The Red Knight (106 page)

We are all making the wrong decisions
, Harmodius thought. And he realised that if he died here, his new-found knowledge would die with him.

It was like some ancient tragedy, in which man is granted knowledge only to be destroyed.

But he didn’t have to waste much more time on such thoughts.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched, almost unbelieving, as the target of his campaign threw himself forward, unprotected. He couldn’t have manipulated the king into such a foolish move.

The king.

He had made a dash for the fortress and Thorn had suddenly seen his defeat – for in the fortress the king would be unassailable.

But no.

The fool was now leading his knights forward into the very maw of Thorn’s monsters.

And his boglins were
in the fortress.

Just for a moment, he was balanced on an exquisite knife-blade of doubt as to whether to kill the king himself, by means of power, or to send his choicest creatures to do his work.

But in that moment, he decided that, regardless of the campaign, if he killed the king, he had won. No matter which power was using him, killing the King of Alba would place him in the front
rank. It would cause civil war. Would weaken the human hold on Alba.

He gathered power to him.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The company was dying around him.

The anonymity of armour kept him from knowing who – he could never spare more than a glance – but as the boglins surrounded them and hemmed them tighter and tighter, armoured figures
went down – either hamstrung horses, spear thrusts, or lucky arrows.

Tom continued to be like a hammer at his side, Sauce was like an avenging angel, and the military order knights fought like the legions of Heaven.

Even as he raised and lowered his sword yet again, he would have chuckled at the pointlessness of it all, if he had not been occupied. They had bought the time, and the battle should now be
safely won. And the bitterness – had Carlus not gone down with the trumpet, had Jacques lived fifty more heartbeats—

He slew two more boglins before he saw the troll.

It reared, its blank stone face smooth and black, and it belled, it’s shrill trumpet ringing out above the ring of weapons and the silent intensity of the boglins.

Not just one of them.

Six of them.

And the wave front of their fear made the boglins beneath his horse’s hooves quail and void their attacks. George rose, kicked out, and then plunged forward.

The wave of terror passed over them.

The captain got his sword in a good two-handed grip, and George leaped for the nearest troll as he brought it up high above his head on the left.
You are supposed to use a lance on these
things
, he thought.

The troll saw him, turned, and put its antlered head down, low, so its antlers covered its neck, and charged, seeking to get its antlers under the Red Knight’s sword and unhorse him.

George turned mid-stride.

Faster than human thought, the animals struck.

Like a cat, George pivoted his weight and one hoof licked out and caught the monster a staggering blow in the centre of the forehead, so hard that cracked its stone face.

The troll screamed, turned its head, whipping its antlers through a spray of motion and leaped, turning, caught the armoured horse in the right rear haunch. George got his back feet off the
ground with a caper and the blow slewed the horse around on his forefeet—

The line of attack opened like a curtain as the two creatures turned into each other. The captain felt as if he had all the time in the world – as if this moment had been predicted since
the dawn of the world. The troll’s turn – his destrier’s turn – the open line at the back of the monster’s neck . . .

His sword struck, two handed, like the fall of the shooting star to earth, and cut along the line where two great plates of hardened flesh met; sliced through the troll’s spine, and in,
down, out and free in a gout of ichor—

George leapt free, stumbled, and the captain was thrown from the saddle.

He got a shoulder down, landed on something squishy and rolled, the plates of his shoulder harness clanking like a tinker’s wagon and the muscles in his neck, injured and re-injured since
early spring, wrenched again.

But he ended his shoulder roll on his knees, and pushed immediately to his feet.

Off to the right, Tom and Sauce were pouring blows into another troll, but behind them the thick knot of companions had begun to dissolve as the remaining trolls ripped into their horses. Armour
crumpled; men died.

Lissen Carak – Ser Gawin

Gawin followed Sym as the archer followed the novice – down the stairs, across the courtyard to the entrance to the cellars where the stores were kept.

There were two archers guarding the heavy oak door to the cellars.

‘The Wild is coming up the escape!’ Amicia yelled, fear and frustration powering her words.

Every farm wife and nun in the courtyard heard her.

The two archers looked at each other.

Sym came up next to her. ‘Captain’s orders!’ he yelled, his thin voice shrill and not very heroic.

The bigger of the two archers fumbled with his keys.

Gawin ran across the yard to join them.

The women were frozen, and he had a moment to consider the looks on their faces – panic, determination, and a sullen kind of anger that it should come to this when they had already lost so
much.

Yes, he understood those looks of loss. Of failure.

‘Arm yourselves!’ he called to them.

The bigger archer opened the iron-bound oak door and Sym ran down the steps into the darkness.

Gawin pushed past the novice.

The first cellar was gloomy but well-enough lit. A stack of spears leaned against one of the company’s great wagons. Gawin caught one up as he went by.

There was another door, ahead, which was just opening.

Sym was too late to stop it, so he spitted the creature that opened it – ripped his sword out of the boglin’s armoured thorax and kicked it so hard that it folded
backwards—

Gawin caught a glimpse of steps going down and a seething knot of the creatures filling the stairwell.

‘Hold the door!’ Gawin called. He thrust with his spear, and felt the steel head crunch through the soft hide around the boglin’s neck and head – just like digging a
knife into a lobster. Something popped, it fell off his spear, and he pushed.

Sym cut, and cut again, and again, desperation and terror lending wings to his sword arm.

The stairwell was crawling with them.

He killed another one.

And another one.

And the novice turned, raised her hands, and spoke a single word in Archaic, and golden-green light filled the cellar.

