Ash filled the morning air. Even with the loss of his tail, he was bigger than a ship, or a castle, and he blocked out the sun, his wings beat the air, the trailing wingtips black as night, lifting vortices of water off the river’s surface, his head already across, his black, forked tongue like a banner of wickedness as he opened his mouth to breathe again where Tamsin, 1Exrech, and Gregario held the rear guard together. Every horse panicked; the wave front of his terror was such that men fell on their faces; Mogon herself simply stood in midstream, unable to act, her great shoulders hunched against the weight of his presence; Tamsin lost her working, her mind clouded.

Now! Ash exulted in the moment of his triumph.

And now? asked Lot, two hundred leagues to the north.

And his life line, his unending reserve of potentia, was cut. And in the next moment, one of his precious eggs was destroyed; a little bit of himself, dead.

In one moment, a tolerable risk became deadly peril. Ash rolled, so low to the ground that his wingtips ripped dead leaves from autumn trees, and turned his vast bulk upstream toward the west, where the looming dark of vast ash clouds rose still from the burning craters of the battlefield of N’gara. It took him time to turn; time, his foe.

Not an arrow rose to strike him.

Not a hermetical working leaped to wound him.

Loomsack Mountain—Lady Tamsin

Tamsin had a hand to her throat. She looked old, with creases in her face that Gregario had never seen before; her skin appeared tight over her bones, and her hair fluttered around her face.

“Why are we still alive?” she asked.

Gregario watched the immensity of the black-brown dragon sailing off into the west against the leaden sky. The size of the dragon drew the eye like the beauty of the dawn.

He was having to force his body to breathe.

“Sweet Christ,” he said.

A hundred feet away, 1Exrech was faster to recover; a different blood chemistry and an immunity to some forms of fear powered him, and his cold, layered understanding leapt to the moment.

He directed his scent glands at 53Exrech, just a few paces away, her wing cases vibrating in agitation. In scent, he proclaimed:

Truth.

Justice.

Revelation of Falsehood.

End of Slavery.

She writhed, her legion almost at the tips of her enemy’s spears, and then she inhaled. No countercommand reached her; no uttering of her master’s mighty will.

She did not try to resist further. In a moment, her own scent glands echoed those of her former adversary, now her senior.

In their next inhalation, all the bogglins south of the Cohocton River changed sides.

High above, on Loomsack, both Tapio and Master Niko understood immediately.

“Now!” Tapio said.