The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (40 page)

“Blessed Saint George,” muttered the knight behind him.

Ser John balanced on a sword’s edge of indecision—he didn’t know
what he was going into, but he knew as sure as he was a sinful man that halting to figure it out would cost him men and horses.

He thought about his lady love, and laughed aloud as the thought stiffened his spine as if he was fifteen years old and had just seen breasts for the first time.

“Forward,” he roared.

His ten lances, shorn of their squires, rode single file around the corner of the tall stone wall and the whole of the hillside came into view—a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching away for more than a mile, and a thick fringe of trees at the top of the next ridge, like hair on top of a balding man’s head.

As soon as he took in the terrain, he knew that the enemy was beyond his own forces.

Almost at his feet, a mere bowshot away, was a pack of the new imps. Ser John had never seen them, but one of the Red Knight’s squires—Adrian Goldsmith—had a talent for drawing, and had rendered the lithe creatures, like greyhounds from hell, in livid detail. All the company men said they were as fast as anything in the Wild, and that they went for horses.

Even as he watched, the dread creatures turned like a flock of birds and started across a newly turned field towards him. At his back were ten knights, ten archers and ten pages.

The field was muddy, the earth heavy with melted snow and spring rain, black and shiny.

There was a narrow ditch by the verge of the road. Behind them was the high stone wall of some farmer’s apple orchard. It was too high for a mounted man to get over.

He gave the order before he knew what he’d committed to.

“Dismount!” he called, pulling up. “Horses to the rear—all the way back to the last farmyard, Rory!” he called to the oldest page, who was as white as a sheet.

He slid out of his saddle as the imps came on at the speed of an arrow from a heavy bow.

Even as his feet touched the ground and he seized his fighting hammer from his saddle bow, he wondered if he had made a poor decision. If they would be in among his horses before—

“On me!” he called. “On me! Archers in the second rank!”

It was all glacially slow.

But God was merciful. The imps—even the horrifying imps—were slowed in all that mud.

They seemed to flow over the field, though, and there were more of them—and more still flowing out of the far hedgerow.

“Let us ha’ three arrows in front o’ ye,” said the archer at his back.

Rory had just taken Iskander’s reins and was taking him to the rear, the
war horse rolling his eyes and looking for something to kill. Ser John gave him a parting slap on the rump and stepped back.

“Three shafts!” roared the master archer—one of the company men.

The imps were a hundred yards away. They covered the earth like a pale green carpet of teeth and sinew. There had to be five hundred of them.

“Loose!” called the company man.

“Loose!” he said again.

“Loose!” he said again.

Three arrows in as many breaths. The imps were still far distant.

“Keep shooting,” Ser John said. “Rory—get to the farmyard and send for help.”

Rory, now mounted on Iskander, saluted.

Send someone to bury us.

Behind the wave of imps was a group of boglins, all pushing through and under the hedgerow. His tactic had worked beautifully—they had cut the enemy off.

He wanted to choke the huntsman. This wasn’t a raiding force, but a small army. The sparkle of magic on the far hillside told him that the enemy had a sorcerer of some sort, too.

The company archers were a blur of speed, their arrows leaving their bows as fast as their arms could move, their grunts rhythmic and almost obscene, like the rhythm of the old bed the night before.

“Loose!” grunted the old bastard in front of him.

“Loose!” he said again.

“Exchange ranks!” Ser John roared.

The archers dived for the rear, putting a wall of flesh and steel between them and the imps.

“Over the wall!” called the old man.

Most of the archers had no harness beyond elbows and knees and bascinets. The imps would flay them alive.

An incredible number of the imps were already down. Worse, the ones pinned to the ground by the heavy shafts were dragging themselves towards the fight.

Ser John set his weight without conscious thought, pole-hammer across his thighs, in the bastard guard.

The imps had to leap the ditch to reach them.

He killed two or three before one knocked him flat by momentum. But they were small and his faceplate and aventail kept him safe in the panicked seconds he was flat on his back. He drove his dagger into one—where had that come from?—got to his knees, and punched another with his steel fist. Something had his ankle, but that ankle was fully encased in steel.

