The earl chewed his moustache for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘My pleasure, your Majesty,’ he replied.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
‘God be with you,’ The Abbess said quietly, laying her hands on Wilful Murder’s head, and he flinched.
She caught the captain’s eye as the narrow gateway began to clear.
‘Any pursuit?’ he asked Ser George Brewes, the rear file leader – a man ready to be a corporal. One of Jehannes’ cronies, not one of Tom’s. Still waiting in the gate, aware it was open, eyes on the darkness outside.
Brewes shrugged. ‘How would I know?’ he asked. But he relented. ‘I wouldn’t think it.’ He shook his head. ‘We lit ten farms’ worth of the woods, and sent the fire downwind right at their camp.’
‘How many Jacks?’ the captain asked.
‘At least a hundred. Maybe thrice that – there’s no proper counting in the dark, ser.’ Brewes shrugged. ‘M’lord,’ he added, as an afterthought.
A pair of valets and an archer came up and began to winch the main gate shut.
‘Ware!’ shouted a voice from the highest tower, the one over the nuns’ dormitory, and the captain heard the unmistakable sound of a crossbow snapping off a shot.
Something passed over the moon.
Thankfully every man was on the walls and alert, or it might have been worse when the wyvern came down into the courtyard on wings a dozen ells wide, and its claws wreaked ruin among the unarmoured dancers and singers and merry-makers, but before the screams started it sprouted a dozen bolts, and it raised its head and screeched a long cry of anger and pain, and leapt back into the air.
The captain saw Michael, unarmoured, hurdle a pair of corpses and draw his heavy dagger, flinging himself at the wyvern’s back as it lifted into the air. Its tail flicked – and slammed full force into the squire’s hip. Michael screamed in pain and was thrown a horse’s length to the stone.
The Red Knight didn’t waste the time provided by his squire. He was down from the gatehouse, sword in gloved hand, before Michael’s scream had echoed off the stable walls and the chapel.
The wyvern whirled to finish the squire, and Bad Tom stepped between the monster and its prey. The big man had a long, heavy spear in hand, and he attacked, thrusting for the thing’s head. It was fast – but its sinuous neck served the creature as a man’s torso serves a man, and when it flicked its head to avoid the spear, it could neither strike nor rise into the air until it had its balance back.
Bad Tom stepped in closer, shortened his grip on the spear and struck hard, thrusting the spear brutally into the thing’s chest where the neck met its underbelly.
Long shafts began to feather the thing’s wings and abdomen.
It screamed and leaped into the air, wings beating hard, slamming its tail at Tom, but the big man jumped high and cleared the lashing tail by a fraction. But he missed the flicker of a wing in the dark, and the wingtip creased his backplate and slammed him to the ground.
The archers on the walls loosed shaft after shaft. Wilful Murder stood a horse’s length away, drawing shafts from the quiver at his hip and loosing carefully – aiming for any vulnerable part.
The bonfire in the courtyard illuminated their target, and the wickedly forged arrowheads cut into the beast’s hide like chisels through wood as the sparks from the courtyard fires rose like fireflies in the weakening wingbeats.
The captain was behind and above it when it leaped for the air, and he leaped too. He hit its neck and his sword whipped around its throat. His left hand grabbed the sword at the other side and he let himself drop, his sword become a vicious fulcrum, dragging the wyvern’s head down. It lost height and crashed on the steps of the chapel, his sword deep in the soft underside the neck, its jaws unable to reach him, the wyvern injuring itself as its head slammed into the steps again and again in fury and panic.
A lone crossbowman ran along the parapet, leaped down to the courtyard, stumbled, righted himself, and loosed his heavy weapon into the wyvern’s head from a distance of a few feet. The power of the bolt snapped its head back, and the captain rolled to his left, loosed his left hand, and got to his feet, his heavy blade already lashing out for the neck – again, and again, and then, when the head came up, he caught the blade in his left hand again, and slashed down into the creature’s head, his blade sliding down its armoured scales to slice softer flesh. He made ten strokes in as many heart beats, and the head suddenly snapped back, the whole beast rolled like a man and the brave crossbowman died when the mighty claws took him round the waist and tore him in half.
