The air between them was thick with the misspent green power of his last phantasm, only partially expended. He had only to reach forth and take that power . . .
But if he was caught while doing it, it would be the end of him.
Carefully, he began to wrap sigils of concealment about himself, even as he roared with false defiance.
High above him, in the fortress of his enemies, someone seized the power of the Wild – raw – and shaped a mighty phantasm with it.
He wasn’t waiting for the trap to close. He fled.
Lissen Carak – de Vrailly
Jean de Vrailly judged his moment well. He had led the chivalry of Alba off to the west almost a league along the river. A handful of boglins had tried to oppose him, his sword was wet with their hellish ichor, and it was as easy as taking the heads off fennel plants in his mother’s garden.
And now-
Oh, the glory.
He raised his arm, closing his fist – turned his horse. ‘Halt!’ he ordered. ‘Now turn to face the enemy!’ Not a military command, but he had never led so many knights, and he didn’t know their commands in their language. So he turned out of the line, and cantered along the column. ‘Face me!’ he called. ‘Come! Turn your horses!’
As soon as half a dozen knights understood him, they all understood. And the great column, a thousand horses long, turned into a line a thousand horses wide as he cantered down the front, his lance held above his head, the royal arms of Alba sparkling on his chest.
He didn’t know where the thought came from, but suddenly it was there – he grinned and turned his horse to face the enemy. He was in the centre of this mighty line. To his right front, his own dismounted knights, led by his cousin, and the men of the King’s Guard had just slammed into the enemy fighting line. They were outnumbered badly.
But it didn’t matter.
Because he lay across the enemy’s line, like the crossing of a T, and the enemy had committed all of his reserves. And there was no force on earth, in the Wild or out of it, that could stop a thousand of his kind charging in a line.
He raised his lance high, feeling the astonishing, angelic vitality that filled him. ‘For God and honour!’ he roared.
‘Deus veult!’ cried the knights. Men closed their faceplates.
And then the line started forward.
The battle was over long before the first lance struck home. The enemy’s whole right wing had begun to melt back into the forest as soon as the knights emerged over the bridge – and now, as their charge rumbled forward, the wyverns, the trolls, and the handful of daemons edged back too. Some simply turned and ran for the woods. They didn’t have the bad judgment of men. Like any animal in the Wild faced with a larger predator, they turned and fled. Wyverns leapt into the air; the remaining trolls ran with stone-footed grace, and the daemons ran at the speed of racehorses – untouchable.
Only the boglins and irks stood and fought.
And in the centre, held by Thorn’s will, a dozen mighty creatures and a horde of boglins continued to try to kill the king and the dark sun.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain could no longer raise his sword to cut. He had the weapon in both hands – his left gauntlet held the blade halfway down, and he used it as a short spear, slamming the point into faces and armoured chests.
Moments of terror blended together – a scythe talon that came inside his visor, luck or skill directing the razor- sharp claw to curve up into his scalp and hair, leaving him alive instead of blind or dead.
A trio of irk warriors dragged him down with their sheer weight, their thin, strong limbs racketing against the steel of his armour in a killing frenzy. As slowly as honey poured on snow, or so it seemed, his right hand burrowed past the hideous strength of their limbs to the rondel dagger at his hip, and then he was on one knee, and they were gone, and his dagger dripped gore.
The comfort of steel armour rasping against his own – back to back. He didn’t know who it was, he was just thankful for steel not chitin.
And then, a daemon.
This lord of the Wild was taller than a war horse. The captain hadn’t remarked on their absence from the battlefield, but now that he faced one some part of his brain registered that he hadn’t faced one before.
The crest on its head was a livid blue – utterly different from the one he’d faced in the woods to the west, or in the dark.
It watched him intently, but it didn’t attack.
He watched it and wished he had his spear – currently leaning against his armour rack inside the fortress – and a horse, and a ballista, and twenty fresh friends.
The thing had a pole-axe the size of a wagon’s axle-tree. The head was flint. It was crusted with blood.
It turned its head.
Had he been fresh he’d have sprung forward with a mighty attack while it was distracted, but instead he merely breathed again.
It looked back at him.
‘You are the dark sun,’ it said at last. ‘I can take you, but if you hurt me, I will die here. So instead-’ It saluted him with a flourish of the great pole-axe. ‘Live long, enemy of my enemy.’
It turned and ran.
The captain watched it go, throwing boglins from its path, with no idea who or what it was. Or why it had left him alive.
But he was trembling.
He fought more boglins. He cut some sort of tentacled thing from the Prior, who flicked him a salute and went back to work. Later, he saw the king go down, and he managed to get a foot on either side of the king’s head, and then all the monsters in the Wild came for him.
Some time passed, and he was standing between Sauce and Bad Tom, and the King of Alba’s body lay between his feet. The last rush of the monsters had been so ferocious as to rob the word of all meaning – an endless rain of blows, which only fine armour could repel, because sheer fatigue had robbed muscles of the ability to parry.
Tom was still killing.
Sauce was still killing.
Michael was still standing . . .
. . . so the captain kept standing too, because that’s what he did.
They came for him, and he survived them.
There finally came a point when the blows stopped. When there was nothing to push against, no fresh foe to withstand.
Before he could think about it, the captain slapped his visor open and drank in the air. And then bent down to check the king.
The man was still alive.
The captain had had a leather bottle, just an hour ago. He started to search his person for it with the slow incompetence of the utterly exhausted.
Not there.
