They sang in the aethereal, and now they were a choir of a hundred powers, and their pitch and melody, harmony and tempo were thought, and worship, and spirit, and their power was vast, and their adversary was stopped in its tracks, unable to scale the sheer ice of their perfection.

But the adversary had millions of voices. And what they lacked in precision and harmony, they made up for in unity and purpose and they were loud, in the aethereal. Their noise peaked, but through them, like a knife cutting an old curtain, the choir of Lissen Carak sang, and the two leaders found the center of the adversary’s sound and used it as a bass on which to build their soprano, and their voices soared, and the adversary’s music was merely part of their music, and for one timeless aeon, the whole of the adversary’s power was channeled into the wards of the ancient gate.

Miriam did not laugh, or smile, in triumph. Instead, she pointed in the real at the left choir, and Sister Elisabeth fell silent.

To the right-hand choir, she said, “Gloria.”

The battle for the gates had begun. It could end only one way—in defeat—unless a miracle occurred.

Sunrise was still an hour away, although the sky was beginning to show light.

Gavin, Earl of Westwall, was at Southford. He’d driven his vanguard all night; he’d refused them sleep and food, and he’d all but beat some of them with whips to keep them moving. And now, in the first pale, desperate light of day, his hardened militia and his Morean mountaineers splashed through the ford, too tired to worry about the cold, and began to form on the far bank.

They formed a hollow square, and Tamsin began to work to protect them against the Odine. But the worms were still. When terrified Moreans came across a huddle of them, they were as unmoving as stones, or pinecones, which they more resembled when seen in the real.

The sky was pink in the east when Count Gareth’s knights began to splash across the ford.

Greatly daring, a Morean corporal took a shovel from the chapel at the ford and used it to gather a few dozen of the worms, which were lying about in terrible plenty in the nearby stand of maple trees. His mates had a fire, and some sausage. He took the shovel full of worms, and threw them into the fire.

They burned. But then all the other worms began to awake.

The Albin River—Harmodius