He was learning the hermetical language of the Odine. It was very like the language of the rebel, and yet different. Rigorous. Pure. Undiluted.

A little naive.

He could feel it planning, preparing, building power.

He tried sabotaging a thought, and failed; it ignored him.

He lost the initiative and spent a great deal of his choir’s ops on defence. He wasn’t altogether successful and lost almost a hundred people, and the will pounced. It knew the code by which mere humans lived, and it assaulted Mortirmir with a wave of revulsion and self-loathing based on his failure, his love of his fellow men, his betrayal of their hopes.

The Odine was as mistaken as the man had been. Mortirmir was not very interested in people. He protected them because by doing so he could win, but he could sustain losses and still win, and the coercive attack washed over him. And in it he found information. He changed his own message; he fine-tuned the choir’s shields and exchanged, at the speed of thought, some ideas with his wife and with Magister Petrarcha.

The gonnes fired in the real. They were working; the will feared them. Even though their immediate effects were infinitesimal, Gabriel had correctly assessed that the will must view the world in very long aeons. The will could not afford a siege of its puissance by gonnes.

The will shielded itself. But the kinetic force of the gonnes was huge, and required a massive manipulation of potentia and thus a huge display of information in the aethereal, and Mortirmir watched, manipulated, and unleashed.

He failed, and the balls were stopped on the magnificent shield that towered over the thing.

It struck back.

In the real, the will’s counterstrike fell like a sheet of lightning two hundred paces long, and it burned through the casa’s shields in a dozen places. Comnena fell at the head of the Scholae, burned down one side of his body and saved only by one of Mortirmir’s finest amulets, and behind him, a hundred gentlemen of Liviapolis were burned to death in an instant.

Count Zac died as the air in his lungs ignited. Forty Vardariotes died with him, and the white lightning played over into the hand gonners, killing a dozen Venikans and an Ifriquy’an.

The casa went forward into the fire.

The company followed. Out on the flanks, men and women began to edge forward because courage is infectious and because there were no orders not to. Sauce was now at the head of the company; Conte Simone was not a man to wait while others did the fighting, and the duchess, on the far flank, walking easily at the head of her scarecrows, thirsted for vengeance against this very monster, the personifier of her fears, the epicenter of her nightmares.

The scarecrows went forward.