Inwardly, he frowned.
“When did I become so simple?” he asked the air around him.
“Be content,” Ash said at his elbow. The entity was cloaked in flesh-he appeared as a man, a very old man, in a body taut with use and muscle. His skin was jet black-not the black of Ifriquy’a or Dar as Salaam, but a colour like lamp black. He wore the simple clothes of a peasant, but all in dirty grey. He had a scythe in his hand, and an hourglass.
Thorn watched the night. “You have a new guise,” he said with distaste.
Ash snorted. “A very old guise.”
“Are you like some rich girl of Harndon, with a different dress for every suitor?” Thorn asked.
Ash seemed to think for a moment. At least, his face did not move. The silence lengthened and Thorn began to feel he was not going to be answered. This had happened frequently-it was one of the ways Thorn had arrived at the realization that he was a tool and not an ally.
Ash hissed. “It might appear that way,” he admitted.
An old teacher-back in the mists of time before Thorn, when he had been a boy and a human and a scholar-a teacher had told him never to ask a question to which he did not want to know the answer.
Where did that come from? Thorn asked himself.
But he asked anyway.
“Or is the way in which we perceive you shaped by our own-beings?” Thorn asked.
Ash laughed. It was not, for once, derisive or contemptuous. It was rich, and flavoured with humour and delight. “You are an apt pupil, sorcerer. In truth, to my eye, I am always the same. It is you-the sentients-who try to force me to the moulds of your minds.”
Thorn was not afraid of the night or the abyss. He looked into Ash’s eyes. “With people, and animals-if enough people call a dog cur, he’ll learn to bite.”
Ash inclined his head. The movement seemed genuine. “An eternity of striving, and I have one convert,” Ash said. “Well… perhaps two or three. Yes-even I am manipulated by the beliefs of those around me. As are you and every other sentient.”
Thorn looked at the stars. He pointed at them. “And those? Are they, as astrologers maintain, the pinpricks of light from other spheres-an infinity of spheres?”
Ash sighed. “Thorn, if I told you all I know, you would whip me with thongs of fire.”
Thorn nodded. “You quote scripture.”
Ash laughed-and this time it was derisive. “Everyone quotes scripture, Thorn. Or writes it to suit themselves.”
“Will we take Ticondaga?” he asked.
Ash frowned. “Yes. Your plan-which is far too complex, too devious, and too bent on your ideas of vengeance-is a delight, and it will succeed. There is no mind in all this sphere-except mine-that can comprehend what you plan.”
“You flatter me,” Thorn said.
“Of course,” Ash answered. “If you insist on treating me as a mentor, eventually I will behave like one.”
“And after?” Thorn asked.
Ash might have shrugged. The old man’s shoulders twitched. Perhaps he laughed. “We conquer this world, I break my bonds, and then we move through the portals to others, and take them, and eventually you gain enough in power to betray me, and we fight. And I destroy you utterly after we lay waste to the cosmos.”
Thorn nodded, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “And you are sure that it is you who destroys me?” he asked.
Ash laughed. “There is no sure, in all the multiverse,” he said.
Thorn shook his great stone head. “Lord, all this badinage aside-Ghause kills the Queen. I kill Ghause. The King-”
“I have seen to the King.” Ash nodded. “Ten times over.”
“Ticondaga falls-surely they will all unite against me.” Thorn was a better strategist than he had been. He saw the consequences clearly. War and strategy and the dealing of minds, one with another-he no longer disdained these as beneath him. Besides, the more time he spent on them, the more they seemed to have laws like the laws of the hermetical.
Ash nodded. His voice was easy, lulling, like a mother’s speaking to a child. “Yes-it is good to see all the futures. But that is not a realistic one. I have sowed dissension for fifty years ready for this moment. Will the lamb lie down with the lion? Will the Galles ally with the Albans they have just tried to destroy? After Ticondaga, they will fall-Middleburg, Lissen Carak, Albinkirk, Liviapolis and Harndon and Arles in Occitan. And in the old world, as well, until we hold all the portals and all the points of power.”
Thorn stood, transfixed by the note of falsity he had just heard. He blessed his face of stone and the magical enhancements on his body. He did not tremble, and he did not give away so much as a twitch of his fingers.
But he detected in that moment that Ash had a plan for the time after Ticondaga.
And it did not include Thorn.
Ash chuckled. “Why would I betray you? You are my chosen avatar in this sphere. I cannot win here without you. I’ve put a great deal of effort into you. You might say,” Ash chuckled, “that I’ve put all my eggs in one basket.”
Thorn’s intellect struggled to understand what he might mean. Or what he might want. “You are blind to some things,” he said, accusingly.
Ash turned and looked at him. Thorn had a momentary frisson of terror.
Then Ash said, “I admire your black moths. Very clever.”
Thorn sighed like a winter breeze on desiccated leaves. “One of them cleared an entire village-and left no evidence of its passage.”
“And another was killed by a squaw with a stick,” Ash noted.
Thorn nodded. “My assassins will come out of the darkness after midnight. The generation I have sent to kill the Dark Sun-they should be almost immune to normal men. They exist more in the aethereal than the so-called real.”
Ash pondered the stars. “You will waste your pets on this mortal you feel challenges you, but I tell you, he is nothing. He does not even enter into my calculations.”
Thorn paused. “Really?” he asked.
Ash shook his black head. “He is nothing-a boy puffed with vanity and pride of birth. You react to him because he has all the things you did not have-wealth and power and good looks. If I am to be your mentor I must make you understand this. I can scarcely follow him in the aethereal, he is of so little account.”
Thorn frowned. “That makes no sense. He burns in the aethereal like a sun.”
Ash flicked his scythe. “You exaggerate.”
Thorn was silent. Trying to make out what Ash might mean-or what he might have just given away.
“After Ticondaga, none will stand against you,” Ash said.
Thorn thought, So you keep saying.
Liviapolis-Morgon Mortirmir
Deep in the university, at Liviapolis, Morgon woke to find that Tancreda had, after all, stayed with him. Her brother was snoring on a chair. She had brought him the manuscript he needed, and he’d begun to read-
More immediately, Tancreda was draped across Mortirmir, who was lying on a bench with a pair of Venike-made lenses in his right hand and a little known treatise by one of the magisters of the past called Optika in the other. He carefully dropped the book and the lenses to the floor.
Her hazel eyes opened.
“You are very beautiful,” he said.
“Could I just once be very intelligent, or elegant, or perhaps stubborn or clever?” she asked sleepily. “Must it be beautiful? Always?” She narrowed her eyes. “Who found the manuscript on lenses? Mmmm? Was that beauty?”
Mortirmir glanced at the brother, and then, greatly daring, leaned over her and put his mouth on hers. He winked in his head at the absent shade of Harmodius.
Her lips remained tightly closed until the tip of his tongue licked them lightly, and then they sprang open-a delicious parting that left him giddy.