and the Faery Knight laughed and slapped his thigh.
“They all use the same tactics of manipulation and gross coercion,” Harmodius said. “Draw your own conclusions.”
Gabriel thought of Master Smythe. “I would merely emphasize that my side has a smaller body count and tends to minimize-negative outcomes.”
“One of them is more honest than the others,” he said.
Harmodius shrugged. “My order has made a choice: to fight them all.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “How’s that going for you?” he asked. “That sounds like a typical un-pragmatic solution-something from a classroom. Noble, and doomed. I grant you their power. If they are divided among themselves-surely the classical solution is to use them against each other?”
The Faery Knight stretched his immortally long legs and shook his head. “This is either brilliant or rampant madness. Ser Gabriel, what makes you think these great powers, who are to us like gods, can be manipulated?”
Gabriel looked not at Harmodius, but at the Queen. “Are they all great dragons, do you think? The four, or the seventeen?”
Harmodius nodded. “We think they are all dragons.”
Gabriel sat back. “This is the fascinating cutting edge of hermetical philosophy, no doubt, but-when we fight-” He looked around. “We’re fighting Ash. Ash, making a bid to manifest directly into our sphere, and control the gates directly, one of which-perhaps the single most important one-is under Lissen Carak.” He frowned. “Ash is a dragon?”
“Lissen Carak was the home and sacred ground of my people,” Mogon said.
“And before that the Odine, and before them the Kraal, and so on and so on.” Harmodius raised a hand. “If we do nothing, the cycle continues forever.”
“Fascinating,” Gabriel allowed. “But not immediately affecting my dispositions.” He made a face. “Except that it’s clear that he wants to fight at Albinkirk-he or Thorn or whoever controls that horde. And because he wants to fight here, I’m tempted to fight somewhere else.” Gabriel leaned forward. “Does your Ifriquy’an know more gates? I would give a great deal to understand the geographia of this aethereal battlefield. If I’m understanding this at all.”
Harmodius nodded. He withdrew a second sheet of the memory parchment. “Lissen Carak, as we all knew or at least guessed. In the Citadel of Arles, in Arelat.” He nodded to the Queen.
Gabriel flinched as if he’d been bitten. “Of course!” he said. “I was there. The King of Galle tried to take Arles by treachery-a long tale. But I was there. I knew something felt-hollow.”
“Hollow?” the Queen said. “I, too, know a place that feels hollow in my soul.”
“I believe there’s a lost gate under the palace in Harndon.” Harmodius exchanged a long look with the Queen.
The Queen leaned back and let go a breath. “There is something there. An emptiness.”
Harmodius nodded. “Let us say Harndon. Assuredly there is one in Dar as Salaam. I have felt it myself. In fact, it set Al Rashidi on his investigations, almost a hundred years ago. And of course, once you understand the game and the pieces, the whole of the Umbroth Wars make sense. The not-dead are just someone else’s tools to take the gate.”
Gabriel began to rock back and forth like a small child.
“Arles. In Arelat. Where the King of Galle has just, according to the Etruscans, been badly beaten by a mighty army of the Wild.” Gabriel steadied himself.
Prior Wishart’s face grew still, though even in the aethereal his fear showed.
The Queen looked from one to another.
“Umbroth Wars, gentles?” she asked.
“Almost a hundred years of attacks by the not-dead and the one we call Necromancer on the people of Dar as Salaam, the Abode of Peace,” Harmodius said. “Before the attacks started, there were green fields. Now there is desert.” He looked at Gabriel. “Rashidi says there are seven gates in this sphere. Or, to be complete, he says there are at least seven gates. And to that I must add that the terrain of today need not be the terrain on which the gates were set. This contest is so old that there might be gates under glaciers, inside volcanoes, or under the sea for all I know.”
Prior Wishart drew a deep breath. “How long ago were the gates built?” he asked.
Harmodius didn’t answer at first. He looked from one to another to another, around the circle. None flinched. The Faery Knight grinned and showed his teeth.
“You might have been a mountebank,” the Faery Knight said. “Jussst tell them!”
“At least thirty thousand years,” Harmodius said.
The bishop sighed. “My scripture tells me that the earth is between six and seven thousand years old,” he said.
Harmodius shrugged. “It might simply be wrong.”
The bishop acknowledged this with a nod.
“It might refer to somewhere else,” Gabriel said. “We are no more from here than the Duchess Mogon.”