The Red Knight

And dead, you fool, he thought to himself. Dead men never become lord mayor, nor sheriff.

Set against that, he’d brought them through an ambush and one straight-up fight and last night most of them had snatched a little sleep. He was reasonably sure that, with the Magus at his side, they could cut their way to the fair at Lissen Carack.

But what if they arrived to find no fair? The farther north-west they went, the less likely it seemed that there was a fair at Lissen Carack. Or even a convent.

On the other hand, going back seemed both craven and dangerous. And the old Magus had been very clear: he was going to Lissen Carack, not back down the river to the king.

He scratched his itching head again.

He was seven leagues west of Albinkirk, if his notions of the road were accurate. About two days travel to the fords of the Cohocton, and another full day at oxen speed up the north side to the Convent.

The sun rose fully and the sky was truly blue for the first time in three days. Men’s clothes dried, they warmed up, and the chatter of a well-ordered company began to spread. Men ate stale bread and drank a little wine, or small beer if they had it fresh, or hard cider if not, and the column rolled briskly along.

The soldiers were twitchy – Old Bob had a dozen mounted men spread a hundred horse-lengths wide in the trees ahead of the wagons, and the rest covered the rear in a tight knot ready to charge in any direction under Guilbert.

They didn’t stop to eat a noonday meal, but rolled on.

When the sun was well down in the sky, Old Bob rode back to report that they were coming to one of the turn fields, the cleared fields maintained specifically for the fair convoys to camp.

‘Looks like hell,’ he said. ‘But it has fresh water and it’s clear enough.

In fact, raspberry prickers had grown up over most of the field, and while one small convoy seemed to have made camp there a few days before, they had stayed to the edge by the road and cut no brush.

Guilbert sent his men out into the raspberry canes in armour, to cut armloads of the stuff with their swords, and he had the archers lash them in bundles on the sturdy Xs of a pair of fascine horses, cradles made of heavy logs where armloads of brush and prickers could be wrapped tight. In the last three hours of daylight, while the boys cooked and brought in water and the older men saw to the animals and circled the wagons, the soldiers build a rampart of raspberry cane bundles.

And then, the evening being dry, they set fire to the rest of the field. The canes went up like dried wood, burning into the edge of the trees in a few minutes.

The Magus came awake to watch the sparks rise into the clear night air.

‘That was extremely foolish,’ he said.

Random was eating a garlic sausage. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Clear field for archery. No cover for the little boglins and spider irks.’

‘Fire calls strong as naming,’ the old Magus said. ‘Fire is the Wild’s bane.’ He glared at the merchant, and his glare held weight.

Random had been glared at all his life. ‘Convoy’s safer with a clear field around,’ he said, like an angry boy.

‘Not if six wyverns come, you idiot. Not if a dozen golden bears decide you’ve intruded – not if even a pair of daemon wardens decide youy’ve broken the Forest Law. Then your clear field will not save you.’ But he looked resigned. ‘And irks have nothing to do with spiders. Irks are Fae. Now – where’s my patient?’

‘The young knight? Sound asleep. He wakes up, talks to himself, and goes back to sleep.’

‘Best thing for him,’ Harmodius said. He walked around the circle of wagons, found his man, and looked him over.

Harmodius put the blanket back after a long look, and then the younger man’s eyes opened.

‘You might have just let me live,’ he said. He looked pained. ‘Sweet Jesu – I mean you might have let me die.’

‘No one ever thanks me,’ the Magus agreed.

‘I’m Gawin Murien,’ he said. Groaned. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘I know who you are,’ the Magus said. ‘Now they can call you Hard Neck.’

Neither man laughed.

‘I don’t really know what I did to you. I’ll work it out over the next few days. Don’t worry about it.’

‘You mean, don’t worry that I’m gradually turning into some loathsome God-cursed enemy of man who will try to slay and eat all my friends?’ Gawin asked. His voice strove for calm, but there was panic in it.

‘You have a vivid imagination,’ Harmodius said.

‘So I’ve always been told.’ Gawin looked at his own upper left arm and recoiled in horror. ‘Good Christ, I have scales. It wasn’t a dream!’ His voice rose suddenly, and his eyes narrowed. ‘By Saint George – my lord, must I ask you to kill me?’ His eyes went far away. ‘I was so beautiful,’ he said, in another voice.

Harmodius made a face. ‘So very dramatic. I seized the power to heal you from something of the Wild.’ He shrugged. ‘I wasn’t really fully in control of the power, but never mind that. Without it, you’d have died. And whatever you may feel about it right now, death is not better!’

The young knight rolled away, closing his eyes. ‘Like you would know. Go away and let me sleep. Oh, Blessed Virgin, am I doomed to be a monster?’

‘I very much doubt it,’ Harmodius said, but he knew that his own slight doubt was not very reassuring.

‘Please leave me alone,’ the knight said.

‘Very well. But I’ll be back to check on you.’ Harmodius reached out with a tendril of power and it was his turn to recoil at what he saw. Gawin saw his reaction.

‘What’s happening to me?’

Harmodius shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he lied.

An hour after full dark, the enemy struck. There was a whistle of arrows from the darkness, and two of the guildsmen on guard fell – one silently, the other with the panicked screams of a man in pain.

Guilbert had the wagons manned and alert in a hundred heartbeats. Which was as well, because a wave of boglins, announced by a sinister rustling, exploded into the north face of the wagon-fort.

But Guilbert was an old campaigner, and his dozen archers shot fire-arrows into the piles of cane and brush left around the old clearing, and most of them caught. And then, by the flickering light of spring bonfires, the guildsmen and the soldiers killed. Having negotiated the raspberry cane walls, the boglins were almost incapable of climbing the tall wagons after, and they died in dozens trying.

But the red arrows arching like vicious dragonflies over the fires began to annoy the defenders. The arrows lacked the potency to penetrate good mail, and their flint heads shattered easily, but they sunk deep in exposed flesh, and men who took them, even as a scratch on the hand, became fevered in an hour.

Harmodius went from man to man, pulling the poison by grammerie. He’d had a day to gather power and rest, and he was full of sunlight, his aids charged and ready except for the two wands, whose charging required greater time, attention, and investment.

When the fires burned down, he cast a powerful phantasm of light on a tree way out at the edge of the raspberry thicket. He repeated the spell six times, all the way around the wagon-fort, to back-light their attackers and blind their archers. But the Hermetic cost was immense, and he was shouting his power to the world.

As his sixth light casting began to fade, and the deadly, wasp-like arrows began to come in again, Harmodius felt the presence of an enemy. A practitioner.

Another magus.

There was a moment’s warning – possibly as the other one raised a defensive ward.

Harmodius raised his own. And then, like a man fighting with a sword and buckler, he pushed his ward across the open space between himself and the other source of power. If his ward was held close to his body, it could only cover him. Held close to the other magus, the ward could cover the whole convoy.

A simple exercise in mathematica that most practitioners never learned.

It cost a fraction more energy to maintain the ward over there than here. Energy exploded against his ward and was deflected. Irks and boglins died under the onslaught of phantasms which should have been supporting them.