"Did you just eat the Leehtorx?" asked Stave as I staggered inside. He sounded almost clinically interested, as though I had done something rather novel instead of a superhuman feat actuated by runic impossibility gates unique in the known universe.

I think I was beginning to like this kid.

"No. It's temporarily imprisoned in a wormhole matrix embedded runically into dragonscale. I haven't figured out how to kill the thing yet, but I can hold it indefinitely while we're inside the Nethergates."

His eyebrows actually went up at that. "I rated four different impossibilities in that statement, but you believe it to be true. Interesting..."

I shrugged. "It's a gross over-simplification of the real explanation, but people's eyes start to glaze over when I try to tell them how my mother created an interlocking series of cyclical space portal holes by manipulating runic antithesis evocations into metaphysical relationships and tying them together in a causal chain, let alone the complexities involved in the distinction between embedding runes and depositing arcana and the importance of the depository alignment colors and the reasons why the gloves are genetically tied to Mother's descendants and the--"

"That's enough!" Kalerin said, shuddering as she threw up her hands in surrender.

I suppressed the smirk, but it was hard. Seeing Kalerin get flustered like that was adorable. I will never admit this, but her reaction to technical explanations of my magic was one of the biggest reasons I still tried to do it from time to time.

Stave, however, managed to surprise me. His eyes twinkled a bit, and he said, "Oh, I don't know, Mother. That sounded like that explanation could get really interesting as a probability study exercise."

Kalerin looked like she had just been betrayed, but rescue came from an unexpected quarter.

*Don't encourage him,* huffed Stalnir from where he had been led off to one side. *Veydann will literally go on like that for hours, and heavens help you if he starts busting out the mathematics and the statistical tables.*

I had to laugh at that one, if only because it was true, but Stalnir had reminded me that there were other concerns in play. "Anyway, holding the Leehtorx like this should buy us some time before they miss it, but it's not a good guess how much. We need to resolve this and get everyone we can out of their reach as soon as possible."

"All well and good, but doesn't that partly depend on how things are going up top?" asked Kalerin.

This time it was my turn to shrug. "Somewhat, sure, but that just means that I need to do some scrying, and we'll need to do that pretty much regardless. How long was I out for, again?"

"It can be hard to correlate from this deep, but my best guess is probably a week and a half," replied Kalerin.

"Right. A lot can change in a week or two, even if everything Beavan and Trinda said was dead on...Stalnir, are you coherent enough to help me mirror a scry-matrix? I know you've done it for...done it before, and it should actually be easier from in here since we won't need to cancel out our own physical location."

Stalnir blinked, a slow, lazy roll of one horsey eye accompanying an almost-human shrug of his equine shoulders. *As long as you don't need great precision, yeah, I think so. I'm still a little rattled for anything that might let us communicate, though.*

Not ideal, but I appreciated the candor, and I could hardly fault him for being shaken after everything that had happened in the last few days. "That would still help tell me a lot and give me an idea of how dire things are and where I need to go once we get out. Kalerin, do you have a mirrored surface I can use anywhere? The bigger the better."

She laughed and traded grins with Stave. "Big mirror? Oh, I think I've got one of those."

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Kalerin was, if anything, understating the matter, but I wasn't going to complain. The place she led us to looked better suited to the pomp and circumstance of a grand throne room or a ballroom, an enormous, sweeping expanse of marbled austerity that was nearly half the footprint of one of Aesaguard's towers, three hundred yards across if it was an inch and twice as deep, and one entire wall on the shorter axis of the room was a single, expansive, three-hundred-yard-by-two-hundred-yard mirror.

I blinked. "Wow. What on earth does a hospital use this for?" I asked, my voice echoing in the cavern-room as we walked towards it.

"We are a healerie for demonlords," said Kalerin, managing to sound amused and make her voice not echo at the same time. "Most of them are a wee bit bigger than you. The mirror serves as our main entrance and exit point for them, it was put in as part of the original facility when they gave me the mandate. It's actually some kind of multi-dimension thingy that lets us transport them anywhere they want to go or pick them up from where they get hurt. Can you use it?"

I nodded. "Definitely. All I really need is a reflective surface and someone or something else with ties to the people I'm trying to see. It'll change a few of the dynamics of the dretheranic connections, but nothing too significant as long as we avoid impinging on the spatial data array it's running on. You ready, Stalnir?"

The old grey horse tossed his head and gave a very expressive snort.

"Right. Anything in particular I need to know or be careful of before we begin?"

