But in the center, the casa covered ground; they were less than five hundred paces from the great worm of worms now, and they began to pick up speed because they were afraid, and they all, collectively, wanted to get it over with.

The gonnes fired again.

The will responded, concentrating its efforts directly at the gonnes.

But this was the attack that the choir had anticipated, and now it struck shield after shield, knocking one down only to meet another. The gonnes had been a trap; Mortirmir had expected the will to attack them first.

Now Mortirmir had the initiative, and not a single gonner was killed.

Mortirmir recast shields, along with a dazzling array of attacks: balls of spectacular fire, bolts of lightning in various colours, a driven wind of colours from beyond the human spectrum of perception, through the rainbow and beyond again.

The will stopped them.

In the real, the world beyond the shields was a rolling cacophony of noise and light.

Anything you could do to distract it would be appreciated, Mortirmir said inside Gabriel’s palace.

People were down. There were gaps in the casa; the Scholae had stopped advancing altogether. The Vardariotes were unable to continue forward and began, despite Kriax’s entreaties, to run. Edmund’s hand gonners were wavering, unable to see beyond the ends of their weapons.

But . . .

Even as Gabriel prepared himself in his palace, the Saint Catherine came forward, the company dividing along the middle to pass on either side of the casa. They were less than a hundred paces from the maelstrom of chaos.

Gabriel, despite his fears, prepared to cast. He went into his palace and saluted Prudentia.

“You are very close now,” she said quietly.

“My friends are dying,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He pointed to three simple sigils.

“Allow me,” she said. “You really should not power anything just now.”

Gabriel stepped back out of the line in the real and augmented his voice.

Archers! he called.

Knights! Forward!

Then he pushed past Woodstock and went forward into the storm. He could not see that the Etruscans and the scarecrows were also pushing forward. He couldn’t see that Cully was loosing heavy arrows behind him, aiming high at a conglomerate of terror that towered over them. He couldn’t see Tom Lachlan or Michael or Sauce or Francis Atcourt or any of the rest of the men and women he’d led for years.

But he knew they were there.

And together, they went forward.

The shield of the Odine was like a wall of soft clay—clinging, cloying, sickening, an assault on every sense. But soft.

The ghiavarina cut it like butter, and Gabriel was momentarily reminded of fighting his mother’s curse of black felt, except that every stroke of the weapon took his deeper and opened a hole.