The women were frozen, and he had a moment to consider the looks on their faces – panic, determination, and a sullen kind of anger that it should come to this when they had already lost so much.
Yes, he understood those looks of loss. Of failure.
‘Arm yourselves!’ he called to them.
The bigger archer opened the iron-bound oak door and Sym ran down the steps into the darkness.
Gawin pushed past the novice.
The first cellar was gloomy but well-enough lit. A stack of spears leaned against one of the company’s great wagons. Gawin caught one up as he went by.
There was another door, ahead, which was just opening.
Sym was too late to stop it, so he spitted the creature that opened it – ripped his sword out of the boglin’s armoured thorax and kicked it so hard that it folded backwards—
Gawin caught a glimpse of steps going down and a seething knot of the creatures filling the stairwell.
‘Hold the door!’ Gawin called. He thrust with his spear, and felt the steel head crunch through the soft hide around the boglin’s neck and head – just like digging a knife into a lobster. Something popped, it fell off his spear, and he pushed.
Sym cut, and cut again, and again, desperation and terror lending wings to his sword arm.
The stairwell was crawling with them.
He killed another one.
And another one.
And the novice turned, raised her hands, and spoke a single word in Archaic, and golden-green light filled the cellar.
Lissen Carak – Desiderata
Desiderata could scarcely breathe for the immanence of power. And the pain, which was returning. But she could feel the enemy – the centre of the power of the Wild, its emerald intensity shot full of black – gathering force. She could feel it as surely as she could feel the power of the sun on her arms.
‘What’s happening here?’ Ser Alan asked. He bent to carefully place her litter on the doorsill of the chapel.
The woman was older – dressed plainly, like a servant or a farmwife. She had a spear in her hands. ‘If it please you, Ser Knight – there’s boglins got into the cellars, and all the garrison is trying to hold the doors.’
‘Good Christ!’ Ser Alan cursed. The other knights of the escort drew their swords.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn watched as the king and his knights obligingly fought their way into the centre of his range.
Sometimes plans did work out.
His trolls – the magnificent dhags – were cutting the knights to pieces. They were also dying, but he had more. Or he could obtain more. The Wild was fecund beyond human imagining.
He let the king fight on – on and on – until his reckless charge broke through the ring of bone and hide around the mercenaries. Around the dark sun.
The king and the dark sun together.
He took his gathered power, summoning every tendril that he could muster – the might that had been Thurkan, the souls of the fair folk, the convoluted essence of the Sossag shamans—
He savoured it, for a moment.
There was nothing to interrupt him, no distractions as he placed his power almost lovingly on a spot just between his two foes.
The edifice of his memory was no palace but a twisted yarn of ropes and webs, and he braided them in his mind with the mastery of an aeon.
Laid his hand to the completed cord, and cast.
Harmodius felt it, saw it, and cast his counter: a mirror. Even his counter had tails and vestiges – traps within traps. As he had learned.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain felt the moment the great phantasms were loosed as a single instant. It was as if fire or lightning had flashed through every inch of the air between the two casters.
He was Harmodius. As, for a moment, he had been Amicia.
There was no time.
He had so little left – but he gave it, straight into Harmodius’s arms. He reached and took from Amicia, who was herself fighting for her life – from Miram and her choir. And from the very sunlight around him.
And it wasn’t going to be enough.
The captain reached out to the great iron-bound door, and threw it open, and green light flooded into him.
He threw it through Harmodius to strengthen the counter work.
There was a thunderclap – a gout of white-green fire that shot into the heavens. A ripple in the curtain of reality so that, just for a moment, the veil of the world was wrenched aside. The captain saw black night pierced with white stars, and the dawn of chaos, and the rising plume of power that was the coming of the world.
Lissen Carak – Desiderata
Desiderata felt Harmodius’s power rise to meet the emerald giant – and she saw the deep subtlety of his mind in his casting.
But the emerald’s might was twenty times greater than that of the court Magus, and the tide of green rolled over him – dissipated, mirrored, channelled – but overpowering, like a rising river facing a plain full of channels and damns, yet eventually overcoming all of them to spill in one unstoppable flood—
But vast quantities of the emerald power hung in the air, cast aside by Harmodius’s counter spell. Or part of it.
The ripple of power passed the king, who watched, horrified, as Ser Alan was burned at his side, his armour straps charring, his face a livid red as he screamed – and man and horse collapsed. Beyond him, Harmodius frowned – his hand withered and blew away to ash and then, in a few hearttbeats, the Magus was subsumed. He turned to ash, crumpled and was borne away on the wind.
Thorn was struck by the mirror in the very moment of completion of his phantasm, and some of his own carefully hoarded power struck right back down the channel of his casting, burning him.
He screamed. Flinched. But far across the battlefield, Harmodius’s essence flickered and went out.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain struck, the sword descending more from the force of gravity than from any power of his shoulders.
In the Aether he had Harmodius by the hand.
Take me, boy.
