The Red Knight

Chapter Fifteen

Long Paw

Albinkirk (Southford) – Ranald Lachlan

When Ranald Lachlan led his scouts down to the edge of the Albin River, he could scarcely believe his eyes.

Fifty great boats, like galleys, lay in the river opposite the landing. The river fleet covered the river in four long files of boats, and their oars went back and forth like the legs of water-running insects.

At his back, the Royal Standard of Alba fluttered in the breeze over the gate-towers of Albinkirk, and the fields by the great bridge were empty of foes. It was like a dream, because the familiar ground was so empty.

Ranald sat his horse, watching the big river craft row, and even as he watched, they turned, all together, at a flash of a great bronze shield, and suddenly the whole fleet went from four columns advancing west to four lines heading toward the north shore. His shore.

He walked his horse out onto the landing stage where the ferry had run, in better times, and waved.

A woman in the bow of the largest galley waved back. An awe-inspiringly beautiful woman in a flowing white overkirtle. It took an effort of will to tear his eyes away from her, and he knew her well, from his years in the south.

Queen Desiderata.

Unbidden, a smile came to his face, and he laughed.

Albinkirk – Desiderata

Who is that?’ Desiderata said to her maidens teasingly. She was standing in the bow, waving. ‘I feel I know him.’

Lady Almspend stood and waved. ‘Ranald the barbarous hillman, my lady,’ she said brightly.

Desiderata smiled at her secretary. ‘You seem happy enough to see him,’ the Queen said.

Lady Almspend sat a little too suddenly. ‘He – gave me the most wonderful book,’ she said haltingly.

The other ladies laughed, but not unkindly.

‘Was it a big book?’ one asked.

‘Very old?’ asked another.

‘Perhaps more like a nice, thick scroll?’ suggested Lady Mary.

‘Ladies,’ the Queen said. The oarsmen were losing the stroke, laughing so hard. But the bank was rushing at them, despite the current.

As they rowed into the landing, the Queen stepped lightly up on the gunwale and leaped onto the pier.

Ranald Lachlan, who she remembered perfectly well, bowed deeply and then knelt.

She gave him her hand. ‘It is a long way, since you were in my bridal guard.’

He smiled at her. ‘A pleasure, my lady.’

She looked past him, up the tall bank, where Donald Redmane had the lads dismounted. ‘You have a small army of your people here. Come to aid the king?’

He shrugged. ‘My cousin lost a small army, my lady. We’ve already fought the Outwallers. But I have a thousand head of beeves and some sheep, and I’m looking to sell them to the Royal Army.’

She nodded. ‘I will buy them all. What’s your asking price?’

If he was surprised by her tone or manner, he hid it well. ‘Three silver marks a head,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘You drive a hard bargain.’ She said. ‘Is it chivalrous for a knight to bargain with his Queen?’

Ranald shrugged, but he couldn’t stop looking into her eyes. ‘Lady, I could say I’m no knight, but a drover. And I could say I’m a hillman, and not in any way your subject.’ He grinned, and knelt. ‘But he’d be a rude bastard and no kind of a man, who ever failed to acknowledge you as his Queen.’

She clapped her hands delightedly. ‘You are the very spirit of the north, Ser Ranald. One mark per beeve.’

‘You, my lady, are the living embodiment of beauty, but for a mark a head, I could have sold them to the Keeper of Dorling. Two silver marks a head.’ His eyes flicked to something behind her, and his smile intensified.

‘You remember my secretary, the very learned Lady Almspend?’ she asked. ‘One and a half.’

‘One and a half, right here, on this side of the river?’ he asked. He made another deep bow, this time to her secretary, who was standing on the gunwale, beaming. ‘Two if I have to drive them over the river.’

‘What’s a kiss worth,’ sang Lady Almspend. She blushed, shocked at her own boldness.

‘Everything!’ he shouted back. ‘But these aren’t my beeves, so I can’t trade them for a kiss, my sweet,’ He relented. ‘Your Grace, my price is two, but I’ll drive them where you like, and pledge my lads to serve your Grace.’

The Queen nodded. ‘Sold. Fetch me my navarch. I have a thousand head of cattle to ferry over the river.’ She turned back to the hillman. ‘So despite your sordid money, you’ll do a deed of arms with me?’

She put extra effort into her voice. She saw a coldness in him – something absent, some terror recently passed – and her voice caressed it like liquid gold.

The hillman looked cautious. ‘What kind of deed?’

‘What knight asks what deed is required of him? Really, Ser Ranald,’ she said, and put her arm through his.

‘I’m no knight,’ he said. ‘Except perhaps in my heart,’ he added.

She smiled at Lady Almspend. ‘We must do something to rectify that.’

On the bank above them Donald Redmane watched his cousin with the Queen.

‘What’s happening?’ asked one of the boys.

‘We just sold the herd to the Queen,’ Donald said. ‘What’s an Alban mark worth?’ he asked, and then shrugged. ‘And now we have to live to spend it.’

Lissen Carak – Harmodius

Harmodius listened to the angry crowd and kept his head down. He was almost drained of power – needed more recovery time, and the last thing he needed was a confrontation with ignorant witch-hunters.

Let the boy handle all that.

He dressed carefully. The old Abbess had never been a friend of his – but now, in death, he had to admire her. She had disclosed power of a level she had never had in youth – and had deployed her power brilliantly. She’d held the Enemy for long moments, while he prepared his masterstroke.

Sadly, his masterstroke hadn’t quite come off. But she hadn’t died in vain. The fortress still stood. And the Enemy’s beard had been badly singed.

Again.

Harmodius imagined himself standing at the Podium at Harnford, staff in hand, lecturing on Hermeticism. I learned the underpinnings of the nature of reality in the middle of one war, he would say, and I learned to manipulate them myself in the middle of another. Or perhaps he would say, I saved the world for mankind, yes, but I only stood on the shoulders of giants. That was better. Quite good, in fact.

And now all of her secrets would go to her grave with her, and her soul would fly to her maker.

Harmodius ran his fingers through his beard.

What if-

What if all the power in the world came from a single source?

That’s what it was, wasn’t it? It was, in a way, a commonplace.

Green or gold, white or red? Power. It’s just power

And that meant-

No good. No evil. No Satan. No – no God?

Did it mean that, in fact? Were there really any fewer angels on the head of a pin, if all power came from a single source?

His head spun.

What if Aristotle was wrong?

He could hardly breathe. One thing to think it. Another to know it to be true.

He stumbled down the tight staircase to the common room of the dormitory, and then he forced one foot in front of the other as he walked toward the chapel.

Bad Tom appeared at the captain’s side. The captain was doing his damnedest to appear to be a member of the congregation. He had just sung a hymn. He had himself well in order.

She had wanted him to understand.

He knelt when the other attendees knelt. Sister Miram led the service in the absence of the priest, a matter that seemed to excite no comment.

I swear on my name and my sword that I will avenge you, my lady.

‘My lord?’ asked Tom, at his elbow.

‘Not now.’

‘Now, my lord,’ Tom said.

Glaring at his corporal, the captain stood, walked to the aisle and genuflected to the crucified figure that towered over him, and then backed down the aisle to the doors. Every head turned.

Too bad.

‘What?’ he barked, when he was outside. The nuns were singing her to rest – every voice it the woven fabric of music a thread of power. It was incredibly beautiful.

Tom looked at the door to the cellars. ‘I hae’ the priest, God rot his false soul to hell. I put him I’ the darkest room wi’ a lock.’ Anger made his voice thick.

The captain nodded. ‘You valued her too.’

Tom shrugged. ‘She blessed me.’ He looked away. ‘That priest, he’s going to die hard.’

The captain nodded. ‘We’ll try him for treason, first,’ he said.

Tom had his back to the door. ‘Why try him? You’re the captain of a fortress under siege. Law of War.’

Lissen Carak – Gerald Random

Gerald Random picked his way fastidiously along the captain’s trench, following Ser Milus – clambering over the cooked bodies of a hundred boglins, their charred remnants a testimony to the power of fire. They smelled like cooked meat, and when he lost his balance and stepped on one, it crunched as if he’d stepped on charcoal. He paused.

His skin prickled.

Gelfred the huntsman strode past him, eyes wary, moving faster. The mercenary didn’t seem to mind stepping on the cremated boglins.

Random wondered how long he’d have to do this before he was like Gelfred, or Milus.

Behind him, forty men moved carefully along the trench – company archers, new recruits, farm boys. The reinforcements.

They came out of the trench under the wall of the Bridge Castle and hollered to the watch to open the postern. Random had answered the call from the fortress before mains, and he wasn’t in armour. He grabbed a bite of bread and a sound apple, and one of the young whores who’d come with the convoy handed him some good cheese. He smiled. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ he asked. Dora. She was Dora Candlesomething. Young Nick Draper fancied her, and Allan Pargeter had drawn her naked, which was still a nine-day wonder among the wagons, despite the flying monsters and magic. That made Random laugh.

