The Red Knight

pushed his left foot forward and threw the thing over his outstretched right leg. Its wing cases snarled in his knee armour’s flanges and ripped free. Its own weight accelerated its fall, but its limbs clasped him fast, and he fell atop it, his rondel dagger a projection from his fists.

His steel carapace held.

The monster’s didn’t. The triangular blade punched cleanly though it, and ichor jetted out.

He didn’t stop, but pulled the foot-long steel dagger clear of the wound and drove it up under the thing’s mandibles that were opening and closing with terrific force on the slick metal of his helmet. They ripped his visor off his face, forcing his head around in a painful arc, and he was eye to eye with the thing – its eyes glowing with unfocused power.

He countered with a lightning blow to its nearer eye-patch. He raked the point through the oblong eye – and again, and again, as a scythed foreleg reached for his face.

It was not going to die before it cast its phantasm.

He got his left gauntlet under its head and slammed the dagger into its left eye – through the eye patch, through the skin and bone. He reached for his memory palace to fight its power, even as he stirred its brains with the blade . . .

And a wave of power entered him – a sickly blue wave of chilling intensity, and he writhed-

Its eyes went out.

He took its force into him, subsuming the alien thing as creatures of the Wild do. He had never done it before, and hadn’t known how. He thought it was probably best that Prudentia hadn’t been there to watch.

He bounced to his feet, suddenly awash in concentrated calculations as to the survivability of his host under the conditions of the current combat, and for a fleeting instant, the captain was able to see and calculate as both sides in the courtyard.

But the balance had shifted.

A third of his men-at-arms were down – dead, wounded, or merely tripped, he had no way of knowing, but the back of the enemy resistance was broken and already the fringes of the melee had become more like a hunt than a fight.

His archers began to clear the walls, their shafts joined by the dozen archers loosing from the towers, and the pace of victory accelerated. A dozen of the white boglins scuttled down a hole. A man, half the skin ripped from his flesh and trailing down his back, screamed again, and an archer put a shaft into his throat with rough mercy, and stopped his screams – and all through the courtyard, armoured figures opened their visors and heaved air into desperate lungs.

The captain walked up a ramp of dead bodies to the door of the north tower where a young giant, drenched in acrid boglin-blood, stood leaning on a six-foot bill with a heavy steel head, coated in gore.

‘Well fought, young Daniel,’ the captain said.

The former carter shrugged. ‘Twas Master Random held the door, Cap’n. For most part of an hour, seems to me.’

‘Dead?’ the captain asked.

Daniel shrugged again. ‘They drug him into the pile,’ he said. ‘We fought ’em for the corpse but lost him when you charged their rear.’ He stood straighter. ‘Deserves finding, I think.’ He seemed to shake off his fatigue, and then he reached out, spiked an armoured boglin on the back-spike of his bill, and flung it from the pile like a farmer moving hay with a pitchfork.

The captain grabbed another. Dead, the boglins were curiously harmless – disgusting, but less insectoid, and more animal. He tossed one aside, and then another. His hands shook. His knees were weak.

He was insanely full of power.

Sauce joined him. ‘What are we doing? Killing the wounded?’ she asked, her voice a little too sharp and bright. This was a fight that men – and women – would relive too many times.

‘Looking for a body,’ the captain said. He was down to waist level, now.

‘I’ve got his leg!’ Daniel called.

Michael joined them, and suddenly there was Ser Milus, and Ser Jehannes, blood still leaking from the joints of his shoulder, and they hauled, and the corpse of the merchant stiffened, and he screamed.

His armour was slick with boglin blood, and human, and he popped out of the pile of corpses. The flesh of his left foot was gone at the ankle, and blood was leaking too slowly out of the wound where sharp mandibles had flensed the flesh from his foot.

‘Tourniquet! Cut his greave off!’ the captain shouted.

Daniel already had a small knife in his great paw of a hand, and he slit the straps holding the greave – Sauce opened the catch and the greave came loose with a gout of fresh blood.

The captain grabbed the stump of his leg. Sauce got her sword belt around the small of the ankle, got it through the buckle, and pulled with all her strength.

The blood stopped.

‘Tie it off,’ the captain said unnecessarily. Every soldier in his company could be a leach in an emergency.

Then he took a weary breath and ran for the wall.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt the dark sun take Exrech and he cursed. Cursed that he had been fooled again, cursed that every encounter seemed to go against him.

The accession of power by the dark sun made him far more dangerous than he had been.

Thorn reached out to the two Sossag shamans attending him and subsumed them, stripping their essences and their power, feeding on it. Their empty corpses collapsed to the earth. It wasn’t much power, but sufficient for him to see and send.

The coming darkness was not his friend. He needed light, where he could deploy his superior numbers and his massed archery.

And then he sent his powerful senses questing for Clackak. Found him deep in the earth under the stone fort by the water, with a hundred more of his kin.

Break off, he demanded.

The sun had begun to slide toward evening. There were long hours until night.

Thorn shook his massive head and torso. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The archers opened the gate and the knights rode in, their black hooded surcotes hiding the gleam of armour, their black horses like nightmare creatures in the full dark.

The Prior rode to the captain, who was sitting on a folding stool, scraping crap out of his sabatons to make the plates work properly. His whole body felt like a badly maintained machine.

‘With God’s help, you have conquered,’ the Prior said.

‘If you like,’ the captain said. ‘We have conquered, for the moment. But only by the skin of our teeth, as old wives say. And where are the wyverns? Where are the daemons? The Jacks?’ He gazed out into the last light. Killing off the last of the boglins had taken another hour, and now the enemy machines were throwing stones again.

The valets were stacking corpses outside the gate. The courtyard of the Bridge Castle stank of burned wood, dead boglin and ordure – horses killed in their traces, oxen butchered, men and boglins dead. The rotting meat smell rose like an evil sacrifice in the too-warm evening air, and midges were settling on the working men like an evil plague.

The Prior dismounted, his own sabatons ringing on the stones of the courtyard. ‘Where indeed? I haven’t seen so many evil creatures in many years.’

‘We saw them every day. Now they are gone,’ the Red Knight said. ‘Next wave, perhaps?’ he added. ‘That’s my guess. Wear us out with the boglins. Then break us with the bigger creatures.’ He tested his foot on the ground.

‘Then-’