The Red Knight (23 page)

‘Yes,’ the captain admitted. ‘I do, from time to time.’

Gelfred shook his head. He prayed aloud, and they rode on until a drizzle began and the light began to fade.

‘We’ll have to stand watches,’ the captain said. ‘We are very vulnerable.’ He could barely think. While Gelfred curried the poor beast, he gathered firewood and
started a fire. He did everything wrong. He gathered bigger wood and had no axe to cut it; then he gathered kindling and broke it into ever smaller and better sorted piles. He knelt in his shallow
fire-pit and used his flint and steel, shaving sparks onto charred cloth until he had an ember.

Then he realised that he hadn’t built a nest of tow and bark to catch the ember.

He had to start again.

We’re a pair of fools.

He could
feel
that the woods were full of enemies. Or allies. It was the curse of his youth.

What exactly have I stumbled into?
he asked himself.

He made a little bird’s nest of dry tow and birchbark shreds, and made sparks again, his right hand holding the steel and moving precisely to strike the flint in his left hand. He got a
spark, lit the char—

Dropped it into the tow and bark—

And blew.

The fire caught.

He dropped twigs on the blaze until it was steady, and then built a cabin of dry wood, carefully split with his hunting knife. He was very proud of his fire when he’d finished, and he
thought that if the Wild took him here, at least he’d started the damned fire first.

Gelfred came and warmed his hands. Then he wound his crossbow. ‘Sleep, Captain,’ he said. ‘You first.’

The captain wanted to talk – he wanted to think, but his body was making its own demands.

But before he could go to sleep he heard Gelfred move, and he was out of his blankets with his sword in his fist.

Gelfred’s eyes were big in the firelight. ‘I just wanted to move the head,’ he said. ‘It – it’s hard to have it there. And the horse hates it.’

The captain helped to move the head. He stood there, in the dark, freezing cold.

There was something very close. Something powerful.

Perhaps building the fire had been a mistake, like coming out into the woods with just one other man.

Prudentia? Pru?

Dear boy.

Pru, can I pull the Cloak over this little camp? Or will I just make a disturbance in casting?

Cast quietly, as I have taught you.

He touched her marble hand, chose his wards and gardes, and opened the great iron door to his palace. Outside was a green darkness – thicker and greener than he liked.

But he took carefully from the green, and closed the door.

He staggered with the effort.

Suddenly he couldn’t stay upright. He fell to his knees by the daemon’s head.

The darkness was thick.

The head still had something of its aura of fear about it. He knelt by it – knees wet in the damp, cold leaves, and the cold helped to steady him.

‘M’lord?’ Gelfred asked, and he was obviously terrified. ‘M’lord!’

The captain worked on breathing for a moment.

‘What?’ he whispered.

‘The stars went out,’ Gelfred said.

‘I cast a little – concealment over us,’ the captain said. He shook his head. ‘Perhaps I mis-cast.’

Gelfred made a noise.

‘Let’s get away from this thing,’ the captain said, and he got to his feet, and together the two men stumbled over tree roots to their tiny fire.

The horse was showing the whites of its eyes.

‘I have to sleep,’ he said.

Gelfred made a motion in the dark. The captain took it for acceptance.

He slept from the moment his head went down, despite the fear, to the moment Gelfred woke him with a hand on his shoulder.

He heard the hooves.

Or talons.

Whatever it was, he couldn’t see the thing making the noise. Or anything else.

The fire was out and the night was too dark to see anything. But something very large was moving – just an arm’s length away. Maybe two.

Gelfred was right there, and the captain put a hand on his shoulder to steady them both.

Skerunch.

Snap.

Tick.

And then it was past them, moving down the hill to the road.

After an aeon, Gelfred said ‘It didn’t see us or smell us.’

The captain said
Thanks, Pru.

‘My turn to watch,’ he said.

Gelfred was snoring in ten minutes, secure in his lord in a way the captain could not be in himself.

The captain stared into the darkness, and it became his friend more than his foe. He watched, and as he watched, he felt his heartbeat settle, felt his pains fade. He made an excursion into his
palace of memory – reviewing sword cuts, castings, wards, lines of poetry.