In one moment, the captain had to understand, and to act. He opened his way into his palace, seized the spirit of the dead Magus with one Aethereal hand and cast his own phantasm with the other. The air outside was heavy with discarded power, green and ripe for plucking, and he took it, aided by the meticulous ordering of last night’s foe, aided by the thaumaturgical knowledge of his tutor – of Amicia’s Wild casting—
And there he was. Standing on the plinth, where she had always stood.
‘Better the slave of a bad master,’ the Magus muttered.
Suddenly the captain was unsure whether he should have allowed this – entity – refuge to his palace.
‘Any port in a storm, lad,’ the dead Magus said. ‘Go fight monsters, or you’ll be as dead as I am.’
And he lifted his sword again. The air was still redolent with power.
George was behind him, and on his feet.
Amplify my voice, he told the dead Magus.
‘Wedge! On me! Michael – the banner to me!’ His voice rang out like some antique god’s.
In a moment out of time, the captain wondered if this was exactly how the antique gods came about.
No time like the present.
Kneel! He commanded the creatures of the Wild.
Hermes Thrice-sainted, boy! You are challenging his control! Stop!
A third of the creatures around him stopped fighting, fell back or stood, stunned.
Lissen Carak – de Vrailly
Ser Jean de Vrailly led the main battle of the king’s host down the last ridge, and their hooves clattered like a fall of hail as they crossed the bridge. He had more than a thousand belted knights, and no one – not even the Count of the Borders – questioned him. An archangel had given him great glory, and every man in the main battle knew it.
Jean could see the Royal Standard trapped, far out
in a sea of foes, with another standard he didn’t know – lacs d’amour in gold on a field of black. A foppish banner.
But he laughed to see the battle, and led the first files to cross the bridge off to the left, west towards the setting sun.
The soldiers in the long trench were rising from it, either in loyal determination to save the king, or in eagerness to join his attack.
Good for them. For once, there was to be enough glory for all.
He continued to ride west, and the long file of knights followed him – gradually enveloping the southern flank of the enemy.
Behind him, the Count d’Eu rose to his feet, and pointed his cut-down lance at the knot around the Royal Standard. ‘A moi!’ he roared.
Daniel Favor, former wagoner, climbed over the edge of the trench, to stand on the grass in the wind. Around him, farmers from the villages around Lissen Carack looked at him, and knew they could not let him be a better man.
Adrian Pargeter climbed out of the safe trench, and put his crossbow on the ground to draw his sword. Older guildsmen looked at each other. A draper with a grey beard asked his lifelong business rival – we really doing this? – and then they were up the vitrified earth too, drawing their swords.
Ranald Lachlan leaped up the side of the trench, waved his axe at his comrades, and pointed it at the enemy. ‘Come on, then!’ he said.
The trench emptied in moments, and they came.
Lachlan threw his axe in the air, and it spun in a great wheel of light over his head and fell back into his hand.
And the thin line of men charged.
Lissen Carak – Ser Gawin
Gawin saw Sym stumble, and a pair of the armoured things took him – dragged him down. Sym’s dagger licked out, gutted another boglin which fell atop him . . . and then the archer was gone, and Gawin was alone in the doorway.
A bright green light flashed, and Gawin was able to see far too much in the illumination. The crawling things beneath him on the stairs turned brown, their eyes burned away and dozens of them sank to the ground, all vitality leaching away as their bodies crumbled.
Gawin heaved a breath.
There were a dozen of the things left – all in a clump, a crawling, rolling mass of legs – he cut and cut at them like a madman, and then forced the door with sheer weight and determination, and he stumbled back . . .
A swarm of armoured men fell on the knot of boglins, hacking with axes, stabbing with spears – six knights he knew all too well. Ser Driant – the King’s Companion – other men of the household.
Gawin found himself pulled to the floor. He’d lost a moment’s attention and two of the things had him—
But he was Hard Hands, and he closed his left hand and slammed it into a lobe-shaped eye, keyed his hand around his adversary’s arm, and ripped it off the boglin with a tearing like ripping old leather, and then he swung the taloned arm like a club beating the bleeding thing to the ground. Ripped his rondel from its place at his hip, drove his knee into the soft place at the centre of the second boglin’s breast, and as its arms closed on him, slammed the dagger home, breaking its back. Spears slammed into the thing from all sides.
He got to his feet with his dagger clenched like a mantis’s claw. But the only figures standing in the green-lit cellar were armoured men.
Gawin sagged.
Ser Driant reached out an ichor-spattered hand. ‘Ser Gawin?’ he said.
Gawin was looking for the novice.
She was slumped against the wall. At her feet were the remnants of Sym the archer – the skin of his face flensed away where they’d swarmed atop him. She was pouring her power into him.
‘You cannot help him,’ Gawin said. ‘However great your talent, you cannot help him.’
She ignored him.
Ser Driant seized his shoulder. ‘Is she a healer?’ he asked.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn felt the challenge as a blow in his gut.
The dark sun.
The young Power glowed with fresh vitality. He had taken new prey, and he was stronger for it.
