And then he could see the mountain of worms on the other side, a thousand thousand ravening mouths. He set himself and cut, even as the first worms began to turn on him. Two paces to his right, Bad Tom’s sword burst through in a spray of fire and even in the hell of the Odine’s maw, Gabriel heard, “Lachlan for Aa!”

Then he was cutting. It was like exercise; like cutting at air, except that the worms themselves had the same consistency as the shield, and they fled him and Lachlan, the wall of mouths and glistening grey bodies writhing away.

Lachlan, as casually as if he were fighting in a tournament, spared two blows to widen the rift in the shield.

Gabriel cut to his left, opening the tear wider.

Mortirmir couldn’t handle the ferocity of the attacks.

But he didn’t have to. He wasn’t alone, and Tancreda spun her web faster than a hermetical spider while Magister Petrarcha wove a fabric of deceit and reconciliation. A Morean magister dropped, exhausted, and was killed; the choir faltered, and the shields flickered. Women died, and men. Irks died.

But . . .

The choir held. The will was distracted; swords were eating at its base in the real, and its shield of flexible adamantine had become porous. It began to change its priorities, and orders flowed through the aethereal as its millions of component beings demanded, ordered, shouted, received . . .

Mortirmir found what he sought; and in the haze of communications that the Odine used to master themselves, he and his choir deciphered. Analyzed.

Prepared.

If the duel had been with swords, then all the attacks, all the lightning, all the fireballs, all the swords would have been an attack in an outside line.

A feint.

Mortirmir gathered every shred of power remaining to his choir.

His chessboard was empty. His wall of diagrams was complete. He didn’t even have time to savour the moment at which he was either triumphant or annihilated.

He cast. A single pulse, a single ray of light. Or perhaps a single musical note. Or perhaps a single colour. A texture. An emotion.

He cast it on what he had perceived as the moment in the spectrum wherein the Odine’s components communicated, and he sustained it. . . .

In the real, the worm of worms began to collapse like an undermined tower in a siege; slowly at first, like a wounded man subsiding, and then . . .

. . . then the worms were everywhere, writhing like larvae, mouths pulsing. Swords took a few; arrows snapped through the air and nipped others, but the effect was like that of a single gardener attacking a forest. And the knights and men-at-arms were buried in the collapse, the grotesque unmaking of the Odine into its components, but the components themselves were still deadly.

Gabriel felt the dissolution and knew, too, that the moment had come.

He went into the palace.

“Don’t!” Pru said.