The Red Knight

The rest fell on the curtain wall to his left. A section of wooden hoardings twenty paces long burned in a flash, and a section of the wall cracked and fell outward, killing two archers instantly and crushing the two older Lanthorn men to pulp.

Harmodius felt them die.

His failure made him angry, and anger made him lash out. His riposte was pitiful, small, weak, too late.

It was also entirely unexpected. Like a slow attack in a sword fight, his flare of anger sailed out into the dark and caught Thorn unprepared.

Pain enraged Thorn. It always had.

He struck back.

Lissen Carak, The Lower Town – The Red Knight

The Lower Town square was carpeted in corpses. The captain passed in the chapel doorway looking for his men-at-arms. The archers were spreading out, right and left.

‘On me,’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’ He ran across the square, and they pounded along behind him.

Parties with ladders broke off and headed east, through the rubble.

He could hear fighting to this left, and more straight ahead. Angelo di Laternum materialized out of the darkness.

‘Ser Jehannes prays your aid,’ he said formally.

‘On me,’ the captain said, and followed the squire. The captain had no time to comment that Jehannes was off course.

A vast burst of light lit the sky, like all the summer lightning ever seen combined in one single burst. The levin flash showed the captain that Squire Angelo was bleeding from the shoulders of his harness; the archers were splashed in red and black and, ahead of him, Jehannes’s men-at-arms were caught in the flash, illuminated like a manuscript illustration of knights fighting monsters.

‘Ware!’ the captain shouted. ‘Daemons!’

The terror struck him like a heavy mall. He set his teeth and pushed himself forward through the terror, and one of the things turned on him with its supernatural speed.

The captain had supernatural speed, too.

The daemon’s blade met his, so hard that sparks flew from his blade, and he yielded before the creature’s awesome strength, rotated his blade around the fulcrum of his armoured wrist, stepped inside its terror and pushed his point into its brain.

It fell away off his sword, and he was on the next. It turned its head – its beautiful eyes catching his.

The daemon’s taloned hand came up, too fast to block.

His sword came down.

The daemon stumbled away, spraying fear the way a skunk sprays scent, and the captain found himself retching. There was blood in his eyes.

My faceplate is open.

It got me.

A different fear, colder and heavier, settled on his gut.

But the daemons were not immortal; their ichor was mixed with the blood of men on the ground and they were retreating. As they began to put distance between them and their foes, the fear abated.

The captain saw there were fewer than a dozen of the things.

The archers – frozen in place – suddenly burst into action. The last daemon – the one the captain had wounded – sprouted shafts like a field growing grass.

The thing turned, its fear welled, and it fell.

Jehannes was shouting for his men.

‘Stand!’ called the captain. It sounded like a squeal. But Wilful Murder roared it from behind him. ‘Stand!’ he called.

Jehannes paused.

‘The tower!’ the captain insisted.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn’s burst of rage fell like a hammer.

Harmodius watched the strike come in, helpless to stop it, a whole heartbeat to see his death wash at him in sickly green radiance.

He felt the fortress’s Hermetic defences go back up, and knew it would never be enough.

The great works that powered the defence were brilliantly designed – they funnelled what they could, channelled some more, reflected yet more. They were so well artificed that they almost seemed intelligent. New practitioners attempted to meet force with force – skilled practitioners knew to meet force with guile, deflecting the opponent’s energy like a skilled swordsman. Most static sigils were easily overcome, but this . . .

In the moment of his annihilation, Harmodius thought Who built this?

The wards caught, turned, and covered. But there was only so much the ancient sigils could do.

And the rest burst through the great wards like a river in flood bursting through a levy.

He raised a hand.

The Abbess reached past him, and stopped the overflow of the great spell of wrath just short of their place on the wall. She flung it back down the path of the casting.

She reached out and put her left hand on his shoulder.

I know nothing of this sort of war she said. Let me in.

Through her, he could feel her sisters, singing plainchant in the chapel. Their power did not fuel the Abbess directly. It was far subtler than that.