The Red Knight

Mag, standing in the former street of the Lower Town, nonetheless felt the old Abbess struggle with the Enemy. It was terrifying, but she felt the Abbess’s power and she raised her own hands in sympathy. Unknowing, untrained, the seamstress nonetheless poured her carefully hoarded power into the Abbess.

The Abbess smiled in triumph.

Father Henry rose from behind the altar, and drew his arrow to his mouth, and loosed.

And from the darkness, a cry of rage.

The Abbess screamed like a soul in torment, and was knocked flat on her face – dead before her head hit the stone floor.

Blood welled from her eyes and she lay still, a vicious black arrow in her back.

Fire – a pure fire of crystalline blue – Prudentia’s favourite colour – enveloped Thorn’s mortal shell. The heat of it was stupendous.

And from the fire, smoke – a rich, bright smoke, luminescent and alive, more than white, more than smoke, and the captain could feel Harmodius sending the smoke through him, through his place of power and down his arm and into the air about him. A subtle working – insidious, clever, a fog of a million mirrors.

She had hurt him – hurt him so much. And the dark sun had hurt him, and now he was screaming in agony. A moment’s remorse – and the cost had been cataclysmic.

But he was saved – she was dead, her light extinguished, and not by him. Some other power had struck her down and he was innocent of that crime, and he turned – strong enough to finish this pretender.

But he writhed inwardly in the knowledge that she was dead.

It had to be done.

It should not have been done.

And then – too late! He felt his apprentice’s working, the complex, layered phantasm that was that boy’s trademark – a coloured smoke, so quiet, so harmless, so complex-

He lunged back up the line of Harmodius’ casting, as he had attacked along the line of his lover’s.

Harmodius felt his former master’s power coming.

His counter-strike was so tiny, so very subtle, that it cost him almost no power. It relied on his enemy’s hubris and his sense of his own power.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn killed the apprentice effortlessly, although he couldn’t, for some reason, take the man’s not inconsiderable power for his own. Typical of the man – to squander his power rather than let his master have it. His former apprentice fell back amidst a choir of nuns. If he’d had time, Thorn might have exterminated the nest, but the dark sun was still pounding him with his strange blue fire.

If Thorn had been a man he might have laughed. Or cried.

Instead, his consciousness raced back to the plain below, where his shell faced being consumed by fire.

Another slow heartbeat while he poured power into the problem and extinguished the blue fire.

He was surprised – and concerned – to see how badly hurt he was. Again – yet again, he would appear weak.

He had no time to take stock. Even now he was so badly hurt that any of the lesser powers could take him.

He raised his staff and was gone.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Run, boy! cried Harmodius.

The captain tried to run.

He crawled through the prostrate boglins. He forced himself to his feet, and he ran, a broken, stumbling run while waiting for the levin bolt in the back that would end him. He stood in the palace, and the plinth was empty, and Prudentia’s statue lay cold and still on the ground.

Damn.

Time to mourn later, if he lived.

He leapt onto the plinth, and called his names.

Honorius! Hermes! Demosthenes!

Desperation, luck, and a strong will.

Goodbye, Prudentia! You deserved better than I ever gave you!

He ran to the door, and pulled it open.

The flicker of a casting – Thorn reached out, trying to find its source. The dark sun was still on the battlefield. Still casting?

I am badly hurt, he conceded. He summoned his guards to withdraw.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

– powered his phantasm and slammed the door shut again.

His body rose in a leap, sailed through the heated air, and fell to earth again – a hand’s breadth clear of the wall of the trench.

The captain turned away from the fire, and saw a wedge of knights, their mirror-bright harnesses like liquid fire in the smoky darkness. Off to the north, boglins hovered, uncertain.

A daemon raised his axes in challenge.

But the knights did not pause to fight. Even as the captain ran, strong arms grabbed him, an arm under each shoulder, and he was swept away as cleanly as if he’d been snatched by a great bird.

Chapter Fourteen

Father Hugh

Valley of the Cohocton – Peter