The Red Knight

long staff of heavy wood, and his hand unerringly found the one arrow he needed.

Black as her heart.

It was a most remarkable arrow. Behind the head and the first three fingers of the shaft, all white bone, the rest of the arrow was of Witch Bane.

Lissen Carak, The Lower Town – The Red Knight

In a plan dependent on preparation and planning and Hermetic mastery, it was ironic that the first part required twenty brave men and one middle-aged woman to risk their lives to sweep the road clean. And he didn’t even know if they’d succeeded.

But Thorn couldn’t possibly expect him to come on horseback, through the Lower Town. In fact, the captain had seen to it that Thorn would expect him on the covered footpath instead.

Out in the darkness, where the Lower Town had been, a line of lights sprang up. It was a small casting – hardly a ripple on a sea full of heavy waves.

But when the blue lights sprang up, the captain gave Grendel his head. They marked a sure way through the rubble of the Lower Town.

He found that the lights heartened him. He wouldn’t fail because of a detail. Now, it was a fight.

He grinned inside the raven-face of his visor, and reached for

Prudentia. He was in the room, and he didn’t want anything to do with the door. He merely touched his tutor, and she smiled.

‘Find me Harmodius,’ he said. ‘Open the link.’

She frowned. ‘But I have things I must say to you-’

He grinned. ‘Later,’ he said.

He drew power – just a trickle – stored from the sun and placed it in a ring given him by the Abbess. It had come with power; now he used it in the Aether to ignite his darksight.

Back in reality, and his sense of the the night altered. The outline of the trap was clear now, and he smiled like a wolf when the prey begins to tire.

Thorn had sent creatures into the ditch beyond the remnants of the Lower Town wall – the ditch his own men had dug to communicate with the Bridge Castle. It was now full of boglins, which suited him just fine.

Off to the south, at the entry to the defended path which the archers had taken and retaken every day of the siege, waited a company of daemons. At least forty of them, enough to exterminate his company of knights.

He grinned. I didn’t go that way, he thought, smugly. The creatures of the Wild were not as clever as men at hiding themselves in the Aether. It occurred to him as he cantered down the steep road that they didn’t think of hiding in what – to them – was their natural element. Or something.

And out on the plain, moving steadily forward towards the town, was Thorn.

The great figure towered over his allies. Even at this distance he stood head and shoulders above the trolls who surrounded him, at least twenty feet tall with antlers like a great hart’s spreading away on either side of his stone-slab face. He towered, but he was not particularly fearsome from five hundred paces. He was a beacon in darksight, though, and his power wound away in a hundred threads – to the skies, to the creatures around him, to the woods behind him-

Two-dozen trolls guarded the horned figure, reflecting his power.

Even as the Red Knight watched the horned man he raised his staff.

Thorn raised his staff. He could see the dark sun. For a moment he was tempted to lay his great working on the mysterious, twisted creature, but a plan is, after all, a plan. He reached into the slug on his left shoulder, and green fire washed up his right arm, pulsed once on his staff – and it was like joy; like the ultimate release of love.

The light was like that of the deep woods on a perfect summer day. It was not a pinpoint, a line, a bolt, a ball. It was everywhere.

The Abbess was in her choir, and she felt the assault on the wards – felt them stumble. She raised her voice with those of her sisters. She could hear them, feel them in the Aethereal, feel Harmodius and Amicia.

The light was everywhere. It’s green radiance was seductive, the siren call of summer to the young, to run away from work and play, instead. The Abbess remembered summer – summer days by the river, her body wet from a swim, her horse cropping grass . . .

Far, far away, the sigils that defended her house were-

Harmodius read the working, and its immense subtlety, and just as he was about to throw his counter, he saw the trap.

Thorn wanted him to swat the working aside.

The summer light was an insidious working that struck directly at the sigils from all sides and drained their strength into the Wild itself. The craftsmanship was magnificent.

The power involved was majestic.

And any counter – any reinforcement – would drain away with the sigils themselves, into the hungry maw that awaited.

If I survive this, I’m going to learn that working, Harmodius thought.

He took his narrow sword of bright blue power, and severed the Abbess’s connection to the fortress sigils.

The fortress sigils fell. Thorn gave a grunt of satisfaction, tempered by knowing that Harmodius had done the only thing he could have to avoid being sucked down with them.

The faerie folk danced around Thorn’s head, in the sudden accession of power – this ancient power, the very life-blood of wards that had stood for centuries. It was bleeding into the ground at his feet, and they bathed in it, their winged forms like tiny angels flitting in a rainbow of light.

The final collapse was like the opening of a window. There – and then nothing.

He didn’t pause. His staff swept up, and he released his second wor king – a simple hammer.

One Leg and Three Legs and the trebuchet and the top third of the great North Tower vanished in a flash of light. The explosion that followed destroyed every window in the fortress – the stained glass of the saints became a hurricane of coloured shrapnel.

Father Henry, head down behind the altar below the great window, had his back flayed bloody. His robes were all but ripped from his body although his head and arms were covered. He screamed.

The captain reached into his palace and drew power through the ring.

He had the charred cloth in his gauntlet, where he couldn’t lose it in the dark, and he funnelled the power through it.

Four feet beneath the duck boards at the base of his trench, beneath the boglin horde, ten fuses sprang alight.

Above him, in the fortress, a single massive pulse of power ripped through the night air – the concatenation almost cost him his seat on Grendel.

But the fuses were lit, and now-

Now it was a hundred long heartbeats to Armageddon.

He had reached the base of the slope and now he followed the path between the first of the blue lights across the rubble to the town’s back gate. Grendel couldn’t move quickly here, and this was the weakest part of the whole plan. If he could see Thorn then Thorn would see him. Indeed, the whole point was that Thorn should see him. And yet even now, the daemons were starting to shift. They must already know that their trap was in the wrong place. And the huge shapes around the enemy were new.

Thorn had already struck the trebuchet, and destroyed it.

We’re too late.

He was halfway across the town, Grendel was moving at a trot, and one bad step on rubble and he would be down. The risk was insane.

Fifty heartbeats.

He turned in the saddle and looked back. Tom was right behind him, and the sound of the column of knights filled the darkness robbed of other sound by the force of the explosion.

He rose in his stirrups as Grendel stepped over a downed roof beam – the blue lights seemed to ripple – and