The Fell Sword

Chapter Eighteen

Harndon – The Queen

Four days after Christmas, three ships came sailing in to Harndon port. On board was Ser Gerald Random, and he brought the entire Morean fur trade with him, minus only his concessions to the Etruscan merchants, as well as fifteen tons of Wild honey. The Etruscan banks in the city received into their coffers some thousands of leopards in loans, and trading – gambling, some called it – in the value of some elite commodities changed tenor rapidly.

Ser Gerald was seen to go to the palace and place in the King’s hands a quantity of pelts, honey, and gold.

In the great marketplace at Smithfield, outside the western gates of the city, workmen began to construct the scaffolding for a truly titanic set of lists, including bleachers for seats. Loads of lumber came downriver, the great logs simply heaved in and floated down the Albin from the edge of the Wild.

Ser Gerald’s furs were sold for good quantities of silver – many to Harndon’s Etruscan merchants, who paid a higher price but no doubt had ways of passing the cost onto their customers. But the flow of silver was steady, and, just as the first warmth of spring melts the snow and causes the frozen streams to develop to a trickle, so the silver began to flow into the King’s new mint, which bore a startling resemblance to Master Pye’s work yard.

The dies were ready, and Edmund began striking slugs of silver as soon as the first shipment reached him. Outside Master Pye’s gate, a full company of the Harndon trained men stood guard, less proud now in their half armour than they had been on Christmas night. Keeping a hundred apprentices and journeymen ‘idle’ so that they could play soldier in winter was expensive and boring and cold.

But there were no attacks on the fledgling mint, and the coins began to flow.

Almost as soon as the new coins appeared – sacks of them – in the trade squares, they changed the nature of commerce. They were solid. They were heavy.

They had an excellent silver content.

The King couldn’t share Master Ailwin’s triumph as he neither understood it nor, really, respected it. But he did notice the change in the faces of his interior councillors, and he was delighted to hear them vote him the funds to carry on his tournament for the first of May.

If the new Bishop of Lorica listened with a sour face and referred to the whole exercise as ‘usury’, the King could afford to ignore him.

But if the King was victorious in Cheapside, he was less sanguine about the palace. And the months after Christmas passed in petty defeats for the Queen as her belly grew rounder and her King grew more indifferent. Galahad d’Acre was arrested and thrown in the tower – although no one seemed to actually suspect him of the murder of Lady Emota. Another of the King’s squires simply vanished. Some said he’d been murdered, others that he had gone home to his father’s estates, afraid for his life and reputation.

The pace of the slanders increased, and the Queen began to seriously suspect that she might have a rival – that the King might have taken a mistress. Such things were done, and it was her duty to ignore such behaviour.

It was not in her character to accept a rival. Nor to accept the staging of a passion play about the whore of Babylon, performed under her window, and loud with the laughter of Jean de Vrailly. And the King. And the Sieur de Rohan, whose hired Etruscan players said the unsayable and sang the unsingable with panache.

Lady Almspend spent her days practising small acts of hermeticism and reading the old King’s papers – and those of his hermetical master and several of his other ministers. She declared her reading fascinating, and took copious notes while her royal mistress paced up and down in her solar and Diota cleaned and tidied uselessly.

Eight weeks into the New Year, Desiderata sat down at her writing table – covered in Rebecca’s stacks of musty documents and crisp, new notes – and took a sheet of new vellum, idly wondering how many sheep died for her correspondence.

Dear Renaud she wrote. Her brother, hundreds of leagues to the south, in L’Occitan.

She looked at those words, and considered every argument she had made when she had accepted the King of Alba’s proposal of marriage. And his replies. His anger. His desire for conflict.

Calling to Renaud for help would be an irrevocable action.

She stared at the words on the parchment, imagining her worthy brother raising his knights and leading them north. Imagining his western mountains unguarded against the Wyrms and Wyverns and worse things that infested them.

Imagining him fighting her husband.

She chewed on the end of her stylus.

‘You’ll have ink in your mouth, and then what will people say?’ Diota asked.

‘My belly is as big as a house, woman. No one will look at me anyway.’ Desiderata didn’t like being pregnant. Things hurt, the morning sickness was oppressive, her bladder was always full and, worst of all, she had lost the regard of the knights of court. They didn’t look at her. The whispers were bad enough. But the loss of that worship was like torture.

She considered the tournament. The subject made her tired. It had been her idea in the first place, and now-

Now the King’s mistress might be the Queen of Love. And she would merely be the Queen. The very heavily pregnant Queen whose husband suspected her of an unspeakable betrayal, and seemed disposed to laugh it off.

She was just framing the thought that she could invite her brother for the tournament when one of Rebecca’s dusty parchments caught her eye.

She ran her eyes along the Gothic script automatically. Even without Rebecca’s skills, she’d begun to be able to pick up on the hands of the various major players. This was the infamous traitor Plangere.

Her eye caught on the word ‘rape’.

She choked at what she read, and closed her eyes and her mouth filled with bile.

She bent over as far as she comfortably could and rested her head on her writing table.

The door to her solar opened, and she heard Almspend’s light steps and her intake of breath. ‘Oh,’ she said.

The Queen made herself sit up.

Rebecca’s deep eyes were drawn with concern. ‘I’m a fool,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t meant to leave that out.’

The Queen stared at her.

‘I couldn’t bear to destroy it, because it is history,’ Almspend said.

‘My husband,’ the Queen said. She had trouble drawing a breath. ‘My husband,’ she said again.

‘Madam – it was many years ago. He has doubtless done his penance and made his peace with God.’ Almspend held her hands tightly.

But the Queen’s world – her very ideas of who she was and who the King was – was collapsing like dams under the force of mountain torrents in springtime. She tried to breathe.

‘The King my husband,’ she croaked. Her fingers found the parchment. ‘Raped his sister. She cursed him for it. Oh, my God, my God.’

Almspend took the document, and smoothed it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t King yet,’ she added. ‘He was quite young.’ She looked at her Queen and tried a different tack. ‘It’s only what Plangere writes, and he was a traitor.’ She looked at the date on the note.

The Queen put her hand to her chest and sat back. She struggled to pull in a breath. Her hands grew cold. She felt her baby kick, and she cried out, and Almspend put her hand on the Queen’s head.

The Queen looked at her, eyes wide as the realisation hit – the moment at Lissen Carrak when- And she cried out again, as if in pain.

‘Of course!’ she said. ‘The Red Knight is his son.’

The Imperial Army – as the Red Knight styled their force – arrived on the plains of Viotia as the last snow melted in the shadowy corners of the neatly walled fields. But the frozen ground was still hard as iron, and rang under their horses’ hooves.

They swept into the rich lands a day ahead of the enemy, and marched north and west on the ancient stone road.

Eavey – or ‘Eves’ as the soldiers called it – opened her gates for them. It was not quite the miracle it seemed; the near sack of Amphipolis had grown in the telling. And the Emperor was there in person this time, beautifully dressed in crimson and purple silk over fur. He wore a small gold crown over a magnificent fur hat.

The people came out to cheer him when the gates were open and it was clear that the soldiers were not going to punish them.

The Red Knight went directly to the Ducal residence – one of Andronicus’s lodgings, a magnificent forty-room castle with a Great Hall and marvellous woodwork. And ancient sculptures. The chamberlain admitted him, and he quartered the army in the castle.

He summoned Father Arnaud.

The priest came.

The Megas Ducas was sitting with the Emperor, who was dining while the Red Knight served him. Father Arnaud waited patiently to be called forward, as he had studied the Morean etiquette and had some idea what he might be in for.

The Emperor ate as if no one was watching him, and talked – politely – to Count Zac, who poured his wine, and Ser Giorgios, who held his napkin, and to Harald Derkensun, who stood with an axe on his shoulder. There were servants – actual servants – and for each of them there was a gentleman of the Scholae, who watched them the way cats watch mice.

The Red Knight turned and caught Father Arnaud’s eye and winked.

Father Arnaud was shocked, but also pleased.

The Emperor discussed the weather, and some differences between Alban and Imperial religious practice. Father Arnaud was surprised to hear how conversant the Red Knight was with Alban practice.

Eventually the Emperor ate something very sweet and sticky, and raised his hand for a napkin. He glanced at Father Arnaud and smiled. ‘Ah – the fighting priest. Please be with us!’

Father Arnaud came forward and made a deep bow.

‘It is the Emperor’s pleasure that you take command of a detachment of belted knights to police the city,’ the Red Knight said.

Father Arnaud nodded. ‘We intend to hold these walls and force a siege?’ he asked.

The Emperor smiled. ‘I would rather that my Megas Ducas used our army to force a battle, in which God might show us his mercy. But the commander of our armies has different intentions.’

The Red Knight picked up a dish and Father Arnaud discovered he found it disconcerting to see him waiting on the Emperor as if he was a servant. He bowed, and carrying the plate, which held the remains of two roast pheasants in saffron with their skins gilded so that they shone like birds of solid gold, he walked down the hall’s dais and out the door by which the noblemen and women were served.

Father Arnaud bowed to the Emperor, took a serving dish – rapini, or something like it, loaded with garlic – and followed the Red Knight.

The moment he crossed out of the hall, a pair of servants – real servants – took the dish from his hands with the obvious disdain of professionals for amateurs.

‘You serve beautifully,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘I had practice. I was my father’s page for years. Ticondaga is too far from civilisation for me to have been fostered, but while there I waited on many famous men.’ He followed the servants towards the kitchen, and as they entered he plucked most of a pheasant off the tray and stood in an alcove, eating.

Father Arnaud adapted his actions to his own needs and seized a large piece of slightly used chicken pie, with raisins, spices and sugar, from a serving tray where it sat idle and unwanted.

‘There’s wine in the pitcher,’ the Red Knight said. ‘I love kitchens. Well-run kitchens, anyway. I could live here.’

‘But we’re retreating,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘Yes,’ the Red Knight said. He’d finished his pheasant and now had sticky gold leaf on his hands.

‘You could hold this place,’ Father Arnaud said.

The Red Knight cocked his head to one side like a puzzled puppy. ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ he said.

Father Arnaud now had hands coated in ginger and sugar. ‘Both ways?’ he said. Boyhood habits count and he began to lick his fingers. The pie had been delicious.

‘You don’t want any towns to be sacked. You were right. I was tired and annoyed. And I was wrong. I needed to get my head together and control my men. But – now you want me to hold this place? Really?’ The Red Knight shook his head. ‘When we fight, I’ll make it as far from here as I can manage.’

‘The Emperor seems to think that you – and God – can win.’ Father Arnaud couldn’t find a cup, so he drank from the jug.

‘The Emperor is a kindly man, who is so nice that he can’t imagine that his daughter sold him out, his chamberlain betrayed him and his magister stabbed him in the back.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you staking some special claim to the wine, or will I get some if I’m especially good, or what?’

Father Arnaud handed over the wine. ‘He’s not a good strategist,’ he commented.

‘He’s not terribly bright,’ the Red Knight said. He paused. ‘He’s not of this world,’ he added. ‘That’s a kinder way of putting it.’

‘You know that his daughter betrayed him?’ Father Arnaud asked.

The Red Knight shrugged. ‘I wasn’t there. But I’d bet heavily on the notion. I can prove she sent messengers to Andronicus. And Kronmir thinks she was the original betrayer.’

Father Arnaud shook his head. ‘How terrible.’

Again, the Red Knight shrugged. ‘Really? He’s a dreadful Emperor, Arnaud. He cares nothing for most of the things that the others live for – including keeping the Etruscans in line. Imagine living in the palace, watching your father doom your Empire to stagnation and death. Imagine you could stop it. Imagine being trained from birth to respect and adore a thousand years of history that is being destroyed before your eyes.’ He smiled.

