And deep in the cave of black flesh, Tom Lachlan roared “Lachlan for Aa!” again, and struck, and more black flesh rolled away; Sauce cut up, sottano and the ghiavarina, almost a live thing, cut high, mezzano as if slicing a curtain, and another panel of flesh fell away, and there was white bone.

The spine.

Bad Tom paused, faced with the reality of the thing.

A grin covered his face.

“HECTOR! I AVENGE THEE!” he roared, and cut into the bone of the dragon’s spine.

And then they were covered in faeries; the tide of colour descending on the dying dragon, leaching his black and taking him for their own.

When the fortress of his mortal immanence was no longer practicable, Ash fled to the high aethereal, to wait another hundred aeons, grow new allies, and . . .

He was not alone. Even as the hideous faeries stripped his essence like hermetical heyaenas on a carcass, he was naked on the endless plain, and he was not alone.

There in the aethereal stood an infinite tide of figures of gold, more than an army of bogglins; and each of them imbued with the shining gold of transcendence, rank upon rank, like a phalanx of angels. Some he knew; most be knew not; and at their head, the golden figure of a knight. His nemesis the Red Knight, at the head of the phalanx; men and women, irks and wardens, rank on rank his victims and his enemies and all the others; men and wardens, women and irks blazing like suns.

And on the glass-covered floor of the chapel of the abbey of Lissen Carak, Desiderata raised her hands and said, “Te Deum.”

Epilogue

Epilogue

Christmas Eve

Adrian Goldsmith was the last man to leave the scaffolding. He was an odd young man, a study in contrasts, like so many of his generation; he wore the somber, plain clothes of a workingman, and yet on his hips was a knight’s belt, and on his collar was the wheel badge of the company.

Below him, in the nave of the great hall of the new palace of Liviapolis, the dowager empress, great with child, sat on a chair specially made for her to watch the progress on the vast fresco. Goldsmith waved, and she smiled, and her knight, Galahad d’Acon, waved, too.

It took Adrian a long time to get down; No Head’s scaffolding was itself a miracle of design, and he had included ladders and platforms enough for a siege, or so it seemed to the artist-knight as he climbed down.

He bowed to the dowager empress when his feet were on solid marble. “Majesty. I wanted you to see what it would look like.”