The Red Knight

It seemed to slow as it crossed the water – vestigial wings a blur of angry motion, maned head with a helmet crest of bone curving above it, spraying spittle as the thing tried to snap at the fine web of Power he had cast over the near bank. It would only last a moment – already the daemon was blowing through the mild restraint the way a big child, angry and frightened, tears through spider web.

He tracked the thing’s right eye with his lance tip like it was an opponent’s crest; the brass ring; the upper left corner of the shield on the quintain. Held in place like an insect pinned to a page, it tried to rear back just as his spear point glanced off the ocular ridge and plunged into the soft tissue of the eye, the strong steel of the long spear head breaking the bone above and below the eye socket, driving the point deeper and deeper, the whole weight of the man and horse behind it.

His lance shaft snapped.

The creature’s legs spasmed and its talons tore into his horse’s forequarters, raking flesh and tendon from bone, flaying the poor animal while it screamed. The captain flew back over its rump on force of the impact, with no brace against his back from a tilting saddle. The horse reared and the talons eviscerated it, its guts spilling onto the road in a great gout.

The daemon got its feet on the ground and its forearms shredded the last of his web of power-

It turned from the ruin of his horse and he saw the damage he’d done, the angry orange of its remaining eye – no slit, no pupil. Nothing but fire. It saw him.

The terror of its presence pounded him like a hammer of spirit – for a moment, the terror was so pure in him that he had no self. He was only fear.

It came for him then, rising up fast on its haunches – and, like a puppet with the strings cut, it collapsed atop the corpse of his riding horse.

He gagged, clamped down on the vomit, failed, and heaved everything in his stomach down the front of his jupon. When he was done he was sobbing in the backwash of the terror.

As soon as he had any control over himself, he said ‘Ware! There’s another!’

Gelfred approached him slowly, holding a cup in one hand and a cocked and loaded crossbow balanced carefully on his arms.

‘It’s been a long time.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve prayed the whole rosary, waiting for you to recover.’ He was shaking. ‘I don’t think the other one is coming.’

The captain spat out the taste of vomit. ‘Good’ he said. He wanted to say something witty. Nothing came. ‘Good.’ He took the cup. ‘How – long did I kneel here?’

‘Too long,’ Gelfred said. ‘We need to ride.’

The captain’s hands shook so hard he spilled the wine.

Gelfred put his arms around him.

The captain stood in that unwanted embrace and shook. Then he washed in the creek. He felt violated. And different. He was suddenly afraid of everything. He didn’t feel at all like a man who had faced a daemon, the greatest adversary to the rule of man, in single combat, and the adoration in Gelfred’s eyes made him sick.

Tomorrow, I will no doubt be insufferable, he thought.

Gelfred cut the head from the daemon.

He threw up again, a stream of bile, and wondered if he could ever face a creature of the Wild again. His bones felt like jelly. There was something in the pit of his gut – something that had gone.

He knew exactly what this felt like: like being beaten by his brothers. Beaten and humiliated. He knew that feeling well. They’d been younger than him. They’d hated him. He’d made their lives a misery, when he learned that-

He spat.

Some things are best left unexamined. He held the line at that memory, and felt his fear recede a little, like the first sign the tide is in ebb.

It would pass, then.

Gelfred couldn’t get the horse to bear the head. The captain didn’t have enough concentration to conjure anything to help them with it. So they tied a rope to the head and dragged it.

It would be a long walk back to camp. And after an hour, something behind them began to howl, and the captain felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

Lissen Carak – Mogan

Mogan watched her cousin’s killer as he mounted slowly and rode up the road.

Mogan was a hunter, not a berserker. Her cousin’s death terrified her, and until she had understood it she was not going down to face the men on the road. Instead, she edged cautiously from rock to rock, keeping well out of their line of sight, and she watched them with her superb eyes, made for spotting the movement of prey a mile across the plains to the west.

When they were well clear of the scene of the fight, she trotted down the ridge.

Tunxis lay in a pitiful heap, his once mighty frame hunched and flattened by death, and there were already birds on the corpse.

They cut his head off.

It was horrendous. Mogan threw back her head and howled her rage and sorrow.

After her third howl, her brother came. He had four hunters with him, all armed with heavy war-axes or swords.