The Red Knight (89 page)

Out in the darkness, where the Lower Town had been, a line of lights sprang up. It was a small casting – hardly a ripple on a sea full of heavy waves.

But when the blue lights sprang up, the captain gave Grendel his head. They marked a sure way through the rubble of the Lower Town.

He found that the lights heartened him. He wouldn’t fail because of a detail. Now, it was a fight.

He grinned inside the raven-face of his visor, and reached for

Prudentia. He was in the room, and he didn’t want anything to do with the door. He merely touched his tutor, and she smiled.

‘Find me Harmodius,’ he said. ‘Open the link.’

She frowned. ‘But I have things I must say to you—’

He grinned. ‘Later,’ he said.

He drew power – just a trickle – stored from the sun and placed it in a ring given him by the Abbess. It had come with power; now he used it in the Aether to ignite his
darksight.

Back in reality, and his sense of the the night altered. The outline of the trap was clear now, and he smiled like a wolf when the prey begins to tire.

Thorn had sent creatures into the ditch beyond the remnants of the Lower Town wall – the ditch his own men had dug to communicate with the Bridge Castle. It was now full of boglins, which
suited him just fine.

Off to the south, at the entry to the defended path which the archers had taken and retaken every day of the siege, waited a company of daemons. At least forty of them, enough to exterminate his
company of knights.

He grinned.
I didn’t go that way,
he thought, smugly. The creatures of the Wild were not as clever as men at hiding themselves in the Aether. It occurred to him as he cantered down
the steep road that they didn’t think of hiding in what – to them – was their natural element. Or something.

And out on the plain, moving steadily forward towards the town, was Thorn.

The great figure towered over his allies. Even at this distance he stood head and shoulders above the trolls who surrounded him, at least twenty feet tall with antlers like a great hart’s
spreading away on either side of his stone-slab face. He towered, but he was not particularly fearsome from five hundred paces. He was a beacon in darksight, though, and his power wound away in a
hundred threads – to the skies, to the creatures around him, to the woods behind him—

Two-dozen trolls guarded the horned figure, reflecting his power.

Even as the Red Knight watched the horned man he raised his staff.

Thorn raised his staff. He could see the dark sun. For a moment he was tempted to lay his great working on the mysterious, twisted creature, but a plan is, after all, a plan.
He reached into the slug on his left shoulder, and green fire washed up his right arm, pulsed once on his staff – and it was like joy; like the ultimate release of love.

The light was like that of the deep woods on a perfect summer day. It was not a pinpoint, a line, a bolt, a ball. It was everywhere.

The Abbess was in her choir, and she felt the assault on the wards – felt them stumble. She raised her voice with those of her sisters. She could hear them, feel them
in the Aethereal, feel Harmodius and Amicia.

The light was everywhere. It’s green radiance was seductive, the siren call of summer to the young, to run away from work and play, instead. The Abbess remembered summer – summer
days by the river, her body wet from a swim, her horse cropping grass . . .

Far, far away, the sigils that defended her house were—

Harmodius read the working, and its immense subtlety, and just as he was about to throw his counter, he saw the trap.

Thorn wanted him to swat the working aside.

The summer light was an insidious working that struck directly at the sigils from all sides and drained their strength into the Wild itself. The craftsmanship was magnificent.

The power involved was majestic.

And any counter – any reinforcement – would drain away with the sigils themselves, into the hungry maw that awaited.

If I survive this, I’m going to learn that working,
Harmodius thought.

He took his narrow sword of bright blue power, and severed the Abbess’s connection to the fortress sigils.

The fortress sigils fell. Thorn gave a grunt of satisfaction, tempered by knowing that Harmodius had done the only thing he could have to avoid being sucked down with them.

The faerie folk danced around Thorn’s head, in the sudden accession of power – this ancient power, the very life-blood of wards that had stood for centuries. It was bleeding into the
ground at his feet, and they bathed in it, their winged forms like tiny angels flitting in a rainbow of light.