Arnaud was careful not to move too fast. He didn’t want to break whatever spell kept the man talking. ‘Is that how your childhood was?’

The other man laughed. ‘Not at all. My father was the best soldier I knew, and my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. We had the best castle, the strongest, the most magical, and it was going to be mine if I proved myself worthy.’ He was looking off into the kitchens. ‘That’s why, when I found out-’ He paused. Then he turned slowly and looked at the priest. ‘Damn, you are good. Let’s just leave it there, shall we?’

Father Arnaud smiled. ‘So, I’m the duty officer for tonight?’ he asked.

The Red Knight nodded. ‘Ser Gavin will take your place at the fourth hour, so you can have two hours’ sleep before we march.’

‘Mark my words,’ Wilful Murder said. And this time, he was right. They did march at first light, leaving the most comfortable welcome and the warmest beds. The company had been billeted in the town, and the townspeople had treated them like heroes – scary heroes. Bent and Long Paw shared a bed in a house owned by a wool merchant, and the cook made them bread fried in eggs with maple syrup for breakfast, and Bent shook his head at Long Paw.

‘I can’t remember the last time someone cooked me breakfast of their own will,’ he said. He wiped his sticky moustache on his sleeve.

‘Ever think about it?’ Long Paw asked.

‘About what?’ Bent asked, in the way that men do when they already know the answer, but need to buy themselves some time to think.

‘Oh,’ Long Paw said, and then he got his saddle down off the family’s rack – a nice touch, and very helpful on a cold morning. He got it up on his gelding’s back. The horse grunted. ‘You know. We could have stormed this town. Killed the men. Done the women. Right?’

Bent nodded. ‘Yep.’

‘We was eating breakfast just now, and she served us on nice pewter plates – you saw that?’ Long Paw asked.

Bent nodded, and their eyes met as he flung his own saddle over his horse. ‘A few words different, and the Cap’n orders us to storm this place. An’ the cook is dead or worse, and I have those pewter plates in my panniers.’ Bent got the girth under his horse. ‘But no breakfast, eh?’

Long Paw smiled. ‘That’s just what I mean.’

As the sun rose, it became obvious that the Thrakians had marched all night.

They were just too late to surprise the town – and Count Zac had mounted patrols who reported their approach as the Imperial Army formed up in the town’s square.

The Red Knight climbed a tower by the main gate – a laborious process in full harness. Ser Michael went with him, and Ser Jehan too, and they had the briefest of conferences.

And then the army was moving, leaving from the north gate even as the warden of the south gate was opening a parley with the Thrakians.

Count Zac was first out of the gate with three hundred Vardariotes, Gelfred, and fifty green-coated men of the company. They formed in small companies just south of the town and, at a raised hand from the Count, they galloped over the iron-hard fields, right and left around the town.

Next the stradiotes emerged – first the companies of city stradiotes, and then the Scholae, guarding the army’s baggage – a long string of mules, some donkeys, a few horses taken at Amphilopolis and a dozen new wagons. They passed through the gate one by one. It took a lot of time.

Just south of the city, almost under the walls, Count Zac’s Vardariotes emerged from the olive grove and slashed into the vanguard of the Thrakians. They were like a razor cut – they passed very quickly and left blood in their wake.

Demetrius’s Easterners countered their charge, emerging from the distant treeline to the south in good order with sabres drawn over their right arms and hilts tucked over their bowstring hands, so that they could loose arrows with their swords ready to hand. Screaming war cries, they went at Count Zac’s men. The two forces went right at each other. As it was early spring, there was no dust. The two forces spread out wide, looking for a flank or an opportunity, and then threaded each other, each warrior passing between the charging horses of two enemies.

Both sides rallied instantly. The khan’s men had more empty saddles, but they charged again and the much-feared Vardariotes broke and fled. The khan’s men harried them, and more than a hundred of the Thrakian heavy horse who had initially been harried by the red-coated Vardariotes now changed direction and pursued the pests who had stung them.

The longbows on the town walls shocked them. The Thrakians had taken for granted that the company archers were already gone, retreating. The flight of three hundred arrows, even at long range, emptied saddles and killed many horses outright.

And then Gelfred struck, leading his scouts in a charge from under the walls to the west. He only had fifty men, but they made a great deal of noise, and the khan’s men feared a larger trap – and so they broke.

Instantly, the Vardariotes switched direction – their best trick. Arrows flew in every direction for a moment, but the Easterners were broken. They left two or three dozen dead behind them.

The Vardariotes formed a crisp array, picked up their wounded, and trotted away into the shadow of the olive trees. Gelfred’s men took no casualties and melted into the woods to the north and west of the town.

The Red Knight watched the last of the action from the base of a south-facing tower. Then he turned his charger and cantered heavily around the town, in time to see his archers, led by Bent, riding out of the north gate.

Bent saluted, and the archers cheered.

The action lost him forty men, but it bought him another day.

‘He is making us dance to his tune every day,’ Aeskepiles said.

Demetrius scratched his jaw. ‘My men performed well this morning. Those are the Empire’s best soldiers – we matched them.’

Aeskepiles shook his head. ‘No. We lost.’

‘We’ll catch him tomorrow,’ Demetrius said. ‘But our horses need rest, and my men need sleep.’

That night Dariusz doubled the guards on the horse herd. The raid came in the hour of death, when men sleep most heavily, three hours after midnight, and took no one by surprise. The fields were dark, and the woods were darker, and they only found a dozen dead men, but Dariusz slapped Verki on the back.

‘It’s good to win one,’ he said, looking at the dead man-at-arms.

The rest of the army slept. Their horses rested.

At midnight, Gelfred came in from the west and demanded to be taken straight to the Duke, who was awake.

‘He looked as happy as his sourpuss face can manage,’ Nell muttered to Wilful.

Wilful shrugged. ‘We’ll be fighting again tomorrow, mark my words.’

Nell slapped him as one of his hands drifted over the treaty line, and he subsided and took a bite of garlic sausage.

Two hours later, Ser Giorgios brought back the raid. He was despondent, having lost almost a dozen men. ‘They were waiting for us,’ he told Kronmir, who took his horse.

Kronmir nodded. ‘They aren’t fools,’ he said.

‘You would know,’ Ser Giorgios said. It wasn’t accusing, merely factual. Moreans took a different view of these things.

‘I would know,’ Kronmir said, and went to report to the Duke.

Two hours before sunrise, the Imperial Army had its light horse in motion.

An hour before sunrise, their baggage, all their women and children and most of the non-combatant men, marched away – west. It was the first day they hadn’t marched north in several days. Mag knew why, and when she kissed her man goodbye she gave him a hard squeeze.

‘What do you know?’ John le Bailli asked.

‘Same as you,’ Mag said. She winked. ‘Don’t be brave.’

He kissed her again. ‘Only the brave deserve the fair.’

‘Just my point.’ She kissed him again, fought the urge to cry or say something foolish, and pushed him away lightly, her fingers on his cold breastplate.

She climbed back up on her wagon box and looked over her convoy. She pumped her fist once, and the wagons began to roll. West.

The Empress Livia referred to the plains and wheat fields of Viotia as the dance floor of Mars. Both of the major battles of the Irk campaigns were fought there – and two of the three battles of the Second Civic War. There was space on the plains for armies much bigger than the Imperial Army commanded by the Red Knight, but the hand of history was palpable here.

The ground was flat for miles. Lonika rose in the middle distance, almost ten miles away, a forest of turrets amidst the cliffs of crenellated walls.

At the strategic level, the plains of Viotia offered the best manoeuvring space on this side of the Green Hills. He could march his army in almost any direction.

But at a tactical level, they represented a nightmare of hedgerows, small tilled fields, farm ponds and stone walls – some of them ten feet high – stone barns and outbuildings, churches with fortified walls, a monastery as big as an Imperial castle, sheep pens, and streams running so full that they flowed over their carefully tended stone banks, all criss-crossed with excellent roads that had high hedges or stone walls of their own. Most of the fields were quite large, but a few were very small indeed.

His rearguard covered the crossroads where the wagons had turned west. They waited, a detachment of the company’s mounted archers dismounted behind the walls, backed with two squadrons of Vardariotes, until the sun was high in the sky and the wagons were long out of sight to the west. On roads this good, wagons could make five miles an hour.

Ser Jehan kept them in place for another hour. When the first Thrakian scouts came down the road from the south, they received a volley of arrows that emptied a handful of saddles. The Alban mercenaries mounted without haste and trotted away, and the Thrakians kept their distance.

It was noon before Captain Dariusz occupied the crossroads.

He looked west along the old Dorling road and watched it for a while. He could see the enemy army halfway between his horse and the distant loom of Lonika, waiting. He watched them for a bit, too. Then he snapped his fingers.

‘Stepan,’ he said. ‘Inform Lord Demetrius he has his battle.’

Aeskepiles rode into the crossroads and examined the enemy array, and then made a sign, unfolded his hands and produced a shimmering lens of air. He played with it for some time and added a second, and by the time Lord Demetrius came up, he had the thing focused on the enemy.

Demetrius looked through it like a child with a new toy, but his attention was elsewhere. ‘Why has he halted? Have they dug traps?’

Ser Christos spat derisively. ‘No, my lord. The ground remains frozen. If it wasn’t, we’d be fetlock deep in mud.’

Demetrius sat watching. ‘Why fight me at all?’ he asked. ‘The capital is wide open. He can march in and take Lonika.’ He shrugged. ‘We have no siege equipment.’

Aeskepiles smiled. ‘You have me,’ he said. ‘And your own mages, worthy young men that they are.’

Demetrius shrugged again. He rode west a few paces and turned, looking over the fields from a better vantage point. ‘It’s not a bad position,’ he said. ‘He’s got his right flank covered against the farm and all those little outbuildings, and his left refused with a nice high wall. A tough nut to crack.’ He turned and grinned. ‘Let’s get him.’

The Thrakians didn’t waste time. Their cavalry marched into the field, and then split up into companies and began to form lines. Duke Andronicus’ infantry marched straight up the road to a point where their pioneers had knocked holes in the old farm wall. They marched through a gap forty feet wide, with the farmer standing cursing them.

‘You fucking- That’s a year’s work! A year’s work!’

A spear point licked out and saved him from any further effort. He fell forward, over his own wound, and bled out on the ground he’d tilled throughout his life.

The heavy infantry were almost two thousand strong – all by themselves, they equalled the whole of the Imperial Army. They flew three great banners: the Virgin Mary, Christ Crucified, and Christ Harrowing Hell. They marched in silence, formed up to a few shouted commands, and halted, waiting for the cavalry to form on them.

The Easterners went wide west, galloping away down the road. They were ordered to sweep well out around the Imperial flank on their own left, to fall on the enemy’s unshielded flank.

The Thrakian stradiotes formed to either flank of the infantry. The one band of mercenary knights formed to the right of the stradiotes, close to the road. The rest of the left was made up of a thousand Thrakian peasants, all armed with axes and bows.

The Thrakian line overlapped the Imperial line on both flanks. Their line was almost two Alban miles from end to end. The Imperial line had gaps and different depths, and was still only a little less than an Alban mile long.

When the lines were formed, a little less than a mile apart, the Thrakians sang a hymn. It was two in the afternoon, and they raised their weapons and gave a shout that rang off the distant hills.

And then they marched on their enemies.

The Red Knight watched them come and he shook his head. ‘He’s too damned bold. Didn’t he ask himself why I was so eager to fight?’ He sighed. ‘If he’d waited until tomorrow morning-’

Father Arnaud raised an eyebrow. ‘Are we retreating?’ he asked.