Kalerin shrugged. "Not that I know of. Stave?"

He shook his head. "Spatial arrays should be completely separate from the information tendrils, but you already know that. Visually, it's just a really big mirror, and that's all that should matter for scrying."

"Alright. Here goes nothing..."

I took a deep breath and began to weave. Scrying with a mirror-angle wasn't really all that hard, actually; you just needed to thread illusion manipulation through an etheric rather than a physical connection, though angling and controlling it could be tricky.

I will admit, however, that I was slightly worried about what we were going to find.

Nothing for it but forward, I guess. I bent the seeking part of the spell towards my least favorite brother, tied the resonance through Stalnir's connection to the world above (by the flavor of it, he didn't like Fallon Tyran any more than I did), and opened the viewport.

The scene was...unfortunate, from my perspective, but it fit what Beavan and Trinda had told me right down to the ground. Stalnir hadn't been kidding about shaky focus; the closest I could maintain steadily was almost a full league in the air, which was rather difficult to use for people-spotting but worked perfectly well for army assessment purposes.

The rune-knights--it looked like he had managed to go south with virtually the entire Einherion after my father's death and my own disappearance--had made it nearly halfway through the Dragon's Bowl, almost a third of the way to the Gateway and Garmondir. Among other things, that meant he had left before the crater at Fenrar had even cooled, possibly even before it had ruptured, disregarding the defense of the Valley and our previous plans completely to pursue his own favorite strategy of targeting the greatest assessed threat at the first inkling of opportunity.

What was worse, they were in the process of burning a good-sized city to the ground, a place called Waymark that had made a point of staying out of our battles in the past and that Father had been trying to negotiate trade agreements with only a couple of months ago. Fallon hated neutral parties, and I knew he'd been chafing at some of our restrictions on his more comprehensive war strategies, but to tear off on his own before anyone was probably even sure Father was dead, let alone me, and to engage in total destruction of this scale at what I was pretty sure amounted to minimal or no provocation (As in, they had probably refused to provision him free of charge or something. This had happened before.)... There were good reasons I didn't like Fallon, but I had really hoped he would at least have recognized the value of the Valley and our citizens better than this.

One major disappointment of a brother, check. And what was worse, the Einherion, while immensely formidable against most smaller opponents, were completely ill-equipped against a beast as large and well-armored as Garmondir, and because he was being a headstrong idiot, none of the Valkonir or the Pulvranin, let alone the Koboldin, would have come with him, and sure enough I couldn't see any sign of them.

He was going to get his entire corps pulverized, and there was functionally nothing I could do about it...and that was even assuming he still had enough loyalty to the title and country I had inherited not to attack me if I tried (or any other potential helpers I could send).

At this point, I wasn't holding my breath.

"That's...more or less what I was expecting," I told the others, preparing to shift the scry-matrix. "Not good news by a long shot, but it follows expectations."

Stave raised an eyebrow. "Not good news? It looks like they're winning, doesn't it?"

I snorted. "Oh, they're winning now, but for them to even be at that city, the whole army has effectively deserted our cause, assaulted neutral parties, and are on their way to fight a creature that they are literally the worst choice to face. Fallon... I don't know what he's thinking, but he's consistently refused to believe his knights can't defeat a creature he thinks is just a 'giant dog,' so probably this is just hubris. Horrifying timing for him to defect, if he has, but that's pretty normal. Let's see how Thorion and Modagni are doing."

I slipped the connection across to my most exasperating brother and his son Modagni, and studied the resulting picture.

Stalnir's focus was better here, probably because we both liked Thorion a great deal better than we did Fallon. I don't know why that affects things like this, but I knew from experience that it would, so I wasn't surprised when we were able to get down to no more than a few hundred yards up. We still couldn't see a lot, mostly because there were some remnants of a snowstorm blowing around, but at least that meant Modagni had indeed tried to stick to his part of the plan and gone up into the mountains to hold back the Mithgarians. The storm was in the process of clearing up, too, so it wasn't long before I spied Modagni up on top of one of his ramparts with a bugle, a flag, and his giant lightning-clad axe.

They looked to have built a whole maze of walls up there, which would suit Modagni as a general and the siege-based warfare capabilities of the Pulvranin quite well, but again there was no sign of mixed insignia. I hadn't expected to see Einherion up here after what I'd seen of Fallon's campaign, but there should still have been a few of the Vanal to mitigate the storm, some of the Koboldin for range support, probably some civilian support troops from Volhollan... But it seemed the Pulvranin were alone.

