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—
At the top of the hill, the figure of horror stepped out where they could all see him, and raised his arms—
He still functioned through the panic because he’d been afraid so damned often he was used to it now.
The captain touched Prudentia’s hand. Above his head, the three great levels of his palace spun like gaming wheels.
Don’t open the door! Prudentia said. He’s right there!
Faced with imminent immolation, the captain opened the door.
There was an entity of the Wild. Right outside the door to his mind.
He made a long, sharp dagger of his will and punched it into the entity, leaning out through the door to do so.
Prudentia caught him.
The door slammed shut.
‘You’re insane,’ she said
In the world the great figure stumbled. It didn’t fall, but the intensity of its gathered power stumbled with it. And dissipated.
‘To horse!’ he captain roared. Behind the monstrous figure on the ridge he could see thrashing tentacles approaching and fresh hordes of monsters.
The massive thing, like two twin trees, reared up and a flash of green fire covered the hillside. It fell shorter than it might have, or more men might have died, but archers were reduced to bones – a page burned green like a hideous barn-lamp for three heartbeats before vanishing – and dozens of wounded creastures on the ground were immolated as well.
Behind him, men were mounting – pages and archers hurried horses to their riders. This was their most practised movement; escape.
But the captain’s sense of the enemy was that he’d get one more gout of fire in.
He got a leg over Grendel’s saddle and
Passed back into the palace.
‘Shield, Pru!’ he called. He pulled raw power from the sack hanging on her arm as the sigils turned above them – Xenophon, St George, Ares.
The first spell any magister learned. The measure of an adept’s power.
He made a buckler, small and nimble, and threw it far forward, into his adversary’s face.
Behind him, the corporals ordered men into motion, but they needed no urging, and the company moved away, down the hill.
The captain turned Grendel and rode, running as fast as the heavy horse would allow—
The two-horned thing in the woods reached out with his staff—
The captain’s shield – his very strongest, smallest, neatest casting – vanished like a moth in a forge fire.
The captain felt his shield go – felt it vanish – had a taste of the sheer power of his adversary – but training told.
Quick as a cat pouncing, the captain spun his horse to face the foe and
reached in and cast again – a wider arc to cover horse and rider
The green fire ran across the ground like a rising tide, immolating everything that lay in its path – scarring trees, reaping grass and flowers, boiling squirrels in their own skin. It struck the air in front of Grendel’s chamfron—
It was like watching a sand-castle give way under the power of the waves.
His second shield was weaker, but the green fire had crossed hundreds of paces of ground and its puissance was ebbing – and still it eroded the shield – slowly, and then more quickly as Grendel half-reared in panic, alone in a sea of incandescent green.
He put everything he had – every shred of stored power
He could smell burning leather, and he could see – trees. Upright and black.
Grendel screamed and bolted.
All he wanted to do was sleep, but Cuddy needed reassurance. ‘You was in full harness—’ said the Master Archer.
‘It was the right decision,’ the captain
agreed.
‘I can’t believe we hit you so many times,’ Cuddy said, shaking his head. Even as he spoke, Carlus, the armourer and company trumpeter, was working with heat and main strength to get the dents out of the captain’s beautiful helmet.
‘I’ll be more careful to whom I give extra work details in future,’ the captain agreed.
Cuddy left the tent, still muttering.
Michael got his captain out of the rest of his armour. The breast plate was badly dented in two places. The arm harnesses were untouched.
‘Wipe my blade first,’ muttered the captain. ‘Boglins; I’ve heard their blood is caustic.’
‘Boglins,’ Michael said. He shook his head. ‘Irks. Magic.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Did we win?’
‘Ask me that in a month, young Michael. How many did we lose?’
‘Six pages. And three archers, in the retreat when yon thing began to rain fire on us.’ Michael shrugged.
Their retreat had become a rout. Most of the men had ridden back to camp almost blind with terror, as more and more monsters crested the ridge and entered the field, following that fire-raining figure of terror.
‘Well.’ The captain allowed his eyes to close for a moment and then jolted awake. ‘Son of a bitch. I have to tell the Abbess.’
‘They might attack us again, any moment,’ Michael said.
The captain gave him a hard look. ‘Whatever they are, they aren’t so different from us. They know fear. They do not want to die. We hurt them today.’ They hurt us, too. I was too rash. Damn it all.
‘So now what happens?’ Michael asked.
‘We scurry into the fortress. And that thing comes and lays siege to us.’ The captain got slowly to his feet. For a moment, absent the weight of his harness, he felt as if he could fly. Then the fatigue settled again like an old and evil friend.
‘Attend me,’ he said.
The Abbess received him immediately.
‘It seems you were correct. Your men look badly beaten.’ She averted her eyes. ‘That was unworthy,’ she allowed.
He managed a smile. ‘My lady, you should see the state they’re in.’
She laughed. ‘Is that cockiness or truth?’
‘I think we killed a hundred boglin and fifty irks. Perhaps even a few Jacks. And we kicked the hornet’s nest.’ He frowned. ‘I saw their leader – a great horned creature. Like a living tree, but malevolent.’ He shrugged, trying to forget his panic. Tried to keep his voice light. ‘It was huge.’
She nodded.
He put that nod away for future consideration. Even in his fatigue, he caught that she knew something.
She went to the mantel of her chimney and picked up her curious ivory box. This time, she opened it and took the slip of bark between her hands. It turned jet-black. He felt her casting. Then she threw it in the fire.
‘What shall I do now?’ the captain asked. He was too tired to think.
She pursed her lips. ‘You tell me, Captain,’ she said. ‘You are in command.’
