The Red Knight (29 page)

His company had treated them well enough on the long trip west. Well enough, despite the frowns of the Emperor’s Knight – a pompous bastard too proud to share his meals with a mere
mercenary
. After Albinkirk the man would no longer be his problem.

But when they passed Behnburg, the last town before Albinkirk, and found the town’s garrison and population huddled within their walls in fear of un-named terrors, he’d started to
hurry west, leaving the rest of the spring flood of merchants to hurry along in his wake. A dozen with wagons and good horses had paid him in gold to stay with his convoy.

He’d only taken the job transporting slaves to pay his passage – rumour had it that the fortress convent at Lissen Carak was offering payment in gold for monster-hunting work, and
Guissarme needed the work. Or his company did.

Or perhaps they could manage a little longer. He sat his charger, at eye level with the corpses who had been killed, he now saw, by the act of their impaling.

He’d heard of impalement. Never seen it before. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.

He was still gazing at them, rapt, when the arrows began to fall.

The first hit his horse. The second struck his breastplate with enough force to unseat him and sprang away and then he was falling. Men were screaming around him, and he could hear his corporals
shouting for order. Something struck him in the groin and he felt a hot, rapidly spreading damp. Heard the sound of hooves – heavy horses moving fast, although with an odd rhythm. He
couldn’t see well.

He tried to raise his head, and
something
crouched over him, coming for his face—

The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Peter

Peter watched the arrows fly from the woods that lined the road with a sort of hopeless, helpless anger.

It was so
obvious
an ambush. He couldn’t believe anyone had walked into it.

Chained by the yoke around his neck to the women front and back, he couldn’t run.

He didn’t have the words, but he tried all the same.

‘Fall down!’ he shouted. ‘Down!’

But the panic was already coming. The terror – he’d never felt such terror. It came directly behind the arrows, and washed over him like dirty water leaving fear behind. The two
women to whom he was bound ran in different directions, stumbled, and fell together, taking him to the ground with them.

The arrows continued to fall on the soldiers, who mostly died. Only a small knot of them were still fighting.

Something – he couldn’t see very well in the late morning ground fog – something came out of the fog moving as fast as a knight on a horse and slammed into the column. Men and
horses screamed anew, and the terror increased to the point where his two companions simply curled into balls.

Peter lay still and tried to make his head work. Watched the creatures coming at the column. They were daemons. He had heard of them in his home, and here they were, and they were feeding on the
corpses. Or perhaps the living.

A wyvern fell from the sky on the blonde woman ahead of him, its beaked head ripping at her guts. The woman behind him shrieked and got to her knees, arms extended, and a gout of pure green
passed inches over Peter’s head and slammed into the thing, which gave off an overpowering smell of burning soap.

It pivoted on its hips like a dancer, the action ripping the screaming woman under its forefoot in two and snapping the chain that connected the slaves. The end of the chain whipped around the
creature’s leg.

The wyvern unwound the chain fastidiously, using a talon, and the woman at Peter’s back cast again, two handfuls of raw spirit shot out with an hysterical scream. The wyvern screamed back
as it was hit, hundreds of times as loud, snapped its wings open and flung itself on the woman.

Peter rolled beneath it, the newly snapped end of the chain running through his yoke, which caught on a tree root and wrenched his neck. Free, he was on his feet and running into the fog.

A flash, and he was thrown flat. Silence – he got to his feet and ran on, and only after a hundred panicked steps did he realise he was deaf and the shirt on his back was charred.

He ran on.

His mouth was so dry he could not swallow, and his thighs and calves burned as if they, too, had been burnt. But he ran until he crossed a deep stream, and there he drank his fill and lay
gasping until he passed out.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Ser Alcaeus rode up to Albinkirk on a blown horse, with his destrier trotting along behind him. He’d lost his squire and his page in the fighting but his valet, a boy too
young to swing a sword to any effect, had somehow survived with the pack horse.

Alcaeus pounded on the town’s west gate with his sword hilt. A pair of scared looking guards opened the main gate the width of one horse to let him in.