Why wouldn't the Himdalls be helping them out up here? For that matter, how in the world were they even feeding people without support from the capital? The Pulvranin wouldn't be resorting to pillaging the way Fallon was doing; Modagni might be a stiff shirt, but he was a stiff shirt with both spine and honor; he'd sooner eat his best boots than steal from civilians like that, and his troops were just as stubborn as he was.

We had apparently chosen a remarkably climactic moment to perform my spell; I had never seen so many undead in one place before, not even in the near-cataclysm of the First Mithgarian War before we bound them with the Great Seal of Hungering Air so many years ago. Modagni was on the battlements, directing the battle like he was supposed to be but far too visible with his nine-foot frame and his herald's panoply (he'd been the real commander of the Pulvranin for over a century, but he still insisted on the ruse of being his father's herald for reasons I had never understood), while Thorion himself was, of course, down in front of his perfectly good wall, slinging the Hammer Mitagni through the ranks of the undead like the wrecking ball it was. The handle might be shorter than Mitagni and Ror'denya had intended it, but that had actually turned out to suit Thorion's reckless fighting style even better, since it made it far easier to throw, and it was easier to catch when it reappeared in his hand at the end of its arc.

And a block of steel the size of a man's torso hurtling at truly ridiculous speeds had turned out to be a really effective way to destroy the bodies the Mithgarians relied on for cannon fodder in a way that even their magic could rarely make useful again.

"What is he doing down there?" asked Stave. "Especially by himself?"

"He's doing what he always does," I growled, though there was a sinking feeling in my stomach as the weather continued to clear and more details became more visible. "He's playing one-man-army berserker."

It was still absurdly reckless, of course, no matter how many times he'd done it; he spent most of the battle with no weapon in his hand and almost always proceeded (either intentionally or not, I was never quite sure) to find himself in the heat of the fighting, brawling with his fists and throwing the Hammer every time it returned, but he had been doing it for so long that even Modagni rarely did more than scold him after the fact anymore.

For once, though, I could tell exactly what my brother was thinking, jolly giant that he usually was, and it wasn't terribly complicated.

"Whatever he thinks he's doing, this group isn't doing nearly so well," Kalerin remarked.

She wasn't wrong. Modagni was terrifyingly good at defensive battles, and it looked like they had had time to prepare their ground, but without their typical ranged, logistical, and weather support, they were fighting at less than half their usual effectiveness, and the sheer, ridiculous numbers of the undead were taking their toll. They didn't have a solid foothold on the battlements--yet--but they were pushing onto them in at least four different places that I could see and threatening to in a dozen more. The Pulvranin were desperate, and for the first time since Modagni had matured, they were losing.

"Who's the big snake?" asked Stave.

It was a good question. Right in the middle of the horde, and clearly Thorion's target, was a giant coiling snake, easily twice the height of anyone or anything else on the battlefield and of almost unimaginable length, a creature with a great crown upon his head and with whose lore every child in Noldur has been acquainted for over three hundred years.

"That's Yormungandr. He's the king of Mithgaria and the single greatest mage-lich and necromancer ever born. If he's here, so is most of the Mithgarian army, living and dead," I told them.

If Yormungandr himself had come out for this assault, that said unfortunate things about the level of commitment and involvement in this sorry mess the Mithgarians had, but it also said some really impressive things about Modagni's defensive efforts thus far. The great snake was far and away the greatest mage the necromancer nation possessed, and he kept it that way by literally eating any of his followers who passed a certain threshold. For him to be out here himself explained a lot of the number and power of warriors and undead on display...and also why, this time, Thorion had descended from the battlements his son had so ably provided.

Yormungandr was an immensely formidable foe, with contact nerve poison for blood, a literal army of bodyguards, and the far from inconsiderable abilities of a mage who had been accumulating power and learning for centuries. Even successfully killing the monster, especially with a splashy weapon like the Hammer, was probably going to result in getting himself killed. We had mostly avoided engaging with Yormungandr himself in past conflicts, for exactly those reasons.

By the same token, however, if he were to succeed, at whatever cost, the entire enemy formation would be broken in catastrophic fashion. Yormungandr ruled by fear and power, including a host of tightly woven spells that held the lives of most of his generals and officials hostage to his own. He also served as the thaumic battery that fueled at least half of the undead currently besieging Thorion's son and in danger of overwhelming his beloved soldiers.

