The Red Knight (83 page)

His third cover was not quite fast enough – he intended to cast a single line of power like a sword parry – but Thorn’s speed left him too late, and he tried to widen his cast,
with too little power.

He still stopped most of it.

The rest fell on the curtain wall to his left. A section of wooden hoardings twenty paces long burned in a flash, and a section of the wall cracked and fell outward, killing two archers
instantly and crushing the two older Lanthorn men to pulp.

Harmodius felt them die.

His failure made him angry, and anger made him lash out. His riposte was pitiful, small, weak, too late.

It was also entirely unexpected. Like a slow attack in a sword fight, his flare of anger sailed out into the dark and caught Thorn unprepared.

Pain enraged Thorn. It always had.

He struck back.

Lissen Carak, The Lower Town – The Red Knight

The Lower Town square was carpeted in corpses. The captain passed in the chapel doorway looking for his men-at-arms. The archers were spreading out, right and left.

‘On me,’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’ He ran across the square, and they pounded along behind him.

Parties with ladders broke off and headed east, through the rubble.

He could hear fighting to this left, and more straight ahead. Angelo di Laternum materialized out of the darkness.

‘Ser Jehannes prays your aid,’ he said formally.

‘On me,’ the captain said, and followed the squire. The captain had no time to comment that Jehannes was off course.

A vast burst of light lit the sky, like all the summer lightning ever seen combined in one single burst. The levin flash showed the captain that Squire Angelo was bleeding from the shoulders of
his harness; the archers were splashed in red and black and, ahead of him, Jehannes’s men-at-arms were caught in the flash, illuminated like a manuscript illustration of knights fighting
monsters.

‘Ware!’ the captain shouted. ‘Daemons!’

The terror struck him like a heavy mall. He set his teeth and pushed himself forward through the terror, and one of the things turned on him with its supernatural speed.

The captain had supernatural speed, too.

The daemon’s blade met his, so hard that sparks flew from his blade, and he yielded before the creature’s awesome strength, rotated his blade around the fulcrum of his armoured
wrist, stepped inside its terror and pushed his point into its brain.

It fell away off his sword, and he was on the next. It turned its head – its beautiful eyes catching his.

The daemon’s taloned hand came up, too fast to block.

His sword came down.

The daemon stumbled away, spraying fear the way a skunk sprays scent, and the captain found himself retching. There was blood in his eyes.

My faceplate is open.

It got me.

A different fear, colder and heavier, settled on his gut.

But the daemons were not immortal; their ichor was mixed with the blood of men on the ground and they were retreating. As they began to put distance between them and their foes, the fear
abated.

The captain saw there were fewer than a dozen of the things.

The archers – frozen in place – suddenly burst into action. The last daemon – the one the captain had wounded – sprouted shafts like a field growing grass.

The thing turned, its fear welled, and it fell.

Jehannes was shouting for his men.

‘Stand!’ called the captain. It sounded like a squeal. But Wilful Murder roared it from behind him. ‘Stand!’ he called.

Jehannes paused.

‘The tower!’ the captain insisted.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn’s burst of rage fell like a hammer.

Harmodius watched the strike come in, helpless to stop it, a whole heartbeat to see his death wash at him in sickly green radiance.

He felt the fortress’s Hermetic defences go back up, and knew it would never be enough.

The great works that powered the defence were brilliantly designed – they funnelled what they could, channelled some more, reflected yet more. They were so well artificed that they almost
seemed
intelligent.
New practitioners attempted to meet force with force – skilled practitioners knew to meet force with guile, deflecting the opponent’s energy like a skilled
swordsman. Most static sigils were easily overcome, but this . . .

In the moment of his annihilation, Harmodius thought
Who built this?

The wards caught, turned, and covered. But there was only so much the ancient sigils could do.

And the rest burst through the great wards like a river in flood bursting through a levy.

He raised a hand.

The Abbess reached past him, and stopped the overflow of the great spell of wrath just short of their place on the wall. She flung it back down the path of the casting.

She reached out and put her left hand on his shoulder.

I know nothing of this sort of war
she said.
Let me in.

Through her, he could feel her sisters, singing plainchant in the chapel. Their power did not fuel the Abbess directly. It was far subtler than that.

Despite the situation, he had to pause to admire the magnificence of the structure. The fortress. The sigils. The sisters, who could maintain the power of the sigils indefinitely, regardless
of their individual weakness.

He wondered, yet again, who made this?

Then he gripped her spiritual hand in his own and led her through the great bronze doors of his palace, like a bridegroom leading a bride. ‘Welcome,’ he said.

She was a much younger and less spiritual woman, in the Aethereal. Suddenly he had a frisson of memory. Of this same woman dressed for hunting, standing in his master’s chamber, tapping
her whip on her hand. Trying to get his master to go out riding.

He dismissed the memory, although here it took on a visible aspect, so that she saw it and smiled. ‘He was the worst lover imaginable,’ she said with a sad smile. ‘He
didn’t hunt, didn’t ride, wouldn’t dance. He was always late, and made many promises he couldn’t keep.’ She shrugged. ‘I wanted him. And look at the
consequences. Some sins do not wash away.’ She spread her arms. ‘It is very nice here.’

He flushed with her praise, as if he was a much younger man. Time in the Aethereal had virtually no meaning so he had no sense of urgency. ‘Did you ever suspect? ‘ he asked
carefully. ‘When he turned?’

The Abbess sat in one of his great leather armchairs. She had riding boots under her voluminous riding skirts, which she crossed over the arm of the chair. ‘You know, don’t you,
that in old age, one doesn’t easily adopt positions like this,’ she said happily. ‘Ah, to be young.’ She leaned back. ‘You must have asked yourself, many
times.’