Lissen Carak – Desiderata

Desiderata could scarcely breathe for the immanence of power. And the pain, which was returning. But she could feel the enemy – the centre of the power of the Wild, its
emerald intensity shot full of black – gathering force. She could feel it as surely as she could feel the power of the sun on her arms.

‘What’s happening here?’ Ser Alan asked. He bent to carefully place her litter on the doorsill of the chapel.

The woman was older – dressed plainly, like a servant or a farmwife. She had a spear in her hands. ‘If it please you, Ser Knight – there’s boglins got into the cellars,
and all the garrison is trying to hold the doors.’

‘Good Christ!’ Ser Alan cursed. The other knights of the escort drew their swords.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched as the king and his knights obligingly fought their way into the centre of his range.

Sometimes plans did work out.

His trolls – the magnificent
dhags
– were cutting the knights to pieces. They were also dying, but he had more. Or he could obtain more. The Wild was fecund beyond human
imagining.

He let the king fight on – on and on – until his reckless charge broke through the ring of bone and hide around the mercenaries. Around the dark sun.

The king and the dark sun together.

He took his gathered power, summoning every tendril that he could muster – the might that had been Thurkan, the souls of the fair folk, the convoluted essence of the Sossag
shamans—

He savoured it, for a moment.

There was nothing to interrupt him, no distractions as he placed his power almost lovingly on a spot just between his two foes.

The edifice of his memory was no palace but a twisted yarn of ropes and webs, and he braided them in his mind with the mastery of an aeon.

Laid his hand to the completed cord, and cast.

Harmodius felt it, saw it, and cast his counter: a mirror. Even his counter had tails and vestiges – traps within traps. As he had learned.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain felt the moment the great phantasms were loosed as a single instant. It was as if fire or lightning had flashed through every inch of the air between the two
casters.

He was
Harmodius. As, for a moment, he had been Amicia.

There was no time.

He had so little left – but he gave it, straight into Harmodius’s arms. He reached and took from Amicia, who was herself fighting for her life – from Miram and her choir.
And from the very sunlight around him.

And it wasn’t going to be enough.

The captain reached out to the great iron-bound door, and threw it open, and green light flooded into him.

He threw it through Harmodius to strengthen the counter work.

There was a thunderclap – a gout of white-green fire that shot into the heavens. A ripple in the curtain of reality so that, just for a moment, the veil of the world was wrenched aside.
The captain saw black night pierced with white stars, and the dawn of chaos, and the rising plume of power that was the coming of the world.

Lissen Carak – Desiderata

Desiderata felt Harmodius’s power rise to meet the emerald giant – and she saw the deep subtlety of his mind in his casting.

But the emerald’s might was twenty times greater than that of the court Magus, and the tide of green rolled over him – dissipated, mirrored, channelled – but overpowering, like
a rising river facing a plain full of channels and damns, yet eventually overcoming all of them to spill in one unstoppable flood—

But vast quantities of the emerald power hung in the air, cast aside by Harmodius’s counter spell. Or part of it.

The ripple of power passed the king, who watched, horrified, as Ser Alan was burned at his side, his armour straps charring, his face a livid red as he screamed – and man
and horse collapsed. Beyond him, Harmodius frowned – his hand withered and blew away to ash and then, in a few hearttbeats, the Magus was subsumed. He turned to ash, crumpled and was borne
away on the wind.

Thorn was struck by the mirror in the very moment of completion of his phantasm, and some of his own carefully hoarded power struck right back down the channel of his casting,
burning him.

He screamed. Flinched. But far across the battlefield, Harmodius’s essence flickered and went out.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain struck, the sword descending more from the force of gravity than from any power of his shoulders.

In the Aether he had Harmodius by the hand.

Take me, boy.

In one moment, the captain had to understand, and to act. He opened
his way into his palace, seized the spirit of the dead Magus with one Aethereal hand and cast his own phantasm with the
other. The air outside was heavy with discarded power, green and ripe for plucking, and he took it, aided by the meticulous ordering of last night’s foe, aided by the thaumaturgical knowledge
of his tutor – of Amicia’s Wild casting—

And there he was. Standing on the plinth, where she had always stood.

‘Better the slave of a bad master,’ the Magus muttered.

Suddenly the captain was unsure whether he should have allowed this – entity – refuge to his palace.

‘Any port in a storm, lad,’ the dead Magus said. ‘Go fight monsters, or you’ll be as dead as I am.’

And he lifted his sword again. The air was still redolent with power.

George was behind him, and on his feet.

Amplify my voice
, he told the dead Magus.

‘Wedge! On me! Michael – the banner to me!’ His voice rang out like some antique god’s.

In a moment out of time, the captain wondered if this was
exactly
how the antique gods came about.

No time like the present.

Kneel!
He commanded the creatures of the Wild.

Hermes Thrice-sainted, boy! You are challenging his control! Stop!

A third of the creatures around him stopped fighting, fell back or stood, stunned.

Lissen Carak – de Vrailly

Ser Jean de Vrailly led the main battle of the king’s host down the last ridge, and their hooves clattered like a fall of hail as they crossed the bridge. He had more than
a thousand belted knights, and no one – not even the Count of the Borders – questioned him. An archangel had given him great glory, and every man in the main battle knew it.

Jean could see the Royal Standard trapped, far out in a sea of foes, with another standard he didn’t know – lacs d’amour in gold on a field of black. A foppish banner.

But he laughed to see the battle, and led the first files to cross the bridge off to the left, west towards the setting sun.

The soldiers in the long trench were rising from it, either in loyal determination to save the king, or in eagerness to join his attack.