The Red Knight

Chapter Six

Harmodius Magis

Prynwrithe – Ser Mark Wishart

Two hundred leagues and more south of the Cohocton, well west of Harndon, the Priory of Pynwrithe was a beautiful castle rising from a spur of solid rock, a hundred years old, with high battlements, four slim towers with arched windows, topped in copper-gilt roofs, and a high arched gate that made some visitors exclaim that the whole must have been built by the Faery.

Ser Mark Wishart, the Prior, knew better. It had been built by a rich thug, who had given it to the church to save his soul.

It was a very comfortable place to live. A dream for a soldier who had lived most of his life having to sleep on the cold hard ground. The Prior was standing in his shirt, in front of a roaring fire, with a piece of bark in his hand – a small piece of birch bark, which had just turned almost perfectly black. He turned it over and over in his hands, and winced at the pain in his shoulder. The she-bear had hurt him badly.

It was a chilly morning, and from the glazed glass window, he could see that there had been a frost – but a mild one. Spring was in the air. Flowers, crops, new life.

He sighed.

Dean – his new servant boy – appeared with a cup of small beer and his clean mantle. ‘My lord?’ he said, an evocative question, for two words.

The boy was far too intelligent to spend his life pouring hippocras for old men.

‘Hose, braes, double, and a cote, lad,’ the Prior said. ‘Summon the marshal and my squire.’

Thomas Clapton, the Marshal of the Order of Saint Thomas of Acon, was in his solar before the Prior had his hose laced to his doublet – something he could not get used to allowing a servant to do.

‘My lord,’ the marshal said, formally.

‘What’s our fighting strength, right now?’ the Prior asked.

‘In the priory?’ the marshal asked. ‘I can find you sixteen knights fit to ride this morning. In the Demesne? Perhaps fifty, if I give you the old men and boys.’

The Prior lifted the birchbark and his marshal went pale.

‘And if we make knights of all our squires who are ready?’ Ser Mark asked.

The marshal nodded. ‘Then perhaps seventy.’ He rubbed his beard.

‘Do it,’ said Ser Mark. ‘This isn’t some minor incursion. She would never call us unless it was war.’

Harndon Palace – Harmodious

Harmodius cursed his age and peered into the silver mirror, looking for any redeeming features and finding none. His bushy black and white eyebrows did not recommend him as a lover and nor did his head; he was bald on top with shoulder length white hair, the ruined skin of age and slightly stooped shoulders.

He shook his head, more at the foolishness of desiring the Queen than at his reflection. He admitted to himself that he was happy enough with his appearance, and with its reality.

‘Hah!’ he said to the mirror.

Miltiades rubbed against him, and Harmodius looked down at the old cat.

‘The ancients tell us that memory is to reality as a seal in wax is to the seal itself,’ he said.

The cat looked up at him with aged disinterest.

‘Well?’ he asked Miltiades. ‘So is my memory of the image of myself in the mirror a new level of removal? It’s the image of an image of reality?’ He chuckled, pleased with the conceit, and another came to him.

‘What if you could perform a spell that altered what we saw between the eye and the brain?’ he asked the cat. ‘How would the brain perceive it? Would it be reality, or an image, or an image of an image?’

He glanced back at the mirror. Pursed his lips again and began to climb the stairs. The cat followed him, his heavy, four-foot gait an accusation and a complaint about overweight infirmity.

‘Fine,’ Harmodius said, and turned to scoop Miltiades up, putting a hand in the middle of his back at the pain. ‘Perhaps I could exercise more,’ he said aloud. ‘I was a passable swordsman in my youth.’

The cat’s grey whiskers twitched a reproach.

‘Yes, my youth was quite some time ago,’ he said.

Swords, for example, had changed shape since then. And weight.

He sighed.

At the top of the stairs he unlocked the door to his sanctum and reset the light wards he’d left on the place. There was very little to guard here, or rather, his books and many artefacts were supremely valuable, but it was the king that guarded them, not the lock and the wards. If he ever lost the king’s confidence-

It didn’t bear thinking about.

Wanting Desiderata must be the common denominator of the entire court, he thought and laughed, mostly at himself, before going to the north wall where shelves of Archaic scrolls, many of them gleaned from daring raids into the necropoli of the distant southlands, waited for him like pigeons in a cote. I used to be a very daring man.

He deposited Miltiades on the ground and the cat walked heavily to the centre of the room and sat in the sun.

He began to read on the origins of human memory. He picked up a day-old glass of water and drank from it, tasting some of yesterday’s flames and a little chalk, and said ‘Hmm,’ a dozen times as he read.

‘Hmmm,’ he said again, and carefully re-rolled the scroll before sliding it back into the bone tube that protected it. The scroll itself was priceless – one of perhaps three surviving scrolls of the Archaic Aristotle, and he always meant to have it copied but never did. He was tempted, sometimes, to order the destruction of the other two, both held in the king’s library.

He sighed at his own infantile pride.

The cat stretched out in the sun and went to sleep.

The other two cats appeared. He didn’t know where they had been – and suddenly wasn’t sure he could remember when he’d adopted them, or where they had sprung from at all.

But he had found the passage that he remembered, about an organ in the tissue of the brain that transmitted the images from the eye for the mind.

‘Hmm,’ he said to himself with a smile, and reached down to pat the old cat who bit his hand savagely.

He jerked his bloody hand back and cursed.

Miltiades got up, walked a few steps and settled again. Glared at him.

‘I need a corpse. Perhaps a dozen of them,’ he said, flexing his fingers and imagining the dissection. His master had been quite enamored of dissection . . . and it had not ended well.

It had led him to make a stand with the Wild at the Field of Chevin. The old memory hurt, and Harmodius had an odd thought – he thought when did I last think about the fight at Chevin?

It poured into his mind like an avalanche, and he staggered and sat under the impact of the memories – the strange array of the enemy, with Jacks on the flanks and all their monstrous creatures in the centre, so that the kingdom’s knighthood was raked with arrows as they rode forward through the waves of terror to face the creatures of the Wild.

His hands shook.

And his master had stood with them. And thrown carefully considered workings designed to baffle and deceive, that had led the king’s archers to loose their shafts into their own knights, and to fight each other-

And so I attacked him. Harmodius didn’t treasure the memory, or that of the king begging him to do something. The suspicion of the barons, each assuming he would betray them and join the Wild as well.

His master’s eyes when they locked wills.

He cast, and I cast. Harmodius shook his head. Why did he join our enemy? Why? Why? Why? What did he learn when he began to dissect the old corpses?

Why have I not thought on this before?

Shrugged. ‘My hubris differs from his hubris,’ he said to his cats. ‘But I pray to God that he may yet see the light.’ At least enough to reduce him to a small mound of ash, he continued in his head. A really powerful light. Like a lightning bolt.

Some things were best not said aloud, and naming could most definitely call. He had triumphed over his master, but no corpse had ever been found, and Harmodius knew in his bones that his mentor was still out there. Still part of the Wild.

Enough of this, he thought, and reached for another scroll on memory. He scanned it rapidly, took a heavy tome of grammerie down from a high shelf, referred to it, and then began to write quickly.

He paused and tapped his fingers rapidly on an old beaker while trying to think who could provide him with fresh corpses for his work. No one in the capital. The town was too small, the court too full of intrigue and gossip.

‘Who would feed you if I took a trip?’ he asked. Because, already, his pulse was racing. He hadn’t left his tower in – he couldn’t remember when he’d last left Harndon.

‘Gracious Divinity, have I been here since the battle?’ he asked Miltiades.

The cat glared at him.

The Magus narrowed his eyes suddenly. He couldn’t remember this cat as a kitten, or where the cat had come from. There was something out of step in his memories.

Christ, he thought, and sat in a chair. He could remember picking the kitten out of the dung heap by the stables, intending to dissect it. But he hadn’t.

How had he lost that memory?

Was it even a true memory?

A spear of pure fear lunged through his soul. The beaker crashed to the floor, and all the cats jumped.

I have been ensorcelled.

He drew power quickly, in a whispered prayer, and performed a small and subtle working with it. Indeed, it was so subtle it scarcely required power.

The tip of his staff glowed a delicate shade of violet, and he began to move it around the room.

The violet remained steady for some time until, as he paused with the staff held up, to look at his own chalk marks on one wall, the tip flared pink and then a deep, angry red.

He waved it again.

Red.

He leaned closer to the wall. He moved the tip of the staff back and forth in ever smaller arcs, and then he muttered a second casting, speaking stiffly the way a man does when he fears he’s forgotten his lines in a play.

A line of runes was suddenly picked out in angry fire-red. Wild runes, concealed under the paint on the wall.

Across the middle was a scorch mark that had erased a third of the writing.

‘By the divine Christ and Hermes saint of Magisters,’ he said. He staggered back, and sat, a little too suddenly. A cat squalked and twitched its tail out from beneath him.

Someone had placed a binding spell on the walls of his sanctum. A binding laid on him.

On a hunch, he placed his staff where he had positioned it yesterday, to power it. He sighted along the line from his crystal to the head of the staff-

‘Pure luck.’ he said. ‘Or the will of God.’

He stood in thought. Then he took a deep breath. Sniffed the air.

He gathered power slowly and carefully, using a device he had in the corner, using an ancient mirror he had on a side table, using in the final instance a vial filled with shining white fluid.

In the palace of his mind, on a black and white tiled floor like an infinite chessboard, pieces moved – like chess pieces and yet not like. There were pawns and rooks and knights, but also nuns and trees and ploughs and catapults and wyverns. He slowly resolved them into a pattern, each piece positioned on a tile of its own.

He poured his gathered power slowly out on the altar in the centre of the floor.

With the casting hovering, potent with a will to locate but still unrealised, in his mind, he climbed the twenty steps from his sanctum to the very top of his tower. He opened the door and stepped out onto a wooden hoarding, like a massive balcony, that ran all the way around the top of the tower. The spring sun was bright and the air was clear but the breeze was cold.

He saw the sea to the south-east. Due south, Jarsey spread like a storybook picture of farms and castles, rolling away for leagues. He raised his arms and released his phantasm.

Instantly, he felt the power behind him, in the north.

No surprise there.

He walked slowly around the hoardings, his staff thumping hollowly on the wooden planks. His eyes stayed on the horizon. He looked due west, and there was, to his great enhanced vision, a faint haze of green off to the west along the horizon. Just as it ought to be, where the Wild held sway. But the border was farther than a man could ride in five days on a good horse, and the tinge of green stemmed from the great woods beyond the mountains. A threat – but one that was always there.

He walked around the tower.

Long before he reached the northernmost point, he saw the bright green flare. His spell was potent and he used it carefully, tuning his vision to get every scrap of knowledge from his altered sight.

There it was.

He refined the casting, so that instead of a complex web of lenses bouncing light, he reduced his effort to a single shining green strand, thinner than a strand of a spider web, running from the north directly to his tower. He had no doubt it ran to the very runes on his wall.

Damn.

‘Was I fantasising about the Queen a moment ago?’ he asked the wind. ‘What a fool I have been.’

He didn’t sever the strand. But he let go most of the Aethersight that had allowed him to see the threats displayed, and he reduced that, too, until he could just see the glimmer of his thread. Now his great phantasm took almost no golden light to power it.

He strode down into the tower with sudden purpose, and carefully shut the door behind him.

He picked up his staff, took the first wands to come under his hand and a heavy dagger with a purse, and went back out of his library, leaving the door wide open. He went down one hundred and twenty-two steps to the floor below, picked up a heavy cloak and a hat and fought the urge to pause there. He walked through the open door and shut it behind him, aware that all three cats were watching him from the top of the stairs.

He longed for an ally and, at the same time, doubted everything.

But he had to trust someone. He chose his Queen, stopped at the writing desk beyond the door and wrote.

Urgent business calls me to the north. Please tell the king that I have the gravest fears that I have been manipulated by an ancient enemy. Be on your guard.

I remain your Majesty’s least humble servant,

Harmodius

He walked rapidly to the head of the twisting stairs and started down them, cursing his long staff and making as much haste as he could. He was trying to remember when he had last come down the stairs. Had it been yesterday?

He cast a very minor working ahead of him, now afraid that there might be spells to prevent his departure, but he could see nothing. That didn’t help. If his fears were correct, his eyes might betray him, or be a tool of the enemy. Did his vision in the aether function in the same manner as natural sight?

Richard Plangere used to ask us, ‘What is this natural of which you speak’ and we’d all be silent.

Richard Plangere, the spell on my wall stinks of you.

Caught up in his thoughts, Harmodius almost missed a step. His foot slipped, and for a moment he hung at the edge of a forty-foot fall to the cobblestones below, and the only enemy he was fighting was old age and memory. He got the rest of the way down the stairs with nothing worse than a pain in his side from walking too fast.

His tower opened on the main courtyard, fifty paces on a side and lined with the working buildings of the king’s government, although there were more of those down along the west wall as well, where there high windows looked down on the mighty river.

He walked to the stable. Men and women bowed deeply at his approach. His actions were scarcely secret, and he wondered briefly if he would have been better served leaving in the dark of night. Anyone could be an informant. Equally, he feared to go back to his chambers.

What am I afraid of?

Have I lost my mind?

He built a mental compartment around his chambers and all his associated thoughts and fears and closed the door on them. I may be at the edge of madness, or I may have just discovered a terrible secret, he thought.

There were two grooms in the stable, working quickly and efficiently to unsaddle a dozen royal horses in hunting tack. They stopped when they saw the Magus.

He tried a smile. ‘I need a horse,’ he said. ‘A good one, for a journey.’

Both of them looked at him as if he was insane.

Then they looked at each other.

Finally, the older nodded. ‘Whatever you like, m’lord,’ he said. ‘I can gi’ you a courser – a fine big mare callit Ginger. If it please you?’

Harmodius nodded, and before he could grow any more afraid a big bay was led out, a light saddle on her back. Harmodius looked up at that saddle with an old man’s despair, but the younger groom had anticipated his look and moved to help, bringing him a stool.

Harmodius stepped up on the stool and forced his leg up over the horse’s back.

The ground seemed a long way down.

‘Thank you, lad,’ Harmodius said. The boys handed him up his staff, two wands, and his purse, dagger, and cloak. The elder boy showed him how to stow it all behind the saddle.

‘See that this note makes it to the Queen. Deliver it in person. This is my ring, so you may reach her – every guard in the palace should know it. Do you understand me, boy?’ he asked, and realised that he was a figure of terrible fear to these two boys. He tried on a smile. ‘You’ll get a reward.’

The younger smiled bravely. ‘I’ll take it, Master.’

‘See you do.’ He nodded.

And then they were gone, and he was riding.

He rode through the gate without so much as a nod from the two Royal Guardsmen who stood there, either scanning the approach or sound asleep. The brims of their ornate helmets hid their eyes.

His horse’s hooves rang hollowly against the drawbridge. The palace and its surrounding castle was merely the citadel in an extensive series of works – three rings of walls and two other castles – that towered above the ancient city of Harndon. Twice in Alba’s history the entire Demesne had been reduced to the people that could huddle inside these walls.

When the Wild came.

He rode down the slope of the castle mound into High Street – the main street of the city of Harndon, that ran from gate to gate until it became the High Road and passed through the countryside, out to the town of Bridge where it crossed the mighty river, in the first of seven bridges. The river ran like a great snake from the north to the south of Alba, while the road cut straight across it.

Here the road was a steep street lined with magnificent white-walled houses, each as tall and turreted as small castles. They were adorned in gilt and black iron with red or blue doors, tile or copper roofs, marble statuary painted and unpainted, and windows, clear or stained, high or wide. Each house was a palace and had its own character.

I used to dine here. And here. How long have I been under?

The pressure in his chest eased as Harmodius rode down the hill, looking at the palaces of courtiers and great knights and wondering how it was that he had never visited any of them.

He rode through the Inner Gate without glancing at the guards. It was chilly in the wind, and he struggled with his cloak as he rode through Middle Town, and peered out into the High Cheaping, the city’s principal market. The Cheaping was a market square two or three times the size of the courtyard of the castle, and packed with stalls and the bustle of commerce. He watched it as he passed, and then he was into the lower town, the Cheaping in local dialect, crossing Flood Street at the Bridge Gate, and his heart began to beat faster. He saw no threat – but he expected one.

The men at the Bridge Gate had all of their attention on a magnificent retinue of knights and armoured men-at-arms entering the city. Harmodius looked at it from under his hood, trying to make out the blazon and guess whom the lord might be – not anyone he had ever seen at court. A tall man, heavy with muscle.

The guards clearly wanted no part of making the decision to let the giant and his men into the town. Nor did they have any attention to spare for solitary old men riding out.

The knight commanding the retinue did, though, and turned to watch him as he rode by. His glance sharpened – and then the Lieutenant of the Lower Gate appeared, armoured head to toe and holding not a wax tablet and stylus but a pole-axe, with four more knights at his back. The foreigner stiffened, and Harmodius rode past him while he was distracted.

Through the gate, down the slope past the lesser merchants who were only allowed to display their wares outside the walls – in the Ditch, as men liked to call it. He rode past the mountebanks, the players, and the workmen building bleachers and barriers for the Whitsunday Play.

