The roll of thunder: crash, crash, crashcrash, crashcrashcrash CRASH.

Silence.

And then another brilliant display.

In the aethereal, Miriam could see the wispy magnificence of the new power; the dense web of what she assumed was the Odine, and the malevolent green pyre of vanity that called itself Ash. They were hammering at each other, throwing enough power to level a town with every gout of sorcery.

“Oh, Abbess! They will destroy each other!” Sister Anne said.

The most powerful of the novices echoed her.

Miriam watched them, like dark gods, showering each other with the very essence of the universe, and she began to raise her citadel’s shields.

“I pray it will be so,” she said. “But truly, my sisters, my heart tells me that the victor will have the power of the sum of them both.”

After almost an hour, the light show ceased suddenly, and the night was dark, although no bird song or night noise returned to the air. Miriam sent word to the militia to beg them to keep a good watch.

Theodora, the messenger, a novice from the west, came and knelt before her mistress in the hall. “Lady, the captain of North Albin says that his people keep very good watch. And that he only takes orders from his feudal superiors, and not from old women in holy orders.”

In the morning, from the height of the abbey’s walls, her garrison could see the flicker of movement across the Cohocton and miles to the west, or thought that they could. And at the northernmost end of the new earthen fortifications, out toward Abbington, a work party was massacred by daemons—a sudden onset, and the only survivor was the first man to run. The abbess paced her walls all morning, because she had almost four miles of fortifications to man and less than three thousand infantrymen to man them. She sent an imperial messenger to the Count of the Borders to request that he march to her. She heard reports of a second attack south of Abbington, this time by bogglins.

Michael Rannulfson, her captain, joined her on the walls. He had white in his beard and he’d seen a life of war.

“Can we retake the section we lost?” she asked, pointing north into the magnificent autumn foliage of the wooded valley that came down from the high Adnacrags. The earthworks lay along the valley like a ribbon dropped on a carpet; a narrow wall of earth and timber, and a wider area of abattis and tree stumps to leave the militia a field of fire, all punctuated with small square forts outthrust from the walls to cover bad ground or take advantage of hills. Four miles of it, and now they’d lost a section.