The final collapse was like the opening of a window. There – and then nothing.

He didn’t pause. His staff swept up, and he released his second wor king – a simple hammer.

One Leg and Three Legs and the trebuchet and the top third of the great North Tower vanished in a flash of light. The explosion that followed destroyed every window in the
fortress – the stained glass of the saints became a hurricane of coloured shrapnel.

Father Henry, head down behind the altar below the great window, had his back flayed bloody. His robes were all but ripped from his body although his head and arms were covered. He screamed.

The captain reached into his
palace and drew power through the ring.

He had the charred cloth in his gauntlet, where he couldn’t lose it in the dark, and he funnelled the power through it.

Four feet beneath the duck boards at the base of his trench, beneath the boglin horde, ten fuses sprang alight.

Above him, in the fortress, a single massive pulse of power ripped through the night air – the concatenation almost cost him his seat on Grendel.

But the fuses were lit, and now—

Now it was a hundred long heartbeats to Armageddon.

He had reached the base of the slope and now he followed the path between the first of the blue lights across the rubble to the town’s back gate. Grendel couldn’t move quickly here,
and this was the weakest part of the whole plan. If he could see Thorn then Thorn would see him. Indeed, the whole
point
was that Thorn should see him. And yet even now, the daemons were
starting to shift. They must already know that their trap was in the wrong place. And the huge shapes around the enemy were new.

Thorn had already struck the trebuchet, and destroyed it.

We’re too late.

He was halfway across the town, Grendel was moving at a trot, and one bad step on rubble and he would be down. The risk was insane.

Fifty heartbeats.

He turned in the saddle and looked back. Tom was right behind him, and the sound of the column of knights filled the darkness robbed of other sound by the force of the explosion.

He rose in his stirrups as Grendel stepped over a downed roof beam – the blue lights seemed to ripple – and then he was over the outer wall and in the field. Bad Tom passed the wall
right behind him, and they reined in together.

He turned Grendel and pointed his muzzle at the horned figure, now at eye level, just two hundred paces away across the plain. Behind him, his sortie shook out into a wedge as they got free of
the tumble of rocks and roof tiles that had been a town. In the dark.

The captain thought,
Damn, we’re good.

He raised his right arm, lance and all. He used a little power to light the tip of his lancehead – not just light it, but make it burn like a star.

He swept his lance down.

Grendel gave a little start, and went from a stand to a gallop in three strides, as if they were in a tiltyard.

Thirty heartbeats.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched the dark sun come at him, and he waited with a curious mixture of elation and loathing for the misshapen thing. It was like a man, but it was not like a man. He
was some odd fusion of man and Wild. He might have pitied it, but he hated it, as well – because its fusion was different from his.

It was coming, just as his secret friend said it would. But not by the path it had said it would take. That meant the secret friend was compromised.

And that meant . . .

The dark sun held a power that shouted itself to every Wild creature on the battlefield.

This was his first clear look at the thing, and Thorn felt a tingle – not of fear, precisely. But in that creature was something that bellowed a challenge to him. Like a vast predator
roaring defiance across the swamps of the Wild. And every Wild creature felt that call. Some flinched from it. Some were attracted to it.

That was the Way of the Wild.

. . . and so the dark sun must be a creature of the Wild, and that meant—

It was too fast. Thorn’s discovery came very, very late. He had allowed himself to ponder the thing’s creation for long
thuds
of his great, slow heart, and in that time the
man had crossed the ruins of the Lower Town like a dhag – so fast that even as his hidden ambush of daemons sprang from their concealment and raced to save him they were already too late to
strike a blow. The wedge of knights was past them.

Something was slowing him!

Bitch
he roared in his head.
She was working her will on him
—

He shook himself free of her enchantment, even as—

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

He put his spurs to Grendel – just a pressure of the pricks to the sides, so that the great horse knew not to stint. This was the great effort.