‘I’ve been largely trapped in his phantasm for many years,’ Harmodius said. ‘But yes. I think of it now. All the time.’

‘I only know that in the months before Chevin he discovered something. Something terrible. I badgered him to tell me, and he would smile and tell me that I wasn’t ready to
understand it.’

Harmodius grimaced. ‘He never said as much to me.’

The Abbess nodded. ‘But now you know what he knew. I know it too, now.’

There aren’t many secrets in the Aethereal.

‘Yes,’ he said.

The Abbess shook her head. ‘Any servant of the Order of Saint Thomas knows that the green and the gold are the same,’ she said. ‘Richard was a fool who saw the world
entirely in shades of black and white. He still is. A staggering intellect, a tower of puissance, and no common sense whatsoever.’ She shrugged. ‘Enough chatter. My home is being blown
to bits. Show me how to use our power to stop him.’

‘Like this,’ he said. ‘But it will be more efficient if you pass me power and I cast.’

In a heartbeat – in no time at all, because in the Aethereal, time had so little meaning – they stood on a balcony of his great palace, looking out over the world of
solidity.

In his vision, Thorn stood out like a beacon tagged in green. Harmodius pointed her hand at the thing that had been her lover.

She flooded Harmodius with power.

He made fire.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

For the first time, Thorn paused to raise a shield. His burst of temper was over, and Harmodius’s response had been respectable. No more, but no less.

And the fortress’s defences were back. He had landed some good blows. But now he was risking himself for nothing. He raised a second shield.

Harmodius’ mighty blow rolled away like a child’s stick on a knight’s armour.

Thorn grunted.

It might have been a laugh.

Lissen Carak, The Lower Town – The Red Knight

Tom’s unconscious body took six men to carry and the captain was unwilling to lose the horses that had been left for the Lower Town garrison, so a party of archers cleared
the town’s upper gate and opened it. The garrison escaped behind the horses, and the sortie went over the walls via ladders.

It was all going very well, until the daemons struck back.

His rearguard was slow in forming – understandable, in the conditions – and suddenly three of them were down, dead, and a gleaming monster stood over them with a pair of wickedly
curved axes gleaming in the soft spring moonlight. Marcus – Jehannes’s valet – and Ser Willem Greville, his armour opened as if he was wearing leather. A third man was face down
beside them.

The fear was like a waft of foul air.

There were more daemons behind it – fluid and horrible, arresting and beautiful in their movements. And below them, a legion of boglins, irks and men poured into the town they were
leaving.

Just like that, the captain was alone.

‘Run, little man,’ the daemon whispered.

The captain reached
inside and found Prudentia.

The working was already aligned.

He opened the door before she could protest – he was so much faster than he had been.

The green whistled through the crack, a tempest—

‘He can reach you!’

‘He’s otherwise engaged,’ the captain told his tutor.

‘I need to tell you so many things,’ she said.

He smiled and
was back in the dark.

His sword arm was bathed in silver.

The daemon rotated its two axes, one over each wrist and golden-green light joined the two.

‘You!’ said the daemon. ‘Ahh, how I have longed to meet you.’

The captain got his blade up into guard, and cast.

The beam of silver-white light rose into the night like a beacon. And then fell to earth in the centre of the town.

‘Missed,’ hissed the daemon.

The captain backed away, rapidly.

Above him on the trail, a crossbow loosed with a snap.

The daemon grunted as the bolt struck.

Let loose his own spell.

The captain caught it – marvelling at the ease with which he fielded the blow. In
the Aethereal, his adversary’s blow was like the cut of a sword, and he caught it and parried it
with a sword of his own power, flicking it away.
And he was back in the solid, because the daemon followed his phantasm immediately with a heavy cut from his right axe.

He could remember the first time he’d stopped such an attack by Hywel. Had been hit in the next instant because of the sheer pleasure of having accomplished it. Now, as then, he almost
died through admiring his own cleverness.

He passed forward into the attack, his sword at eye level, the Guard of the Window, and the axe fell away harmlessly like rain off a roof.

He began to cut overhand, his left foot powering forward, and he caught the growth of his opponent’s power and he
turned the blow even as it was rising from his adversary’s
talons.

In the
solid
the attack came in, and he drove the power into the stones of the road between them.

The road exploded, knocking him flat.

With a high scream the daemon leaped the crater and swung both axes at once.

He saw Michael step over him and he caught both blows – one on his buckler, one on his long sword. The squire staggered, but the blows fell away.

The captain was backpedalling from between his squire’s knees; using his elbows, steel sabatons scraping the road, he got himself back.

He rolled to the left, almost falling off the elevated road. The daemon captain was pounding Michael with blow after blow, and the lad was standing his ground, pushing his sword and his buckler
up into the blows, deflecting them, using the daemon’s strength against it as best he could.

The other daemons were trying to get around the fight.

The captain got his feet under him and he cut at the daemon from the side – but the thing parried his blow high with an axe blade – a horrifying display of skill – and flicked
his weapon forward. It was all the captain could do to bat the blow aside.

Both men fell back as the daemon hammered blow after blow, one axe then the other, in an endless rhythm. It might have been predictable, except that it was so
fast.

And then, during the moment that the captain had one axe turned on his long sword, and Michael had the other – just for a heartbeat – safely on his buckler—

Jehannes punched his pole-axe between them.

The daemon fell away, folding over the blow. But its armour – or its eldritch skin, or its sigils of power – held.

The captain stumbled back, and he felt Michael at his shoulder.

‘Let me in,’ Jehannes shouted.

Michael slumped and Jehannes stepped past him.

Two daemons leaped past their leader, who was just gaining his feet.

Far above them on the fortress, the trebuchet loosed.

Thump-snack