Beyond the bubble of his will the night passed slowly. But it did pass.

Eventually, the faintest light coloured the eastern sky, and he woke Gelfred as gently as he could. He lowered his ward when they were both awake and armed, but there was nothing waiting for
them, and they found the horse, and the head.

Just around the clearing where they’d slept, a pair of deep tracks – cloven, with talons and a dew claw – pierced the forest leaf mold.

Gelfred started. The captain watched as he followed the tracks—

‘Are we borrowing trouble, Gelfred?’ he asked, following a few paces behind.

Gelfred looked back and pointed at the ground in front of him. When the captain joined him, he saw multiple tracks – perhaps three sets, or even four.

‘What you fought yesterday. Four sets of prints. Here’s one moving more slowly. Here’s two moving fast – here they pause. Sniffing.’ He shrugged.
‘That’s what I see.’

Curiosity – the kind that gets cats killed – pulled the two of them forward. In ten more steps, there were eight or ten sets of tracks, and then, in another ten steps—

‘Sweet Son of Man and all the angels!’ Gelfred said.

The captain shook his head. ‘Amen,’ he added. ‘Amen.’

They stood on a bank over a gully wide enough for a pair of wagons and a little deeper than the height of a man on a horse. It ran from west to east. The base was clear of undergrowth, like a
– a road.

The whole gully was a mass of churned earth and tracks.

‘It’s an army!’ Gelfred said.

‘Let’s move,’ said the captain. He turned and ran back to their clearing and settled his gear on the poor horse.

Then they were moving.

For a while, every shadow held a daemon – until they passed it. The captain didn’t feel recovered; he was cold, hungry, and afraid even to make tea. The horse was lame from the cold
and from being insufficiently cared for on a cold, damp spring night, and they rode her anyway.

It turned out they didn’t have to go very far, which probably saved her life. The camp’s sentries must have been alert, because a mile from the bridge, they were met by Jehannes
leading six lances in full armour.

Jehannes’ eyes were still bloodshot, but his voice was steady.

‘What in the name of Satan were you doing?’ Jehannes demanded.

‘Scouting,’ the captain admitted. He managed to shrug, as if it was a matter of little moment. He was very proud of that shrug.

Jehannes looked at him with the look that fathers save for children they intend to punish later – and then he caught sight of the head being dragged in the mud. He rode back to look at it.
Bent over it.

His wide and troubled eyes told the captain that he had been right.

Jehannes turned his horse with a brutal jerk of the reins.

‘I’ll alert the camp. Tom, give the captain your horse. M’lord, we need to inform the Abbess.’ Jehannes’ tone had changed. It wasn’t respectful, merely
professional. This was now a professional matter.

The captain shook his head. ‘Give me Wilful’s horse. Tom, stay at my back.’

Wilful Murder dismounted with his usual ill grace and muttered something about how he was always the one who got screwed.

The captain ignored him, got a leg over the archer’s roncey with a minimum of effort, and set off at a fast trot, Wilful holding onto another man’s stirrup leather and running full
out, and then they stretched to a racing gallop across the last furlongs, with Wilful seeming to run alongside in ten league boots.

The guard had already turned out at the camp gate – a dozen archers and three men-at-arms, all in their kit and ready to fight. For the first time since he’d set his spear under his
arm the day before, the captain’s heart rose a fraction.

The head dragged in the dirt behind Gelfred’s horse left a wake of rumour and staring.

The captain pulled up before his pavilion and dropped from the saddle. He considered bathing, considered washing the clots of ordure from his hair. But he wasn’t positive he had the
time.

He settled for a drink of water.

Jehannes, who had paused to speak to the Officer of the Watch, rode up, tall and deadly on his war horse.

Two archers – Long Sam and No Head, were ramming the head down on a stake.

The captain nodded at them. ‘Outside the main gate,’ he said. ‘Where every cottager can see it.’

Jehannes looked at it for too long.

‘Double the guard, put a quarter of the men-at-arms into harness round the clock as a quarter-guard, and draft a plan to clear the villages around the fortress,’ the captain said. He
was having trouble with words – he couldn’t remember being so tired. ‘The woods are full –
full
of the Wild. They have amassed an army out there. We could be attacked
any moment.’ He seized an open inkwell on his camp table and scrawled a long note. He signed it in big capitals – good, educated writing.

