The captain walked up a ramp of dead bodies to the door of the north tower where a young giant, drenched in acrid boglin-blood, stood leaning on a six-foot bill with a heavy steel head, coated in gore.
‘Well fought, young Daniel,’ the captain said.
The former carter shrugged. ‘Twas Master Random held the door, Cap’n. For most part of an hour, seems to me.’
‘Dead?’ the captain asked.
Daniel shrugged again. ‘They drug him into the pile,’ he said. ‘We fought ’em for the corpse but lost him when you charged their rear.’ He stood straighter. ‘Deserves finding, I think.’ He seemed to shake off his fatigue, and then he reached out, spiked an armoured boglin on the back-spike of his bill, and flung it from the pile like a farmer moving hay with a pitchfork.
The captain grabbed another. Dead, the boglins were curiously harmless – disgusting, but less insectoid, and more animal. He tossed one aside, and then another. His hands shook. His knees were weak.
He was insanely full of power.
Sauce joined him. ‘What are we doing? Killing the wounded?’ she asked, her voice a little too sharp and bright. This was a fight that men – and women – would relive too many times.
‘Looking for a body,’ the captain said. He was down to waist level, now.
‘I’ve got his leg!’ Daniel called.
Michael joined them, and suddenly there was Ser Milus, and Ser Jehannes, blood still leaking from the joints of his shoulder, and they hauled, and the corpse of the merchant stiffened, and he screamed.
His armour was slick with boglin blood, and human, and he popped out of the pile of corpses. The flesh of his left foot was gone at the ankle, and blood was leaking too slowly out of the wound where sharp mandibles had flensed the flesh from his foot.
‘Tourniquet! Cut his greave off!’ the captain shouted.
Daniel already had a small knife in his great paw of a hand, and he slit the straps holding the greave – Sauce opened the catch and the greave came loose with a gout of fresh blood.
The captain grabbed the stump of his leg. Sauce got her sword belt around the small of the ankle, got it through the buckle, and pulled with all her strength.
The blood stopped.
‘Tie it off,’ the captain said unnecessarily. Every soldier in his company could be a leach in an emergency.
Then he took a weary breath and ran for the wall.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn felt the dark sun take Exrech and he cursed. Cursed that he had been fooled again, cursed that every encounter seemed to go against him.
The accession of power by the dark sun made him far more dangerous than he had been.
Thorn reached out to the two Sossag shamans attending him and subsumed them, stripping their essences and their power, feeding on it. Their empty corpses collapsed to the earth. It wasn’t much power, but sufficient for him to see and send.
The coming darkness was not his friend. He needed light, where he could deploy his superior numbers and his massed archery.
And then he sent his powerful senses questing for Clackak. Found him deep in the earth under the stone fort by the water, with a hundred more of his kin.
Break off, he demanded.
The sun had begun to slide toward evening. There were long hours until night.
Thorn shook his massive head and torso. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The archers opened the gate and the knights rode in, their black hooded surcotes hiding the gleam of armour, their black horses like nightmare creatures in the full dark.
The Prior rode to the captain, who was sitting on a folding stool, scraping crap out of his sabatons to make the plates work properly. His whole body felt like a badly maintained machine.
‘With God’s help, you have conquered,’ the Prior said.
‘If you like,’ the captain said. ‘We have conquered, for the moment. But only by the skin of our teeth, as old wives say. And where are the wyverns? Where are the daemons? The Jacks?’ He gazed out into the last light. Killing off the last of the boglins had taken another hour, and now the enemy machines were throwing stones again.
The valets were stacking corpses outside the gate. The courtyard of the Bridge Castle stank of burned wood, dead boglin and ordure – horses killed in their traces, oxen butchered, men and boglins dead. The rotting meat smell rose like an evil sacrifice in the too-warm evening air, and midges were settling on the working men like an evil plague.
The Prior dismounted, his own sabatons ringing on the stones of the courtyard. ‘Where indeed? I haven’t seen so many evil creatures in many years.’
‘We saw them every day. Now they are gone,’ the Red Knight said. ‘Next wave, perhaps?’ he added. ‘That’s my guess. Wear us out with the boglins. Then break us with the bigger creatures.’ He tested his foot on the ground.
‘Then-’
‘It’s what I’d do. Bleed us with the easily replaced critters and save the others. He needs them to fight the king. This was all just to fix us in place.’
‘We can hold until the king comes,’ the Prior said. He was pulling his sodden arming cap off his head and paused to slap a mosquito.
‘Despite wyverns and daemons? I hope so,’ said the captain. He got to his feet. ‘Michael – tell the valets to serve beer and maple sugar.’ He smiled at the Prior. ‘It’s going to be a long night.’ He looked around. ‘Gelfred?’
‘My lord?’ Gelfred said.
‘I need you to do something insanely brave,’ he said.
Gelfred shrugged.
‘Can you get a message to the king?’ the captain asked.
‘In the dark? Through a host of enemies?’ Gelfred smiled. ‘I can with God’s help. And by my faith, messire, if you make a crack about God not caring, you can take your cursed message yourself.’
The captain got to his feet and gave the huntsman his hand. ‘I am rebuked, Gelfred.’
Gelfred shrugged. ‘Join me in prayer,’ he said.
‘Let’s not get carried away,’ the captain replied.
Gelfred laughed. ‘Why do I like you so much?’ he asked.
The captain shrugged. ‘The feeling is mutual.’
Half an hour later, Gelfred went straight into the river from the docks. He swam for fifteen minutes in the dark, and then went with the current for a while to rest. He heard, or felt, a wyvern in the dark air overhead, and he went under the water and stayed down as long as he could. When he surfaced, his heart was beating so fast that he had to head for shore.
‘There goes the bravest man in all my company,’ the Red Knight said to the Prior.
‘Because he faces his fears?’ the Prior asked. ‘He has God’s aid.’
The captain shook his head but said nothing. Only watched the darkness, and wished he was in the castle. He touched the soiled handkerchief pinned to his arming cote. It was no longer white, indeed, it held the blood and ichor of several foes, and it was cut almost in two.
Lissen Carak – Amicia
Amicia tried not to go to the gate. She tried not to look out the window. When a party of men-at-arms clattered in on exhausted horses, she forced herself to wait until the wounded came in.
Ser Tancred told her that the Red Knight was spending the night in the Bridge Castle.
When the last wounded were healed, she knelt in the chapel by the Abbess’s bier and prayed. She opened herself, as the nuns had taught her, to God. And she made God a hard, heartfelt promise.
Somewhere – Gelfred
He was tired and cold and very, very scared when he heard the sound of men’s voices on the other bank, and he struck out for them. He swam quietly, as well as he could.
They had boats.
After some time, he swam to the boats, and a sentry saw him.
‘Halt! Alarm! Man in the water!’ A crossbow loosed, and the bolt passed somewhere near him.