Orley tried to scream.

Ash left almost nothing of Orley’s personality, although he noted that there was little enough as it was—a poisonous mixture of hatreds and insecurities. He went through them ruthlessly, leaving only buttresses of himself.

Thorn should have done this, Ash thought. He restructured the writhing, silently shrieking mind’s internal processes and massaged the surviving consciousness into talent, replacing most of the mental structures with one of his own, but even this activity was interrupted.

Something was happening in the south. He felt a dozen bogglins slip his control, then a hundred, and the mind he set aside for higher thought wondered if “he noticed even a bogglin’s fall” was humourous.

Ash reached out a hand without turning his head and beckoned at the line of dark, antlered men.

“Come,” he said. It was an excellent precaution anyway—to distribute his selves. Insurance against disaster.

Most of them fell on their faces, shrieking in terror, and the smell of their fear—musk, and urine and worse—filled the air. The terror was palpable, like a miasma; hundreds of bogglins fell beneath it.

Five of the antlered men made themselves go forward into the fear.

Ash gave them a lopsided grin. “But men are very, very brave,” he said. “Really, it is your only talent.”

He repeated the process with all five; he rearranged them and made them better, according to his lights, and he imprinted himself on their meat, leaving them very little self and a reimagined node that would function only to receive and transmit his will. Each received an entire imprint of him.

But he found there were aspects of Orley that pleased him—in spite of its debasement, or perhaps because of it—and he overwrote these aspects of Orley on them all.

He grinned with pleasure, and his grin caused the same terror as his grimmer face.

“Good,” he said. “Now you are all Orley. A triumph, of sorts.” He touched each of them. “No mortal weapon of steel or bronze will touch you, my children. You are my will.”

“Yes,” all six of them said instantly.

“It is almost like talking to a person,” he said.

“Yes,” they chorused.

He couldn’t stifle a giggle. “I am God,” he said, delighted. “I can make and I can destroy.”

He touched another dozen cringing slaves and made their slavery more abject.

And more efficient.

All of this required an investment of power, as did the maintenance of his armies, the empowerment of his various shields, and the bonds of adamant that held his aquatic “allies” to his purpose.

And through the ties of will that bound him to every bogglin in his host, he felt the further stirrings of the will. The process was not unlike the way a cat might feel the edges of a tunnel with her whiskers. And Ash’s reaction was as instinctive.

Even as the distant will began to seize his slaves, Ash drew himself up. He withdrew his will from Orley’s monsters and turned to walk back down the beach.