He pursed his lips and touched his heels to the horse’s flanks, and the mare, delighted to be out in the spring and bored by the pace, sprang forward.

Harmodius cantered along beside the market and continued past the outer ring of homes, the poorest still associated with the city, and past the first fields, each surrounded by a ring of rocks and old, painstakingly cleared tree stumps. The soil here was not the best. He cantered along the road for a further half a mile, pleased with his horse but still in the grip of fear, and came to the bridge.

Still no one challenged him.

He crossed the first great span, stopped, spat into the river, and worked two powerful spells while he was safe in the bright sunshine at the centre of the bridge. Hermeticism functioned best in sunlight; while most workings of the Wild couldn’t cross running water without enormous effort or the water’s Hermetic permission. There was no power on earth that could take him in bright sunlight, in the middle span of flowing fresh water.

And if there was such a power, he had no chance against it anyway.

Then he went the rest of the way across and took the road north.

The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Robert Guissarme

Robert Guissarme was tall and cadaverously thin despite his intake of mutton and ale. Men said that his appetite for food was only exceeded by his appetite for gold. He called his company of men a Company of Adventure, like the best Eastern mercenaries, and he dressed well in leather and good wool, or in bright armour made by the best Eastern smiths.

No one knew much of his birth. He claimed to be the bastard son of a great nobleman, whom he was careful never to name – but he was known from time to time to lay a finger to his nose when a great man passed him on the road.

His sergeants feared him. He was quick to anger, quick to punish, and as he was the best man-at-arms of his company none of them wanted to cross him. Especially not right now; he was sitting fully armed on his charger, in deep fog, looking at a pair of peddlers who had passed them the night before, and who now stood in the middle of the road. They had been carefully butchered, flayed, and then set on posts in the road so that their heads seemed locked in endless screams of abject agony.

Since yesterday, he had pushed his convoy north-west along the bad road that connected Albinkirk to the east – to the Hills, and then over the mountains to Morea, and the land of the Emperor. He’d started his convoy in Theva, the city of slavers, and had pushed his men so hard that their horses began to fail. As for the long chain of slaves that was their principal cargo – he no longer cared much whether they lived or died. They had been entrusted to him in Theva; a long line of broken men and women – some pretty, some ugly, and all with the blank despair of the utterly beaten human being. He’d been told that they were a valuable consignment, being skilled slaves – cooks, menservants, housemaids, nurses, and whores.

His company had treated them well enough on the long trip west. Well enough, despite the frowns of the Emperor’s Knight – a pompous bastard too proud to share his meals with a mere mercenary. After Albinkirk the man would no longer be his problem.

But when they passed Behnburg, the last town before Albinkirk, and found the town’s garrison and population huddled within their walls in fear of un-named terrors, he’d started to hurry west, leaving the rest of the spring flood of merchants to hurry along in his wake. A dozen with wagons and good horses had paid him in gold to stay with his convoy.

He’d only taken the job transporting slaves to pay his passage – rumour had it that the fortress convent at Lissen Carak was offering payment in gold for monster-hunting work, and Guissarme needed the work. Or his company did.

Or perhaps they could manage a little longer. He sat his charger, at eye level with the corpses who had been killed, he now saw, by the act of their impaling.

He’d heard of impalement. Never seen it before. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.

He was still gazing at them, rapt, when the arrows began to fall.

The first hit his horse. The second struck his breastplate with enough force to unseat him and sprang away and then he was falling. Men were screaming around him, and he could hear his corporals shouting for order. Something struck him in the groin and he felt a hot, rapidly spreading damp. Heard the sound of hooves – heavy horses moving fast, although with an odd rhythm. He couldn’t see well.

He tried to raise his head, and something crouched over him, coming for his face-

The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Peter

Peter watched the arrows fly from the woods that lined the road with a sort of hopeless, helpless anger.

It was so obvious an ambush. He couldn’t believe anyone had walked into it.

Chained by the yoke around his neck to the women front and back, he couldn’t run.

He didn’t have the words, but he tried all the same.

‘Fall down!’ he shouted. ‘Down!’

But the panic was already coming. The terror – he’d never felt such terror. It came directly behind the arrows, and washed over him like dirty water leaving fear behind. The two women to whom he was bound ran in different directions, stumbled, and fell together, taking him to the ground with them.

The arrows continued to fall on the soldiers, who mostly died. Only a small knot of them were still fighting.

Something – he couldn’t see very well in the late morning ground fog – something came out of the fog moving as fast as a knight on a horse and slammed into the column. Men and horses screamed anew, and the terror increased to the point where his two companions simply curled into balls.

Peter lay still and tried to make his head work. Watched the creatures coming at the column. They were daemons. He had heard of them in his home, and here they were, and they were feeding on the corpses. Or perhaps the living.

A wyvern fell from the sky on the blonde woman ahead of him, its beaked head ripping at her guts. The woman behind him shrieked and got to her knees, arms extended, and a gout of pure green passed inches over Peter’s head and slammed into the thing, which gave off an overpowering smell of burning soap.

It pivoted on its hips like a dancer, the action ripping the screaming woman under its forefoot in two and snapping the chain that connected the slaves. The end of the chain whipped around the creature’s leg.

The wyvern unwound the chain fastidiously, using a talon, and the woman at Peter’s back cast again, two handfuls of raw spirit shot out with an hysterical scream. The wyvern screamed back as it was hit, hundreds of times as loud, snapped its wings open and flung itself on the woman.

Peter rolled beneath it, the newly snapped end of the chain running through his yoke, which caught on a tree root and wrenched his neck. Free, he was on his feet and running into the fog.

A flash, and he was thrown flat. Silence – he got to his feet and ran on, and only after a hundred panicked steps did he realise he was deaf and the shirt on his back was charred.

He ran on.

His mouth was so dry he could not swallow, and his thighs and calves burned as if they, too, had been burnt. But he ran until he crossed a deep stream, and there he drank his fill and lay gasping until he passed out.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Ser Alcaeus rode up to Albinkirk on a blown horse, with his destrier trotting along behind him. He’d lost his squire and his page in the fighting but his valet, a boy too young to swing a sword to any effect, had somehow survived with the pack horse.

Alcaeus pounded on the town’s west gate with his sword hilt. A pair of scared looking guards opened the main gate the width of one horse to let him in.

‘There is an army of the Wild out there,’ Alcaeus gasped. ‘Take me to your captain.’

The captain of the town was an old man – at least as fighters went – grey bearded and tending to fat. But he was booted and spurred, wearing a hauberk of good iron rings and a belt that showed his paunch to unfortunate effect.

‘Ser John Crayford,’ he said, holding out a hand.

Ser Alcaeus thought it unlikely that the man had ever been knighted. And he wondered how such an ill-favoured lout had come to command such an important post.

‘I was with a convoy of fifty wagons on the Behnburg Road,’ Alcaeus said. He sat suddenly. He hadn’t intended to sit, but his legs went out from under him.

‘The Wild,’ he said. He tried to sound sane and rational and like a man whose word could be trusted. ‘Daemons attacked us. With irks. A hundred, at least.’ He found that he was having trouble breathing.

It was difficult even telling it.

‘Oh, my God,’ he said.

Ser John put a hand on his shoulder. The man seemed bigger somehow. ‘How far, messire?’ he said.

‘Five leagues.’ Alcaeus took a deep breath. ‘Maybe less. East of here.’

‘By the Virgin!’ the Captain of Albinkirk swore. ‘East, you say?’

‘You believe me?’ Alcaeus said.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the captain. ‘But east? They went around the town?’ He shook his head.

Alcaeus heard boots on the steps outside. He raised his head and saw the same man who’d let him into the city, with a pair of lower-class men.

‘They say there’s boglins in the fields, Ser John.’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘That’s what they say.’

‘My daughter!’ the younger man shouted. It was more like a shriek than a shout. ‘You have to save her.’

Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m not taking a man out that gate. Steady, man.’ He poured the man a cup of wine.

‘My daughter!’ the man said in anguish.

Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, not unkindly. He turned to the sergeants. ‘Sound the alarm. Bar the gates. And get me the mayor and tell him I’m imposing martial law. No one is to leave this town.’

East of Albinkirk – Peter

Peter woke at a jerk of his heavy yoke. It was a hand-carved wooden collar with a pair of chains that ran down to his hands, allowing some movement, and a heavy staple for attaching him to other slaves, and he’d slept in it.

Two Moreans, easterners with scrips and heavy backpacks, wearing hoods and the air of men recently released from fear, stood over him.

‘One survived then,’ the taller one said, and spat.

The shorter one shook his head. ‘Hardly a fair return on the loss of our cart,’ he said. ‘But a slave’s a slave. Get up, boy.’

Peter lay in abject misery for a moment. So, naturally, they kicked him.

Then they made him carry their packs, and the three of them started west along a trail through the woods.

His despair didn’t lasted long. He had been unlucky – or perhaps he had been lucky. They fed him; he cooked their meagre food and they let him have some bread and a little of the pea soup he’d made them. Neither of them were big men, or strong, and he thought he could probably kill them both, if only the yoke came off his shoulders.

But he couldn’t get it off. It had been his constant companion for a month of walking over snow and ice, sleeping with the cold and hellish thing while the soldiers raped the women to either side of him and waiting to see if they would take a turn on him.

He bruised his wrists again and again trying get free of the thing. He daydreamed of using it as a weapon to crush these puny men.

‘You’re a good cook, boy,’ the taller man said, wiping his mouth.

The thin man frowned. ‘I want to know what happened back there,’ he said, after drinking watered wine from his canteen.

The thicker man shrugged. ‘Bandits? Cruel bastards, no doubt. I never saw a thing – I just heard the fighting and – well, you ran, too.’

The thinner man shook his head. ‘The screams,’ he said, and his voice shook.

They sat and glowered at each other, and Peter looked at them and wondered how they managed to survive at all.

‘We should go back for our cart,’ said the thinner man.

‘You must’ve had a bump on the head,’ the fatter one said. ‘Want to be a slave? Like him?’ he gestured at Peter.

Peter hunched by the fire and wondered if lighting it had been a good idea, and wondered how these two could be so foolish. At home, they had had daemons. These idiots must know of them too.

But the night passed – a night in which he never slept, and the two fools slumbered after tying his yoke to a tree. They snored, and Peter lay awake, waiting for a hideous death that never came.

In the morning, the easterners rose, pissed, drank the tea he’d made, ate his bannock and started west.

‘Where’d you learn to cook, boy?’ the thicker man asked him.

He shrugged.

‘Now that’s a saleable skill,’ the man said.

The Toll Gate – Hector Lachlan

Drovers hated tolls. There was no way to love them. When you have to drive a huge herd of beasts – mostly cattle, but small farmers put in parcels of sheep, and even goats as well – representing other men’s fortunes, across mountain, fen, fell, swamp and plain, through war and pestilence, tolls are the very incarnation of evil.

Hector Lachlan had a simple rule.

He didn’t pay tolls.

His herd numbered in the hundreds, and he had as many men as a southern lord had in an army; men who wore burnies of shining rings and carried heavy swords and great axes slung from their shoulders. They looked more like the cream of a mercenary army than what they were. Drovers.

‘I didn’t mean to cross you, Lachlan!’ the local lordling pleaded. He had that tone, the one Hector hated the most – wheedling bluster, he called it, when a man who had pretended he was cock of the north started begging for his life.

Hector hadn’t even drawn the great sword that sat across his hip and rump. He merely leaned his forearm on the hilt. He stroked his moustache idly and ran a hand through his hair, looked back down the long, muddy train of cattle and sheep that extended behind him, as far as the eye might see on the mountain track.

‘Just pay me the toll. I’ll – see to it you ha’ the coins back soon enough.’ The other man was tall, well-built, and wearing a chain hauberk worth a fortune, every link riveted closed, strong as stone.

He was afraid of Hector Lachlan.

But not afraid enough to let the long convoy of beasts past. He had to be seen to try and collect the toll. It was the way, in the hills, and his own fear would make him angry.

Sure enough, even as Hector had the thought, he saw the man’s face change.

‘Be damned to you, then. Pay the damned toll or-’

Hector drew his sword. He wasn’t hurried by his adversary’s anger, fear, or the fifty armed men at his back. He drew the long sword at his own pace, and allowed the heavy pommel to rotate the sword in his hand, so that the point aimed unwaveringly at the other man’s face.

And punched the needle sharp point through the other man’s forehead with all the effort of a shoemaker punching a hole in leather. The armoured man crumpled, his eyes rolling up. Already dead.

Hector sighed.

The dead man’s retinue stood rooted to the ground in shock – a shock that would last a few more heartbeats.

‘Stop!’ Hector said. It was a delicate art – to command without threatening them and provoking the very reaction he sought to avoid.

The body crashed to the ground, the dead man’s heels thrashing momentarily.

‘None of ye need to die,’ he said. There was a thread of the dead man’s blood on the tip of his sword. ‘He was a fool to demand a toll of me, and every man here knows it. Let his tanist take command, and let us hear no more about it.’ Lachlan got the words out, and for a moment the men he was facing teetered on the knife-edge of doubt and greed and fear and loyalty – not to the dead man but to the code that required them to avenge him.

The code won.

Lachlan heard the grunt that signified their refusal, and he had both hands on his sword, swinging a heavy overhand blow at the nearest man. He had a sword in his hand, but was too slow to save his own life; the heavy swing batted his parry aside and cut through his skull from left eyebrow to right jaw, so that the top of his head spun away, cleanly severed.

Hector’s own men started to come forward, abandoning their places with his herd. Which meant that when this was over, with all the attending noise, violence, blood and ordure, a day would be lost while they collected all the beasts who ran off into the glens and valleys.

Someone – some ancient philosopher Lachlan couldn’t remember from the days when a priest came to teach him letters – had said that the hillmen would conquer the world, if only they would ever stop fighting among themselves.

He pondered that as he killed his third man of the day, as his retinue charged with a shout, and as the doomed men of the toll gate tried to make a stand and were cut down.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The camp below the Abbey vanished as quickly as it had appeared, the tents folded and packed into the wagons, the wagons double-teamed and hauled up the steep slope into the fortress.

The first chore that face all of them was billeting the company. Captain and Abbess walked quickly through the dormitory, the great hall, the chapel, the stables, and the storehouses, adding, dividing, and allocating.

‘I will need to bring all my people in, of course,’ the Abbess said.

The captain bit his lip and looked at the courtyard. ‘Eventually, we may have to re-erect our tents here,’ he said. ‘Will you use the Great Hall?’

‘Of course. It’s being stripped even now,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘It is Lent – all of our valuables are put away already.’

One of the company’s great wagons was just crossing the threshold of the main gate. Its top just fitted under the lintel.

‘Show me your stores and all your storage places,’ he said.

She led him from cellar to cellar, from store room to the long, winding, airless steps that led deep into the heart of the living rock under their feet, to where a fresh spring burbled away into a pool the size of a farm pond. She was slower coming back up the winding steps than she had been going down.

He waited with her when she stopped to rest.

‘Is there an exit? Down there?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Of course – who would hollow out this mountain and not make one? But I haven’t the strength to show you.’ They reemerged through the secret door behind the chapel altar, and the Abbess was immediately surrounded by grey-clad sisters, each demanding her attention – matters of altar care, of flowers for the next service, of complaints about the rain of blasphemous oaths falling from the walls, now fully manned.

‘All you cock suckers get your fucking arses in armour or I’ll chew off the top of your sodding skulls and fuck your brains,’ Bad Tom was dressing down a dozen men-at-arms just going onto the wall. His tone was conversational and yet it fell into a moment of silence and was carried everywhere inside the fortress.

An older sister stared at her Abbess in mute appeal.

‘Your sisters are silent,’ the captain said.

The Abbess nodded. ‘All are allowed to speak on Sundays. Novices and seniors may speak when they are moved to – which is seldom for seniors and often for novices.’ She made a gesture with her hands. ‘I am their ambassador to the world.’ She pointed at the cowled figure who followed her. ‘This is Sister Miram, my chancellor and my vicar. She is also allowed to speak.’

The captain bowed to Sister Miram, who inclined her head slightly.

The Abbess nodded. ‘But she prefers not to.’

Whereas you - the captain thought that perhaps she liked to speak more than she let on, and liked to talk to him, to have an adult to spar with. Yet he did not doubt her piety. To the captain, piety came in three brands – false piety, hypocritical piety, and hard won, deep and genuine piety. He fancied that he could tell them apart.

At the far end of the chapel stood Father Henry. He looked harried – hadn’t bathed or shaved, the captain suspected. He looked at the Abbess. ‘Your priest is in a bad way,’ he said.

He knew that she had cast a phantasm on him last night. She’d done it expertly, and so revealed she was more than a mere mathematical astrologer. She was a magus. She’d probably known the instant he cast his glamour in her yard, and on her sisters.

And she was not the only magus. There were wheels within the wheels that powered this situation. He looked at Sister Miram, his sense of power reaching tentatively towards her, like a third hand.

Aha. It was as if Sister Miram had slapped that hand.

