The Red Knight (107 page)

Good for them. For once, there was to be enough glory for all.

He continued to ride west, and the long file of knights followed him – gradually enveloping the southern flank of the enemy.

Behind him, the Count d’Eu rose to his feet, and pointed his cut-down lance at the knot around the Royal Standard. ‘A moi!’ he roared.

Daniel Favor, former wagoner, climbed over the edge of the trench, to stand on the grass in the wind. Around him, farmers from the villages around Lissen Carack looked at him, and knew they
could not let him be a better man.

Adrian Pargeter climbed out of the safe trench, and put his crossbow on the ground to draw his sword. Older guildsmen looked at each other. A draper with a grey beard asked his lifelong business
rival –
we really doing this? –
and then they were up the vitrified earth too, drawing their swords.

Ranald Lachlan leaped up the side of the trench, waved his axe at his comrades, and pointed it at the enemy. ‘Come on, then!’ he said.

The trench emptied in moments, and they came.

Lachlan threw his axe in the air, and it spun in a great wheel of light over his head and fell back into his hand.

And the thin line of men charged.

Lissen Carak – Ser Gawin

Gawin saw Sym stumble, and a pair of the armoured things took him – dragged him down. Sym’s dagger licked out, gutted another boglin which fell atop him . . . and
then the archer was gone, and Gawin was alone in the doorway.

A bright green light flashed, and Gawin was able to see far too much in the illumination. The crawling things beneath him on the stairs turned brown, their eyes burned away and dozens of them
sank to the ground, all vitality leaching away as their bodies crumbled.

Gawin heaved a breath.

There were a dozen of the things left – all in a clump, a crawling, rolling mass of legs – he cut and cut at them like a madman, and then forced the door with sheer weight and
determination, and he stumbled back . . .

A swarm of armoured men fell on the knot of boglins, hacking with axes, stabbing with spears – six knights he knew all too well. Ser Driant – the King’s Companion – other
men of the household.

Gawin found himself pulled to the floor. He’d lost a moment’s attention and two of the things had him—

But he was Hard Hands, and he closed his left hand and slammed it into a lobe-shaped eye, keyed his hand around his adversary’s arm, and ripped it off the boglin with a tearing like
ripping old leather, and then he swung the taloned arm like a club beating the bleeding thing to the ground. Ripped his rondel from its place at his hip, drove his knee into the soft place at the
centre of the second boglin’s breast, and as its arms closed on him, slammed the dagger home, breaking its back. Spears slammed into the thing from all sides.

He got to his feet with his dagger clenched like a mantis’s claw. But the only figures standing in the green-lit cellar were armoured men.

Gawin sagged.

Ser Driant reached out an ichor-spattered hand. ‘Ser Gawin?’ he said.

Gawin was looking for the novice.

She was slumped against the wall. At her feet were the remnants of Sym the archer – the skin of his face flensed away where they’d swarmed atop him. She was pouring her power into
him.

‘You cannot help him,’ Gawin said. ‘However great your talent, you cannot help him.’

She ignored him.

Ser Driant seized his shoulder. ‘Is she a healer?’ he asked.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt the challenge as a blow in his gut.

The dark sun.

The young Power glowed with fresh vitality. He had taken new prey, and he was stronger for it.

Thorn gathered his wits.

I am hurt. He is not. And I have been duped.

What if he can best me?

The air between them was thick with the misspent green power of his last phantasm, only partially expended. He had only to reach forth and take that power . . .

But if he was caught while doing it, it would be the end of him.

What if this was a Power’s plan all along? To lead me to over-extend, so that I might be destroyed?

Oh, Thurkan, it may be I owe you an apology.

Carefully, he began to wrap sigils of concealment about himself, even as he roared with false defiance.

Attack!
he commanded his creatures.

High above him, in the fortress of his enemies, someone seized the power of the Wild – raw – and shaped a mighty phantasm with it.

So!

He wasn’t waiting for the trap to close. He fled.

