Authors: Miles Cameron
‘This is more help than I ever expected,’ he said. ‘Again.’
‘From which you may – again – assume that things are worse than you imagined,’ said the guide.
There was a long silence – made more epochal by the totality of the fog and the quiet around them.
He’s taking us straight across the
aethereal
, isn’t he?
asked Harmodius.
Blessed Virgin, think of the power required.
He’s saving us about forty miles of brutal mountains. We’ll have to pass them on the way out. Or be trapped against them, unable to manoeuvre, and cut to pieces.
Well, aren’t you the optimist?
When they stumbled out of the snowy fog, they were in a broad, flat marsh, frozen solid, at the foot of a ridge that seemed to fill the sky as the sun rose somewhere far, far to the east behind it. A castle stood at the top of the ridge, and well off to the north sat the town of Ermione. The sea was on the other side of the ridge; the Red Knight could smell it.
The Red Knight gathered them all together. ‘Now we rescue the Emperor,’ he said.
They all nodded.
‘Where are we?’ asked Ser Michael.
‘Eastern Thrake,’ said the Captain. ‘That’s the Imperial castle of Ermione. Last night we moved very fast indeed.’
Count Zac scratched his beard and strove to appear his usual phlegmatic self. ‘Where are the rest of my lads?’ he asked.
‘I very strongly hope that they are storming and holding the high pass for us, and choosing a camp for the main army,’ said the Red Knight. ‘If not, this will turn out to be a very unfortunate trip.’
Men began to ask questions, and the Captain held up his arms for silence. ‘It’s not your business if I cut a deal with Satan,’ he said coldly. ‘It’s your business to storm the castle on those heights. I am told that the enemy has a force within a day’s march. There will be no siege but we’ll only get one shot at this.’ He smiled in the growing grey light. ‘You’ll find if you examine your recent training that you have all practised this.’
Men looked around and realised how many times in the last sixteen weeks they had stormed mock castles.
‘How do we open the gate?’ Count Zac said. ‘Sorcery?’
The Red Knight shrugged. ‘Better,’ he said. ‘Alchemy.’
Ser Michael and Gavin had, as they discovered, practised the whole thing.
Bent and Wilful Murder waited a long time in the growing light at the edge of day, arrows on their bows, watching the men in the towers. It was so cold that the very hairs in your nose seemed to freeze – so cold that sentries kept moving smartly or froze to death. But tired, cold men tend to move in patterns.
Ser Michael opened his mouth, and the Red Knight shook his head and pursed his lips.
The two master archers raised their bows in perfect unison, and all the other archers with them raised theirs, and two dozen shafts flew in the crystalline air. The spent shafts rattled against stone where they missed, but few of them missed.
The two sentries died.
Ser Gavin and Ser Michael picked up the thing like a bronze bell that had materialised at the last halt and ran it to the postern gate of the castle. At their heels came all the men-at-arms, while Count Zac and his men and all the archers remounted and waited at the edge of the woods.
Ser Michael’s hands shook and the backs of his arms and edges of his biceps tingled with what felt like weakness.
The snow crunched under his sabatons, and he made himself run faster.
The two strongest men lifted the bronze bell, mouth to the great iron-shod oak postern door, and seated it against the door.
There was a blur of power, and the bronze somehow mated to the iron on the gate. Ser Gavin let go of the thing as if it was poisonous. Michael backpedalled, almost fell as his heel caught on a piece of frozen dung in a horseshoe print, caught himself with a wrenching motion of his hips that made noise.
‘Run!’ hissed the Red Knight. ‘Here – flat to the wall!’
Twenty armoured men-at-arms held themselves flat to the wooden palisade, just around the corner from the postern gate. The Red Knight’s mouth moved.
There was a sound like all hell breaking loose, and the stench of hell, too.
In what seemed like silence, the Red Knight waved his sword and ran into the foul-smelling smoke, and they all followed him in.
Ser Michael’s responsibility was the main gate. He led six men-at-arms across the frozen yard and fell flat on his face when the ice under foot betrayed him. Harald Derkensun got him to his feet and the other men passed him. There were men sleeping in the gatehouse, but no guard. They killed the sleeping men in their beds and Derkensun, who knew his way around a gatehouse, tripped the gate mechanism and the chains rattled as the portcullis went up and the two big gates opened on counterweights—
Ser Milus followed the Captain’s steel-clad back into the nearest door in the main hall – which proved to be nothing but a covered passage dividing the Great Hall from a barracks area.
