The Red Knight ttsc-1

by Miles Cameron

  Tom nodded. ‘So we’re the bait, then?’

  The captain looked grim. ‘You are a little too quick, my friend.’

  Tom nodded. ‘When there’s death in the air, I can see through a brick wall.’

  Near Lissen Carak – Thorn

  Thorn had everything he needed to proceed. He’d built his two most powerful phantasms in advance, storing them carefully in living things he’d designed just to store such things – pale limpets that clung like naked slugs to his mossy stone carapace.

  He didn’t bother to curse the wyverns who had failed him. It had been, at best, a long shot.

  But now it was down to him, and he didn’t want to do it.

  He didn’t want to weaken himself by taking on the fortress directly.

  He didn’t want to expose himself to direct assaults from his apprentice and the dark sun. However puny, they were not unskilled or incapable.

  He didn’t want to fight with her. Although his reason told him that when he killed her, he would be much stronger for it. His link to her was a link to his past life. A weakness.

  He didn’t want to do this at all. Because win or lose, he’d engaged forces that forced his hand. Made him grow in power. In visibility.

  Damn them all, the useless daemons most of all. It was their fortress, and they were all busy watching him to see if they could bring him down, instead of helping.

  And Thurkan had failed to take the dark sun.

  Thorn was not without doubt. In fact, he was full of doubt, and again, for the hundredth time since the siege began, he considered taking his great staff and walking off into the Wild.

  But without him the Wild might fail. And that would be catastrophic. At best it would be fatal for his long term plans.

  He extended his hands, and power flowed smoothly. A cloud of faeries began to gather, so great was the power concentrated in a few yards of air.

  He tried to imagine what it would be like when she was dead. He would miss her. She had once been the standard by which he measured himself. But that self was largely gone, and it was time he did without her.

  And the apprentice. It is a weakness, to miss the company of men.

  The Wild had to win. Men were like lice, undermining the health of the Wild.

  It was time to act, and he could imagine all of his actions, a fugue of them extending back to his earliest conscious thoughts, culminating here.

  He surfaced from the tide of his thoughts and looked around, unhampered by the darkness. He looked at Exrech. ‘Your people must storm the trench,’ he said. ‘And hold it. By holding it, we separate the fortress from the Bridge Castle.’

  ‘And then we dig,’ Exrech said.

  Thorn bowed assent. To Thurkan he said, ‘The dark sun will come for me.’

  ‘We will lay in ambush for him,’ the daemon promised.

  Thorn looked at the trolls – mighty creatures which he suspected had been created in the distant past by magi. As bodyguards. He had now acquired two dozen of them, as was the way when one became a power. He was like a beacon, and so they came. He no longer saw them as horrible. Instead, he saw them as beautiful, the way a craftsman views his perfect chisel, the one that fits his hand as if made for it.

  Thorn tapped his great staff on the ground. ‘Go,’ he told his captains.

  Lissen Carak – The Abbess

  The Abbess felt the spells he cast. She had lain down to rest, but it was happening sooner that she expected and she sat up, her mind reaching for the threads of power that bound her to her stone.

  She felt him, in the darkness out there, planning the ruin of her home, and she narrowed her eyes and reached down the link they would always share.

  Traitor! she said. She flung the word with a woman’s contempt.

  Sophia! He cried into the Aether.

  She hurled her defiance at him and she felt her venom strike home, and in the moment of his startlement she read him, and saw that he had a trap prepared – that she had a traitor in her midst, as she had long suspected.

  Then she was running, her bare feet slapping the stone floor, her unbound hair trailing behind her like the tail of a comet, running for the courtyard.

  She felt him respond, and she had her defences up. She felt his come up – slowly, but when raised, as strong as a wall of iron. She couldn’t even sense him through them, merely that he must be behind that veil. She prayed as she ran – prayed for his ruin.

  The young captain was standing by his destrier in the courtyard, with twenty knights behind him.

  ‘You cannot go out there!’ she screamed. ‘He is waiting for you! It is a trap!’

  The captain gave her an odd smile, and waved to Michael, who had his bascinet. ‘He’s coming already, is he?’ he said to her. He turned to his knights. ‘Mount!’ he shouted.