‘There’s another!’ shouted Tom, off to his left.
The tip of the thrashing tail caught his right ankle and ripped his feet from under him, and the captain cursed that he was not in armour.
He hit his head on a chapel step and lost an instant.
The wyvern reared over him.
A woman – the seamstress – appeared out of the darkness on his right, and threw a barrel at the monster – clipped the thing’s head, and it lost its balance, and one of his engineers loosed a scorpion into it.
The power of the scorpion shaft was so great that it took the creature’s neck and punched it through the chapel doors so hard that where the creature’s head smashed into the stone the lintel cracked. He heard its neck break. The shaft did a hundred leopards’ damage inside the chapel, the wyvern’s death struggles did a hundred more, and a river of gore spoiled the sacred carpet on the marble floor.
The captain got to his feet and found that he’d kept his sword. His chamois gloves were ruined and his left hand was bleeding where he’d grabbed the blade too high, above the area left dull for such purposes. He’d twisted his ankle, and he had to blink rapidly bring the world, spinning around him, back into focus.
The thing twitched, and he buried his point in the eye he could reach.
The courtyard fire glimmered on the belly of the second wyvern.
Forty archers threw shaft after shaft, so that the fortress seemed to have a new column of sparks rising into the fire-lit monster, and something happened – not suddenly, like the strike of the siege shaft, but gradually the wyvern’s wings tore, holed, it lost lift and screamed in fear as the men below brought it down and it realised there was no escape from the deadly upwards rain of steel. It slipped lower and lower, wings beating more frantically, turned sharply and suddenly one mighty wing failed. It plummeted to the hillside and crashing down with such weight and speed that the captain felt the steps shake under his boots.
‘Sortie!’ the captain shouted. He meant to shout, but it came out as more of a croak . . . although it was understood, and his eight armoured knights had the gate open and were away down the road, led by Sauce.
As the courtyard stilled it showed twenty dead people – dead or terribly maimed. A girl of fifteen or so screamed and screamed, and the woman who had thrown the barrel bent and gathered her into her arms.
A child tried to drag himself by his arms, because he had no legs.
Nuns were suddenly pouring from their dormitory – ten, twenty, fifty women, surrounding the injured and the dead in a storm of grey wool and clean linen, spreading out to access the scale of the dead, injured and traumatised. The captain slumped against a wall, his right leg a torrent of pain, and wished he could just slide into unconsciousness.
She screamed again and again. His eyes flickered to her but only after a long look did he see that most of the left side of her upper torso was gone. He couldn’t believe she was alive, or screaming. The woman who had saved his life was covered in her blood – shiny with it, trying to help her – and there was nothing to be done.
He wished the screaming woman would just die.
A pair of nuns wrapped her tight in a sheet, round and round, and the sheet turned red as fast as they could wrap another layer, and still she screamed, becoming one voice amongst a chorus of anguish that filled the night.
He staggered up and stumbled to Michael, who lay crumpled
against the chapel.
The boy was alive.
He looked around for Amicia. She had been standing right there – there, where the woman screamed. But she was gone. He shouted for a sister – for anyone – and four responded. They ran their hands carefully over him before lifting him away from Michael.
Men were shouting now. Even over the screams, their shouts were triumphant, but he ignored them and dragged himself over to Tom.
Tom was sitting against the stable. ‘Backplate took it,’ he said with a grin. ‘Christ, I thought I was done.’ He pointed at the sword. ‘Nice trick, that.’
‘Half-sword versus wyvern,’ the captain said. ‘A standard move. All the best masters teach it.’ He stripped away the ruin of his left glove and wrapped it tight around his cut. ‘I just need more practice.’
