Mortirmir appeared inside his palace, and then Petrarcha in long, blue velvet robes, and Tancreda in the habit of a Liviapolitan nun, and as they entered they took his aethereal hands. The other casters, mostly Morean and Alban university students, pushed potentia into the link.

The will pressed against the gate.

Gabriel pushed back.

Mortirmir laughed. “Anytime,” he said.

If the struggle for the gate was like arm wrestling with hermetical will, Gabriel did the equivalent of rotating his adversary’s hand and wrist. He slammed his opponent’s arm down on the metaphorical table.

The gate opened.

It was open for exactly as long as it might take a faery to blink her eye.

Mortirmir displaced a small, round egg of pure gold through the gate.

The gate shut.

Three. Two. One. They all counted down together.

Gabriel reached for the gate again.

No resistance.

He flicked it open, and the sun of a bright day fell across the line of the red banda.

They were looking out across a rocky down slope; volcanic, the earth red brown, the stone grey and black in contrast, with clumps of grass and a marvelous yellow sunlight. It was warm.

The air was full of dust, so full of dust that nothing of the landscape was visible beyond a few spear’s lengths.

The ground outside the gate was thick with the corpses of bogglins. They were messily dead, their juices splattered across the ground in front of the gate.

“Go,” Gabriel said.

The red banda marched through the gate. They marched forward two hundred paces, flowing around an ancient altar and two downed basalt columns and a huge volcanic rock and halting with both flanks resting on dry streambeds.

The white banda went through the gate and wheeled to the left by sections of lances. The casa came through on horseback, at the double, and formed to the right, and by then, the first wave of enemy had appeared out of the dust and died.

Mortirmir had passed the gate. He took a moment while Tancreda and Petrarcha raised immense shields in the ops rich air to draw the baselard from his hip and slit open the carcass of a bogglin.

Gabriel looked down at the mass of the thing’s pink-grey innards.

“Not bogglins,” Mortirmir said. “And look.”

Gabriel knew what he would see. And it caused his heart to swell with joy; it meant they were on track, it meant he was right . . .

A worm. An Odine possessor worm in an alien bogglin-thing.

“We did it,” Morgon said, and for once his adolescent superiority was utterly punctured, and joy covered him, and he threw his arms around Gabriel, who pounded his back.

Tom Lachlan looked down from his great black horse as if the two were idiots.

“Ye’r wode!” he said.

Gabriel thought he might cry, the relief was so great. So painful.

“Ye can tell ’em. Are we fucked?” asked Tom.