I had my share of frustrations and frictions with the meathead, not least of which was his tendency to solve every problem he encountered with a swing (or two, or three) of the Hammer and/or his fists, but his loyalty and love toward his family and soldiers was unquestionable and awe-inspiring. If he saw any chance to save them, no matter what it would do to himself...

Thorion would be charging as soon as the thought even crossed his mind.

And with the possible exception of the son on the battlements above who kept getting distracted from his own boiling fight to yell (probably futilely, even with Modagni's lungs) at the father whose motivations were undoubtedly even more obvious to the general-herald than they were to me, Thorion, even with his reckless, wild style, was probably the single most formidable physical fighter I have ever seen.

Impossible as it seemed, the mass of Mithgarian revenants and highly trained war-mages began, slowly, to part, driven by the insane force of the thrown Hammer and an immensely powerful warrior who didn't care if he died so long as he reached his objective. Great warriors as the serpentfolk were, nothing in their chaotic and violent history had prepared them for the raw, desperate fury of the trapped Pulvran with his back against the wall, and Thorion Pulvran had always, and rightly, been feared when he chose to step onto the battlefield.

"Where is he going?" asked Kalerin.

To those unfamiliar with Thorion, he looked like he was flailing wildly, hurling his great hammer repeatedly and with great force into the ranks of his enemies, only to have it return to his hand as soon as it had expended its force (I'd always wondered how the dwarf had pulled off that trick), all the while breaking bones and weapons with fists and raw strength. Thorion Pulvran in battle was a roaring incoherency, his bloodstreaked arms a windmill of havoc and death, just on the rim of sanity. "He's trying to end this," I said grimly, "and probably get himself killed."

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Because my brother had not, this time, succumbed to the berserk rage for which he was justly famous. He had a target.

And his 'flailing about' on the battlefield was never so aimless as he pretended.

Roaring like the mad avenger he had become, Thorion mowed through the standing ranks of the great serpent’s warguard like a bloody whirlwind and hurled himself and his Hammer onto the command platform.

"The time is now, my slithering friend!" he roared, brandishing the Hammer in one bloody fist as he charged his opponent.

Yormungandr, himself, hissed and reared, dodging the raving giant’s first blow. "Fool, you cannot kill me!" he hissed, whipping his enormous tail towards the offending intruder.

Thorion allowed the tremendous blow to land, sweeping him back and up on a trajectory the snake had intended to end in its teeth.

"Oh yeah?" he said, taking a fresh grip on the Hammer as he soared upwards. "Watch me!"

And he brought the Hammer of Thunder down upon the gaping jaws of the Serpent of Mithgaria.

The impact, both physical and magical, was tremendous. The Hammer was the embodiment of hopes and dreams of many both living and dead, a powerful symbol of all the Pulvranin were. It contained the captured lightning of a hundred massive storms, and the only dwarven smith who had ever succeeded in becoming one with a weapon instead of with armour. Its impact had never been denied.

Yormungandr had not ruled a powerful magical realm for half a thousand years by being weak. Among the strongest of a strong, dark race, gifted with all the captured power of a thousand thousand lives, his very body was poison to the touch, and all his underlings and most of his neighbors rightly feared his anger, and his power. There was no stronger or better-protected magus in the entire world, but when push comes to shove, mortal flesh, however altered and strengthened, is no match for that type of direct impact with arcane steel.

The yawning head of the Serpent succumbed to the ferocious power of the Hammer, crumpling like a strange tin can before swelling abruptly as the accumulated toxins of centuries erupted through Yormungandr’s brain, splashing outward in a particularly gory explosion. (This was actually a standard safety measure even lesser mage-snakes used to take automatic vengeance on their slayers. It had, perhaps unsurprisingly, caused assassins, as well as deathbed chats, to be few and far between in Mithgaria.)

The backsplash wave was as impressive as everything else about the ancient snake. The shockwave proceeded to level an entire acre, and the powerful venom in the serpent’s fangs and blood spattered across every creature for twenty yards around, a great fount of the foul contact poison splashing directly backwards against the great Hammer that had struck--and the man who had wielded it.

Thorion rolled, bounced, then skidded, taking out several suddenly screaming functionaries along the way, then staggered to his feet as the massive dose of poison began to affect those around him.

"He survived that?" asked Stave, surprised.

"Not for long," said Kalerin grimly. "I don't know how he's still on his feet, but it won't last."

For a moment I dared to hope that somehow, after all, Thorion had managed to survive his mad gambit, that for once Kalerin was wrong. It had worked, after all. Thorion was the hero of the day, and the serpent was dead.

