Near Lissen Carak – Gaston
Gaston, Count D’Eu, was as tired as he had ever been, and something was wrong with his left hip – it didn’t seem to move as freely as it ought – but he managed to get his leg over his destrier’s broad back and he rode forward under his own banner, with his cousin’s men arrayed behind them – two hundred knights and men-at-arms. Fully a hundred gentlemen lay dead or wounded in the woods and meadows along the road – an absurdly steep price for his cousin’s reckless desire to be the man who broke the ambush his angel had told him awaited the king’s army.
His cousin, who lay in the arms of death. Who only wanted to be the greatest knight in the world.
Gaston wanted to go home to Galle, sit in the chair of judgment of his castle, and pontificate on which wine was the best at harvest time. He thought back to the peasants under the bridge, his heart now full of understanding. He vowed – would God accept such a vow? – to go home and beg Constance for her hand in marriage.
At the top of the last ridge, the king’s friend, the Count of the Borders, was sitting with a number of other gentlemen under the flapping folds of the Royal Banner. The Count d’Eu rose in his stirrups – damn it, that left hip hurt – and looked down to the river where the red-surcoted Royal Guard were just marching for the great three span bridge. On the other side, two companies of men-at-arms were formed in neat wedges at the base of the great ridge on which the fortress sat – half a league north of the river. From the Fortress of Lissen Carack to the bridge ran a trench, black, as if it had been burned.
At the western edge of the meadows and burned-out farms that had marked the demesne of the Abbess, thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of creatures swarmed like ants from a recently kicked hive.
As he watched, the long arm of a trebuchet mounted high in the fortress swung. It appeared to swing slowly, but its payload – invisible at this distance – flew at the sudden whip-crack release of the counterweight. The count looked for the fall of the shot, but he couldn’t see it.
The Count of the Borders waved. ‘My lord,’ he said. ‘You command the vanguard?’
‘I do. My cousin is wounded,’ Gaston said. ‘I have fewer than two hundred lances, and many of my younger knights are spent.’
‘Despite which, the king begs that you will use every effort to get your men across the river – dismount and occupy the line of works prepared for you.’ The count pointed at the black slash that ran from the fortress’s ridge to the bridge.
‘I see it,’ Gaston said. ‘But I lack the force to occupy that length.’
‘You shall be with the Royal Guard and all our archers,’ the Count of the Borders added. ‘All dispatch, my lord!’
Gaston could see creatures from the swarm now venturing farther and farther into the fields beyond the wood’s edge.
‘A moi!’ he ordered. ‘En avant!’
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn watched the Royal Army begin to deploy across the river. His blow was ready – a single hammer strike to win Alba.
The Royal Army appeared singularly unharmed by a morning-long ambush. That was unexpected. The Qwethenethogs alone should have done great damage amongst their ranks.
He felt a ripple of power – identified it, and cursed again. Both the dark sun and his former apprentice had survived. He acknowledged his own hubris in imagining them dealt with. It was the very curse of his existence. Why did he constantly think things would go his way?
Because they should.
He felt another use of power – closer to him, and it smelled like Qwethnethog. Like Thurkan.
He nodded and drew power to himself. The Qwethenethogs’ presence on this side of the river was very revealing.
The great daemon was coming for a trial of power. Thorn rocked his stone head.
Turquoise fire began to play along the edges of his stick-like tree limbs and his beard of grey-green moss oozed power, and the faeries flitting through the clearing, excited by the overflow of his vast resources, he now drained of power in a single sip, leaving their fragile bodies to flutter to the ground.
The magnificent daemon entered the clearing from the south. His hide was still wet from swimming the river, but green and brown lightning played along the sides of his head, down to his long, scythed arms and over his richly inlaid beak and armour.
Thorn let him come.
When they were a few horse lengths apart, Thorn raised one hoary arm. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘If you mean me harm, save it for the defeat of our enemies.’
Thurkan stopped but he shook his mighty head. ‘Greater Powers than you or I contend here today,’ he said. ‘You are a pawn in the plans of a greater Power.’
Those were not the words Thorn expected, and they stung – stung with the peculiar power of words that carry their own truth.
‘It cannot be,’ Thorn said.
‘Why else do the humans have every advantage when we have none? That thing you call fortune; we have none. Every turn we make favours the enemy. Let us withdraw from this field.’ Thurkan held up an axe. ‘Or we must be rid of you.’
Thorn needed time to test the hypothesis that he had been used. He was the one who used others – the enmity of the Outwallers for the Albans, the needs of the boglins for new ground to live, the hunting instincts of the wyverns and the trolls.
He was not, in turn, used.
‘We have been used!’ Thurkan insisted. ‘Order the retreat, and we will fight another day!’
Thorn considered it.
And he considered the great mass of his infantry – the wights in their magnificent armour, the five thousand irk archers, the squadrons of trolls ready to engage the enemy’s knights. The Outwallers and the wyverns and the other daemons.
‘Even if what you say is true,’ Thorn said, ‘we are about to win a great victory. We will scour the kingdom of Alba from the face of the continent. We will
Thurkan shook his great head. ‘You delude yourself,’ he said. ‘There is no number of boglins who can match this number of armoured men in combat. And Thorn – I call you by name – I call you three times to attend my words. A battle, says my grandsire, is the result of a situation wherein both sides imagine they can win a conclusive fight with one throw of the knucklebones.
Thorn chewed on Thurkan’s words for many heartbeats, and not a breeze stirred the torpid late spring heat in the woods. Insect noises stopped. Not a gwyllch chattered, as if all of nature waited on Thorn’s decisions.
‘Not for nothing do men call you The Orator, Thurkan,’ Thorn allowed. ‘You speak brilliantly. But I doubt your motives. You want this army for your own. The only good you know is the good of the Qwethnethog.’ He took a breath and let it out slowly, to still his rage. And then he threw a single phantasm, a long prepared blow, like a single punch.
The daemon reacted instantly, raising all of its not-inconsiderable power in a wall of walls to stop the blow.
Quick as a mountain lion Thorn cast again.
The single gout of green lightning blasted through his walls like a siege ram through the walls of the wattle and daub house, and the tall daemon crumpled to the ground without a sound. He lay still but for the thumping of his left leg under the command of his hindbrain, still battering the ground in rage and frustration at his own death.