She smiled back at him. ‘Money,’ she said. ‘Same as you.’

He shook his head and laughed again. ‘If we get back to Harndon, come and ask me for a job,’ he said.

She looked at him. ‘You mean that?’ she asked.

He made a face. ‘Of course.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Just when we’re all going to die.’

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain looked out through the hole in his wall and watched the fires burning in a swathe across the enemy’s camp. The enemy’s men, at least, cooked supper.

The rest of the camps were dark.

His back hurt. But then, his side hurt too, he now had cracked ribs on both sides of his ribcage – his shoulders were wrenched from the stress of being plucked off the ground by his knights, and his right hand had odd, numb spots in it and he had no idea why.

He was supposed to be in bed.

Toby stood uncertainly by the door.

‘You want to be in bed, I suppose,’ he said.

Toby shrugged. ‘I’m hungry.’

The Red Knight went to the table in the middle of the room and tossed his valet a biscuit.

Then he looked at the lute on the table. He hadn’t played it in-

He couldn’t remember when he played it last.

He picked it up, suddenly decisive, and walked out the door into the hallway. Toby tried to cut him off.

‘Oh, Toby,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ He knocked on the door to his Commandery.

In three heartbeats, Michael was there.

‘Grab your lute,’ he said. ‘Good evening, Miss Lanthorn. Michael, these people need some music. Not a grim silence. Let’s light a fire.’

Michael sometimes forgot that his master was only a few years older than he was. He grinned. ‘Give me – us – a moment.’

Lissen Carak – Mag the Seamstress

Mag looked out into the darkness because she’d heard music.

There it was again, the sound of a southern lute. A wild, joyous sound.

And then another, lower lute played back.

There was a bonfire burning on the cobbles.

An archer, Cuddy, came and peered out of the North Tower. He shouted something.

Amy Carter peered out of the stable door and saw Kaitlin Lanthorn dancing by firelight, her legs flashing.

She ran back inside and rubbed her sister’s cheek. ‘They’re dancing!’ she said.

Kitty sat up, fully awake.

Low Sym heard music playing below the windows at the end of the hospital room. He threw his feet over the end of the bed and walked softly across the floor and opened one casement, and the sound of the notes raced in like a spell. He leaned out, listening.

The nun appeared by his side. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

Sym giggled. ‘Capt’n likes to play. Fast.’ He shook his head. "Leastways, he used to play. On the Continent. Ain’t heard him in an age.’

She smiled. Leaned out. ‘You like him,’ she said.

Sym thought about that for so long she thought he wouldn’t answer.

From their vantage point, they saw the music do its work. Men came out of the stable and down the steps from the towers and the stumps of the towers. Women emerged from the stables and from the nun’s dormitory.

Suddenly, there were as many people in the courtyard to dance as had been there for the priest.

The two instruments were joined by pipes and a drum.

The dancers began to move in a circle.

‘I don’t hate him.’ Sym admitted.

Amicia turned. ‘You are not lost, Sym,’ she said. ‘You are more hero than villain, even now.’

He stepped back as if she’d struck him. But then he grinned.

Then he stiffened. ‘Where you going?’

She smiled. ‘You can come guard me. I’m going to dance. Or at least to watch.’

In the courtyard, Sister Miram stretched her arms and smiled wearily at the Red Knight, who stood with his back to the fire playing his lute like a madman. She turned to Sister Anne and ordered a cask of ale opened.

Bad Tom put a man-at-arms on the door to the cellars and another on the barracks. He and Jehannes whispered for a moment in the darkness beyond the fire, and Jehannes doubled the watch and forced some unwilling soldiers onto the walls where the farmers could see them.

When Jehannes looked down, Tom was dancing with the seamstress’ daughter.

Mag, Lis, and Sister Mary Rose hauled a great cauldron of beef soup to the door of the dormitory. Cheering archers and farmers hauled it together into the firelight.

Long Paw appeared with a brace of wine jars, and handed them to the first men he saw. They toasted him, and the bottles passed around, soldier to farmer, and farmer to soldier, until they were empty.

A farmer went and burrowed in his belongings in the stable, and returned with a jug that proved to contain apple jack.

And the lutes played on.

Lissen Carak – Michael

At some point, Michael knew he had never played so well, and he also knew that his fingers were going to hurt all the next day. Kaitlin whirled by, leaped in the air and was caught by Daniel Favor; Bad Tom caught Mag’s Sukey around the waist and she, a widow of twenty-four hours, squealed like a girl; Low Sym turned with the eight-year-old daughter of the Wackets, and Sister Miram and Sister Mary turned a somewhat statelier pavane together when Long Paw bowed, very Continental, and took Sister Miram’s hand and led her around the yard. Francis Atcourt bowed over Sister Mary’s hand and she laughed, and curtsied. Amicia danced with Ser Jehannes, Harmodius whirled Lis like a much younger man, and her feet spun her skirts out around her like a king’s cloak. and then Amicia spun by again with Ser George Brewes, and the Red Knight drank off his fourth glass of the Abbess’s red wine and played on. Cuddy tilted the apple jack back and back . . . and rolled off the barrel on which he was perched, and landed flat on his back, and didn’t move, and the farmers laughed. Wilful Murder had an arm around Johne the Bailli and a leather flagon in the other hand, and was singing at the top of his voice, his face lit like a daemon’s in the firelight.

The Carter girls began to dance, a fast, flashy dance of their own creation, and the Lanthorn girls, not to be beaten, leaped into the circle, and the music ran away with them. More pipes joined in, and Ben Carter produced bagpipes, and his drunkenness seemed to fall away as he played for his sisters. Fran Lanthorn leaned out of the turning circle and kissed him hard on the cheek as she swept by, and he blushed furiously and his tune tumbled, but he caught it and launched it anew.

Lissen Carak – Michael

Michael and his master allowed their fingers to fall still. The lutes dropped out of the busy music, which swept on.

Michael felt his captain’s arms go around his shoulders. He was afraid he’d cry. The captain had never hugged him before. Or anyone else that he knew of. He’d never seen the man’s face so open. So – defenceless.

And then he was gone into the swirling darkness and firelight.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn could hear the music. It drew him the way a candleflame will draw insects and frogs on a still summer night in the deep woods. He walked heavily to the edge of the woods, and listened with his keen senses to the sounds of people laughing and dancing, to the sounds of as many as ten instruments.

He listened, and listened. And hated.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The Red Knight lay with his head in Amicia’s lap. She was looking at the firelit scene at their feet, inside the walls of the courtyard, and he was looking at the line of her throat and jaw. She was thinking about how simple happiness could be, and he felt the current of her thoughts through their joined hands.

Gradually – glacially slowly – she lowered her mouth over his.

Playfully, at the last moment, he licked her nose, and they both dissolved into laughter, and he shifted, grabbed her under the arms and began to tickle her and she shrieked and tried to hit him.

He put her in his lap and bent to kiss her. She arched her back to reach him more quickly, and their tongues touched, their lips touched-

He drank her, and she drank him. Each of them could feel the contact, real, aethereal, spiritual.

He had pulled her robes above her hips, and she had not stopped him. The feeling of her naked flank inflamed him, and he pressed on.

She broke the kiss. ‘Stop,’ she said.

He stopped.

She smiled. Licked her lips. And then rolled out from under him, as swift as a dancer. Or a warrior.

‘Marry me,’ the Red Knight said.

Amicia stopped. She froze. ‘What?’

‘Marry me. Be my wife. Live with me until we die, old and surrounded by children and grandchildren.’ He grinned.

‘You’d say that to any girl who keeps her legs closed,’ she said.

‘Yes, but this time I mean it,’ he said, and she swatted him.

‘Amicia,’ said Sister Miram. She was standing by the apple tree. She smiled. ‘I missed you at the fire.’ She looked at the captain, who felt like a schoolboy. ‘She may choose for herself whether to marry a mercenary or be the bride of Christ,’ Miram said. ‘But she can choose in daylight, and not on an apple-scented night.’

Amicia nodded, but her half-hooded eyes concealed a spark that the Red Knight saw, and rejoiced at. He sprang to his feet. And bowed low. ‘Then I bid you good night, ladies.’

Miram stood her ground. ‘It was well thought,’ she said. ‘They needed to rejoice. And the lady would have wanted a better wake than we were providing.’

The captain nodded. ‘It was good. I didn’t-’ He shrugged. ‘I just wanted some music. And maybe to lure this lady into my lair’ He smiled. ‘But it was good.’