The Red Knight turned. ‘No. We’re in it, now. Win or lose, this is our path. But it’s going to be tight.’ His head snapped around – his helmet was still in Toby’s hands. ‘No!’ he shouted.

The Emperor, mounted on a beautiful white steed, was cantering along the front of his army.

Men cheered.

Then he turned his horse’s head and trotted towards the enemy.

‘What is he doing?’ the Red Knight asked. He put spurs to his great black charger, and he started forward. The Red Knight was thinking of giving this one a name, instead of a number. He’d killed seven chargers so far. But the horse Count Zac had given him-

Father Arnaud cursed. ‘He’s trying to prevent the battle,’ he said, and followed the Red Knight, equally helmetless.

The Red Knight threw himself forward on his horse’s neck and the giant horse leaped into a gallop as if they were in a tiltyard. He rode like a jockey in a race, not like a man in full harness on a battlefield. His magnificent warhorse did its best to carry him at breakneck speed.

‘Majesty!’ he shouted.

The Emperor stopped his horse and waved.

The Red Knight reined in to save his horse’s wind and trotted up. ‘Majesty?’

‘I want them to see me,’ the Emperor said. ‘If they see me alive they won’t fight. I am their Emperor. My person is sacred.’ He nodded decisively.

The Red Knight felt as if he were arguing with a gifted child. ‘Yes, Majesty. But these men have already hurt you.’

The beautiful man turned his head and favoured the Red Knight with the full weight of his magnificent smile. ‘No, my lord Duke. Those men are dead. You killed them, and quite justly, before my very eyes. That is the banner of Demetrius, son of Duke Andronicus, one of my most trusted lords. He is my wife’s brother.’

‘He took you prisoner,’ the Red Knight said gently.

The Emperor thought a moment.

Behind them, the centre of the Imperial line started forward.

‘He did, did he not?’ the Emperor asked slowly. ‘How could that have happened? The Logothete warned me – I don’t remember. Therefore it cannot be important. Let us ride over and see those gentlemen-’

The Red Knight didn’t know why his own company was advancing at the double, but all he could see was disaster. And the unravelling of his plan – his over-complex plan. He took the Emperor’s bridle, and turned his horse. ‘Those men will try to kill you, Majesty. Come with us – with your friends.’

They trotted along, parallel to the two armies, for a hundred paces, and then the Red Knight turned and led the Emperor towards his own lines. After another hundred paces, he dropped the Emperor’s reins, and the man followed him willingly enough.

The Red Knight rode until he met Ser Jehan, leading the company, under his own black banner.

‘Looked like trouble,’ Jehan said. ‘We can turn about.’

The Red Knight shook his head. ‘We can’t. The city stradiotes only need a feather’s touch to cut and run.’ He looked at the sun and swore. ‘Damn it, Jehan! Now we’ll start sooner. I needed time!’

Ser Jehan looked away.

The Red Knight looked around. Men were staring at him.

He thought back to his first encounter with them, in Arles, and he laughed. ‘Look at yourselves,’ he said. He left the Emperor to Toby and trotted to the head of the company. All the men-at-arms except Gelfred’s were there, in the front rank, with their squires in the second rank, their archers in the third and spear-armed pages in the fourth. The old way. They were all dismounted, their horse holders well to the rear. Their armour was polished as well as could be expected after a three-week campaign in winter weather, and their scarlet surcoats were fading to a ruddy brown. But their weapons glittered like malevolent ice.

‘Look at yourselves,’ he shouted again. ‘Think of who you were last year. And who you are now.’ He turned back to where the enemy lay, having caught in a relieved glance the approach of the Nordikans and Vardariotes, who were reforming the line.

The Scholae came forward at a trot.

He pointed at the enemy, who was marching steadily at them over the frozen fields. ‘An archaic scholar once said that the Thrakians would conquer the world, if only they would stop fighting among themselves.’ He grinned. ‘But he never met you, gentlemen. I will not lie and say this will be easy. I’ll merely say that if you hang together for three hours you will be victorious, and the whole of the Morea will be ours.’

They cheered him like a new messiah.

Long Paw, in the third rank behind Ser Alison, said, ‘Three hours, against all that? Christ, we’re doomed.’

‘He’s coming right at us!’ Aeskepiles said.

Demetrius watched the enemy advance and shook his head. ‘He’s moving his line forward. What does that mean? He has traps set behind him?’ He watched. ‘Is his line in confusion? Now his left is trailing away – those are the Scholae. And the Vardariotes. I see.’

Ser Christos appeared and raised his visor. ‘My lord, many of the levies are anxious. That was the Emperor.’

‘Merely a usurper,’ Demetrius said.

Ser Christos narrowed his eyes. He looked at Count Stefano, who looked away. He turned his horse and faced golden Demetrius. ‘Where is your father, my lord?’ he asked.

‘He is sick, but bravely holding the walls of Lonika with a handful of worthy men,’ Demetrius said.

Ser Christos looked at Aeskepiles.

Aeskepiles ignored him. ‘Here they come,’ he said. He raised himself in his stirrups to cast, but the distance was greater than he had expected and the angle was poor. He put spurs to his horse and went forward.

‘Do your duty,’ Demetrius told his father’s best knight.

Ser Christos nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. He took the banner and followed Demetrius into the field beyond the low stone wall, and was the last man to leave the crossroads.

Aeskepiles opened the battle with a set of workings – an illusion of a fireball, a second illusion of a complex net spell weaving its way forward from his feet to the enemy lines, and a third spell, a sweeping organic scythe aimed at bowstrings.

His illusions struck with dramatic intensity, shocking new recruits and peasant levies all over the field. The fireball floated slowly, roaring like a blast furnace, to burst like a terrifying entertainment over the centre of the enemy army.

His string cutter left his hand and vanished into a protection.

The enemy archers raised their bows.

Annoyed, he cast again.

They loosed, and a volley of arrows rose.

He swatted them to earth with a simple wind harness he had prepared, to be safe.

The Thrakian infantry marched slowly forward. Their footsteps raised no dust from the frozen ground, but the ground shook with their matched step. Over to the left, the Thrakian peasants had no order, but they flowed over the ground like thirst-maddened wolves scenting water. The competing wind workings – from both sides of the field – created small vortexes, tiny hurricanes that buzzed as they moved and raised old leaves and mulch into the air.

Demetrius watched the infantry go forward, unscathed, and laughed.

‘Oh, Pater. How I wish you’d been here to see this.’

Wilful Murder stood a few feet behind the Red Knight, who had now dismounted and taken his place: at the centre of the line, with the banner.

The line didn’t shuffle. The lance points projecting from the pages in the fourth rank wavered – it took real strength to hold a heavy spear this long. And the archers moved. The order had come down to cease fire, but every man had a dozen livery arrows stuck point down in the ground by his back foot.

The enemy spearmen – the same hard bastards who’d almost pounded them at Liviapolis – were coming in untouched by long-range archery while the warlocks and sorcerers fought it out in the air over his head. The Captain had a pair of glowing shields – one of the reasons Wilful liked to be the Captain’s archer was that in battle he was covered by the Captain’s sorcerous crap.

When the fireball detonated, it was right on top of them. Wilful cringed away – and in the moment after it imprinted itself on his retinas, he patted his forehead and his arms. Then he laughed at the smell.

‘Someone pissed their pants!’ he called.

Rough laughter. The Captain turned his helmeted head. ‘That was just an illusion. There will be more.’

His eyes glowed red. The enemy spearmen were about a hundred Alban cloth yards away.

Bent roared, ‘Nock!’

I need you to get closer to Aeskepiles.

Harmodius had been decorously silent since his last burst of humour. The Red Knight had begun to hope – or fear – that the entity was gone. His words were immediately followed by a spike of pain, as if a sword thrust had gone in between his eyes.

Nothing I can do about that just now, old man.

In the palace, things were calm, and Harmodius stood decorously, younger than ever, like a page waiting to serve. He had the Fell Sword in his hand. Aeskepiles has increased in power – again. He has access to something, or someone. He’s swatting my wind workings around like a child killing moths, and-

I knew it was mistake to send Mag away.

You said yourself – only Mag can guarantee the safety of our women. Now let me take over.

Don’t keep hold of my body when I need to be fighting. Oh – Harmodius, the pain.

Never fear, boy. I’m leaving you soon. I promise. We need to get closer to Aeskepiles. Sweet saviour, where did he get all that power?

Harmodius took control of the Red Knight’s body. Without the other presence as an intermediary, he could cast more quickly – more cleanly. And he’d had six months to prepare for this moment. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get there.

‘Loose!’ roared Bent.

The front-rank knights and men-at-arms knelt. The archers leaned forward and loosed. At this range, their shafts had a travel time of about four heartbeats and required very little loft.

Bent was shooting needle point bodkins, cut square, sixpence a head from Master Pye in Cheapside. Hardened steel. The heads were five fingers long and tapered away to a wicked point like an ice pick. He chose his target carefully – the banner man in the front rank. Scale armour, and a magnificent gold helmet. Plate arms and legs.

The arrow weighed three Alban ounces and flew almost two hundred feet in a second. The head struck one finger to the outside of its target’s shield and passed through a bronze scale and between two iron scales beneath – through the elk hide base, through a layer of linen, through a finger of tightly packed sheep’s wool, through a second layer of linen canvas. Through a thin linen shirt.

Through skin into fat, and through fat to muscle. To bone. Slid along the bone almost half a finger and then into fat – and more muscle.

The man fell. The heavy banner fell forward, and twenty hands reached to pluck it up. But the arrow had not arrived alone-

Bent’s second arrow was on his bow before the first pierced the banner man’s heart. And his third . . .

Fourth . . .

The space between the centres of the two armies was a blizzard of archery, and all the shafts went in one direction. On the Red Knight’s left, Demetrius held back his mercenary cavalry for the death stroke – so that the ground in front of the Nordikans was empty.

They began to advance. At a shouted order, three hundred guardsmen raised their axes, screamed a shrill and very ancient cry, and started forward at the distant enemy cavalry. The Nordikans were packed so tightly that the man on the right of the line was scraping his magnificent gilded shield against the man-high stone wall of the main Liviapolis-Lonika road at his left shoulder. The Nordikans were only two deep and their line moved with a kind of supernatural precision. Each one of them had a heavy throwing spear – a lonche – with a head that weighed almost a pound, often inlaid in silver or gold or both, the shaft covered in gilded runes, the point of the best steel, blued, running out to a needle. Most of them also had a pair of darts behind their shields – lead weighted, on two-foot shafts. A practised man could hurl them eighty paces.

Fifth-

Sixth-

The Nordikans passed the end of the company line and continued forward, with Darkhair calling time in his own language. His voice had an eerie singing quality to it that rose over the vicious humming of the arrow shafts and the screaming that came from the spearmen.

The enemy spearmen came on through the hail of bodkins and broad heads, despite heavy losses.

The Red Knight was singing in High Archaic, and he had three different moving shields – one lavender, one a very heraldic red, one a blinding gold.

Directly across the field from him was an unarmoured man on a tall grey horse who also wore a succession of shields – green, purple, lavender, red, black. The black shield rose in response to a bolt of levin that came across the field like a cavalry charge. The black absorbed the lightning and it returned precisely down its line of attack.

And met a buckler of the same black stuff – a small shield not much bigger than the palm of a man’s hand, precisely focused.

The bolt spat back – to strike the front rank of the spearmen, where a man exploded, his guts emerging as superheated steam and boiled meat. A second man was killed by a piece of his skull.

Seventh shaft.

Eighth.

