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.