‘There is more heart in us tonight than last night, despite everything.’ Miram looked at Amicia. ‘Will you wed her?’

The captain leaned very close to the nun. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said.

Miram put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Then tell us your name,’ she said.

‘I know his name,’ Amicia said. ‘He’s-’

There was a sudden cheer from the courtyard, and then a roar of voices. The captain saw that Ser Jehannes was standing at the edge of the firelight, and behind him were three men in full plate, the fire lighting them like moving mirrors. They had black surcotes with white crosses.

The Red Knight turned away from the two nuns. He waved to Ser Jehannes and leaned out into the courtyard. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Now someone’s come into the secret passage,’ Ser Jehannes said. ‘From outside. From the king.’ At the word king the courtyard burst into cheers again. Jehannes pointed to the trio of armoured figures standing in the ruin of the covered way. ‘Knights of the Order.’

The music stopped.

One of the three knights raised his visor. He was an old man, but his smile was quite young.

The relief that flooded the captain was palpable, solid. He felt giddy. He felt weak. He said, ‘Splendid.’

The captain clasped hands with the first man in the long black cloak that marked the Knights of the Order of Saint Thomas of Acon.

‘I’m the captain,’ he said. ‘The Red Knight.’

‘Mark, Prior of Pyrwrithe,’ said the man whose right hand was clasped in his own. ‘May we offer you our compliments on a brilliant defence? Although I understand from Ser Jehannes that the lady Abbess is dead.’

‘She died last night, my lords. In battle.’ Suddenly the captain was hesitant. He had no idea how the fighting orders felt about Hermeticism or any other form of phantasm.

The Prior nodded. ‘She was a great lady,’ he said. ‘I will go and pay my respects. But first – the king is across the river, moving carefully. But he should be opposite the Bridge Castle by late tomorrow. The next day at the latest.’

The captain grinned with pure joy. ‘That is welcome news.’ He looked at the three men, all in full armour. ‘You three must be tired.’

The prior shrugged. ‘The armour of faith is such that we feel little fatigue, my son. But a glass of wine is never amiss.’

‘Let us go to chapel,’ murmured the central figure. He wore a black tabard with the eight pointed cross of the order.

‘If I may: I’d rather you stood where the people could see you just a little longer,’ said the captain. ‘There have been doubts.’

The Prior shook his head. ‘We’re late and no mistake, Captain.’

The captain raised his hand for silence. In the courtyard, they cheered and cheered. But after a a few resurgences of spirit, they fell quiet, with Mag shouting ‘Shut up, you fools’ and a titter of laughter.

‘Friends!’ the captain said. His voice carried. ‘Our prayers have been answered. The king is here, and these three knights of the order are the vanguard.’ There were cheers, but he went on. ‘We’ve had a sip or two and a dance tonight. But when the king comes, we’ll have to break this siege. The enemy is still out there. Let’s have some sleep while we can. Aye?’

Men who had cursed him as Satan a few hours before raised wooden jacks now.

‘Red Knight!’ they shouted. And others shouted ‘St Thomas!’

And then, as if by magic, they tottered off to bed. Sym and Long Paw put Cuddy over their shoulders and carried him to bed in the hospital. Ben Carter found himself carried by Wilful Murder and Fran Lanthorn to his pile of straw in the stable.

Together the four men walked to the chapel.

The Red Knight didn’t say anything. The Abbess lay on her bier, and the three knights knelt around her. After some time, they rose, in unison. The captain led them to his Commandry, which, as he expected, was empty, without a sign of Michael’s sleeping gear.

‘This is my office,’ the captain said. ‘If you wish to disarm, I can send you a couple of archers.

Ser John smiled. ‘I’ve been sleeping in harness since I was fifteen,’ he said.

‘Are you three alone?’ the captain asked.

The prior shook his head. ‘I have sixty knights in the woods east of the ford,’ he said. ‘Short of direct intervention by the enemy, they won’t be found.’

The tallest knight nodded and pulled his helmet over his head. He gave a sigh of pure pleasure. ‘It’s what we do,’ he said. He pulled a cushion off one of the chairs, put it under his head, and went to sleep.

Lissen Carak – Gerald Random

The Siege of Lissen Carak. Day Fourteen

Yesterday the folk of the towns talked rebellion – but it was all shock at the death of the Abbess, and the captain restored order and none were injured. The priest, Henry, was taken into custody. The Enemy’s engines pounded the Bridge Castle, but the enemy was hesitant and careful in their movements, and we saw a large force crossing the river to the west. We had heavy rain in the afternoon, and at nightfall the captain (crossed out) the people celebrated the Feast of Saint George. After dark a party of Knights of St Thomas entered and told us we were to be relieved by the king.

It was a lovely late-spring morning. There was a low fog, and Master Random looked out at it for a moment, enjoying his small beer. He waved to Gelfred, who was fussing with his falcons, and found young Adrian to get armed.

While he was still getting his arm harnesses on, the alarm sounded.

Before the bell had stopped ringing, he was on the curtain wall of the Bridge Castle with the master huntsman. The bridge was still down, and although the bridge gates were closed and heavily barred, it was still the hope of every merchant in the lower fortress that more survivors would stumble in from the Wild – despite all evidence to the contrary.

Gelfred had a trio of big hawks with him, and from time to time he flew one away into the morning light. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist – mostly he spoke to the hawks, murmuring to them in much the same language that Random’s daughters spoke to their dolls.

Two archers assisted him.

Random watched the open ground out to the line of trees. Plenty of movement this morning – boglins crawling through the deep grass. They continued to believe that they were invisible in the grass, and Random, for one, hoped they continued to believe it.

He motioned to one of the small boys who had survived the caravans. ‘Tell Ser Milus that there is a boglin attack coming on the curtain wall,’ he said. And was proud that his voice remained steady and professional. He refused to let his mind dwell on how he had seen a line of boglin take his men apart.

The boy ran along the wall.

The bell rang again. The new company formed. It was a hodge-podge of men; a dozen goldsmiths with crossbows, with a dozen spearmen, all farmers sons or young merchants in borrowed armour; but the front rank was all men-at-arms, and Ser Milus led them in person.

When they were well-formed and he’d inspected their armour, he led them up the ladders onto the curtain wall.

‘Good morning, Master Random,’ he said, as he got to the top of his ladder.

‘Good morning, Ser Milus,’ Random answered. ‘Nice of them to announce themselves.’

‘I’ve doubled the watch in the towers,’ Ser Milus said. ‘Look sharp!’ he said, loud and clear, and the men on the wall stopped their conversations and looked through the crenellations. ‘You – Lusty Luke, or whatever you name is. Where’s your gorget? Get it fastened.’

Out in the deep grass, irks and boglins began to loose arrows.

One, lucky or perfectly aimed, struck one of the third rank spearmen and killed him instantly, and he fell bonelessly from the wall into the courtyard behind them.

The other farmer-spearmen shuffled nervously.

‘And did he have his gorget properly fastened?’ Ser Milus roared. ‘And did I just speak to him about it?’ he bellowed.

Gelfred finished lashing his birds to their perches and putting on their jesses and hoods. He went into the north tower followed by his two archers. His calm, unhurried movements contrasted with the spearmen.

Their shuffling stopped.

The boglins made their run at the wall. There were enough of them that they covered the ground – it was like a charge by a nest of ants. The grass seemed to come alive, and there they were – hundreds of them, scurrying to the wall, the elfin irks bounding ahead in great leaps.

Like most fortress walls at the edge of the Wild, this one had a slope at the base and then rose sheer for the last few metres. The design had an immediate function beyond stability – as Random had seen in the last four attacks. Boglins misjudged the wall because of the initial slope and attempted to run straight up it – over and over. Apparently, they couldn’t help themselves, and they ran at the wall, harder and harder, and very few ever made it to the top.

Random had come to believe that this, too, was by design, as the success of a few egged the rest on to continue their mostly-fruitless runs.

The men-at-arms with pole-axes and heavy swords began the slaughter of the soft-bodied things.

The crossbowmen cleared any that managed to alight on the crenellations, their heavy bolts plucking the creatures off the wall to a body-crushing fall.

The spearmen were there to catch any who got through the defence.

Random appointed himself to the third rank. He was much better armoured than the farm kids, and yet – he was more one of them than he was a knight. Or a man-at-arms.

The fight went very well for two long minutes. The armoured professionals massacred the boglins, and the crossbowmen covered their backs, and one big, fast boglin who knocked Ser Stefan to the ground got a farmer’s spear between his limbs and writhed – literally like a bug pinned to paper – until a half-dozen axes finished it. Ser Stefan got back to his feet, unharmed.

