His back grated on the stone wall. He had nowhere left to retreat to. A sword clicked into his right arm harness, and an imp fell away dead. He saw the familiar green and gold of the Muriens arms.
His dagger was dangling from the chain at his wrist and he got it back, buried it in an imp that was trying to bite him.
The arrows sliced down in front of him like a protective curtain. Out in the fields across the valley there was suddenly a light show-gold and green and purple and black.
A horn sounded. It was not a human sound. The horn blew over and over like a human hunting horn, but its tone was deep and booming and had the knell of doom to it.
Ser John got on with the business of killing. He pushed off the wall, accepted the price of friendly arrows slamming into his helmet, and he used his long dagger like a two-handed pick, his strikes accurate, his movements increasingly spare as he found the right way to fight the imps, using his armoured ankles and feet as a lure to draw them into the range of the dagger’s bite, defending his groin carefully.
One of the Morean knights-Ser Giannis-had a spear with a long blade, and he was untouched in the centre of a whirl of death, his weapon passing back and forth, back and forth, stabbing and cutting. Farther along, one of the company knights, Ser Dagon la Forêt, used a poleaxe with equal artistry. Ser Aneas fought with a weapon in each hand, like a dancing master, except that he seemed to clear more space than most. One of the Jarsay knights was down and messily dead, and another had a dozen of the things on him like limpets because he wasn’t wearing proper maille.
Ser John went and cleared the imps off him like a father getting leeches off a child. The imps were thinning.
Behind them were boglins. Despite eight knights and a dozen archers, the boglins kept coming. Ser John was so full of combat spirit, fear and elation at being alive that he didn’t understand what was happening. He took a moment after the last imp was killed-Ser Dagon stepped on its head-to retrieve his pole-hammer.
Sixty boglins were no match for eight knights. But they still came on.
“Shoot them!” Ser John panted.
“No more arrows, Cap’n,” said a voice above his head. “Sorry, boss.”
Indeed, the whole area of the fight with the imps was like a field of stubble, except that the stubble was heavy war arrows shot almost straight down and standing in clumps where the fighting had been fiercest. A dozen men had loosed more than four hundred arrows in three minutes. Their entire load-almost forty a man.
The boglins were wallowing through the mud. Behind them, something bigger broke through the hedgerow. There was a flash of green fire, an explosion of mud, and a hole as long as a horse opened. Boglins poured through-as did daemons.
Ser John shook his helmeted head and tasted the sour air inside his bascinet. “Fuck,” he said.
The boglins were so hampered by the mud that they’d have all been killed by the archers-had there been any arrows.
“Fuck it,” the older man said and dropped over the wall. He began to pluck arrows from the ground-in a moment all the archers were there.
“Never get up the fuckin’ wall again, mark my words,” muttered the older archer.
The shorter Morean knight had a bottle of wine, of all things. He handed it to Ser John, who had a pull and then gave it to the old archer.
“Now that’s right decent o’ you, Ser John.” He took a drink and handed it on.
He had a dozen muddy arrows in his belt.
The boglins were seventy yards away and looked exhausted, their wing cases half open and their vestigial wings hanging loose.
The archers began climbing back up the wall. Only one man could make it-their arms were tired-and he had to rig a rope.
The older archer loosed his dozen arrows into the boglins as they plodded on through the mud. So did the other archers as they waited their turn to climb.
The boglins lay down. Behind them, the mass of creatures-boglins and daemons-did not come forward. They began to move west, sliding along the hedgerow. At the burning hole, something big, like a cave troll, only darker, emerged. But its entire attention was focused down the hill, or across the valley.
Only then did Ser John understand.
“There’s someone else behind them, harrying them!” he shouted. “Saint George and Alba! Christ and all his saints, lads! Ser Ricar must be behind them!”
Indeed, only now did he hear the roar-the waterfall-like rush of sound of combat. Ser John reckoned that the whole of the far hedgerow must be engulfed in fighting. He looked left and right.
The enemy force below him in the muddy field was now all moving west, many of the creatures crouching low to the ground. They were leaving a trail of stolen objects behind-a quilt, a blanket, shoes, a girl’s doll and an apple basket. Somewhere they had struck a human settlement and left nothing but death behind, and now…
The shapeless black thing in the hedgerow gap whirled and cast. Ser John saw it-saw the casting-and then he was flat on his back again.
But he was mostly unharmed. He got up heavily, head throbbing and his neck feeling as if it would never be right again. The sigil he wore on his chest-the gift of Prior Wishart of the Order-burned as if heated on a stove. But he was alive.
He thought that the creatures-stripped of their imps-were near panic. But the hammer-like charge of his knights would slow to nothing in the same mud that had mired the imps.
He looked up. “What’s your name, Master Archer?” he called.
“Wilful Murder. Sir.” The man shrugged, as if acknowledging that it wasn’t a typical name.
“Can you hit them from here?” he asked.
Wilful Murder grunted. As if against his better judgment, he jumped down from the wall-again.
“Long shot,” he said. He drew to his ear, his right leg sinking as if under great weight, his whole body rocking as his heavy back muscles engaged. He loosed high, his body bent forward into the bow.
His arrow fell into the mob at the base of the field like a thunderbolt.
Heads turned.
“If you can reach out and touch yon then do!” Wilful called. “Otherwise, stay the fuck up on the wall.”
Three men jumped down. They looked scared. A fourth man looked down the field for some heartbeats, shrugged, and dropped off the wall in turn. He began to prowl the ground for arrows.
“I need a lighter shaft,” he said as he pushed past Ser John.
The handful of arrows had no obvious effect. The archers had to make too much effort to loose fast-each shaft took long seconds to pull and aim, and all of them flexed their right arms between pulls.
Then the heavy arrows were plunging, one every few heartbeats, into the mass of boglins at the base of the field.
Ser Giannis came over and opened his faceplate. “I have never faced this-this…” His face did an odd thing.
“The Wild,” Ser John said as kindly as he could.
“Yes,” Ser Giannis said. “Yes. But I think…”
Ser John was trying to get a sense of what was going on beyond the next hedge.
“I think that if the archers kill enough of them, the rest will charge us. Yes?” Ser Giannis pointed his elegant, ichor-caked spear down the field.
Ser Aneas laughed mirthlessly. “Many things my master-at-arms told me make sense now,” he said.
A long bowshot away, one of Wilful Murder’s arrows struck a daemon in the head, plummeting almost straight down. It went into the skull and struck the great creature to the mud, full length, like a blow from an angel.
The growling, roaring, crashing sound was closer.
The great horn spoke again-three long blasts.
“What the hell is that?” asked Ser Dagon.