The Abbess was looking at the priest. ‘He’s in love with me,’ she said dismissively. ‘My final lover. Gentle Jesu, might you not have sent me someone handsome and gentle?’ She turned and smiled wryly. ‘I suspect he was sent me as a penance. And a reminder of what – of what I was.’ She shrugged. ‘The Knights of our Order didn’t send us a priest last winter, so I took him from a local parish. He seemed interesting. Instead, I find he’s-’ She paused. ‘Why am I telling you this, messire?’

‘As your captain, it is my duty to know,’ he said.

She considered him. ‘He’s a typical ignorant parish priest – can scarcely read Archaic, knows the Bible only from memory, and thinks women are less than the dirt on his bare feet.’ She shook her head. ‘And yet he came here, and he is drawn to me.’

The captain smiled at her, took her right hand between his and kissed it. ‘Perhaps I am your last lover,’ he said.

As he did it, he saw the priest squirm. Oh, my, what fun. The man was loathsome, but his piety was probably genuine too.

‘Should I box your ears for that? I understand that’s the fashion,’ the Abbess said. ‘Please desist, Captain.’

He retreated as if she’d struck him. Sister Miram was frowning.

To regain his composure, he summoned Jehannes and Milus. ‘Get the drovers to dismantle the wagons. Put the hardware in the cellars – Abbess, we’re going to need some guides.’

The Abbess sent for the old garrison – eight non-noble men-at-arms hired at the Great Fair a dozen years before. They were led by Michael Ranulfson, a grizzled giant with gentle manners, the sergeant at arms the captain had met briefly the night before.

‘You know that I’ve placed the captain in charge of our defence,’ she said. ‘His men need help moving in, and guides to the storerooms. Michael – I trust them.’

Michael bowed his head respectfully, but his eyes said on your head be it.

‘How are you set for hoardings?’ the captain asked. ‘Do you have pre-cut lumber?’

The old sergeant at arms nodded. ‘Aye. Hoardings, portable towers, a pair of trebuchets, some smaller engines.’ He rolled his head on his neck, as if trying to rid himself of a stiffness. ‘When you are in garrison, you may as like do a good job of work.’

The captain nodded. ‘Thanks, Ser Michael.’

‘I’m no knight,’ Michael said. ‘My da was a skinner.’

The captain ignored his statement to look at Jehannes. ‘As soon as the lads are unpacked, give this man fifty archers and all the riff-raff and get the hoardings up while the men-at-arms stand to.’

Jehannes nodded, obviously in full agreement.

‘Store the dismantled wagons wherever the hoardings are now,’ the captain said. ‘And then we’ll start on patrols to fetch in the peasants. Gentlemen, this place is going to be packed as tight as a cask of new-salted mackerel. I want to say this in front of the Abbess. There will be no rape and no theft by our men. Death penalty on both. My lady, I can’t do much about casual blasphemy, but an effort will be made – you understand me, gentlemen? Make an effort.’

She nodded. ‘It is Lent,’ she said.

Jehannes nodded. ‘I gave up wine,’ he said, and then stared at the floor.

‘Jesu does not care what you give up, but rather, what you give him,’ Sister Miram replied, and Jehannes smiled shyly at her.

She returned his smile.

The captain released a heavy sigh. ‘Ladies, you may well cure all of our souls yet, but it must wait until the hoardings are up and all your people are safe. Michael, you are in charge of them. I recommend that my men live in the towers and galleries – if we have time, we’ll build them beds.’

‘My people will go four to a room,’ the Abbess said. ‘I can take the older girls and single women from the farms into the dormitory, and all the men and their families will go in the hall. Overflow into the stables.’

Michael nodded. ‘Yes, my lady,’ he replied. He turned to the captain. ‘I’m at your orders.’ He looked back and forth. ‘Will we hold the Lower Town?’

The captain stepped up onto the gate wall and looked down at the four streets of the town, a hundred feet below.

‘For a little while,’ he said.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Ser Alcaeus passed a bad night and drank too much wine in the morning. The man whose daughter had been abducted sat in the garrison barracks and wept, and demanded that the garrison send out a sortie to her rescue.

The mayor agreed with him, and hot words were exchanged.

Alcaeus didn’t want any part of it. They were too alien – the commoners were both too servile and too free, and Ser John was no knight. Even the churches were wrong. Mass was said in low Archaic.

It was disorienting. Worse than the convoy of slaves had been, because he could ignore them.

Mid-morning, as he finished his ablutions – he, the Emperor’s cousin, washing without so much as a servant or slave to help him – he heard the mayor’s shrill voice in the guardroom, demanding that Ser John come out.

Alcaeus dressed. He had spare shirts because the boy had saved his packhorse, and he’d see the page richly rewarded for it.

‘Come out of your hole, you doddering old coward!’ shrieked the mayor.

Alcaeus was trying to lace his cuffs by himself. He had done his own in the past, but not since he became a man. He had to press his right hand against the stone of the castle wall and pin the knot in place.

‘Master Mayor?’ he heard. It was Ser John, his voice calm enough.

‘I demand that you gather all the useless mouths you call your garrison and go out and find this man’s daughter. And open the gates – the grain convoys are on their way. This town needs money, though I’m sure you’ve been too drunk to notice.’ The mayor sounded like a fishwife – a particularly nasty one.

‘No,’ said the captain. ‘Was that all?’

Alcaeus couldn’t, in that moment, decide exactly what he thought of the knight. Over-cautious? But memories of yesterday’s ambush were still burned onto the backs of his eyelids.

He reached for his boots – uncleaned, of course. He pulled them on, and fought with all the buckles, his head suddenly full of irks and boglins and worse things. The road. The confusion.

He had been trained to fight the Wild. Until yesterday, he’d only fought other men – usually one to one, with knives, at court.

The images in his head made him shudder.

‘I order you!’ the mayor screamed.

‘You can’t order me, Master Mayor. I have declared martial law, and I, not you, am the power here.’ Ser John sounded apologetic rather than dismissive.

‘I represent the people of the town. The burgesses, the merchants, and the artisans!’ The mayor’s voice sank to a hiss. ‘You don’t seem to understand-’

‘I understand that I represent the king. And you do not.’ Ser John’s voice remained level.

Alcaeus had made his decision. He was going to go support the low-born knight. It didn’t matter what the two men were debating – it was their manners. Ser John was knightly. He might even survive at court.

Alcaeus tested his feet in his boots, and took his heavy dagger and put it in his belt. He never left his rooms without a dagger. Then he went out into the hall – a hall crowded with garrison soldiers listening to the argument in the main room below. He ran light-footed down the stairs.

He’d missed an exchange. When he entered, the mayor, red-faced, thin and tall and blond as an angel, was silent, his mouth working.

Ser Alcaeus went and stood behind the old knight. He noted that the mayor wore a rich doublet of dark blue velvet trimmed in sable, and a cap to match, embroidered with irks and rabbits. He smiled – his own silk doublet was worth about fifty times the value of the mayor’s.

The irks in the mayor’s cap were ironic, to say the least.

‘This is Ser Alcaeus,’ Ser John said. ‘The Emperor’s ambassador to our king. Yesterday his convoy was attacked by hundreds of Wild creatures.’

The mayor shot a venomous glance at him. ‘So you say. Go do your fucking job, sell-sword. Aren’t you even a little humiliated to think that this man’s daughter is the plaything of monsters while you sit and drink wine?’

The man – who stood behind the mayor with a dozen other men – gave a sob and sank to a wooden bench, his fist in his mouth.

‘His daughter has been dead since yesterday and I won’t risk men to look for her corpse,’ Ser John said with casual brutality. ‘I want all the woman and children moved to the castle immediately, with victuals.’

The mayor spat. ‘I forbid it. Do you want to panic the town?’

Ser John shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In my professional opinion-’

‘You have no professional opinion. You were a sell-sword – what? Forty years ago? And then a drinking crony of the king’s. Very professional!’ The mayor was beside himself.

Alcaeus realised the man was afraid. Terrified. And that terror made him belligerent. It was a revelation. Alcaeus was not, strictly speaking, a young man. He was twenty-nine, and he thought he knew how the world worked.

Yesterday had been a shock. And now today was a shock too. He watched the fool mayor, and watched Ser John, and understood something of their quality.

‘Messire mayor?’ he asked in his stilted Gothic. ‘Please – I am a stranger here. But the Wild is real. What I saw was real.’

The mayor turned and looked at him. ‘And who in God’s name are you?’ he asked.

‘Alcaeus Comnena, cousin to the Emperor Manual, may his name be praised, the drawn sword of Christ, the Warrior of the Dawn.’ Alcaeus bowed. His cousin was too old to draw a sword but his titles rolled off the tongue, and he was annoyed by the mayor.

The mayor was, for all his belligerence and terror, a merchant and an educated man. ‘From Morea?’ he asked.

Alcaeus thought of telling this barbarian what he thought of their casual use of Morea for the Empire. But he didn’t bother. ‘Yes,’ he shot back.

The mayor drew a breath. ‘Then if you are a true knight, you will go and rescue this man’s daughter.’

Alcaeus shook his head. ‘No. Ser John is correct. You must call in your out-farmers and move the people into the castle.’

The mayor shook his fist. ‘The convoys are coming. If we close the gates, this town will die!’ He paused. ‘For the love of God! There’s money involved.’

Ser John shrugged. ‘I hope the money helps when the boglins come,’ he said.

As if on cue, an alarm bell sounded.

After the mayor pounded out of the castle, Alcaeus went out on the wall and saw two farms burning. Ser John joined him. ‘I told him to bring the people in last night,’ he muttered. ‘Fucking idiot. Thanks for trying.’

Alcaeus watched the plumes of smoke rise and his stomach did flips. Suddenly, again, he was seeing those the irks under his horse. He had once, single-handed, fought off four assassins who were going for his mother. Irks were much, much worse. He tasted bile.

He thought of lying down.

Instead, he drank wine. After a cup, he felt strong enough to visit his page, who was recovering from terror in the resilient way teenagers so. He left his page to cuddle with a servant girl and walked wearily back to the guard room, where there was an open cask of wine.

He was on his fourth when Ser John’s fist closed around his cup. ‘I take it you are a belted knight,’ Ser John said. ‘I saw your sword, and you’ve used it. Eh?’

Ser Alcaeus got up from his chair. ‘You dared draw my sword?’ he asked. At the Emperor’s court touching a man’s sword was an offence.

The old man grinned mirthlessly. ‘Listen, messire. This town is about to be attacked. I never thought to see it in my lifetime. I gather you had a bad day yesterday. Fine. Now I need you to stop draining my stock of wine and get your armour on. They’ll go for the walls in about an hour, unless I miss my guess.’ He looked around the empty garrison room. ‘If we fight like fucking heroes and every man does everything he can, we might just make it – I’m still trying to get that fool to send the women into the castle. This is the Wild, Ser Knight. I gather you’ve tasted their mettle. Well – here they come again.’

Ser Alcaeus thought that this was a far, far cry from being a useful functionary at his uncle’s court. And he wondered if his true duty, given the message he had in his wallet, was to gather his page and ride south before the roads closed.

But there was something about the old man. And besides, the day before he’d run like a coward, even if he’d had the blood of three of the things on his sword first.

‘I’ll arm,’ he said.

‘Good,’ Ser John said. ‘I’ll help, and then I’ll give you a wall to command.’

Abbington-on-the-Carak – Mag the Seamstress

Old Mag the seamstress sat in the good, warm sunshine on her doorstep, her back braced against the oak of her door frame, as she had sat for almost forty years of such mornings. She sat and sewed.

Mag wasn’t a proud woman, but she had a certain place, and she knew it. Women came to her for advice on childbirth and savings, on drunken husbands, on whether or not to let a certain man visit on a certain night. Mag knew things.

Most of all, she knew how to sew.

She liked to work early, when the first full light of the sun struck her work. The best time was immediately after Matins. If she managed to get straight to her work – and in forty years of being a lay sister, helping with the altar service in her village church, of tending to her husband and two children she had missed the good early morning work hours all too often.

But when she got to it – when cooking, altar service, sick infants, aches and pains, and the will of the Almighty all let her be – why, she could do a day’s work by the time the bells rang for Nones in the fortress convent two leagues to the west.

And this morning was one of those wonderful mornings. She’d been the lay server at church, which always left her with a special feeling, and she had laid flowers on her husband’s grave, kissed her daughter in her own door yard and was now home in the first warm light, her basket by her side.

She was making a cap, a fine linen coif of the sort that a gentleman wore to keep his hair neat. It wasn’t a difficult object and would take her only a day or two to make, but there were knights up at the fortress who used such caps at a great rate, as she had reason to know. A well-worked cap that fit just so was worth half a silver penny. And silver pennies were not to be sneered at, for a fifty-three-year-old widow.

Mag had good eyes, and she pricked the fine linen – her daughter’s linen, no less – with precision, her fine stitches as straight as a sword blade, sixteen to the inch, as good or better as any Harndon tailor’s work.

She put the needle into the fine cloth and pulled the thread carefully through, feeling the fine wax on the thread, feeling the tension of the fine cloth, and aware that she pulled more than the thread with each stitch – every one gathered a little sun. Before long, her line of stitches sparkled, if she looked at it just so.

Good work made her happy. Mag liked to examine the fine clothes that came through to Lis the laundress. The knights in the fortress had some beautiful things – usually ill-kept but well made. And many less well-made clothes, too. Mag had plans to sell them clothes, repairs, darning-

Mag smiled at the world as she stitched. The sisters were, in the main, good landlords, and much better than most feudal lords. But the knights and their men brought a little colour to life. Mag didn’t mind hearing a man say fuck, as long as he brought a little of the outside world to Abbington-on-the-Carak.

She heard the horses, and her eyes flicked up from her work. She saw dust rising well off to the west. At this hour, it could never bode well.

She snorted and put her work in her basket, carefully sheathing her best needle – Harndon work, there was no local man who could make such – in a horn needle case. No crisis was so great that Mag needed to lose a needle. They were harder and harder to get.

More dust. Mag knew the road. She guessed there were ten horses or more.

‘Johne! Our Johne!’ she called. The Bailli was her gossip, and occasionally more. He was also an early riser, and Mag could see him pruning his apple trees.

She stood and pointed west. After a long moment, he raised an arm and jumped down from the tree.

He dusted his hands and spoke to a boy, and heartbeats later that boy was racing for the church. Johne jumped the low stone wall that separated his property from Mag’s and bowed.

‘You have good eyes, m’ame.’ He didn’t smirk or make any obvious gesture, which she appreciated. Widowhood brought all sorts of unwelcome offers – and some welcome ones. He was clean, neat, and polite, which had become her minimum conditions for accepting even the most tenuous of male approaches.

She enjoyed watching a man of her own age who could still jump a stone wall.

‘You seem unconcerned,’ she murmured.

‘To the contrary,’ he said quietly. ‘If I were a widowed seamstress I would pack all my best things and be prepared to move into the fortress.’ He gave her half a smile, another bow, and sprang back over the wall. ‘There’s been trouble,’ he added.

Mag didn’t ask foolish questions. Before the horses rode into their little town square, shaded by an ancient oak, she had two baskets packed, one of work and one of items for sale. She filled her husband’s travelling pack with spare shifts and clothes, and took her heaviest cloak and a lighter cloak – for wearing and sleeping, too. She stripped her bed, took the bolster and rolled the blankets and linens tightly around it to make a bundle.

‘Listen up!’ called a loud voice – a very loud voice – from the village square.

Like all her neighbours she opened the upper half of her front door and leaned through it.

There were half a dozen men-at-arms in the square, all mounted on big horses and wearing well-polished armour and scarlet surcotes. With them were as many archers, all in less armour with bows strapped across their backs, and as many valets.

‘The lady Abbess has ordered that the good people of Abbington be mustered and removed into the fortress immediately!’ the man bellowed. He was tall – huge, really, with arms the size of most men’s legs, mounted on a horse the size of a small house.

Johne the Bailli, walked across the square to the big man-at-arms, who leaned down to him, and the two spoke – both of them gesturing rapidly. Mag went back to her packing. Out the back she scattered feed for her chickens. If she wasn’t here for a week, they’d manage, longer, and they’d all be taken by something. She had no cow – Johne gave her milk – but she had her husband’s donkeys.

My donkeys, she reminded herself.

She’d never packed a donkey before.

Someone was banging at her open door. She shook her head at the donkeys, who looked back at her with weary resignation.

The big man-at-arms stood on her stoop. He nodded. ‘The Bailli said you’d be ready to move first,’ he said. ‘I’m Thomas.’ His bow was sketchy, but it was there.

He looked like trouble from head to foot.

She grinned at him, because her husband had looked like trouble, too. ‘I’d be more ready if I knew how to pack a donkey,’ she said.

He scratched under his beard. ‘Would a valet help? I want people moving in an hour. And the Bailli said that if people saw you packed, they’d move faster.’ He shrugged.

Off to the right, a woman screamed.

Thomas spat. ‘Fucking archers,’ he snarled, and started back out the door.

‘Send me a valet!’ she shouted after him.

