It was folly, of course. She should have freed him before this began; should never have bound them so close. Any of them, her pretty ones. It had never been necessary, not with the good ones. How had it begun? A sop to her mortal vanity; to pride, to desire. What was power good for if not for that? It pleased her to be surrounded by youth in all its fleeting beauty. What was immortality good for without simple pleasures? She was a generous mistress. None of them had ever taken any harm from it, only tales to tell their grandchildren.

Too late, now. As strained as the linkage was, it would take more to sever it than to maintain it Lilias shoved aside her regrets and shook her head like a fly-stung horse, impatient. “Gergon?”

“There, my lady.” Sarika pointed, her voice soothing.

He looked like an ant toiling up the mountainside. They all looked like ants. Her wardsmen, the Warders of Beshtanag, defending the mighty wall. Other ants in bright armor swarmed it, creeping along the top with their siege-towers and ladders, while the battering ram boomed without ceasing. Lilias sat back in her chair, surveying her crumbling empire. She remembered, now. She’d had a high-backed chair of office placed here, on the terrace of Beshtanag Fortress itself, to do just that.

Lilias.

Calandor’s voice echoed in her skull. “No,” she said aloud. “No.”

Her Ward Commander, Gergon, toiled up the mountainside, nodding as he went to archers posted here and there, the last defenders of Beshtanag. It was warm and he was sweating, his greying hair damp beneath his helmet. He took it off to salute her. “My lady Lilias.” He tucked his helmet under his arm, regarding her. His face was gaunt and the flesh beneath his eyes hung in bags. He had served her since his birth, as had his father and his father’s father before him. “I am here in answer to your summons.”

“Gergon.” Her fingers curved around the arms of the chair. “How goes the battle?”

He pointed. “As you see, I fear.”

Below, the ants scurried, those inside the wall hurrying away under its shadow.

A loud crr-ackk! sounded and a web of lines emerged on a portion of the wall, revealing its component elements. Rocks shifted, boulders grinding ominously. Lilias stiffened in her chair, closing her eyes, drawing on the power of the Soumanië. In her mind she saw her wall whole and gleaming; willed it so, Shaped it so, shifting platelike segments of mica, re-forming the crystalline bonds of silica into a tracery of veins running throughout a single, solid structure. What she saw, she Shaped, and held.

There was a pause, and then the sound of the battering ram resumed.

Lilias bent over, gasping. “There!”