The Red Knight
Page 69
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.
More creatures charged at his knot of knights from either side, and he rode for the long trench he had ordered dug. A trench full of boglins.
Ready? he asked into the Aether, and looked back.
Bad Tom had already made his turn. At least a dozen knights were with him.
They all knew the score, and the plan. He’d lost count of the time. But it had to be close.
He rode right for the trench, wondering if – hoping that – he had put Thorn down. He had to hope. It had been a mighty blow.
He landed with a thunderclap of strained armour straps and saddlery, a clank and a rattle, his teeth rattled, his jaw hurt, and his helmet slammed into his forehead despite arming cap and padding, and he was blind for a critical moment—
—and Grendel shuddered and stumbled, and all around the two of them, his knights were jumping the trench and the boglins were turning – too slowly.
The last knight – Tom – cleared the trench. Landed, and passed Grendel, who was slowing under his master’s hand.
The boglins, fooled for a moment by the speed of their passage, came over the lip of the trench in a flood.
The captain just had time to think Now would be good.
The naphtha charge buried under the boards in the trench ignited. It didn’t explode. It went with a great whoosh as if God himself had willed it, and then there was only a wall of fire behind them.
The captain might have laughed in his triumph, but in that moment Grendel died under him. The horse had given his life to get his master over the trench with a dozen well-thrown javelins in him, and he crashed to the earth, and all the lights went out.
Lissen Carak – Harmodius
A third of the choir was dead.
Harmodius found the Abbess, and got a hand under her elbow, but she levered herself to her feet with dancer’s muscles and reached in the Aether –
He was wounded. The boy had hurt him.
Harmodius had Miram steady on her feet, and the chorus began again – shaky, trembling, but lifting once again. Amicia’s voice was clear above them all – for a long minute, she had carried the choir by herself.
The power was still there – the immense power of the well, wrapped in the working of the choir.
Harmodius spread his arms, and raised his staff, and began to cast.
Lissen Carak – Father Henry
Father Henry lay in a pool of his own blood, ears ringing.
The pain on his back and shoulders was incredible.
He shrieked.
But Christ had born pain. Pain was like the Enemy – it could be vanquished.
Father Henry rose to his knees.
By a miracle, his bowstring had not been cut by the glass that was all around him.
He nocked his arrow with shaking hands.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn felt the pain of his wounds, but not as much as he felt the mockery of the attack. The dark sun was taunting him – had ridden through his trap with deliberate mockery.
Hatred suffused him.
He rose to his feet. Tested his strength and grunted.
He was struck by a crossbow bolt, which didn’t even distract him. He spread his fingers, flame crackled and a dome of green power sprang over his head, another flashed into being on his left hand like a verdant buckler, and in his right hand he raised his staff.
He took a stride toward the trench, and his guards followed him.
Look, I am an epic hero, he thought with bitter irony. And I have to do everything myself.
He didn’t run. He took long strides to his boglins, surging out of the trench the men had cut like an obscene wound on the earth.
And then alchemical fire exploded in front of him. It wasn’t a manifestation of power, or he’d have sensed and quenched it. In fact, he tried. It took him wasted seconds to realise that his enemy had filled the ground under the trench with naphtha – they had poured poison into the very veins of earth.
Men must die.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
He never quite lost consciousness, although he hit the ground very hard. But he rose before the pain could fill him, and nothing was broken. His sword was lying under Grendel’s body, but he got a hand on the pommel and dragged it clear.
He looked around but the hoofbeats said that it had all worked better than he might have hoped. He hadn’t wanted Tom to stay and die. On the other hand, somehow he hadn’t ever thought he would lose Grendel.
He didn’t take up his sword because he expected to live, so much as because it seemed appropriate.
For the first time since the sortie began he had time to breathe. Beyond the confines of his faceplate it was a big, dark, violent night. Many of the boglins in the trench had made it out, and some had started to follow the knights before the naphtha charge went off, and of course he was an infernal beacon to creatures of the Wild. They were coming for him.
So was Thorn.
The captain couldn’t manage a smile inside his Raven’s beak. But he wasn’t shaking too badly, and he had control of his head.
