The Red Knight (45 page)

Thorn shook his head minutely. ‘Obey,’ he said again, and pushed a little more of his will into the binding.

The monster resisted, showing – or growing – wicked black in a black mouth. His whole body stretched for Thorn.

To Thorn, it was like arm wrestling with a child. A strong child – but a child nonetheless. He slammed his will down on the troll’s, and it crumbled.

That was the way of the Wild.

The other trolls weren’t hard to find, and the second was considerably easier to
press
than the first had been . . . but the seventh was much harder than the sixth, and by the time
the sun had set he had a tail of mighty trolls and that sense a man gets when he has lifted so much weight that he can no longer lift his arms.

He sat in a narrow gully, and listened to the wind while his blank-faced trolls crouched all around him.

After some time, as the sun began to slip beneath the rim of the world and he felt better, he reached out a tendril of his power toward the dark sun in the distant fortress.

And he recoiled from what he found, because—

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain was leaning on the wall, the curtain wall that covered the outer gate. He’d walked here almost without volition, because the confines of the Commandery were
suddenly too close and airless.

He’d written her a note. Because he was not fifteen he had written one, not ten of them, and he’d placed it in the crotch of the old apple tree. And then, after cursing himself for
waiting and hoping she might appear by some sympathetic magic, he’d walked to the wall for some air.

The stars burned in the distant heavens, and there were fires in the Bridge Castle courtyard below him. The Lower Town at the foot of the ridge was empty – a skeleton guard held it and no
more. And there was no light.

He looked out at the darkness – the Wild was as dark as the sea.

Something was looking for him. At first it was a prickle in his hair, and then a presentiment of doom, and then, suddenly, he’d never felt so vulnerable in all his life, and he crouched on
the battlement fighting a particularly awful childhood memory.

When it didn’t relent, didn’t let up, he took a deep breath and forced himself to his feet. He turned and made himself walk, despite the crushing fear, up the steps set into the wall
to the first tower. The second step was so hard he had to use his hands on the fourth and fifth – by the eighth he was crawling. He pushed, made a sword of his will, and pushed through. The
feeling relaxed like the grip of an unwelcome suitor as soon as he entered the stone structure.

Bent leaped to his feet, a deck of painted cards in his hand. ‘Captain!’ he shouted, and a dozen archers leaped to their feet and snapped their salutes.

The captain glanced around. ‘At ease,’ he said. ‘Who’s on the walls?’

‘Acrobat,’ Bent answered. ‘Half-Arse on the main curtain, Ser Guillam Longsword and Snot commanding the towers with the engines. Watch changes in a glass.’

‘Double up,’ the captain ordered. He wanted to apologise –
Sorry, boys, I have a creepy feeling, so I’m costing a lot of you a night’s sleep.
But he’d
learned not to apologise when he gave an unpopular order, much less over-explain it. And the successful raid had given him credit in the hard currency of leadership – no commander is ever
much better than his last performance.

Bent grimaced, but he started lacing up his embroidered leather jack. Like many of the other veterans, Bent wore his fortune on his body – a subtle brag, a statement of his worth, a
willingness to see that fortune taken by his killer. The dark-skinned man looked around, and like true soldiers his fellow gamblers avoided his eye.

‘Hetty, Crank, Larkin, with me. Hetty, if you don’t want the duty, don’t be so obvious about sneaking to the jakes.’ Bent glared at the youngest man in the tower room and
then turned back to the captain. ‘That sufficient, m’lord?’

The captain didn’t know Bent very well – he was Ser Jehannes’ man – but he was impressed that his most senior archer would take the trick on the wall himself.
‘Carry on,’ he said coldly, and walked across the room surveying the piles of coins on the tables, and the dice and cards, as he did. He was pretty sure Ser Hugo would never have
allowed such overt gambling. So he scratched his beard and beckoned to Bent.

The archer came up like a dog expecting a kick.

The captain pointed at the money on the main table. He didn’t say a thing.

Bent raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth.

‘Save it,’ the captain said. ‘Remind me of the company rule on gambling.’

Bent made a face. ‘Total value of the game not to exceed a day’s pay for the lowest man,’ he recited.

Two rose nobles gleamed up at the captain, with more than a dozen silver leopards and a pile of copper cats by them. The captain put his hand over the pile. ‘Must be mine then,’ he
said, ‘I’m the only man in the company who makes this kind of money every day.’

Bent swallowed but his eyes narrowed in anger.

The captain lifted his hand, leaving the pile untouched. He locked eyes with the archer and smiled. ‘You get me, Bent?’

The archer all but sighed with relief. ‘Aye, Captain.’

The captain nodded. ‘Good night, Bent,’ he said, and touched the man’s shoulder, to say,
And over is over, unless you dick up.
He’d learned from experts, and he
wanted to believe he was doing the captain thing well.

He walked out onto the wall, and there it was again – not the fear, but the feeling he was being watched. Scrutinized. He was ready for it this time, and he reached into the round room,
and—

—
there was Prudentia.

‘He is looking for you,’ she said. ‘His name is Thorn. A Power of the Wild. Do you remember how to avoid being found?’

He stopped to kiss her hand.

‘How do you know it is this Thorn?’ he asked.

‘He has a signature, and he has cast many times tonight, gathering allies. If you would pay attention to the Aethereal, instead of dabbling—’

He smiled. ‘I’m not interested. Too much like hard work.’

