And from it rose-
One wing. It was long, and a deep blue-black, shot with veins of softly glowing purple black, and it moved.
It moved with an elegant lethality.
Ser Hartmut was still having trouble with the scale, and doubted his eyes.
The rising wing’s passage knocked him and his horse to the ground.
Mag rose to her feet.
“Here he comes,” she said aloud. Which was interesting, as she was alone. There was not another soul-damned, blessed, or otherwise-in the first line of forts.
Just as she had arranged. Lord Wayland and the Grand Squire and their troops had withstood two assaults from an almost unimaginable horde of unsupported boglins. The northern Brogat levy had fought-with her hermetical support-until they had filled the marsh to the front and all the ditches with dead monsters.
Now the enemy was massing on the far side of the marsh-readying another assault. And Lord Wayland’s men were delighted to obey the order to march for the rear, the higher, safer ground.
Mag stayed. Mag had her own plan.
“Here I come, John,” she said, as if her love were right there, with her.
Like the whisper of rain coming on a summer’s day, he came-a black cloud, a coalescing.
Mag rose on her tiptoes and poured fire into the formation of the monster miles to the north. She loosed her working in the aethereal in the moment that the thing was moving to the real and had a presence in both. It was taking shape-not, as she had hoped, being born, but leaping, fully-fledged, into the world.
Mag stood alone at the centre of an empty fortress of earth and wood, and let slip all the bonds that bound her power. She knew no university laws, and had no memory palace, and her access was direct and uncompromising.
Blue fire leapt into the sky.
Across the swamp, an entire nest’s worth of boglins-an uncountable, crawling mass-prepared the last assault across the low ground. They had rafts and ladders and great hoardings of wild bramble and ropes of vine and grass, and among them were two years of the full crop of the Wild. They had been left with their Exrech to watch the Hillmen-and eat them. And then, when the army’s flank was secure, and their cousins had made a path with their bodies, to storm the forts.
No Hillmen had come.
Almost five miles to the south, the Hillmen had forded the Upper Albin at first light, slipping and cursing on the wet stones and watching the distant tree line for the ambush that they would, themselves, have launched. Late in the crossing, a handful of irks opposed them, and Kenneth Dhu died with an irk’s arrow in his throat. But the big men in their long byrnies got across and scoured the bank, and then they started moving, not west towards their allies, but almost due east and a little north, as if marching to Morea, ever deeper into the marshy low ground. Behind them, the surviving animals of the drove moved with them, parallel but on the eastern side of the river, where there was an old drove road. The horse-boys and a handful of old borderers moved the cattle herd.
When they came opposite the best ford for twenty miles, the Hillmen had already cleared it, striking into the ambush from the flank. Tom Lachlan never shouted his war cry, for his people did their work so suddenly that he never bloodied his sword.
“Now for it, lads,” he said. “Bring the beasties across. Now we avenge Hector.”
And indeed, now they were in the very country where great Hector had fallen, the same streams, and a cloud of faeries came with the morning rain and followed them, flitting about among the long horns of the cattle.
Donald Dhu was stony faced, but he kept running his thumb along the edge of his great blade, and Tom knew a man who’d marked himself for death.
“He was a fine boy,” Tom said.
“This is a daft plan,” Donald Dhu said. “You’re as madcap as your cousin.”
Tom Lachlan frowned. “Tell me that at sunset,” he said.
“It’s that Red Knight of yours,” Donald Dhu said.
“I can thole him,” Tom said.
“Ca’ ye, just? E’en if he’s killing off your own folk to save his?” Donald Dhu glared, eyes red-rimmed.
Tom didn’t snarl. He might have, once. Now he simply looked. “Donald, darlin’, you’ve lost yer fine boy and that’s a cryin’ shame. But if you go on like this, I’ll split yer round head, myself.” He nodded sharply, and drove his horse forward, giving the other man his back.
No man laughed-but Red Rowan and Daud the Cow shouldered their axes and followed Bad Tom, and soon enough the whole force of the Hillmen was pushing as fast as could be managed through the tangled edge of the marsh and swamp.
Two hours later, the beasts pushed out of the swamp. They were, in fact, at the very edge of the grassy meadows where Hector had left his herd a year before. Tom sent two of the younger warriors to have a look, and dismounted, settled his back to a tree, and had a nap. There was a big storm higher in the mountains, and they could hear the snap of lightning, the roll of thunder.
Tom awoke to the feeling he’d slept too long. But his men, almost a thousand of them, were well rested and had eaten a meal, and now he got them mounted and moved the herd back west-now along the line of the old road, through the open woods on either side.
The storm in the hills began to rise to an epic intensity, and it became clear-suddenly, in one single and titanic triple detonation-that this was not nature’s hand, but the power of sentience.
“Tar’s tits,” Donald Dhu swore.
“Move them along,” Tom yelled, and gave a shout. A hundred men took it up-a high-pitched noise between a keen and a yell-and the cattle began to move faster. Here and there, a younger animal, pushed by a stronger, fell, and the herd began to fan out over more forest.
Tom wished for wings, so he could fix a location for himself-but then, as if granted a dream by a god, he saw a giant maple tree with a vast bole and a huge bulging projection-a tree he knew well, that his people all called the Forest God. The tree was ancient and the bole a landmark well-known, and he grinned.
Something fell gave voice. It was shrill, and high, and utterly without pity for man. It shrieked of the dark when there were no stars, of aeons of time before the hand of man came to mar the earth-and even the Hillmen were afraid.
Most of them.
Although that shriek was a mile away or more, Tom Lachlan drew his great sword.
Then he turned to the horse-boys in the drag, raised his horn, and blew.
They answered with shouts, horns, and whips.
In twenty beats of a man’s heart, the herd went from swiftly trotting individual beasts to a live thing of great mass, and a single will. It was panicked.
It ran.
More than a long bowshot wide, filling the woods from side to side, the herd ran west up the line of the road.
Ash rose, delighting in the rush of damp air beneath his wings, free for the first time in an aeon-embodied, and full of power and vitality-and cast a working almost contemptuously into the mortals to his front as he cleared the ridge, and destroyed half a thousand years’ worth of N’gara irks. The red of his fire and the footprint of his destruction rooted the company and terrified even his own army.
He remembered breath, and he breathed.
He turned, almost lazily, and Mag’s blue fire struck him in the side, under his right wing as it rose for more altitude-
His scream killed. His rage was palpable-red fire swept along the ridge. Men died-Cuddy and Tom Lantorn and Dagon La Forêt and Tancred di Piast, boiled to death in their armour, killed almost instantly as a hundred company lances died. Then his wound turned him south and east and his rage-fire passed over the red-crested daemons and into a cohort of trolls and down the helpless ranks of Outwallers preparing to retake the heights, eliminating them in four heartbeats the way a forge eats coal.