She got a produce basket down from the shed and began to fill it with perishable food, and then preserves. She had sausage, pickles, jam, that was itself valuable -

‘Good wife?’ asked a polite voice from the doorway. The man was middle-aged, and looked as hard as rock and as sound as an old apple. Behind him was a skinny boy of twelve.

‘I’m Jaques, the captain’s valet. This is my squire, Toby. He can pack a mule – I reckon donkeys ain’t much different.’ The man took his hat off and bowed.

Mag curtsied back. ‘The sele of the day to you, ser.’

Jacques raised an eyebrow. ‘The thing of it is, ma’am – we’re also to take all your food.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve been trying to pack it-’ Then his meaning sunk in. ‘You mean to take my food for the garrison.’

He nodded. ‘For everyone. Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d rather you made it easy. But we will take it.’

Johne came to the door. He had a breast and back plate on and nodded to Jacques. To Mag, he said, ‘Give them everything. They are from the Abbess, we have to assume she will repay us.’ He shrugged. ‘Do you still have Ben’s crossbow? His arming jack?’

‘And his sword and dagger,’ Mag said. She opened her cupboard, where she kept her most valuable things – her pewter plates, her silver cup, her mother’s gold ring, and her husband’s dagger and sword.

Toby looked around shyly, and said to Jacques, ‘This is a rich place, eh, master?’

Jacques smiled grimly and gave the boy a kick. ‘Sorry, ma’am. We has some bad habits from the Continent, but we won’t take your things.’

But you would under other circumstances, and anything else you fancied, she thought.

Johne took her by her shoulders. It was a familiar, comfortable thing, and yet a little too possessive for her taste, even in a crisis.

‘I have a locking box,’ he said. ‘There’s room in it for your cup and ring. And any silver you have.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘Mag, we may never come back. This is war – war with the Wild. When it’s done, we may not have homes to return to.’

‘Gentle Jesu!’ she let slip. Took a shuddering breath, and nodded. ‘Very well.’ She scooped up the cup and ring, tipped over a brick in her fireplace and took out all her silver – forty-one pennies – and handed it all to the bailli. She saved out one penny, and she gave it to Jacques.

‘This much again if my donkeys make it to the fortress,’ she said primly.

He looked at it for a moment. Bit it. And flipped it to the boy. ‘You heard the lady,’ he said. He nodded to her. ‘I’m the captain’s valet, ma’am. A piece of gold is more my price. But Tom told me to see to you, and you are seen to.’ He gave her a quick salute and was out her door, headed for Simon Carter’s house.

She looked at the boy. He didn’t seem very different from any other boy she knew. ‘You can load a donkey?’ she asked.

He nodded very seriously. ‘Do you-’ he looked around. He was as skinny as a scarecrow and gawky the way only growing boys can be. ‘Do you have any food?’ he asked.

She laughed. ‘You’ll be taking it all anyways, won’t you, my dear?’ she asked. ‘Have some mince pie.’

Toby ate the mince pie with a determination that made her smile. While she watched him, still packing her hampers, he ate the piece he was given and then filched a second as he headed for her donkey.

A pair of archers appeared next. They lacked something that Ser Thomas and Jacques the valet had both possessed. They looked dangerous.

‘What have we here?’ asked the first one through the door. ‘Where’s the husband, then, my beauty?’ His voice was flat, and so were his eyes.

The second man had no teeth and too much smile. His haubergeon was not well kept, and he seemed like a half-wit.

‘Mind your own business,’ she said, her voice as sharp as steel.

Dead-eyes didn’t even pause. He reached out, grabbed her arm, and when she fought him he swept her legs out from under her and shoved her to the floor. His face didn’t change expression.

‘House’s protected,’ said the skinny boy said from the kitchen. ‘Best mind yourself, Wilful.’

The dead-eyed archer spat. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘I want to go back to the Continent. If I wanted to be a nurse-maid-’

Mag was so stunned she couldn’t react.

The archer leaned down and stuck his hand in the front of her cotehardie. Gave her breast a squeeze. ‘Later,’ he said.

She shrieked. and punched him in the crotch.

He stumbled back, and the other one grabbed her hair, as if this was a practised routine-

There was a sharp crack and she fell backwards, because the archer had released her. He was kneeling on the floor with blood pouring out of his face. Thomas was standing over him, a stick in his hand.

‘I tol’ em that this house was protected!’ the thin boy shouted.

‘Did you?’ The big man said. He eyed the two archers.

‘We was gentle as lambs!’ said the one with dead eyes.

‘Fucking archers. Piss off and get on with it,’ the big man said, and offered her a hand up.

The two archers got to their feet and went out the back to collect her chickens and her sheep and all the grain from her shed, all the roots in her cellar. They were methodical, and when she followed them into the shed, the dead-eyed one gave her a look that struck fear into her. He meant her harm.

But soon enough the boy had her donkeys rigged and loaded, and she put her husband’s pack on her back, her two baskets in her arms, and went out into the square.

From where she stood, her house looked perfectly normal.

She tried to imagine it burned. An empty basement yawning at the sun. She could see the place where she rested her back when she sewed, rubbed shiny with use, and she wondered if she would ever find such a well-lit spot.

The Carters were next to be ready – they were, after all, a family of carters with two heavy carts of their own and draught animals, and six boys and men to do the lifting. The bailli’s housekeeper was next, with his rugs – Mag had lain on one of those rugs, and she blushed at the thought. She was still mulling over her instinctive use of his name – his Christian name-

The Lanthorns were the last, their four sluttish daughters sullen, and Goodwife Lanthorn, in her usual despair, wandered the village’s column of animals, begging for space for her bag and a basket of linen. Lis the laundress was surrounded by soldiers, who competed to carry her goods. But she knew many of them by name, having washed their linens, and she was both safely middle-aged and comely, an ideal combination in the soldiers’ eyes.

At last the Lanthorns were packed – all four daughters eyeing the soldiers – and the column began to move.

Three hours after the men-at-arms rode into Abbington, the town was empty.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Ser John gave him a company of crossbowmen – members of the town’s guilds, all of them a little too shiny in their guild colours. Blue and red predominated, from the furriers, the leading guild of Albinkirk. He might have laughed to think that he, cousin to the Emperor, was commanding a band of common-born crossbowmen. It would have amused him, but . . .

They came at sunset, out of the setting sun.

The fields looked as if they were crawling with insects and then, without a shout or a signal the irks changed direction and were coming up the walls. Ser Alcaeus had never seen anything like it, and it made his skin crawl.

There were daemons among them, a dozen or more, fast, lithe, elegant and deadly. And they simply ran up the walls.

His crossbowmen loosed and loosed into the horde coming at them, and he did his best to walk up and down behind them on the crenellations, murmuring words of encouragement and praising their steadiness. He knew how to command, he’d just never done it before.

The first wave almost took the wall. A daemon came right over and started killing guildsmen. It was nothing but luck that its great sword bounced off a journeyman armourer’s breastplate and the man’s mates got their bolts into the lethal thing. It still took four more men down while it died, but the sight of the dead daemon stiffened the guildsmen’s spines.

They staved off the second wave. The daemons had grown careful and led from the back. Alcaeus tried to get his crossbowmen to snipe at them, but there was never a moment when they could do anything but fight the most present danger.

A guild captain came to him where he was standing, leaning heavily on his pole-axe because he knew enough not to waste energy in armour. The man saluted.

‘M’lord,’ he said. ‘We’re almost out of bolts. Every lad brings twenty.’

Ser Alcaeus blinked. ‘Where do you get more?’

‘I was hoping you would know,’ said the guild officer.

Ser Alcaeus sent a runner, but he already knew the answer.

The third wave got over the walls behind them, they heard it go. The sounds of fighting changed, there was sudden shrieking and his men started to look over their shoulders.

He wished he had his squire – a veteran of fifty battles. But the man had died protecting him in the ambush and so he had no one to ask for advice.

Ser Alcaeus set his jaw and prepared to die well.

He walked along the wall again as the shadows lengthened. His section was about a hundred paces, end to end – Albinkirk was a big town, even to Ser Alcaeus who hailed from the biggest city in the world.

He stopped when he saw three of his men looking back at the town.

‘Eyes front,’ he snapped.

‘A house on fire!’ some idiot said.

More men turned and, just like that, he lost them. They turned, and then there was a daemon on the wall, killing them. It moved like fluid, passing through men, round them, with two axes flashing in its taloned hands – even as Alcaeus watched, one of the daemon’s taloned feet licked out to eviscerate a fifteen-year old who’d had no breastplate.

Alcaeus charged. He felt the fear that it generated – but in Morea knights trained for this very thing, and he knew the fear. He ran through it, blade ready-

It hit him. It was faster by far, and an axe slammed into his arm. He was well-trained and caught much of the blow. His small fortune in plate armour ate the rest, and then he was swinging.

It had to pivot to face him. The twitch of its hips took a heartbeat, and he swung his pole-axe up from the garde of the boar, like a boy swinging a pitchfork at haying, but with twice the speed.

Ser Alcaeus was as shocked as the daemon when his axe caught the other creature’s axe-hand and smashed it. Ichor sprayed and its axe fell. It slashed at him with the left, turned and kicked him with a taloned foot. All four talons bit through his breastplate and knocked him flat, but none reached him through his mail and padded arming cote.

A crossbow struck the daemon. Not a bolt but the bow itself, swung by a terrified guildsman.

The daemon bounded onto the wall, scattering defenders, and jumped.

Alcaeus got to his feet. He still had his pole-axe.

He was proud of himself for two breaths, and then he realised that the town behind him was afire, and there were two more daemons on the wall with him, and irk arrows were suddenly everywhere. Worse, they were coming from the town.

He had a dozen men by him, including the stunned looking man who’d hit the daemon with his crossbow. The rest of his fools were leaving the wall, running for their houses.

He shook his head and cursed. They were surrounded, half his men gone, and it was growing dark rapidly.

He made his decision. ‘Follow me!’ he called, and ran along the wall. He was headed for the castle, which towered over the western end of town by the river gate. It had its own defensive walls.

The whole town was falling. It was the only place to make a stand.

When he paused to breathe, Albinkirk was afire from south to north, and a sea of Wild creatures were running through the streets. He knew the difference between the irks – elfin and gnarled and satanic in the firelight – and the boglins, with their leather midsections and their oddlyjointed arms. He’d studied pictures. He’d trained for this, but it was like a nightmare. He was running again with the half dozen of his crossbowmen who stuck with him. The rest ran off into the town despite his admonitions. One died at their feet, ripped to pieces by boglins and consumed by something worse.

He could see the river, and the castle, but the next section of wall was crowded with enemies. The streets below were worse.

But at the edge of the firelight, he could see a company of soldiers with spears still holding one street, a crowd of panicked refugees behind them pressing on the castle gates.

Unbeckoned, a thought whispered into his head.

Time to earn your spurs.

‘Let me go first,’ he said to his crossbowmen. ‘I will charge. You will follow me and kill anything that gets past me. You understand?’

He longed, just for a second, for wine and his lyre, and for the feeling of a woman’s breast under his hand.

He raised his pole-axe.

‘Kyrie Eleison!’ he sang, and charged.

There were perhaps sixty boglins on the wall. It was too dark to count, and he wasn’t that interested.

He smashed into them, taking them by surprise. The first one died, and after that nothing went right. His pole-axe fouled in the boglin; his blow had caught the thing in an armpit, and it fell off the wall taking his precious weapon with it.

He was instantly surrounded.

He got a dagger unsheathed with a practised flick - because a bastard cousin of the Emperor does not survive long at court without being able to use a dagger expertly, in or out of armour – and then they piled on him and he was all but buried standing up.

His right arm began stabbing largely of its own accord.

A tremendous blow knocked him forward, and he stumbled a few steps smashing pieces of boglin beneath his feet – suddenly panicked that he would fall off the wall. Panic powered his limbs, he spun and felt his steel-clad back slam into the crenellations. Suddenly his arms were free, and the thing trying to open his visor was the top priority, and then it was gone too and he was clear.

His right arm was slick with green-brown blood. He took up the low guard – All Gates are Iron – with his dagger back over his right hip, left fist by his left hip, looking over his left shoulder.

A boglin threw a spear at him.

He blocked it with his left hand, and stumbled forward into them. His breath was coming in great bursts, but his brain was clear, and he rammed the point of his heavy dagger into the first one, right through its head, and ripped it out again. His armoured fist snapped out in a punch and smashed the noseless face of a second.

The next two boglins were folded over their midriffs, shot with bolts. He stepped past them, his dagger switching hands with a dexterity his uncle’s master of arms would have approved of, he was drawing his sword right-handed as he advanced.

The boglins began to back away.

He charged them.

They had their own gallantry. One creature gave its life to trip him, and died on his dagger as he fell. He rolled on a shoulder, but then there was nothing under his feet-

He hit a tiled roof, slid, hit a stone lintel with his armoured shoulder, flipped . . .

And landed in the street, on his feet. He still had both sword and dagger and took the time to thank God for it.

Above him, on the wall, the boglins were staring at him. ‘Follow me!’ he shouted to his men. He hadn’t meant to come down to the street – but from here he could see irks coming along the wall from behind his archers.

Two made the jump. The rest froze, and died where they stood.

The three of them ran for the castle, which was lit up as if it was a royal palace ready for a great event. Albinkirk was ablaze, and the streets were carpeted with dead citizens and their servants and slaves.

It was a massacre.

He ran as well as he could in sabatons. His two surviving archers ran at his heels, and they killed the only two enemies they found, and then they were in the open street in front of the castle’s main gate.

The spearmen were still holding the street.

The gate was still shut.

And the three of them were on the wrong side of the fighting.

He flipped up his visor. He no longer cared that he might die; he had to breathe. He stood there for as long as it took for his breathing to slow – bent double, he was easy meat for any boglin or irk who wanted him.

‘Messire!’ shouted the panicked crossbowmen.

He ignored them.

It seemed like eternity, but he got his head back up after he vomited on the cobbles. There was a half-eaten young boy at his feet, his body cast aside after his legs had been gnawed to the bone.

Across the square, the spearmen were barely holding. There were fifteen of them, or perhaps fewer, and they were holding back a hundred irks and boglins. The Wild creatures weren’t particularly enthusiastic – they wanted to loot, not fight. But they kept pressing in.

Alcaeus pointed across the small square. ‘I’m going into that,’ he said to the crossbowmen. ‘I intend to cut my way through to the spearmen. Die here or die with me – it’s all one to me.’ He looked at the two scared boys. ‘What are your names?’ he asked.

‘James,’ said the thin one.

‘Mat,’ said the better accoutered one. He had a breastplate.

‘Span, then. And let’s do this thing,’ he said.

He knew that he didn’t want to do it – and he knew that if he didn’t make himself go then he’d die right here, probably still trying to catch his breath.

‘Holy Saint Maurice, stand with me and these two young men,’ he said. And then, to the boys, ‘Walk right behind me. When I say to loose, kill the creatures closest to me.’ He began to walk around the edge of the square.

Off to the right a pack of irks were fighting over bales of furs. He ignored them.

A daemon loped into an alley, chasing a screaming, naked man, and he ignored it, too. He kept walking, hoarding his strength, sabatons making a grim metallic sound on the bloody stones.

He didn’t look back. He just kept going, under a tree hanging over a house wall, and then along a stone bench on which, in happier days, drunks had no doubt passed out.

When he was ten paces from the back of the enemy mob, he shrugged. He wanted to pray, but nothing came to his mind but the sight of a beautiful courtesan in Thrake.

‘Loose,’ he said.

Two bolts snapped into the mass of Wild flesh, and he followed them in, his sword and dagger flashing.

The lowest caste of boglins had no armour, but just their soft leather carapaces, and he cut them open, slammed them to earth, and crushed them with his fists. One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. He had no more to give-

– but he struck blindly, and something caught his dagger hand and threw him to the ground.

He rolled to his feet, because he was a knight, as an irk – one of the deadly ones – slammed a spear into his midriff. He went backwards and suddenly there were men all around him-

Men!

He was in among the spearmen. It put power into his limbs, and he got up again, his sword rising and falling.

He could see the thin crossbowman, James, still standing. The boy had flattened some of the things with his crossbow, and now had his side sword in his hand.

The creatures, panicked by even this very small attack from their rear, were flinching away from them both.

Ser Alcaeus gathered himself. One more time.

He tottered forward, and swung – one.

Two.

Three times. In those swings two boglins went down. The big irk flinched, turned, and hopped back.

The two hellish things feeding on the older boy died on James’ sword, and then abruptly the square cleared.

Behind them huddled two hundred shocked survivors.

The men on the castle walls finally opened the gate. Or perhaps were ordered to, now it was safer, and people flooded through, utterly panicked. More died, trampled by others, than at the Wild’s hands – the crush of women panicked beyond the capacity for anything but herd animal flight.

The spearmen backed up after them, step by step.

Step.

By.

Step.

In the shadowed streets beyond the square a pair of daemons rallied their own panicked forces, and added irk archers – good ones. Using the light of the burning town, the irks began to loose long shots across the square. Their elfin bows were light but deadly.