‘Ignore them!’ the Captain said softly and ran through a curtained door into the Great Hall. There were a dozen men sprawled on log benches and two men were awake. One shouted.
The Captain ran through the hall, and none of the Thrakians seemed to see him. So they turned on Milus and Gavin, and the fighting began. Milus set his feet and swung his axe and the Thrakians backed away, and Ser Giorgios ran right past the melee and followed the Captain with two more Scholae at his heels – as they’d been taught to.
Milus’s pole-axe caught an unwary Thrakian who didn’t know how long his reach was, cleanly severing almost a third of his head as well as the arm he’d raised to defend himself in the last heartbeat. He had enough head left to scream in stupefied horror as the top of his head fell in his lap.
The surprise was over.
Ser Giorgios followed the Captain up the steps of the tower, which twisted like a corkscrew. It was all he could do to breathe, and he was wearing less armour than the Albans.
They reached the top to find four men cramming the landing, using swords to break down the door of the room at the top of the tower.
The Red Knight put one down before the fight started, by slamming his long red sword into the man’s unarmoured ankle from three steps down – a long thrust and a wrist cut. It was almost the end of the fight – the man staggered, screamed without comprehending what had happened to him – and fell down the stairs. His death on their swords almost threw the Scholae back, and gave his mates time to prepare.
The Red Knight grunted in exasperation. He leaped up the last three steps, absorbing two heavy blows – one to his helmet and one to his right pauldron – and his basilard clenched in his left fist gutted the nearest man.
Ser Giorgios was so close on his heels that he used the dying man as a shield, shouldered him into the third man on the landing and then stabbed through the dying man – repeatedly – until his adversary gurgled.
The Scholae finished the last man standing when he fell to his knees begging for mercy.
The Red Knight put his gauntleted hand against the door. ‘He’s in there,’ he said. ‘Majesty!’ he called. ‘Open your door! It is your rescue!’
The men pouring out of the barracks had begun to form a line in the icy yard – unarmoured, but with a workmanlike collection of short swords and heavy falchions, sabres and horse bows. An officer shouted, and they raised their shields and gave a Thrakian war cry.
Count Zac led the mounted men through the now-open gates. Arrows flew like snow flurries and the yard, already muddy, turned red-brown. The garrison had nowhere to go, no armour, and no hope of fighting twenty mounted men.
The rest of the armoured men were pouring into the Great Hall to help Milus and Ser Gavin, who had the only serious fighting. Both of them took wounds, outnumbered, fighting alone for as long as it took the sun to rise one finger above the horizon.
Ser Michael had one more duty to perform – a self-imposed one. He collected his team and ran through the bloody yard – the ice was gone – to the kitchens under the eastern tower. The yard door was unlatched, a woman screamed and they were in.
‘Lie down!’ he shouted. ‘And you will not be killed.’
The Red Knight hadn’t ordered him to save the women and children, but Michael was newly married, and he had his own notions about war.
Before the last screams were done, the Red Knight came into the yard with Giorgios and two more Scholae carrying the Emperor. Every man in the yard fell to his knees – even the archers, with a little help.
The Emperor smiled. ‘Oh, my braves,’ he said. ‘Please spare the rebels.’
They got him into a horse litter rigged up on the spot.
Milus found the Red Knight with Ser Michael. ‘Do we spare them?’ he asked.
The Red Knight grinned. ‘Ser knight, you have a flap of skin the size of a flapjack hanging off your thigh.’ He knelt in the bloody snow and put pressure on a wound Ser Milus hadn’t even seen. ‘But yes – if the Emperor wants to be clement, I’m not going to countermand him.’
‘You said to kill them all,’ Ser Michael said accusingly.
‘I said that when we were desperate,’ the Red Knight said, as if talking to a fool. ‘Now we’re merely in a hurry.’ He glared at Wilful Murder, who was trying to pass unnoticed into the kitchen, and nodded to Michael. ‘Saving the kitchen staff? That was well done,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even think of it,’ he admitted.
Bent and two more archers were holding Ser Milus, and Long Paw was wrapping his thigh with clean white linen. ‘Missed your prick,’ the archer said comfortingly.
‘If we bind them, they’ll be dead in an hour from the cold,’ Ser Milus said.