To the Red Knight’s right, the Vardariotes swept forward at the Thrakian peasant infantry until they were less than fifty paces away from the charging mass, and began to loose their own, lighter, cane shafts. Three hundred Vardariotes spread out across the flat plain and emptied their first quivers into men who could not make a reply. And as they charged faster in brave desperation, sprinting at the hornets stinging them with arrows, the Vardariotes slipped away – turning and riding a few paces and loosing another shaft at a range too close for a veteran to miss.

And again.

The peasants were flayed. Twenty of them died with every volley, and the shafts were rolling off the Vardariotes’ fingers like coins from a mountebank’s trick.

Nine.

Ten.

The spearmen were going to close. They were too brave, too confident to break, or to lie down and die out there on the frozen ground. They’d been shocked at Liviapolis, at the intensity of the archery and the power of the great yew bows, but they’d had six months to chew on their rage and boast of their glory. They took their losses and stepped over them – and over men they’d known for twenty years.

Bent raised his war bow with his eleventh arrow. Experience told him he wasn’t getting in his twelfth. He leaned out over Ser Jehan’s shoulder in a rhythm that the two of them knew as well as old lovers know the rhythm of their lovemaking – his bow arm well past the knight’s right shoulder, his hip against the knight’s hip – and shot a veteran of twenty battles just below the bridge of his nose, where the nasal of his helmet stopped.

Bent tossed his bow up and back, over his right shoulder. It would land on the frozen, untilled earth about fifteen feet behind him and he’d find it again if he lived. He passed back a rank, leaving the squire in front of him and the spear of the page passing over his shoulder.

He drew a hand and a half sword from his belt – forty days’ pay – and took the buckler off the hilt. And braced his left shoulder against the squire’s.

Ser Jehan raised the head of his pole-axe by a distance of about a foot.

Morgan Mortirmir stood in the front rank, terrified. His armour weighed like lead on his limbs, and the spearmen looked like evil gods of war, carrying his doom.

The Red Knight had ordered him to maintain a shield over the whole of the front, and he did so. Well warned, he let the illusions crash among them, although he himself didn’t always see the workings as genuine until they were too late.

Stop this one.

Mortirmir threw effort into the pale gold of his shield. Fire roared all along the front of his corner of the battle, and licked both over and under his working. Frozen grass caught fire. He let it burn. The spearmen were closer, the noise was alien and suffocating, and he was desperate to escape the confines of his helmet. He couldn’t see anything beyond the hard eyes of the killers opposite him – almost close enough to touch.

His squire – a hard-eyed bastard provided him by Ser Michael – put his shoulder against Mortirmir’s back. ‘Get ready, ser!’

Mortirmir had decided to fight with sword and buckler. He set his feet.

‘Close yer fucking visor, ser,’ his squire said. A gauntleted hand slammed his visor down so hard he almost fell.

He looked through the slits and saw-

The spearhead came for him, trying reap his life, and caught on his chain aventail. He did nothing to parry it – it cut through the aventail, popping rings at their rivets. But the aventail was too big for the fifteen-year-old ‘man-at-arms’ anyway and the spearhead punched past him, over his shoulder, creasing his round shoulder pauldron and wrenching his shoulder in a way he’d remember in a hundred nightmares.

Mortirmir’s training took hold. His buckler flicked out and the steel boss slipped along the spearshaft. He nudged the point of the blade into line.

Phontia! he said.

The spearman burst into flame inside his scale shirt, so that for a moment his face appeared to be that of a daemon from hell.

The old man had told him to remain on the defence. That was, he could see, a recipe for disaster. He pushed into the dead man’s place, the smell of burning meat strong in his nostrils even through his visor, and pointed the sword again. He put a quarter of his potentia into a single simple working.

Well, not so very simple.

A ball of fire has to emerge from somewhere. Fire, as an element, was parasitic – fire never exists without a source. The source is the hard part – creating the source of a ball of fire requires time and patience and practice. It is much easier if the caster works the source close to himself and much harder if he attempts to do it at a distance – hence, most battlefield casters worked up a heavy shield and then made the ball of fire, fuelled by wood or various gases, appear at arm’s length, and then, when they had a satisfactory pyrotechnic, they would move it as they might throw a heavy object. Except worked in the aethereal, of course.

This is where education was often a limiting factor on power. A young practioner who has been shown how to create coal oil is far more dangerous than one who has only learned to create beeswax.

A young practioner who has linked to Harmodius has access to a world of substances beyond the ken of most magisters. Rarefied alchemical creations. After all, an hermeticist who knew alchemy need only make a substance in real once.

Mortirmir’s fireball burned so hot as it ignited six feet in front of him that he flinched away, almost lost his hermetic shield, and lost control of the fire. It drifted away. Then it vanished with a pop as he lost the fine control of his source.

Forty close-packed spearmen were incinerated. The left front corner of the enemy phalanx collapsed.

Ser Michael, who commanded the rightmost battle in the company, pointed his pole-axe – one-handed – at the charred ruin. ‘At them!’ he roared.

Aeskepiles had ridden his horse closer and closer to the point of impact – so that as the spearmen slowed, aimed and thrust with their spear points and the sound of their impact on the armour of his enemies exploded, he arrived at a point just fifty paces from the combat. He was secure behind the centre.

The closer two magisters were, the less able either was to deflect the castings of the other. At fifty paces-

An enormous ball of white-hot fire appeared to his left. He hadn’t felt it cast and hadn’t seen the caster.

As fast as the flash of terror that rippled through his system – making his horse shy as his spurred heels bit into her sides – he spat five words in the aether.

The Red Knight felt the old man leave him as the breaking of a fever and the loss of an unwelcome memory. He wanted to say something. If only to know the man was gone for good.

But the enemy spearmen were two spear lengths away. Cully and Wilful Murder tossed their bows aside and slid back through the ranks – Toby, who fought with a heavy spear, slid it over his head. He raised his ghiavarina. He’d never used it in combat.

He was alone, and the headache was gone.

He took a deep breath. Rotated his hips back. He had the spear, head up, in the spear guard called dente di cinghiaro. As his opponent’s spear came at him – a long, committed thrust – he cut down into it. His blow should have batted the heavy spear down and safely away. Instead, his magnificent, dragon-gifted weapon cut through his opponent’s spearhead. The truncated, blunt iron end slammed into his helmet, knocking him backward. The force of his cut, which should have been dissipated on his adversary’s shaft, sent the head of the ghiavarina deep in the ground at his feet.

He ripped it free, stepped forward, and slammed it into his opponent’s head before he was even over the shock of its effect. But it didn’t slam into his opponent’s helmet. It sheared through it, severing the helmet’s top four fingers and one finger of the man’s skull so cleanly that for a half a heartbeat, brains, skull, arming hood, mail and helmet were a series of concentric circles like some wild nomadic art.

Another spear struck his left pauldron and bounced up and over his shoulder, and a third slammed into his breastplate, but Toby’s shoulder in his back kept him on his feet and he struggled to recover from his surprise.

Toby saved his life as an enemy second ranker got a hand on the haft of his weapon – the haft didn’t seem to have any special properties – and reached for him with a wicked dagger. It flashed past the bottom of his vision, limited behind his visor, and he felt the blow only as pressure.

Toby rammed his short spear into the man’s head. His skull went backwards, Toby passed his knight, stepped long, rotated the spear end for end and pushed the iron at the base of the shaft into the man’s aventail and crushed his throat.

The two sides were stable – pushing at each other. Here and there, men fought, but this was what older veterans called the press. A deadly shoving match, where the cost of failure was rout and death. The spearmen were deeper. The company had better armour.

There was a titanic flash of yellow-white light in the Red Knight’s right peripheral vision.

He tapped Toby with his right gauntlet – not trusting his weapon – and the squire pivoted on his hips, parried a last thrust from their new opponent, and passed back. The Red Knight got his body low and set his feet wide. And cut – small passes. All as precise as dagger flicks. He severed the spear shaft pressing at him, and severed a man’s hand at the wrist with the kind of motion that a man might use when fishing.

Then, as his next adversary stumbled back, hand severed and cauterised, the Red Knight stepped forward and swung.

Spears were severed. Men fell forward as they lost the support of their weapons pinned against opponents in the press.

He cut again, as if his sword-like long spearhead was a huge axe, carried by a giant Nordikan.

Everything the spearhead touched was cut – armour, leather, wood, and flesh.

A hole, the width of his swing, opened in the enemy phalanx.

He stepped forward again, and swung at five cringing men. Two died.

The weapon lodged deep in the body of the third. He pulled – and a spear shaft struck him in the back. Desperate, he wrenched at the thing and it slid out like any weapon, shimmering blue red in the spring sunlight.

Whatever properties it had had were used up. And he was six steps deep in the enemy phalanx.

Blows began to fall on him like hail, and he was driven to his knees by a crashing, two-handed blow by a desperate man wielding a spear shaft like a two-handed flail.

The press closed around him.

Another man stripped his weapon from his hands – they were all around him, too close – but he got his right hand on his new dagger hilt and flicked it out.

And then it was just the fighting.

In full plate, he was lighter and more mobile then his adversaries in calf-length chain and scale. They had heavy shields and long spears – some were discarding them and others were not – and as they pressed him down, he burst into the frenzied routines his father’s master-at-arms had taught him since boyhood. He caught the right arm of the man who had stripped his spear, rolled him, broke his arm and stabbed him in his unarmoured neck below his ear. Grabbed the next man, slamming his steel fist into the unprotected face, caught his shoulders and used the point of his beaked visor to smash the man’s teeth even while his steel sabatons mangled the man’s feet and shins. Blows fell on his back – on his right shoulder, exposed in the melee – two blows so hard they moved his whole body and struck his helmet. He was dazed.

His hands and feet kept killing. He kicked a spearman between the legs, the steel point of his sabaton crushing the man’s testicles even as he held the man’s spear – his right arm shot out, and the hardened steel flange of his own elbow joint ripped the nose from the face of another spearman who was trying to climb his back.

His left leg was caught in something. It threatened his balance, and he was fighting so many men he had no time to spare to free it.

He knew, with awful clarity, that he was going down. The loss of balance was incremental. He got his dagger, point down, into a man’s scale-protected back – and the triangular point punched through like an awl through hardened leather.

He tried to use the dagger as a sort of climbing iron to hold himself erect.

Then something gave in his left knee.

Damn it. I tried, he thought, and down he went.

The mercenary cavalry watched the madmen come at them. It was a well-known fact that infantry cannot charge cavalry – that it was suicide to do so.

They came on anyway.

The lead knight – a Southerner from distant Occitan – pointed his lance. ‘Sweet friends,’ he said, in the language of romance. ‘These are brave men and worthy foes. If they want a contest-’ He smiled. ‘Let us give them their wish.’

He reached up and closed his visor – tossed his head to make sure his great helm was firmly seated in his steel cap. Lowered his lance into his rest. ‘For Saint James!’ he roared.

The mercenaries were not all from Occitan, and a polyphony of war cries emerged. The knights lowered their lances and rumbled towards the axe-wielding madmen.

The moment of impact was like an explosion of flesh. Axes severed the front legs of warhorses even as lances punched through layered byranies. A generation of Nordikans died in the front rank – a fifth of their number reaped by death in a single instant.

The survivors didn’t flinch. The great axe heads swept up again. The horses fought – hooves flashed – and in the centre four friends stood together, the axes had hewn two horses to the ground and the other horses couldn’t get past them. That firm point in the centre of the Nordikan line became like the prow of a ship in a storm.

As the knights slowed, their horses became more vulnerable. Lances were dropped, swords swept out.