Tom chuckled. ‘Sauce just killed t’other, I’ll wager,’ he said, pointing at the cheering archers.
Sure enough, the next moments brought the mounted sortie back through the main gate, dragging the head of the second wyvern. Brought to earth by fifty arrows, it had died on their lance tips without injuring a single human.
Tom nodded. ‘That was well done, Captain.’
The captain shrugged. ‘We were ready, we laid our trap, you burned their camp and surprised them, and they still killed our people.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t ready enough. I was caught lollygagging.’
Tom shrugged back. ‘They killed a lot of people.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But not many of our people.’
‘You’re a hard bastard, Tom Mac Lachlan.’
Bad Tom shrugged, obviously taking it as a compliment, then something caught his eye in the chapel. He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something bad.
‘What?’ asked the captain.
‘Ever notice how they’re always smaller when they’re dead?’ Tom asked. ‘It’s just the fear that makes ’em seem so big.’
The captain nodded. He was looking at the wyvern too, and he had to admit that it was smaller than it had seemed in the fight. And it looked different. Paler. A mass of wounds and cuts and barbs.
Almost pitiful.
Tom smiled and started to get to his feet, and the Abbess was there.
He expected anger or recriminations from her, but she merely extended a hand and took his.
‘Let us heal your people,’ she said.
The captain nodded, still pressing his glove tight around his hand. There was a lot of blood. She got an odd look on her face, just before he fainted in her arms.
Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus
Deep in the marches of the next night, the enemy attacked the castle of Albinkirk.
Ser Alcaeus had passed beyond fatigue. He was in a world lived one heartbeat at a time, and events passed him in a series of illuminated flashes, as if lightning was playing on all of them.
There were some assaults on the walls of the castle, but unlike the low stone curtain walls of the town the castle walls were too high and too well maintained for the flood of Wild creatures to climb. The handful of beasts who made it to the top were killed.
But every attack cost him a little more.
One flash was a fight with an irk – a tall, thin, beautiful creature with a hooked nose like a raptor’s beak and chain armour as fine as fish scales that turned his sword again and again. And when, by dint of desperate strength, he knocked it to the stones, and its helmet spun away, the irk’s eyes begged for mercy. Like a man’s.
Alcaeus would remember that. Even as his dagger terminated it he registered that it, too, had humanity.
. . . and what followed was worse.
Because something came.
It was huge and foreboding, out in the horrifying fire-lit ruins of the town. It strode forward with a hideous shambling gait, and it was as tall as the city wall or taller.
It was alive.
And now it raised its staff – the size of a mounted knight’s heavy lance, or bigger – and a line of white-green fire struck the castle wall. The stone deflected in it a wash of white-green fire for as long as the terrified men on the wall might have counted to ten.
And then there was a rending crack and the wall breached, about ten paces to the left of the gate. The whole wall moved. Men fell – chunks of flint fell to crush the creatures below.
Then the monster raised its arms and seemed to call the stars down from the heavens, and as they began to plummet, Alcaeus fought not to fall on his face and hide.
The stars screamed down from the clear sky, falling to earth with an eerie, unearthly wail, and struck. One struck out in the fields, killing a wave of boglins. One struck in the centre of the town, and the cloud of fire reached into the heavens. The whole castle moved, and a cloud of dust reached like a fist into the heavans.
The third struck the castle wall mere feet from the great crack, and an enormous piece of masonry and stone fell outward with a crash.
Alcaeus ran for the breach, and found himself with another armoured man – Cartwright, he thought, or the Galle, Benois. The breach was narrow – two men wide.
They filled it with their bodies.
And the enemy came for them.
At some point, Benois fell. He was stunned, and Alcaeus tried to cover him, but the enemy reached a hundred hands and talons for his feet, sank claws into his flesh and dragged him to the edge of the wall, inch by inch. He screamed, unmanned with horror, and tried to rise. Boglin weapons cut him in the soft places not covered by armour, peeled his plate away.
