The Red Knight

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.