The Prior rode up and saluted. ‘We’ll cover you!’
The captain saluted as Michael handed him his heavy spear. ‘If we aren’t out before full dark,’ the captain said, ‘Assume the bridge is lost.’
The Prior crossed himself. ‘God go with you, Ser Knight.’
‘God doesn’t give a shit,’ the captain said. ‘But it’s the thought that counts. On me!’ he called, and started up the slope of new turned earth. It was damp and hard – hardened with something excreted by the boglins, to judge from the smell. Acrid, like naphtha.
There were fifty boglins on the wall, and they died when the men-at-arms ripped through them.
The captain looked down into the inferno of the courtyard. All the merchant wagons were afire, and the courtyard crawled with figures like the damned in hell – men stripped of their skin, shrieking their lungs out; armoured boglins in glowing, fire-lit white. Most of them crowded to the door of the nearest tower, but more poured from a gaping wound in the earth where a dozen flagstones had been hurled aside, like maggots in a bloated corpse when it is opened. More boglins on the walls – but on the east wall, a small, disciplined company fought back to back, holding the opposite curtain against assault from both directions.
‘Files from the right!’ the captain called, and led his men down off the curtain wall – down the ramp intended for siege engines to be hauled up to the curtain, and there were a pair of pale boglins gleaming there, each with a pole-axe.
He had no time for finesse. He raised his spear, point low and butt high and caught the first creature’s heavy cut on his haft – wrapped its arm with his own in the high key that men practised when wrestling in armour – and then ripped its arm from its body like a man ripping a crab leg from a new-cooked crab.
The thing’s other arm came at him – he rammed his spear point into its head, let go of the shaft with his armoured left hand and punched into the boglin’s throat. It’s great maw opened, mandibles flashing at his visor – overhand, he rammed the spearhead down its gullet and acrid ichor blew out of the top of it like lava from a new volcano.
‘Form your front!’ he roared, even as Sauce beheaded the second armoured boglin with her axe.
Ser Jehannes came up on his left, and Sauce cleared her weapon and fell in next, tapping her axe-haft against the breastplates of Ser Jehannes and Ser Tancred, and the line was formed.
The armoured creatures were trying to overrun the defenders of the north tower, and the captain pointed with his spear. ‘Charge!’ he called.
Twenty paces into the rear of the things.
His sabatons rang on the pavement – he stumbled on a corpse.
And then – a storm of iron. Skittering screeches and staccato clicks like the beat of an insane drummer as the mass by the North Tower turned and charged him.
In the first meeting he was head to head with an armoured monster the size of Bad Tom – the complex interlacing of its front armour over the interstices of its six armour plates was like an obscene mouth as the thing reared back, its whole strength bent on a single, crushing blow from its great hammer, its body bent like a bow with the effort.
He set his feet and took the blow on his haft, rotated the weapon on the pivot of his opponent’s blow, and slammed a spike into the middle of its helmeted head. His spike penetrated the thing’s face plate, and it spasmed.
Behind his dying opponent towered another, wielding two long swords, and even as he watched, the thing beheaded Ser Jehannes’s new squire, the two weapons coming together like a tailor’s shears. Jehannes leaped to avenge his squire and took a pommel to the helmet that staggered him, and two lightning fast blows followed it, literally beating him to the ground.
The captain’s command sense shrieked in panic. The boglins had stopped his men-at-arms. It shouldn’t have been possible. There was nothing in the Wild that could stop twenty fully armoured men.
Not many things.
The captain paused and locked eyes with the thing standing over Jehannes, and it knew him. He leaped at the double-sworded thing, but his spear remained lodged in his last kill, and he had to leave it.
Double Sword turned from his prey – Jehannes – and faced him. It was yet another kind of boglin – sleek, taller than Bad Tom and heavily muscled, with man-made chainmail covering all its joints and feral, organic plate armour that might have been grown, or very finely forged. A wight.
At the edge of his peripheral vision, Sauce rammed a spike through the carapace of another armoured monster and screamed her war cry.
Ser Tancred was locked with another, his arms straining against it as his squire stabbed his long sword into its armpit – rapid, professional stabs that made its limbs thrash.
Double Sword tapped its blades together and leaped at him with animal rapidity.
The captain snatched his rondel dagger from his belt and trusted his armour. He entered between the blades, arms high, dagger in both fists, and the longsword blows crashed into his shoulder plates. The hardened steel bent and split – only to cut into the rings of the mail haubergeon underneath, and the blades were held, though the force drove through the thickly padded jupon under the mail, and still managed to bruise his shoulders . . .
But he swung the dagger overhand, two handed through the boglin’s mail aventail and into its neck.
Six times.
It’s limbs spasmed, but it’s forearms tightened like a band of steel around the captain’s shoulders. And it lit up with power, eyes glowing cool blue as it prepared-
He drove his armoured knee in between its legs – nothing there to hurt, but his blow took it off balance, and he pushed his left foot forward and threw the thing over his outstretched right leg. Its wing cases snarled in his knee armour’s flanges and ripped free. Its own weight accelerated its fall, but its limbs clasped him fast, and he fell atop it, his rondel dagger a projection from his fists.
His steel carapace held.
The monster’s didn’t. The triangular blade punched cleanly though it, and ichor jetted out.
He didn’t stop, but pulled the foot-long steel dagger clear of the wound and drove it up under the thing’s mandibles that were opening and closing with terrific force on the slick metal of his helmet. They ripped his visor off his face, forcing his head around in a painful arc, and he was eye to eye with the thing – its eyes glowing with unfocused power.
He countered with a lightning blow to its nearer eye-patch. He raked the point through the oblong eye – and again, and again, as a scythed foreleg reached for his face.
It was not going to die before it cast its phantasm.
He got his left gauntlet under its head and slammed the dagger into its left eye – through the eye patch, through the skin and bone. He reached for his memory palace to fight its power, even as he stirred its brains with the blade . . .
And a wave of power entered him – a sickly blue wave of chilling intensity, and he writhed-
Its eyes went out.
He took its force into him, subsuming the alien thing as creatures of the Wild do. He had never done it before, and hadn’t known how. He thought it was probably best that Prudentia hadn’t been there to watch.
He bounced to his feet, suddenly awash in concentrated calculations as to the survivability of his host under the conditions of the current combat, and for a fleeting instant, the captain was able to see and calculate as both sides in the courtyard.
But the balance had shifted.
A third of his men-at-arms were down – dead, wounded, or merely tripped, he had no way of knowing, but the back of the enemy resistance was broken and already the fringes of the melee had become more like a hunt than a fight.
His archers began to clear the walls, their shafts joined by the dozen archers loosing from the towers, and the pace of victory accelerated. A dozen of the white boglins scuttled down a hole. A man, half the skin ripped from his flesh and trailing down his back, screamed again, and an archer put a shaft into his throat with rough mercy, and stopped his screams – and all through the courtyard, armoured figures opened their visors and heaved air into desperate lungs.