The Sossag stood and ran like songbirds before an eagle. They ran north, even as the two long lines of knights closed on them.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain watched the painted man rise from the grass just a hundred horse lengths in front of him, sound his horn, and begin to sprint north, out of the closing jaws of the counter-trap. He watched with a sense of failure and the vaguest professional admiration. He knew the Outwallers.
He ordered his valet to sound ‘Charge – ahead!’
His line caught a handful of stragglers but, obedient to his orders, the line swept east and south, and didn’t deviate to pursue the Sossag. Arrows flew as the Sossag rearguard gave their lives for their fellows, and one man-at-arms went down in a tangle of armour plate and dead horse, and then the black-clad knights from the riverside swept over the rearguard, killing every one of them in an instant, no quarter given.
The Prior moved past him, raised his hand, and summoned the military order knights to him without a word being spoken. It was a magnificent display of power.
The captain shook his head. ‘I thought we were good,’ he said.
Sauce had blood on her lance tip, and she reined in. Jacques was sounding the rally, and a wounded knight – Ser Tancred – was being hauled bodily onto Ser Jehannes’ horse. She leaned over. ‘We are good,’ she said.
To their left front the whole squadron of black- and red-clad knights went from a galloping charge to a dead stop in a few hoofbeats – then wheeled right around as if performing some gypsy horse trick and halted facing the Bridge Castle in a neat wedge.
Sauce shook her head – not a big motion in an aventail and bassinet. ‘Sweet Jesu. They are good,’ she admitted reluctantly.
The Prior cantered to the centre of the new line. ‘Well, Captain?’ he asked. ‘Shall we relieve the castle?’
The captain raised his hand. ‘At your command, Prior.’
Seventy mailed knights made the earth tremble.
The boglins scattered.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn watched in weary anger as his useless allies ran rather than face the knights. So many claims – so many boasts that they could fight anything, that they could conquer the maille-clad riders.
He watched them run, and knew – with the pain of intimate and exact intellect – that his entire plan for the day would come apart.
A burst of power from the field alerted him. The power itself was very low in intensity, but also very tightly controlled. Only someone as imbued with mastery as he himself would detect it.
And immediately recognise the wielder.
Prior Mark.
Thorn watched as the Prior used his power to pass signals to his knights – to turn them into finely crafted weapons, responsive to his will. Another man who loved power.
For a moment, he considered using all of his remaining puissance in a single spell to kill the Prior.
But that was foolish. He needed that power. He reminded himself that there was no hurry. That the king’s army would never reach the river.
But the fall of the Bridge Castle would have made all that unnecessary.
Thorn rarely spoke aloud. He had no peers to whom he could speak his mind – voice his indecision, his secret fears.
But he turned to his startled guards. The shamans who worshipped him. The cloud of midge-like followers who attended his every need. His voice came out as a harsh croak, like the voice of a raven.
‘Thirty days ago, a daemon sought to take this place from an old woman with no soldiers,’ he said. ‘Fate and bad luck have left me to contest it with the King of Alba and whole armies of knights, with a dozen able magi and now with the best warriors in the world.’ He laughed, and his wicked croak startled the birds in the trees. ‘And yet I will still conquer.’
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
Nothing withstood their charge, and the strong band of knights scoured the ground around the Bridge Castle. They rode all the way around it, close against the walls, killing every creature of the Wild that didn’t scuttle clear of their path. The lesser boglins rose in brief bursts of flight or lay flat in the tall grass where they were difficult to find, and the greater boglins and irks, those with armour, struggled into their hastily dug tunnels to emerge in one last spurt of violence to the burning hell of the Bridge Castle courtyard.
The captain raised his hand for his company to halt when they returned to the base of the soft earth ramp that the worker-Boglins had run up to the curtain wall on the north side of the Bridge Castle.
