Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Arles—The Red Knight, over central Galle

Gabriel’s layered shields were up now, and mostly held the incredible flash of ops, but despite losses, he loosed back, throwing preset counters down his opponent’s line of thought in the aethereal while Prudentia spun and spun his memory palace, catching, amplifying, shielding . . .

Another godlike fist of power struck his shields, and his shields held again.

He had time to think about what Mortirmir had said about the accession of powers. He had already turned to flee; his reactions in the aethereal were defensive . . .

But he was untouched.

He leaned, and Ariosto turned.

There, below him, was a forest, and in the forest there were Titans. Hundreds of them, their size a little distorting until he saw one by a tree.

Umroth.

A whole herd.

Connections were made; more, when he saw the herd draw power in a great indrawn aethereal effect like a breath taken; every one of the four hundred or more not-dead beasts . . .

A distributed intelligence.

Odine. Rebel Odine, if Kronmir was correct.

He knew the working that Mortirmir had used to free the not-dead at Arles, but he didn’t have it cast, ready at hand, hanging on Prudentia’s arm or around her neck. It was something that would take time and patience to work, and right then he had neither.

And he was taking an utterly unnecessary risk.

Inside his helmet, his lips twitched involuntarily, and Ariosto screamed, pivoted, and struck like the great predator he was. His wings overshadowed one of the Umroth, and the thing, thirty hands high, forty feet long, with four legs like pillars and huge tusks that curved like Mamluks’ scimitars.

The huge thing reared on its hind legs, reaching for the heavens.

Gabriel’s ghiavarina shot lightning, which careened off the thing’s black hermetical shield—the only passive shield he’d ever seen. He coveted it; a shield that was always on . . .

Ariosto screamed. His talons slammed into the shield.

Leaning out, Gabriel’s weapon sliced through the black shield, and the combined assault of talon and weapon defeated it; it vanished, Ariosto’s talons raked the thing’s head, and Gabriel pulsed three bolts into the stinking carcass of the ancient, not-dead hulk, the third a different hue from the first two, and they were past, rising away as two more of the monsters charged them from the deep, dark spruce forest.

A ripple passed over the herd, almost as if their colour was changing.

The one Gabriel had hit exploded.

“Home,” the Red Knight said.

Behind him, a shapeless black arm reached out of the herd. It grew until it was hundreds of feet high, and then it reached into the east, as if blindly groping for Ariosto.

Gabriel blew it a kiss, and raced farther east into the rain clouds.

Mitla—The Duke of Mitla