Tamsin gathered her smoke about her. “And not the only one,” she said aloud to the aethereal. She passed a signal to Harmodius, and she paused to examine the edifice that the Odine was building; she sent a message to Miriam, and then she betook herself into the real.

The falls were two hundred feet high, with a cave at the base and a magnificent cataract of water that could really be seen only from the bottom.

They were barely visible from the new roadbed, although their thunderous roar drowned out almost all sound, even fifty paces distant.

Harmodius received the signal he dreaded, and expected, from Tamsin, in the aethereal, and he reviewed his preparations; most especially, his wall of golden bricks and his new tools taken from his efforts to unpick what he had subsumed from Thorn.

He notified Ser Ranald with a single flash of light.

He raised a layered simulacrum of Desiderata. He twinned a tiny portion of his own talent into his illusion and built there a pale shadow of his own golden wall, creating an animated statue with an apparent will. It frightened him a little, to be able to create something so very nearly alive, and he wondered, for a moment, if he could actually create something alive, and what the ramifications of that would be.

He saw Ash coming. The dragon made no effort to hide himself in the aethereal, and Harmodius sneered at him.

He launched a veritable barrage of attacks across the entire spectrum available to his talent. None of them were illusions. And all of them intercepted the giant dragon fifty miles from his goal, in the real.

The lightstorm struck the dragon as he climbed for a better view of the landscape around the falls, and he had no warning.

What he had, however, was aeons of age and experience, and his defences went to work, absorbing, channeling, deflecting, mirroring. A tiny fraction of the intense gout of power thrown at him at such an incredible range leaked through, but what fell off his defences exploded ancient rock, blew the top clear of a tall hill, leveled thousands of acres of forest, and started a huge fire.

What penetrated caused him pain.

He launched a retaliatory barrage.

Ranald’s men were scrambling for cover long before the dragon struck; the whole advance guard packed into the cave under the falls, workmen, sailors, rowers, and soldiers packed like mackerel in a barrel.

The boats were, for the most part, already up the rails and ready to launch. Their cargo lay on the sand of the riverbank, all except one, which was assembled with its carriage. Master Pye stood by that one, and it was a monster with a mouth like a dragon, twenty-six feet long.

The dragon’s response came in, titanic and ill aimed, and it struck in an ellipse roughly a mile long, raining fire into the woods and waters.