The Red Knight

Tom was sitting against the stable. ‘Backplate took it,’ he said with a grin. ‘Christ, I thought I was done.’ He pointed at the sword. ‘Nice trick, that.’

‘Half-sword versus wyvern,’ the captain said. ‘A standard move. All the best masters teach it.’ He stripped away the ruin of his left glove and wrapped it tight around his cut. ‘I just need more practice.’

Tom chuckled. ‘Sauce just killed t’other, I’ll wager,’ he said, pointing at the cheering archers.

Sure enough, the next moments brought the mounted sortie back through the main gate, dragging the head of the second wyvern. Brought to earth by fifty arrows, it had died on their lance tips without injuring a single human.

Tom nodded. ‘That was well done, Captain.’

The captain shrugged. ‘We were ready, we laid our trap, you burned their camp and surprised them, and they still killed our people.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t ready enough. I was caught lollygagging.’

Tom shrugged back. ‘They killed a lot of people.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But not many of our people.’

‘You’re a hard bastard, Tom Mac Lachlan.’

Bad Tom shrugged, obviously taking it as a compliment, then something caught his eye in the chapel. He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something bad.

‘What?’ asked the captain.

‘Ever notice how they’re always smaller when they’re dead?’ Tom asked. ‘It’s just the fear that makes ’em seem so big.’

The captain nodded. He was looking at the wyvern too, and he had to admit that it was smaller than it had seemed in the fight. And it looked different. Paler. A mass of wounds and cuts and barbs.

Almost pitiful.

Tom smiled and started to get to his feet, and the Abbess was there.

He expected anger or recriminations from her, but she merely extended a hand and took his.

‘Let us heal your people,’ she said.

The captain nodded, still pressing his glove tight around his hand. There was a lot of blood. She got an odd look on her face, just before he fainted in her arms.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Deep in the marches of the next night, the enemy attacked the castle of Albinkirk.

Ser Alcaeus had passed beyond fatigue. He was in a world lived one heartbeat at a time, and events passed him in a series of illuminated flashes, as if lightning was playing on all of them.

There were some assaults on the walls of the castle, but unlike the low stone curtain walls of the town the castle walls were too high and too well maintained for the flood of Wild creatures to climb. The handful of beasts who made it to the top were killed.

But every attack cost him a little more.

One flash was a fight with an irk – a tall, thin, beautiful creature with a hooked nose like a raptor’s beak and chain armour as fine as fish scales that turned his sword again and again. And when, by dint of desperate strength, he knocked it to the stones, and its helmet spun away, the irk’s eyes begged for mercy. Like a man’s.

Alcaeus would remember that. Even as his dagger terminated it he registered that it, too, had humanity.

. . . and what followed was worse.

Because something came.

It was huge and foreboding, out in the horrifying fire-lit ruins of the town. It strode forward with a hideous shambling gait, and it was as tall as the city wall or taller.

It was alive.

And now it raised its staff – the size of a mounted knight’s heavy lance, or bigger – and a line of white-green fire struck the castle wall. The stone deflected in it a wash of white-green fire for as long as the terrified men on the wall might have counted to ten.

And then there was a rending crack and the wall breached, about ten paces to the left of the gate. The whole wall moved. Men fell – chunks of flint fell to crush the creatures below.

Then the monster raised its arms and seemed to call the stars down from the heavens, and as they began to plummet, Alcaeus fought not to fall on his face and hide.

The stars screamed down from the clear sky, falling to earth with an eerie, unearthly wail, and struck. One struck out in the fields, killing a wave of boglins. One struck in the centre of the town, and the cloud of fire reached into the heavens. The whole castle moved, and a cloud of dust reached like a fist into the heavans.

The third struck the castle wall mere feet from the great crack, and an enormous piece of masonry and stone fell outward with a crash.

Alcaeus ran for the breach, and found himself with another armoured man – Cartwright, he thought, or the Galle, Benois. The breach was narrow – two men wide.

They filled it with their bodies.

And the enemy came for them.

At some point, Benois fell. He was stunned, and Alcaeus tried to cover him, but the enemy reached a hundred hands and talons for his feet, sank claws into his flesh and dragged him to the edge of the wall, inch by inch. He screamed, unmanned with horror, and tried to rise. Boglin weapons cut him in the soft places not covered by armour, peeled his plate away.

They were eating him alive.

Alcaeus struck and struck again, powered by desperate fear, and he straddled the screaming man’s body and cut and cut.

It wasn’t enough. And then Benois grabbed at his ankles.

He ripped himself clear, and leaped back into the uncertain footing of the breach, and Benois was gone, a pile of hellspawn feeding on him, his armour torn open -

Alcaeus made himself breathe.

Suddenly Ser John was there with his mace. The five foot weapon moved like a goodwife’s broom on a new spring morn, and he shattered first the boglins around them, and then Benois’ skull.

There was a flash of light to the east – a distant whump of displaced air. A column of flame leaped up perhaps a league away. Perhaps two.

Then another – even greater.

The creatures of the Wild faltered, looked over their shoulders, and the fury of their assault rapidly abated.

Albinkirk – Thorn

In an instant, Thorn knew that something had gone wrong.

He’d drained himself by calling even the smallest stones from the heavens. It was a showy, inaccurate and inefficient working, but it had spectacular results when it worked. And he loved to cast it, the way a strong man loves to show his strength.

The daemons were impressed, and that alone was worth the fatigue. Better, the town was utterly destroyed and it had been far, far easier than even he had hoped.

I have grown so strong, he thought. What he had planned as a mere diversion had become a triumph. She would hear of it and cower in fear.

Perhaps taking the Rock is worth doing after all. Perhaps I will refashion myself as a warlord.

But the twin pillars of fire behind him came from his camp – the camp where his greatest allies, the irks and the boglins, stored their food and their belongings and their slaves and their loot. And it was afire.

He had left his most trusted troops had been left to guard it.

He turned with his army and strode for it.