Ser Alcaeus couldn’t cover them all. He was almost immune to their hits but the shafts hurt when they struck his helmet or his greaves, and he was already beyond normal pain, beyond normal fatigue. He looked to the right and left and found that he had reached the gate. The guards were trying to close it; he was trying to back in. But the crush of injured men and trampled corpses underfoot was jamming them open as the enemy made their charge.

He was able to get his sword arm up in time; he managed to cover himself against a daemon’s heavy sword, and then old Ser John was there. He had a mace. It had a five-foot handle.

He used it well.

He stepped out past Ser Alcaeus, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if eager for the contest, and his mace moved like a piston. The daemons flinched back from his strike. A boglin died. Another daemon took a blow in the torso and staggered and the mace hit its foot, shattering the bone. It screamed as it went down.

It wasn’t glorious work but Alcaeus bent and grabbed the corpse of a trampled woman and threw it out into the darkness.

The gate moved.

He got his hands under a dead boglin’s skull and threw the corpse into its fellows.

The gate moved another hand’s breath.

‘Ser John!’ he shrieked. His voice was hoarse and cracked.

The old knight bounced, cut, and suddenly bounded back.

Alcaeus stumbled after him.

The gates slammed shut. Terrified sergeants slammed the timbers home into the sockets that held them, and blows rained on the outside surface of the gate from the creatures outside. One irk, braver or craftier than the rest, ran up the gate and got a leg over before one of Ser John’s archer’s spiked it to the wooden hoardings with a clothyard shaft. The professionals on the wall held – the wave failed, and died.

Ser John fell to his knees. ‘Too gods-damned old for this,’ he said, staring at the courtyard full of refugees.

But the gate held. The wall held.

Alcaeus tottered to a pillar in the colonnade and tried to open his faceplate, but he couldn’t raise his arms. He hit his head on the colonnade. He couldn’t breathe.

Strange hands flipped the catches of his visor and lifted it. Air flooded him. Sweet, wonderful air, tainted only with the harsh screams of people too maddened by fear to do anything else.

It was James the crossbowman. ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Just stand still.’ The boy hauled the helmet right off his head.

He pulled off the gauntlets. And Alcaeus slumped to the ground, his back against the colonnade.

Ser John appeared in front of him. ‘I need you on the walls.’

Alcaeus groaned.

The boy stood in front of him. ‘Let him breathe! He saved everyone!’

Ser John snorted. ‘They ain’t saved until they’s saved, boy. Ser knight? To the walls.’

Alcaeus reached out a hand.

Ser John caught it, and pulled him to his feet.

Harndon City – Edward

Master Pyel’s first commission for him was the dullest project he could imagine. It was something he could have done when he was fourteen.

He was to take twenty iron bars and make staves like barrel staves, then forge-weld them into a single column with bands to keep the staves together. Bands every handspan. Inside diameter to be a constant diameter of one inch.

Dull.

Still, he was smart enough to know that Master Pyle wouldn’t have given him the work if it didn’t matter. He was careful with his measurements, and he decided to construct a mandrel to keep the insides of the staves equidistant while he forge-welded them. That took time, too. He planished the mandrel and then polished it endlessly.

He had a moment of deep satisfaction when another journeyman, Lionel, grinned. ‘You know,’ he drawled, obviously relishing the moment. ‘You can order an apprentice to do that.’

I’m a fool, he thought, happily. He left Ben the shoemaker’s boy to use pumice on his lovely mandrel while he went out into the evening to fence with his mates and show Anne his ring. Better, to show Anne’s parents. Apprentices didn’t marry – but a journeyman was a person of consequence. He was a man.

The next morning, he had the mandrel ready, thanked the apprentice like a good master, and then whipped the forge welds into shape, smoothing both inside and outside. It turned out to be more finicky than he had expected, and took him all day.

Master Pyle looked at the result and slammed it against the oak tree in the yard. The welds held. He smiled. ‘You made a mandrel,’ he said.

‘Had to,’ replied Edward.

Master Pyle made a face. ‘My design is flawed,’ he said. ‘How’re your casting skills?’

Edward shrugged. ‘Not that good, Master,’ he admitted.

The next morning when the sun rose, he was down by the river, casting bells with the Foibles – rivals, but friends.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Hundreds of leagues to the north, the same sun rose on a fortress which was complete in every warlike respect – high wooden hoardings crowned the turrets and curtain walls, and a major engine of war stood atop every tower: the donjon tower bore the weight of a trebuchet, and smaller mangonels and ballistae decorated the smaller towers.

Aside from a dozen men on duty, the garrison, who had laboured two days and nights by torchlight, lay asleep in heaps of straw. The dormitory was full of local people and so was the hall and the stable.

Sauce awakened the captain because there was movement down by the river. He had placed a garrison of ten archers, three men-at-arms and a pair of knights in the tower at the bridge under Ser Milus’ command the evening before. They had their own food and a mirror with which to signal, and this morning they were apparently flashing away merrily.

Ser Jehannes had gone with them, as a mere man-at-arms. He had gone without comment and left no note. The captain awoke to find it still on his mind.

‘Damn him,’ he said, staring at the newly whitewashed plaster over his head. Jehannes had always disliked him because he was young and well-born.

As far as the captain saw it, Messire Jehannes could have both his birth and his youth. He lay on his bed, his breath steaming in the air, and found himself growing angrier and angrier.

‘Damn who?’ asked Sauce. She flashed him a smile that was probably meant to be winsome. She was an attractive woman, but the missing front teeth and the scar on her face tended to made her winsome look slightly savage.

Sauce and the captain went backaways. The captain considered confiding in her – but he was the captain, now. Everyone’s captain.

He got his feet on the cold stone instead. ‘Never mind. Call Toby for me, will you?’

She leered. ‘I’m sure I could dress you, mesself.’

‘Maybe you could and maybe you can’t, but neither will get me moving fast enough.’ He stood up, naked and she swatted at him with her gloves and went out calling for Toby.

Toby and Michael arrived together, Toby with clothes, Michael, sleepy to the point of clumsiness, with a cup of steaming wine.

The captain armed himself in the ruddy light of the new sun, Michael fumbling with buckles and laces so that it seemed to take twice as long as arming usually did and he almost regretted sending Sauce away. But he ran lightly down the steps to the great courtyard and patted Grendel’s nose when he was led out. He took the tall bassinet on his head, pulled steel gauntlets over his hands, and vaulted into Grendel’s war-saddle. He was giving his men a good example – he was also riding out of a fortress into the unknown.

It occurred to him as he ducked his head to pass through the narrow postern – he had ordered that the main gate be shut for the duration – that if nothing attacked them, he was going to look a ripe fool. Followed by the image of a taloned foot ripping the guts out of his riding horse, which made his stomach lurch and his throat go cold.

He rode down the steep road, leaning well back into the comforting buttress of his war-saddle, with Wilful Murder, Sauce, Michael Rankin and Gelfred all fully armed at his back. At the base of the hill he turned away from the bridge and rode west – not onto the narrow track he’d followed and fought the daemon, but around the base of the fortress.

He rode slowly around it, looking up so hard that his neck hurt, examining his hoardings from their attackers’ perspective. The fortress was a hundred feet above him, huge, imposing and very, very far away.

After he passed the donjon the first trebuchet released. He heard the crack of the wood base of the counter-weight striking its restraint and saw the rock pause at the height of its arc. Then it fell with a crash well to the west.

The captain turned to Wilful Murder. ‘Go and put an orange stake on it, Will. They won’t loose again.’

‘It’s always me,’ Wilful grumbled and did as he was told.

The rest continued to ride around the base of the fortress. Two other engines released, and both times the captain sent Wilful off to mark the fall of shot.

‘Tough nut,’ Sauce said, suddenly.

‘Some of our enemy have wings,’ the captain replied and he nodded heavily, because he was in full harness and couldn’t really shrug well. ‘But yes. With our company on the walls and all the defences up we should be able to hold until we starve.’ He looked beyond her. ‘We’ll lose the Lower Town first, then Bridge Castle.’ He shrugged. ‘But the – the king will come first.’

With that, he leaned his weight forward and led them at a slow, lumbering canter across the fields to the Bridge Castle.

Milus met him, also fully armoured, at the tower gate. Behind him, on the bridge, were a dozen heavy wagons laden with goods and fifty or more men and women all pale as parchment. Merchants.

‘Come for the fair,’ Milus said. He made a face. ‘They say there’s five convoys behind them.’

The captain turned and looked at Michael, who grimaced. ‘We don’t even have all the farmers in,’ he said. ‘Fifty, you say? And their wagons?’

‘And I’ll bet they don’t have any food,’ the captain said. ‘I’ll guess they have carts full of cloth and luxury goods, because they’ve come to buy grain.’ He looked around. ‘How many more mouths can you take, Milus?’

The older knight narrowed his eyes. ‘I can take all of ’em,’ he admitted. ‘And thirty more like ’em. But I’ll need more grain, more salt meat, more of everything to do it. Except water. We’ve plenty of that, out of the river.’

Back up the hill he went to report to the Abbess. A heavy military wagon was raised from the cellars and reassembled, then loaded to heaping with food and provender, and hand-hauled down the steep slope, teams of men on gate winches letting it down a few feet a time. The captain disarmed, handing his harness to his squire. His hips were screaming, and once it was finally off he felt light enough to fly away.

Even as they increased the supplies to the lower fort, more merchants arrived. Some were angry at the interruption of trade, and some were clearly already terrified. The captain went back down the hill and wasted the morning trying to calm them. He finally told them to send a deputation up the hill to the Abbess.

Then he made the climb back up to the fortress to hide in his Commandery, a small cell with a door directly onto the courtyard and a pair of arched windows separated by a fluted column. Open, the windows let in a spring breeze carrying the scent of wildflowers and jasmine, and he could see fifteen leagues to the east over the low hills.

Today, instead of turning to the parchment scrolls full of accounts that awaited him, he unbuckled his sword and hung it on the man-high bronze candelabra and leaned his elbows on the sill of the leftmost window.

Booted footsteps announced Michael. ‘Your armour,’ the young man said quietly.

The captain turned to see two archers with a heavy wicker basket, and his valet with an armload of dressed lumber. While he watched, the archers argued about which pre-cut peg went in which hole and the valet stared off into space while idly providing the correct piece, even when the archers asked for the wrong thing. Before the sun had moved the width of a finger, they had assembled a rack for the captain’s armour, man sized, a little taller than the man himself, and Michael dressed the heavy wooden form carefully. A good arming rack could speed a man into his harness by precious minutes. And with every inch of the fortress convent crammed to capacity and past it with soldiers and refugeees, his office was his sleeping room.

When the archers and the valet went back out, the noise vanished and the captain returned to his window.

‘Will that be all, ser?’ Michael asked.

‘Well done, Michael,’ the captain said.

The younger man jumped as if he’d been bitten. ‘I – that is-’ he laughed. ‘Your valet, Jacques, did most of it.’

‘The more credit to you that you give him credit,’ the captain observed.

Emboldened, Michael came forward and, very slowly, leaned into the right hand window. His stealthy progress was not unlike that of a convent cat the captain had observed that morning, which had been intent on stealing a piece of cheese. He smiled. It took Michael as long to rest in the window as it had for the three men to build the armour rack. ‘We’re fully provisioned,’ Michael said carefully.

‘Hmm. No commander facing a siege ever admits being “fully provisioned”,’ the captain said.

‘So now we wait?’ Michael asked.

‘Are you a squire or an apprentice captain?’ the captain asked.

Michael stood up straight. ‘My pardon, ser.’

He grinned wickedly. ‘I don’t mind an intelligent question, and especially not when it helps me think. I do have to think, young Michael. Plans don’t just come full-blown into my head. Next we’re going to use a powerful magic, something potent, grave and dire. The Archaics used it well and often. All the histories describe it, and yet no romance of chivalry ever mentions it.’

Michael pulled a face that told the captain he’d wit to tell when he was being baited.

‘What spell?’ he asked.

‘No spell,’ the captain advised. ‘But it’s a kind of magic nonetheless. We’re provisioned and armed, we’ve repaired our fortifications, and the enemy are not yet at the gates. So what shall we do?’

‘Compel the rest of the peasants into the walls?’ Michael asked.

‘No. That’s done.’

‘Build outworks?’

‘We lack the force to man them, so no.’ The captain paused. ‘Not so bad, though.’

Michael’s frustration was obvious. ‘Summon a tame daemon?’ he asked.

The captain scratched his pointed beard. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Although if I knew how to I might.’

Michael shrugged.

‘Two words,’ the captain encouraged him.

Michael shook his head. ‘Higher walls?’ he asked, knowledge of his own inadequacy making him sound petulant.

‘No.’

‘More arrows?’

‘Not bad, but no.’

‘Find allies?’ Michael asked.

The captain was silent a moment at that, looking east. ‘We have already summoned our allies, but that’s not bad at all,’ he said. ‘A very useful thought, and one that I may pursue.’ He looked at the fashionably greenclad scion of the aristocracy and added. ‘But no.’

‘Damn,’ Michael said. ‘Can I give up?’

‘As squire, or as apprentice captain?’ the captain asked. ‘You started this, not me.’ The captain picked up the short baton of office that he almost never carried. It had belonged to the previous captain, and had some history and authority to it – enough that the captain suspected it might have a touch of phantasm about it. ‘You have thirty-one lances, give or take; sixteen elderly but competent sergeants and one well-constructed, if elderly, fortress on good ground. You must defend a ford, a bridge, a constant flow of terrified merchants and a vulnerable Lower Town with inadequate walls. Tell me your plan. If it’s good enough, I’ll claim it’s my own and use it. There are stupid answers but there’s no right answer. If your answer is good, you live and make a little money. If your answer is bad, you fail and die and just for extra points, a lot of harmless people, some actual nuns and a bunch of farmers will die with you.’ The captain had an odd look in his eyes. ‘Let’s hear it.’

Michael had sprouted enough hairs on his chin that it might honestly be called a beard and he played with them for a while. ‘All in our current situation? Fully provisioned and so on?’

The captain nodded.

‘Send messengers for aid. Enlist allies from local lords. Button up the fortress, tell the merchants to go hang themselves, and prepare for the enemy.’ Michael looked out over the woods to the east while he thought on.

‘Messengers sent. Allies cost money and our profit on this is slim as it is. We were in pretty desperate straits before we got this job. And those merchants represent a source of cash to us. I leave aside the morality of the thing. We can make them pay for protection and split the money with the abbess. Fair is fair – it’s her fortress and our steel.’ The captain’s gaze was out the window, on the distant woods.

The sun moved in the sky.

‘I give up,’ Michael admitted. ‘Unless it’s something very simple like more rocks for siege engines, or more water.’

‘I think I’m glad that you can’t find it, lad, because you have a brain and your family has a lot of war craft. And if you don’t see it, perhaps they won’t see it either.’ The captain pointed out the window.

‘They? The Wild?’ Michael asked quietly.

The captain scratched at his beard again. ‘Active patrolling, Michael. Active patrolling. Starting in about six hours, I’m putting our lances out in fast-moving patrols. In all directions, but mostly east. I want to be familiar with the terrain, to relocate our foe, and then I’m going to ambush, harass, irritate, and annoy him and his minions until they go elsewhere looking for easier prey. If they choose to come here and lay siege to us I intend to have them leave a trail of blood – or whatever they have for blood – through that forest.’

Michael was looking at his hands, which were trembling. ‘You intend to go out into the Wild?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Again?’

‘If the initiative is in the woods, I’ll seize it in the woods,’ said the captain. ‘You think the enemy are ten feet tall and made of adamantine. I think they have a corps of men as servants, archers and woodsmen, who have so little war-craft that I can see the smoke of their dinner fires from here.’ The captain put a hand on his squire. ‘And ask yourself – why is the main body of our enemy to the east?’ He looked out. ‘Gelfred is out there right now,’ he said quietly.

Michael whistled. ‘Blessed Saint George. Have they passed us by?’

The captain smiled. ‘Well guessed, young Michael. Our enemy has bypassed us – a tribute to our preparations and our little raid. But there’s a reason you don’t bypass a fortress, and I’m about to teach him. Unless,’ he smiled, and just for a moment, he showed his youth. ‘Unless it’s all a fucking trap.’

Michael swallowed.

‘Anyway, his human allies are right there as well – to the east. Don’t point. I suspect that some of the birds are spies.’ The captain turned away.

‘Then they can see everything we do!’ Michael said.

‘Everything,’ the captain said with evident satisfaction. ‘Go to the refectory, find some parchment, write me a list of all of your notions for the defence of this position, and then go polish something.’ He smiled. ‘But first, get me some wine.’

‘I was afraid,’ the squire blurted. ‘In the fight with the wyvern – I was so afraid I could barely move.’ He breathed heavily. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it.’

The captain nodded. ‘I know,’ he said.

‘But it will get better, won’t it? I mean – I’ll get used to it. Won’t I?’ he asked.

