Gabriel was able to shine his genuine smile. “Think of what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re lying to the most dangerous immortal being we know of, unless God is real. Honest men would not do.”

Du Corse and he clasped arms. “I may still need magisters,” Du Corse said.

“If worst comes to worst, it will be me, in person,” Gabriel said.

He leaped into Ariosto’s saddle. His mount had eaten three sheep, and looked a little cross-eyed. He thought about Du Corse.

Despite Du Corse being his first great opponent, a ruthless adversary in a dangerous game, Gabriel trusted him.

The more so as he had the right bribe in hand. Carrot and stick.

Is this what it is like to be a dragon? he asked himself as he started back.

Distances in the air were deceptive; only today, after days of flying, did he realize that he could reach Arles if he wanted, and curl in Blanche’s protective arms, and . . .

That way madness lay. He watched the hills rise before him, and then—

There was a sharp tug at his reality, as if someone grabbed his life in the aethereal and gave it a shake.

In no real time at all he was in his palace. He pulled the shield off Prudentia’s arm; the one he kept ready, and he deployed it—

Slam.

The entire shield crumpled in a single blow. But Gabriel was not new to combat in the aethereal. The overflow of power from the attack roiled into a second layer, which absorbed it and used it creatively in a series of, not shields, but baffles, so that the second and third attacks were channeled into the real as heat and light.

Ariosto was up on one wingtip, and a new sun burned a bowshot below them, but none of the energy touched them.

Dive.

On it, boss.

In his palace, he deployed the most powerful shield-working he had to hand and he began another, using Prudentia to run the working while he funneled her power, changing raw ops to potentia at a speed that most practioners would envy.

There was no fourth blow.

He had time to look; there was no hermetical source anywhere near him.

The world of the aethereal was and was not like the world of the real. It was very empty at high altitude; the plane of action had no other players and almost no gradient of power. All that was located elsewhere in more than three dimensions, but as the ground rushed at him in the real, so that gradient of probabilities approached from all directions and dropped toward a singularity.

He had no time to ponder the philosophy of it. He deployed Mortirmir’s search working; the one that looked for signs of nothing, generated by purpose.

This time, the result was unambiguous, or rather, the probability was startlingly high.