“Surrender?” He laughed. He was silent a long time, and then he spoke carefully, as if considering them all. “You are nothing. In a generation you will done, and nothing will be left of you but the wind. The gates will be open for years, and I will be here waiting for your alliance to collapse. The irks will fight the men, and the men will hunt the bears, and the Outwallers will rise to old grievances, and I will be here to make sure you all drown in your own blood for daring to impede me.”

And Gabriel said, “All that may be. All that you say is my greatest fear, so I thank you for threatening it; men’s memories are helped by such terrible words. But today, I have a great army; the greatest army that any being has assembled here since the Empress Livia passed the gates. And I have a choir of magisters who are your match. And I say to you: Dragon, surrender, or we will end you. I offer no other choice; no condition, no bargain, no truce. Surrender to our mercy, and allow us into your mind. Or we will make an end of you.”

“I cannot die. At best, you will force me into the immaterium.” The dragon’s voice betrayed his fear.

In a pocket of the real, the word mind keyed something. Gabriel had an odd sensation, so that he looked around, as if he’d heard a hail, or a call for help, or a woman’s scream.

He went back into the aethereal. He made his avatar’s face take on a lazy smile. “Are you sure?” he asked. “If I were you, I would wonder how this all came to be. How I came, as a being that can transcend reality, to have lost a war so thoroughly to a mob of mortal rag pickers.” Gabriel nodded. “Perhaps you are losing your mind,” he said.

(Again, the word mind. Again, a call; this time he felt it in the aethereal, a sort of substrate under the voice of the dragon.)

“I am the lord of this world,” Ash said. “I will do with it as I please, and no mortal hand will keep me from the least of my desires. And I have subsumed the Odine, and you have no idea of my power. I could break this world and kill you all.”

Desiderata laughed. “You dream dark dreams,” she said. “You can no more break this world than I can.”

“I spit on your pitiful offer of surrender,” Ash said.

Gabriel nodded. “I knew you would,” he said.

(He knew that note now. It was Harmodius. The instinct to aid him was stronger than revulsion or fear, and he extended a tendril of his thought . . .