The Red Knight (54 page)

Here, where stands of unkempt trees stood on every ridge, and where an incursion of the Wild threatened a major city just over the horizon – the knights rode abroad in colourful tunics
with fashionable, long trailing sleeves, pointed shoes and carefully wrapped hats like the turbans of the far East, with their armour stored in wicker baskets and oak barrels.

Right now, four days from Albinkirk, a party of the king’s younger knights and squires were hawking, riding their palfreys along the ridge tops to the west, and he wanted to punish them
for their light-hearted foolishness. These effete barbarians needed to be taught what war
was.
They needed to learn to take off their chamois gloves and feel the cold weight of steel on
their soft hands.

He prayed, and praying made him better. He was able to smile to the king, and nod to a young squire who ill-manneredly galloped down the column raising a cloud of dust, mounted on a hot-blooded
Eastern mare worth a hundred leopards as a racehorse and worthless in a fight.

But when the army, which grew every day as contingents of knights, men-at-arms, and archers joined from each town, each county, each manor, settled for the night, de Vrailly ordered his squires
to set his pavilion as far from the rest of the army as could be managed – out in the horse lines, surrounded by beasts. He dined simply on soldiers’ rations with his cousin, summoned
his chaplain, Father Hugh, to hear Mass and confession of his sins of passion, and then, shriven and spiritually clean, he bathed in water from the Albin, the mighty river that rolled by the door
of his tent, dismissed his squires and his slaves, and towelled himself dry, listening to the sound of three thousand horses cropping grass on a beautiful spring evening. The smell of the
wildflowers overpowered even the smell of the horses.

Dry, he dressed in a white shirt and braes and a white jacket, a jupon of the very simplest style. He unrolled a small, precious carpet from far to the east, and opened a portable shrine –
two paintings hinged face to face for travel – the Virgin and the Crucifixion. He knelt before their images and prayed, and when he felt empty and clean he opened himself.

And his archangel came.

Child of Light, I salute you.

As he did every time the angel came, de Vrailly burst into tears. Because he never quite believed a visitation was real, until the next one confirmed all of the past ones. His unbelief –
his doubt – was its own punishment.

Through his tears, he bowed. ‘Bless me, Taxiarch, for I have failed you many times.’

He tried never to look directly into its shining face which seemed in memory to be made of beaten gold, but in fact looked more like mobile, sparkling pearl. Looking too closely might break the
spell—

It is not your error that the King of Alba did not do as we wished. It is not through you that this kingdom has been untimely assailed by the forces of Evil. But we will overcome
.

‘I succumb to rage, to contempt, to self-righteousness and anger.’

None of these will help you to be the best knight in the world. Remember how you are when you fight, and be that man at all times.

No priest had ever put it to him so well. When he fought, he dismissed all worldly concerns and was only the point of his spear. The archangel’s words rang through him like the meeting of
blades between two strong men, like the clarion call of a stallion trumpeting.

‘Thank you, lord.’

Be of good cheer. A great test is coming. You must be ready.

‘I am always ready.’

The archangel placed a shining hand on his forehead, and just for a moment, de Vrailly looked up into the archangel’s shining face, his outstretched, perfect hand, his golden hair, so much
brighter than de Vrailly’s own and yet somehow alike.

Bless and keep you, my child. When the standard falls, you will know what must be done. Do not hesitate.

De Vrailly frowned.

But the angel was gone.

He could smell the incense, and he felt at peace – his mind comforted, languorous, as he was after he had a woman, but without the sense of shame or dirt.

He smiled. Took a deep breath, and sang the opening notes of a Te Deum under his breath.

West of Albinkirk – Harmodious

Harmodius lay on a pack of furs, the pottery mug of warm wine balanced on his chest, and watched Random stir a hot poker into another beaker, adding honey and spices.

Behind the merchant, Gawin Murien sat quietly mending a shoe. He didn’t speak, but he was going about the tasks of soldiering, and Harmodius was content to keep a watch on him. His left
shoulder was now heavily scaled from the nipple to the neck, and down to the base of his bicep. The scales no longer seemed to be spreading, but they were growing larger and harder. The young man
seemed curiously heedless of them – since the first night, he hadn’t remarked on them at all.

Harmodius was old in guile, and had known many young men. This one was preparing for death, and so Harmodius watched him carefully. The second ring on his right hand held a phantasm that would
drop the boy like a blow from a spiritual axe.

‘I like it sweet. But I have a sweet tooth,’ Random said. He grinned. ‘My wife says that all my efforts to win riches and fame are merely to ensure my supply of biscuits and
and honey.’

Harmodius drank from his cup again. It was far sweeter than he liked it but on this evening, under the curtain of stars with a dreadful enemy as close as the edge of the firelight, the hippocras
was all he could have asked.

Immanence.

It was a mild shock, like seeing a former lover walk into a tavern. Somewhere not so very far away, something powerful was manifesting. It might be something supremely powerful, a very long way
away, or something merely awesome and terrifying, in the next field.

‘To arms!’ Harmodius said, jumping to his feet. He gathered himself for a moment and extended his enhanced senses.

Gawin Morion was already in his leather jupon, and his helmet was going on his head.

Random had a breast- and backplate on over his travel clothes, and he produced a crossbow from the same wagon bed which had held the makings of their wine.