Random was unengaged – almost bored, despite the tide of monsters lapping at the wall. But his boredom saved them, because he was the one who heard the screams of the sentries in the north tower.

Random whirled and saw boglins on the tower top.

He turned and went into the tower through the open curtain wall door, drawing his heavy sword as he ran. He had a buckler on his hip and he got that into his left hand.

‘Boglins on the tower!’ he shouted at a huddle of men – Gelfred and his huntsmen.

Then he ran up the ladder to the tower top.

‘Ring the alarm,’ shouted Gelfred – a better response than Random’s one-man fire brigade.

Random threw back the roof-trap and immediately received a blow to his head. It fell on his bassinet and glanced away and he was up another step, buckler over his head – two fast blows to the small shield, and he was atop the ladder and cutting low with his sword, and he felt it cut into the firewood-hard flesh of a boglin’s leg and then he pushed with his legs and got clear of the trap door.

A blow to his back plate.

Random punched with his buckler, the steel rim cracking a boglin’s head with the same feeling of a lobster’s shell giving under a hard blow, and then he pivoted on his hips – a new move, learned from Ser Milus – and cut with his sword – one, two. The second blow was wasted – his first went home, splitting a head, and the back cut plucked the head off the body and blood spewed from the thing.

But they were all around him, stabbing with spears. One spear skidded across his back plate and went in under his buckler arm, stopped only by his chain voiders, and another spear-blow hit the side of his head hard enough to make him see stars. He stumbled forward and tangled with yet another of the things, who tried to pin him by wrapping all four limbs around his legs, but he put the pommel of his sword into the centre of the boglin’s face and – it’s nose seemed to open into a horrible parody of a gullet, lined in spikes – it shrieked in pain, and all four limbs began to scrabble at a tremendous rate.

Random swept his buckler in a desperate arc, let go his sword, and whipped his dagger from his belt. He rammed it into the leathery parts of the boglin’s six-segmented chest, stabbing more times than he cared to count, and the thing almost literally fell to pieces under his hands.

Then he saw a flash of dark green, and Gelfred was there, swinging a short-hafted boar spear with practised efficiency – cut, thrust, cut, thrust, like a weapon’s master demonstrating for a class.

And then they were done.

Random was covered in blood – but he felt like a god.

He leaned over the wall to call down to Ser Milus and saw that the courtyard was full of boglins.

White boglins. In armour. Wights.

‘Gelfred!’ he screamed.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The Red Knight woke from a dream of Amicia with a smile on his face and Bad Tom’s hand on his shoulder.

‘You look like hell,’ the captain said.

‘Bridge Castle is under assault,’ Tom said. ‘It looks bad, and they’ve stopped signalling.’

‘Right,’ said the captain. He took a deep breath. Of course the Enemy knew the king was a half-day’s march away. Hence their assault. An all-or-nothing assault. And the trebuchet was gone. But – Bent had spent yesterday with the farmers erecting a trebuchet that filled the stump of the old tower. The captain rolled off his bed. He was fully dressed.

‘Bent!’ he called.

The senior archer came from under the scaffolding. ‘My lord?’

‘Start laying buckets of gravel across the trenchline,’ he said. ‘Commence as soon as you can get loaded.’

Bent saluted.

The captain turned to Tom. ‘Tell the archers to start loosing into the field between here and the Bridge Castle. Everything we have. Don’t spare shafts now. Someone heat rocks for the trebuchet. Michael! Get me Harmodius.’

His squire had, apparently, spent the night in his room.

‘And then armour, helmet and gauntlets,’ he called out.

Tom licked his lips.

‘Sortie?’ he asked.

‘Not much choice. Tom, the three gentlemen in my Commandery are knights of the order – see to it they get a cup of wine-’

‘And horses,’ said the Prior, appearing in the doorway. ‘If you will allow me, my lord, I will have my knights meet us in the field below. Which may be a dolorous surprise to our foes, by the grace of God.’

He raised a hand and made a sign and spoke a word – a single word that the captain did not know – in Archaic.

Something definitely happened. But the captain didn’t know what it was.

It did become clear, though, that the military orders used Hermeticism.

‘Wine and war horses, then,’ the captain said. The king is coming. Let’s not get rash.

Overhead, the trebuchet slammed into its supports, and the whole scaffolding creaked.

Several hundredweight of gravel flew out into the early morning.

Above him, on the remnants of the south tower, the heavy arbalests began to thwack away at the creatures in the fields below.

‘You called?’ asked Harmodius.

‘I need to save the Bridge Castle. He’s throwing everything at it – and he’s waiting for us to respond. I’m hoping that we can pound his attack flat with artillery but I can’t count on it. The Prior, here, has offered us another trick up our sleeves, but I need more. What can you do?’

‘It’s the King’s Magus!’ The Prior said. ‘The king has never ceased to look for you.’

Harmodius shrugged. ‘I was never lost.’ He fingered his beard. ‘I think this is a case for misdirection,’ he said. He smiled, and it was particularly nasty smile. ‘He thinks I’m dead.’

Lissen Carak – Gerald Random

Random led the valets and the spearmen against the wights. There were fifty of them, and they were bigger and far better armoured than the boglins who had climbed the tower walls.

By the time Gelfred reached the courtyard many of the merchants who had come in the first convoys were dead. They were no match for the boglins, who were faster and better armoured and whose every limb had a killing scythe or a spike. The merchants did not live in their armour like the mercenaries; they fought unarmoured, and they died.

But in the light of the sun Gelfred and his archers, high above in the tower, began to slaughter them like rats in a trap.

The heavy longbow arrows went through their iron armour with a wet slapping sound, and the big boglins shrieked as they died and tried to crawl over each other to reach the tower steps. They were already flowing up the ladders to the curtain wall – up the top and the underside of the ladders. They jammed the open doorway of the tower, and Gerald Random set his feet and fought to hold the door.

‘Fortress is signalling!’ called Nick Draper. ‘On the way.’

Random set his teeth, and slammed his visor shut.

The arrows flying from the towers were answered by flights of arrows from the ground outside, from the courtyard – the hole there was a yawning maw vomiting monsters.

There were massive irks, nothing like the slim elfin creatures he’d seen before, but as big as a big man, armoured in ring mail with shields and long swords. There were more boglins as white as the moon, with hooked spears and iron plate. They came at him in one gout.

The farm-boys slammed spears past him – sometimes they fouled his sword arm, and one pinked him in the buttock, but he was their shield and they were his weapon, their nine-foot spears pinning the armoured things so that Random cut pieces off them – and just past the door, the hail of shafts continued to reap the enemy.

But there were more and more of the things out in the courtyard.

To all appearances, the sortie emerged after a concerted volley from all the engines in the fortress – a veritable rain of projectiles from fist-sized rubble to twenty-pound rocks; crossbow shafts two feet long and weighing two pounds.

The sortie rode down the fortress ridge at top speed, a blur of motion at the edge of the dark, and halted at the foot of the ridge to form its wedge. But they took too long. Men and horses were too far behind – other men had over-ridden the assembly point and had to turn back – and a hundred heartbeats were consumed achieving their formation.

Thorn watched the enemy sortie emerge. He watched them ride down the cliff face and he tasted the power of the phantasm that surrounded them. And spat at the taste.

Thorn sent the signal to his ambush, and triggered the massive spell he had spent the day preparing. Power leapt across the late morning light, raw and green, and coalesced-

Thorn choked.

That was not the sortie. It was an illusion. The spectre of a sortie.

The Fallen Magus roared his rage. But it was too late, and the carefully prepared power of his magic fist slammed to empty earth.

Lissen Carak – Harmodius

‘He didn’t used to be this easy,’ Harmodius said, looking up to the captain, who sat on a borrowed destrier. The Magus grinned like a small boy. ‘The Wild has sapped his imagination.’

The shattering thunderclap of the outpouring of the Enemy’s power rang in their ears and the massive flash still burned across the captain’s retinas. ‘Can he do that again?’ the captain asked.

‘Perhaps, Harmodius admitted. ‘I doubt it, though.’

The captain exchanged a glance with Sauce, who rode by his side. It was Tom’s turn to have the duty, and the big man was fretting about missing the sortie.

‘No heroics,’ the captain called. ‘Right across the plain to the castle, then around the walls. Kill anything that comes under our hooves.’

The Wild – Peter

Peter had just finished making breakfast when the two boglins came to his fire. They had a pair of rabbits, already skinned, in each arm – eight rabbits in all. They also had a large animal carcass – also field dressed – carried between them on a pole.

‘U kuk fr us?’ said the larger one.

Peter realised with a shock that the larger mammal was a woman – beheaded and skinned. Gutted. Cleaned.

‘Kuk?’ said the larger boglin.

Peter took a deep breath, pointed at the dead woman, and shook his head. ‘I will not cook a person,’ he said.