His job now was to hold Thorn’s attention as long as ever he could.
Best do a proper job of it.
He reached out, and summoned the nearest creatures of the Wild to serve him, the way his witch of a mother had taught him to. He’d sworn never to do it. But this was his last stand. Now, for everything, the oaths of an angry boy were thrust aside . . .
Lissen Carak – Thorn
The dark sun’s challenge was contemptuous.
He was forcing the boglins to his will, on the other side of the trench.
Thorn shrieked with rage, as if he’d been struck. He threw caution to the wind, and leaped the trench of fire.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain was surrounded by boglins – a crush of them, and their acrid scent filled his helmet.
He had never been so close to the creatures, and despite his revulsion for them, he found it impossible not to notice things about them – how their soft shells seemed to be formed like armour, their human arms emerging from breastplates.
He waited for the coup de grâce . . . But he was holding them, and all their thoughts were his.
This was what he had been made to do. Created. Honed. Polished for it.
And he began to work on them.
He was in the room of his palace, and Prudentia was off her pedestal, standing by the iron-bound door. She had her stone arms locked against it, and it trembled on its hinges despite her efforts.
‘He is coming for you,’ Prudentia said.
‘Open the door,’ he said, trying to master his terror.
‘He wants you to face him in the Aetherial! He will eat your power, you arrogant child!’
Prudentia said. ‘Can’t you hear him?’
The captain could hear his bellows of victory, all through the Aether. ‘I could use some advice here,’ he said.
‘Don’t stand against the powers of the world until you are much, much more powerful,’ Prudentia said in a matter of fact tone. She shrugged. ‘But when brute force will not suffice, consider artifice. Recall, dear boy, that he will not know the limits of your power. He calls you the dark sun.’
Good advice. But he couldn’t think of anything he could do with it. He reached for Harmodius and opened the door.
Thorn was there.
He had crossed the trench of fire, and now he stood, smouldering, the acrid smoke of his wounds rising in wisps, and he was backlit by the fire in the trench.
The captain coughed.
Thorn towered over him and even from a horse length away, the captain could see that the sudden shock of lances had hurt him. Something dark and watery oozed form a deep pit in his breast.
You thought yourself my peer, you little thing.
The captain was fighting the wave of nausea that came with the fear. Whatever Thorn was, his coming brought terror, revulsion, a deep, sick feeling of oppression and violation. The captain struggled with it. For a long, long moment, all he saw was his mother, promising him—
You dared to oppose me. Do you know who I am?
Deep in the grip of the horror, the captain writhed. His conscious, rational mind registered that only the most unstable beings asked such questions.
And he had a lifetime’s experience of prete
nding courage when all he wanted to do was roll in a ball and weep. It was like arguing with his mother.
He cast – not an attack, but a subtle reinforcement of his armour.
He raised his sword. ‘Well,’ he said. His attempt at a drawl actually sounded somewhat hysterical. ‘Well,’ he said again, and his voice was better. He used to goad his mother this way. ‘I understand you used to be the King’s Magus.’
Thorn leaned down and one giant, hot hand slapped the captain to the ground. He saw the blow coming, his wrists answered his will, his sword swept up, and the blade shattered as it touched the sorcerer’s skeletal hand. The power of Thorn’s blow hurt the captain right through the steel harness he wore. Even through the power supporting it.
I am infinitely greater than the mere man who was the King’s Magus.
The captain couldn’t muster a laugh, or even a cackle. But he got back to his feet, as he had when his brothers beat him.
Thorn raised his hand.
One finger fell away.
The captain felt a wild, foolish joy. He tossed the shards of his sword away and drew his rondel dagger instead. ‘You are just one of the many Powers of the Wild, Thorn.’ He took a deep breath against the pain in his ribs. ‘Don’t get above yourself, or someone will eat you.’
Good shot, muttered Harmodius, inside his memory palace. Almost ready.
There was a pause, as if the earth stood still. The captain tried to see Amicia’s face – to think any worthy, noble, or merely human last thought that was not born of fear and would not leave him to die the slave of this creature.
But he couldn’t.
Hold on, said Harmodius.
You are challenging me?!