Gavin then waved his hand at the Lissen Carak road, running not-quite-straight from the southern edge to vanish in the woods to the west. Halfway from the Albin Ridge to the woods’ edge, there was a fine stone church and a small walled town. “Penrith,” he said. “Right now, it’s being held by royal foresters and some Moreans and all our wardens and bears, under the duchess. She’s keeping the road open for us.” He looked at the imperial troops coming up behind them, and at the distant edge of the woods to the west, where his knights had vanished. “We don’t need to hold all the ground,” he said. “Hold the towns, and we’ll retake the ground between at will. So far, there’s nothing out there that can stop a charging knight.”

“So far,” Gareth Montjoy muttered.

Harmodius was almost done; almost out of both ops and options. He’d been clever; he’d been magnificent; he’d been subtle.

Now he was just tired. It was time for his last trick.

When Ash eventuated, very close, Harmodius held his shields and took the whole brunt of the dragon’s wrath, the light dusting of snow vaporized, the hills beneath him melting to slag.

He took the last of his enemy’s effort and followed it back, as quick as an angler taking a trout on a wild stream. Except that instead of reeling in his great fish, he was reeled in; his consciousness snapped back along the line of his enemy’s casting. It was Thorn’s working; the irony was not lost on his former pupil.

And like that, he was aboard. That was how Harmodius thought of it, in the fastness of his own essence; he was a lone pirate, boarding a vast ship.

The halls of the dark temple that was the mind of Ash went on for infinity, and the walls were written in an endless script, an alien hand that confused and frustrated thought even from a glance.

It was not like taking the mind of Askepiles, with its wheels and levers. Whatever he had expected, it was not this: the endless corridors of madness. He had expected to confront his great enemy for one last fight; instead, he was alone with uncountable internalized truths and overwritten falsehoods and a vista of stony darkness and abandonment.

Harmodius drew a Fell Sword from within himself. His right hand burst into life; light shone, where only darkness had ruled for aeons.

Harmodius took the sword and slashed it along the tiny lines of script that seemed to ebb and flow in three or more dimensions on the wall. The spot was not carefully chosen; Harmodius was aware that at any moment, out in the real, his borrowed body might be killed; if not by some hammer-like blow of ops, then by superheated steam or molten rock.