The Red Knight

The second self opened the first package. A third self stood ready with an axe.

The phantasm was heartbreakingly beautiful. Thorn had been a great magus, of course.

Harmodius allowed his second self to subsume himself in the complexities of the working.

He shut down the room, withdrew his second self, and sat in another created room in his memory palace, a comfortable room with a circle of armchairs. His second self sat in another, wrote the phantasms out in longhand, and they discussed them in detail. His third self stood behind the second with an axe.

Suddenly he understood how the cats had been used.

He understood how his former master was using animals to watch the fortress.

He understood how he could possess the body of any creature he wanted, unless they had the power to resist him. How he could subsume their essence – in effect, eat that part of a mortal that Harmodius thought of as the soul.

For power.

And take the mortal body for his own, or make one.

Harmodius let the knowledge roll around inside his head for a little. And found himself watching a mongrel dog – one of the mercenaries had brought the animal into Lissen Carak – rooting in the midden heap that was beginning to fill the courtyard. Eventually, the dog would be eaten, if the siege went on.

I could just try it on the dog.

The dog is going to die, anyway.

The dog turned and looked at Harmodius. She tilted her head to one side, watching to see if the man had anything interesting to offer.

Power poured out around him. No wonder the creatures of the Wild want this place back, Harmodius thought. He reached out to the power, took a taste, and ran it through the phantasm-

And made a motion of negation with his hands, cancelling the working and draining the power into the walls of the fortress.

He got to his feet and grinned at the dog. ‘You’ve got to draw the line somewhere,’ he said aloud.

He did that on purpose, the subtle bastard. He’s inviting me to fall.

Harmodius could smell breakfast, and he decided he needed to be with people.

East of Albinkirk- Ranald

Ranald was tired, and he wept a great deal. He wasted an afternoon trying to catch a horse. At every step, he expected to find the drag, the rear guard, or another survivor. But he saw no one.

He wasted more time at the edge of the battlefield, trying to find his pack.

Eventually he gave up and walked, wet when it rained, scorched when the sun shone. He had nothing to cook with, nothing to eat, and no means of acquiring food

On the evening of the fourth day after the fight, he walked up the lane to the great Inn. Men shouted when they saw him.

Every man and woman in the dale came running, when they knew whom he was. And because he was his cousin’s tanist, they thought, at first, that his appearance must bode well.

But when they came closer, they saw the tracks of his tears, and the sword. And they knew.

By the time he walked the last few paces to the porch of the great Inn, the Keeper alone barred his way, and he was grim-faced. ‘Greetings, Ranald Lachlan,’ he said. ‘Tell me how many were lost?’

Ranald had no trouble meeting the Keeper’s eye. Death made you less careful of such things.

‘They’re all dead,’ he said. ‘Every man of us. I, too, was dead.’

They gasped, the folk of the Dale, and then the tears began, and the wail of loss, the roar of rage.

Ranald Lachlan told his story quickly, and without embellishment. And then he turned to the weeping woman who stood by her father. ‘Here’s his sword,’ Ranald said. ‘If you bear him a son, he says the boy is to avenge him.’

‘That’s a heavy load to lay on an unborn bairn’s shoulders,’ the Keeper said.

Ranald shrugged. ‘It’s not my choice,’ he said wearily.

Later, he sat in the Keeper’s own rooms, and told the story of the last fight. Hector’s wife listened through her tears. And when he was done, she looked at him long, and mean.

‘Why’d they send you back, then?’ she spat. ‘When they might have sent my love?’

Ranald shrugged.

The Keeper shook his head. ‘Too many men lost, along with the whole herd.’ He put his chin in his hand. ‘I’ll be hard pressed if they turn on the Dale.’

Ranald didn’t even pretend to be interested. And the Keeper let him go.

He was not interested when the men in the Inn offered him ale.

He wasn’t interested when the woman of the Inn offered themselves, nor when a travelling player offered to make a song of the battle.

He slept, and the next day he was just as numb as he had been the day before, and the day before that. But he went down from his room to the common room at dawn, and there he faced the Keeper and asked for a horse and gear.

‘You can’t mean to go fight the Outwallers all by yourself,’ the Keeper said, gruffly.

‘No,’ Ranald said.

‘You mean to just ride home?’ the Keeper asked, incredulous.

‘I’m a drover,’ Ranald said. ‘I have no home.’

The Keeper drank some small beer and wiped his moustache. ‘Where, then?’ he asked.

Ranald sat back. ‘I’m going to find the Wyrm of Erch,’ he said. ‘I mean to ask why he allowed us to be attacked by the Wild.’ The drover shrugged. ‘We pay a tithe to the Wyrm in exchange for protection from the Wild. It’s the Law of Erch. Eh? Ancient as the oaks and all.’

The Keeper put his beer down slowly. ‘You mean to speak to the Wyrm?’

‘Someone has to,’ Ranald said. ‘I might as well; I’m already dead.’

The Keeper shook his head. ‘I have just a dozen horses left. Your cousin took my herd.’

Ranald nodded. ‘I mean to remedy that first, before I go to the Wyrm. Give me twenty men and I’ll bring in the herd. There’s a lot of it left. A thousand head at least.’

‘You are like your cousin,’ the Keeper said. ‘Always a sting in the tail.’

Ranald shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t bother, but Sarah’s boy will need those beasts, if he means to be a drover.’ He didn’t say the other thing that was on his mind. That he was a King’s Man, and he owed the king a warning of the Wild.

That afternoon, with twenty wary men, he rode south.

They rode quickly, spread in pairs over a mile of ground, scouting every hummock and every stand of trees.

They made a cold camp and Ranald ate the oatcakes that Sarah had given him, and when the sun was a red disc on the edge of the world they rode on.

By noon they found the first beasts. The Dalemen were spooked, terrified of the Sossag, and afraid, too, to find corpses grinning at death in the woods, but they were still, by Ranald’s reckoning, miles north of the battleground. The herd had turned and headed home, as animals will do.

Ranald swept south along the road, and before darkness he found the boy that Hector had sent back as a messenger. He was dead, and he’d either been lost or he’d ridden a long way west to get around something. He lay on his face, a cloud of flies around his bloated corpse, and his horse was still standing nearby. The boy had four arrows in him, and it was clear he’d died trying to fulfil his mission. The Dalemen buried him with love and honour and his cousins, two tall, grey-eyed boys, wept for him.

But the next day held the greatest shock.

They were well west of the fight, collecting animals hard against the great Swamp, and Ranald scented a fire and went to scout it himself. It was a foolish risk to take, but he couldn’t bear to be the cause of any more Dalemen’s deaths.

What he found was the drag – twenty of Hector’s men, alive, with a third of the herd. Donald Redmane had led