‘Dismount!’ he called. The sun was past noon, but still high. There were streaks of cloud in the west, but hours of daylight remained. Still, experience told him that if he didn’t clear the courtyard before full dark he would lose the Bridge Castle.
And thus lose his connection to the king.
If the king was coming at all.
Every fifth valet took ten horses in his fist.
‘Spears!’ the captain called, and his men formed a tight line at the base of the ramp; men-at-arms in front, valets and squires in the middle, and archers in the rear rank.
The Prior rode up and saluted. ‘We’ll cover you!’
The captain saluted as Michael handed him his heavy spear. ‘If we aren’t out before full dark,’ the captain said, ‘Assume the bridge is lost.’
The Prior crossed himself. ‘God go with you, Ser Knight.’
‘God doesn’t give a shit,’ the captain said. ‘But it’s the thought that counts. On me!’ he called, and started up the slope of new turned earth. It was damp and hard – hardened with something excreted by the boglins, to judge from the smell. Acrid, like naphtha.
There were fifty boglins on the wall, and they died when the men-at-arms ripped through them.
The captain looked down into the inferno of the courtyard. All the merchant wagons were afire, and the courtyard crawled with figures like the damned in hell – men stripped of their skin, shrieking their lungs out; armoured boglins in glowing, fire-lit white. Most of them crowded to the door of the nearest tower, but more poured from a gaping wound in the earth where a dozen flagstones had been hurled aside, like maggots in a bloated corpse when it is opened. More boglins on the walls – but on the east wall, a small, disciplined company fought back to back, holding the opposite curtain against assault from both directions.
‘Files from the right!’ the captain called, and led his men down off the curtain wall – down the ramp intended for siege engines to be hauled up to the curtain, and there were a pair of pale boglins gleaming there, each with a pole-axe.
He had no time for finesse. He raised his spear, point low and butt high and caught the first creature’s heavy cut on his haft – wrapped its arm with his own in the high key that men practised when wrestling in armour – and then ripped its arm from its body like a man ripping a crab leg from a new-cooked crab.
The thing’s other arm came at him – he rammed his spear point into its head, let go of the shaft with his armoured left hand and punched into the boglin’s throat. It’s great maw opened, mandibles flashing at his visor – overhand, he rammed the spearhead down its gullet and acrid ichor blew out of the top of it like lava from a new volcano.
‘Form your front!’ he roared, even as Sauce beheaded the second armoured boglin with her axe.
Ser Jehannes came up on his left, and Sauce cleared her weapon and fell in next, tapping her axe-haft against the breastplates of Ser Jehannes and Ser Tancred, and the line was formed.
The armoured creatures were trying to overrun the defenders of the north tower, and the captain pointed with his spear. ‘Charge!’ he called.
Twenty paces into the rear of the things.
His sabatons rang on the pavement – he stumbled on a corpse.
And then – a storm of iron. Skittering screeches and staccato clicks like the beat of an insane drummer as the mass by the North Tower turned and charged him.
In the first meeting he was head
to head with an armoured monster the size of Bad Tom – the complex interlacing of its front armour over the interstices of its six armour plates was like an obscene mouth as the thing reared back, its whole strength bent on a single, crushing blow from its great hammer, its body bent like a bow with the effort.
He set his feet and took the blow on his haft, rotated the weapon on the pivot of his opponent’s blow, and slammed a spike into the middle of its helmeted head. His spike penetrated the thing’s face plate, and it spasmed.
Behind his dying opponent towered another, wielding two long swords, and even as he watched, the thing beheaded Ser Jehannes’s new squire, the two weapons coming together like a tailor’s shears. Jehannes leaped to avenge his squire and took a pommel to the helmet that staggered him, and two lightning fast blows followed it, literally beating him to the ground.
The captain’s command sense shrieked in panic. The boglins had stopped his men-at-arms. It shouldn’t have been possible. There was nothing in the Wild that could stop twenty fully armoured men.
Not many things.
