‘Good Christ!’ Ser Alan cursed. The other knights of the escort drew their swords.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn watched as the king and his knights obligingly fought their way into the centre of his range.
Sometimes plans did work out.
His trolls – the magnificent dhags – were cutting the knights to pieces. They were also dying, but he had more. Or he could obtain more. The Wild was fecund beyond human imagining.
He let the king fight on – on and on – until his reckless charge broke through the ring of bone and hide around the mercenaries. Around the dark sun.
The king and the dark sun together.
He took his gathered power, summoning every tendril that he could muster – the might that had been Thurkan, the souls of the fair folk, the convoluted essence of the Sossag shamans-
He savoured it, for a moment.
There was nothing to interrupt him, no distractions as he placed his power almost lovingly on a spot just between his two foes.
The edifice of his memory was no palace but a twisted yarn of ropes and webs, and he braided them in his mind with the mastery of an aeon.
Laid his hand to the completed cord, and cast.
Harmodius felt it, saw it, and cast his counter: a mirror. Even his counter had tails and vestiges – traps within traps. As he had learned.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain felt the moment the great phantasms were loosed as a single instant. It was as if fire or lightning had flashed through every inch of the air between the two casters.
He was Harmodius. As, for a moment, he had been Amicia.
There was no time.
He had so little left – but he gave it, straight into Harmodius’s arms. He reached and took from Amicia, who was herself fighting for her life – from Miram and her choir. And from the very sunlight around him.
And it wasn’t going to be enough.
The captain reached out to the great iron-bound door, and threw it open, and green light flooded into him.
He threw it through Harmodius to strengthen the counter work.
There was a thunderclap – a gout of white-green fire that shot into the heavens. A ripple in the curtain of reality so that, just for a moment, the veil of the world was wrenched aside. The captain saw black night pierced with white stars, and the dawn of chaos, and the rising plume of power that was the coming of the world.
Lissen Carak – Desiderata
Desiderata felt Harmodius’s power rise to meet the emerald giant – and she saw the deep subtlety of his mind in his casting.
But the emerald’s might was twenty times greater than that of the court Magus, and the tide of green rolled over him – dissipated, mirrored, channelled – but overpowering, like a rising river facing a plain full of channels and damns, yet eventually overcoming all of them to spill in one unstoppable flood-
But vast quantities of the emerald power hung in the air, cast aside by Harmodius’s counter spell. Or part of it.
The ripple of power passed the king, who watched, horrified, as Ser Alan was burned at his side, his armour straps charring, his face a livid red as he screamed – and man and horse collapsed. Beyond him, Harmodius frowned – his hand withered and blew away to ash and then, in a few hearttbeats, the Magus was subsumed. He turned to ash, crumpled and was borne away on the wind.
Thorn was struck by the mirror in the very moment of completion of his phantasm, and some of his own carefully hoarded power struck right back down the channel of his casting, burning him.
He screamed. Flinched. But far across the battlefield, Harmodius’s essence flickered and went out.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain struck, the sword descending more from the force of gravity than from any power of his shoulders.
In the Aether he had Harmodius by the hand.
Take me, boy.
In one moment, the captain had to understand, and to act. He opened his way into his palace, seized the spirit of the dead Magus with one Aethereal hand and cast his own phantasm with the other. The air outside was heavy with discarded power, green and ripe for plucking, and he took it, aided by the meticulous ordering of last night’s foe, aided by the thaumaturgical knowledge of his tutor – of Amicia’s Wild casting-
And there he was. Standing on the plinth, where she had always stood.
‘Better the slave of a bad master,’ the Magus muttered.
Suddenly the captain was unsure whether he should have allowed this – entity – refuge to his palace.
‘Any port in a storm, lad,’ the dead Magus said. ‘Go fight monsters, or you’ll be as dead as I am.’
And he lifted his sword again. The air was still redolent with power.
George was behind him, and on his feet.
Amplify my voice, he told the dead Magus.
‘Wedge! On me! Michael – the banner to me!’ His voice rang out like some antique god’s.
In a moment out of time, the captain wondered if this was exactly how the antique gods came about.
No time like the present.
Kneel! He commanded the creatures of the Wild.
Hermes Thrice-sainted, boy! You are challenging his control! Stop!
A third of the creatures around him stopped fighting, fell back or stood, stunned.
Lissen Carak – de Vrailly
Ser Jean de Vrailly led the main battle of the king’s host down the last ridge, and their hooves clattered like a fall of hail as they crossed the bridge. He had more than a thousand belted knights, and no one – not even the Count of the Borders – questioned him. An archangel had given him great glory, and every man in the main battle knew it.
Jean could see the Royal Standard trapped, far out in a sea of foes, with another standard he didn’t know – lacs d’amour in gold on a field of black. A foppish banner.
But he laughed to see the battle, and led the first files to cross the bridge off to the left, west towards the setting sun.
The soldiers in the long trench were rising from it, either in loyal determination to save the king, or in eagerness to join his attack.
Good for them. For once, there was to be enough glory for all.
He continued to ride west, and the long file of knights followed him – gradually enveloping the southern flank of the enemy.
Behind him, the Count d’Eu rose to his feet, and pointed his cut-down lance at the knot around the Royal Standard. ‘A moi!’ he roared.
Daniel Favor, former wagoner, climbed over the edge of the trench, to stand on the grass in the wind. Around him, farmers from the villages around Lissen Carack looked at him, and knew they could not let him be a better man.
Adrian Pargeter climbed out of the safe trench, and put his crossbow on the ground to draw his sword. Older guildsmen looked at each other. A draper with a grey beard asked his lifelong business rival – we really doing this? - and then they were up the vitrified earth too, drawing their swords.
Ranald Lachlan leaped up the side of the trench, waved his axe at his comrades, and pointed it at the enemy. ‘Come on, then!’ he said.
The trench emptied in moments, and they came.
Lachlan threw his axe in the air, and it spun in a great wheel of light over his head and fell back into his hand.
And the thin line of men charged.
Lissen Carak – Ser Gawin
Gawin saw Sym stumble, and a pair of the armoured things took him – dragged him down. Sym’s dagger licked out, gutted another boglin which fell atop him . . . and then the archer was gone, and Gawin was alone in the doorway.