The Red Knight (38 page)

The wyvern reared over him.

A woman – the seamstress – appeared out of the darkness on his right, and threw a barrel at the monster – clipped the thing’s head, and it lost its balance, and one of
his engineers loosed a scorpion into it.

The power of the scorpion shaft was so great that it took the creature’s neck and punched it
through
the chapel doors so hard that where the creature’s head smashed into the
stone the lintel cracked. He heard its neck break. The shaft did a hundred leopards’ damage inside the chapel, the wyvern’s death struggles did a hundred more, and a river of gore
spoiled the sacred carpet on the marble floor.

The captain got to his feet and found that he’d kept his sword. His chamois gloves were ruined and his left hand was bleeding where he’d grabbed the blade too high, above the area
left dull for such purposes. He’d twisted his ankle, and he had to blink rapidly bring the world, spinning around him, back into focus.

The thing twitched, and he buried his point in the eye he could reach.

The courtyard fire glimmered on the belly of the second wyvern.

Forty archers threw shaft after shaft, so that the fortress seemed to have a new column of sparks rising into the fire-lit monster, and something happened – not suddenly, like the strike
of the siege shaft, but gradually the wyvern’s wings tore, holed, it lost lift and screamed in fear as the men below brought it down and it realised there was no escape from the deadly
upwards rain of steel. It slipped lower and lower, wings beating more frantically, turned sharply and suddenly one mighty wing failed. It plummeted to the hillside and crashing down with such
weight and speed that the captain felt the steps shake under his boots.

‘Sortie!’ the captain shouted. He meant to shout, but it came out as more of a croak . . . although it was understood, and his eight armoured knights had the gate open and were away
down the road, led by Sauce.

As the courtyard stilled it showed twenty dead people – dead or terribly maimed. A girl of fifteen or so screamed and screamed, and the woman who had thrown the barrel bent and gathered
her into her arms.

A child tried to drag himself by his arms, because he had no legs.

Nuns were suddenly pouring from their dormitory – ten, twenty, fifty women, surrounding the injured and the dead in a storm of grey wool and clean linen, spreading out to access the scale
of the dead, injured and traumatised. The captain slumped against a wall, his right leg a torrent of pain, and wished he could just slide into unconsciousness.

She screamed again and again. His eyes flickered to her but only after a long look did he see that most of the left side of her upper torso was
gone.
He couldn’t believe she was
alive, or screaming. The woman who had saved his life was covered in her blood – shiny with it, trying to help her – and there was
nothing
to be done.

He wished the screaming woman would just die.

A pair of nuns wrapped her tight in a sheet, round and round, and the sheet turned red as fast as they could wrap another layer, and still she screamed, becoming one voice amongst a chorus of
anguish that filled the night.

He staggered up and stumbled to Michael, who lay crumpled against the chapel.

The boy was alive.

He looked around for Amicia. She had been standing right there – there, where the woman screamed. But she was gone. He shouted for a sister – for anyone – and four responded.
They ran their hands carefully over him before lifting him away from Michael.

Men were shouting now. Even over the screams, their shouts were triumphant, but he ignored them and dragged himself over to Tom.

Tom was sitting against the stable. ‘Backplate took it,’ he said with a grin. ‘Christ, I thought I was done.’ He pointed at the sword. ‘Nice trick, that.’

‘Half-sword versus wyvern,’ the captain said. ‘A standard move. All the best masters teach it.’ He stripped away the ruin of his left glove and wrapped it tight around
his cut. ‘I just need more practice.’

Tom chuckled. ‘Sauce just killed t’other, I’ll wager,’ he said, pointing at the cheering archers.

Sure enough, the next moments brought the mounted sortie back through the main gate, dragging the head of the second wyvern. Brought to earth by fifty arrows, it had died on their lance tips
without injuring a single human.

Tom nodded. ‘That was well done, Captain.’

The captain shrugged. ‘We were ready, we laid our trap, you burned their camp and surprised them, and they
still
killed our people.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t
ready enough. I was caught lollygagging.’

Tom shrugged back. ‘They killed a lot of people.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But not many of
our
people.’

‘You’re a hard bastard, Tom Mac Lachlan.’

Bad Tom shrugged, obviously taking it as a compliment, then something caught his eye in the chapel. He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something bad.

‘What?’ asked the captain.

‘Ever notice how they’re always smaller when they’re dead?’ Tom asked. ‘It’s just the fear that makes ’em seem so big.’

The captain nodded. He was looking at the wyvern too, and he had to admit that it
was
smaller than it had seemed in the fight. And it looked different. Paler. A mass of wounds and cuts
and barbs.

Almost pitiful.

Tom smiled and started to get to his feet, and the Abbess was there.

He expected anger or recriminations from her, but she merely extended a hand and took his.

‘Let us heal your people,’ she said.

The captain nodded, still pressing his glove tight around his hand. There was a lot of blood. She got an odd look on her face, just before he fainted in her arms.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Deep in the marches of the next night, the enemy attacked the castle of Albinkirk.

Ser Alcaeus had passed beyond fatigue. He was in a world lived one heartbeat at a time, and events passed him in a series of illuminated flashes, as if lightning was playing on all of them.

There were some assaults on the walls of the castle, but unlike the low stone curtain walls of the town the castle walls were too high and too well maintained for the flood of Wild creatures to
climb. The handful of beasts who made it to the top were killed.

But every attack cost him a little more.