Thorn was standing facing the fortress, and his bodyguard of misshapen horrors were shoulder to shoulder holding massive bill hooks and spiked clubs, wearing armour of wood and leather. They
glowed, not with the healthy summer green of Thorn’s workings but with a sickly putrescent colour.

The captain had hoped to save his lance for Thorn with a tiltyard trick, so he gave Grendel the sign to put its head down. He flicked his lance down, and the troll followed the lance tip,
cutting up—

Grendel struck the troll as it parried the lance, so that the spike on his great horse’s head drove into the monster’s stone-armoured chest. It was six inches long, sharp as a needle
on its tip and as broad as a man’s hand at the base, and the horse weighed more than the troll by several times. The horn broke the stone plate in two and punched through its hide, to shatter
the bones of its chest. Grendel crushed the troll flat, and planted a great steel-shod hoof precisely on its hips, the horse’s charge virtually unimpeded by the collision.

With the practise of a hundred jousts, the captain let his lance come down again. Thorn was ten paces beyond his bodyguard, just turning to ward himself.

He leaned forward, adding the power of his body and hips to the weight of the horse. By luck, or a last second intuition, his lance struck home within a hand’s span of where the ballista
bolt had struck Thorn hours before and he rocked his enemy back. Thorn tottered, reached out with his staff—

Fell backwards and crashed to earth.

The captain struggled after the impact – it felt much like slamming a lance into a castle, but he kept his seat and swept on, leaving his lance, and the next two men in the wedge –
Bad Tom and Ser Tancred – each put their lances into the thing after him; or so he had to hope, because he was riding past, and the rest of the bodyguard were on him. The trolls were as tall
as he was, and one blow from one of their weapons would crush his armour and kill him. But he rode as if inspired – he leaned, Grendel danced, and no blow fell fully on him.

Grendel put his spiked head into the next one. The unicorn’s horn of twisted steel bit deep again, and again the captain almost lost his seat in the shock – the great horse went from
a gallop to a stand, screamed his anger and struck the thing with his hooves – one, two, each landing with greater force than ten belted knights could muster, yet precise as a boxer.

The Wild monster’s sickly green glow was extinguished between the first and second blow to its great stone head, and the horse reared in triumph.

The captain drew his great sword.

Another troll screamed from his left, rose to its full height, and was struck in the chest by a lance that knocked it flat.

Bad Tom roared, ‘Eat me, you son of a bitch!’ at his side and was gone into the green-tinged darkness. Tom was a legend for temper, for ill manners, for lechery and crime. But to see
him on a fire-lit battlefield was to see war brought to earth in a single avatar, and as his knights swept past him, the captain watched as Tom’s lance, unshivered, swept through the
trolls.

‘Lachlan for Aa!’ he roared.

When his lance broke in his third victim, he ripped his five-foot blade from its scabbard and the blade rose and fell, catching the fires of the plain on its burnished blade at the top of every
cut so that it seemed to be a living line of fire – rose and fell with the smooth and ruthless precision of a farmer scything grain at the turn of autumn.

By himself, Bad Tom cut a hole through the company of monsters.

The captain nudged Grendel back into motion. On his sword side, a smooth stone head rose out of the darkness and he swung down with all his might, rising in the stirrups to get the most out of
his cut – the sword rebounded from the stone, but the head cracked and dropped away, it’s roar changed to the caw of a giant crow as it fell.

And then he was through the enemy line. His sword was wet and green with acrid blood, and behind him, the trolls who survived the charge were already gathering to cut him off from the fortress.
The crisp spring air was suddenly full of arrows, announced only by their whickering flight – almost unnoticed against the ringing of his ears – but then they began to strike him. And
Grendel.

Whang!

Ting-whang WHANG
.

There were irks behind the trolls, and they were loosing into the melee – unconcerned about their own, or perhaps Thorn was too fully armoured to fear an irk arrow.