Mages and warriors all around him were dying, some neatly decapitated by their hostage spells, others writhing in shock from one or more of the poisons and plagues now raging among the host. Undead were stuttering to a halt and collapsing as their wielders attempted to deal alone with a burden Yormungandr was meant to be sharing, many necromancers buckling to their knees or collapsing outright under the strain.

Thorion seemed almost unaffected, dashing back to his son's position on the wall, but that said nothing of the incredible toxicity my foolish, headstrong brother had just absorbed, something perhaps--probably--near certainly too much even for his immense immune system.

Then he stumbled, and I knew it hadn't missed him after all.

His grip slipped on the way up the wall, and I knew he wasn't shrugging it off.

And when he collapsed at his son's horrified feet, I knew what had truly happened, and I felt my heart open up into a new pit of despair and pain alongside the still-fresh one for my father.

The Hammer was an important part of our history and our family, and it was also a powerful weapon, but its most important feature was that it housed the soul of a powerful dwarven smith. Mitagni didn't interfere with the outside world very often, since from what I'd been able to communicate with him it was a terrible strain on whatever his resources were within the metal, but this was definitely a situation that warranted it, and while it had likely taxed him to get Thorion back to Modagni before he died, it was vastly better for all concerned not to leave a powerful sentient weapon in the center of the death zone the Mithgarian army had become.

Not to mention, it gave Thorion exactly the kind of dramatic exit he'd always said he wanted. I could almost smile at that thought, though I doubted the clinical and terminally grumpy dwarven smith would have taken it into his own calculus.

I felt tears blur my eyes as Modagni reached out to take the weapon his father had wielded for so long, his face grim and his hands certain, and while none of my senses could normally do such a thing, I swear I felt my brother die as Modagni's hand closed around the hilt.

Well. The Pulvranin shouldn't have much trouble with the Mithgarian front after that. I swiped the tears from my eyes and said hoarsely, "Taking out Yormungandr like that will cripple the entire Mithgarian war effort and every necromancer they have. My...Modagni will be hurting, but he won't waste the opportunity his father just gave him. If he can feed his soldiers, he should be able to carve a foothold into those hills a dragon would struggle to pull him out of after this."

"Modagni? Is that the one who took up the hammer after...?" asked Stave.

I swallowed thickly. "Yes. He's probably the best defensive general I've ever encountered, and he's been actually in charge for decades, though he always gave lip service to following Th... Anyway, if he doesn't lose it completely after--after all that, he's the one who will take over and move on. I just wish I knew why they didn't have any support troops, or even Vanal. Stalnir, I'm switching to Friyar. Hopefully we can make some sense of this from whatever he's doing. You still holding up?"

Stalnir gave me a rather non-equine shrug. *You're doing all the heavy lifting. At this rate I can keep it up for hours.*

"Good. Here goes."

This time, however, the image refused to congeal. There was a series of broken almost-images, something about fog, and dust, and Drinorae...a fleeting shadow that looked like Lokigan Faeron juggling something head-sized (quite possibly an actual head, based on his personality back before his imprisonment)...

"So Friyar is already dead," I concluded. That was the only way you got that kind of half-fuzzy result out of this kind of connection scry. "Probably taken out by the Drinorae and/or the Faeron, by the echoes..."

"I thought the Faeron was an ally?" asked Kalerin, confused.

Sometimes I forgot how long she'd been out of touch. "He used to be. He murdered Baldan about forty years ago and we trapped him in fire chains for it until he got out when this particular conflict started."

"Ouch," said Stave. "Why not just kill him?"

"We couldn't figure out how to."

"Really?"

"Quite seriously. He's the most powerful shapeshifter and fire-master in the world. The man can survive indefinitely in multiple pieces and no longer needs air, water, or food to survive, and regenerates faster than we can burn him."

"Ah."

I snorted. "Yeah. I'm switching to Ulmer, Stalnir."

*Go ahead.*

I slipped the ether towards a different target, and once again found myself grimacing.

"Well, he's still alive," said Stave, "but he doesn't look very happy."

