The Red Knight (80 page)

Just bending to lift a stone was hard enough in armour.

It took five of them to lift a fallen roof beam.

When they began to complain, he pointed out that it was their horses who would come through here in the dark.

They went on, picking up rubble, pushing obstructions aside.

After an hour, the captain was soaked through. He collapsed on a low stone wall and Toby handed him a flagon of water.

Thump-snack
.

‘Son of a bitch,’ the captain cursed, and the stone slammed into a church fifty paces distant, blowing a hole through the tile roof and vanishing inside.

He began to stand up, and the irks attacked.

There were only a dozen of them; desperate, and brave, and ferocious.

When the rush was cleared, the captain found that the armoured man at his back was Ser George Brewes.

The flagon of water was still unbroken by a miracle. He took a swig, spat, and handed the jug to Ser George.

Ser George leaned on his sword. ‘Feg,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Irks. I’ve heard of them.’

The captain just panted.

‘Like killing children,’ Ser George said.

The whole sky was a pink-red. Another rock crashed to earth off to their left.

‘You really think we can hold?’ Ser George asked.

‘Yes,’ the captain wheezed. He’d taken a cut on the back of his shoulder. He could feel the blood mixing with his sweat.
I need to learn to heal myself.
It was trickling
down his side – warm, instead of cold.

Why? Why did she turn her back on me?

He made a face.

‘It would be something,’ Ser George admitted.

‘Yes,’ the captain managed.

Toby – unarmoured and unarmed – had survived the rush from the irks. He’d simply run away. Now he was back.

‘I’ve food,’ he said.

His scrip was packed with beef, bread and good round cheeses and Sauce’s men-at-arms fell on him like scavengers on a carcass. His head was patted a dozen times. He had a meat pie for
himself. But he always seemed to.

Sauce moved among them. ‘Drink water,’ she said, as if they were children and turned to the captain. ‘Think they’ll try again?’ she asked.

The captain shrugged, and the weight of his armour and the pain in his shoulder defeated the motion completely. So he bobbed his head. ‘No idea.’ He took a deep breath. His
breastplate seemed to be too small, and he couldn’t catch his breath. The smoke in the air was burning the inside of his lungs.

It was a very small working, an insidious thing. He saw it as soon as he made the effort.

The air was
full
of a poison. He couldn’t even see how it was done.

Sauce started to cough.

Harmodius!
He called.

I see it, lad.

Do something!
the captain shouted in his head.

Lissen Carak – Amicia

His shout came to her as clearly as his anguish.

She was working on Sym’s back, running her hands along the weels left by the lash, and trying to fix some of the deeper issues, as well. The captain’s thoughts were not helping her
concentration.

She reached out instinctively. It was in the air. Poison. She read it from his thoughts.

She tasted the air through his mouth, and felt it through his lungs.

She was in him.

Then he slammed his gate shut.

She was standing over Sym, with her hands clenched into fists. Shaking.

Captain!
She sent.

He responded.

It’s an unhealing. A curse.

Tell me.

You cannot banish it. You can only heal it.

Another voice. The Magus.
I see! Well thought, mistress.

Now it was her turn to raise her defences.
Get out!
She said it aloud too.

Sym looked at her.

‘Not you, silly,’ she muttered.

Lissen Carak, The Lower Town – The Red Knight

The captain could feel the poison thickening in the air and he didn’t know how to heal. Although now that she showed him, he could see it.

A curse.

The physical manifestation of a curse.

He
went into his tower. ‘I need help,’ he said to his tutor.

She smiled. ‘Ask me anything,’ she said.

‘A curse. A physical curse – a poison in the air.’ He went to the door to his tower.

‘He’s waiting for you to open it,’ she said.

‘I think he’s busy, and a lot of people are going to die if I don’t act.’ He reached to door.

‘If it is physical, perhaps we can move it physically,’ Prudentia said. She smiled sadly. ‘I don’t know healing, either.’

‘That’s a fine thought.’ He looked up at his symbols. ‘Wind,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Prudentia agreed.

He spoke the names. ‘St George, Zephyr, Capricorn,’ he said, and the great ranges of symbols rotated silently.

He touched the door.

He could feel the enemy, and he opened it anyway.

And slammed it back shut.

Lissen Carak – Sauce

The wind came up without warning – first a heavy gust that cooled them, and then a mighty rush of air from the east.

Sauce drew a shuddering breath.

‘Get a scarf over your face,’ the captain shouted. ‘Anything.’

The wind moved the poison – but he could still smell it.

And then he felt the sending. It was gentle as snow, and just for a heartbeat the air seemed to sparkle all around them, as if the world was made of magic.

Lissen Carak – Harmodius

Harmodius watched the Abbess’s working and he could only think of Thorn’s statement that men were too divided.

It was beautiful. The sort of mathematical Hermeticism that moved him the most deeply. In it were the rotations of the planets and the paths of the stars across the heavens. And many other
things, thought and unthought . . .