‘No.’ The captain shook his head. ‘Never. You never get used to it. You shake, vomit, foul your braes, piss yourself, whatever you do, every fucking time. What you get used to is the power of the fear, the onset of the terror. You learn you can face it. Now get me some wine, drink a couple of cups yourself, and get back to work.’

‘Yes, m’lord.’

There was a constant flow of men and materiel up and down the hill, from the top of the fortress to Bridge Castle. The war engines on the towers lofted practice rounds into the fields, and trusted corporals took patrols out into the farmland – careful, wary patrols on fast horses. The closest farmers had responded well enough to the alarm bells and yesterday’s summons, and Abbington, the biggest of the hamlets, was clear, but the more distant had only sent children to ask for more information, and none of them had brought in any of their precious grain unless the soldiers had brought it themselves. The patrols either went to fetch in the timid or led out farmers who had believed it was merely a drill.

And the more prosperous yeoman had other questions.

‘Who is going to pay for our grain?’ demanded a strong middle-aged man with an archer’s forearms and a handsome head of brown hair. ‘This is my treasure, ser knight – my precious store. What we scrimp and save up over the winter turns to silver when the merchants come in the spring. Who’s paying for it now?’

The captain directed all such questions, firmly and quietly, to the Abbess.

As the sun set on the third full day the cellars were bursting with grain. A further hundredweight lay at the foot of the track that ran up the hill to the fortress where a cart had broken loose and smashed to pieces, and now every wagon up or down ran with ropes attached to the gate winches – and the main gate had stood open all day.

The hundredweight of grain had the curious effect of dragging birds out of the sky to eat the free bounty. Archers, led by Gelfred, netted them.

The fortress was so packed with people that there were men and women planning to sleep on the stone flags on straw despite the briskness of the evening. Torches burned all around the courtyard and a bonfire burned in the centre, the flickering orange light reflecting off the towers, the donjon and the sparkling dormitory windows. Chickens – hundreds of chickens – ran about the courtyard and the rocks on the ridge below the gate. Pigs rooted in the convent garbage at the base of the cliff, nigh on two hundred of them. The convent sheepfold, hard against the eastern walls, was also full to bursting and in the last light a man standing in the Abbess’s solar could see the glitter of a dozen men-at-arms and as many archers, bringing in another thousand sheep from the eastern farms.

The captain stood in the Abbess’s solar and watched patrols, the sheep, and the formal closing of the gate. He followed Bent’s craggy form as the big archer changed the watch in the donjon, marching the off-going watch around the whole circuit as he collected them and put fresh men in their places. It was an impressive and efficient ceremony, and it had the right effect on the villagers, most of whom had never seen so many armed men in their lives.

The captain sighed. ‘In an hour’s time a virgin will have been deflowered and a husbandman will have lost his farm at dice,’ he said.

‘You have a virgin in mind?’ the Abbess asked.

‘Oh, I’m quite above such earthy concerns.’ The captain continued to watch, and he was smiling.

‘Because you are worried, you mean. You must be worried that nothing has come at us yet,’ the Abbess said.

The captain pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘I’d rather be a ripe fool, the laughing stock of every soldier in Alba,’ he said, ‘then face a siege by those things. I don’t know where they are yet or why they let us get everyone under cover. In my dark moments I think our walls are already undermined, or they have a legion of traitors inside the walls-’ He raised a hand, making a warding-off motion. ‘But in truth, I can only hope they know as little of us as we know of them. The day before yesterday we were easy meat. Today, if sheer fear doesn’t break us, we could hold for a year.’ He glanced at her worried face.

She shrugged. ‘How old are you, Captain?’

He was clearly uncomfortable with the question.

‘How many sieges have you seen?’ she asked. ‘How many Wild creatures have you faced in combat?’ She turned towards him and stepped forward, boring in on her target. ‘I’m a knight’s daughter, Captain. I know these are not polite questions, but by God I feel I deserve to know the answer.’

He leaned against the wall. Scratched under his chin for a moment, staring off into space. ‘I’ve killed more men than I have monsters. I’ve stood one siege and, to be fair, we broke it in the second month. I’m-’ He turned his head and met her eye. ‘I’m twenty.’

She made a sound between a satisfied hrmmf and a snort.

‘But your divination told you that.’ He straightened from the wall. ‘I’m young, but I’ve seen five years of unending war. And my father-’ He paused, and the pause became a silence.

‘Your father?’ she asked quietly.

‘Is a famous soldier,’ he finished, his voice very quiet.

‘I’ve entrusted my defences to a child,’ the Abbess said, but she pursed her lips in self-mockery.

‘A child with a first rate company of lances. And there is, truly, no better sell-sword captain in Alba. I know what I’m doing. I’ve seen it and done it before, and I’ve studied it, unlike the rest of my breed. I’ve studied them all – Maurikos and Leo and Nikephoros Phokas, even Vegetius. And if I may say so, it’s too late to change your mind now.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid.’ She drank her wine and, quite spontaneously, she took his hand. ‘I’m fifty,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never withstood a siege, myself.’ She let his hand go and bit her lip. ‘Are you afraid?’

He took her hand again and kissed it. ‘Always. Of everything. My mother made me a coward. She taught me, very carefully, to fear everything. Starting with her. See? You are become my confessor.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘I am the world’s expert at overcoming fear. Cowardice is the best school for courage, I find.’

She had to smile. ‘Such a wit. Vade retro!’

He nodded. ‘I’m too tired to get out of the chair.’

Their laughter and light conversation lasted through the rest of her wine, and his. Finally she said, after looking out the window, ‘And what do you fear most?’

‘I fear failure,’ he said. He laughed at his own words. ‘But alone of the people in this fortress, I have no fear of the Wild whatsoever.’

‘Are you posturing?’ she asked.

He stared into her fire for a little. ‘No,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I need to go look at the watch. I have tried something reckless tonight. I need to make sure my people are ready for it. You know that your enemy is using animals to watch us – yes?’

‘Yes,’ she said, very quietly.

‘Do you know anything else, my lady? Anything that would help your very young captain save your walls?’ He leaned toward her.

She looked away. ‘No,’ she said.

He put his wine cup on the oak sideboard with a click. ‘I told you the truth.’

‘Let us have a few moments to marshal our forces,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘Go see to your watch. My few tawdry secrets are not in any way germane to our siege.’

He bowed, and she waved him away, so he went out into the stairwell. It was dark.

Her door closed, and he began to feel his way down the stone steps when a hand closed on his.

He knew her in a moment, and pulled the hand to his lips – faster than she could take it away. He heard her sigh.

That moment he considered crushing her against the stone wall. But it occurred to him that she must be there by the Abbess’ commission, and it would be rude, to say the least, to attack the novice outside the Abbess’ door. Or something like that went through his head – before her lips came down on his and her hands pushed against his shoulders.

His heart pounded. His mind went blank.

He could feel her power, now. As their bodies moved together – her tongue probing his – they were generating power.

She broke their kiss and stepped away – a sudden absence of warmth in the dark – and said ‘Now we are even.’ She took his hand. ‘Come.’

She led him down the dark stone steps. Across the hall – the bonfires in the courtyard made the stained glass figures flicker and wriggle as if they were animated, and fitful rainbows played across the hall floor. After the complete darkness of the Abbess’ solar stairwell, the hall seemed well enough lit.

She was taking him to the books. Halfway across the hall they kissed again. No one could have said which of them initiated it. But when his hand moved across her bodice, she stepped away.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to show you this, and I am not your whore.’

But she kept his hand. Led him to the book. ‘Have you seen it?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you understand?’ she asked, flipping the pages.

‘No,’ he admitted. There is nothing a young man enjoys less than telling the object of his affection how little he knows.

Her not-quite-a-smile played somewhere in the corner of her mouth. ‘You are one of us, are you not? I can feel you.’

His eyes were on hers, but when she looked at the book he looked too. Looked at the alembic in St Pancreas’s hand. And followed the saint’s pointing finger to a diagram, lower on the page – a tree.

He flipped to another page, where another saint pointed – this time to a cloud.

‘Is this a test?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘Yes.

‘Then I guess the book is a code. The shapes that the saints point to indicate the shape of a template that, when covering the text, will indicate what the reader should read.’ He ran his finger over the text across from St Eustachios. ‘It is a grimoire.’

‘A fantastically detailed, internally coded, referential grimoire,’ she said, and then bit her tongue which he found, just at that moment, intensely erotic. He reached to kiss her, but she made the dismissive motion women make when boys are tiresome. ‘Come,’ she said.

He followed her across the hall. He was conscious, at a remove, that he had a watch to oversee; a siege to command. But her hand in his held such promise. It was smooth, but rough. The hand of a woman who worked hard. But still smooth; like the surface of good armour.

She dropped his hand the moment she opened the courtyard door, and they were in the light again.

He wanted to say something to her – but he had no idea what he wanted to say.

She turned and looked back at him. ‘I have one more thing to show you,’ she said.

Even as she spoke, she pulled a cowl of not-seeing around herself.

He was being tested in another way.

He reached into the palace of his memory and did the same. He was there for long enough to see Prudentia looking at him with ferocious disapproval, and that the green spring outside his iron door was building up into a storm of epic proportions.

And then they slipped across the courtyard. They were scarcely invisible – one of the Lanthorn girls, spinning in a reel with a young archer, saw the captain clearly because she was dancing and she deftly avoided him as she whirled.

But he was not interrupted as he passed.

She stopped at the iron-bound dormitory door and he manipulated his phantasm so that it linked to hers. It was a very intimate thing to do – something he had never done with anyone but Prudentia, and which the sight of her had reminded him of.

She used to say that the mind was a temple, an inn, a garden, and an outhouse, and that casting with another magus partook of worship, intimate conversation, sex, and defecation.

But as his power reached to hers, hers accepted it, and they were linked.

He winced.

She winced as well.

And then they were in the dormitory, standing in a small hall where, on his former visit, older nuns had sat to read or to do needlework. There was light here. Most of the nuns were out in the yard, but two still sat quietly.

‘Look at them,’ Amicia said. ‘Look.’

He didn’t have to look too hard. Tendrils of power played about them.

‘All of you have the power?’ he asked.

‘Every one of us,’ she said. ‘Come.’

‘When will I see you again?’ he managed, as she led him along the northern curtain behind the stable block. An apple tree grew there, in a stone box set into the wall. There was a bench around it.

Amicia settled onto the bench.

He was too befuddled to seek to kiss her, so he simply sat.

‘All of you are witches?’ he asked.

‘That’s an ugly word for you to use, man-witch,’ she said. ‘Sorcerer. Warlock.’ She looked out over the wall.

Far to the east he saw the barest smudge of orange, and it instantly recalled him to his duty. ‘I must go,’ he said. He wanted to impress her – he wanted not to seem to need to impress her. ‘I’ve sent people to do something I should have done myself,’ he blurted.

She didn’t seem to pay him any heed. ‘I thought that you needed to know what the stakes were,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she is going to tell you. This is a place of power. And the Masters of our Order have filled it with women of power, and with powerful artefacts. Now it shines like a beacon.

He felt blind and foolish at her words. But Prudentia’s rules – on the use of power, on using the sight of power – which were wisdom in a world that distrusted the magi, had deprived him of this insight.

‘That, or she meant me to tell you,’ Amicia added. Her head slumped for the first time that evening.

‘Or she expected me to reason it out for myself,’ he said bitterly. He felt the time flowing away as if he had an hourglass in his hand – he felt tonight’s raid slipping west into the trees, and he felt the lack of alertness on his watch, and sensed a thousand forgotten details, like a tendril of power attached to his soldiers that was pulling him from her side. And the glow far in the east – what was that?

And then he felt her, and it was like a chain that tethered him to the bench.

‘I must go,’ he said again. But youth, and his hand, betrayed him, and he was again in her arms or she in his.

‘I do not want this,’ she said as she kissed him again.

So he broke free. Broke the binding between them with a thought, and stepped away. ‘Do you often come here?’ he asked, his voice hoarse. ‘To the tree?’

She nodded, barely perceptible in the odd light.

‘I might write to you,’ he said. ‘I want to see you again.’

She smiled. ‘I imagine you’ll see me every day,’ she said. ‘I don’t want this. I don’t need it. You don’t know me. We should walk away.’

‘If I strike you now we can end as we started,’ he said. ‘With a kiss and a blow. But you want me as I want you. We are bonded.’

She shook her head. ‘That sort of thing is for children. Listen, Captain. I have been a wife. I know how a man feels between my legs. Ah! You wince. The novice is not a virgin. Shall I go on? I lived across the wall. I was an Outwaller. No, look!’ She peeled back the collar of her gown, and her shoulder was covered in tattoos.

Bathed in the distant firelight her shoulder gleamed, and all he felt was desire.

‘I was taken young, and grew to womanhood among them. I had a husband – a warrior, and we might have grown old together, he as war chief and I the shaman. Until the Knights of the Order came. They killed him, they took me, and here I am. And I do not need rescuing. I live in the world of spirit. I have come to love Jesus. Every time I kiss you, I hurtle backwards in my life to another place. I cannot be with you. I will not be a mercenary’s whore. I sacrificed myself this evening so that you could see what you are so obviously blind to – because you are so very afraid of your power.’ She turned her head. ‘Now go.’

The lines of power to his soldiers were taut as cables. He was ignoring his duty. It was like a broken bone – a scream of pain. But he couldn’t let what was between them rest.

‘You wanted me as much as ever I wanted you, from the moment your eyes met mine. Don’t be a hypocrite. You sacrificed yourself this evening? Rather, you craved this evening and built yourself a reason to let yourself have it.’ Even as he spoke the words, he cursed himself for a fool. It was not what he wanted to say.

‘You have no idea what I do or do not want,’ she said. ‘You have no idea the life I have led.’

He took a half-step away – the sort of half-step a swordsman takes when he changes from defence to attack. ‘I grew up with five brothers who hated me, a father who ignored and despised me, and a doting mother who wanted to make me a tool of her revenge,’ he hissed. ‘I grew up across the river from your Outwaller villages. When I looked out of my tower I saw you Outwallers in the land of freedom. You had a husband who loved you? I had a succession of sweethearts placed in my bed by my mother to spy on me. You would have been an Outwaller shaman? I was being trained to lead armies of the Wild to crush Alba and rid the earth of the king. So that my mother could feel avenged. Knights of the Order came for you? My brothers ganged up to beat me, to please my supposed father. It was good fun.’ He found that his voice was rising and spittle flew from his mouth.

So much for self-control; he had said too much. Far too much. He felt sick.

But he was not done. ‘But fuck that. I am not the Antichrist, even if God himself decrees I should be. I will be what I will, not what anyone else wills, as can you. Be what you choose. You love Jesus?’ he asked, and something black passed into his mind. ‘What has he done for you? Love me instead.’

‘I will not,’ she said, quite calmly.

He didn’t will himself to walk away. He didn’t feel a thing – he didn’t feel an urge to reply. It was like being cut with a very sharp sword, and watching your arm fall to the ground.

The next he knew, he was standing in the guard box over the gate.

Bent, the duty archer, stood with his arms crossed. When he saw the captain he twirled his moustaches. ‘You’ve sent out a sortie,’ he said. ‘Or somewhat similar. I can’t find Bad Tom or half the men-at-arms for duty.’

‘It’s about to happen,’ the captain said, mastering himself. ‘Tell the watch to be alert. Tell them-’

He looked up. But the stars were silent and cold.

‘Tell them to be alert,’ he said, at a loss. ‘I have to attend the Abbess.’

He got himself to the jakes and threw up. Wiped his chin on an old handkerchief and threw it after his puke, which would have scandalized a laundress. And then he pulled himself up straight, nodded, as if to an invisible companion, and walked back into the hall.

The Abbess was waiting for him.

‘You met with my handmaiden,’ she said.

His armour was adamantine. He smiled. ‘A merry meeting,’ he said.

‘And you saw to your guards,’ she said.

‘Not enough,’ he said. ‘Lady, there are too many secrets here. I do not know what the stakes are. And perhaps I am simply too young for this.’ He shrugged. ‘But we have two foes – the enemy outside and the enemy within. I wish you would tell me what you know.’

‘If I told you everything I knew you would scourge me with whips of fire,’ said the Abbess. ‘It is a passage in the Bible on which I often ponder.’ She rose from her throne and crossed the hall to the book. ‘You have solved this riddle?’ she asked.

‘Using the enormous hints provided,’ he answered.

‘It was not my place to tell you,’ she said. ‘When our kind swear oaths, those oaths bind our power.’

He nodded.

‘You are as tense as a bowstring,’ she said. ‘Is that the effect of Amicia?’

‘I have played a trump card tonight,’ he admitted. ‘And I let my tryst interfere with duty. Things are not done as I would like on an evening when I have taken a gamble that now seems reckless.’ He paused, and said what he had boiling inside him. ‘I do not enjoy being toyed with.’

The Abbess picked up her onyx rosary and adjusted her wimple. She shrugged. ‘No one does,’ she said dismissively. ‘I don’t deal in the imagery of gambling,’ she said. ‘But perhaps we can do some good, and by our presence prevent the dicing and the deflowering you were worried about,’ she said. ‘Let’s walk among our people, Captain.’