‘That’s a chance I’m willing to take,’ the Red Knight said. ‘Sorry. I know you are all gentle, perfect knights on errantry, but I’d rather not see these gentlemen again today. And when Andronicus’s relief force reaches here, every one of our prisoners will turn into a blood-mad Thrakian.’
‘Emperor said not to kill them,’ Ser Michael said. ‘If we tie them, the women will just untie them.’ He set his hips. ‘I won’t let you kill the women.’
The Red Knight rolled his eyes. ‘I wasn’t proposing to kill them, my young idealist. I was hoping you’d come up with some noble, but efficient, way of protecting us – and them from your excellent friends, like Wilful Murder here, who merely want a bit of rape.’ He shrugged. ‘Very well. Lock them all in the basement of the eastern tower, and let the fates see our mercy.’ He leaned over. ‘Michael – we did it!’
Michael shook his head. ‘Of course we did,’ he said.
The Red Knight sighed. ‘Sometimes I think you all take me for granted,’ he said and went off to wash the blood off his hands.
Father Arnaud laughed so hard that he almost fell down.
Demetrius’s relief force arrived at the seaside castle of Ermione six hours later.
His scout officer knew they were too late as soon as he saw the place on the horizon, with no smoke rising from the chimneys, but he kept his mouth shut. Demetrius was in a murderous mood, and looking for scapegoats and victims after his latest savage row with his father, ten leagues behind them with the main army.
They rode into the silent yard and Dariusz busied himself climbing the tower – just in case the guards had followed orders and held the room against all comers. Or killed the Emperor, as they’d been ordered to.
All four guards were dead on the landing – purses empty, weapons gone. The door to the Emperor’s room stood open. Dariusz walked around the room where the Emperor had been a prisoner, looking at it with the eyes of a man who analysed things. He came down via the Great Hall, and then walked in – and out – of the gate tower.
By then, Demetrius’s Easterners were killing the rescued prisoners, one by one. Demetrius sat his milk-white horse, a beautiful man on a magnificent horse in the midst of a courtyard awash in mud and blood. The men who had been the garrison fell on their knees – some for the second time – in the bloody slush and begged for mercy. This time they found none, and the Easterners coldly shot them down.
Dariusz waited until the worst of it was over, and then picked his way across the yard. ‘Sixty men,’ he said. ‘They took it by coup de main, at dawn. I don’t think that they lost a man in the process.’
Demetrius spat. ‘Fucking fools,’ he said. ‘If we kill them all, we make a lesson for the future.’ He spat in the bloody snow. ‘We
have
to pursue them. We’ll lose everything if the Emperor escapes.’
Dariusz looked at Aeskepiles, who was unmoved by the massacre. ‘My lord, we have equal numbers and they are hours ahead. If they choose to set an ambush, we’ll fall into it. Or we will pursue them too slowly because of the possibility of ambush. Either way, there is no point.’ He didn’t add that if he’d been the enemy commander, there would be another force – a blocking force – somewhere close by ordered to destroy any pursuit. Or that Lord Andronicus had fielded his entire army in late February, and the enemy’s force was as yet undetected.
Dariusz felt something like admiration for the Red Knight. They clearly read the same books.
Demetrius growled.
There were screams. Women’s screams.
Dariusz put his heels to his mount so that its head touched the head of Demetrius’s horse. To get the lord’s attention. ‘Spare the women,’ he said.
Demetrius laughed. ‘Oh, they won’t die,’ he said.
Aeskepiles drew a deep breath, snapped his fingers and Demetrius’s horse tossed him over his head into the muck of the yard.
Dariusz found his hand locked behind his back.
Aeskepiles backed his horse. ‘I won’t be party to this,’ he said. ‘Spare the women and children, or by dark gods, I will kill both of you right here.’
Dariusz wondered why the magister assumed that he was in favour of the rape and murder, but he was helpless and unlike many other helpless men, when Dariusz was helpless he relaxed.
Demetrius bounced to his feet. ‘You might have just asked, man-witch. Instead, you humiliated me.’ He smiled. ‘We’ll see. For now, they may live, their virtue unsullied.’ He rubbed his hip. ‘The virtue of some army women, saved by a warlock’s honour,’ he said. ‘You’re fools.’ He turned to Dariusz. ‘I hear what you say, scout. I worry—’