One flash was a fight with an irk – a tall, thin, beautiful creature with a hooked nose like a raptor’s beak and chain armour as fine as fish scales that turned his sword again and
again. And when, by dint of desperate strength, he knocked it to the stones, and its helmet spun away, the irk’s eyes begged for mercy. Like a man’s.

Alcaeus would remember that. Even as his dagger terminated it he registered that it, too, had humanity.

. . . and what followed was worse.

Because something came.

It was huge and foreboding, out in the horrifying fire-lit ruins of the town. It strode forward with a hideous shambling gait, and it was as tall as the city wall or taller.

It was
alive.

And now it raised its staff – the size of a mounted knight’s heavy lance, or bigger – and a line of white-green fire struck the castle wall. The stone deflected in it a wash of
white-green fire for as long as the terrified men on the wall might have counted to ten.

And then there was a rending
crack
and the wall breached, about ten paces to the left of the gate. The whole wall moved. Men fell – chunks of flint fell to crush the creatures
below.

Then the monster raised its arms and seemed to call the stars down from the heavens, and as they began to plummet, Alcaeus fought not to fall on his face and hide.

The stars screamed down from the clear sky, falling to earth with an eerie, unearthly wail, and struck. One struck out in the fields, killing a wave of boglins. One struck in the centre of the
town, and the cloud of fire reached into the heavens. The whole castle moved, and a cloud of dust reached like a fist into the heavans.

The third struck the castle wall mere feet from the great crack, and an enormous piece of masonry and stone fell outward with a crash.

Alcaeus ran for the breach, and found himself with another armoured man – Cartwright, he thought, or the Galle, Benois. The breach was narrow – two men wide.

They filled it with their bodies.

And the enemy came for them.

At some point, Benois fell. He was stunned, and Alcaeus tried to cover him, but the enemy reached a hundred hands and talons for his feet, sank claws into his flesh and dragged him to the edge
of the wall, inch by inch. He screamed, unmanned with horror, and tried to rise. Boglin weapons cut him in the soft places not covered by armour, peeled his plate away.

They were eating him alive.

Alcaeus struck and struck again, powered by desperate fear, and he straddled the screaming man’s body and cut and cut.

It wasn’t enough. And then Benois grabbed at
his
ankles.

He ripped himself clear, and leaped back into the uncertain footing of the breach, and Benois was gone, a pile of hellspawn feeding on him, his armour torn open –

Alcaeus made himself breathe.

Suddenly Ser John was there with his mace. The five foot weapon moved like a goodwife’s broom on a new spring morn, and he shattered first the boglins around them, and then Benois’
skull.

There was a flash of light to the east – a distant
whump
of displaced air. A column of flame leaped up perhaps a league away. Perhaps two.

Then another – even greater.

The creatures of the Wild faltered, looked over their shoulders, and the fury of their assault rapidly abated.

Albinkirk – Thorn

In an instant, Thorn knew that something had gone wrong.

He’d drained himself by calling even the smallest stones from the heavens. It was a showy, inaccurate and inefficient working, but it had spectacular results when it worked. And he loved
to cast it, the way a strong man loves to show his strength.

The daemons were impressed, and that alone was worth the fatigue. Better, the town was utterly destroyed and it had been far, far easier than even he had hoped.

I have grown so strong,
he thought. What he had planned as a mere diversion had become a triumph. She would hear of it and cower in fear.

Perhaps taking the Rock is worth doing after all. Perhaps I will refashion myself as a warlord.

But the twin pillars of fire behind him came from his camp – the camp where his greatest allies, the irks and the boglins, stored their food and their belongings and their slaves and their
loot. And it was afire.

He had left his most trusted troops had been left to guard it.

He turned with his army and strode for it.

Without his willing it, the bulk of his Wild creatures turned and followed him. They had no discipline, and they went like a shoal of fish—

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Alcaeus watched them go, slumped against the wall. The Gallish man-at-arms looked like a butchered animal, his bones stripped. The boglins had feasted on him.

The sun was rising, and the lower town was an abattoir of horrors. In the main square irks had taken the time to carefully flay a man and hang him on a cross. He was still alive.

James the crossbowman stepped into the breach. He took a long look, raised his weapon and shot the crucified man. It was a good shot, given the range. The man’s screaming, skinless head
dropped, and he was silent.

Ser John was slumped against the other wall. James helped the old man get his visor up. He winked.

He
winked.

In that moment the old knight became a hero, in Ser Alcaeus’s estimation.

Alcaeus had to smile back, despite so many things. The loss of Benois hurt. The feel of the man’s hands on his ankles—

‘I need you to ride to the king,’ Ser John said. ‘Right now, while whatever miracle this respite may be lasts.’

Alcaeus must have agreed with him, because an hour later he was on his best horse, unarmoured, and galloping south. It was a desperate gamble.

He was too tired to care.

Ser John Wishart

South of Albinkirk – Master Random

‘G
ates of Albinkirk are broken, ser,’ Guilbert reported. He shrugged. ‘There’s fires burning in the town and it looks
like a fucking fist, beg your pardon, punched the cathedral. King’s banner still flies over the castle but none answered my hail.’

John Judson, worshipful draper, and St Paul Silver, a goldsmith, drew their horses closer to Random where he sat with Old Bob, Guilbert’s friend and the last man he’d hired, a bald,
ruddy skinned drunkard whose voice and carriage suggested that the spurs on his heels were actually his.