They were eating him alive.
Alcaeus struck and struck again, powered by desperate fear, and he straddled the screaming man’s body and cut and cut.
It wasn’t enough. And then Benois grabbed at his ankles.
He ripped himself clear, and leaped back into the uncertain footing of the breach, and Benois was gone, a pile of hellspawn feeding on him, his armour torn open -
Alcaeus made himself breathe.
Suddenly Ser John was there with his mace. The five foot weapon moved like a goodwife’s broom on a new spring morn, and he shattered first the boglins around them, and then Benois’ skull.
There was a flash of light to the east – a distant whump of displaced air. A column of flame leaped up perhaps a league away. Perhaps two.
Then another – even greater.
The creatures of the Wild faltered, looked over their shoulders, and the fury of their assault rapidly abated.
Albinkirk – Thorn
In an instant, Thorn knew that something had gone wrong.
He’d drained himself by calling even the smallest stones from the heavens. It was a showy, inaccurate and inefficient working, but it had spectacular results when it worked. And he loved to cast it, the way a strong man loves to show his strength.
The daemons were impressed, and that alone was worth the fatigue. Better, the town was utterly destroyed and it had been far, far easier than even he had hoped.
I have grown so strong, he thought. What he had planned as a mere diversion had become a triumph. She would hear of it and cower in fear.
Perhaps taking the Rock is worth doing after all. Perhaps I will refashion myself as a warlord.
But the twin pillars of fire behind him came from his camp – the camp where his greatest allies, the irks and the boglins, stored their food and their belongings and their slaves and their loot. And it was afire.
He had left his most trusted troops had been left to guard it.
He turned with his army and strode for it.
Without his willing it, the bulk of his Wild creatures turned and followed him. They had no discipline, and they went like a shoal of fish-
Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus
Alcaeus watched them go, slumped against the wall. The Gallish man-at-arms looked like a butchered animal, his bones stripped. The boglins had feasted on him.
The sun was rising, and the lower town was an abattoir of horrors. In the main square irks had taken the time to carefully flay a man and hang him on a cros
s. He was still alive.
James the crossbowman stepped into the breach. He took a long look, raised his weapon and shot the crucified man. It was a good shot, given the range. The man’s screaming, skinless head dropped, and he was silent.
Ser John was slumped against the other wall. James helped the old man get his visor up. He winked.
He winked.
In that moment the old knight became a hero, in Ser Alcaeus’s estimation.
Alcaeus had to smile back, despite so many things. The loss of Benois hurt. The feel of the man’s hands on his ankles-
‘I need you to ride to the king,’ Ser John said. ‘Right now, while whatever miracle this respite may be lasts.’
Alcaeus must have agreed with him, because an hour later he was on his best horse, unarmoured, and galloping south. It was a desperate gamble.
He was too tired to care.
Chapter Seven
Ser John Wishart
South of Albinkirk – Master Random
‘Gates of Albinkirk are broken, ser,’ Guilbert reported. He shrugged. ‘There’s fires burning in the town and it looks like a fucking fist, beg your pardon, punched the cathedral. King’s banner still flies over the castle but none answered my hail.’
John Judson, worshipful draper, and St Paul Silver, a goldsmith, drew their horses closer to Random where he sat with Old Bob, Guilbert’s friend and the last man he’d hired, a bald, ruddy skinned drunkard whose voice and carriage suggested that the spurs on his heels were actually his.
Old Bob was the oldest man in the company, and had a much-broken nose, bumpy with knots of erupting flesh. His straggly salt and pepper hair erupted from a narrow zone around his ears and was always dirty, but the man’s eyes were deep and intelligent and a little disturbing, even to a man as experienced as Gerald Random.
He wore good armour, and he wore it all the time.
‘That’s what the peasants said yesterday,’ Old Bob noted calmly.
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