“Never. No organization, no order, no group is above the manipulations of others. If we are strong, we can help shape the final outcomes, and if we are weak, we may become the tool of someone powerful-a tool that cannot make its own decisions.” The Prior nodded. “One of my options is to take all of us across the sea, or into Morea. Another is to go into the north. To Lissen Carak. And await events there.”
Amicia was too tired for all this. “All I know is that he and his people think they will rescue the Queen,” she said.
“Ahh,” the Prior said. He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “That is precisely what I wanted to hear.” He put a hand on her head. “Will he fight for the Queen?”
Amicia felt she would betray a confidence by answering, but she shrugged inwardly. “I believe Ser Gabriel views himself as the Queen’s Champion. Indeed, I believe she asked him-but before the role had quite such consequences.”
“Against the King?” the Prior asked quickly.
Amicia pursed her lips and snapped, “I have never heard him say aught against the King, or the Queen. He bears no love for the Galles.” She frowned. “I have attended a number of the meetings of his officers. They are open in their derision of the King’s weakness. But then-” She looked hard at the prior. “But then, so am I.”
“Bah,” Prior Wishart said. “It’s no treason at this point to think the King is mad or ensorcelled. Go sleep. Tomorrow will be very hard I suspect.”
She curtsied. “I sense something… evil,” she said.
Prior Wishart paused. “You are much stronger than I,” he said. “Yet I do feel some-malmaissance. Where is it, though? Is it Harndon, burning?”
She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and searched with her aethereal eye.
“It’s in the sky,” she said quietly.
Wishart looked up. He looked for long enough that her eyelids began to sag.
“Happy Easter, Sister,” he said. “I have to hope that it is a figment of our fatigue and our crisis. I cannot believe we are open here-on this night-to direct attack. Go and sleep.”
She nodded, almost beyond speech, and went down from the wall. It was two or three hours after midnight-most of the abbey was asleep, and aside from the watch on the walls, most voices were stilled. The torches were out, and she took a wrong turn at the foot of the steps and found herself in the inner cloister, but aside from the monks lying on the grass, everyone was gone, and the only other men awake were some servants finishing the wine. She found the low tunnel, richly carved, that led from the inner cloister to the outer and, drawn by voices, she felt her way through the dark.
Halfway, in almost total darkness, she had another shock of apprehension. She thought for a moment it might be her fatigue as the Prior had said, but she closed her eyes and entered her palace and made a very small working-an open net of woven ops to catch the workings of others. It was a working she had learned from Gabriel.
She released it. And settled like a spider in a web to “see” what she might see in the aethereal.
She dropped out of her palace and felt her way forward, a portion of her awareness now tucked away in her palace.
Just at the end of the tunnel, four men were sitting in the shade of a grape arbor in the courtyard.
One of them was Gabriel-she’d know his voice anywhere. The big man was clearly Ser Thomas-a nose taller than any other man she’d ever met.
“Gabriel,” she said sharply.
He rose.
“There’s something-” she said, and extended her hand.
He reached out in the real.
The other two men were almost as big as Ser Thomas-a big red-headed knight of her own Order, who she knew by repute and by the sheer size of his nose. Ser Ricar Orcsbane.
And a black man the size of a small house, or so it seemed. The men rose as she approached and bowed-the black man very elegantly, by putting his hands together and bending at the waist.
“Sister Amicia, of the Order of Saint Thomas,” Gabriel said, and repeated it in passable Etruscan. His smile was tired, but warmed her nonetheless.
In her heart, she thought, I must get him to pay attention.
“This magnificent gentleman is Ser Pavalo l-Walīd Muḥammad Payam.” Ser Gabriel spoke the name cautiously-for once, it was a language he did not know. But the dark-skinned man bowed again and smiled at the sound of his name.
“You went to mass,” Amicia said. “I saw you.” She made herself smile, but she seized Gabriel’s hand and tried to drag him by main force into her memory palace.
“He says he craves your blessing.” Gabriel shrugged. “I have been to mass before and was not slain by lightning, nor do my infernal legions always make trouble.”
“He took the host,” Tom Lachlan said. “I expected the chapel to collapse.”
Between one sentence and the next he was there with her.
“There’s something out there-there. In that direction.” She pointed at the simulacrum of her sensory net in the aethereal, which was ripped asunder somewhere above her and to the north. Direction and distance were not the same in the aethereal as in the real.
Gabriel looked at the screen of aethereal force she had projected.
In the real, Amicia put a hand on the dark-skinned man’s hand and said a small prayer for his soul.
“I tried to get the infidel to come to mass,” Tom said. He grinned. “I mean, if the captain was there, what would one more damned soul matter?”
Amicia had suddenly had enough. “Don’t mock what you do not understand,” she snapped.
Tom was seldom baulked. But like most very dangerous men, he was not a fool. He bowed his head. “Sister?” he asked quietly.
“Something is wrong,” Ser Gabriel said. He was back in the real. He turned to look north. “Toby-my spear.”
Toby detached himself from a wall and ran for the stables.
“Amicia, get behind us,” Gabriel said. He still had her hand-and something about his instant willingness to believe her, to obey and react-
She turned to look.
Turned back to speak to him. She opened her mouth to say something neither of them would ever be able to forget, and she knew better-fatigue, religion, love, danger-it was a heady potion that transcended day-to-day and common sense, her usual guideposts all thrown down. The sense of wrongness now filled the air around her. Whatever it was, it was aimed for him, not her. She cast a protection, a mirror to confuse whatever the malevolence was; she borrowed his aura and put it on.
She raised a shield of glowing gold with a twitch of her be-ringed hand.
Something black fluttered out of the darkness onto her face, right through her shield.
At its touch, she screamed.
The Red Knight saw the change in her posture. He tossed the first working in his arsenal-
Fiat Lux.
Golden light leapt from a point fifty feet above them.
It revealed a beautiful horror-six magnificent, shimmering black moths, each the size of a great eagle, their wings the purest black satin shot with veins of blue-black that throbbed with ops and thick velvet-black bodies with elaborate black filigree and lace antennae-and probisci of obscene dimensions, long as baselards and swollen with a velvety hardness that made the skin crawl, tipped with adamant that shone like blued steel.
One of them fluttered against Amicia even as the light burgeoned.
Its probiscis throbbed with power and bit-and she screamed.
The Ifriquy’an’s long, curved sword slipped from the scabbard and flowed out and up like liquid metal in the silver-gold of mixed moonlight and mage light. He was a pace behind Amicia and his sword struck at an angle from the scabbard-severed a great, rapidly beating wing and the probiscis at its base in one strike-the sword passed through its target and swept back, was reversed, and swept back up, almost the same line, cutting off a lock of her hair as her knees gave from the poison and opening the velvet body from base to eye-cases in a shower of ops and potentia and black acid blood.