“Thirty thousand years is a long time,” the bishop said.
Lord Krevak nodded. “Even to my people, that is too long.” He shrugged. “Too long to take seriously.”
Desiderata glanced at her captain and then leaned towards Harmodius. “I see how this could forever alter everything. But I do not see how it alters the next few days. Is there a weapon? A way to prevent this manifestation?”
Mogon now spoke. “No-I see it. Manifestation is power and weakness.”
Harmodius nodded. “If Ash is here,” he said, “he is not anywhere else, and when he is entirely here-” He paused. “Then I think he can be destroyed. Only when they distribute themselves are they immortal. And less powerful.”
Gabriel nodded. “Now I am not yawning. You want to kill a god.”
“It will be very difficult,” Harmodius said.
Gabriel winced. “We’re going to be pinched hard to win a simple field battle to protect our crops against heavy numbers and better levels of ops.”
“That part I leave to you,” Harmodius said. “Our battle will be fought here, in the aethereal, and it will all be about misdirection.”
“Mine, too,” Gabriel said. “I feel I need to remind you all of something.”
“Speak, man,” the Faery Knight said.
Gabriel looked around. “As a knight it is my duty to protect the weak. My first duty. You may be right, but please, old man, admit that you may have all this backwards. My duty is to protect the peasants in the fields, the merchants, the women bearing babies.” He looked around. “I agree that the game of gods should stop. I hate it. But men play it and wardens play it and dragons play it and wyverns and bears. It is not nearly as simple as killing a god. So let us focus, your grace and my lady and lords-on beating Thorn.”
The Faery Knight nodded agreement. “We may not even be on the right side,” he said. “We may be too puny to even understand the sides.”
Gabriel smiled at him. “I can tell a good company by riding through the streets of their camp-once. Let me meet one whore, one servant, and I know their captain.” His eyes narrowed. “I will not debate theology with you, my lords. But I know Ash by his works. I know two of these others-and whatever they may intend…” He shrugged.
“They run better companies?” the Faery Knight suggested.
“Just so,” the Red Knight agreed, and they shared a brief smile. “I only mean this, Harmodius. You want to destroy a race of gods so that we can be free. I say-a pox on it. I serve the Queen and the Emperor and my own interest-everyone serves someone. Let our lords be just and generous, and we prosper.”
Harmodius growled. “There speaks an aristocrat who has never known the lash.”
Gabriel spat. “You lie.”
“You-you, of all creatures, will forfeit your freedom?” Harmodius shook his head. “I think it is you who lies.”
“I say, fight one battle at a time and do not rule out any ally.” Gabriel put a hand to his head-a familiar headache.
“I say, they are false allies and will enslave us, generation after generation and you mortgage the future to win a battle today.” Harmodius was adamant. “They are all equally our enemies.”
Desiderata sat wrapped in thought. Gabriel could guess what had cut her. The others considered, each in their own way.
Gabriel took a deep aethereal breath. A meaningless symbol of a breath-a conversational habit.
“There must be other Powers,” he said.
Harmodius nodded. “The Necromancer is one. The being Rashidi identifies as Rot is another. Who I suspect is leading the assault in Galle. Or managing it.”
“Dragons?” Krevak asked.
“Not all Powers are dragons,” Exrech said. “At least one Kraal still bloats the earth.”
“Thorn seeks to become a Power.” Gabriel raised an eyebrow.
Harmodius nodded heavily. “And Sister Amicia is on the very verge of becoming one.”
“Like the dragons?” Gabriel asked.
“I don’t actually know,” Harmodius admitted slowly. “Al Rashidi doesn’t know either.”
Desiderata raised her head. “This is too deep for me,” she said. She looked at the Bishop of Albinkirk.
He smiled. “That God’s will and love extends to every level of the cosmos comes as no surprise to me,” he said. “Beyond that, I would not comment, except to say that to plot the death of a creature, however powerful, who has done you no harm is awfully like murder, however you may see the consequences for future generations. But then, I am but a priest, and I fear that even violence in the defence of the weak is-sin. Murder.”
The Faery Knight looked at him in wonder. “Are there other children of men who think as you do?” he asked.
The bishop nodded. “A few. We call ourselves Christians.”
The Faery Knight laughed.
Even Gabriel had to laugh.
Harmodius nodded like a man waking from sleep. “Your grace-I know this will be painful. But my sense-from stories I have heard, and your very presence-is that you have already faced our foe. Directly. In the aethereal.”
Desiderata appeared as she always had in the aethereal, as a beautiful young woman in a kirtle of gold, barefoot, with a ring of daisies in her hair and a belt of them around her waist. In the aethereal, she seemed both wanton and matronly, the very embodiment of woman’s power.
Now Gabriel, who had healed her and knew her aethereal and outward self, looked at her and saw how clearly her ordeal in Harndon had marked her. In the aethereal, she still wore the form that she had had a year ago in the real. But pregnancy and torment had put crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes and a different colour in her face. She had more gravity-more presence-than she had a year ago. But he would never have noticed the difference until he saw her golden form in the aethereal.
She did not smile. But nor did she wince, or stumble.
“I have faced Ash,” she said quietly.
The aethereal was still.
“It was not a straight contest of powers. In which I would have been bested instantly. And I think-if I may pre-empt Master Harmodius-that he dwells in the aethereal and that our ‘real’ is very difficult for him. But for the battle of will-will, with ops as a weapon, to use your university terms-I built this.”
Memories can be very difficult in the aethereal -the memory palace lives only in the user’s mind, and the weakness of memory can make anything fluctuate. Living memory-actual events-can be subject to an infinite number of seductions and degradations, as every hermeticist knows-delusions of success or defeat, failures of will, troubles of image.
But for most casters, memories of direct manipulations of hermetical power have themselves a glow of solid experience, and the Queen’s memory of the climaxes of Ash’s assault on her wall were vivid, complex, and so fraught with emotion that Mogon groaned and Gabriel found himself weeping.