That was something of an understatement. Ulmer Allhas was trudging through a high mountain pass I didn't recognize with what looked like the bedraggled remnants of our Koboldin archer corps. They were in terrible shape, there were a fraction of the numbers that they should be, and the very fact that I couldn't recognize the pass meant they were deep in enemy territory, probably north in the Drinorae's lands if he'd been forced to flee from Friyar and Fallon's foolishness. From this aerial perspective, it was pretty clear that there were also several groups of enemy soldiers closing in on his position…and I had no way to contact him to even warn him. The Koboldin were a formidable force, and Ulmer excelled at the type of guerrilla hit-and-run they were trained and equipped for, but there were three times as many Drinorae nearby as Koboldin, they had clearly expended a lot of their ammunition already, many looked to be hauling damaged armor, and they were in a near-total encirclement. The Drinorae were a poor matchup for the Koboldin anyway, because they were the only foes fast enough to be able to dodge hammerbow projectiles or run the archers down, not to mention their armor was far better than the light stuff the Koboldin favored, but in their own mountains, with the element of surprise, and with a decisive numbers advantage…

I had seen too many die to watch another one do it when I had the choice to turn away. "I can't watch this. Stalnir, I'm switching to Beavan."

*Understood.*

As this one snapped into focus, I breathed a sigh of relief. At least something was going the way it was supposed to. I'd begun to wonder, after the last few...

"Now that is an impressive caravan," Stave remarked. "What's up with this one?"

It was a fair question, and a truer observation I had never heard. The sheet of wagons, people, and animals stretched out for literally miles in every direction we could see, a moving sea of every sort of people who had called the Valley of Noldur or Volhollan City home. It looked like Trinda had been able to convince Beavan of the reality of my visit after all, though the direction seemed odd to me…

"They're evacuating the Valley," I told him distractedly, trying to determine if I was right. "I went to see Memer right before this whole mess kicked off, and he warned us that the whole 'mountain nest will be broken.' It's actually what I went back to tell them about while I was comatose."

"Noldur must have done pretty well for itself over the last few decades," Kalerin remarked. "That looks like a lot more people than most records would admit you had up there."

"Our population growth rate is exponential," I told her, "because very few of our people die in comparison to most other nations. Are they going north?"

Stave squinted at the sun. "I think so, though it's a little hard to tell. Why?"

"Because the only thing north of Noldur is a smoking wasteland," his mother told him. "Unless your lot have managed to fix any of that?" she added, turning to me.

I shook my head. "If anything, Toneil's actually gotten worse since you've been...gone. It's a sea of poison, malevolent beasts, and sentient quicksand that even our best soldiers hesitate to cross. What could Beavan be thinking, taking the civilians into that?"

"What are his alternatives?" Stave asked.

It was a better question than mine, and not just because of his more or less complete ignorance of the geopolitical situation in the world above. Fifty years ago, I'd've said to take them to Waesir, but Lokigan Faeron's homeland was hardly what I would call an ally anymore. They could have gone to Drelfthon, but not without a pretty serious military presence to handle the bandits and robber barons that infested the area...military force that our prior scryings made me pretty sure they didn't have. They could have gone south...unless Fallon had been behaving the same way as at Waymark at other cities along his route. And the only thing to the east of us were the immensely rugged mountains in which Modagni was currently fighting the undead.

"Maybe not much, now that I come to think of it," I said in response to his question, "but I'd love to know how he thinks he's going to handle the dangers once he gets there. He must have some ideas to get this many people to follow him."

"Who's in charge of this one?" asked Kalerin, sounding quite curious. "Anybody I'd have heard of?"

I shook my head. "Most of this will be Beavan, Aesaguard's castellan and my father's youngest son. He was born well after that mess with Salthary. Trinda Toneilon was my other contact, though. I'm sure you've heard of her."

She snorted slightly, and Stave raised an eyebrow. "She's famous, apparently?"

"Trinda's been married sixteen times, and I doubt even she knows how many affairs and flings and sudden romances she's had," I told him. "She's managed to earn herself something of a reputation being that fickle, and several of her marriages and romances had pretty severe political consequences for us."

"Ah. That would do it. Is there any way to get a better view?"

"Not today," I told him, deciding to leave Stalnir's unsettled mental state as his own business for now. "And given that this one actually looks like it's working the way it's supposed to, I think it's time to check on the Himdalls. Stalnir?"

*Ready when you are,* the quiet steed said.

I switched to the Himdalls, specifically to Treynall, since I knew him the best. I was actually a little worried about being able to see anything on this one; the Himdalls were our traditional garrison commanders while the armies were deployed, and with this shaky of a focus and the resultant distance our view would appear from them, the chances were unfortunately high that we'd wind up staring at the roof or wall of whatever building they were in rather than being able to learn anything.

