A bright green light flashed, and Gawin was able to see far too much in the illumination. The crawling things beneath him on the stairs turned brown, their eyes burned away and dozens of them sank to the ground, all vitality leaching away as their bodies crumbled.
Gawin heaved a breath.
There were a dozen of the things left – all in a clump, a crawling, rolling mass of legs – he cut and cut at them like a madman, and then forced the door with sheer weight and determination, and he stumbled back . . .
A swarm of armoured men fell on the knot of boglins, hacking with axes, stabbing with spears – six knights he knew all too well. Ser Driant – the King’s Companion – other men of the household.
Gawin found himself pulled to the floor. He’d lost a moment’s attention and two of the things had him-
But he was Hard Hands, and he closed his left hand and slammed it into a lobe-shaped eye, keyed his hand around his adversary’s arm, and ripped it off the boglin with a tearing like ripping old leather, and then he swung the taloned arm like a club beating the bleeding thing to the ground. Ripped his rondel from its place at his hip, drove his knee into the soft place at the centre of the second boglin’s breast, and as its arms closed on him, slammed the dagger home, breaking its back. Spears slammed into the thing from all sides.
He got to his feet with his dagger clenched like a mantis’s claw. But the only figures standing in the green-lit cellar were armoured men.
Gawin sagged.
Ser Driant reached out an ichor-spattered hand. ‘Ser Gawin?’ he said.
Gawin was looking for the novice.
She was slumped against the wall. At her feet were the remnants of Sym the archer – the skin of his face flensed away where they’d swarmed atop him. She was pouring her power into him.
‘You cannot help him,’ Gawin said. ‘However great your talent, you cannot help him.’
She ignored him.
Ser Driant seized his shoulder. ‘Is she a healer?’ he asked.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn felt the challenge as a blow in his gut.
The dark sun.
The young Power glowed with fresh vitality. He had taken new prey, and he was stronger for it.
Thorn gathered his wits.
I am hurt. He is not. And I have been duped.
What if he can best me?
The air between them was thick with the misspent green power of his last phantasm, only partially expended. He had only to reach forth and take that power . . .
But if he was caught while doing it, it would be the end of him.
What if this was a Power’s plan all along? To lead me to over-extend, so that I might be destroyed?
Oh, Thurkan, it may be I owe you an apology.
Carefully, he began to wrap sigils of concealment about himself, even as he roared with false defiance.
Attack! he commanded his creatures.
High above him, in the fortress of his enemies, someone seized the power of the Wild – raw – and shaped a mighty phantasm with it.
So!
He wasn’t waiting for the trap to close. He fled.
Lissen Carak – de Vrailly
Jean de Vrailly judged his moment well. He had led the chivalry of Alba off to the west almost a league along the river. A handful of boglins had tried to oppose him, his sword was wet with their hellish ichor, and it was as easy as taking the heads off fennel plants in his mother’s garden.
And now-
Oh, the glory.
He raised his arm, closing his fist – turned his horse. ‘Halt!’ he ordered. ‘Now turn to face the enemy!’ Not a military command, but he had never led so many knights, and he didn’t know their commands in their language. So he turned out of the line, and cantered along the column. ‘Face me!’ he called. ‘Come! Turn your horses!’
As soon as half a dozen knights understood him, they all understood. And the great column, a thousand horses long, turned into a line a thousand horses wide as he cantered down the front, his lance held above his head, the royal arms of Alba sparkling on his chest.
I will be king.
He didn’t know where the thought came from, but suddenly it was there – he grinned and turned his horse to face the enemy. He was in the centre of this mighty line. To his right front, his own dismounted knights, led by his cousin, and the men of the King’s Guard had just slammed into the enemy fighting line. They were outnumbered badly.
But it didn’t matter.
Because he lay across the enemy’s line, like the crossing of a T, and the enemy had committed all of his reserves. And there was no force on earth, in the Wild or out of it, that could stop a thousand of his kind charging in a line.
He raised his lance high, feeling the astonishing, angelic vitality that filled him. ‘For God and honour!’ he roared.
‘Deus veult!’ cried the knights. Men closed their faceplates.
And then the line started forward.
The battle was over long before the first lance struck home. The enemy’s whole right wing had begun to melt back into the forest as soon as the knights emerged over the bridge – and now, as their charge rumbled forward, the wyverns, the trolls, and the handful of daemons edged back too. Some simply turned and ran for the woods. They didn’t have the bad judgment of men. Like any animal in the Wild faced with a larger predator, they turned and fled. Wyverns leapt into the air; the remaining trolls ran with stone-footed grace, and the daemons ran at the speed of racehorses – untouchable.
Only the boglins and irks stood and fought.
And in the centre, held by Thorn’s will, a dozen mighty creatures and a horde of boglins continued to try to kill the king and the dark sun.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain could no longer raise his sword to cut. He had the weapon in both hands – his left gauntlet held the blade halfway down, and he used it as a short spear, slamming the point into faces and armoured chests.
Moments of terror blended together – a scythe talon that came inside his visor, luck or skill directing the razor-sharp claw to curve up into his scalp and hair, leaving him alive instead of blind or dead.
A trio of irk warriors dragged him down with their sheer weight, their thin, strong limbs racketing against the steel of his armour in a killing frenzy. As slowly as honey poured on snow, or so it seemed, his right hand burrowed past the hideous strength of their limbs to the rondel dagger at his hip, and then he was on one knee, and they were gone, and his dagger dripped gore.
The comfort of steel armour rasping against his own – back to back. He didn’t know who it was, he was just thankful for steel not chitin.
And then, a daemon.
This lord of the Wild was taller than a war horse. The captain hadn’t remarked on their absence from the battlefield, but now that he faced one some part of his brain registered that he hadn’t faced one before.
The crest on its head was a livid blue – utterly different from the one he’d faced in the woods to the west, or in the dark.
It watched him intently, but it didn’t attack.
He watched it and wished he had his spear – currently leaning against his armour rack inside the fortress – and a horse, and a ballista, and twenty fresh friends.
The thing had a pole-axe the size of a wagon’s axle-tree. The head was flint. It was crusted with blood.
It turned its head.
Had he been fresh he’d have sprung forward with a mighty attack while it was distracted, but instead he merely breathed again.
It looked back at him.
‘You are the dark sun,’ it said at last. ‘I can take you, but if you hurt me, I will die here. So instead-’ It saluted him with a flourish of the great pole-axe. ‘Live long, enemy of my enemy.’