The Red Knight stiffened his spine, stood as tall as he could, and said, ‘My mother made me to be the greatest Power of the Wild,’ He managed another breath. And delivered his sentence, like a sword cut. He said, ‘You are just some parvenu merchant’s son trying to ape the manners of his betters.’
He ordered the boglins to Kill Thorn and the crowd of boglins turned their weapons on their former master.
Stung – even though none of them could penetrate his glowing green armour – he clenched one gnarled fist.
Boglins died.
The sorcerer’s rage was automatic rage, unthinking rage at being challenged, at insult piled on insult. Thorn bellowed. You are nothing! Faster than the captain could parry, strike – react at all – Thorn’s fist slammed into him and knocked him to the ground again, except this time he felt bones break. Collarbone? Ribs, for sure.
Suddenly he was in his palace, and Prudentia stood with a handsome young man in black velvet embroidered with stars. So great was his fear and his confusion that he took long heartbeats to see that the stranger was Harmodius.
But he couldn’t hold the palace in his mind. He was too afraid, and even as Harmodius opened his mouth he was on his back and the pain was remarkable. His armour had probably saved him from death. But not from pain.
That was a laugh.
He used his stomach muscles to roll over, to get to his feet.
There was Thorn.
Why are you not dead? Thorn asked.
‘Good armour,’ the Red Knight said.
Aah! I can see your power. I will take it for my own. It is wasted on you. Who are you? You are no different from me.
‘I made different choices,’ the captain answered. He had trouble breathing but, just there, he started to be proud. He was holding his own.
Thorn threw a working; bright as a summer day, fast as a levin bolt.
The Red Knight parried it to the ground with a flash of silver white.
I see, now. You were made. You were constructed. Bred. Ahh. Fascinating. You are not an ugly mockery after all, dark sun. You are a clever hybrid.
‘Cursed by God. Hated by all right thinking men.’ The captain was gaining strength from sheer despair. With nothing left, he was going to beat his fear, the way he’d beaten it a thousand other times.
The time of men is over. Can you not see it? Men have failed. The Wild is going to crush men, and before ten thousand suns set, the young fawn and the bear cub will ask their mothers who wrought the stone roads, and the faerie will weep for their lost playthings. Even now, men are but a pale shadow of what they once were.
But then, you are scarcely a man. Why do you cleave to them?
Breathing was difficult, but he was achieving calm. Calm meant mastery of the Aethereal.
Hope gave rise only to more fear. But fear was the ocean in which he swam, and he reached through the fear – he used the fear.
He was in the palace of memory. He reached out to Amicia, who took his hand and Harmodius’, and the Abbess’, and Miram’s. And Mag’s. And that of every surviving nun singing in the chapel.
He mastered his thoughts.
Cast his very favourite phantasm.
‘Holy Saint Barbara, Despoina Athena, Herakleitus,’ he said, pointing at each statue as he spoke the name, and the great room began to spin.
Prudentia reached down from the plinth and put a hand on his shoulder. She smiled at him. It was a sad smile. And she reached out and took his hand free hand. ‘Goodbye, my lovely boy. I had so many things to say. O Philae pais—’
He was flooded with power – power like pain, when it rises beyond any possible point of pleasure – like victory. Like defeat, like hopelessness and hope. And he stayed there, for an eternity, balanced between all and nothing.
Like love when love is too much to bear.
What did she mean, goodbye?
He was back in the acrid night air.
He wondered if the calm that suffused him was artificial.
Thorn leaned over him, blocking the stars.
You are ours. Not theirs.
The captain laughed, a laugh he treasured. ‘There is no us, Thorn. In the Wild, there is only the law of the forest and the rule of the strongest. And if I join you, I will subsume you to my needs.’
Just to make his point, the captain projected, as his mother had taught him, the imperative. Kneel.
More than two thirds of the surviving boglins feel immediately to their knees.
He was deeply gratified to see Thorn twitch so that his singed branches shook as if a strong wind had passed through a forest.
And even as he exchanged words with the Enemy, buying precious heartbeats, an agony of power rose inside him – the greatest power he had ever felt, as if love personified drove his phantasm. Between two heartbeats, the captain knew what she had done.
Prudentia had not opened the door, which would have invited Thorn to take him from inside.
She had ended herself, and as a phantasmal construct, she had poured her own power and the power of her making into his work. It explained the love.
Oh, the love.
I make fire, he said in the purest High Archaic.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn felt the swelling of power – such a sweet power, with a taste he had forgotten. He lost a thousandth of a heartbeat trying to identify it. Only then did he reach for his shield of adamantine will.
You don’t remember that taste, my sweet? That taste is love, and once, you were capable of it.
The lady was in his head – in his place of power – naked, exposed, and rendering him the same.
Confused – a storm of rage and hate – he struck at her.
In striking, he did not raise his shield.
Lissen Carak – The Abbess
The Abbess took her stand in the ruined chapel, in near darkness, her hair unbound, her feet bare in the shattered glass. Her nuns stood in close array behind her, and their voices rose in sacred music.
