The earl sighed. “Woman, I am no more your tool than you are mine. ‘Bide’ is not a companionable word. Spring is coming-”
“And so is the sorcerer,” she said. “He is coming, and we will need all our strength to hold here until our son comes.”
The earl pursed his lips, rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Ah. Like that, eh? So we’ll have the fight here?”
She smiled delicately.
“Christ, woman, I’m your husband and your partner in a hundred crimes. You might tell me what you have planned!”
She leaned over, her eyes fixed on his. She leaned closer and closer, and then her pointed tongue flicked out like a cat’s and licked his lips.
“I might,” she whispered. “But that would spoil the surprise.”
Later, while forty knights pounded the pells in the courtyard and while the foot soldiers did their spear drill, she watched the Queen in a ball of rock crystal that was, to her certain knowledge, more than three thousand years old-perhaps as many as fifteen thousand. Some things were beyond her range of skills or belief. She suspected that it had been made by something truly alien, because when her concentration slipped, she could hear its makers haunting, a-rhythmic songs. And see them slipping like wraiths of slime through the caverns beneath the earth.
But she was many times the mistress of the stone, and she drove it south and east until she had the Queen, deep in her dungeon under the earth.
She missed her youngest son, Aneas. Without him she had no one with whom to discuss her plots. He was still near Albinkirk, serving with the field army. A knight on errantry. She’d watched him in the stone-fighting, flirting with a girl. The girl and her mother both looked familiar. She was pretty-
Ghause put a hand over the stone, and moved it and her will.
She watched the woman, whose hair was lank and whose lips moved constantly. Ghause watched her for a long time, trying to decide whether the woman had lost her wits or was acting. It was hard to know.
If her brother was going to kill his own wife, there was no need for Ghause to use the massive working on which she had laboured for eight months. The young Queen’s hermetical defences were formidable-doubly so, as she had clearly been trained by Harmodius. Ghause knew that to kill her unborn baby, she would have to strike massively and accurately and all at once. There would be no second chance.
But it would be delicious if, instead, he killed her himself. Deluded by evil gossip into believing his wife untrue-what a fool.
She smiled at the purity of her revenge. And how it dovetailed into her other plans.
After all, what had the prophecy said?
“The son of the King will rule all the spheres.” She smiled, and her heart raced with anticipation. She would turn his actions against him, rob him of a legitimate son and make her own sacrifice worth… everything.
But she still felt something for his Queen. When she had been green and beautiful, she had felt nothing but jealousy and malice for her-but now, watching her hang her head and mumble, seeing her soiled kirtle and the weight of oppression and betrayal on her young shoulders…
“I’m sorry for your baby,” Ghause said aloud. “But I’ll avenge you, too.”
Babies reminded her of how they were made, and she moved the stone’s view-moved it back and forth over the fields, adding first one guiding spell and then another.
She saw things that surprised her. She saw the Queen’s brother riding across the fields of the Albin. She thought it odd that he should be north of Harndon.
She followed her guiding spell north, and further north, and found her target. She glanced at her sons-Gavin was a handsome devil, and Gabriel looked like an archangel on a binge. She smiled.
And moved on to the nun. Sister Amicia.
Ghause had planted suggestions on the nun since the first time they’d met. She approved of the woman-liked her good sense and the width of her hips and her sense of humour. Gabriel needed a noble wife to bear him a son-to be, in time, Queen.
The little nun was not that woman.
But she would be the right ally, and the right mistress. And the right tool of control.
And she had power-deep, strong, well-trained power that grew and evolved almost before her eyes.
“You remind me of me,” she said aloud. And knowing that link between them, she made a very subtle working-the sort of working, in fact, that she might cast on herself. She had done it once before, to render the distasteful more acceptable.
And now she passed her working carefully through the stone. She watched it strike home on its intended victim the way an archer watched a shaft shot high and far.
She smiled.
A hundred leagues north and west of Ticondaga, Thorn stood in his place of power, watching Ghause in the space between his raised hands. He was not wearing his human form, but a new stone form-a carefully evolved form of discs and whorls and stone coils that were laced together with cartilage and muscle taken from many sources. Thorn had all the bestiary of the earth at his disposal, now. He used it with brilliance and imagination and a certain dark elegance.
His new level of understanding the shifts of being that could be contained in his concept of reality-to put it loosely-included the knowledge that he could build into his power a subordinate working of enormous complexity that would continuously monitor and alter his form as circumstance required, even as he moved and shifted and had different requirements. So he could make his form of stone, and make the stone move. While this required a constant expenditure of ops, it also rendered him nearly invulnerable.
He had another form-he was already working on generations of them-in which he was almost entirely energy and smoke. But it was still too vulnerable to use except in special circumstances.
None of this crossed his conscious mind. Instead, he held his stone arms aloft effortlessly and watched Ghause practise her art. He watched her watch the Queen with growing frustration, having watched her prepare her spell for a hundred days and nights.
He had prepared his own working. Indeed, all his own plans now hinged on hers, an ironic twist that delighted him and annoyed his mentor immensely.
That, too, was good. Thorn was tiring of being Ash’s tool. He had probed the black space in his head thoroughly. He had spent considerable time rebuilding what he felt might be missing of his own thoughts and perceptions. He made some slight experiments in hiding things from the black space.
He had re-discovered how much he detested moths. And he had doubts.
Irony was not something that the master sorcerer could share either with his tools or his allies. An inconvenient impasse had been reached.
Thorn’s ally had gathered his army of unwilling slaves and his professional soldiers and the thin trickle of reinforcements he had received from Galle and moved them to the head of the lake above Ticondaga. Thorn’s own servants-Kevin Orley not least among them-had joined the Black Knight’s army.
Thorn took himself to them, his preparations complete. He crossed seventy leagues of virgin wilderness in the blink of an eye. He had learned to make the Wyrm’s way-to make a hole in his reality, and to travel through it.
He had learned so many things that sometimes he feared that at the moment of truth, he would not be able to find all his powers and employ them.
Nonetheless, he appeared in the camp of the Gallish army on the day he had planned.
If Ser Hartmut was appalled to have a giant stone golem of interlocking helixes appear in front of his great black silk tent, he gave no sign. Instead, he nodded to a squire. “Wine,” he said. “And a long spoon.”
Thorn might once have laughed, but almost all of the human had been burned out of him, leaving little beyond ambition and a thirst for knowledge. “I am here,” he said. His voice was deep, menacing, and alien, and his accent sounded curiously like the northern Huran.