Ash nodded. His face was expressionless. “That is better than I expected. Open yourself.” He did not look away, and his eyes, lacking pupils, also lacked any semblance of humanity. “How did you permit Muriens to delay you?”

Orley stood silent.

“Answer me,” Ash said. His voice was quiet, and yet it carried through all the ranks of antlered men, twisted wardens, irks, and bogglins. The Rukh shuffled and looked uncomfortable.

Orley moaned. “My lord?” he asked again. “I . . .”

“Yes?” Ash said. He hissed the last syllable.

“My sentries failed me! And he had overwhelming strength of arms and ops!”

“Really?” Ash’s voice drawled contempt. “Your collection of things outnumbered him ten to one. Your powers are the equal of his; you have other sorcerers to call upon.”

“My lord, I . . .” Orley’s voice crawled with self-contempt and irrational anger.

“I hate men,” Ash said loudly. “I hate their vanity, I hate their promiscuity, I hate their selfishness, their endless greed, their pettiness, and most of all, I hate their failure to pay attention to details. When I have extirpated man, this world will return to its natural order. And the details will be properly attended to. Kneel.”

Orley stood silent under the lash of his master’s anger.

“You failed, and in your failure you exposed me to defeat.” Ash reached out suddenly and put a hand between Orley’s mighty antlers and forced him to kneel with a twist of his hand. “Open yourself, Kevin Orley,” he said.

Orley squirmed. “My lord, I . . .”

“Comply,” Ash said.

Orley complied, and Ash flooded him.

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.”