The door was open a crack. He often left it that way to give himself fast access to power, and tonight he could feel that searching presence through the crack in the door – more
powerfully, if anything, than he had felt it on the wall.

Of course.

He continued past Prudentia and pushed the door firmly shut. The heavy iron latch fell into place with a comforting click.

North-west of Lissen Carak – Thorn

—the dark sun went out like a torch thrown into a pool.

He was disoriented, at first. The dark sun had dimmed and strengthened, dimmed and strengthened, and years of patient growth of power had taught him not to read too much into the fluctuations in
power wrought by distance, weather, old phantasms that lingered like ghosts of their former powers, or animals who used power the way bats used sound. There were thousands of natural factors that
occluded power the way other factors might affect sound.

In fact, he thought that the use of power and the movement of sound might usefully be studied together. The thought pleased him, and he spun off a part of himself to contemplate the movement of
sound over distance as an allegory – or even as a direct expression – of power. Meanwhile, he sat and breathed in the night air and maintained, almost without effort, the chains of
power that bound the trolls, and a third part of him looked for the dark sun with increasing frustration.

A fourth aspect considered his next move.

The conflict at the Rock had now forced a gathering of resources and allies that involved risks and challenges he had not anticipated. If he continued gathering, he would soon reach a level that
would at least appear to challenge his peers – already the mighty Wyrm of the Green Hills was awake to him, raising, as it were, a scaled green eyebrow at his speedy accumulation of power and
lesser creatures, men and resources. The old bear in the mountains did not love him either. And at some future point the trolls, scarcely people and more like cruel animals as they were –
would come to resent his chains and find a way to throw them off.

So might one feudal lord be alarmed – or at least deeply curious – when a neighbour called in his vassals and raised an army.

The allegory occurred to the fourth self, because the fourth self had once been a man – a man capable of raising armies.

Before he’d learned the truth.

And at another level, the fortress was obviously not going to crumple at his command. Albinkirk’s outer wall had fallen so easily that he’d allowed himself to be seduced by the easy
victory – but the citadel itself, full of terrified humans, was not yet under his claws and the easy conquests were over.

And whatever the dark sun was, it was powerful and dangerous, and the men of violence who surrounded it were deadly enemies who he would not underestimate again. Neither could he accept their
pollution of his land, attack of his camp, or the preceeding endless cycle of challenge and counter challenge that had led him to grant a favour and confront the fortress more directly.

And where, exactly, was his professed friend in the Rock?

Enough.

He had made his choices, and they led to making war. Now he had to marshal his assets without affronting his peers, rip the fortress from the face of the world – a warning and a tale for
all his foes – and grant the Rock to the Wild.

And all the while he contemplated this next move, that part of him which was enjoying the cool of night continued to avoid the golden light cast by the Abbess, as if the mere admission of her
existence would be a defeat.

Twenty leagues to the south a hundred of his creatures stirred and rumbled and slept in the cold darkness, and two hundred men huddled close to their fires and posted too many sentries, and over
the mountain to the north, hundreds of Sossag warriors woke and made their fires and prepared to come to his cause. And west, and north, creatures woke in their burrows, their caves, their holes
and hides and homes – more irks, more boglins, and mightier creatures – a clan of daemons, a moiety of golden bears. And because power called to power, they were coming to him.

The trolls would counter the knights. The Sossag would give him more reliable scouts. The irks and boglins were his foot soldiers. By morning, he would have a force to deal with anything that
humankind could offer. Then he would close his claws around the fortress.

Of course, there was irony in his trust of men, rather than creatures of the Wild, to fight other men.

With this decision his selves collapsed, one by one, back into the body under the tree, and that body stretched, sighed, and was almost like a man’s.

Almost.

Lissen Carak – Kaitlin Lanthorn

Kaitlin sighed, and half rolled against the figure beside her. She sighed again, and wondered why her sister had to take up so much of the bed . . . and then she suddenly knew
where she was, and she made a noise in her throat. The man next to her turned and put a hand on her breast, and she smiled. And then moaned a little.

He licked her under her chin and kissed her, his tongue dabbing away at the corner of her mouth like a questing thing, and she laughed and threw her arms around him. She was not a slut like her
sisters, and she’d never had a man in her bed before in her life, but she was not going to be bound by their sordid plans or their poor taste. She was in love.

Her lover ran his tongue across the base of her ear lobe while one lazy finger traced the line of her nipple. She laughed, and he laughed.

‘I love you,’ Kaitlin Lanthorn said into the darkness. She had never said the words before, not even when he’d first had her maidenhead.

‘And I love you, Kaitlin,’ Michael said, and put his mouth over hers.

Master Random

North of Albinkirk – Peter

P
eter the cook’s first thought was
I am still a free man.

He had walked for two days along the road east, and he hadn’t seen another man. Yesterday noon he’d smelt smoke, and seen the fortress rising to the south – a fortress he had
to assume was the town of Albinkirk, although his appreciation of the landscape of western Alba was virtually non-existent and he had only the comments of his captors and the mercenaries to go
by.

The two traders must have travelled some way to the east, then. And he was virtually back where he’d begun.

Or he was walking in circles.

But the sight of Albinkirk, five leagues or so distant, oppressed him. It was, after all, the place they’d been taking him to be sold. So he turned up the first decent path leading north,
into the mountains, and he followed it even though setting his feet to it required an act of courage and marked his first decision.