I needn't have worried, as it turned out, because for once in their lives, the Himdalls were not anywhere in or even near our walled city or the fortress at its heart, though I could see a few pieces of it off in the distance.

Instead, for reasons that were actually readily apparent, they were sitting, all three of them, on a big crag called Lookout Rock by the farmers who lived near it, though it had been centuries since the name had had any military connotations. It was on the edge of a canyon that was one of the best approaches to the city from the west, and the big ledge had some of the most expansive views in the area.

Right now, they were looking down at one of the most sinister sights I had seen in a month of very dark times.

The column really wasn't all that visually impressive; neither the Waesir nor the Drinorae were particularly numerous peoples, so I happened to know that the few hundred fire-masters and ice- and weather-shamans down there would have to represent almost the entirety of Waesir's fire-masters and at least a third of the Drinorae strong enough to be considered a serious threat, but they were really just a small column, a loosely packed group that didn't even cover the floor of the canyon with their respective and extremely distinct silhouettes.

In spite of myself, I felt a stab of fear at seeing them, because visually impressive or not, that many fire and weather mages were strong enough to level the city entirely, and possibly take out most of the city's remaining soldiery (even including the Himdalls themselves, in those numbers). If the Einherion had stayed, or the Valkonir hadn't taken terrible losses against the Fenrar, or even if Modagni and the Pulvranin were reachable, we'd have a fighting chance, and Ulmer's Koboldin could have wreaked some serious havoc on at least the Waesir portion of the battle-column, but as it was...

Who did the Himdalls even have left? The Vanal? They'd spent the last two hundred years hiding in our city because they couldn't fight in our level of wars. The city militias? They were good men, sure, and I respected them, but they were shopkeepers, not soldiers. Most of them only drilled once or twice a month at the most, and I'd be surprised if there were more than a handful of enhanced weapons or a dozen mages with useful talents in the whole lot. We used them mostly as a recruiting and personnel evaluation tool, so most of those with skill or resources got sucked up into one of the higher corps fairly quickly. About the only thing they had going for them was sheer numbers, and I doubted they had the stomach to act as cannon fodder or swarm tactics in the face of lightning-imbued weaponry and living firestorms; actually, even if they did (and with their families evacuating the walled city, some of them might be willing to try), I highly doubted it would be very effective, anyway. The Himdalls themselves were formidable champions and mages in their own rights, especially working together, but they were only three men. Without better backup and against this many of their near peers...

This time, however, we had finally come upon a situation that was not a battle, a storm, or a massive convocation of people, because the Himdalls were out contemplating the enemy entirely unaccompanied. What that translated to was that, much as I had been able to hear Thorion's bombastic challenge to Yormungandr (really Thorion? "Watch me"?), I could hear the much softer conversation our guard champions were carrying on below me.

"So Friyar failed then," remarked Gasdali, staring down at the scene below and obviously making the same gloomy calculations I just had.

Harasti snorted. "The puppy never had a chance. Taking on the full might of Waesir and the Faeron with no effective counter to fire? Please!"

Gasdali shrugged. "Nobody--well, nobody but Friyar--expected him to actually stop him, but I was hoping he might slow him down a bit. It would have helped to have a bit more time."

Harasti opened his mouth, but Treynall beat him to it. "What's past is past and should be put in the past. We need to figure out how to deal with the present."

"I still think a trefoil death spell is our best bet for putting the Faeron down," Harasti said, apparently accepting the implied rebuke.

I shivered. Death spells were an ugly, chancy business at the best of times, but they were undeniably powerful. He might be right, but self-sacrifice like that was...well, pretty much what we all swore if necessary, wasn't it? And it wasn't as if I could tell them there was any better help coming...

"Probably true," shrugged Gasdali, brushing aside the mention of magical suicide as a routine question. "But even so we'll need to get pretty close. And we need to make sure his retinue down there can't finish chasing after our people. Beavan's sections of the militia won't do much against this kind of firepower."

"I still think we should have tried harder to pull Fallon back," grumbled Harasti. "To be more present, however, I think our best bet against the Waesir is going to be the Bridge gambit. It might hurt a lot of the Drinorae, too, and if we're serious about the trefoil, the personal price won't matter for long."

"We will still have to handle the Drinorae, but I have some ideas for that, assuming the initial ambush goes off as planned," Treynall told them.

"From the look on your face, that made more sense to you than it did to us," Kalerin told me a few minutes later when I finally cut the connection and slumped to the ground, "but I don't think it was good news. What does all that boil down to?"

