The Red Knight

The captain could barely move his steel clad feet, and never had leg armour seemed so pointless, so heavy, as it did when the first of the enemy began to crest the hill behind him. They were close.

West of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn’s initial reaction to the assault on his camp was panic. It took him long minutes to recover from the shock and when he did, the sheer effrontery of it filled him with an irrational rage. As he reached out through his creatures, he was shocked to find how pitiful and few were his human attackers. A few dozen of them, and they had sent his Jacks running down the path, broken fifty irks, and killed an outpost of boglins who were caught napping after a feed.

He stopped the rout by killing the first irk to pass him, in spectacular style. The creature exploded in green fire, raining burning flesh on the others, and the Magus raised his hoary arms and the rout stopped.

‘You fools!’ he roared at them. ‘There are fewer than fifty of them!’ He wished he had his daemons but they were already scouting Albinkirk. His wyverns were close, but not close enough. He poured his will into two of the golden bears and sent his forces up the ridge after the raiders. His Wild creatures would be far more nimble in the woods then mere men. The bears were faster than horses on their home ground.

One of the boglin chiefs stood at his side, his milk-white chiton all but glowing in the setting sun.

‘Tell your people that they will feast. Anything they catch is for their own.’

Exrech saluted with a sword. He released a cloud of vapour – part power and part scent. And then he was away, racing loose-limbed up the ridge with boglins following like a brown tide at his heels.

West of Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain tried to be the last man, shoving his flagging pages along before him by force of will, but the weaker among them were used up. One, a little plumper than he ought to have been, stopped to breathe hard.

The enemy were fifty paces away. Closer with every heartbeat.

‘Run!’ roared Tom.

The boy threw up, looked behind him and froze.

A boglin paused and shot him with an arrow.

He screamed and fell, kicking, into his own vomit.

Tom heaved the writhing boy over his shoulders and ran. His sword licked out – caught an irk in the top of the knee, and the thing screamed and fell, clutching at the wound.

The captain paused – they were trying to surround him. He punched at the nearest and impaled him, took two cuts on his leg armour, and suddenly it had been worth it to wear the stuff all afternoon.

There were, in moments, hundreds of boglins. They seemed to boil up out of the ground in terrifying numbers. They moved like ants and covered the forest floor as fast as he could back away. Their armoured heads rose above his knight’s belt.

Behind him, he heard a trumpet call and Cuddy’s voice, as clear as on parade, called ‘Nock! And Loose!’

The captain was still on his feet, but there was a sharp pain in his left thigh where a boglin was trying to sink its jaws into his flesh, and his legs were all but immobilized by the press of creatures when something reached for his soul through the aether.

He panicked.

He couldn’t see. The brown boglins were everywhere, clamping onto him, and he wasn’t fighting anymore, he was just trying to keep his feet, and the pressure of the phantasm was bearing down harder and harder on his soul.

Then, even through his helmet and his fear, he could hear the hiss of the warbow arrows, like the fall of vicious sleet.

The arrows hit.

Three of them hit him.

West of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn paused at the top of the ridge to watch the last moments of the raiding party. The boglins weren’t as fast as the irks, but the irks were running the enemy down. The tide of boglins would finish the fight.

Any fight.

He prepared a casting, gathering the raw force of nature to him through a web of half-rational portals and paths.

At the base of the ridge, one of the fleeing raiders paused.

Thorn reached out for him, grasped him and felt his will slip off the man like claws around a stone.

And then fifty enemy archers stood up from concealment, and began to fill the air with wood and iron.

West of Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain was hit more than a dozen times more. Every strike was like being kicked by a mule. Most fell on his helmet, but one ripped across his inner thigh, cutting through his hose and his braes. He was blind with pain, dazed by the repeated impacts.

But he was armed cap à pied in hardened steel armour, and the boglins trying to kill him were not.

When every one of Cuddy’s archers had loosed six shafts, the v-shaped space between the arms of the ambush was silent. Nothing was left alive.

Cuddy ordered his men forward to collect their shafts as the captain raised his visor, aware that there was still something-