In the aethereal, the thing in the gate was like an infinite web of organic mush linked by trails of slime. Its presence threatened to overwhelm him, and its coercive powers rose to choke him, but the massive bolt of raw power it tossed at him blew aside his more careful protections and challenged him as neither Kerak nor Tamsin nor Nikos had challenged him. The fire exploded along his senses and he roared his rage in the aethereal and the real.

The house in which Phillippa had grown to womanhood was destroyed in a single outpouring of dragon fire. Ash’s unmaking fire roared across the roof and left black earth behind, and continued into the field of standing stones. But the thing there withstood him effortlessly, a canopy of pearlescent grey shedding his breath of unmaking as if water ran off an upturned bowl.

Ash turned, looking for a threat in the real or the aethereal; he cast a heavy attack and was rebuffed, and he began to doubt he could break the thing’s shield; a genuine peer. And with that doubt, other doubts crept in immediately; his grip on the sea monsters was weakening, and the flow of bogglins from the west had slowed to a trickle, and he’d lost track of the enemy’s main army; his changing of the antlered men into copies of his mind began to seem a little foolish, and his failure to retake the well like some form of self-delusion, and suddenly all his plans were laid bare, insufficiently realized, and he himself had failed on details, and he began to wonder . . .

And then his overmind felt the trap, and he lashed out, breaking the coercion with a hammer of his contempt.

Lissen Carak

On the walls of Lissen Carak, Miriam watched the duel the way a child watches fireflies in the back garden. The sky was dark, but the pulses of light, red, blue, violet, and white, came at an accelerating tempo. The rolling sound of thunder came, each boom a few seconds after its corresponding flash of light.

“Half a day’s travel to the east,” Miriam said to Sister Anne.

Beneath their feet, the infantry of the royal army, most of them northern militia, stood guard in the long trenches and reinforced earthworks that a small army of northern peasants were still refining. Darkness was falling, and Miriam wished that the workers would retreat into the safety of the inner defences, but she could not cover all of them.

Worse, her two attempts at the dragon working had failed, either because the massive spell was too complex for her, or because the newly empowered Odine were too strong for her magicks. She knew that there were worms in the woods; already, she knew that workers had been lost.

A long series of flashes. Most of her people were on the walls, watching.

“The choir should be ready,” she said aloud.