The Red Knight

Yesterday the enemy destroyed all the villages west of Albinkirk by fire and sword. We were forced to watch. Today, the enemy fills his siege lines with monsters and overhead his foul creatures fill the air with their cries. When more than two of them are over the fortress, it is as if they darken the sky. And it has disheartened many of the people to see how many our enemies really are. They are literally uncountable. All our efforts to kill them now seem like the efforts of a man with a shovel to move a mountain.

The captain was tireless today, moving from point to point around the fortress. Our people began to build an artillery platform in the ruins of the Onager Tower. He and Lord Harmodius helped the workmen lay stones in new cement and then worked the cement so that it dried faster – a great miracle, and one that did much to encourage the people.

Now it is the middle of the afternoon. The enemy had set engines of war to work, but their stones could not even reach the fortress, and we watched them sail uselessly through the air and land well short of our walls – indeed, one killed a creature of the Wild out in the fields. The captain says that the spirit of resistance can be fuelled by things as small as this.

But an hour ago, using his thousands of slaves, the enemy rebuilt his engines closer to us.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

‘He’s going to have a go at the Lower Town,’ Jehannes said.

The captain was staring out, watching the distant engines as they were cranked back. The enemy had two trebuchets built about four hundred paces from the Lower Town’s walls, on a timber and earth mound almost forty feet tall. The speed with which they had built the siege mound had been, for the captain, the most horrifying moment of the siege.

Perhaps not quite the most horrifying. I am not your lover.

It was ironic that Harmodius was training him to divide himself, to rule himself, to wall off dangerous elements of spells and counter-spells. He had issued his new apprentice an absolute injunction.

‘Never use this power on your emotions, boy. Our humanity is all we have.’ The old man had told him that this morning, as if it was a matter of great moment.

The captain had used his new talent to wall off his emotions almost the moment Harmodius left. The Mage wasn’t attempting to prosecute a siege while feeling as if his leg had been ripped off by daemons.

Why?

Clearly his control needed work.

He settled back into the crenellations as a rock struck one of the Lower Town gate-towers squarely. The tower shrugged off the hit.

The captain breathed.

‘We have men down there,’ Jehannes said. ‘We can’t hold it.’

‘We have to,’ the captain said. ‘If we lose the Lower Town, he’s cut us off from the Bridge Castle. Then he shifts his batteries south. It’s like chess, Jehannes. He is playing for the ground just there,’ the captain pointed at a set of sheepfolds to the south and to the west. ‘If he can build a siege mound there, and put his engines there, he can destroy the Bridge Castle one tower at a time.’

Jehannes shook his head. He was a veteran of twenty sieges, and he clearly hated it when the captain talked down to him. ‘He can build there any time he likes,’ Jehannes snarled.

The captain sighed. ‘No, Jehannes. He cannot. Because he fears our sorties. Despite his immense power and force, we’ve stung him. If he places engines there without killing the Lower Town, we can sortie out and burn his engines.’

‘He can build more. In a day.’ Jehannes was dismissive.

The captain considered this.