Lissen Carak – de Vrailly

Jean de Vrailly judged his moment well. He had led the chivalry of Alba off to the west almost a league along the river. A handful of boglins had tried to oppose him, his sword
was wet with their hellish ichor, and it was as easy as taking the heads off fennel plants in his mother’s garden.

And now—

Oh, the glory.

He raised his arm, closing his fist – turned his horse. ‘Halt!’ he ordered. ‘Now turn to face the enemy!’ Not a military command, but he had never led so many
knights, and he didn’t know their commands in their language. So he turned out of the line, and cantered along the column. ‘Face me!’ he called. ‘Come! Turn your
horses!’

As soon as half a dozen knights understood him, they all understood. And the great column, a thousand horses long, turned into a line a thousand horses wide as he cantered down the front, his
lance held above his head, the royal arms of Alba sparkling on his chest.

I will be king
.

He didn’t know where the thought came from, but suddenly it was there – he grinned and turned his horse to face the enemy. He was in the centre of this mighty line. To his right
front, his own dismounted knights, led by his cousin, and the men of the King’s Guard had just slammed into the enemy fighting line. They were outnumbered badly.

But it didn’t matter.

Because he lay across the enemy’s line, like the crossing of a T, and the enemy had committed all of his reserves. And there was no force on earth, in the Wild or out of it, that could
stop a thousand of his kind charging in a line.

He raised his lance high, feeling the astonishing, angelic vitality that filled him. ‘For God and honour!’ he roared.

‘Deus veult!’ cried the knights. Men closed their faceplates.

And then the line started forward.

The battle was over long before the first lance struck home. The enemy’s whole right wing had begun to melt back into the forest as soon as the knights emerged over the bridge – and
now, as their charge rumbled forward, the wyverns, the trolls, and the handful of daemons edged back too. Some simply turned and ran for the woods. They didn’t have the bad judgment of men.
Like any animal in the Wild faced with a larger predator, they turned and fled. Wyverns leapt into the air; the remaining trolls ran with stone-footed grace, and the daemons ran at the speed of
racehorses – untouchable.

Only the boglins and irks stood and fought.

And in the centre, held by Thorn’s will, a dozen mighty creatures and a horde of boglins continued to try to kill the king and the dark sun.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain could no longer raise his sword to cut. He had the weapon in both hands – his left gauntlet held the blade halfway down, and he used it as a short spear,
slamming the point into faces and armoured chests.

Moments of terror blended together – a scythe talon that came inside his visor, luck or skill directing the razor-sharp claw to curve up into his scalp and hair, leaving him alive instead
of blind or dead.

A trio of irk warriors dragged him down with their sheer weight, their thin, strong limbs racketing against the steel of his armour in a killing frenzy. As slowly as honey poured on snow, or so
it seemed, his right hand burrowed past the hideous strength of their limbs to the rondel dagger at his hip, and then he was on one knee, and they were gone, and his dagger dripped gore.

The comfort of steel armour rasping against his own – back to back. He didn’t know who it was, he was just thankful for steel not chitin.

And then, a daemon.

This lord of the Wild was taller than a war horse. The captain hadn’t remarked on their absence from the battlefield, but now that he faced one some part of his brain registered that he
hadn’t faced one before.

The crest on its head was a livid blue – utterly different from the one he’d faced in the woods to the west, or in the dark.

It watched him intently, but it didn’t attack.

He watched it and wished he had his spear – currently leaning against his armour rack inside the fortress – and a horse, and a ballista, and twenty fresh friends.

The thing had a pole-axe the size of a wagon’s axle-tree. The head was flint. It was crusted with blood.

It turned its head.

Had he been fresh he’d have sprung forward with a mighty attack while it was distracted, but instead he merely breathed again.

It looked back at him.

‘You are the dark sun,’ it said at last. ‘I can take you, but if you hurt me, I will die here. So instead—’ It saluted him with a flourish of the great pole-axe.
‘Live long, enemy of my enemy.’