No shield on earth can stop an axe wielded by a man as tall as your horse. And even when your hardened plate stops the cut of the weapon, the force of the blow can still rip you from your saddle.

But while the murderous giant shifts his weight and sweeps the axe up for another crushing blow, he is very vulnerable.

Great men died. Knights and warriors, veterans of a dozen wounds, died in heartbeats, without even knowing their killers.

The horses pressed on. And the Nordikans stumbled back.

The Thrakian peasants broke.

They’d lasted longer than anyone had a right to expect, their bravest men running at a full sprint after the laughing Vardariotes, and dying with carefully aimed arrows in their bodies. The best were killed, and the hesitant and the slow were left. In the end, like scavengers beaten off a corpse, they turned and ran.

The Vardariotes – old hands at this kind of fight – had allowed themselves to retreat all the way back to the stone outbuildings of the isolated farm. They rallied, and changed quivers, and let the remaining Thrakian peasants live.

Count Zac counted the horses. He had lost one man.

‘Where’s Khengiz?’ he called.

‘Girth snapped!’ an avildahr called out. Men laughed.

Opposite them, they could see the enemy’s main cavalry force forming. They had to open the centre of their line to let the peasants through, and that wasn’t going well. It was a missed opportunity, but following the peasants too closely could have been a disaster.

Zac shrugged. ‘Ready, my loves?’

Their shouts rang in the air.

He glanced left. The Nordikans were in it – they’d die where they stood. The centre of the line seemed to be winning. He frowned.

Ser Giorgios rode over from the head of the magnificent Scholae. ‘That was like a textbook exercise.’ He shrugged. ‘The skirmishing. The-’

Count Zac beamed with pleasure. ‘High praise indeed from the Count of the Scholae.’

The enemy was still having trouble with the terrified peasants clumped up in front of their cavalry. Alas, thought Count Zac.

‘But now,’ Giorgios said.

‘Bah!’ Count Zac laughed. ‘Two thousand country cavalry? We have five hundred between us. We can handle them.’ He grinned. ‘Until their Easterners sweep around these buildings in an hour, and then we all die.’ He shrugged. ‘I am true to my salt. You?’

Ser Giorgios smiled. ‘How shall we begin?’ he asked.

‘Ah, you grant me the command?’ Count Zac was a small man, but he sat up straighter at these words.

‘I do.’

‘Then we will start with a dramatic failure, I think. Yes?’ He laughed.

Ser Giorgios tried to match his laugh.

‘Here they come!’ shouted Dmitry, Ser Christos’s hypaspist.

Ser Christos watched the Vardariotes and the Scholae – men he’d commanded on other fields – come at him. The crispness of their lines and the neat precision with which they drew their bows from their bow cases contrasted sharply with his own rural tagmas, still struggling with their own peasants. In many cases, their friends and neighbours. A landowner would bend down from the saddle to hear a weeping man tell how his brother had died screaming, gut shot by the red-clad barbarians.

It was all very Morean, and he loved them for loving their men. But he could also see how all this was about to go wrong.

‘Look alive, there!’ he roared. ‘Clear my front! This will be a false charge – see their bows? They will come in, loose arrows, and then run. We will not respond – Hear me, Hetaeroi? Stand your ground!’

The enemy line came forward at a fast trot. Two hundred paces away, as the Latin mercenaries slammed into the distant Nordikans with a sound like their own Ragnarok, the two regiments of the guard broke into a canter.

‘Shields up!’ Christos roared.

The peasants huddled in front of the cavalry raised what shields they had.

The flight of arrows came in. Some of the Vardariotes loosed arrows with whistles and they screamed.

Those of his own stradiotes who were practised bowmen loosed back.

Men and horses fell on both sides.

The Guard turned together and cantered away, leaving a handful of dead horses and men in their wake. Over the backs of their saddles, they loosed again. Again, the whistles shrieked. It took real courage to stand straight as the whistles came closer – the longest heartbeat of your life. And maybe the last.

There were screams. And grunts.

Ser Christos looked at the sun, which hadn’t moved by a quarter of an hour.

Ser Christos thought, What am I doing here? Why am I fighting these men? This has all gone terribly awry. We were supposed to save the Morea.

Men were looking to him. His battle plan was simple – to wait for the Easterners to come in on the enemy flank, and only then to charge. With sheer weight of numbers his two thousand horse might break the Guard, but the casualties would break a generation and farms – hundreds of farms – would go back to the Wild. The Guard would not die easily.

Whereas, if they were outflanked, they would retire like the professionals they were. And live to fight for a new Emperor. And his men could vent their rage on the foreigners in the centre.

‘Stand fast!’ he called again.

Demetrius was winning, he could feel it, and he hadn’t even bloodied his sword. He suspected that his pater would have been in the centre with the infantry. Or leading one of the flanks in person.

Dariusz – in many ways, his best man, but an irritating, over-focused man who did not take enough care about how he phrased his criticisms – rose in his stirrups. ‘The Thrakians are beaten. Why does Ser Christos not charge through them?’ He shook his head.

Demetrius rose in his stirrups and watched for a long time – as long as a priest might take to consecrate the host. ‘Go and tell the old man to charge. Now.’ He looked at his own right and saw the knights – his best purchase – closing their visors and preparing to charge the Nordikans, whom he feared like other men feared disease and death. The foreigners were too ignorant to know what they were facing, and they were recklessly brave – let them take some time dying, and he’d have the whole battle.

The centres were locked. As he expected. Men died. And other men stepped on their corpses – whether they were alive or dead – and pressed on.

Fifty paces to his front, Aeskepiles sat alone on his pale horse and no light seemed to fall on him, nor did he leave a shadow. He was facing just slightly to the left. He had four shields – one round, one square, two shaped like knight’s shields – all a deep black. They moved as he moved.

Whatever he was doing was far, far more spectacular than anything in the previous battle. Lightning of every colour and no colour sparkled among his shields and struck well off to the left of the enemy centre – at the very end of the foreigners, the so-called company.

Detonation after detonation rolled against the distant mountains and came back as thunder, and men died every time. Blown to pieces by forces they could not comprehend.

Aeskepiles’ shoulders slumped and then rose, as if the man was wielding a great smith’s hammer, and he struck again, this time with both hands.

And men died.

Aeskepiles was lost in the great fugue of his borrowed sorcery – aware, at one panicked level, that he was spending his reserves too profligately. Shocked that the young practitioner to his left had such power. Wary that the old one to his right had fallen silent.

But it didn’t matter, because his working – his new, unsubtle working – was building to its climax. It built without him, sorcery multiplying upon itself the way living creatures bred and multiplied.

Like a watched pot-

But he didn’t need to watch.

The student – he had the boy fixed as a senior Academy student, based on the manner of his casting – produced a very respectable blade of light. Aeskepiles lost two shields, and was aware, in the corner of his mind that was aware of the battle, that the centre was not quite as it should be,

If I do this just right, they will all die – on both sides.

But first, the two who could threaten him. The young one, and then the old one.

Aeskepiles was close – so close that Mortirmir had no chance to parry the attack. The blow from the green-black axe, when it came, collapsed all four of Mortirmir’s carefully wrought shields.

John le Bailli died, burned to ash in his armor. Bent died, his lungs on fire inside his body. Ser Jehan died. The company lost a generation of leaders and twenty men in the blink of any eye.

But the main force of the blow fell on Mortirmir.

And it was deflected.

He didn’t have time or thought to be shocked.

Move aside, Harmodius said. In the aethereal, he took control of Mortirmir’s body and his potentia. And everything else.

You were just bait, he said. Now you are the skin of the lion.

A wall of sparkling white fire stood between them and Aeskepiles. Men screamed – men half burned or caught at the edges of the massive working.

I’m the lion.

Faster than the thought of a mortal, Harmodius rode the casting back to its source – as Richard Plangere had taught him to. He’d declined to do it to a dog – but now-

Instead of casting, he followed the course that Thorn had taught him.

And then Morgan Mortirmir was alone.

The Red Knight had his arms pinned by corpses, and someone stepped on his breastplate. A rib cracked. And he was helpless. Another foot – this time on his armoured shin. The pain was immense, the damage negligible.

He couldn’t move.

Panic – blind panic, the panic that comes from helplessness and impending death – was right there. And so was death.

He ran, as he had when he was a child, for his hermetical palace, and waited for the end. Time was different here.

It is difficult to be panicked when you have time to think.

There was the new statue on the plinth in the middle of his casting rotunda. It had been empty for many months, and he stared at it and realised that he was used to having another mind available to feed him workings.

And then he realised that he wasn’t without resources himself.

It wasn’t something he had practised. He had to improvise. And he didn’t know whether the foot on his breastplate belonged to an enemy or his brother.

In the end, he settled for simplicity. He placed the end of an aethereal chain of iron in his left hand. And he pulled it with ops - slowly. The sigils whirled above his head – creation, displacement, enhancement, augury (because he needed to know which way to face). He cast the most complex working of his hermetical life – merely to stand.

He stood.

Thrakian spearmen who had seen twenty fights in the Wild and a dozen actions with men fell back a pace. Toby, straddling him, was brushed aside – Ser Milus took advantage of the shock he gave them and cracked a helmet with his great two-handed hammer.

The Red Knight drew his sword. His draw was fluid, his hips rotated – he had seldom felt more alive. The great red sword flashed from the scabbard and the heavy point went over the shield of the next spearman.

‘Captain’s up!’ screamed Toby.

There was a sound like a watermill, a roar like a waterfall, and the whole company pushed.

The Red Knight disdains to kill his enemies by sorcery. And if I win this, I need as many of them alive as I can manage, he thought. He was under their spears – most of the Thrakians had short swords in their hands. He gripped his sword two-handed, and started hacking men to the ground.

On his left, Ser Milus saw something he didn’t and began yelling for men to join on him.

The Thrakians were pushed back another step, and another.

He turned his head – safe for a moment – and saw Milus and Francis Atcourt and a dozen other men-at-arms running to the left.

The company was pivoting on the centre, the right advancing, the left sliding back. And he had no idea why. Trapped in the airless, sweat-stink of his faceplate, he could see nothing beyond the next foe.

He stopped. Pivoted again and let Toby push past. The press was lighter – there was room. A wider space opened in the centre and the Thrakians backpedalled a dozen paces and stopped. Those men who still had spear points raised them.

The centre of the company shuddered to a stop.

Toby stepped past him, and then Cully. And then he was past Nell, who was white-faced and had a red slash from the base of her chin to the top of her left breast – right through her maille.

He had no time for her. He stepped back again. And again.

A boy was holding his warhorse. By an act of pure will he got into the saddle. Flipped his visor back after fighting the buckle. Washed himself in air. Wrenched crisp, clean breaths of it after the foul stuff trapped against his visor-

And saw the Nordikans were dying.

They’d killed a great many knights and more horses, but they were now an island in a sea of cavalrymen. The enemy’s stradiotes were mixed in with the mercenary knights – he could see Derkensun’s gilded helm, and axes still flashed.

Ser Milus, at the head of a third of the company, smashed into the side of the melee.

To his right, where young Mortirmir should have been anchoring the company shield, there was a light show unlike anything hermetical that the Red Knight had ever seen. Despite which, Ser Michael was far up the field, advancing at a steady walk – so far that he was almost at weapon’s length from Demetrius.

The enemy centre was moments from collapse – like his own left.

Aeskepiles – he could just see the man over the swirl of the melee – was writhing like a man fighting a pack of wolves. Except that he was alone, and his shields had all fallen.

And beyond him, further to the right, by the old road to Dorling, there was confusion in the ranks of the enemy’s main body of cavalry – confusion that cheered his heart. Even as he glanced that way, the Vardariotes and the Scholae went forward.