The captain paused and locked eyes with the thing standing over Jehannes, and it knew him. He leaped at the double-sworded thing, but his spear remained lodged in his last kill, and he had to leave it.
Double Sword turned from his prey – Jehannes – and faced him. It was yet another kind of boglin – sleek, taller than Bad Tom and heavily muscled, with man-made chainmail covering all its joints and feral, organic plate armour that might have been grown, or very finely forged. A wight.
At the edge of his peripheral vision, Sauce rammed a spike through the carapace of another armoured monster and screamed her war cry.
Ser Tancred was locked with another, his arms straining against it as his squire stabbed his long sword into its armpit – rapid, professional stabs that made its limbs thrash.
Double Sword tapped its blades together and leaped at him with animal rapidity.
The captain snatched his rondel dagger from his belt and trusted his armour. He entered between the blades, arms high, dagger in both fists, and the longsword blows crashed into his shoulder plates. The hardened steel bent and split – only to cut into the rings of the mail haubergeon underneath, and the blades were held, though the force drove through the thickly padded jupon under the mail, and still managed to bruise his shoulders . . .
But he swung the dagger overhand, two handed through the boglin’s mail aventail and into its neck.
Six times.
It’s limbs spasmed, but it’s forearms tightened like a band of steel around the captain’s shoulders. And it lit up with power, eyes glowing cool blue as it prepared-
He drove his armoured knee in between its legs – nothing there to hurt, but his blow took it off balance, and he pushed his left foot forward and threw the thing over his outstretched right leg. Its wing cases snarled in his knee armour’s flanges and ripped free. Its own weight accelerated its fall, but its limbs clasped him fast, and he fell atop it, his rondel dagger a projection from his fists.
His steel carapace held.
The monster’s didn’t. The triangular blade punched cleanly though it, and ichor jetted out.
He didn’t stop, but pulled the foot-long steel dagger clear of the wound and drove it up under the thing’s mandibles that were opening and closing with terrific force on the slick metal of his helmet. They ripped his visor off his face, forcing his head around in a painful arc, and he was eye to eye with the thing – its eyes glowing with unfocused power.
He countered with a lightning blow to its nearer eye-patch. He raked the point through the oblong eye – and again, and again, as a scythed foreleg reached for his face.
It was not going to die before it cast its phantasm.
He got his left gauntlet under its head and slammed the dagger into its left eye – through the eye patch, through the skin and bone. He reached for his memory palace to fight its power, even as he stirred its brains with the blade . . .
And a wave of power entered him – a sickly blue wave of chilling intensity, and he writhed-
Its eyes went out.
He took its force into him, subsuming the alien thing as creatures of the Wild do. He had never done it before, and hadn’t known how. He thought it was probably best that Prudentia hadn’t been there to watch.
He bounced to his feet, suddenly awash in concentrated calculations as to the survivability of his host under the conditions of the current combat, and for a fleeting instant, the captain was able to see and calculate as both sides in the courtyard.
But the balance had shifted.
A third of his men-at-arms were down – dead, wounded, or merely tripped, he had no way of knowing, but the back of the enemy resistance was broken and already the fringes of the melee had become more like a hunt than a fight.
His archers began to clear the walls, their shafts joined by the dozen archers loosing from the towers, and the pace of victory accelerated. A dozen of the white boglins scuttled down a hole. A man, half the skin ripped from his flesh and trailing down his back, screamed again, and an archer put a shaft into his throat with rough mercy, and stopped his screams – and all through the courtyard, armoured figures opened their visors and heaved air into desperate lungs.
The captain walked up a ramp of dead bodies to the door of the north tower where a young giant, drenched in acrid boglin-blood, stood leaning on a six-foot bill with a heavy steel head, coated in gore.
‘Well fought, young Daniel,’ the captain said.
The former carter shrugged. ‘Twas Master Random held the door, Cap’n. For most part of an hour, seems to me.’