It turned and ran.

The captain watched it go, throwing boglins from its path, with no idea who or what it was. Or why it had left him alive.

But he was trembling.

He fought more boglins. He cut some sort of tentacled thing from the Prior, who flicked him a salute and went back to work. Later, he saw the king go down, and he managed to get a foot on either
side of the king’s head, and then all the monsters in the Wild came for him.

Some time passed, and he was standing between Sauce and Bad Tom, and the King of Alba’s body lay between his feet. The last rush of the monsters had been so ferocious as to rob the word of
all meaning – an endless rain of blows, which only fine armour could repel, because sheer fatigue had robbed muscles of the ability to parry.

Tom was still killing.

Sauce was still killing.

Michael was still standing . . .

. . . so the captain kept standing too, because that’s what he did.

They came for him, and he survived them.

There finally came a point when the blows stopped. When there was nothing to push against, no fresh foe to withstand.

Before he could think about it, the captain slapped his visor open and drank in the air. And then bent down to check the king.

The man was still alive.

The captain had had a leather bottle, just an hour ago. He started to search his person for it with the slow incompetence of the utterly exhausted.

Not there.

He felt an armoured back against his, and turned to find the Captain of the King’s Guard – Sir Richard Fitzroy. The man managed a smile.

‘I will build a church,’ Michael chanted. ‘I will burn a thousand candles to the Virgin,’ he went on.

‘Get the crap off your blade,’ Tom said. He had a scrap of linen out of his wallet, and he was suiting action to words.

Sauce didn’t grin. She took a handkerchief from her breastplate and wiped her face. Then she took in what her captain was doing and handed him a wooden canteen of water, pulling it over
her shoulder on a strap.

He knelt and gave water to the King of Alba.

Who smiled.

The knight who reined in above him provided some shade. His giant war horse had a hard time standing securely on the shifting pile of dead boglins, and his rider curbed him savagely and swore in
Gallish. He looked around, as if expecting something.

The king grunted something, and the captain bent over further, his shoulder screaming at the effort, the helmet and the aventail on his head and neck feeling like the weight of a lifetime of
penance.

The king had a horny talon between the plates of his fauld, buried deep in his thigh, and his blood soaked the ground.

‘I have saved you,’ said the knight who towered over them. ‘You may take your ease – you are saved.’ Indeed, as far as the eye could see, a wave of knights were
dispatching the last creatures too foolish or too bound by Thorn’s will to flee. ‘We have won a mighty victory today. Where is the king, please?’

The captain was able for the first time in hours – it felt like hours, and later it would prove to be only a few minutes – to look around.

His company—

His men-at-arms were gone. They lay in a ring, their white steel armour, even matted with gore, brilliant when surrounded by the green, grey, white and brown of their adversaries.

But their red tabards were very like those worn by the king’s knights.

The king’s household knights were intermixed with them, and the Knights of Saint Thomas in their black. Many of the latter were still standing – more than a dozen.

‘The king is right here,’ Fitzroy said.

‘Dead?’ the foreign knight asked.

The captain shook his head. He could easily come to dislike this foreigner. Galles were superb knights but very difficult people.

His mind was wandering.

Don’t give him the king
, said Harmodius.

The captain stiffened in shock.
How did you do that? Prudentia never spoke to me outside the memory palace.

Do I look like Prudentia?
Harmodius muttered.
Do not give this man the king. Take him to the fortress, yourself. Take him to Amicia, with your own hands.

‘Give him to me,’ said the foreign knight. ‘I will see he is well guarded.’

‘He’s well-guarded right here,’ said Sir Richard.

Bad Tom leaned forward. ‘Sod off, son.’

The captain reached out a hand to steady Tom.

‘You need manners,’ said the mounted knight. ‘But for my charge, you would all be dead.’

Tom laughed. ‘All you did was to lower my body count, pipkin,’ he said.

They glared at each other.