‘There is an army of the Wild out there,’ Alcaeus gasped. ‘Take me to your captain.’

The captain of the town was an old man – at least as fighters went – grey bearded and tending to fat. But he was booted and spurred, wearing a hauberk of good iron rings and a belt
that showed his paunch to unfortunate effect.

‘Ser John Crayford,’ he said, holding out a hand.

Ser Alcaeus thought it unlikely that the man had ever been knighted. And he wondered how such an ill-favoured lout had come to command such an important post.

‘I was with a convoy of fifty wagons on the Behnburg Road,’ Alcaeus said. He sat suddenly. He hadn’t intended to sit, but his legs went out from under him.

‘The Wild,’ he said. He tried to sound sane and rational and like a man whose word could be trusted. ‘Daemons attacked us. With irks. A hundred, at least.’ He found that
he was having trouble breathing.

It was difficult even telling it.

‘Oh, my God,’ he said.

Ser John put a hand on his shoulder. The man seemed bigger somehow. ‘How far, messire?’ he said.

‘Five leagues.’ Alcaeus took a deep breath. ‘Maybe less. East of here.’

‘By the Virgin!’ the Captain of Albinkirk swore. ‘East, you say?’

‘You believe me?’ Alcaeus said.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the captain. ‘But east? They went
around
the town?’ He shook his head.

Alcaeus heard boots on the steps outside. He raised his head and saw the same man who’d let him into the city, with a pair of lower-class men.

‘They say there’s boglins in the fields, Ser John.’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘That’s what they say.’

‘My daughter!’ the younger man shouted. It was more like a shriek than a shout. ‘You have to save her.’

Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m not taking a man out that gate. Steady, man.’ He poured the man a cup of wine.

‘My
daughter
!’ the man said in anguish.

Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, not unkindly. He turned to the sergeants. ‘Sound the alarm. Bar the gates. And get me the mayor and tell him
I’m imposing martial law.
No one is to leave this town.
’

East of Albinkirk – Peter

Peter woke at a jerk of his heavy yoke. It was a hand-carved wooden collar with a pair of chains that ran down to his hands, allowing some movement, and a heavy staple for
attaching him to other slaves, and he’d slept in it.

Two Moreans, easterners with scrips and heavy backpacks, wearing hoods and the air of men recently released from fear, stood over him.

‘One survived then,’ the taller one said, and spat.

The shorter one shook his head. ‘Hardly a fair return on the loss of our cart,’ he said. ‘But a slave’s a slave. Get up, boy.’

Peter lay in abject misery for a moment. So, naturally, they kicked him.

Then they made him carry their packs, and the three of them started west along a trail through the woods.

His despair didn’t lasted long. He had been unlucky – or perhaps he had been lucky. They fed him; he cooked their meagre food and they let him have some bread and a little of the pea
soup he’d made them. Neither of them were big men, or strong, and he thought he could probably kill them both, if only the yoke came off his shoulders.

But he couldn’t get it off. It had been his constant companion for a month of walking over snow and ice, sleeping with the cold and hellish thing while the soldiers raped the women to
either side of him and waiting to see if they would take a turn on him.

He bruised his wrists again and again trying get free of the thing. He daydreamed of using it as a weapon to crush these puny men.

‘You’re a good cook, boy,’ the taller man said, wiping his mouth.

The thin man frowned. ‘I want to know what happened back there,’ he said, after drinking watered wine from his canteen.

The thicker man shrugged. ‘Bandits? Cruel bastards, no doubt. I never saw a thing – I just heard the fighting and – well, you ran, too.’

The thinner man shook his head. ‘The screams,’ he said, and his voice shook.

They sat and glowered at each other, and Peter looked at them and wondered how they managed to survive at all.

‘We should go back for our cart,’ said the thinner man.

‘You must’ve had a bump on the head,’ the fatter one said. ‘Want to be a slave? Like him?’ he gestured at Peter.

Peter hunched by the fire and wondered if lighting it had been a good idea, and wondered how these two could be so foolish. At home, they had had daemons. These idiots must know of them too.