Lissen Carak – Father Henry
Father Henry watched the mercenary come down the steps of the Great Hall with the Abbess on his arm, and his skin crawled to watch that spawn of Satan touch her. The man was young and pretty, for all his bruises and the dark circles under his eyes, and he had an air about him that Father Henry knew in his soul was all pretence; the sham of concern and the worm of falsity.
The big mercenary barked a laugh. And then the sergeant at arms and the master warder both appeared from the donjon tower.
Father Henry knew his duty – knew that he could not allow major decisions to be made without him. He walked forward to join them.
The Abbess gave him a look that he suspected was meant to drive him away, but he schooled his face to hide his feelings and bowed to the loathsome killer and his minion.
The master warder rolled his eyes. ‘Nothing for you here, Father,’ he said.
The old soldier had never liked him, had never made a confession.
The mercenary returned his bow pleasantly enough, but the Abbess didn’t introduce him or let any one else do so. She indicated the mercenary. ‘The captain is now the Commander of this fortress. I expect all of you to give him your ready obedience.’
The master warder nodded and the sergeant at arms, who commanded the tiny garrison, merely bowed. A possible ally, then.
‘My lady!’ Father Henry rallied his arguments. His thoughts were a riot of confused images and conflicting motives, but they were united by the knowledge that this man must not be given command of the fortress. ‘My lady! This man is an apostate, an unrepentant sinner, a bastard child of an unknown mother by his own admission.’
The mercenary now looked at him with reptilian hate.
Good.
‘I’ve never suggested my mother was unknown,’ he said with mild condescension.
‘You cannot allow this piece of scum into our fortress,’ the priest said.
He was too vehement, he could see them closing their minds against him. ‘As your spiritual adviser—’
‘Father, let us continue this conversation at a more seemly time and place,’ the Abbess said.
Oh, how he hated her tone. She spoke to him – him, a man, a priest – as if he was a errant child and just for a moment the quality of his rage must have shown through, because all of them – except the mercenary – took a step back.
The mercenary, on the other hand, looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, and gave a sharp nod.
‘I feel you are making a grave error, my lady,’ the priest began again, but she turned on him with a speed that belied her years and put her hand on the pectoral cross he wore.
‘I understand that you disagree with my decision, Father Henry. Now please desist.’ Her tone of ice froze him in place.
‘I will not stop while the power of the Lord—’
‘Me Dikeou!’ she hissed at him.
The bitch was using arcane powers on him. And he found himself unable to speak. It was as if his tongue had gone to sleep. He couldn’t even form a word in his mind.
He staggered back, scarred hands over his mouth, all of his suspicions confirmed and all of his petty errors transformed into acts of courage. She had used witchcraft against him. She was a witch – an ally of Satan. Whereas he—
She turned to him. ‘This is an emergency, Father, and you were warned. Return to your chapel and do penance for your disobedience.’
He fled.
North of Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn strode east as fast as his long legs would carry him, a swarm of faeries around his head like insects, feeding on the power that clung to him like moss to stone. ‘We continue,’ he said to the daemon at his side.
The daemon surveyed the wreckage of tents and the scatter of corpses. ‘How many did you lose?’ he asked. His crest moved with agitation.
‘Lose? Only a handful. The boglins are young and unprepared for war.’ The great figure shook like a tree in the wind.
‘You took a wound yourself,’ Thurkan said.
Thorn stopped. ‘Is this one of your dominance games? One of them distracted me. He had a little magic and I was slow to respond. It will not happen again. Their attack had no real affect on us.’
The great figure turned and shambled east. Around him, irks and boglins and men packed their belongings and prepared to march.
Thurkan loped alongside, easily keeping pace with the giant sorcerer. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why Albinkirk?’
Thorn stopped. He despised being questioned, especially by a troublemaker like Thurkan, who saw himself – a mere daemon – as his peer. He longed to say, ‘Because I will it so.’
But this was not the moment.
‘Power summons power,’ he said.
Thurkan’s head-crest trembled in agreement. ‘So?’ he asked.
‘The irks and boglin hordes are restless. They have come here – was that at your bidding, daemon?’ Thorn leaned at the waist. ‘Well?’
/> ‘Violence summons violence,’ Thurkan said. ‘Men killed creatures of the Wild. A golden bear was enslaved by men. It cannot be borne. My cousin was murdered; so was a wyvern. We are the guardians. We must act.’
Thorn paused, and pointed his staff. They were passing to the north of the great fortress; it was just visible from here, high on its ridge to the south.
‘We will never take the Rock with the force we have,’ Thorn said. ‘I might act to destroy it, or I might not. This is not my fight. But we are allies, and I will help you.’
‘By leading us away from that which we wish to reclaim?’ snapped the daemon.
‘By unleashing the Wild against a worthy goal. An attainable goal. We will strike a blow that will rock the kingdoms of man, and that will send a signal throughout the Wild. Many, many more will come to us. Is this not so?’
Thurkan nodded slow agreement. ‘If we burn Albinkirk, many will know it and many will come.’
‘And then,’ said Thorn, ‘we will have the force and the time to act against the Rock, while the men worry over smoking ruins.’
‘And you will be many times more powerful than you are now,’ Thurkan said suspiciously.
‘When you and yours can again drink from the spring of the Rock, and mate in the tunnels beneath the Rock, you will thank me,’ Thorn said.
Together, they began to walk east.
Chapter Six
Harmodius Magis
Prynwrithe – Ser Mark Wishart
Two hundred leagues and more south of the Cohocton, well west of Harndon, the Priory of Pynwrithe was a beautiful castle rising from a spur of solid rock, a hundred years old, with high battlements, four slim towers with arched windows, topped in copper-gilt roofs, and a high arched gate that made some visitors exclaim that the whole must have been built by the Faery.