One deep breath.

It was all perfectly balanced.

It was not a time for chivalry.

He pointed his sword at the enemy’s mercenary knights, and he cast.

The Easterners hadn’t appeared.

Count Zac reined in from his latest feigned flight and, while his crack light horsemen rallied on their squadron banners, he cantered around the stone barn and looked west. What he saw made him smile.

He rode back to where the Scholae and the Vardariotes joined. ‘Change horses,’ he ordered.

Ser Giorgios had an arrow in his right thigh, snapped off short. He waved. He was white, but in charge of himself – to a man like Zac, that was worth high praise. ‘You are like one of my own children,’ he said.

Ser Giorgios nodded. ‘Hurts like poison,’ he muttered. ‘The centre seems to be holding,’ he said. ‘What do we do now?’

Zac nodded. ‘Now we win,’ he said. He pointed with his riding crop, to the west.

Ser Giorgios managed a pained smile. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘That’s why we win!’ Zac said.

The horse holders came forward and handed men their remounts. It took very little time for crack troops to change horses.

Opposite them, they only faced the right end of the enemy line. But that end was shifting, trying to remould itself across the road. They were good troops – they weren’t in chaos. But they were attempting a difficult manoeuvre in the face of the enemy.

Count Zac watched them for as long as a child might take to count ten. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘But wrong.’

He placed himself exactly between the two regiments.

‘Walk!’ he ordered.

As crisply as on parade, the two cavalry regiments moved forward, horses at a walk.

Zac had dreamed of this a hundred times – a stricken field, against long odds. A fresh horse and a sharp sword.

And an enemy trapped in place. It was the steppe nomad’s dream.

‘Draw!’ he roared. His horse walked six prancing steps before he called, ‘Swords!’

Five hundred sabres glittered like ice on a fair winter’s day.

The Vardariotes and the Scholae pressed into the centre as they had practised, so that they were a single mass of horseflesh and sabres. Or war hammers or small steel axes, as personal preference might dictate.

The Thrakian cavalrymen opposite them shuddered. That shudder was even visible; their ranks moved.

The Guards rolled forward as gracefully as a dancer at a party. Their precision was inhuman, and they inspired awe.

Zac turned his head and saw movement on the road to the right – a glimpse of steel.

He laughed, stood in his stirrups and threw his long sabre in the air in a great whirling flash – up and up, and then down, and into his hand as if ordained by his own wind-blown steppe gods.

A screech rose in Zac’s throat. Unintended.

The Vardariotes answered him, and the Guards put their spurs to their fresh horses, and charged.

And in answer, from the Dorling road, came a great shout that rolled over the field like the hunting call of a great Wyvern or a mighty dragon – ‘Lachlan! Lachlan for aa!’

Harmodius stood among the cogs and wheels and foundry runs of Aeskepiles’ memory palace. He had time to marvel at the complexity of the man’s forming and the strain on it all. There were frayed ropes and chains at maximum tension and leaking buckets, and the water that turned the wheels that drove the workings was sluggish and thick, filthy with unredeemed pledges and treasons.

He flicked his sword, and a massive bellows vanished.

Harmodius allowed himself a grin. A thousand times, it had occurred to him that the hair he’d taken from the cutler in Liviapolis might belong to another man, and not Aeskepiles.

Aeskepiles’ aethereal form appeared. He was a big man with a black beard and a scowl, and two heavy black cords ran out of his forehead and away into aethereal space.

Begone! he snapped.

Harmodius smiled.

I am the lion, he said. And severed the chains that powered . . . something.

There was a mighty crash.

Aeskepiles – obviously panicked, even here – raised a wand of iron.

It won’t make any difference, Harmodius said. But that’s a bad way to go, loosing destruction inside your own head.

He stepped forward.

Who are you? demanded the sorcerer. How can this happen?

I am the lion, Harmodius said, and used his Fell Sword to destroy the sorcerer’s soul in a single cut.

Then he opened himself a little, and collapsed the dead man’s memory palace, appalled at the waste of energy and potential as the whole of a behemoth spell-working drained away into the aether and the real. He worked fast, scraping it away as a nomad woman scrapes a hide clean of fat.

And then he unpacked his own, neatly. He’d had plenty of time to practise, and it spooled out of his soul into the clean space. Some things fitted oddly. Some things might never be quite the same.

Harmodius remembered his first rooms, when he was a student in Harndon. They didn’t match his furniture. But they were his own.

The two black ropes that had been attached to the magister’s aethereal forehead remained, dangling, and as his own memory palace materialised around him, they transformed into the black pupil of a golden eye. A golden eye the size of a door.

‘Ahhh,’ said a deep and pleasant voice. ‘I see. I thought you were dead.’

The eye blinked. ‘You will not triumph,’ the voice said, as if this was the best of news. ‘But I grant you, this was clever.’

The sword flicked, and the eye vanished.

And Harmodius stood and shook in the midst of his new home.

When it was too late to matter, and all was lost, Ser Christos stood amidst the rout of his wing and readied his lance.

The Green Hillmen were the Thrakians ancient foes. They knew each other well. They stood shoulder to shoulder against the Wild, and they hacked one another to pieces over their borders.

The enemy was mostly afoot – big men in ring mail like the Nordikans, and just as ferocious. And they flowed like a tide. And Ser Christos cursed, because on another day, on an open field, he’d have rolled these arrogant clansmen up like a carpet.

But today his men could not fight in two directions at once, and they folded. And in truth, Ser Christos thought, fitting his lance in its rest, in truth, none of them believed it was worth dying for Demetrius, anyway.

One man amidst his adversaries was mounted: a giant man on a giant horse. Ser Christos knew the fate that awaited him, to be executed as a traitor, and determined to give his son a different view of his end.

He put his spurs to his horse.

The armoured giant saw him, and flicked his lance tip – an acknowledgement? And came at him. His horse’s hooves skimmed the ground, the sun had melted the surface of the road, and the movement of thousands of men tore the turf down into mud. But he and his enemy were on the road.

He gave his war cry, and his lance came down.

So did his opponent’s, and the man roared, ‘Lachlan for aa!’ and inside his helm, Ser Christos smiled.

They came together like a clap of thunder.

Ser Christos’s lance head went through the giant’s shield, piercing two layers of oxhide and the carefully laid-up panels of elm underneath – into the mail that guarded the big man’s armpit, which it pierced. His lance bowed and snapped in three places.

Lachlan’s lance struck him full on the shield, and broke it to pieces, and shattered, but the shortened stump of his lance struck the Morean knight’s shoulder and slammed him back in his saddle, and the force of the their meeting knocked both horses back on their haunches. Ser Christos’s horse was first to recover, and it scrambled away. The bigger horse bit at it savagely while both knights struggled to draw their swords and stay mounted.

The horses circled. Lachlan was bleeding from his right armpit. The Morean suspected that something was broken in his collarbone. He got his sword free and slammed it into the big man’s helmet with no obvious effect; a good blow, but nowhere near enough.

Lachlan reeled, and then got his sword free in time to stop a cut to his neck.

For ten heartbeats, both men exchanged blows as fast as their arms could drive their weapons. Sparks flew, and both men were hurt.

Lachlan’s stallion planted an iron-shod forefoot on Ser Christos’s mount’s right front leg, and it snapped. And his horse began to go down. He ignored the pain, reached out left-handed and locked his gauntlet over Lachlan’s sword wrist. Then his horse toppled, taking both men with him.

By this time, Ser Christos was the last of Demetrius’s men still fighting for a hundred paces in all directions. Men paused – those bent on taking ransoms, or leaning on blood bespattered axes and swords – to watch.

Men who had just surrendered paused and looked.

The two combatants rose together, and Ser Christos planted his pommel hard against Lachlan’s helmet, so that the bigger man’s head snapped back. Bad Tom retreated a step and his blade snapped forward, staggering the smaller man.

They circled. Lachlan was bleeding from armpit and a hand, and had blood running from beneath his aventail. Christos had only one hand on his sword hilt, now, and blood was running down his left cuisse. He changed guard, rotating on his hips and putting his sword on the left side of his body, point back.

The Hillmen were chanting. Ser Christos had no idea what they were chanting, but he was determined to beat this one man, regardless of the cost. Or he would die trying.

When Lachlan cut at him, a monstrous, overhand cut that seemed to ignore the wounds he’d taken, Ser Christos cut up, into the blow, one-handed.

Lachlan’s strike was stopped.

The two teetered, sword to sword, for half a heartbeat.

Quick as a viper, Lachlan reversed his sword and drove his pommel at Ser Christos’s face. The Morean knight raised his hands to defend himself.

Lachlan passed his pommel over his opponent’s sword arm, locking it down. Then he passed his blade over the Morean knight’s head, using the anchored pommel as a pivot, so that he had Ser Chritos’s arms pinned against him in the prison of his body and his sword, crushing the man’s throat.

It happened so fast that Christos could only struggle, trying to wedge his blade against the giant’s crushing grip. He released his sword, the world dimming, and grabbed for his dagger.

The giant swept his feet from under him, so he was suspended in the air.

‘Yield,’ roared Tom Lachlan. ‘Gods, that was glorious!’

Ser Christos coughed. And subsided to the ground.

Bad Tom flipped open his visor and breathed like a bellows. His kerns were gathering over the downed knight. ‘Don’t kill this loon!’ he snapped. ‘I want him.’

Demetrius didn’t wait for his army to collapse. As soon as he saw the coward Aeskepiles turn his horse and bolt from the field – headed west, of all foolish ideas – Demetrius saw how the wind was blowing.

To the east, by the Lonika road, the mercenary knights had been decimated by a hermetical attack and were now breaking away from the remnants of the Nordikans. The centre was shattered – there was a palpable hole in the middle of his father’s veteran spear block and the Alban mercenaries were pouring through it. His father’s most trusted veterans were throwing down their weapons and kneeling in surrender.

And to the west instead of his Easterners, enemies had appeared.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

Dariusz shrugged, as if the whole subject wearied him.

Surrounded by his Guard, he rode south.

‘Gabriel!’

The Red Knight reined up and waited for the spike of pain in his forehead, but it didn’t come.

‘Harmodius?’

‘I go my own way now. This field is yours – you’ll want to stop the killing as soon as you can.’

‘Tom will be outraged.’

‘I may not see you again. As Master Smythe suspected, Aeskepiles was a tool just as Thorn is. Ash is using them. One of the First. I have done something morally dark. I wish to ask a favour. I think, despite using your body for months, that you owe me.’

Gabriel knew – almost intuitively – what must have happened. Because there was no more lightshow.

‘You have taken Morgan Mortirmir’s body,’ he said.

‘No. That option presented itself, and represents a temptation which, thankfully, I resisted. I took Aeskepiles’body. In fact, I AM Aeskepiles. He is not.’

‘And your favour?’ Gabriel asked.

‘Don’t pursue me. Our goals are the same.’

Gabriel looked carefully at his mentor. ‘You have made a dark choice.’

‘In a good cause.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘I will not pursue you.’

Harmodius extended an aethereal hand. ‘You will be very powerful now. Mortirmir – when he regains his wits – will eventually be even more so. With Mag and Amicia and some other allies you may still not last any longer than a candle in a rainstorm against our true foe. But you must try.’ The old man’s aethereal form shrugged. ‘You have a sort of ferocious luck that gives me hope.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘Thanks for the good rede, old man.’ He reached out, and the two embraced in the aether - a gesture of trust in that environment beyond the imagining of many practitioners.

‘Where are you going?’ Gabriel asked.