Harmodius stood beside her, his staff in his hand, riding the song of power into the darkness, into the labyrinthine mind of the young man on the field below, facing a monster—
She, too, faced a monster. A variety of monsters, many of them of her own making. That she had loved this thing which now sought the ruin of all she loved—
She hit him with her frustration and her love, her years of loss. She poured her love of her God into his wounds, and she added her contempt – that he had abandoned her to turn traitor to humanity. That he had taken her gift and made this depravity with it.
She hurt him.
And he struck back. But he was hampered, and still – still – he hesitated to hurt her.
She hit him again. She’d had years to expunge her hesitations.
Lissen Carak – Mag the Seamstress
Mag, standing in the former street of the Lower Town, nonetheless felt the old Abbess struggle with the Enemy. It was terrifying, but she felt the Abbess’s power and she raised her own hands in sympathy. Unknowing, untrained, the seamstress nonetheless poured her carefully hoarded power into the Abbess.
The Abbess smiled in triumph.
Father Henry rose from behind the altar, and drew his arrow to his mouth, and loosed.
And from the darkness, a cry of rage.
The Abbess screamed like a soul in torment, and was knocked flat on her face – dead before her head hit the stone floor.
Blood welled from her eyes and she lay still, a vicious black arrow in her back.
Fire – a pure fire of crystalline blue – Prudentia’s favourite colour – enveloped Thorn’s mortal shell. The heat of it was stupendous.
And from the fire, smoke – a rich, bright smoke, luminescent and alive, more than white, more than smoke, and the captain could feel Harmodius sending the smoke through him, through his place of power and down his arm and into the air about him. A subtle working – insidious, clever, a fog of a million mirrors.
She had hurt him – hurt him so much. And the
dark sun had hurt him, and now he was screaming in agony. A moment’s remorse – and the cost had been cataclysmic.
But he was saved – she was dead, her light extinguished, and not by him. Some other power had struck her down and he was innocent of that crime, and he turned – strong enough to finish this pretender.
But he writhed inwardly in the knowledge that she was dead.
It had to be done.
It should not have been done.
And then – too late! He felt his apprentice’s working, the complex, layered phantasm that was that boy’s trademark – a coloured smoke, so quiet, so harmless, so complex—
He lunged back up the line of Harmodius’ casting, as he had attacked along the line of his lover’s.
Harmodius felt his former master’s power coming.
His counter-strike was so tiny, so very subtle, that it cost him almost no power. It relied on his enemy’s hubris and his sense of his own power.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn killed the apprentice effortlessly, although he couldn’t, for some reason, take the man’s not inconsiderable power for his own. Typical of the man – to squander his power rather than let his master have it. His former apprentice fell back amidst a choir of nuns. If he’d had time, Thorn might have exterminated the nest, but the dark sun was still pounding him with his strange blue fire.
If Thorn had been a man he might have laughed. Or cried.
Instead, his consciousness raced back to the plain below, where his shell faced being consumed by fire.
Another slow heartbeat while he poured power into the problem and extinguished the blue fire.
He was surprised – and concerned – to see how badly hurt he was. Again – yet again, he would appear weak.
He had no time to take stock. Even now he was so badly hurt that any of the lesser powers could take him.
He raised his staff and was gone.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
Run, boy! cried Harmodius.
The captain tried to run.
He crawled through the prostrate boglins. He forced himself to his feet, and he ran, a broken, stumbling run while waiting for the levin bolt in the back that would end him. He stood in the palace, and the plinth was empty, and Prudentia’s statue lay cold and still on the ground.
Damn.
Time to mourn later, if he lived.
He leapt onto the plinth, and called his names.
Honorius! Hermes! Demosthenes!
Desperation, luck, and a strong will.
Goodbye, Prudentia! You deserved better than I ever gave you!
He ran to the door, and pulled it open.
The flicker of a casting – Thorn reached out, trying to find its source. The dark sun was still on the battlefield. Still casting?
I am badly hurt, he conceded. He summoned his guards to withdraw.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
—powered his phantasm and slammed the door shut again.
His body rose in a leap, sailed through the heated air, and fell to earth again – a hand’s breadth clear of the wall of the trench.
The captain turned away from the fire, and saw a wedge of knights, their mirror-bright harnesses like liquid fire in the smoky darkness. Off to the north, boglins hovered, uncertain.
A daemon raised his axes in challenge.
But the knights did not pause to fight. Even as the captain ran, strong arms grabbed him, an arm under each shoulder, and he was swept away as cleanly as if he’d been snatched by a great bird.
Chapter Fourteen
Father Hugh
Valley of the Cohocton – Peter
Peter didn’t recover so much as grow used to what was gone, like a man who has lost a hand, or an arm. And it took days, not hours.
Ota Qwan scarcely paid him any heed at all – indeed, now that he was paramount war leader, Ota Qwan was loud and definite and far, far too important to waste time on one new warrior. Peter walked all the way back from the Ford Fight, as the Sossag came to call it, to their camp in a haze of fatigue and a darkness that he’d never known, even as a slave.
