The Red Knight

She met their looks and glared. ‘What?’

‘Your people look good enough for the Royal Guard,’ Tom said with a rich chuckle.

‘What the fuck does that mean?’ she spat. She looked past him, over the walled balcony that let light and air into the tower from the courtyard. She could see the priest from here, climbing out on the wall. She wondered what he was doing there.

Bent slapped his thigh and roared. ‘Told you!’ he shouted, and went back to his game, and she forgot Father Henry. ‘Can’t even take a fucking compliment.’

She glared at both of them and went to the roof to watch her posts. ‘Where are all the men-at-arms? Captain left a note-’

Tom nodded to her. ‘I’ve got it, Corporal. I’m preparing the sortie.’

Sauce felt a keen disappointment edged with anger. ‘A sortie? But-’

‘You have the duty,’ Tom said. ‘It’s my turn.’

’It’s always your turn,’ she shot back.

He nodded, unrepentant. ‘I’m primus pilus, Sauce. I can take the sortie out until Christ returns to earth – maybe after. Wait your turn. Sweeting.’

She drew herself up. But Bad Tom shook his head.’Nay – never mind me, Sauce. That was ill-said. But I want the sorties. The lads need to see me fight.’

‘And you love it,’ Sauce said. She put her nose very close to his. ‘I love it too, you bastard.’

Tom laughed. ‘Point taken, Corporal.’

She backed off. ‘I want my turn. Anyway – where is everyone?’

‘The boys are all off confessing to the priest. Don’t worry, Sauce. We probably won’t go. But there’s going to be a sortie ready all night, every night, in the covered way.’

Sauce shook her head and went up the steps to the roof-top feeling left out.

Full darkness had almost fallen, and the sounds made by the various species of besiegers would have been chilling if she’d let herself think of them that way, but she didn’t. Instead she stood with the crew on the great ballista – as of today, re-mounted on a complex set of gimbals designed by the old Magus. She tried it herself. Now it moved like a living thing. No Head, the man responsible for the machine, patted it affectionately. ‘The old fuck magicked it, that’s what he did. It’s alive. Going to get us a wyvern, next time one comes.’

She swung it back and forth. It was physically pleasant to move – like playing some sort of game.

‘Sometimes a machine is just a machine,’ said a strong voice, and the old man himself emerged from the darkness. She had never been so close to a real magus, and she started.

‘It’s our good luck that we have fifty skilled craftsmen suddenly among us. A pargeter, who can draw precisely. Blade smiths who can make springs. A joiner who can do fine carpentry.’ He shrugged. ‘In truth, it is an Archaic mechanism I found in a book. It was the craftsmen who made it.’ Nonetheless, the old man seemed very satisfied with it, and he gave it an affectionate pat. ‘Although I confess I gave it a touch of spirit.’

‘Which he magicked it, and now it’s alive!’ said No Head happily. ‘Going to bag us a wyvern.

Harmodius shrugged as if mocking the ignorance of men – while accepting their plaudits.

His eyes lingered on her.

Christ – did the old Magus find her attractive? That was a chilling thought. She wriggled involuntarily.

He caught her movement and laughed. Then stopped laughing. ‘Something is moving down between the forts,’ he said.

She leaned over the tower. ‘Wait a little,’ she said. Then, ‘How did you know?’

His eyes glowed a little in the dark. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I can make the sky bright for a moment.’

‘No need,’ she said.

Sure enough, there was a low clash, as if of cymbals, and then another.

‘Captain put lines of tin bangles across the fields,’ she said as the ballista spun, No Head pulled its lever and a bolt crashed out into the darkness.

On the next tower, the onager released a bucket of gravel, and suddenly the night was full of screams.

A retaliatory bolt of purple-green lightning shot out of the darkness and struck the tower on which the onager rested. Sparks flew as if a smith was pounding red-hot metal.

‘Christ, what the fuck was that?’ Sauce asked the darkness. Her night-sight was ruined by the green bolt; all she could see was a pattern on her retinas.

Old Harmodius leaned over the tower, and a bolt of fire sprayed from his hand – it passed almost exactly down the line of the green lightning, as far as the dancing images on her retinas could discern.

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he said. Over and over.

His target caught fire in the distance – a giant of a man, or an oddly misshapen tree. Perhaps two trees.

‘Dear God,’ Harmodius muttered. ‘Again!’ he called.

No Head needed no urging. Sauce watched his crew as they danced through their drill – two men wound the winch, slipped the cocking mechanism into place, removed the winch again, a third carried the twenty-pound bolt as easily as if it was made of straw, dropped it into the charge-trough and pushed it back until the huge nock engaged the heavy string. No Head spun his machine with one hand, gave the burning tree-man a hint of windage, and pulled the release.

Another line of lightning, this one levin-bright – flashed onto the north tower and rock exploded. Men screamed. Her men.

She turned and ran for the stairs. And then paused. She couldn’t be in both towers at the same time.

Behind her the two valets winding the bow sweated to do it as fast as they could, but No Head didn’t look at them or at Simkin, a giant, who dropped the next bolt into the trough with perfect timing, so that just as the string clicked into place on the latch, the nock slid back and engaged the string, and No Head had the weapon aimed.

Harmodius grunted something, and cast fire on the earth. His fire was caught as if by a basket of green light, and cast straight back at them; quicker than thought, his own basket of blue lightning caught it and he threw it back-

No Head pulled the release.

The bolt hit the man-tree squarely in the torso-trunk. There was a roar and a burst of ball lightning like a summer night, and the tower trembled. The ball struck the curtain wall over the main gate and there was a cataclysmic explosion – like pouring water on a hot rock, expanded a thousand times. The curtain wall groaned, buckled and collapsed outward, and the new covered way behind the gate started to take hits.

Someone was alert and still moving on the onager tower, though, because a basket of red-hot gravel – another of the Magus’s innovations – flew from the onager, the pebbles flashing through the air like meteorites.

All the lights went out together, and then there was quiet, punctuated by screams from the plain far below. And moans.

‘Again!’ Harmodius called. ‘Same target. Hit him again! Before he can-’

And then there was a wall of green light across the sky, and the onager tower exploded in sparks and a shower of stars. One long scream rang out across the night – and then the top of the tower leaned out, and out, and fell into the night, taking the onager and four men of the company with it. It crashed to the floor of the valley four hundred feet below, a long rumble like an avalanche.

And then there was only silence.

Sauce had made it to the courtyard when the green fire hit, and she was standing close enough to the gate to be hit by stone chips from the curtain wall. A stone slammed into her shoulder from the broken tower. Up on the main donjon, she could see Harmodius as he leaned out over the wall, with eldritch blue fire coursing over his hands.

The gate had taken a glancing hit and whole chunks of the crenellations had fallen on the covered way, crushing part of the roof. Inside, men and horses of Bad Tom’s sortie were trapped in the pitch black, and there were horse screams of anguish and human shouts.

‘Get torches! Lanterns! On me!’ Sauce shouted.

Just under the back end of the covered way, Ser John Poultney was lying under the ruin of his charger, and his leg was broken. Sauce went with a pair of archers – One Lug and Skinch – to get the horse off him. The archers used spears to raise the carcass and Ser John worked not to scream.

The roof of the covered way had taken most of the gate’s collapse, and it hung askew, and the beams were