They walked out, and she put a hand on his arm, very much the lady, and a veiled sister came and carried her train, which was longer and more ornate than any other sister’s in the convent. Indeed, the captain suspected that her habit was far from the rule as laid down for sisters of Saint Thomas. She was a rich and powerful woman who had somehow turned to this life.

When they entered the courtyard all conversation stopped. A ring of dancers moved to the sound of a pair of pipes and a psalter played by none other than the captain’s squire. The musicians continued to play, and the dancers paused, but the Abbess gave them a firm nod of approval and the dancing continued.

‘When will they come at us?’ the Abbess asked quietly.

‘Never, if I have my way,’ the captain said pleasantly.

‘It’s better to make your money without fighting?’ she asked.

‘Always,’ he said, bowing deeply to Amicia, who stood watching the dancers. She nodded coolly in return. But he had armed himself against her and he continued without a pause. ‘But I also like to win. And winning requires some effort.’

‘Which you will make eventually?’ she said. But she smiled. ‘We spar so naturally I might have to do some penance for flirtation.’

‘You have a gift for it that must have won you many admirers,’ he said gallantly.

She struck the back of his hand with her fan. ‘Back in the ancient times when I was young, you mean?’

‘Like all beautiful women, you seek to make an insult of my flattery,’ he returned.

‘Stand here. Everyone can see us here.’ She nodded to Father Henry, who was standing hesitantly between the chapel and the steps to the Great Hall.

The captain thought that the man was a-boil with hostility. A year ago, the captain, in one of his first acts on taking command, had executed a murderer in the company – an archer who had started to kill his comrades for their loot. Torn had been a non-descript man, an outlaw. The captain eyed the priest. He had something of the same look. It wasn’t really a look. A feel. A smell.

‘Father Henry, I don’t believe that you’ve been properly introduced to the captain.’ She smiled, and her eyes flashed – a glimpse of the woman she had been, who knew that a flash of her eyes would restore any admirer to obedience. A predator who liked to play with her food.

Father Henry offered a long hand to shake. It was moist and cold. ‘The Bourc, his men call him,’ he said. ‘Do you have a name you prefer?’

The captain was so used to dealing with petty hostility that it took a moment to register. He turned his full attention on the priest.

The Abbess shook her head and pushed the priest by the elbow. ‘Never mind. I will speak to you later. Begone, ser. You are dismissed.’

‘I am a priest of God,’ he said. ‘I go where I will, and have no master here.’

‘You haven’t met Bad Tom,’ the captain said.

‘You have a familiar look about you,’ Father Henry added. ‘Do I know your parents?’

‘I’m a bastard, which you’ve already found cause to mention,’ the captain said. ‘Twice, man of God.’

The priest withstood his glare. But his eyes were as full of movement as a man dancing on coals. After too long a pause, the priest turned on his heel and walked away.

‘You go to great lengths to hide your heredity,’ the Abbess noted.

‘Do you know why?’ the captain asked.

The Abbess shook her head.

‘Good,’ said the captain. His eyes were on the priest’s back. ‘Where did he come from? What do you know about him?’

The dance had finished, and men were bowing, women dipping deep courtesies. Michael had just noted that his lord had witnessed his troubadour skills and flushed deep red in the torchlight, and the Abbess cleared her throat.

‘I told you. I took him from the parish,’ the Abbess murmured. ‘He has no breeding.’

The sky to the east lit up, as if from a flash of lightning, but the flash lasted too long and burned too red, for as long as it took a man to say a Pater Noster.

‘Alarm!’ roared the captain. ‘Gate open, all crossbows armed, get the machines loaded. Move!’

Sauce had been watching the dancers. She paused, confusion written on her face. ‘Gate open?’ she asked.

‘Gate open. Get a sortie ready to ride, you’ll be leading it.’ The captain pushed her towards her helmet.

Most of his men were already moving, but if he hadn’t been beguiled by the evening’s revelations, they’d have been in their armour already.

Already, a dozen men-at-arms stood by their destriers in the torchlit gateway, their squires and valets scrambling to arm them. Archers scrambled from the courtyard onto the catwalks around the curtain walls, some even bare-arsed in the light of the courtyard fires, their hose down and their shirttails dangling.

There was a second flash of fire to the east, half as long as the last.

The captain was grinning. ‘I hope you didn’t need olive oil for anything really important,’ he said, and squeezed her arm in a very familiar way. ‘May I take my leave? I should be back with you before the next bell.’

She eyed him in the fire-lit darkness. ‘This is your doing, and not the enemy’s?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘I hope so,’ he said. Then he leaned close. ‘Hellenic fire. In their camp. Or so I hope.’

North of Harndon – Harmodius

Dissection is one of those skills a man never really forgets. Harmodius had exhumed the corpse himself – not much of a risk, given the haste with which it had been buried.

He was only interested in the brain, anyway. Which was as well, as the thorax was badly damaged and the central body cavity was largely empty. Something had eaten the guts.

Harmodius was above such feelings as nausea. Or so he kept telling himself. A steady spring rain fell on his back, darkness was falling, and he was in the midst of the northern wilderness, but the body was there for the taking and it was, after all, what had started him on this mad-cap chase. That, and the firm and magnetic draw of the power. Power like a beacon.

He took out a hunting trousseau – a pair of very heavy knives and half a dozen smaller, very sharp ones – and quickly and accurately flensed the skin from the dead man’s skull, folded the flaps back, took a trepan from his pack, and lifted a piece of skull the size of a triple leopard of solid silver.

The light was failing, but it was still clear the brain-matter was rotting.

Harmodius took an eating knife from his purse, pulled out the sharp pick, and dug around carefully. He used the tip of the knife to cut away small portions of the rotting material-

He spat out a mouthful of salty saliva. ‘I will not vomit,’ he declared aloud. Dug again.

It was too damned dark. He pulled a candle from his increasingly upset horse’s pack, and lit it with sorcery. There was no breeze at all, and the candle hissed in the light rain. He lit two more, squandering the beeswax.

He trepanned again, but it was no use. The brain-matter was too rotten. Or his theory was entirely wrong. Or rather, Aristotle’s theory was entirely wromg.

The Magus left the body where it was, lying half exhumed in the rain. He washed his hands in the creek at the base of the hill, repacked his knives, extinguished the candles, and reloaded his horse, who now shied at every noise. He reached out, and felt the power gathering the north.

Jesu Christe

The Magus paused, one booted foot already in a stirrup. There was something-

The creature gave itself away with a growl, and his mare bolted. Harmodius managed to get a hand on the saddle-bow and clung on for a furlong until the frightened animal turned. Harmodius rode the turn, using the force of her movement to help get his leg over the saddle at last. The moon was new and distant, the rain was covering the stars, and the night was dark. He prayed, rapidly and incoherently, that his mare stayed on the road.

He got his right foot in the stirrup and the reins in his left hand, and he pulled on them. Ginjer did not obey.

He reined in sharply, and felt for the baton he used as a riding whip. It took him what seemed hours to locate it in his belt, and hours more, apparently, to press it to her neck, a trick he’d learned from a knight.

He cast a simple thought, a phantasm that allowed him to see in the dark.

What he saw froze his blood. The horse balked, and he almost went over the cantle.

‘Sweet Jesu!’ he said aloud.

Something was standing in the road, waiting for him.

Off to his left, the north-west, the sky erupted – a long orange flash. Its dim light further illuminated the familiar – too familiar – shape of the creature standing on the road.

It tossed the corpse aside and loped at him. But he had time to feel the convulsion in the northern power first. To ponder, for an instant, the fact that the long flash of orange beyond the horizon had reached him long before the convulsion of power, a matter of great interest to a hermeticist. He had never fully investigated the effects of distance on power-

It was a form of panic, to spin off thought after thought, none of them connected to the monster on the road ahead of him, or the wave of terror that it emitted like a fist of fear.

‘Adeveniat regnum tuum,’ the Magus spat.

A lance of fire sprang from his riding stick to the winged creature, whose head was bathed in flame for as long as man might draw a deep breath. The liquid parts of the creature’s head vaporized and its skull exploded, lit by the intense flame of the lance of fire.

The fire went out, apart for some pale blue flames that licked at the creature’s neck for a few heartbeats before sizzling out.

Silence fell, in which the creature’s tail lashed the ground – thump, thump, thump – and then was still.

The silence went on, and on. The night smelled of singed hair and burnt soap.

The Magus drew a deep breath. Raised his riding crop and blew gently on the silver rune set in the gold cap. He smiled to himself, despite the fatigue that settled on his shoulders like a haubergeon of mail, and allowed himself a single ‘heh’.

He watched the northern horizon as the fire flickered there again, then dismounted and walked through the darkness to the creature’s side and muttered ‘Fiat lux.’ His light was blue and pale, but it sufficed.

He made a clucking sound, reached out into the night with his senses, recoiled from what he found there and ran for his horse.

East of Lissen Carak – Peter

Peter lay in a state of angry exhaustion and watched the pale fire flicker in the distant west. He had to tear his eyes away from it and watch the darkness to be sure that the whole thing wasn’t just his imagination. But it was true – above the endless trees, somewhere to the west, there was a great fire. So great, it reflected from the cliff face above him in long flashes of light.

His two ‘masters’ slept through it.

He struggled with his yoke again, surrendered again, and fell asleep.

Awoke to the smaller man kneeling beside him.

‘Cook,’ he said. ‘Wake up. Something is out here with us,’ he added. There was fear in his voice.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ asked the other Morean.

‘I’m letting him out of this yoke,’ said the smaller man. ‘I’m not going to run and leave him to die. Jesu – I’m a better man than that.’

‘He’s a pagan, or a heretic, or some such filth. Leave him.’ The first man was loading the mule as fast as he could. It was dark, but not true dark – the first pale light of morning. And something heavy was moving in the bush.

‘I am a Christian man,’ Peter said.

‘See?’ said the smaller man. He fumbled with the chains. Grunted.

‘Come on!’ shouted his friend.

The shorter man pulled again, slammed the yoke against a rock, and scrambled to his feet. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the key.’ And he followed his mate into the woods, leaving Peter lying on the ground.

He lay there and waited to die.

But no one came for him, and you can only be so terrified for so long.

He got to his feet and stumbled over a stump he’d made himself the night before. The axe handle bruised his shin. The idiots had left their axe.

He plucked it from the stump. He went through the camp, over the broken ground in the near dark – camp was too strong a word for a place where three men had built a fire the size of a rabbit and lain on the bare ground. But by the fire he found an earthenware cup, still intact, and a tinderbox with both char cloth, flint and a steel.

Peter knelt on the ground and prayed to God. He managed a bittersweet thanks, and then he put the cup and the tinderbox into the front of his shirt, tied them in place, and made his way to the road, just a few horse lengths to the north. It was the main road from the eastern seaports to the Albin Plains. He knew that much.

To the east lay civilization and safety – and slavery.

To the west lay the Albin River and the Wild. Peter had seen the Wild, red in tooth and claw. And it had not enslaved him. So he shouldered the axe and headed west.

Harndon Palace – Desiderata

She read the note with ill-concealed irritation. ‘He gave this to you when?’ she asked the terrified boy.

‘Yesterday, r’Grace,’ he mumbled. ‘Which – er – cook sent me to Cheapside and me mum was sick-’

She looked at him. She was annoyed – she loved the useless old Magus the way she loved her magnificent Eastern riding horse, and his recent display of real power made him even more exciting.

‘An he took a horse – a fine horse – r’Grace. Had leather bags – had hisn staff.’ The boy’s desire to please was palpable, and she relented.

She turned to Lady Almspend and motioned at her waist. ‘Give the boy a leopard for his pains and send Mastiff to the Magus’ rooms in the tower. I would like a full report.’ She made a face. ‘Sir Richard?’

Sir Richard Fitzroy was the old king’s bastard son, a handsome man, a fine knight, and a reliable messenger. He doted on the Queen, and the Queen appreciated his stability.

He was attending her, obviously courting Lady Almspend now that his low-born rival was gone.

She beckonned to him. ‘Sir Richard – I need a private word with the king,’ she said.

‘Consider it done,’ he allowed, and bowed himself out.

East of Albinkirk – Gerald Random

Gerald Random woke to hear Guilbert Blackhead rapping for entrance to his tent – knocking on the tent’s cross-pole with his sword hilt. Random was on his feet in an instant, dagger in hand, and he was awake in another.

‘What is it?’ he asked, fumbling for the hooks and eyes that would open the flap.

‘No idea. But you had better see it.’ Guilbert’s urgency was carried fluently.

Random was out of the tent in another few heartbeats.

They were camped in a narrow meadow on the banks of the Albin, and the great river was in full flood, running fast and deep and almost silent, the black water sullen in the damp night air. They’d been hit by rain squalls again and again all day, and men and animals were still as wet and as sullen as the water.

Far off, north-east, the first crags of the mountains should have been visible, but low clouds drifted right over them, obscuring them for minutes at a time and then clearing just as rapidly, keeping the grass and the trees full of water.

As the next low cloud passed by, the Adnacrag Mountains loomed even in the darkness. Random thought that they might make the fortress town of Albinkirk in four more days. It was not the distance but the condition of the road at this time of year which delayed them. The river road, with its stone bridges and deep stone foundations built by the Archaics, was the only one a sane man would travel with heavy wagons. Every other road was fetlock deep in mud. But all the same, it was not easy.

There was an orange glow to the north.

‘Just watch,’ Guilbert said.

After six days on the road Random had the warrant-man’s measure – careful, cautious, and thorough. Perhaps not the man for a deed of daring, but just the sort of man to work a convoy. The guard posts were always manned and constantly checked.

Whatever he was trying to show the merchant, it was important.

Random watched a flicker – was it more than that? North-west, towards the fair. Perhaps – but they were too far for the fair to be visible. It was fifty leagues away or more – they were not yet to Albinkirk.

‘There!’ said the mercenary.

There was, just for a moment, a pinpoint of light that burned like a star above the glow of Albinkirk.

Random shrugged. ‘That’s all?’ he asked.

Guilbert nodded, clearly unhappy about it.

‘I’m for bed, then,’ Random said. ‘Wake me if we’re attacked,’ he added. He wished, later, that he hadn’t been quite so snappish.

Lissen Carak – Mag the Seamstress

Mag the seamstress sat on a barrel, staying out of the way. The day had passed well enough – she’d helped Lis wash shirts and been paid in solid coin for her work; had remembered her skills at avoiding pinching fingers, or delivering a slap where it was needed. The mercenaries were like nothing she’d ever seen – aggressive beyond anything a town of peasants had to offer.

She knew that, had the circumstances differed, they’d have killed her sheep, taken her chickens, her silver, and probably raped and killed her as well. These were hard men – bad men.

But they shared their wine and danced in the evening, and she had a hard time seeing them for what they probably were. Thieves and murderers. Because the Abbess said the Wild was going to attack them, and these men were all they had as defenders, and Mag thought . . .

Whatever she thought, she must have drifted off after the flashes in the sky. And suddenly they came out of the darkness in blackened armour, led by Thomas, who she now knew was Ser Thomas, riding hard on a destrier covered in sweat; six men-at-arms, twenty archers and some armed valets, all galloping up the twisting road and through the gate almost at her feet.

Bad Tom was the first off his horse, and he bent his knee to the captain. ‘Just as you said,’ he panted. ‘We fucked ’em.’ He rose stiffly.

The captain embraced the bigger man. ‘Go get your harness off and get a drink,’ he said. ‘With my thanks, Tom. Well done.’

‘And who’s gonna take the lamp-black off my mail?’ complained one of the archers – the one with dead eyes. He looked up, and his terrifying eyes found her unerringly with their promise of violence.

He grinned at her. The other men called him Will, and she’d learned it stood for Wilful Murder, of which he had apparently been convicted.

She flinched.

‘How was it?’ asked the captain.

Thomas laughed his huge laugh. ‘Gorgeous, Cap’n!’ he said, and swung down.

The other men laughed, a little wildly, as Mag knew men she knew that Thomas was really laughing, and the others had endured something sharp and horrible.

They’d survived it, and triumphed.

The captain embraced the big man again, and shook his hand. He went among the archers, helping them dismount and giving each his hand, and Mag saw the Abbess was right next to him and that she was blessing them.

She clapped her hands and just managed not to laugh.

Harndon Palace – Desiderata

As evening fell, Desiderata watched the foreign knight with the pleasure of a connoisseur for a true artist. He was tall – a head taller than every other man in the great hall – and he moved with a grace that God only bestowed on women and exceptional athletes. His face was like that of a saint – bright gold hair and sculpted features that were not quite too fine for a man. His red jupon fitted to perfection, his white hose were silk, not wool, and the wide belt of gold plaques on his slim hips was a mute testament to riches, privilege, and bodily power.

He bowed deeply before the king, sinking all the way to one knee with graceful courtesy.

‘My lord King, may I present the noble Jean de Vrailley, Captal de Ruth, and his cousin Gaston D’Albret, Sieur D’Eu.’ The herald proceeded to name their coats of arms and their heraldic achievements.

Desiderata already knew the foreign knight’s achievements.