But the night passed – a night in which he never slept, and the two fools slumbered after tying his yoke to a tree. They snored, and Peter lay awake, waiting for a hideous death that never
came.

In the morning, the easterners rose, pissed, drank the tea he’d made, ate his bannock and started west.

‘Where’d you learn to cook, boy?’ the thicker man asked him.

He shrugged.

‘Now that’s a saleable skill,’ the man said.

The Toll Gate – Hector Lachlan

Drovers hated tolls. There was no way to love them. When you have to drive a huge herd of beasts – mostly cattle, but small farmers put in parcels of sheep, and even goats
as well – representing other men’s fortunes, across mountain, fen, fell, swamp and plain, through war and pestilence, tolls are the very incarnation of evil.

Hector Lachlan had a simple rule.

He didn’t pay tolls.

His herd numbered in the hundreds, and he had as many men as a southern lord had in an army; men who wore burnies of shining rings and carried heavy swords and great axes slung from their
shoulders. They looked more like the cream of a mercenary army than what they were. Drovers.

‘I didn’t mean to cross you, Lachlan!’ the local lordling pleaded. He had that tone, the one Hector hated the most – wheedling bluster, he called it, when a man who had
pretended he was cock of the north started begging for his life.

Hector hadn’t even drawn the great sword that sat across his hip and rump. He merely leaned his forearm on the hilt. He stroked his moustache idly and ran a hand through his hair, looked
back down the long, muddy train of cattle and sheep that extended behind him, as far as the eye might see on the mountain track.

‘Just pay me the toll. I’ll – see to it you ha’ the coins back soon enough.’ The other man was tall, well-built, and wearing a chain hauberk worth a fortune, every
link riveted closed, strong as stone.

He was afraid of Hector Lachlan.

But not afraid enough to let the long convoy of beasts past. He had to be seen to try and collect the toll. It was the way, in the hills, and his own fear would make him angry.

Sure enough, even as Hector had the thought, he saw the man’s face change.

‘Be damned to you, then. Pay the damned toll or—’

Hector drew his sword. He wasn’t hurried by his adversary’s anger, fear, or the fifty armed men at his back. He drew the long sword at his own pace, and allowed the heavy pommel to
rotate the sword in his hand, so that the point aimed unwaveringly at the other man’s face.

And punched the needle sharp point through the other man’s forehead with all the effort of a shoemaker punching a hole in leather. The armoured man crumpled, his eyes rolling up. Already
dead.

Hector sighed.

The dead man’s retinue stood rooted to the ground in shock – a shock that would last a few more heartbeats.

‘Stop!’ Hector said. It was a delicate art – to command without threatening them and provoking the very reaction he sought to avoid.

The body crashed to the ground, the dead man’s heels thrashing momentarily.

‘None of ye need to die,’ he said. There was a thread of the dead man’s blood on the tip of his sword. ‘He was a fool to demand a toll of me, and every man here knows it.
Let his tanist take command, and let us hear no more about it.’ Lachlan got the words out, and for a moment the men he was facing teetered on the knife-edge of doubt and greed and fear and
loyalty – not to the dead man but to the code that required them to avenge him.

The code won.

Lachlan heard the grunt that signified their refusal, and he had both hands on his sword, swinging a heavy overhand blow at the nearest man. He had a sword in his hand, but was too slow to save
his own life; the heavy swing batted his parry aside and cut through his skull from left eyebrow to right jaw, so that the top of his head spun away, cleanly severed.

Hector’s own men started to come forward, abandoning their places with his herd. Which meant that when this was over, with all the attending noise, violence, blood and ordure, a day would
be lost while they collected all the beasts who ran off into the glens and valleys.

Someone – some ancient philosopher Lachlan couldn’t remember from the days when a priest came to teach him letters – had said that the hillmen would conquer the world, if only
they would ever stop fighting among themselves.

He pondered that as he killed his third man of the day, as his retinue charged with a shout, and as the doomed men of the toll gate tried to make a stand and were cut down.