He drew his sword, stabbed down into the thing on his ankle, cut roundhouse to clear a space.

An arrow clanged off his helmet. In the fall, his head had moved inside the padding and his vision was imperfect. He swung again, re-set his feet and got a hand up to push his helmet back on his head. There were two of them on his legs and one going for his balls, which had no armour. He shortened his grip, one hand on the hilt, one on the middle of the blade, and stabbed down, and down, and down, backing as he did, until he cut the creatures off his legs and killed them with blows to their spines.

The archers were now sitting atop the apple orchard wall, shooting light arrows straight down into the fight and killing many. Their arrows decimated the imps, but the dog-like reptiles still came on over their dead, like carrion crows on a corpse.

Ser John knew he had men down. There was too much room to swing his sword.

He cut—left, right, controlled swings into guards to clear the ground around him, but the monsters were not like human opponents who would give ground. They merely came on. The result of his swings was the three of them got under his guard, one hanging from his left wrist. He dropped the sword, broke the back of the one on his armoured wrist and then kicked his steel feet clear of them, thanking God for his sabatons.

His back grated on the stone wall. He had nowhere left to retreat to. A sword clicked into his right arm harness, and an imp fell away dead. He saw the familiar green and gold of the Muriens arms.

His dagger was dangling from the chain at his wrist and he got it back, buried it in an imp that was trying to bite him.

The arrows sliced down in front of him like a protective curtain. Out in the fields across the valley there was suddenly a light show—gold and green and purple and black.

A horn sounded. It was not a human sound. The horn blew over and over like a human hunting horn, but its tone was deep and booming and had the knell of doom to it.

Ser John got on with the business of killing. He pushed off the wall, accepted the price of friendly arrows slamming into his helmet, and he used his long dagger like a two-handed pick, his strikes accurate, his movements increasingly spare as he found the right way to fight the imps, using his armoured ankles and feet as a lure to draw them into the range of the dagger’s bite, defending his groin carefully.

One of the Morean knights—Ser Giannis—had a spear with a long blade, and he was untouched in the centre of a whirl of death, his weapon passing back and forth, back and forth, stabbing and cutting. Farther along, one of the company knights, Ser Dagon la Forêt, used a poleaxe with equal artistry. Ser Aneas fought with a weapon in each hand, like a dancing master, except that he seemed to clear more space than most. One of the Jarsay knights was down and messily dead, and another had a dozen of the things on him like limpets because he wasn’t wearing proper maille.

Ser John went and cleared the imps off him like a father getting leeches off a child. The imps were thinning.

Behind them were boglins. Despite eight knights and a dozen archers, the boglins kept coming. Ser John was so full of combat spirit, fear and elation at being alive that he didn’t understand what was happening. He took a moment after the last imp was killed—Ser Dagon stepped on its head—to retrieve his pole-hammer.

Sixty boglins were no match for eight knights. But they still came on.

“Shoot them!” Ser John panted.

“No more arrows, Cap’n,” said a voice above his head. “Sorry, boss.”

Indeed, the whole area of the fight with the imps was like a field of stubble, except that the stubble was heavy war arrows shot almost straight down and standing in clumps where the fighting had been fiercest. A dozen men had loosed more than four hundred arrows in three minutes. Their entire load—almost forty a man.

The boglins were wallowing through the mud. Behind them, something bigger broke through the hedgerow. There was a flash of green fire, an explosion of mud, and a hole as long as a horse opened. Boglins poured through—as did daemons.

Ser John shook his helmeted head and tasted the sour air inside his bascinet. “Fuck,” he said.

The boglins were so hampered by the mud that they’d have all been killed by the archers—had there been any arrows.

“Fuck it,” the older man said and dropped over the wall. He began to pluck arrows from the ground—in a moment all the archers were there.

“Never get up the fuckin’ wall again, mark my words,” muttered the older archer.

The shorter Morean knight had a bottle of wine, of all things. He handed it to Ser John, who had a pull and then gave it to the old archer.

