The Red Knight

He prayed . . . and God showed him the way. Whoever had come up into the cellar had left a door open. He dragged himself to the portal, and looked down.

Scrambled and found a lantern with a candle and a tinderbox. It was God’s will.

He dragged himself down the steps into the dark.

The mercenaries, efficient as always, had left arrows painted on the rock. He began to follow them.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched his great assault sally forth from the edge of the woods, and knew fear.

He had lost many, many creatures in the weeks of siege and now he feared he lacked the resources to survive.

His fear hadn’t started there, though.

As his assault began, something whose level of manifested power was to Thorn as Thorn was to a boglin shaman, had appeared on the other side of the river. It had cast a single phantasm of such complexity and power that it beggared the very strongest sending Thorn had ever cast. And then it had vanished.

A Power. A great Power of the Wild.

Thorn stood at the edge of the burned fields, watching his massive assault leap towards the hated enemy; seeing the fruition of his revenge on the king and his useless nobles, watching as his boglins finally seized the empty Lower Town and boiled through its streets.

And all he could think was – Damn the daemon. He was right. I’ve been had.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain led his men in single file across the boards laid across the burned, vitrified trench. As he crossed, two farm boys with halberds waved. They gave a cheer.

Why not? They weren’t riding into a horde of boglins.

He laughed. Turned to find Jacques behind him, Carlus the armourer with his trumpet on his hip, and Michael carrying his banner.

‘Form your front,’ he called.

The line of boglins was about six hundred paces distant.

He looked back at Bridge Castle, hoping to see the king.

He looked across the river, but the main battle was just straggling down the ridge. Two thousand knights.

The king was just a little late.

He could see a handful of knights crossing the bridge. The banner was from Galle, and not one he knew.

Move! he thought.

He looked back.

His men-at-arms, with the addition of all the military orders knights, formed in two ranks, and took up two hundred yards of front – leaving as much again on either flank.

Empty air.

He was the centre man in the line.

The boglin line was four hundred paces away, give or take.

‘Advance! Walk!’ he called, and Carlus repeated it by trumpet.

‘Remember this, boys!’ Bad Tom called from his place in the ranks.

The big horses made the earth shake, even at a walk. Their tack rattled and clinked, and the sound of their riders’ armour added to it. The sound of a company of knights.

Two hundred and fifty paces.

‘Trot!’

Even a hundred and fifty armoured men on destriers make the ground rumble like an earthquake.

One last time, the enemy had underestimated them. They had more than a dozen of the great trolls, belling and ranting several hundred paces to the rear of the infantry line. They were coming on now – coming quickly. But like the king, they were going to be much too late for the moment of impact.

The captain had a feeling, though, that the trolls were not at their best in the open, and that they wouldn’t be particularly manoeuvrable. Or was that his own hubris?

But that was all passing away. Strategy and tactics were over, now.

He turned his head at the cost of some pain, and saw the Gallish knights pushing along the trench. The Lorican crossbowmen were moving too – Ser Milus was visible, roaring orders at them.

There would be no gap in their line when the Enemy struck.

The two lines were approaching each other at the combined speed of a galloping horse. The boglins were not going to flinch but they were spread out over the ground, all cohesion lost, like a swarm of insects pouring over the ground.

‘Charge,’ he shouted. Carlus and Jacques might not have heard him over the drumming hooves, but he swept his lance down to point at his first target – locked it into the hook-shaped rest under his arm, and Jacques sounded the charge.

The captain leaned forward into his lance.

For a few glorious heartbeats, it was the way he had imagined, when he was a small boy dreaming of glory.

He was the wind, and the roar of the hooves, and the tip of the spear.

The slight bodies of the boglins were like straw dolls set in a field, and the lances ripped through them so smoothly that creatures died without dragging the lances down, and the stronger men were able to engage three, four even five of the creatures before their lances broke, or their points touched the ground, dug in and shattered or had to be dropped.

The horses were spread widely enough to allow horse and rider to thread the enemy line, to take advantage of spaces between boglins, to weave their path.

For a few deadly heartbeats, the knights destroyed the boglins, and there was nothing the boglins could do to retaliate.