The Red Knight

jaw hurt, and his helmet slammed into his forehead despite arming cap and padding, and he was blind for a critical moment-

– and Grendel shuddered and stumbled, and all around the two of them, his knights were jumping the trench and the boglins were turning – too slowly.

The last knight – Tom – cleared the trench. Landed, and passed Grendel, who was slowing under his master’s hand.

The boglins, fooled for a moment by the speed of their passage, came over the lip of the trench in a flood.

The captain just had time to think Now would be good.

The naphtha charge buried under the boards in the trench ignited. It didn’t explode. It went with a great whoosh as if God himself had willed it, and then there was only a wall of fire behind them.

The captain might have laughed in his triumph, but in that moment Grendel died under him. The horse had given his life to get his master over the trench with a dozen well-thrown javelins in him, and he crashed to the earth, and all the lights went out.

Lissen Carak – Harmodius

A third of the choir was dead.

Harmodius found the Abbess, and got a hand under her elbow, but she levered herself to her feet with dancer’s muscles and reached in the Aether -

He was wounded. The boy had hurt him.

Harmodius had Miram steady on her feet, and the chorus began again – shaky, trembling, but lifting once again. Amicia’s voice was clear above them all – for a long minute, she had carried the choir by herself.

The power was still there – the immense power of the well, wrapped in the working of the choir.

Harmodius spread his arms, and raised his staff, and began to cast.

Lissen Carak – Father Henry

Father Henry lay in a pool of his own blood, ears ringing.

The pain on his back and shoulders was incredible.

He shrieked.

But Christ had born pain. Pain was like the Enemy – it could be vanquished.

Father Henry rose to his knees.

By a miracle, his bowstring had not been cut by the glass that was all around him.

He nocked his arrow with shaking hands.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt the pain of his wounds, but not as much as he felt the mockery of the attack. The dark sun was taunting him – had ridden through his trap with deliberate mockery.

Hatred suffused him.

He rose to his feet. Tested his strength and grunted.

He was struck by a crossbow bolt, which didn’t even distract him. He spread his fingers, flame crackled and a dome of green power sprang over his head, another flashed into being on his left hand like a verdant buckler, and in his right hand he raised his staff.

He took a stride toward the trench, and his guards followed him.

Look, I am an epic hero, he thought with bitter irony. And I have to do everything myself.

He didn’t run. He took long strides to his boglins, surging out of the trench the men had cut like an obscene wound on the earth.

And then alchemical fire exploded in front of him. It wasn’t a manifestation of power, or he’d have sensed and quenched it. In fact, he tried. It took him wasted seconds to realise that his enemy had filled the ground under the trench with naphtha – they had poured poison into the very veins of earth.

Men must die.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

He never quite lost consciousness, although he hit the ground very hard. But he rose before the pain could fill him, and nothing was broken. His sword was lying under Grendel’s body, but he got a hand on the pommel and dragged it clear.

He looked around but the hoofbeats said that it had all worked better than he might have hoped. He hadn’t wanted Tom to stay and die. On the other hand, somehow he hadn’t ever thought he would lose Grendel.

He didn’t take up his sword because he expected to live, so much as because it seemed appropriate.

For the first time since the sortie began he had time to breathe. Beyond the confines of his faceplate it was a big, dark, violent night. Many of the boglins in the trench had made it out, and some had started to follow the knights before the naphtha charge went off, and of course he was an infernal beacon to creatures of the Wild. They were coming for him.

So was Thorn.

The captain couldn’t manage a smile inside his Raven’s beak. But he wasn’t shaking too badly, and he had control of his head.

His job now was to hold Thorn’s attention as long as ever he could.

Best do a proper job of it.

He reached out, and summoned the nearest creatures of the Wild to serve him, the way his witch of a mother had taught him to. He’d sworn never to do it. But this was his last stand. Now, for everything, the oaths of an angry boy were thrust aside . . .

Lissen Carak – Thorn

The dark sun’s challenge was contemptuous.

He was forcing the boglins to his will, on the other side of the trench.

Thorn shrieked with rage, as if he’d been struck. He threw caution to the wind, and leaped the trench of fire.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain was surrounded by boglins – a crush of them, and their acrid scent filled his helmet.

He had never been so close to the creatures, and despite his revulsion for them, he found it impossible not to notice things about them – how their soft shells seemed to be formed like armour, their human arms emerging from breastplates.

He waited for the coup de grace . . . But he was holding them, and all their thoughts were his.

This was what he had been made to do. Created. Honed. Polished for it.

And he began to work on them.

He was in the room of his palace, and Prudentia was off her pedestal, standing by the iron-bound door. She had her stone arms locked against it, and it trembled on its hinges despite her efforts.

‘He is coming for you,’ Prudentia said.

‘Open the door,’ he said, trying to master his terror.

‘He wants you to face him in the Aetherial! He will eat your power, you arrogant