Speaker of Tongues smiled. Men are so easy to use, he thought. I will make them animals, and then they will be fit to live in the Wild.
He swirled his great cloak of wolf skins and vanished.
All the warriors cheered, and the Ruk bellowed.
Kevin Orley would have liked to have been satisfied. But he couldn’t help but wonder why the sorcerer didn’t pause to heal his wounded. And his memory of the taking of the town was untouched.
Thorn left his men with a slight shudder of revulsion, rather like a surgeon closing a jar of leeches, and returned through the aether to his place of power.
He then passed a day in casting and watching. The first of his special moths was about to hatch, and he had to catch it at just the right moment to finish its accession of power. Or so he told himself, while another part of his great and web-filled mind confessed that he simply wanted to be present when his creation hatched.
He watched Ghause and the Earl. He watched her dance naked, spending power like water. He watched her cast, and was annoyed and transfixed and transformed. He sent more moths, and then more still, to observe her from every possible angle in every possible part of her life.
Sometimes he heard her speak his name. It was as if she was already calling to him, over the leagues that separated them.
He watched her subsume a witch woman, and he groaned with pleasure.
She was, in her earthy way, much more complex than he had imagined, and much more powerful, and he chuckled and increased the power of his own wards.
He looked to his defences in case of material attack against her husband.
He watched other scenes, as well, through other moths and other beasts – but what they told him was not enough to build a whole scene. His creatures in Harndon gave him fragments of a picture that he couldn’t understand – a sea of angry faces in fire-lit darkness; the Queen shouting at a young woman. The Queen weeping. The Queen, reading old parchment.
And in the subterranean corridors beneath the old palace, his other creatures were all dead. He had lost every moth, every rat, every living thing that he had created or recruited, seduced or suborned to enable him to read his own notes – or Harmodius’s notes.
In the safety of his island, he’d begun transforming other creatures – some badgers, for example, as underground spies – but he had nothing when he needed it, and this caused him immense frustration. Even the cats he had used to maintain his spells binding Harmodius were lost to him – killing mice and roaming the castle corridors, their feline minds locked against him.
Without context, his moths alone were not useful, and he cursed the time it took to move them over vast distances and the power he had to expend to monitor them. Moths could take two months – and several generations – to reach their targets.
His attempt to plant moths on the Red Knight had failed, and all the insects he sent west to watch his nearest neighbour – the famous Tapio, who had refused to be his ally in the spring – were dead.
Thorn stood and thought in unmoving, superior indignation. If Tapio killed his sendings, then the arrogant irk was going to continue to keep his distance, or worse. Why will the Wild not unite? he asked himself. Because each individual seeks only his own good. Thorn sat in the dark, watching the chrysalis case of a caterpillar as long as a man’s arm, embedded in the corpse of a man, and nodded to himself. I will unite the Wild by force, and save it. If they cannot see to benefit of my idea, I will shove it down their foolish, ruggedly individualistic throats.
Unbidden, the picture of the Red Knight standing against him at Lissen Carrak, and seizing control of his boggles, rose before him. ‘You are just some parvenu merchant’s son trying to ape the manners of his betters.’
He tried to focus his rage the way he would focus power for a working. His father had been a merchant – what of it? I will be God, he thought at the distant figure. And you will be nothing.
He managed his hate – massaged it and relived each petty humiliation of the siege – he dwelled on the moment in which he mis-sited his trebuchet batteries, and he savoured how completely he’d been out-thought the night of his great attack.
He took all that hate, and channelled it into the caterpillar like a man giving a scrap of wool to a scent hound.
When he was done, he felt lighter by the weight of much fear. It was a powerful working – akin to the spell he’d thrown on the men who had raped Nepan’ha. Hermetical workings that altered the internal reality of the sentient mind were so delicate that manipulatting the life force of a moth was child’s play by comparison, but he was beginning to see how he could perform such miracles.
After a while, he ceased his efforts to monitor the world, and turned to his preparations to deal with the Earl.
Near Osawa – Giannis Turkos
The men who surrounded them were all Outwallers – all Northern Huran and Kree, with topknots and dyed deer-hair in bright red. But they had crossbows – heavy, steel-bowed weapons, all new made.
It was the crossbows that decided Turkos, although his decision was almost too fast to be described as thought.
Even as they emerged from the shadows to gloat over their prisoners, he reared his horse – his precious horse, that he loved, Athena.
She reared obediently, and her broad stomach and long neck took all six of the crossbow bolts meant for him. And because she was all heart, she landed on four feet and continued forward after her iron-shod forefeet crushed the skulls of two warriors.
And then she fell.
Turkos landed on his feet and drew the heavy sabre he wore – as long and heavy as an Alban knight’s sword, but slightly curved and with a reinforced point that added authority to every cut.
Two more warriors fell – one with an arm cleanly severed and the other with the whole side of his face caved in from the backbone of the blade – cheekbones shattered, jaw broken.
His reckless charge into their midst created more chaos than he had any right to expect – one Kree put a heavy bolt into a Huran from behind in his haste to engage the foe. But these weren’t boggles – the older warriors were already recovering, drawing weapons, or standing clear and taking aim.
Turkos threw his best offensive working from the amulet at his neck. It was a sheet of lightning that flickered blue in the sunlight, and he laid it like a carpet, running close to the frozen earth, as his grandfather had taught him to. Men with protections wore them high, and no one can ignore a sharp blow to the ankle.
The warriors fell like puppets with their strings cut.
None of them were injured in any meaningful way, and it was the only hermetical protection he had. But knocking men down changes their view of a fight, and the veteran warriors began to consider sheer survival. He dispatched the man who fell closest to him, a sloppy blow that nonetheless buried his point in the man’s skull.
A warrior near to him got to one knee and reached for him, and he seized the man’s arm as the armatura taught and broke it and slammed the pommel of his sabre into the man’s face, knocking him unconscious and waiting for a crossbow bolt between his shoulder blades. He whirled – his time of grace was over, and he was praying to God and Jesus and the Virgin Parthenos and all the legion of saints-
The old man had put an arrow in the nearest Kree, and the rest of them were mere crashing noises running into the woods.
‘Best ye get on my horse,’ the old hunter said. He managed a laugh, but it was obvious he was shaken. ‘Glad I didn’t try an’ rob you,’ he said.