He had his fire going, and he had already fed his friends. So he handed the remains of his squash and squirrel stew with oregano to the larger boglin. ‘Eat,’ he said.

The boglin looked at its partner. They touched their heads together for a moment, and a flood of acrid, complex smells filled the air.

The smaller boglin opened its gullet and swallowed half, and then passed the small copper pot to the larger boglin, who consumed the rest.

Peter didn’t watch.

Ota Qwan came and stood by him. ‘Aren’t you two supposed to be in the big attack?’ he asked.

They remained perfectly still. Animal still. As if they couldn’t hear him.

‘Kuk?’ asked the larger.

‘I – will – cook – the – rabbits.’ Peter spoke slowly.

‘Gud.’ The larger boglin bobbed. ‘Go kill. Back to eat.’ He made a chittering noise, his partner joined him, and they bent forward and loped off into the gathering night.

Ota Qwan looked at Peter. ‘Do you have the power, laddy?’ he asked.

Peter shook his head.

Ota Qwan shrugged. ‘Among the Sossag people it is mostly shamans who can talk to the Wild,’ he said. ‘I would like to have boglins to follow me,’ he said. ‘If they offer to join us, accept.’

Peter swallowed. ‘You would have them in camp?’

Ota Qwan shook his head in mock anger. ‘Boglins are big medicine, you know that?’

‘Where do they come from?’ Peter asked. ‘I had never seen one before – I came here.’

Ota Qwan sat by the corpse of the gutted woman. He didn’t seem to notice her, or care. ‘I don’t know, but I can tell you what men say. The word is that they grow in great colonies like giant termite hills in the deep Wild – way out west. All the creatures of the Wild fear them. The great Powers of the Wild cultivate them, recruit whole colonies, and send them to their deaths.’ Ota Qwan sighed. ‘I’ve heard said they were made – they were created – by a great Power. To fight an ancient war.’

Peter shook his head. ‘That’s just a way of saying you don’t know.’

‘Don’t I?’ Ota Qwan laughed. ‘You have so much to learn about the Wild. Because the Powers pretend that they fear nothing, but they fear the little boglins. A thousand boglins are a fearful sight. A million boglins-’ He shrugged. ‘If they could be fed, they could conquer the world.’

Peter swallowed bile.

‘Maybe you could cook for them, eh?’ Ota Qwan said. ‘You know the matrons have given you a name?’

Peter nodded expectantly.

‘Nita Qwan.’ Ota Qwan nodded expectantly. ‘A very potent name. Well done.’

Peer sounded it out in his head. ‘Gives – something.’

‘He gives life,’ Ota Qwan said.

‘Like your name,’ Peter said.

‘Yes. They see us together. I like that.’ He nodded.

‘What is Ota?’ Peter asked.

‘Take. Like ota nere!’ he paused.

‘Take water. When we are on the march.’ Peter nodded. And then turned. ‘You are Take Life and I am Give Life.’

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘Got it in one. You were Grundag. Now you are Nita Qwan. My brother. And my symbolic opposite.’ He nodded again. ‘Now – recruit me those boglins. This siege is almost over; we’ll go home as soon as the dead are eaten.’

Peter shook his head. ‘I lack your experience of war,’ he said. ‘But the Alban Royal Army is just coming up the Vale of the Cohocton.’

Ota Qwan rubbed his chin. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a very good point. But Thorn says we will triumph tonight.’

‘How?’ Nita Qwan asked.

‘Pick up your bow and spear and come with me,’ Ota Qwan said.

Nita Qwan put the rabbits on green stick spits and left his woman to turn them. He took up his bow and his new spear, tipped with the fine blued-steel head that had come to him as a share of his spoils from the Fight at the Ford. He had many new things, and his woman was impressed.

And it had only cost him a year of his life. But he spat and followed Ota Qwan, because it was easier to follow than to think. He ran, and caught Ota Qwan by the elbow. The war leader stopped.

‘One thing,’ Nita Qwan said.

‘Be quick, laddy,’ Ota Qwan said.

‘I’m not anyone’s lad. Not yours, not anyone’s. Got me?’ Nita Qwan’s eyes bored straight into the war leader’s.

He didn’t flinch. But after several breaths, his nostrils flared, and he smiled. ‘I hear you, Nita Qwan.’

He turned and ran, and Nita Qwan followed, better satisfied.

At the edge of the woods, many of the surviving Sossag warriors were waiting – almost five hundred of them. Beyond them, painted fiery red in the sun were Abenacki, and even a few Mohak, in their characteristic skeleton paint.

The Abenacki war chief, Akra Crom, walked to the centre, between the groups. He raised an axe from his belt and held it over his head.

Ota Qwan smiled. ‘If he falls today,’ Ota Qwan said, ‘I will be war chief of the Sossag, and perhaps the Abenacki, too.’

Nita Qwan felt as if he’d been punched in the gut.

‘Don’t be so naive,’ the older man said. ‘This is the Wild.’

Nita Qwan took a deep breath. ‘What does he say?’

‘He says that if we ever want to get home, we must fight well tonight for Thorn, and kill the armoured horsemen as we have so many times. We have a thousand warriors. We have bows, and axes. La di da.’ Ota Qwan looked around. ‘In truth, this Thorn doesn’t seem to have a serious plan for us – as if he thinks that by ordering us out of the woods and into the fields, we will kill all the knights.’ He shrugged.

Nita Qwan shuddered.

Ota Qwan put an arm around him. ‘We will go and lie in ambush by the enemy back gate,’ he said. He barely waited for the Abenacki man to stop his oration before he rose to his feet, shook his spear, and the Sossag gave a scream of power and followed Ota Qwan into the green of the woods.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The horses were all tired, and many of them bore light wounds, muscle strains, scars – and so did their riders.

There were twenty-five men-at-arms – a pitiful number against a sea of foes.

And at the base of the ridge, a perfect circle of cooling glass marked the best efforts of their foe.

The captain was operating in a haze of fatigue and minor pains that all but subsumed emotion. He knew – at a remove – that the Abbess was gone. That Grendel, almost a friend, was dead and probably eaten down on the plain. That his beloved tutor was cold marble – no longer even a simulacrum of life.

But at another level, he walled all that away.

Can you fight every day?

He knew he could. Every day, until the sun died.

The place in his head where his friends were dying was like a bad tooth, and by an effort of will, he didn’t run his tongue over it.

Nor did he think, If we win today, we’re saved.

He didn’t think that, because he didn’t really think much beyond his next stratagem, and he was now pretty much out of tricks.

All of this went through his head between one leap of his new mount and the next.

He hurt.

They all did.

And then the sortie was down onto the plain, and forming their wedge.

Random was more tired than he had ever been, and had he not been wearing first-rate armour, he’d long since have been dead. As it was, blows slammed into him more and more often as the monsters in the courtyard crawled over their own dead to reach him.

Twice, shouts behind him told him that more of the cursed things had made it onto the tower or the wall – apparently using their vestigial wings, or perhaps they were a new and horrible breed – but the spearmen at his back held their ground.

Twice he had a respite from the attacks on the door, but he had no idea why the white things stopped coming. He would pant, someone would hand him water, and then they’d come again. The white boglins were bad. The big irks were worse.

A farmer tried to help him in the doorway – braver or stupider than the rest – and died almost as soon as he took his place, while one of his mates begged him not to go.

‘Ye have no armour!’ a bigger, Harndon accented man called.

He didn’t have armour on his arms and legs, and the wicked scythes on their limbs sliced him to pieces, dragged him down and carved him up. And they ate him – even the dying ones took a bite.

Random couldn’t lift the buckler high any more. He knew it was just a matter of time before he was struck in the visor or the groin – only luck and the efforts of the spearmen kept him at it.

More irks came. They took their time coming over the low mound of dead, and they all came at him together. A shield caught his outstretched arm – the vambrace held the blow, but he was unbalanced, and the boglins dragged him to his knees – a blow struck the back of his helmet and he was down.

He could feel a sharp pain across his instep – something was hacking at his armoured shin – and then, to his horror, he began to be dragged out of the doorway, into the pile of corpses.

He couldn’t help it. He screamed.

And then he wasn’t being dragged, and a heavy weight crushed him. Only the strength of his breastplate and his backplate and their hinges kept the crushing weight from taking the breath out of him.

There was a sharper pain in his right foot.

He tried to call out, and suddenly his helmet was full of liquid – he spat. It was hell – dark – bitter. He choked and spat and realised that he was drowning.

In boglin blood.

He tried to scream.

More pain.

Christ, I am being eaten alive.

Christ, save me in my hour of need.