“Now that’s right decent o’ you, Ser John.” He took a drink and handed it on.

He had a dozen muddy arrows in his belt.

The boglins were seventy yards away and looked exhausted, their wing cases half open and their vestigial wings hanging loose.

The archers began climbing back up the wall. Only one man could make it—their arms were tired—and he had to rig a rope.

The older archer loosed his dozen arrows into the boglins as they plodded on through the mud. So did the other archers as they waited their turn to climb.

The boglins lay down. Behind them, the mass of creatures—boglins and daemons—did not come forward. They began to move west, sliding along the hedgerow. At the burning hole, something big, like a cave troll, only darker, emerged. But its entire attention was focused down the hill, or across the valley.

Only then did Ser John understand.

“There’s someone else behind them, harrying them!” he shouted. “Saint George and Alba! Christ and all his saints, lads! Ser Ricar must be behind them!”

Indeed, only now did he hear the roar—the waterfall-like rush of sound of combat. Ser John reckoned that the whole of the far hedgerow must be engulfed in fighting. He looked left and right.

The enemy force below him in the muddy field was now all moving west, many of the creatures crouching low to the ground. They were leaving a trail of stolen objects behind—a quilt, a blanket, shoes, a girl’s doll and an apple basket. Somewhere they had struck a human settlement and left nothing but death behind, and now…

The shapeless black thing in the hedgerow gap whirled and cast. Ser John saw it—saw the casting—and then he was flat on his back again.

But he was mostly unharmed. He got up heavily, head throbbing and his neck feeling as if it would never be right again. The sigil he wore on his chest—the gift of Prior Wishart of the Order—burned as if heated on a stove. But he was alive.

He thought that the creatures—stripped of their imps—were near panic. But the hammer-like charge of his knights would slow to nothing in the same mud that had mired the imps.

He looked up. “What’s your name, Master Archer?” he called.

“Wilful Murder. Sir.” The man shrugged, as if acknowledging that it wasn’t a typical name.

“Can you hit them from here?” he asked.

Wilful Murder grunted. As if against his better judgment, he jumped down from the wall—again.

“Long shot,” he said. He drew to his ear, his right leg sinking as if under great weight, his whole body rocking as his heavy back muscles engaged. He loosed high, his body bent forward into the bow.

His arrow fell into the mob at the base of the field like a thunderbolt.

Heads turned.

“If you can reach out and touch yon then do!” Wilful called. “Otherwise, stay the fuck up on the wall.”

Three men jumped down. They looked scared. A fourth man looked down the field for some heartbeats, shrugged, and dropped off the wall in turn. He began to prowl the ground for arrows.

“I need a lighter shaft,” he said as he pushed past Ser John.

The handful of arrows had no obvious effect. The archers had to make too much effort to loose fast—each shaft took long seconds to pull and aim, and all of them flexed their right arms between pulls.

Then the heavy arrows were plunging, one every few heartbeats, into the mass of boglins at the base of the field.

Ser Giannis came over and opened his faceplate. “I have never faced this—this…” His face did an odd thing.

“The Wild,” Ser John said as kindly as he could.

“Yes,” Ser Giannis said. “Yes. But I think…”

Ser John was trying to get a sense of what was going on beyond the next hedge.

“I think that if the archers kill enough of them, the rest will charge us. Yes?” Ser Giannis pointed his elegant, ichor-caked spear down the field.

Ser Aneas laughed mirthlessly. “Many things my master-at-arms told me make sense now,” he said.

A long bowshot away, one of Wilful Murder’s arrows struck a daemon in the head, plummeting almost straight down. It went into the skull and struck the great creature to the mud, full length, like a blow from an angel.

The growling, roaring, crashing sound was closer.

The great horn spoke again—three long blasts.

“What the hell is that?” asked Ser Dagon.

A flash of metal in the gap in the hedge. Flash, flash.

Three long, deep blasts from the huge horn.

Again, there was an explosion of purple-red light, this time at the corner of the field. Fire licked at the hedgerow.

Three green balls of fire materialized in the air at half-heartbeat intervals and struck.