Ash leapt across the nonspace of the aethereal, and sank his hermetical fangs deep into the Odine’s aethereal throat.

His betrayal was immediate, the surprise complete. The Odine, the one holding the gate, seemed distracted, even as he sucked its life away; its distant sister, the will north of the Inland Sea, shrieked in rage and swore revenge.

Ash bore down, even as the Odine under his assault began to crumple. Its collapse was ridiculously quick, and he wondered if he had misjudged its power in the first days.

The gate swung fully open in the timeless time of the aethereal.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Tom Lachlan sprang through the gate with the whole line at his back, and with Petrarcha pouring ops into the casa’s great golden shield as they advanced, and a firework of potent sorceries rolled off the old scholar as he went forward just behind Cully, his head up and his hands opening and closing like a puppet master working marionettes. It was dark, and there was snow in the air, and Tom had somehow expected to arrive in the cellars below the abbey; instead, he was fighting between two great bloodstained pylons of yellow-white, his sword flickering effortlessly through crowds of unmotivated not-dead.

On the other side of the gate, where it was warmer and the sun shone, Ser Michael was rebuilding the army in a parade ground voice. The gate gapped, with a vision of snow-laced darkness, just as, a hundred paces away, Tom Lachlan’s fight was illuminated strangely by the sunlit day pouring through the gate behind him, lighting the falling snow in a most unnatural way.

The will collapsed, its constituents struggling for supremacy. Thousands of worms and larvae fled, on the ground, virtually vanishing into the falling snow.

Petrarcha cast a rolling fire that cleared the ground of both snow and Odine, at least closer in.

*

In the aethereal, Ash reached out and began to subsume the power of the massed wills of the Odine. He needed the power, to replace all that he had used and squandered, but the subsumation of the scattered wills of the Odine was not like taking a single defeated entity, and it took time.

Blue Berry of the Long Dam Clan had fought all day, and her fur was clotted with blood and other fluids, and her gold was dimmed to a dingy brown, and she had a bad wound all down her left side, the slash of a cave troll’s stone axe. But she and her clan had stood their ground with the duchess and held her flank until the very end.

And the men had come, and freed them from the trap.