The Red Knight

Instead, his consciousness raced back to the plain below, where his shell faced being consumed by fire.

Another slow heartbeat while he poured power into the problem and extinguished the blue fire.

He was surprised – and concerned – to see how badly hurt he was. Again – yet again, he would appear weak.

He had no time to take stock. Even now he was so badly hurt that any of the lesser powers could take him.

He raised his staff and was gone.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Run, boy! cried Harmodius.

The captain tried to run.

He crawled through the prostrate boglins. He forced himself to his feet, and he ran, a broken, stumbling run while waiting for the levin bolt in the back that would end him. He stood in the palace, and the plinth was empty, and Prudentia’s statue lay cold and still on the ground.

Damn.

Time to mourn later, if he lived.

He leapt onto the plinth, and called his names.

Honorius! Hermes! Demosthenes!

Desperation, luck, and a strong will.

Goodbye, Prudentia! You deserved better than I ever gave you!

He ran to the door, and pulled it open.

The flicker of a casting – Thorn reached out, trying to find its source. The dark sun was still on the battlefield. Still casting?

I am badly hurt, he conceded. He summoned his guards to withdraw.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

– powered his phantasm and slammed the door shut again.

His body rose in a leap, sailed through the heated air, and fell to earth again – a hand’s breadth clear of the wall of the trench.

The captain turned away from the fire, and saw a wedge of knights, their mirror-bright harnesses like liquid fire in the smoky darkness. Off to the north, boglins hovered, uncertain.

A daemon raised his axes in challenge.

But the knights did not pause to fight. Even as the captain ran, strong arms grabbed him, an arm under each shoulder, and he was swept away as cleanly as if he’d been snatched by a great bird.

Chapter Fourteen

Father Hugh

Valley of the Cohocton – Peter

Peter didn’t recover so much as grow used to what was gone, like a man who has lost a hand, or an arm. And it took days, not hours.

Ota Qwan scarcely paid him any heed at all – indeed, now that he was paramount war leader, Ota Qwan was loud and definite and far, far too important to waste time on one new warrior. Peter walked all the way back from the Ford Fight, as the Sossag came to call it, to their camp in a haze of fatigue and a darkness that he’d never known, even as a slave.

Three nights in a row, he sat by a dead fire, staring at the cold coals and considering ending his own life.

And then he would hear Ota Qwan – instructing, ordering, leading, demanding.

And that would give him the strength to go on.

On the fourth night on the trail back, Skahas Gaho came and sat with him, and offered him some rabbit, and he ate of it, and then together the two of them drank some of the dead men’s mead – honey sweet. The Sossag warrior was quickly drunk, and he sang songs, and Peter sang his own people’s songs and in the morning his head hurt, and he was alive.

It was just as well, because they were moving easily along trails as soon as the sun was up, and suddenly, every warrior fell flat on his face, so that – just for a moment – Peter was the only man standing. Then he threw himself flat. He’d been so deep in his pain that he had missed the signal.

Scouts wormed their way into the bush and came back to Ota Qwan with reports, and the rumour swept the column that there was a great army on the road. Far too large and well-prepared for the Sossag people to challenge alone.

They had won the Ford Fight. But they had lost many warriors. Too many warriors. Too much experience, too many skills.

So they rose as they had fallen to the ground, almost as if a single spirit inhabited many bodies – and they loped off to the north, and they climbed well into the foothills of the Adnacrags, avoiding the enemy by many miles. It was only after three days of gruelling travel over the most difficult terrain that Peter had ever known when they climbed over a low ridge, and saw their camps spread across the woods and green fields of the Lissen where it ran into the Cohocton. From the top of the long ridge, Peter could see thousands of points of light – like the stars in the sky, but every one of them was a fire, and around that fire stood a dozen men, or boglins, or other creatures – such creatures as served Thorn and yet loved fire. And more creatures slept cold in the woods, or slept in streams, or mud.

Peter let Skahas Gaho pass him on the trail and he stood in the deepening twilight at the top of the ridge, and looked down. Almost at his feet rose the great fortress of the lady, which the Sossag called the Rock, and its towers looked like broken teeth, and its arrow slits glowed with fire like a Jack-o’-lantern.

And away to the east, at the edge of his vision, he could see another host of fires burning. The army around which the Sossag had slipped. The King of Alba.

The armies were gathered, and in the last light, Peter watched a tall column of ravens and vultures riding the drafts over the Valley of the Cohocton.

Waiting.

He sat and watched the play of light – massive pulses of power, flashing back and forth like a summer storm.

Lissen Carak – Thurkan

Thurkan watched the dark sun slip away. He had seen the Enemy captain face down Thorn, pounding him with blue fire until the Wild sorcerer fled. And unlike Thorn, the dark sun’s bodyguard came and rescued him, their ranks closing tight around him.

The daemon had learned much about the skills of the knights.

He turned to his sister. ‘Thorn is beaten.’

She spat. ‘Thorn is not beaten, any more than you were last night. Thorn said he would kill the great machine-that-throws-rocks and he has done so. Stop your foolish preening.’

Thurkan shivered with suppressed need to fight.

‘I will challenge Thorn,’ Thurkan said.

‘You will not!’ Mogan replied.