Harmodius paused. ‘Best you don’t know, lad. Desperate times, desperate measures.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve left you a set of my guesses as to what is going on.’ He handed over a scroll – an aethereal scroll, a concept that made Gabriel’s head ache.

‘Go with God,’ Harmodius said.

And then Gabriel was truly alone.

There is a point in a savage action where no prisoners can be taken; where men are too afraid, or too committed to destruction, to give mercy.

But there is another point, where both sides near exhaustion. Then, in sheer fatigue, it is possible to see past the fear and the blood rage.

When one of the captains of Andronicus’s veterans held out his sword by the blade Ser Michael saw it. He took the hilt and raised it – both arms high, armpits open to an attack. ‘They yield!’ he roared.

It took time. For the last man hacked down between Kelvin Ewald and Wilful Murder, it took too much time. Some men in closed helmets couldn’t hear. Other men couldn’t see.

As the surrender spread, some of the Nordikans had to be physically restrained. Ser Milus had a dent put in his helmet by Harald Derkensun, who was determined to wipe knights – all knights – from the face of the earth. Blackhair lay dead between his feet, pierced through with a mercenary’s lance.

The Red Knight sat on his charger, surveying the end. He had only just discovered that Ser Jehan was dead. And John le Bailli.

Ser Gavin caught his stirrup. ‘There goes the bastard,’ he said, pointing at a golden helm and a white horse, vanishing to the south.

The Red Knight let a moment’s rage guide him. ‘Let’s get him,’ he said.

‘I’m your man,’ Gavin said. He hobbled back into the press of horses and pages behind the fighting line.

To the left and right, the beaten Moreans had slumped down. Most simply sat in the mud and blood. The company weren’t doing much better. Half of them were on one knee, or bent double.

Ser Alcaeus dragged himself from the right of the line. ‘You must finish Demetrius,’ he said. ‘This isn’t done until that imp is dead.’ He looked around. ‘Thrakians are stubborn, brave men. And we need them.’

The Red Knight looked down at the Morean knight. ‘I know,’ he said. Better than you.

Alcaeus grabbed his horse, and Dmitry, his squire, mounted his. Their horses were fresh; it was the men who were exhausted from forty minutes of fighting.

The Red Knight bent low in the saddle to Ser Michael, who was insisting he would come.

‘Shut up,’ the Duke said. ‘I need you to stay right here and prevent a massacre. We need every one of these stiff-necked bastards. Right? Don’t let Wilful and Long Paw decide to “make anything right” for Bent. Got me?’

Michael nodded.

‘And get a messenger to Gelfred and the scouts and tell them to get their arses back here.’ The Red Knight looked at his brother. Father Arnaud was there, getting a leg over his own jet-black charger.

‘Father, fetch Mag. And Father-’

‘I know,’ Arnaud said heavily.

‘She has to be told.’ For once, the Red Knight looked young; very young, and not very happy. ‘Why does your God allow all this shit, Father?’

The priest’s eyes travelled over the line of dead that marked the high-water mark of the Thrakian charge. ‘Because we have free will,’ he said. ‘The shit is ours, not His. I’ll tell Mag.’

The Red Knight raised an eyebrow. His mouth opened but his brother leaned over and smacked him in the side with the pommel of his dagger. His mouth closed, and then he reached out to the priest, steel gauntlet to steel gauntlet. ‘Thanks. I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

There were a dozen of them when they rode. Ser Alcaeus and his squire Dmitry, Ser Gavin, Toby, Long Paw, Nell, Ser Milus, Ser Besancon, Kelvin Ewald and three pages who had their horses handy and were fresh. Plus one of the Lanthorn boys, and two Morean recruits.

It was a very small army.

Every one of them took two horses, and they took the time to fetch water and food, and most of them were eating cheese or sausage when they trotted out of the battle line, headed south.

They alternated between a fast trot and a canter while the sun set. No one said anything.

Ten miles south of the battlefield, they dismounted while Long Paw looked at a dead horse in the road. It wasn’t dark; March in Morea was almost like late spring in Alba, and the red sun threw long shadows. To the west, they could see the broken remnants of the Thrakian left wing being pursued by the Vardariotes, who clearly had not received an order to stop killing.

The Red Knight watched wearily, and sent Ser Bescanon with the two Morean pages as interpreters.

‘I would rather go with you, my lord,’ Bescanon said.

‘Well. I’d rather go drink with the Vardariotes and stop the killing, so we’re even,’ said the Duke.

Long Paw scratched under his chin. ‘They’re an hour ahead of us, and riding harder. Galloping, I’d say.’

Ser Gavin nodded. ‘If he makes Eves, he’ll be a tough nut to crack, and we don’t have the men.’

The Red Knight nodded. ‘Nothing for it,’ he said. And pressed his horse to a heavy gallop.

They changed horses with nothing left of daylight but a red streak in the western sky, so that the spikes and peaks of the highest Adnacrags showed black against it. They galloped on. They could see the acropolis of Eves rising ahead of them, and they could see the black spots of a dozen horsemen riding along the road.

They dashed on, thundering down the road, until the very last light was leaching out of the sky and it was clear that Demetrius’s party would make Eves.

And then the Duke reined in.

He rose in his stirrups, and his left hand flashed out. ‘Ignem veni mittere in terram,’ he shouted, and a line of fire rose a mile away.

‘Jesu!’ Gavin said.

‘Not exactly,’ his brother responded. And pressed his spurs to his horse’s side.

They galloped over the darkening fields, and the men they were chasing, trapped on the road by the high walls and the tower of flame, finally turned at bay. There were twenty of them, all professional soldiers. They were in a mix of armour, although they all wore the golden leopard badge of Demetrius. They had ridden away from the flame, which burned like hell come to earth.

Demetrius, in his golden helmet, mounted on his white charger, looked like an angel. But the fire burned too red, and it made him a fallen angel – a rebel. He was in front, and he halted his horse fifty yards from the Red Knight’s horse, which was breathing like it was about to founder.

‘Warhorse,’ the Red Knight said, softly.

Nell brought his horse forward.

He dismounted. ‘Single combat,’ he shouted. ‘You and I can fight for this, Demetrius.’

‘I think I’ll just surrender and see what my cousin Irene decides,’ Demetrius said. ‘Or perhaps my guards will take you and your friends. Wouldn’t that be a nice reversal of fortune?’

The Red Knight got a foot into the stirrup of his great black charger and pushed with all his might to get himself into the saddle. He failed, and almost fell. But his horse stayed still.

He sighed. ‘Look at the pillar of fire that burns at your back, Demetrius. And ask yourself if you can take me – me and my friends?’

‘I accept your point,’ Demetrius said, his cultured voice light, like a comic actor’s. ‘I’ll render myself your prisoner.’

The Red Knight tried to mount again. His left thigh apparently wasn’t doing the job. His armour weighed down like the world on the shoulders of Atlas.

Demetrius laughed. ‘Maybe I should fight. I hear you are very good, but you look tired.’

Suddenly, he slammed his visor down, put his lance into its rest and his horse leaped into a gallop. From fifty yards away. A warhorse takes ten seconds to run fifty yards.

The Red Knight leaped, and Nell shoved her shoulder under his left cuisse and pushed. He almost fell, but he righted himself.

Eight.

He got his feet into the stirrups.

Six.

Slammed his spurs into his charger’s sides and reached for his sword.

Five.

Grasped the sword as the warhorse exploded into motion-

Three.

Demetrius’s lance tip danced in the firelight, but the man was backlit, wearing golden armour, glowing like a creature of hell or one of the old gods, and the Red Knight’s draw flicked out-

One-

He cut up into the lance, his sword arm lifting, point dropping so that the lance tip slipped past his shieldless side. Then he reversed the blade, with the full power of his right shoulder, and backhanded the red-enamelled pommel into Demetrius’s visor, hooking the pommel on the other man’s neck and lifting him over the back of his saddle so that he crashed to earth.

He reined in, only a few paces from Demetrius’s men. It was hard to see their faces in the unsealy light, so he backed his horse before turning. But none of them came for him.

He trotted down the road until he came to Demetrius, who was on his hands and knees. He dismounted and walked over to the young man, who was pulling at his aventail, trying desperately to take a full breath through a partially crushed larynx.

The young Count got his helmet free and gasped in a lungful of air. And saw the Red Knight.

‘I yield,’ he whined, and held out his blade.

The Red Knight had his sword point down, a relaxed grip called Tutta porta di ferro. ‘No,’ he said, and cut.

Demetrius’s head hit the ground at the same moment as his body, but they were no longer together.

Far to the north, the Black Knight stood with two of his squires and Master de Marche under the flapping hearts and lilies of Galle. By careful pre-arrangement, they stood on an island in the midst of the Great River. There was still snow on the grass, and the late winter sun shone fitfully on it.

‘He won’t come,’ de Marche said. He regretted that he had become the Black Knight’s naysayer. It wasn’t a role he relished.

Ser Hartmut Li Orguelleus nodded. ‘It was worth a trip here to find out.’

He raised a gauntleted hand. ‘Ah! But there he is, messires.’

On the northern shore, a company came into view. They carried four slim boats, and in moments they had them in the water.

It took them the better part of an hour to paddle across. The Great River was feeling the first of the thaws. She was great with water.

De Marche watched Ser Hartmut. The man did move – but it was glacial, and he never seemed to lock a joint. Or tire. De Marche felt the weight of his harness everywhere – his ankles hurt the more he thought about them.

Ser Hartmut merely stood.

Eventually, three of the boats landed, disgorging a hand of slovenly warriors in rusted maille and a handsome young man in what appeared to be hand-me-down armour. His bow was courtly.

Ser Hartmut opened his visor. ‘Good day to you, sir.’

The young man rose from his bow. ‘You are the Black Knight, I wager. My master has sent me to ask you if you wish to take Ticondaga.’

‘I will take it,’ Ser Hartmut said.

Suddenly, Speaker was there – cloaked in black, with a tree branch through his midsection and a smell of rot. His once-handsome features were now unmoving. In fact, the body was dead.

Under the body, Thorn was not dead.

‘This young man is the rightful heir of the Earldom of the Northwall,’ Thorn said. He meant the voice to sound pleasant, but he was out of practice and his puppet’s lungs were dead. Flies emerged when he spoke. His puppet emitted a foul reek and a croak.

De Marche retched. And translated.

Ser Hartmut shrugged. ‘You are a necromancer,’ he said.

Thorn’s corpse made no movement.

‘What do you want?’ Ser Hartmut asked. It was like dealing with Satan himself and a host of his fallen angels, but Ser Hartmut had not come to be called the Knight of Ill Renown without supping with various devils. He’d even allied with other necromancers. He knew the smell.

He knew other things that made a slight smile cross his lips.

Thorn was not, and had never been, a fool. He watched the reactions of the men to his puppet – and cast it aside. He’d been careless, and let the body die. He dropped it, seized one of the slovenly warriors and took him.

The new host was tall and thin. He had never been handsome – his face was too ferret-like – but everything worked.

‘There, that will be better,’ Thorn said. ‘I want an ally in the north. I want the Wild left unmolested by men – all men. Immediately, I will aid in the capture of Ticondaga in exchange for free passage south past its defences and the use of its deep cellars as a source of supply for my army.’

‘Your army?’ Ser Hartmut asked.

‘I will summon the Wild, and it will come. A host of boggles like this world has never seen. An ocean of silkies on the water. Wyverns and Wardens and irks and trolls and things no man can yet imagine.’ Thorn spread his arms. ‘I will bring down fire from on high.’

Ser Hartmut rubbed the ends of his moustache with his fingers. ‘How will you transport this army?’

Thorn shrugged and enjoyed the act of shrugging. ‘My captain will take care of the details.’ He indicated the young man.