The Wild – Peter

Nita Qwan loped through the woods. The circle of the sun was high overhead. It was a poor time to set a trap, and he wanted to wait for night, but it was late spring, and darkness – true darkness – was still a long way away.

A brilliant emerald flash lit the sky to the south. A titanic concussion rocked the earth.

Ota Qwan grinned. ‘Our signal. He is mighty, our chief. Let’s go! Gots onah!’ The acting war chief ran ahead of the band, and they began to sprint over the grass, angling east, and the summer light threw shadows under them.

They had almost a mile to go. Nita Qwan was a strong man, and had lived with the Sossag for weeks, but running a mile to fight was the most exhausting work – especially after a morning of food gathering and cooking. He put his head down and tried to seal off his mind from his thighs and his lungs, and he ran.

It took many long minutes to run all the way to the east of the great ridge, but finally, Ota Qwan raised a hand. ‘Down!’ he called, and the People fell to the earth in the tall grass. He turned to Skahas Gaho and another warrior and sent them off farther to the east, and then he lay down by Nita Qwan.

‘Not long now,’ he said. ‘We are in the right place. Now we see if Thorn knows what he is doing.’

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched the action develop from the utter safety of the western edge of the woods. He was not strong enough to risk himself today – because he’d thrown too much in a single casting. It rankled. But he had thousands of servants to aid him, and today he was spending them like water, his usual caution forgotten.

Many of his servants would have been disturbed to note that he had already decided to use them all, if he had to. He knew where more creatures of the Wild could be raised. He himself was irreplaceable.

And she was dead.

He had made mistakes, but the end game was going to play out with the inevitability of one of those ancient plays he had once so enjoyed, and now could no longer remember.

The king would come, and be defeated. That trap was already laid.

And then it would all be his.

Albinkirk – de Vrailly

He could no longer set his tent away from the army. Tonight, the army was camped hard by a small stream that ran down to the Cohocton; the carcass of a great beast of the Wild lay in sodden and hideous majesty, the bones picked redly clean in mid-stream. A litter of corpses and the screams and quarrels of the animals that fed on the recent dead marked the scene of a recent battle.

The king ordered the wagons pulled in, trace to axle tree, a fortress of tall, wheeled carts chained at the hubs, and even de Vrailly couldn’t fault him for his caution. They were in the very midst of the Wild, and the enemy was palpable, all around them. Many of the footsoldiers and not a few of the knights were afraid – scared, or even terrified. De Vrailly could hear their womanish laughter in the firelit dark, but he himself knew nothing but a fierce joy that at last – at last – he would be tested, and found worthy. The much-discussed fortress of Lissen Carak was three leagues away to the north, the Queen’s flotilla was, by all reports, already lying in mid-stream, ready to support their attack in the morning. Even the cautious old women of the king’s council were forced to admit that there would be a battle.

He was kneeling before his prie-dieu when the angel came. He came with a small thunderclap and a burst of myrrh.

De Vrailly cried out.

The angel hovered, and then sank to the earth, his great spear touching the cross-beam of the great tent.

‘My lord de Vrailly,’ the angel said. ‘The greatest knight in the world.’

‘You mock me,’ de Vrailly said.

‘Tomorrow will see you acknowledged as such by every man,’ said the angel.

Jean de Vrailly was struggling with his doubt. He felt as a man does who knows he should not mention a certain fact to his wife, but does so, anyway – precipitating an avoidable argument. ‘You said we would fight a battle,’ he said, hating the whine of doubt in his voice. ‘At Albinkirk.’

The angel nodded. ‘I am not God,’ he said. ‘I am merely a servant. The battle will be here. It should have been at Albinkirk, but forces – circumstances – forced my hand.’

The angel’s hesitation froze de Vrailly.

‘What forces, my lord?’ asked Jean de Vrailly.

‘Mind your own role, and leave me to mine,’ said the angel. His voice sounded like a whip-crack. Like de Vrailly’s own. Beautiful and terrible. Imbued with power.

De Vrailly sighed. ‘I await your orders,’ he said.

The angel nodded. ‘Tomorrow, at dawn, the king will attack. The Enemy has a blocking force on the road between here and the bridge. Let the king lead the attack on that force, and when he falls-’ The angel paused.

De Vrailly felt his heart stop.

‘When he falls, seize command. Cut your way free, save the king’s army, and you will save the day.’ The angel’s voice was pure and precise. ‘His day is done. He has failed. But he will die well, and you, my lord, will take the woman and be king. She is the kingdom. Her father was the greatest lord of Alba next to the king. With the woman, you will rule. Without her – you will not. Am I making myself clear to you?’

De Vrailly’s eyes narrowed. ‘And what of the north?’ he asked. ‘If I am to save the army, am I to let this mighty fortress fall?’

‘You can retake it,’ the angel said reasonably. ‘When you bring an army from Galle.’

De Vrailly bent his proud head, shading his eyes from the brightness of the angel. ‘Pardon me, my lord,’ he said aloud. ‘I have doubted, and been misled by false images.’

The angel touched his head. ‘God forgives you, my son. Remember – when the king falls, take command, and cut your way clear.’

De Vrailly nodded, eyes downcast. ‘I understand very well. My lord.’

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain pointed his wedge south and raised his hand. He could feel the heat coming off the hot glass circle to their right – it went right through his steel gauntlet and his glove.

Ouch, he thought. And thanked Harmodius with a silent nod.

‘Let’s ride,’ he called, and they trotted forward, formed tightly. A perfect target for another burst of power.

His back tingled as he rode away from where he felt his enemy to be, towards the near corner of the Bridge Castle, just two hundred horse-lengths away or less.

The wedge negotiated the trench – last night it had been an inferno – crossing it carefully and wasting precious time. Some men had to dismount.

It was still better than riding the other way around the walls.

Some men jumped it, but most men were less flashy and more cautious.

They reformed on the far side, unopposed.

The captain rose in his stirrups. He pointed across the darkening grass toward the near corner of the Bridge Castle.

‘It’s a trap. If it wasn’t, those boglins-’ the captain pointed at a hundred or more boglins who were watching them from a hastily erected earthen assault ramp that rose to the top of the wall of the Bridge Castle ‘-those boglins would have tried to hold the trench against us. Instead of watching like spectators.’

‘Has the Bridge Castle fallen?’ Sauce asked.

The captain watched it for ten heartbeats. ‘No,’ he said.

The Prior of Harndon came up on his left side. ‘If you let me send my signal, my knights will ride to meet us,’ he said. ‘They are just there, in the woods closest to the river.’

The captain looked a little longer. ‘Catching their ambush between two hammers,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ He turned to his valet. ‘Sound – single rank, full interval.’

Lissen Carak – Peter

Ota Qwan was on his knees in the high grass. The enemy – a small party of knights in highly polished armour – had hesitated at the edge of the Trench of Fire, as the Sossag called it now, though it was black and cold in the sun.

‘That lordling knows his business,’ Ota Qwan said. ‘I don’t know him – lacs d’amour? Whose banner is that?’ He spat. ‘He’s spreading his knights.’

‘So?’ Nika Qwan asked.

‘So in a tight bunch, his men kill a few unlucky warriors and we massacre them from all sides. In a long line, every one of them kills a warrior – or maybe five. It is a lucky warrior who gets an arrow into one of them.’

The knights began to come forward in the strong light, and the blue sky was mirrored in their harness. They looked like monsters from the Aether – like mythical beasts. The overhead sun sparkled from their harness and stung men’s eyes.

Skahas Gaho appeared as if by magic from the grass. ‘More tin-men behind us,’ he said. ‘Forming by the woods closest to the river.’ He shrugged. ‘Their horses are wet. They swam the river.’

Ota Qwan made a grunt. Nita Qwan could see he’d made his decision, just in that moment. The war leader stood, put a horn to his lips, and sounded a long call.

The Sossag stood and ran like songbirds before an eagle. They ran north, even as the two long lines of knights closed on them.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain watched the painted man rise from the grass just a hundred horse lengths in front of him, sound his horn, and begin to sprint north, out of the closing jaws of the counter-trap. He watched with a sense of failure and the vaguest professional admiration. He knew the Outwallers.

He ordered his valet to sound ‘Charge – ahead!’

His line caught a handful of stragglers but, obedient to his orders, the line swept east and south, and didn’t deviate to pursue the Sossag. Arrows flew as the Sossag rearguard gave their lives for their fellows, and one man-at-arms went down in a tangle of armour plate and dead horse, and then the black-clad knights from the riverside swept over the rearguard, killing every one of them in an instant, no quarter given.

The Prior moved past him, raised his hand, and summoned the military order knights to him without a word being spoken. It was a magnificent display of power.

The captain shook his head. ‘I thought we were good,’ he said.