‘Dead?’ the captain asked.
Daniel shrugged again. ‘They drug him into the pile,’ he said. ‘We fought ’em for the corpse but lost him when you charged their rear.’ He stood straighter. ‘Deserves finding, I think.’ He seemed to shake off his fatigue, and then he reached out, spiked an armoured boglin on the back-spike of his bill, and flung it from the pile like a farmer moving hay with a pitchfork.
The captain grabbed another. Dead, the boglins were curiously harmless – disgusting, but less insectoid, and more animal. He tossed one aside, and then another. His hands shook. His knees were weak.
He was insanely full of power.
Sauce joined him. ‘What are we doing? Killing the wounded?’ she asked, her voice a little too sharp and bright. This was a fight that men – and women – would relive too many times.
‘Looking for a body,’ the captain said. He was down to waist level, now.
‘I’ve got his leg!’ Daniel called.
Michael joined them, and suddenly there was Ser Milus, and Ser Jehannes, blood still leaking from the joints of his shoulder, and they hauled, and the corpse of the merchant stiffened, and he screamed.
His armour was slick with boglin blood, and human, and he popped out of the pile of corpses. The flesh of his left foot was gone at the ankle, and blood was leaking too slowly out of the wound where sharp mandibles had flensed the flesh from his foot.
‘Tourniquet! Cut his greave off!’ the captain shouted.
Daniel already had a small knife in his great paw of a hand, and he slit the straps holding the greave – Sauce opened the catch and the greave came loose with a gout of fresh blood.
The captain grabbed the stump of his leg. Sauce got her sword belt around the small of the ankle, got it through the buckle, and pulled with all her strength.
The blood stopped.
‘Tie it off,’ the captain said unnecessarily. Every soldier in his company could be a leach in an emergency.
Then he took a weary breath and ran for the wall.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn felt the dark sun take Exrech and he cursed. Cursed that he had been fooled again, cursed that every encounter seemed to go against him.
The accession of power by the dark sun made him far more dangerous than he had been.
Thorn reached out to the two Sossag shamans attending him
and subsumed them, stripping their essences and their power, feeding on it. Their empty corpses collapsed to the earth. It wasn’t much power, but sufficient for him to see and send.
The coming darkness was not his friend. He needed light, where he could deploy his superior numbers and his massed archery.
And then he sent his powerful senses questing for Clackak. Found him deep in the earth under the stone fort by the water, with a hundred more of his kin.
Break off, he demanded.
The sun had begun to slide toward evening. There were long hours until night.
Thorn shook his massive head and torso. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The archers opened the gate and the knights rode in, their black hooded surcotes hiding the gleam of armour, their black horses like nightmare creatures in the full dark.
The Prior rode to the captain, who was sitting on a folding stool, scraping crap out of his sabatons to make the plates work properly. His whole body felt like a badly maintained machine.
‘With God’s help, you have conquered,’ the Prior said.
‘If you like,’ the captain said. ‘We have conquered, for the moment. But only by the skin of our teeth, as old wives say. And where are the wyverns? Where are the daemons? The Jacks?’ He gazed out into the last light. Killing off the last of the boglins had taken another hour, and now the enemy machines were throwing stones again.
The valets were stacking corpses outside the gate. The courtyard of the Bridge Castle stank of burned wood, dead boglin and ordure – horses killed in their traces, oxen butchered, men and boglins dead. The rotting meat smell rose like an evil sacrifice in the too-warm evening air, and midges were settling on the working men like an evil plague.
The Prior dismounted, his own sabatons ringing on the stones of the courtyard. ‘Where indeed? I haven’t seen so many evil creatures in many years.’
‘We saw them every day. Now they are gone,’ the Red Knight said. ‘Next wave, perhaps?’ he added. ‘That’s my guess. Wear us out with the boglins. Then break us with the bigger creatures.’ He tested his foot on the ground.
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