Ser Hartmut nodded. ‘On what will you swear?’

Thorn massaged his memory until his puppet produced a lopsided grin. ‘My name.’

‘On these terms, I am willing to make alliance.’ Ser Hartmut turned to de Marche, who was doing his best to maintain a blank expression.

‘One last thing,’ Thorn said. Ser Hartmut reminded him of all the things he disliked about men, especially fighting men.

Ser Hartmut raised an eyebrow. Inside a bassinet, it was still an expressive gesture.

‘I get Ghause. And all the Murienses are to be killed, without exception.’ Thorn’s voice was like adamant.

Hartmut bowed. ‘It pleases me to say I don’t even know who Ghause is. And the Murienses-’ He snapped his fingers.

More than two hundred leagues as the eagle flies, to the east, Mag was working. So was Morgon Mortirmir, and the Red Knight, and every other man or woman who could harness potentia and transmit it to those who could heal. The barn stank of shit and blood, and as soon as men were bound up, bones were reknit, or intestines closed – or as soon as their eyes closed on the pain for ever – they were carried to cleaner places.

Not all of the work was hermetical, far from it. Even with Amicia’s support from far off South Ford, even with every scrap of training and working they could muster, much of the blood was cleaned by men and women with their hands. The Yahadut, Yosef ben Mar Chiyya, worked until he fell asleep, rose, and worked again, always carefully using his medical skills to augment his hermetical mastery.

He was not the only practitioner who worked also in the real.

Father Arnaud had not stopped working for three days. And as Mortirmir shook his head over the pile of entrails that had once been a man’s digestive tract, and let the man’s soul slip away; as Mag sat like a marionette with her strings cut, beyond tears for her love or for any of the boys who were dying in desperate hope as they looked into her eye; as the Red Knight realised that he had struck an absolute wall to his potentia, and could do nothing more, he looked up, and saw Father Arnaud bent over Wastewater Will, a boy whose only wound was a simple slash to the leg. It was a slash that had occurred in a barn yard, gone septic, and now would cost the boy his life.

The priest muttered, and shuddered. And raised his hands, and prayed. And prayed.

And the boy died.

Father Arnaud rose from his knees and let a long sigh escape him. Then he made the sign of the cross over the boy’s forehead, and said, ‘Christ be with you on your journey. Know no further pain, but only joy.’ He walked back to another blood-soaked pile of straw, once a man called Lingcropper. But this time he didn’t bother to try his injured powers. ‘I’ll just rewrap that bandage,’ he said cheerfully.

Gabriel watched the priest, and wanted to say something. But he couldn’t think what it was. So in the end, he only stood a moment with his hand on the man’s shoulder. And then he went to find Mag.

Mag was sitting on her chair where she’d collapsed after the last hermetical medical miracle. Her daughter Sukey was by her side; Kaitlin de Towbray held her hand. And of all men, Bad Tom stood at her back.

Mag looked up. ‘I’m not going to explode,’ she said.

Gabriel Muriens took her free hand. ‘I won’t pretend that didn’t come to my mind.’

Mag looked away. ‘It had to have happened sometime. A truly powerful practitioner loses their wits? It would be terrible. Christ defend us.’

He knelt by her a while. Suddenly, and without warning, Kaitlin – heavily pregnant Kaitlin – burst into tears with a great moan and whirl of sobbing, and in a heartbeat Mag and Sukey joined her.

Gabriel Muriens was capable of tears. His weren’t very loud, but there were quite a few of them.

But long before the sobs or the Lanthorn keening were done, Tom grabbed his shoulder. ‘You need to drink,’ he said. He marched the Megas Ducas out of the barn and out of the mud and blood and faeces and into the green fields beyond. The Duke’s pavilion was set up on clean, green grass.

Tom guided the Red Knight to a stool and put him on it. Toby came and washed his hands, and he watched the old blood come away. He watched it a bit too closely.

‘Blood under my nails, Tom,’ he said.

‘Aye. Consequence of killing folk,’ Tom answered.

Toby poured wine. Others were coming over. He could see Ser Alison, who had, of course distinguished herself in the fighting against the Easterners, and Gelfred, who’d commanded that last operation. His mind whirled a bit. He settled for solid things.

‘Why’d you go to Mag?’ he asked.

Tom stretched out his legs. ‘Oh, comfort the widow,’ he said, as if this was a natural thought. ‘Offered to marry her,’ he continued. ‘She said no,’ he added, as if miffed.

‘Don’t tell Sauce,’ the Red Knight said. He raised his wine cup.

‘Old Gods, you are an evil bastard,’ Tom said, and slammed his cup on the table. ‘This crap’s too thin. I have mead.’ He walked off as Sauce came up.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Sauce asked as she ducked under the tent edge. She had been batting her eyelashes at Count Zac, who was performing mounted tricks like a much younger man out in the field.

‘You know how he is,’ Gabriel said.

An hour later, they were well into the post-battle drink. Bad Tom stood at the table, a great horn of mead in his hand, and his laugh boomed over the camp. ‘And then the loon says: stop fighting!’ He looked at his prisoner, Ser Christos, who had an arm in a sling and a bruise which covered half his face. ‘Mind you, thanks to yon, I was bleeding like a stuck pig. That was a mickle blow, messire.’

Ser Christos bowed.

Ser Michael could see the man was pained, like all of the prisoners, at being present at a victory celebration. His inherent gentility won out over his need to boast. ‘Ser knight, there’s many of us who’d like to have the power to put a lance in Bad Tom.’

Ser Gavin laughed, and Tom joined the laughter. ‘They do!’ He laughed. He turned and cocked an eyebrow at the priest, who looked more like sixty than forty. ‘And I hear we’re all to call him Ser Gabriel now, eh? Not lord high god of all? Not Duke any more?’

Ser Gabriel frowned, and then made himself laugh – at himself. ‘I liked being Duke,’ he said.

Father Arnaud drank more. ‘You’ll be a better man as Gabriel.’

Ser Alcaeus looked puzzled. ‘You are still the Duke,’ he said.

Ser Gabriel was looking at Tom. ‘There’s men who feel that there is no rank higher than that of knighthood, Ser Alcaeus,’ he said. ‘And there’s men who feel it’s time I used my given name.’ He looked at Father Alcaeus.

Tom nodded. ‘Time and time, I’d say. Ser Gabriel. I like the sound of it.’

‘That puts me in mind of something,’ Ser Gabriel said. ‘Toby, fetch my sword!’

Toby went quickly, his face showing a boy who didn’t dare to hope. But he was doomed to disappointment.

The Red Knight drew his sword and pointed it at Long Paw. ‘Come here and kneel,’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t!’ Long Paw said. But he was dragged by other men, nor was it so much against his will. ‘You know what I was,’ he said, from his knees, with dignity.

‘No worse than what any of us were,’ said the Red Knight. ‘By my knighthood, and the power of my right hand, I dub thee knight.’

‘There’s another good archer lost for ever,’ muttered Cully, but he gave his mate a hug hard enough to hurt his back. ‘You bastard,’ he said.

After that, there was some serious drinking. Captain Dariusz, who proved to have an excellent signing voice, raised it in an ancient hymn – a marvellous tune, that they all had to learn. Count Zac already knew it, and translated the words to Ser Alison, who grew still.

They drank more wine, and debated the strategy of the campaign.

Kaitlin came to see her husband, and looked around at all the men who bowed to her. ‘Don’t you talk about anything but war?’ she asked, cheeks hot.

Count Zac bowed to her when her husband was tongue-tied. ‘My lady, we but pour earth and wine on the dead.’

She shook her head.

Derkensun, who was drunker than most of them, grinned at her. ‘I have decided to get married!’ he said.

Kaitlin smiled politely at the tattooed giant. ‘That’s different from war,’ she said.

When she was gone, Bad Tom licked his lips and grinned. ‘You’re going to ruin war as a sport,’ he said. ‘All this strategia and taktika. What will you leave us?’

‘It seemed bloody enough today,’ Gabriel said.

At which Tom looked disgusted. ‘You’re carving the fun right out of war. We outmanoeuvre them. They surrender. Now they fight for us? Christ on the cross. Next we’ll settle these things with dice.’

‘Don’t you have a herd to drive?’ Ser Gabriel asked. He sounded better – better than any of them had heard him in months. Despite the dark circles under his eyes. And the impressive intake of wine. Or perhaps because of it.

‘Aye. And drive it I will. Being I’m the Drover.’ He grinned. ‘This was like a nice little rest. No beeves to watch making dung. No sheep – Christ, I hate sheep.’ He slammed back his horn. ‘Sure you wouldn’t like to come to Harndon, now? Ranald is determined to take the beeves all the way. You made him a knight. Now he has another beast in view.’

Ranald coloured, and Ser Gabriel laughed. ‘She’s not a beast – she’s much better looking than that.’ He stood up.

Behind him the whole camp was moving. It was three camps, really. The hospital had grown to cover all the buildings of the farmstead, and the defeated army’s tentage shared the ground with the victorious army’s brush shelters. ‘Can I at least ask why we couldn’t cut the fucker’s bodyguard to ribbons,’ Bad Tom asked. ‘Fair is fair. They lost.’

Ser Gabriel took a pull of wine. ‘They weren’t the enemy. They aren’t now. In a way they’re all my vassals.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s why Demetrius had to die.’

Ser Gavin shook his head. ‘It had to be done.’ But he sounded unsure.

Ser Gabriel nodded. ‘You may have the right of it, but I’ve a glut of death just now.’ His voice was flat. ‘It’s interesting to parse the morality of the thing. Demetrius was merely Aeskepiles’ pawn – but I’d say he murdered his father of his own free will. Where does that put him?’

‘Hell,’ said Ser Milus. He glanced at Ser Alcaeus. The Morean knight nodded his agreement.

‘The Emperor would never have let him reclaim the duchy,’ he said. ‘His hands were stained with his father’s blood. Exile for life was the very best he might have hoped for.’

‘Perhaps,’ Gabriel said coldly. ‘But the Emperor is not of this world. And never is not always a long time, in politics.’ He shrugged. ‘I had to be sure.’

Toby walked around the table pouring – Gelfred took a little, and Alison, recovering from an Easterner arrow in her left biceps, declined. Derkensun had his poured full.

They were all there, or most of them were. Except, of course, for Jacques and Jehan and John le Bailli and all the others who would never be there again.

The Red Knight raised his cup. ‘The Thrakians were never the enemy. Now I hope they’re allies. If I understand it – if I’ll ever understand it – Andronicus intended to rebuild Morea. But Aeskepiles intended to start a civil war which would destroy the Empire’s remaining military potential. The Wild is right there.’ He pointed to the north. ‘Imagine the Wild in Liviapolis. Imagine Thorn there.’

The air shivered.

Bad Tom pulled a heavy dagger out of his belt. ‘Name him again and let’s see how he bleeds.’

Ranald rolled his eyes.

Ser Michael leaned over, a hand in the small of his back. For a moment, with bloodshot eyes and a back arched in pain, he looked like a much older man. ‘So we won?’ he asked cautiously.

‘We certainly didn’t lose,’ the Red Knight said.

‘Now we rebuild the Morean army?’ Ser Gavin asked.

Michael looked at his Captain with pleading eyes. Instead of those eyes slipping away, Ser Gabriel met his look and smiled.

‘No. We’ll leave that condotta to other men. We’re going south with Tom. To a tournament. In Harndon.’

‘A tournament? What? Fighting for sport? What kind of foolishness is that?’ Tom asked, but he was grinning.

‘Just so, Tom,’ the Red Knight said, and raised his cup. ‘We’re headed to a tournament of fools.’