Gabriel lay in a hand’s depth of warm salt water, staring up at the darkness as the water filled his helmet.

Tancreda stood over him. He wriggled his toes; his neck hurt.

“Damn,” he said aloud.

Hungry! Ariosto wailed.

“Get through the gate! Get clear!” Gabriel roared, coming to his senses. He was soaking wet. “Go, go!”

A dozen greens poured across the last sand spit. Mortirmir was casting; Gabriel could tell from his posture. So was Petrarcha.

“Go!” Gabriel screamed at the company archers who stood across the gate. “Milus! Form ranks on the other side of the gate.”

Ser Milus turned immediately, gesturing. The Company Saint Catherine retired; the line of lances went back with it.

More scouts were coming down the end of the causeway. The water was rising.

“They know we’re here,” Morgon said. “And they hate us.”

Gabriel grabbed Mortirmir by the shoulder. “Run. Don’t walk. Run.”

He put an arm around Petrarcha, even as he could feel the malevolent will working out in the water . . . working . . . magnified . . .

Sauce was galloping. She had someone riding double; she was last, and alone.

Behind him, Anne Woodstock got Ariosto through the ranks of the company and through the gate.

Sauce had a long way to go still. She’d stopped for someone.

Gabriel went into his palace and slammed the iron gate shut, just to be sure. Then he reached down through memory and practice to the Umroth, and their passive shield. He took it out, examined it, and rolled it off as an effort of will powered entirely from within himself; from the same source that made his skin glow gold. He didn’t need to understand it completely; he knew enough, now.

It was like working with emotion instead of power, and he wove a shield of hope. And he built a wave front of hope; the antithesis of the hate of the sea creatures.

It was as if everything he’d ever learned, from Prudentia, from Harmodius, from his mother, from the Patriarch, from Al Rashidi and Mortirmir, all came together in a single expression of his innermost will.

There was no casting.

There was only being.

In the real, the sea rose until Sauce was galloping through water up to her charger’s fetlocks. And the deep dweller rising from the water was exposed; vast, bloated, and it threw a fell wave of pale green light . . .

The light struck something invisible, like the prow of a ship, and passed along either side of the causeway to break against the island of rock that contained the gate; and the stone began to crack.

Sauce, with Daud clinging to her, burst past Gabriel who began to walk backwards, carefully. The green light was everywhere; not the green of home, but a watery green, pale, and eager to drink his essence.

His hope met its desire to destroy, and defeated it.

He took another step backward, and another, and another.

“Gate!” called Mortirmir.