‘You are far more powerful than I had imagined,’ Harmodius said.

She smiled. Just for a moment, it was the Queen’s smile.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘You know who I am,’ she said it playfully. She rose from her seat. ‘I think Thorn will find it very hard to use that trick again.’

Harmodius raised an eyebrow. ‘Trick?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t Hermeticism. It wasn’t a working. Not as I understand them.’

‘There are more things on heaven and earth than are in your philosophy,’ she said. ‘He uses the deaths of the irks to fuel his curse. It is a very, very ancient way to power
magic.’

Harmodius nodded in sudden understanding. ‘But you—’

‘I stand for life,’ the Abbess said. ‘Me, and my God, as well.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘He will not be back for some time. I need to speak to a novice. Pray excuse
me.’

Harmodius bowed. As she swept past him, he said, ‘Lady—’

‘Yes? Magus?’ She paused. Her attendants paused, and she waved them on.

‘If we linked, lady—’ he said.

She made a moue. ‘Then you would know all my innermost thoughts. And I yours,’ she said.

‘We would be more powerful,’ he insisted.

‘I am already linked to my novices. And to all my sisters,’ she said. ‘We are a choir.’

‘Of course you are,’ Harmodius said. ‘Gads, of course you are. I’m a fool.’ It was obvious, when she said it. Forty weak magi would still be very powerful indeed,
together. But it would require incredible discipline.

Like monks.

Or nuns.

‘I will think on it,’ she said. She smiled.

He watched her go, and then sat beneath the apple tree.

Thorn

Lissen Carak – Michael

Michael put his quill down and shook his head at the ink stain on his forefinger.

Kaitlin had not come out to meet him last night, even though he was on his way to the Lower Town. The farmers were angry – he could feel it. Old Seth Lanthorn, an oily bastard in the early
days of the siege, was now surly and silent. Farmers muttered when he walked by.

They resented their boys being taken to be archers. And perhaps resented—

I will marry her
, he said to himself. But he couldn’t keep his eyes open . . .

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The curtain wall around the Lower Town was gradually pounded to rubble.

Before the sun rose, the stars were obscured, and clouds rolled in. The rain that started wasn’t hard, but it was soaking, and cold.

‘Attack coming,’ Toby said, rubbing his cheek. The boy’s breath was sweet with apple cider.

The captain rose blearily, feeling as if he’d been kicked repeatedly. It was an effort of will to run through his Hermetical exercises and it was torture to arm. Toby had to put his
harness on him – Michael was down in the Lower Town. Every man and woman had to do their duty, now.

When he went out on the wall, the fields were moving again, lines of irks marching to form up opposite the northern flank of the town. Now they had shields – great pavises of heavy bark
stripped from downed trees in the deep woods.

They formed in six deep columns, glistening in the light rain.

Bad Tom had twenty men-at-arms and as many squires and valets waiting for them, and twenty archers on the tower. The breaches in the town wall glittered damply with men in harness.

The enemy’s engines were silent.

Wilful Murder stepped up on the wall with his captain. ‘It’s done,’ he said. He pointed to the squat remnants of the former southern tower. Now it was an engine platform, two
storeys tall, crowned with a trebuchet whose launching arm was as tall as the spire on the chapel.

The captain gave him a tired smile.

‘Let’s see if we can give Master Thorn another surprise,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

The first stone was loaded with some trepidation. The arm of the trebuchet would throw a man in armour five hundred paces. A war horse three hundred paces.

Wilful fussed like a mother sending her child to church the first time.

No Head, who was supposed to be off duty but whose love of engines outweighed his good sense, pushed the loader out of the way and muscled the stone into the great hemp-rope web.

‘Care to do the honours?’ Wilful asked the captain.

‘Everyone off the tower,’ the captain said.

Every one of the farmers was in the courtyard. They’d worked like draught animals to get the machine built and in place – to level the stump of the tower. Their grumbling was loud
and aggressive, and the captain ignored them.

But he needed them to wind the arm into place. The trebuchet depended on farm women for its motive power.

When they were all clear, the captain pulled the lever.

The trebuchet’s arm moved slowly, at first, then rotating faster and faster until the great sling at the end was lifted clear of the deck – the arm and its massive weight passed the
centre of rotation and the weight crashed down onto a massive pile of old hordles –
thump
– and the sling opened –
crack
, and a stone the weight of a man flew free
– rising for what seemed an incredibly long time.

And of course, the heavy stone started three hundred feet above the fields below.

It rose and rose, passing over the irks, who had just started to move forward, clearly unsure of the efficacy of their new shields, and then it began to fall. It came down at a steep angle, it
passed over the irks, over the deep trench the boglins had dug, over the enemy’s’ artillery platform, the mound on which his engines sat, and vanished into the trees of the woods at the
western edge of the cleared ground.

It did no damage to anyone, or anything.

But the farmers cheered, and the archers cheered and the captain grinned to see it.