Other men repeated the alarm, but most were fully dressed, armed and armoured, and Harmodius ignored them all, reaching out – past the orange glow of firelight, past the fields of bracken
and fern that surrounded them.

Nothing. Not a single boglin.

Harmodius knew the laws of identity in the use of Power. There were two ways to locate another user. He could sit silently, his attuned senses waiting to see if there was another pulse of
immanence.
Or he could send out a pulse of his own power to ring across the night, which would identify him to every creature of the Wild with the slightest sensitivity to such things. Which
was most of them.

He settled for the quieter, more passive option, even though it was not in his nature and although he was all but bursting with power. He hadn’t felt so
capable
in many years. He
wanted to play with it, the way a man will swing a new sword about, cutting the heads off ferns and fennel stalks.

Harmodius bore down on his power. And his impatience.

Pushed his senses further.

Further.

Well to the north he found trolls – their large, misshapen forms as horrible in their lack of symmetry as they were in their black crystalline alienness. They were marching.

To the west, he found a user of much talent and little training. But he had no context for the discovery – a village witch, or a boglin shaman or one of the Wild’s living trees. He
had no idea, and he dismissed the entity as far too weak to have displayed the power he had sensed.

Whatever it was, it seemed to have left the world – departed by whatever path it had chosen. It manufactured a new
loci
, or jumped to one that had previously existed.

The display of power remained like a beacon, and Harmodius was unhappy to find that it was behind them, to the south and the east by many leagues. But he swooped on it like a raptor falling on a
rabbit – and fled just as quickly when he sensed the order of magnitude it represented.

When he was a small boy in a fishing village Harmodius, who’d had a different name then, had rowed out on the deep in a small boat with two friends to fish for sea trout and salmon with
hand lines. Porpoises and small whales shared the sport, and sometimes they caught good fish only to have them snatched away by their aquatic rivals. But late in the day, while pulling in a heavy
fish, Harmodius had seen a seal – an enormous seal as long as his boat – flash into a turn and reach for their magnificent fish . . .

. . . just as a leviathan, as much larger than the seal as the seal was larger than the salmon, turned under the boat to take the seal.

The size of the creature beneath the boat – fifty times its length – and its great eye as it rolled, the froth of blood that reached the surface without a sound as it took the seal,
the gentle swell it made, and then, perhaps the most terrifying of all, its mighty fluke breaking the surface a hundred yards away and flinging spray all the way over them—

In all his life, Harmodius had never seen anything that moved him so deeply, or so impressed on him his own insignificance. It was more than fear. It was the discovery that some things are so
great that they would not notice you even if they destroyed you.

He’d brought in the salmon, which died unaware of the role it had played in the death of the mighty seal, and the lesson was not lost on the boy.

And all of that came to him as he fled the immensity of whatever creature had briefly been in the Valley of the Albin, fifty leagues to the south.

He came back into his own skin.

Random was looking at him with concern. ‘You screamed!’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

‘We are safe,’ Harmodius said. But his voice was more of a a sob than it should have been.
No one is safe. What was that?

East of Albinkirk – Hector Lachlan

East of Albinkirk, the sun rose on the western slopes of Parnassus, the westernmost of the mountains of the Morea where the streams rushed down, heavy with the last of the snow
and the spring rains to flood the upper waters of the Albin.

Hector Lachlan was drinking tea and watching the East Branch. It was high – far too high – and he was trying to figure out how he might get his herds over it.

Behind him, the men in his tail were breaking camp, packing the wagon, donning their hauberks and their weapons, and the youngest, or the least lucky, were already out with the herds.

While he watched, his tanist, Donald Redmane, stripped naked at the water’s edge and plunged in, using the edge of a ruined beaver dam as a diving platform. He was high spirited and strong
and only heartbeats later, he was pulled out by the rope around his waist, his shoulder and collarbone bruised against the rocks.

Lachlan winced.

That night, something killed a stallion in their herd, and Lachlan, who had never fought an irk in his life, had to assume that it was some such creature who was responsible – multiple
punctures and slashes from something much smaller than the horse. But the
why
of it eluded him. He doubled his herd guards, aware of how futile such measures could be. In the Hills, he had
stone fences and deep glens with natural fortifications to take herds and guard them, but here, on the road – he was in the country that the drovers held to be
safe.
And something was
hunting him. He could feel it.

Sister Amicia

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

T
he fog was thin and wispy, but it did its job. It forced whatever was watching them to be more aggressive with the animals it was using.
Rabbits came out of the woods in broad daylight. Starlings flew over the new diggings, first in pairs and then in swift flocks.

Toward midday, when Ser Jehannes had the double outer ditch dug and when the merchant adventurers of Harndon, Lorica, Theva and Albin were cursing their luck and their temporary taskmaster as
the blisters on their hands popped, the Abbess cast again, the fog grew thicker, and the animals grew more numerous still.

By the time the nearly mutinous merchants were allowed to end their day and go to Mass, the fog was so thick that the watchmen on the fortress towers couldn’t see the base of their own
wall. They could see the far horizon, though. The captain had no intention of letting his own fog put him at a disadvantage. Despite which precaution, wyverns overflew the fortress every hour or
two, and the hearts of the defenders flinched each time the leathery wings passed. Out in the trees beyond the fields there was movement – the kind of movement a hunter sees when his quarry
shakes a tree, or when a squirrel leaps to a branch too light to support the weight of the jump.