The Red Knight woke from a dream of Amicia with a smile on his face and Bad Tom’s hand on his shoulder.
‘You look like hell,’ the captain said.
‘Bridge Castle is under assault,’ Tom said. ‘It looks bad, and they’ve stopped signalling.’
‘Right,’ said the captain. He took a deep breath. Of course the Enemy knew the king was a half-day’s march away. Hence their assault. An all-or-nothing assault. And the trebuchet was gone. But – Bent had spent yesterday with the farmers erecting a trebuchet that filled the stump of the old tower. The captain rolled off his bed. He was fully dressed.
‘Bent!’ he called.
The senior archer came from under the scaffolding. ‘My lord?’
‘Start laying buckets of gravel across the trenchline,’ he said. ‘Commence as soon as you can get loaded.’
Bent saluted.
The captain turned to Tom. ‘Tell the archers to start loosing into the field between here and the Bridge Castle. Everything we have. Don’t spare shafts now. Someone heat rocks for the trebuchet. Michael! Get me Harmodius.’
His squire had, apparently, spent the night in his room.
‘And then armour, helmet and gauntlets,’ he called out.
Tom licked his lips.
‘Sortie?’ he asked.
‘Not much choice. Tom, the three gentlemen in my Commandery are knights of the order – see to it they get a cup of wine-’
‘And horses,’ said the Prior, appearing in the doorway. ‘If you will allow me, my lord, I will have my knights meet us in the field below. Which may be a dolorous surprise to our foes, by the grace of God.’
He raised a hand and made a sign and spoke a word – a single word that the captain did not know – in Archaic.
Something definitely happened. But the captain didn’t know what it was.
It did become clear, though, that the military orders used Hermeticism.
‘Wine and war horses, then,’ the captain said.
Overhead, the trebuchet slammed into its supports, and the whole scaffolding creaked.
Several hundredweight of gravel flew out into the early morning.
Above him, on the remnants of the south tower, the heavy arbalests began to
‘You called?’ asked Harmodius.
‘I need to save the Bridge Castle. He’s throwing everything at it – and he’s waiting for us to respond. I’m hoping that we can pound his attack flat with artillery but I can’t count on it. The Prior, here, has offered us another trick up our sleeves, but I need more. What can you do?’
‘It’s the King’s Magus!’ The Prior said. ‘The king has never ceased to look for you.’
Harmodius shrugged. ‘I was never lost.’ He fingered his beard. ‘I think this is a case for misdirection,’ he said. He smiled, and it was particularly nasty smile. ‘He thinks I’m dead.’
Lissen Carak – Gerald Random
Random led the valets and the spearmen against the wights. There were fifty of them, and they were bigger and far better armoured than the boglins who had climbed the tower walls.
By the time Gelfred reached the courtyard many of the merchants who had come in the first convoys were dead. They were no match for the boglins, who were faster and better armoured and whose every limb had a killing scythe or a spike. The merchants did not live in their armour like the mercenaries; they fought unarmoured, and they died.
But in the light of the sun Gelfred and his archers, high above in the tower, began to slaughter them like rats in a trap.
The heavy longbow arrows went through their iron armour with a wet slapping sound, and the big boglins shrieked as they died and tried to crawl over each other to reach the tower steps. They were already flowing up the ladders to the curtain wall – up the top and the underside of the ladders. They jammed the open doorway of the tower, and Gerald Random set his feet and fought to hold the door.
‘Fortress is signalling!’ called Nick Draper. ‘
Random set his teeth, and slammed his visor shut.
The arrows flying from the towers were answered by flights of arrows from the ground outside, from the courtyard – the hole there was a yawning maw vomiting monsters.
There were massive irks, nothing like the slim elfin creatures he’d seen before, but as big as a big man, armoured in ring mail with shields and long swords. There were more boglins as white as the moon, with hooked spears and iron plate. They came at him in one gout.
The farm-boys slammed spears past him – sometimes they fouled his sword arm, and one pinked him in the buttock, but he was their shield and they were his weapon, their nine-foot spears pinning the armoured things so that Random cut pieces off them – and just past the door, the hail of shafts continued to reap the enemy.
But there were more and more of the things out in the courtyard.
To all appearances, the sortie emerged after a concerted volley from all the engines in the fortress – a veritable rain of projectiles from fist-sized rubble to twenty-pound rocks; crossbow shafts two feet long and weighing two pounds.
The sortie rode down the fortress ridge at top speed, a blur of motion at the edge of the dark, and halted at the foot of the ridge to form its wedge. But they took too long. Men and horses were too far behind – other men had over-ridden the assembly point and had to turn back – and a hundred heartbeats were consumed achieving their formation.
Thorn watched the enemy sortie emerge. He watched them ride down the cliff face and he tasted the power of the phantasm that surrounded them. And spat at the taste.
Thorn sent the signal to his ambush, and triggered the massive spell he had spent the day preparing. Power leapt across the late morning light, raw and green, and coalesced-
Thorn choked.
That was
The Fallen Magus roared his rage. But it was too late, and the carefully prepared power of his magic fist slammed to empty earth.
Lissen Carak – Harmodius
‘He didn’t used to be this easy,’ Harmodius said, looking up to the captain, who sat on a borrowed destrier. The Magus grinned like a small boy. ‘The Wild has sapped his imagination.’
The shattering thunderclap of the outpouring of the Enemy’s power rang in their ears and the massive flash still burned across the captain’s retinas. ‘Can he do that again?’ the captain asked.
‘Perhaps, Harmodius admitted. ‘I doubt it, though.’
The captain exchanged a glance with Sauce, who rode by his side. It was Tom’s turn to have the duty, and the big man was fretting about missing the sortie.
‘No heroics,’ the captain called. ‘Right across the plain to the castle, then around the walls. Kill anything that comes under our hooves.’
The Wild – Peter
Peter had just finished making breakfast when the two boglins came to his fire. They had a pair of rabbits, already skinned, in each arm – eight rabbits in all. They also had a large animal carcass – also field dressed – carried between them on a pole.