Sauce had blood on her lance tip, and she reined in. Jacques was sounding the rally, and a wounded knight – Ser Tancred – was being hauled bodily onto Ser Jehannes’ horse. She leaned over. ‘We are good,’ she said.

To their left front the whole squadron of black- and red-clad knights went from a galloping charge to a dead stop in a few hoofbeats – then wheeled right around as if performing some gypsy horse trick and halted facing the Bridge Castle in a neat wedge.

Sauce shook her head – not a big motion in an aventail and bassinet. ‘Sweet Jesu. They are good,’ she admitted reluctantly.

The Prior cantered to the centre of the new line. ‘Well, Captain?’ he asked. ‘Shall we relieve the castle?’

The captain raised his hand. ‘At your command, Prior.’

Seventy mailed knights made the earth tremble.

The boglins scattered.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched in weary anger as his useless allies ran rather than face the knights. So many claims – so many boasts that they could fight anything, that they could conquer the maille-clad riders.

He watched them run, and knew – with the pain of intimate and exact intellect – that his entire plan for the day would come apart.

A burst of power from the field alerted him. The power itself was very low in intensity, but also very tightly controlled. Only someone as imbued with mastery as he himself would detect it.

And immediately recognise the wielder.

Prior Mark.

Thorn watched as the Prior used his power to pass signals to his knights – to turn them into finely crafted weapons, responsive to his will. Another man who loved power.

For a moment, he considered using all of his remaining puissance in a single spell to kill the Prior.

But that was foolish. He needed that power. He reminded himself that there was no hurry. That the king’s army would never reach the river.

But the fall of the Bridge Castle would have made all that unnecessary.

Thorn rarely spoke aloud. He had no peers to whom he could speak his mind – voice his indecision, his secret fears.

But he turned to his startled guards. The shamans who worshipped him. The cloud of midge-like followers who attended his every need. His voice came out as a harsh croak, like the voice of a raven.

‘Thirty days ago, a daemon sought to take this place from an old woman with no soldiers,’ he said. ‘Fate and bad luck have left me to contest it with the King of Alba and whole armies of knights, with a dozen able magi and now with the best warriors in the world.’ He laughed, and his wicked croak startled the birds in the trees. ‘And yet I will still conquer.’

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Nothing withstood their charge, and the strong band of knights scoured the ground around the Bridge Castle. They rode all the way around it, close against the walls, killing every creature of the Wild that didn’t scuttle clear of their path. The lesser boglins rose in brief bursts of flight or lay flat in the tall grass where they were difficult to find, and the greater boglins and irks, those with armour, struggled into their hastily dug tunnels to emerge in one last spurt of violence to the burning hell of the Bridge Castle courtyard.

The captain raised his hand for his company to halt when they returned to the base of the soft earth ramp that the worker-Boglins had run up to the curtain wall on the north side of the Bridge Castle.

‘Dismount!’ he called. The sun was past noon, but still high. There were streaks of cloud in the west, but hours of daylight remained. Still, experience told him that if he didn’t clear the courtyard before full dark he would lose the Bridge Castle.

And thus lose his connection to the king.

If the king was coming at all.

Every fifth valet took ten horses in his fist.

‘Spears!’ the captain called, and his men formed a tight line at the base of the ramp; men-at-arms in front, valets and squires in the middle, and archers in the rear rank.

The Prior rode up and saluted. ‘We’ll cover you!’

The captain saluted as Michael handed him his heavy spear. ‘If we aren’t out before full dark,’ the captain said, ‘Assume the bridge is lost.’

The Prior crossed himself. ‘God go with you, Ser Knight.’

‘God doesn’t give a shit,’ the captain said. ‘But it’s the thought that counts. On me!’ he called, and started up the slope of new turned earth. It was damp and hard – hardened with something excreted by the boglins, to judge from the smell. Acrid, like naphtha.

There were fifty boglins on the wall, and they died when the men-at-arms ripped through them.

The captain looked down into the inferno of the courtyard. All the merchant wagons were afire, and the courtyard crawled with figures like the damned in hell – men stripped of their skin, shrieking their lungs out; armoured boglins in glowing, fire-lit white. Most of them crowded to the door of the nearest tower, but more poured from a gaping wound in the earth where a dozen flagstones had been hurled aside, like maggots in a bloated corpse when it is opened. More boglins on the walls – but on the east wall, a small, disciplined company fought back to back, holding the opposite curtain against assault from both directions.

‘Files from the right!’ the captain called, and led his men down off the curtain wall – down the ramp intended for siege engines to be hauled up to the curtain, and there were a pair of pale boglins gleaming there, each with a pole-axe.

He had no time for finesse. He raised his spear, point low and butt high and caught the first creature’s heavy cut on his haft – wrapped its arm with his own in the high key that men practised when wrestling in armour – and then ripped its arm from its body like a man ripping a crab leg from a new-cooked crab.

The thing’s other arm came at him – he rammed his spear point into its head, let go of the shaft with his armoured left hand and punched into the boglin’s throat. It’s great maw opened, mandibles flashing at his visor – overhand, he rammed the spearhead down its gullet and acrid ichor blew out of the top of it like lava from a new volcano.

‘Form your front!’ he roared, even as Sauce beheaded the second armoured boglin with her axe.

Ser Jehannes came up on his left, and Sauce cleared her weapon and fell in next, tapping her axe-haft against the breastplates of Ser Jehannes and Ser Tancred, and the line was formed.

The armoured creatures were trying to overrun the defenders of the north tower, and the captain pointed with his spear. ‘Charge!’ he called.

Twenty paces into the rear of the things.

His sabatons rang on the pavement – he stumbled on a corpse.

And then – a storm of iron. Skittering screeches and staccato clicks like the beat of an insane drummer as the mass by the North Tower turned and charged him.

In the first meeting he was head to head with an armoured monster the size of Bad Tom – the complex interlacing of its front armour over the interstices of its six armour plates was like an obscene mouth as the thing reared back, its whole strength bent on a single, crushing blow from its great hammer, its body bent like a bow with the effort.

He set his feet and took the blow on his haft, rotated the weapon on the pivot of his opponent’s blow, and slammed a spike into the middle of its helmeted head. His spike penetrated the thing’s face plate, and it spasmed.

Behind his dying opponent towered another, wielding two long swords, and even as he watched, the thing beheaded Ser Jehannes’s new squire, the two weapons coming together like a tailor’s shears. Jehannes leaped to avenge his squire and took a pommel to the helmet that staggered him, and two lightning fast blows followed it, literally beating him to the ground.

The captain’s command sense shrieked in panic. The boglins had stopped his men-at-arms. It shouldn’t have been possible. There was nothing in the Wild that could stop twenty fully armoured men.

Not many things.

The captain paused and locked eyes with the thing standing over Jehannes, and it knew him. He leaped at the double-sworded thing, but his spear remained lodged in his last kill, and he had to leave it.

Double Sword turned from his prey – Jehannes – and faced him. It was yet another kind of boglin – sleek, taller than Bad Tom and heavily muscled, with man-made chainmail covering all its joints and feral, organic plate armour that might have been grown, or very finely forged. A wight.

At the edge of his peripheral vision, Sauce rammed a spike through the carapace of another armoured monster and screamed her war cry.

Ser Tancred was locked with another, his arms straining against it as his squire stabbed his long sword into its armpit – rapid, professional stabs that made its limbs thrash.

Double Sword tapped its blades together and leaped at him with animal rapidity.

The captain snatched his rondel dagger from his belt and trusted his armour. He entered between the blades, arms high, dagger in both fists, and the longsword blows crashed into his shoulder plates. The hardened steel bent and split – only to cut into the rings of the mail haubergeon underneath, and the blades were held, though the force drove through the thickly padded jupon under the mail, and still managed to bruise his shoulders . . .

But he swung the dagger overhand, two handed through the boglin’s mail aventail and into its neck.

Six times.

It’s limbs spasmed, but it’s forearms tightened like a band of steel around the captain’s shoulders. And it lit up with power, eyes glowing cool blue as it prepared-

He drove his armoured knee in between its legs – nothing there to hurt, but his blow took it off balance, and he pushed his left foot forward and threw the thing over his outstretched right leg. Its wing cases snarled in his knee armour’s flanges and ripped free. Its own weight accelerated its fall, but its limbs clasped him fast, and he fell atop it, his rondel dagger a projection from his fists.

His steel carapace held.

The monster’s didn’t. The triangular blade punched cleanly though it, and ichor jetted out.

He didn’t stop, but pulled the foot-long steel dagger clear of the wound and drove it up under the thing’s mandibles that were opening and closing with terrific force on the slick metal of his helmet. They ripped his visor off his face, forcing his head around in a painful arc, and he was eye to eye with the thing – its eyes glowing with unfocused power.

