Gavin looked around at all of them. “That is it exactly, damn it.” He laughed. “The one thing we seem to be good at is staying together.”

“Say rather, the one thing at which we have excelled is distracting Ash,” Tamsin said. “Nothing I could have planned, no wile or deception, could have been as effective as our chaotic probes.” She shrugged. “I have almost nothing left. But if that was our last day . . .” She managed a smile.

“Where is Tapio?” Gavin asked.

“Close,” she said with a smile. “Close enough that I hope to see him, ere the end.”

“The end?” Gavin asked. “I don’t think so.”

They all looked at him.

Gavin shrugged. “You don’t know my brother,” he said. “If he says he’s coming, he’s coming. If he has to march through hell to reach us, he will. If he has to war down Satan, he will.”

Gregario laughed. “Damn, I love your faith. I just wish he’d get on with it.” He looked around. “Anyone have more wine?”

And Tamsin nodded. “I have no faith, man, except in my Tapio. If Gabriel does not come now, we can only make a song.”

For more than an hour, Desiderata held the gate and the wards with the survivors of the two choirs, and one by one, when the walls were clear, she added the deep bass and tenor voices of the Order’s knights to her choir, in the real and in the aethereal, and the mixed choir was stronger than the two choirs had been together. And ever she held the will, and ever her wall of gold stopped Ash, and when he came close, she forced him to see himself reflected in her, and he flinched.

But the struggle was unequal, the addition of twenty male voices could not change the inexorable mathematics of power, and as the time for vespers approached, Desiderata began to endure the same tendrils of doubt, except that she was facing the whole of Ash in addition to the will. The will became strident; the stridency rose to a desperate pitch, and Desiderata began to feel a thread of hope among the warp of fear; the will was no longer as united, and voices were leaving its discordant note, and she felt a weakening in it.

And then it rose like a suffocating fog, and all Desiderata could do was to say, in the real:

Sing!

And every man and woman in the chapel, cut with glass, wounded by sword and claw or unhurt and merely exhausted, raised their voices in praise as best they could. And the will rose like a tidal wave threatening to engulf the world, but its desperation and dissolution were inherent in the force of its last throw.

Something was happening.

In the aethereal, just the other side of the gate, it lost its note. The discord became silence . . .

Then, in a moment, it was gone.