Three nights in a row, he sat by a dead fire, staring at the cold coals and considering ending his own life.
And then he would hear Ota Qwan – instructing, ordering, leading, demanding.
And that would give him the strength to go on.
On the fourth night on the trail back, Skahas Gaho came and sat with him, and offered him some rabbit, and he ate of it, and then together the two of them drank some of the dead men’s mead – honey sweet. The Sossag warrior was quickly drunk, and he sang songs, and Peter sang his own people’s songs and in the morning his head hurt, and he was alive.
It was just as well, because they were moving easily along trails as soon as the sun was up, and suddenly, every warrior fell flat on his face, so that – just for a moment – Peter was the only man standing. Then he threw himself flat. He’d been so deep in his pain that he had missed the signal.
Scouts wormed their way into the bush and came back to Ota Qwan with reports, and the rumour swept the column that there was a great army on the road. Far too large and well-prepared for the Sossag people to challenge alone.
They had won the Ford Fight. But they had lost many warriors. Too many warriors. Too much experience, too many skills.
So they rose as they had fallen to the ground, almost as if a single spirit inhabited many bodies – and they loped off to the north, and they climbed well into the foothills of the Adnacrags, avoiding the enemy by many miles. It was only after three days of gruelling travel over the most difficult terrain that Peter had ever known when they climbed over a low ridge, and saw their camps spread across the woods and green fields of the Lissen where it ran into the Cohocton. From the top of the long ridge, Peter could see thousands of points of light – like the stars in the sky, but every one of them was a fire, and around that fire stood a dozen men, or boglins, or other creatures – such creatures as served Thorn and yet loved fire. And more creatures slept cold in the woods, or slept in streams, or mud.
Peter let Skahas Gaho pass him on the trail and he stood in the deepening twilight at the top of the ridge, and looked down. Almost at his feet rose the great fortress of the lady, which the Sossag called the Rock, and its towers looked like broken teeth, and its arrow slits glowed with fire like a Jack-o’-lantern.
And away to the east, at the edge of his vision, he could see another host of fires burning. The army around which the Sossag had slipped. The King of Alba.
The armies were gathered, and in the last light, Peter watched a tall column of ravens and vultures riding the drafts over the Valley of the Cohocton.
Waiting.
He sat and watched the play of light – massive pulses of power, flashing back and forth like a summer storm.
Lissen Carak – Thurkan
Thurkan watched the dark sun slip away. He had seen the Enemy captain face down Thorn, pounding him with blue fire until the Wild sorcerer fled. And unlike Thorn, the dark sun’s bodyguard came and rescued him, their ranks closing tight around him.
The daemon had learned much about the skills of the knights.
He turned to his sister. ‘Thorn is beaten.’
She spat. ‘Thorn is not beaten, any more than you were last night. Thorn said he would kill the great machine-that-throws-rocks and he has done so. Stop your foolish preening.’
Thurkan shivered with suppressed need to fight.
‘I will challenge Thorn,’ Thurkan said.
‘You will not!’ Mogan replied.
Lissen Carak – Michael
The Siege of Lissen Carak – Day Thirteen
Last night the enemy came with all his might to storm the fortress. The King’s Magus and the Abbess and the Red Knight duelled with him and drove him back, but the Abbess died defending her place, shot in the back by a foul traitor.
Michael sat with his head propped on one hand, looking at the hastily scrawled words. He sippe
d the wine next to him and tried not to go to sleep over the journal.
The captain was in the hospital. His breastplate had a dent in it the size of a man’s fist. They’d lost five men-at-arms.
The archers were openly saying that it was time to ask for terms.
He turned on the wooden stool he was using. Kaitlin Lanthorn lay, fully dressed, on his bedroll. She’d come in after the sortie returned, kissed him, and stayed by his side while he saw to little things – like having the armourer get the dent out of the captain’s breatplate.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said.
She lay, open eyed. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. She sat up. ‘Oh, I might be wrong, but Amicia says I am. She’d know.’ Kaitlin shrugged. ‘I’m pregnant, and the sorcerer is going to kill us all, anyway. So what’s it matter if I spend the night with you?’
Michael tried to think like the captain. To balance it all out. But he couldn’t, so he put the quill down, and took her face in his hands. ‘I love you,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Cause I love you, too, and we’re going to have a baby.’
‘If we live through the next few days.’ He lay down next to her.
She turned to him. ‘You’ll protect me, I think.’
Michael stared into the dark.
Mag stood with her daughter Sukey and a dozen other nuns and local women, laying out the dead.
This time there was no feeling of triumph. The cost was high – the Abbess was dead, and there was a line of figures wrapped in white linen to show the losses of her community and the losses of the captain’s company, intermingled.
And the Red Knight was gone, carried into the hospital.
The Abbess had been killed by an arrow. And no one seemed to be looking into her murder.
Mary Lanthorn smoothed a sheet over Ser Tomas Durren. ‘He was bonny,’ she said.
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