He countered with a lightning blow to its nearer eye-patch. He raked the point through the oblong eye – and again, and again, as a scythed foreleg reached for his face.

It was not going to die before it cast its phantasm.

He got his left gauntlet under its head and slammed the dagger into its left eye – through the eye patch, through the skin and bone. He reached for his memory palace to fight its power, even as he stirred its brains with the blade . . .

And a wave of power entered him – a sickly blue wave of chilling intensity, and he writhed-

Its eyes went out.

He took its force into him, subsuming the alien thing as creatures of the Wild do. He had never done it before, and hadn’t known how. He thought it was probably best that Prudentia hadn’t been there to watch.

He bounced to his feet, suddenly awash in concentrated calculations as to the survivability of his host under the conditions of the current combat, and for a fleeting instant, the captain was able to see and calculate as both sides in the courtyard.

But the balance had shifted.

A third of his men-at-arms were down – dead, wounded, or merely tripped, he had no way of knowing, but the back of the enemy resistance was broken and already the fringes of the melee had become more like a hunt than a fight.

His archers began to clear the walls, their shafts joined by the dozen archers loosing from the towers, and the pace of victory accelerated. A dozen of the white boglins scuttled down a hole. A man, half the skin ripped from his flesh and trailing down his back, screamed again, and an archer put a shaft into his throat with rough mercy, and stopped his screams – and all through the courtyard, armoured figures opened their visors and heaved air into desperate lungs.

The captain walked up a ramp of dead bodies to the door of the north tower where a young giant, drenched in acrid boglin-blood, stood leaning on a six-foot bill with a heavy steel head, coated in gore.

‘Well fought, young Daniel,’ the captain said.

The former carter shrugged. ‘Twas Master Random held the door, Cap’n. For most part of an hour, seems to me.’

‘Dead?’ the captain asked.

Daniel shrugged again. ‘They drug him into the pile,’ he said. ‘We fought ’em for the corpse but lost him when you charged their rear.’ He stood straighter. ‘Deserves finding, I think.’ He seemed to shake off his fatigue, and then he reached out, spiked an armoured boglin on the back-spike of his bill, and flung it from the pile like a farmer moving hay with a pitchfork.

The captain grabbed another. Dead, the boglins were curiously harmless – disgusting, but less insectoid, and more animal. He tossed one aside, and then another. His hands shook. His knees were weak.

He was insanely full of power.

Sauce joined him. ‘What are we doing? Killing the wounded?’ she asked, her voice a little too sharp and bright. This was a fight that men – and women – would relive too many times.

‘Looking for a body,’ the captain said. He was down to waist level, now.

‘I’ve got his leg!’ Daniel called.

Michael joined them, and suddenly there was Ser Milus, and Ser Jehannes, blood still leaking from the joints of his shoulder, and they hauled, and the corpse of the merchant stiffened, and he screamed.

His armour was slick with boglin blood, and human, and he popped out of the pile of corpses. The flesh of his left foot was gone at the ankle, and blood was leaking too slowly out of the wound where sharp mandibles had flensed the flesh from his foot.

‘Tourniquet! Cut his greave off!’ the captain shouted.

Daniel already had a small knife in his great paw of a hand, and he slit the straps holding the greave – Sauce opened the catch and the greave came loose with a gout of fresh blood.

The captain grabbed the stump of his leg. Sauce got her sword belt around the small of the ankle, got it through the buckle, and pulled with all her strength.

The blood stopped.

‘Tie it off,’ the captain said unnecessarily. Every soldier in his company could be a leach in an emergency.

Then he took a weary breath and ran for the wall.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt the dark sun take Exrech and he cursed. Cursed that he had been fooled again, cursed that every encounter seemed to go against him.

The accession of power by the dark sun made him far more dangerous than he had been.

Thorn reached out to the two Sossag shamans attending him and subsumed them, stripping their essences and their power, feeding on it. Their empty corpses collapsed to the earth. It wasn’t much power, but sufficient for him to see and send.

The coming darkness was not his friend. He needed light, where he could deploy his superior numbers and his massed archery.

And then he sent his powerful senses questing for Clackak. Found him deep in the earth under the stone fort by the water, with a hundred more of his kin.

Break off, he demanded.

The sun had begun to slide toward evening. There were long hours until night.

Thorn shook his massive head and torso. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The archers opened the gate and the knights rode in, their black hooded surcotes hiding the gleam of armour, their black horses like nightmare creatures in the full dark.

The Prior rode to the captain, who was sitting on a folding stool, scraping crap out of his sabatons to make the plates work properly. His whole body felt like a badly maintained machine.

‘With God’s help, you have conquered,’ the Prior said.

‘If you like,’ the captain said. ‘We have conquered, for the moment. But only by the skin of our teeth, as old wives say. And where are the wyverns? Where are the daemons? The Jacks?’ He gazed out into the last light. Killing off the last of the boglins had taken another hour, and now the enemy machines were throwing stones again.

The valets were stacking corpses outside the gate. The courtyard of the Bridge Castle stank of burned wood, dead boglin and ordure – horses killed in their traces, oxen butchered, men and boglins dead. The rotting meat smell rose like an evil sacrifice in the too-warm evening air, and midges were settling on the working men like an evil plague.

The Prior dismounted, his own sabatons ringing on the stones of the courtyard. ‘Where indeed? I haven’t seen so many evil creatures in many years.’

‘We saw them every day. Now they are gone,’ the Red Knight said. ‘Next wave, perhaps?’ he added. ‘That’s my guess. Wear us out with the boglins. Then break us with the bigger creatures.’ He tested his foot on the ground.

‘Then-’

‘It’s what I’d do. Bleed us with the easily replaced critters and save the others. He needs them to fight the king. This was all just to fix us in place.’

‘We can hold until the king comes,’ the Prior said. He was pulling his sodden arming cap off his head and paused to slap a mosquito.

‘Despite wyverns and daemons? I hope so,’ said the captain. He got to his feet. ‘Michael – tell the valets to serve beer and maple sugar.’ He smiled at the Prior. ‘It’s going to be a long night.’ He looked around. ‘Gelfred?’

‘My lord?’ Gelfred said.

‘I need you to do something insanely brave,’ he said.

Gelfred shrugged.

‘Can you get a message to the king?’ the captain asked.

‘In the dark? Through a host of enemies?’ Gelfred smiled. ‘I can with God’s help. And by my faith, messire, if you make a crack about God not caring, you can take your cursed message yourself.’

The captain got to his feet and gave the huntsman his hand. ‘I am rebuked, Gelfred.’

Gelfred shrugged. ‘Join me in prayer,’ he said.

‘Let’s not get carried away,’ the captain replied.

Gelfred laughed. ‘Why do I like you so much?’ he asked.

The captain shrugged. ‘The feeling is mutual.’

Half an hour later, Gelfred went straight into the river from the docks. He swam for fifteen minutes in the dark, and then went with the current for a while to rest. He heard, or felt, a wyvern in the dark air overhead, and he went under the water and stayed down as long as he could. When he surfaced, his heart was beating so fast that he had to head for shore.

‘There goes the bravest man in all my company,’ the Red Knight said to the Prior.

‘Because he faces his fears?’ the Prior asked. ‘He has God’s aid.’

The captain shook his head but said nothing. Only watched the darkness, and wished he was in the castle. He touched the soiled handkerchief pinned to his arming cote. It was no longer white, indeed, it held the blood and ichor of several foes, and it was cut almost in two.

Lissen Carak – Amicia

Amicia tried not to go to the gate. She tried not to look out the window. When a party of men-at-arms clattered in on exhausted horses, she forced herself to wait until the wounded came in.

Ser Tancred told her that the Red Knight was spending the night in the Bridge Castle.

When the last wounded were healed, she knelt in the chapel by the Abbess’s bier and prayed. She opened herself, as the nuns had taught her, to God. And she made God a hard, heartfelt promise.

Somewhere – Gelfred

He was tired and cold and very, very scared when he heard the sound of men’s voices on the other bank, and he struck out for them. He swam quietly, as well as he could.

They had boats.

After some time, he swam to the boats, and a sentry saw him.

‘Halt! Alarm! Man in the water!’ A crossbow loosed, and the bolt passed somewhere near him.

‘Friend!’ he spluttered. He was short of breath. ‘From the fortress!’

They were too alert, but they weren’t great marksmen. He swam in, shouting that he was a friend. Eventually, they stopped loosing their bolts at him, and strong arms pulled him into a big barge.

‘Take me to the king!’ he said.

A big man with a hillman’s accent pulled him over the side and put him on a bench. ‘Drink this, laddy,’ he said. ‘You’ve found the Queen, not the king.’