She watched his eyes, and he watched the king.

The king scratched his beard. ‘It is a long way from the Grand Pays,’ he said. ‘Is all of Galle at peace, that you can bring so many knights to my lands?’ He said the words easily, and yet his eyes were hard and his face blank.

De Vrailly remained on one knee. ‘An angel commanded me to come and serve you,’ he said.

His sponsor, the Earl of Towbray, turned sharply.

Desiderata extended her sense – her warmth, as she thought of it – towards him, and the foreign knight burned like the sun.

She inhaled, as if to inhale his warmth, and the king glanced at her.

‘An angel of God?’ the king asked. He leaned forward.

‘Is there another kind?’ de Vrailly asked.

Desiderata had never heard a man speak with such simple arrogance. It hurt her, like a physical blemish on a beautiful flower. And yet, like many blemishes, it had its own fascination.

The king nodded. ‘How do you intend to serve me, Ser Knight?’ he asked.

‘By fighting,’ de Vrailly said. ‘By making unrelenting war upon your enemies. The Wild. Or any men who oppose you.’

The king scratched his beard.

‘An angel of God told you to come and kill my enemies?’ he asked. Desiderata thought the knight spoke with irony but she couldn’t be sure. De Vrailly blinded her in some strange way. He filled the room.

She closed her eyes and she could still sense him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

The king shook his head. ‘Then who am I to deny you,’ he said. ‘And yet I sense that you, in turn, desire something of me?’

De Vrailly laughed, and the sweet musical sound of it filled the room. ‘Of course! I would be your heir in exchange, and this kingdom shall, after you, be my own.’

The earl staggered as if he had been struck.

The king shook his head. ‘Then, angel or no, I think it would be best if you went back to Galle,’ he said. ‘My wife will bear me an heir of my body, or I will appoint my own choice.’

‘Of course!’ de Vrailly said. ‘But of course, my king!’ He nodded, his eyes shining. ‘But I will prove myself and become your choice. I will serve you, and you will see that there is no one like me.’

‘And you know this because an angel told you.’

‘Yes,’ said Jean de Vrailly. ‘And I offer to prove it on the body of any man you send against me, on horse or foot, with any weapon you care to name.’

His challenge, delivered in his sweet angelic voice from the bended knee of the suppliant, had all the authority of a decree. Men flinched from it.

The king nodded, as if satisfied.

‘Then I look forward to placing my lance against yours,’ he said. ‘But not as a challenge to your angel. Merely for the pleasure of the thing.’

Desiderata saw the perfect knight exchange a glance with his cousin. And she had no idea what thought they shared, but they were pleased. Pleased with themselves, and perhaps pleased with the king. It warmed her, so she smiled.

Gaston, the Sieur D’Eu, smiled back at her, but the golden de Vrailly, never took his eyes from the king. ‘I should love to match lances with you, sire,’ he said.

‘Well, not tonight. It’s too dark. Perhaps tomorrow.’ The king looked at the Earl of Towbray and nodded. ‘I thank you for bringing me this splendid man. I hope I have the revenue to keep him and his army!’

The earl chewed his moustache for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘My pleasure, your Majesty,’ he replied.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

‘God be with you,’ The Abbess said quietly, laying her hands on Wilful Murder’s head, and he flinched.

She caught the captain’s eye as the narrow gateway began to clear.

‘Any pursuit?’ he asked Ser George Brewes, the rear file leader – a man ready to be a corporal. One of Jehannes’ cronies, not one of Tom’s. Still waiting in the gate, aware it was open, eyes on the darkness outside.

Brewes shrugged. ‘How would I know?’ he asked. But he relented. ‘I wouldn’t think it.’ He shook his head. ‘We lit ten farms’ worth of the woods, and sent the fire downwind right at their camp.’

‘How many Jacks?’ the captain asked.

‘At least a hundred. Maybe thrice that – there’s no proper counting in the dark, ser.’ Brewes shrugged. ‘M’lord,’ he added, as an afterthought.

A pair of valets and an archer came up and began to winch the main gate shut.

‘Ware!’ shouted a voice from the highest tower, the one over the nuns’ dormitory, and the captain heard the unmistakable sound of a crossbow snapping off a shot.

Something passed over the moon.

Thankfully every man was on the walls and alert, or it might have been worse when the wyvern came down into the courtyard on wings a dozen ells wide, and its claws wreaked ruin among the unarmoured dancers and singers and merry-makers, but before the screams started it sprouted a dozen bolts, and it raised its head and screeched a long cry of anger and pain, and leapt back into the air.

The captain saw Michael, unarmoured, hurdle a pair of corpses and draw his heavy dagger, flinging himself at the wyvern’s back as it lifted into the air. Its tail flicked – and slammed full force into the squire’s hip. Michael screamed in pain and was thrown a horse’s length to the stone.

The Red Knight didn’t waste the time provided by his squire. He was down from the gatehouse, sword in gloved hand, before Michael’s scream had echoed off the stable walls and the chapel.

The wyvern whirled to finish the squire, and Bad Tom stepped between the monster and its prey. The big man had a long, heavy spear in hand, and he attacked, thrusting for the thing’s head. It was fast – but its sinuous neck served the creature as a man’s torso serves a man, and when it flicked its head to avoid the spear, it could neither strike nor rise into the air until it had its balance back.

Bad Tom stepped in closer, shortened his grip on the spear and struck hard, thrusting the spear brutally into the thing’s chest where the neck met its underbelly.

Long shafts began to feather the thing’s wings and abdomen.

It screamed and leaped into the air, wings beating hard, slamming its tail at Tom, but the big man jumped high and cleared the lashing tail by a fraction. But he missed the flicker of a wing in the dark, and the wingtip creased his backplate and slammed him to the ground.

The archers on the walls loosed shaft after shaft. Wilful Murder stood a horse’s length away, drawing shafts from the quiver at his hip and loosing carefully – aiming for any vulnerable part.

The bonfire in the courtyard illuminated their target, and the wickedly forged arrowheads cut into the beast’s hide like chisels through wood as the sparks from the courtyard fires rose like fireflies in the weakening wingbeats.

The captain was behind and above it when it leaped for the air, and he leaped too. He hit its neck and his sword whipped around its throat. His left hand grabbed the sword at the other side and he let himself drop, his sword become a vicious fulcrum, dragging the wyvern’s head down. It lost height and crashed on the steps of the chapel, his sword deep in the soft underside the neck, its jaws unable to reach him, the wyvern injuring itself as its head slammed into the steps again and again in fury and panic.

A lone crossbowman ran along the parapet, leaped down to the courtyard, stumbled, righted himself, and loosed his heavy weapon into the wyvern’s head from a distance of a few feet. The power of the bolt snapped its head back, and the captain rolled to his left, loosed his left hand, and got to his feet, his heavy blade already lashing out for the neck – again, and again, and then, when the head came up, he caught the blade in his left hand again, and slashed down into the creature’s head, his blade sliding down its armoured scales to slice softer flesh. He made ten strokes in as many heart beats, and the head suddenly snapped back, the whole beast rolled like a man and the brave crossbowman died when the mighty claws took him round the waist and tore him in half.

‘There’s another!’ shouted Tom, off to his left.

The tip of the thrashing tail caught his right ankle and ripped his feet from under him, and the captain cursed that he was not in armour.

He hit his head on a chapel step and lost an instant.

The wyvern reared over him.

A woman – the seamstress – appeared out of the darkness on his right, and threw a barrel at the monster – clipped the thing’s head, and it lost its balance, and one of his engineers loosed a scorpion into it.

The power of the scorpion shaft was so great that it took the creature’s neck and punched it through the chapel doors so hard that where the creature’s head smashed into the stone the lintel cracked. He heard its neck break. The shaft did a hundred leopards’ damage inside the chapel, the wyvern’s death struggles did a hundred more, and a river of gore spoiled the sacred carpet on the marble floor.

The captain got to his feet and found that he’d kept his sword. His chamois gloves were ruined and his left hand was bleeding where he’d grabbed the blade too high, above the area left dull for such purposes. He’d twisted his ankle, and he had to blink rapidly bring the world, spinning around him, back into focus.

The thing twitched, and he buried his point in the eye he could reach.

The courtyard fire glimmered on the belly of the second wyvern.

Forty archers threw shaft after shaft, so that the fortress seemed to have a new column of sparks rising into the fire-lit monster, and something happened – not suddenly, like the strike of the siege shaft, but gradually the wyvern’s wings tore, holed, it lost lift and screamed in fear as the men below brought it down and it realised there was no escape from the deadly upwards rain of steel. It slipped lower and lower, wings beating more frantically, turned sharply and suddenly one mighty wing failed. It plummeted to the hillside and crashing down with such weight and speed that the captain felt the steps shake under his boots.

‘Sortie!’ the captain shouted. He meant to shout, but it came out as more of a croak . . . although it was understood, and his eight armoured knights had the gate open and were away down the road, led by Sauce.

As the courtyard stilled it showed twenty dead people – dead or terribly maimed. A girl of fifteen or so screamed and screamed, and the woman who had thrown the barrel bent and gathered her into her arms.

A child tried to drag himself by his arms, because he had no legs.

Nuns were suddenly pouring from their dormitory – ten, twenty, fifty women, surrounding the injured and the dead in a storm of grey wool and clean linen, spreading out to access the scale of the dead, injured and traumatised. The captain slumped against a wall, his right leg a torrent of pain, and wished he could just slide into unconsciousness.

She screamed again and again. His eyes flickered to her but only after a long look did he see that most of the left side of her upper torso was gone. He couldn’t believe she was alive, or screaming. The woman who had saved his life was covered in her blood – shiny with it, trying to help her – and there was nothing to be done.

He wished the screaming woman would just die.

A pair of nuns wrapped her tight in a sheet, round and round, and the sheet turned red as fast as they could wrap another layer, and still she screamed, becoming one voice amongst a chorus of anguish that filled the night.

He staggered up and stumbled to Michael, who lay crumpled against the chapel.

The boy was alive.

He looked around for Amicia. She had been standing right there – there, where the woman screamed. But she was gone. He shouted for a sister – for anyone – and four responded. They ran their hands carefully over him before lifting him away from Michael.

Men were shouting now. Even over the screams, their shouts were triumphant, but he ignored them and dragged himself over to Tom.

Tom was sitting against the stable. ‘Backplate took it,’ he said with a grin. ‘Christ, I thought I was done.’ He pointed at the sword. ‘Nice trick, that.’

‘Half-sword versus wyvern,’ the captain said. ‘A standard move. All the best masters teach it.’ He stripped away the ruin of his left glove and wrapped it tight around his cut. ‘I just need more practice.’

Tom chuckled. ‘Sauce just killed t’other, I’ll wager,’ he said, pointing at the cheering archers.

Sure enough, the next moments brought the mounted sortie back through the main gate, dragging the head of the second wyvern. Brought to earth by fifty arrows, it had died on their lance tips without injuring a single human.

Tom nodded. ‘That was well done, Captain.’

The captain shrugged. ‘We were ready, we laid our trap, you burned their camp and surprised them, and they still killed our people.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t ready enough. I was caught lollygagging.’

Tom shrugged back. ‘They killed a lot of people.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But not many of our people.’

‘You’re a hard bastard, Tom Mac Lachlan.’

Bad Tom shrugged, obviously taking it as a compliment, then something caught his eye in the chapel. He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something bad.

‘What?’ asked the captain.

‘Ever notice how they’re always smaller when they’re dead?’ Tom asked. ‘It’s just the fear that makes ’em seem so big.’

The captain nodded. He was looking at the wyvern too, and he had to admit that it was smaller than it had seemed in the fight. And it looked different. Paler. A mass of wounds and cuts and barbs.

Almost pitiful.

Tom smiled and started to get to his feet, and the Abbess was there.

He expected anger or recriminations from her, but she merely extended a hand and took his.

‘Let us heal your people,’ she said.

The captain nodded, still pressing his glove tight around his hand. There was a lot of blood. She got an odd look on her face, just before he fainted in her arms.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Deep in the marches of the next night, the enemy attacked the castle of Albinkirk.

Ser Alcaeus had passed beyond fatigue. He was in a world lived one heartbeat at a time, and events passed him in a series of illuminated flashes, as if lightning was playing on all of them.

There were some assaults on the walls of the castle, but unlike the low stone curtain walls of the town the castle walls were too high and too well maintained for the flood of Wild creatures to climb. The handful of beasts who made it to the top were killed.

But every attack cost him a little more.

One flash was a fight with an irk – a tall, thin, beautiful creature with a hooked nose like a raptor’s beak and chain armour as fine as fish scales that turned his sword again and again. And when, by dint of desperate strength, he knocked it to the stones, and its helmet spun away, the irk’s eyes begged for mercy. Like a man’s.

Alcaeus would remember that. Even as his dagger terminated it he registered that it, too, had humanity.

. . . and what followed was worse.

Because something came.

It was huge and foreboding, out in the horrifying fire-lit ruins of the town. It strode forward with a hideous shambling gait, and it was as tall as the city wall or taller.

It was alive.

And now it raised its staff – the size of a mounted knight’s heavy lance, or bigger – and a line of white-green fire struck the castle wall. The stone deflected in it a wash of white-green fire for as long as the terrified men on the wall might have counted to ten.

And then there was a rending crack and the wall breached, about ten paces to the left of the gate. The whole wall moved. Men fell – chunks of flint fell to crush the creatures below.

Then the monster raised its arms and seemed to call the stars down from the heavens, and as they began to plummet, Alcaeus fought not to fall on his face and hide.

The stars screamed down from the clear sky, falling to earth with an eerie, unearthly wail, and struck. One struck out in the fields, killing a wave of boglins. One struck in the centre of the town, and the cloud of fire reached into the heavens. The whole castle moved, and a cloud of dust reached like a fist into the heavans.

The third struck the castle wall mere feet from the great crack, and an enormous piece of masonry and stone fell outward with a crash.

Alcaeus ran for the breach, and found himself with another armoured man – Cartwright, he thought, or the Galle, Benois. The breach was narrow – two men wide.

They filled it with their bodies.

And the enemy came for them.

At some point, Benois fell. He was stunned, and Alcaeus tried to cover him, but the enemy reached a hundred hands and talons for his feet, sank claws into his flesh and dragged him to the edge of the wall, inch by inch. He screamed, unmanned with horror, and tried to rise. Boglin weapons cut him in the soft places not covered by armour, peeled his plate away.

They were eating him alive.

Alcaeus struck and struck again, powered by desperate fear, and he straddled the screaming man’s body and cut and cut.

It wasn’t enough. And then Benois grabbed at his ankles.

He ripped himself clear, and leaped back into the uncertain footing of the breach, and Benois was gone, a pile of hellspawn feeding on him, his armour torn open -

Alcaeus made himself breathe.

Suddenly Ser John was there with his mace. The five foot weapon moved like a goodwife’s broom on a new spring morn, and he shattered first the boglins around them, and then Benois’ skull.

There was a flash of light to the east – a distant whump of displaced air. A column of flame leaped up perhaps a league away. Perhaps two.

Then another – even greater.

The creatures of the Wild faltered, looked over their shoulders, and the fury of their assault rapidly abated.

Albinkirk – Thorn

In an instant, Thorn knew that something had gone wrong.

He’d drained himself by calling even the smallest stones from the heavens. It was a showy, inaccurate and inefficient working, but it had spectacular results when it worked. And he loved to cast it, the way a strong man loves to show his strength.

The daemons were impressed, and that alone was worth the fatigue. Better, the town was utterly destroyed and it had been far, far easier than even he had hoped.

I have grown so strong, he thought. What he had planned as a mere diversion had become a triumph. She would hear of it and cower in fear.

Perhaps taking the Rock is worth doing after all. Perhaps I will refashion myself as a warlord.

But the twin pillars of fire behind him came from his camp – the camp where his greatest allies, the irks and the boglins, stored their food and their belongings and their slaves and their loot. And it was afire.

He had left his most trusted troops had been left to guard it.

He turned with his army and strode for it.

Without his willing it, the bulk of his Wild creatures turned and followed him. They had no discipline, and they went like a shoal of fish-

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Alcaeus watched them go, slumped against the wall. The Gallish man-at-arms looked like a butchered animal, his bones stripped. The boglins had feasted on him.

The sun was rising, and the lower town was an abattoir of horrors. In the main square irks had taken the time to carefully flay a man and hang him on a cross. He was still alive.

James the crossbowman stepped into the breach. He took a long look, raised his weapon and shot the crucified man. It was a good shot, given the range. The man’s screaming, skinless head dropped, and he was silent.

Ser John was slumped against the other wall. James helped the old man get his visor up. He winked.

He winked.

In that moment the old knight became a hero, in Ser Alcaeus’s estimation.

Alcaeus had to smile back, despite so many things. The loss of Benois hurt. The feel of the man’s hands on his ankles-

‘I need you to ride to the king,’ Ser John said. ‘Right now, while whatever miracle this respite may be lasts.’

Alcaeus must have agreed with him, because an hour later he was on his best horse, unarmoured, and galloping south. It was a desperate gamble.

He was too tired to care.