Thorn gathered his wits.
I am hurt. He is not. And I have been duped.
What if he can best me?
The air between them was thick with the misspent green power of his last phantasm, only partially expended. He had only to reach forth and take that power . . .
But if he was caught while doing it, it would be the end of him.
What if this was a Power’s plan all along? To lead me to over-extend, so that I might be destroyed?
Oh, Thurkan, it may be I owe you an apology.
Carefully, he began to wrap sigils of concealment about himself, even as he roared with false defiance.
Attack! he commanded his creatures.
High above him, in the fortress of his enemies, someone seized the power of the Wild – raw – and shaped a mighty phantasm with it.
So!
He wasn’t waiting for the trap to close. He fled.
Lissen Carak – de Vrailly
Jean de Vrailly judged his moment well. He had led the chivalry of Alba off to the west almost a league along the river. A handful of boglins had tried to oppose him, his sword was wet with their hellish ichor, and it was as easy as taking the heads off fennel plants in his mother’s garden.
And now—
Oh, the glory.
He raised his arm, closing his fist – turned his horse. ‘Halt!’ he ordered. ‘Now turn to face the enemy!’ Not a military command, but he had never led so many knights, and he didn’t know their commands in their language. So he turned out of the line, and cantered along the column. ‘Face me!’ he called. ‘Come! Turn your horses!’
As soon as half a dozen knights understood him, they all understood. And the great column, a thousand horses long, turned into a line a thousand horses wide as he cantered down the front, his lance held above his head, the royal arms of Alba sparkling on his chest.
I will be king.
He didn’t know where the thought came from, but suddenly it was there – he grinned and turned his horse to face the enemy. He was in the centre of this mighty line. To his right front, his own dismounted knights, led by his cousin, and the men of the King’s Guard had just slammed into the enemy fighting line. They were outnumbered badly.
But it didn’t matter.
Because he lay across the enemy’s line, like the crossing of a T, and the enemy had committed all of his reserves. And there was no force on earth, in the Wild or out of it, that could stop a thousand of his kind charging in a line.
He raised his lance high, feeling the astonishing, angelic vitality that filled him. ‘For God and honour!’ he roared.
‘Deus veult!’ cried the knights. Men closed their faceplates.
And then the line started forward.
The battle was over long before the first lance struck home. The enemy’s whole right wing had begun to melt back into the forest as soon as the knights emerged over the bridge – and now, as their charge rumbled forward, the wyverns, the trolls, and the handful of daemons edged back too. Some simply turned and ran for the woods. They didn’t have the bad judgment of men. Like any animal in the Wild faced with a larger predator, they turned and fled. Wyverns leapt into the air; the remaining trolls ran with stone-footed grace, and the daemons ran at the speed of racehorses – untouchable.
Only the boglins and irks stood and fought.
And in the centre, held by Thorn’s will, a dozen mighty creatures and a horde of boglins continued to try to kill the king and the dark sun.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain could no longer raise his sword to cut. He had the weapon in both hands – his left gauntlet held the blade halfway down, and he used it as a short spear, slamming the point into faces and armoured chests.
Moments of terror blended together – a scythe talon that came inside his visor, luck or skill directing the razor-sharp claw to curve up into his scalp and hair, leaving him aliv
e instead of blind or dead.
A trio of irk warriors dragged him down with their sheer weight, their thin, strong limbs racketing against the steel of his armour in a killing frenzy. As slowly as honey poured on snow, or so it seemed, his right hand burrowed past the hideous strength of their limbs to the rondel dagger at his hip, and then he was on one knee, and they were gone, and his dagger dripped gore.
The comfort of steel armour rasping against his own – back to back. He didn’t know who it was, he was just thankful for steel not chitin.
And then, a daemon.
This lord of the Wild was taller than a war horse. The captain hadn’t remarked on their absence from the battlefield, but now that he faced one some part of his brain registered that he hadn’t faced one before.
The crest on its head was a livid blue – utterly different from the one he’d faced in the woods to the west, or in the dark.
It watched him intently, but it didn’t attack.
He watched it and wished he had his spear – currently leaning against his armour rack inside the fortress – and a horse, and a ballista, and twenty fresh friends.
The thing had a pole-axe the size of a wagon’s axle-tree. The head was flint. It was crusted with blood.
It turned its head.
Had he been fresh he’d have sprung forward with a mighty attack while it was distracted, but instead he merely breathed again.
It looked back at him.
‘You are the dark sun,’ it said at last. ‘I can take you, but if you hurt me, I will die here. So instead—’ It saluted him with a flourish of the great pole-axe. ‘Live long, enemy of my enemy.’
It turned and ran.
The captain watched it go, throwing boglins from its path, with no idea who or what it was. Or why it had left him alive.
But he was trembling.
He fought more boglins. He cut some sort of tentacled thing from the Prior, who flicked him a salute and went back to work. Later, he saw the king go down, and he managed to get a foot on either side of the king’s head, and then all the monsters in the Wild came for him.
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