I sighed. "Utter fragmentation, with some nasty personal issues thrown in. Our single most potent remaining force is in rebellion and running straight to doom, two others have been annihilated and another's about to be, my most loyal army is entrenched in the mountains with no way to feed themselves, and the entire civilian population is on their way to a death trap with the assembled might of our greatest human enemies too close behind to dodge or outrun. And unless I'm really confused, they've managed to create a pile of grudges between themselves in the process. And only one of the league against us has taken any significant damage at all, and it's the one full of loose cannons that we can't turn our backs on unless they're all dead. This is actually worse than my predicted worst-case scenario."

Stave raised an eyebrow. "So, ouch."

I snorted. "Yeah, more or less."

"So on the scale of 'immediate need to get back'...?" Kalerin asked hesitantly.

I blew out a deep breath. "Honestly, I'm not sure. It's hard to say how any of them are going to react, and with the losses the Valkonir took at Fenrar Keep I have limited firepower to throw, but at this point I really don't think I can honestly make anything worse."

"So, pretty badly then," she concluded, and looked across at Stave. "Do you think they'd...?"

Stave frowned as my eyes bounced back and forth between them in confusion. "They might. I'll have to ask formally on that one, though. Direct gates like that can be risky, considering what happened with the last one."

I resisted the urge to glare...just barely. This must be how Kalerin felt when I started trying to explain the time-lapse functions of inferential chaos dynamics and the reference tables of the elemental summoning matrix. "Can somebody clue me in?"

"Stave has a...liege lord of sorts here," my estranged wife told me, not taking her eyes off of her--our--son as she said it. "They call themselves the Lords of Law, and they manipulate the probabilities of occurrences directly. They have the capability, should they choose, to punch a portal straight from here back to reality, or to assist Stave in doing so, but since I can't leave anyway we've never tried it."

"You're working for a demonlord down here?" I asked Stave, surprised. I wasn't judging or anything, since I basically was a demonlord, but I was definitely surprised, based on how he'd treated me when he thought I was a 'normal' one.

"Not as you would consider the term," he said, sounding as if he was picking his words carefully. "They're a... They call themselves a supra-cosmic sub-planar entity, if that means anything to you, but they have a nearly infallible ability to manipulate spatial and pseudo-spatial confines and entities, which makes them the next best thing to invincible in the Nethergates. I swore myself to their cause in exchange for a piece of that ability."

Supra-cosmic sub-planar? That meant they were claiming to exist as the partially materialized avatar of something beyond the Nethergates' (and, depending on how they meant it, possibly beyond any I knew) level of reality.

And...control of space? In the Nethergates, there would still be challengers, but if they were good enough at it, that would be a very hard power to beat.

Anyway, back to the problem at hand. The only ways back to the surface I knew would take months and require passing some very formidable guardians I'd as soon not take chances with, so this could be a very big deal indeed. "Would they be willing to help us? And what would they want in return?"

Stave frowned. "...Maybe," he said at last. "Their stated goals revolve around forcing the Nethergates into what they call a linear-cyclic stability. I've only started to crack the math on what that actually means, but I know portals like what we'd be asking for have a pretty strong and not entirely predictable effect on that. If it would have an even slightly positive effect, though, I'm pretty sure they'd be willing to do it. They've proven more than a little bit interested in advancing their relationships with the actual inhabitants of this reality. Something about the impact our beliefs and practices have on the nature and extent of Nethergates realms, I think, but it would definitely be worth asking."

"I hope this doesn't offend, but we are in the Nethergates. Are they actually sane enough to make a bargain with?" I asked him.

It wasn't a rhetorical question, and by his grimace, Stave knew it. The vast majority of 'demons' (a shorthand way of referring to Nethergates inhabitants of all types) were violently insane, and when I say 'vast majority,' I mean "I lived there and traveled through it for twenty years, and I met exactly two specimens I wasn't quite thoroughly certain of that insanity, and I had my doubts about both of them."

His relief, however, came from an unexpected quarter. "They're not demons, love," Kalerin told me, sounding quite as certain as she ever did. "I haven't been able to prove they are what they say they are, but I know they're not demons."

Huh. Considering both her geas and her occupation, she really should be able to tell. "You're certain of that?"

She nodded. "And they have kept every tenet of Stave's bargain with them for decades now. I'm not as sure of them as Stave is, but if they give their word to us I believe they'll keep it."

"Alright. How do we go about asking them?"