Gavin burst through the back of the enemy and turned Bess in a shallow curve, filled with the spirit of combat, wanting to laugh and shout with joy, wanting to go sleep, wanting never to have to do such a thing again, and as he turned, he saw the dark thing coming up out of the streambed.

Gavin blinked. “Fuck,” he muttered.

He saw the thing unhorse a knight with his fist, point at a second, and there was a burst of pus-yellow fire and a scream.

Gavin put spurs to Bess, who did not deserve any such.

His adversary let loose a torrent of sorcery, and knights and men-at-arms died in every direction—twenty, thirty in a heartbeat.

Bess went forward as if galloping through molasses.

Gavin rose in his stirrups and put the burning sword between him and the thing.

It loosed its bolt down the line at him.

Orley, if the armour of flesh and bone on Ash’s auxiliary consciousness could still be called Orley, drew on his master’s enormous power and began to throw his bolts against the vast, puissant shields of force that covered the whole of the abbey ridge and the towering fortress itself. Behind him stood a dozen of his own kind and twenty stone trolls lent him by the reserve; a host of bogglins who darkened the earth; and another thousand of the western daemons who, despite their dismay at the cold weather, were eager to fight their way into the warm caves beneath the fortress, their ancient and traditional hold.

They slammed weapons into shields.

Orley raised his arms and threw another impossible wall of power into the ancient wards.

Miriam was aware that she was losing. The loss was gradual; it might take the will aeons to break her, but its massive powers raged against her choir, her wards, and the impossibly ancient powers of the gates like a massive flood facing a very ancient dam. The water rose slowly, interspersed with sudden surges; the weight increased by degrees, on many levels, so that even as the allegory of the flood might be one reality, in another, Miriam’s very sanity was challenged; her identity, her sense of self, her faith, her gender, her confidence, her love. All undermined; all sabotaged.

No abbess was chosen for anything but this; that she knew herself, and had that kind of spirit that cannot easily be broken. Miriam’s identity was always a little malleable; her faith was open to doubt every day, her gender had never been the center of her being, her confidence had always rested in her faith in others, her sanity was always a matter for her private mind.

But her love for her people and all people she’d even known was like adamant.

And her choir was very, very good.