  She grabbed his bridle, and his great war horse – quick as lightning – bit at her hand, and only his instant reaction saved her. The Red Knight slapped his hand at Grendel’s neck, and the war horse took one step, and tossed his head, as if to say ‘could have, if I really wanted.’

  ‘He is coming now-’

  His squire placed his helmet on his head, and pulled the chain of his aventail down over his cote armour. The captain flexed his shoulders and arms – left, right. All through the courtyard, squires held up gauntlets – slid them onto their master’s hands, and then reached for the great lances, as tall as small trees and as thick, tipped in long heads of steel.

  His face appeared from under the brow of the helmet. He was smiling. ‘Yes,’ the captain said. ‘I feel him. Through you.’ He laughed. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I told him what I think of him,’ she said. ‘A woman scorned – for power?’ She threw back her head and laughed. It sounded mad.

  ‘I imagine,’ the captain said, even as Michael moved the helmet back and forth, seating it securely on his brow, ‘that must have been a shrewd blow.’

  She shook her head. ‘His amour propre will shed it soon enough. But I saw into him. He has a traitor in the fortress.’

  ‘I know,’ said the captain. ‘I told you,’ he gave a nasty smile, ‘and that traitor has been giving our foe a somewhat incorrect version of events for some time now. It is now or never. He can lay all the traps he likes. Sometimes, it all comes down to speed, and audacity. He is cautious. He is sure.’ The captain seemed to glow with the power he’d prepared. ‘He wants this fight,’ the captain said. ‘So do I. One of us is wrong. We can only try our best, so guard yourself, my lady.’

  The main gate slid open.

  ‘Follow me!’ ordered the captain.

  She stood out of the way, and watched him ride out. The hooves rattled with finality, and the knights began to move. Knights reached out to her – Francis Atcourt accepted her blessing and she reached up to pray for Robert Lyliard, who accepted her benison with a salute. Tomas Durrem bowed to her from the saddle and swept by.

  The Red Knight paused in the gateway.

  Above her, on the balcony of the hospital, she saw Amicia. She saw him touch the favour on his shoulder, saw her bow her head.

  Grendel reared a little, and plunged through the gate, and he was gone.

  She turned to Bent, who was standing by her. ‘Everyone is to go to the basements and lie down,’ she said. ‘Everyone!’

  She ran into the courtyard, shouting orders.

  The alarm bell was ringing, and the archers were pouring out of their barracks, to their battle positions. All of them were in armour. They knew the score.

  The Abbess stopped in the courtyard, and looked around once – the last doors were slamming closed. She nodded in satisfaction, wished she had time to hunt for Father Henry, and ran for the chapel.

  Lissen Carak – Father Henry

  Father Henry saw the Abbess talk to her boy – his revulsion showed raw on his face. They were all creatures of Satan – the Abbess, the mercenary, the sisters. He was surrounded with witches and man-witches. It was like hell.

  He was
done with inaction. He had the power to destroy them. He had all the tools a normal man had to use against evil.

  He knew he would not survive it – but all his life, he had endured pain and mistreatment for what he knew was right. His only regret was that he could not act directly against the mercenary. That man was like Satan incarnate.

  Father Henry went into the chapel, where a dozen sisters were already gathered – not real sisters, he knew it now, but a coven of witches. All gathered to sing their damnable mockery of praise to God.

  He made himself smile at Miram. She was too busy to pay him any heed. Just for a moment, he considered striking with his knife – right here. Taking Miram and a dozen witches-

  He hid his eyes lest they read his mind, and slipped past them to the altar. He reached behind it. Seized the long staff of heavy wood, and his hand unerringly found the one arrow he needed.

  Black as her heart.

  It was a most remarkable arrow. Behind the head and the first three fingers of the shaft, all white bone, the rest of the arrow was of Witch Bane.

  Lissen Carak, The Lower Town – The Red Knight

  In a plan dependent on preparation and planning and Hermetic mastery, it was ironic that the first part required twenty brave men and one middle-aged woman to risk their lives to sweep the road clean. And he didn’t even know if they’d succeeded.

  But Thorn couldn’t possibly expect him to come on horseback, through the Lower Town. In fact, the captain had seen to it that Thorn would expect him on the covered footpath instead.

  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.