The Red Knight, Captain

‘Get two archers provisioned and mounted as fast as you can – a pair of good horses apiece, and on the road. Send them to the king, at Harndon.’

‘Good Chryste,’ said Jehannes.

‘We’ll talk when I’ve seen the Abbess,’ the captain called, and Toby brought up his second riding horse, Mercy. He mounted, collected Bad Tom with a glance, and rode up
the steep slope to the fortress.

The gate was open.

That was about to change.

He threw himself from Mercy and tossed the reins to Tom, who dismounted with a great deal less haste. The captain ran up the steps to the hall and pounded on the door. The priest was watching
from his chapel door, as he always watched.

An elderly sister opened it and bowed.

‘I need to see the lady Abbess as soon as may be,’ the captain said.

The nun flinched, hid her eyes and closed the door.

He was tempted to pound on it with his fists again, but chose not to.

‘You and Gelfred killed that thing?’ Bad Tom asked. He sounded jealous.

The captain shook his head. ‘Later,’ he said.

Bad Tom shrugged. ‘Must have been something to see,’ he said wistfully.

‘You’re – listen, not now, eh? Tom?’ The captain caught himself watching the windows in the dormitory.

‘I’d ha’ gone wi’ you, Captain,’ Tom said. ‘All I’m saying. Think of me next time.’

‘Christ on the cross, Tom,’ the captain swore. It was his first blasphemous oath in a long time, so naturally, he uttered it just as the frightened, elderly nun opened the heavy
door.

Her look suggested she had heard a few oaths in her day. She inclined her head slightly to indicate that he should follow her so he climbed the steps and crossed the hall in her wake, to the
doorway he’d never passed through but from whence wine had been served, and stools brought.

She led him down a corridor lined with doors and up a tightly winding stair with a central pillar of richly carved stone, to an elegant blue door. She knocked, opened the door and bowed.

The captain passed her, returning her bow. He wasn’t too tired for courtesy, it appeared. His mind seemed to be coming back to him and he found that he was sorry to have blasphemed in the
hearing of the nun.

It was like the feeling returning to an arm he’d slept on – the gradual retreat of numbness, the pins and needles of returning awareness, except that it was emotion returning, not
his senses.

The Abbess was sitting on a low chair with an embroidery frame. Her west window caught the mid-day rays of the spring sun. Her scene showed a hart surrounded by dogs, a spear already in his
breast. Bright silk-floss blood flowed down his flank.

‘I saw you come in. You lost your horse,’ she said. ‘You stink of phantasm.’

‘You are in great peril,’ he replied. ‘I know how that sounds. But I mean it, just the same. This is not a matter of a few isolated creatures. I believe that some force of the
Wild seeks to take this fortress and the river crossing. If they cannot take it by stealth and subterfuge, they will come by direct assault. And the attack could come at any hour. They have massed,
in large numbers, in your woodlands.’

She considered him carefully. ‘I assume this isn’t a dramatic way of increasing your fee?’ she asked. Her smile was subtle, betraying fear and humour in the same look.
‘No?’ she asked, with a catch in her voice.

‘My huntsman and I followed the spore – the Hermetical spore – of the daemon that murdered Hawisia,’ he said.

She waved him to a stool, and he found a cup of wine sitting on the side table. He drank it – the moment the cup touched his lips, he found that he was tilting it back, feeling the acid
fire rush down his gullet. He put the cup back down, a little too hard, and the horn made a click on the wood that caused the Abbess to turn.

‘It is bad?’ she asked.

‘We found a man’s corpse first. He was dressed as a soldier – as a
Jack.
’ He took a deep breath. ‘Do you remember the Jacks, Abbess?’

Her eyes wandered far from him, off into another time. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘My lover died fighting them,’ she said. ‘Ah, there’s a reason for penance. My
lover. Lovers.’ She smiled. ‘My old secrets have no value here. I know the Jacks. The secret servants of the Enemy. The old king exterminated them.’ She raised her eyes to his.
‘You found one. Or at least you showed me a leaf.’