Move aside, Harmodius said. In the aethereal, he took control of Mortirmir’s body and his potentia. And everything else.
You were just bait, he said. Now you are the skin of the lion.
A wall of sparkling white fire stood between them and Aeskepiles. Men screamed – men half burned or caught at the edges of the massive working.
I’m the lion.
Faster than the thought of a mortal, Harmodius rode the casting back to its source – as Richard Plangere had taught him to. He’d declined to do it to a dog – but now—
Instead of casting, he followed the course that Thorn had taught him.
And then Morgan Mortirmir was alone.
The Red Knight had his arms pinned by corpses, and someone stepped on his breastplate. A rib cracked. And he was helpless. Another foot – this time on his armoured shin. The pain was immense, the damage negligible.
He couldn’t move.
Panic – blind panic, the panic that comes from helplessness and impending death – was right there. And so was death.
He ran, as he had when he was a child, for his hermetical palace, and waited for the end. Time was different here.
It is difficult to be panicked when you have time to think.
There was the new statue on the plinth in the middle of his casting rotunda. It had been empty for many months, and he stared at it and realised that he was used to having another mind available to feed him workings.
And then he realised that he wasn’t without resources himself.
It wasn’t something he had practised. He had to improvise. And he didn’t know whether the foot on his breastplate belonged to an enemy or his brother.
In the end, he settled for simplicity. He placed the end of an aethereal chain of iron in his left hand. And he pulled it with ops – slowly. The sigils whirled above his head – creation, displacement, enhancement, augury (because he needed to know which way to face). He cast the most complex working of his hermetical life – merely to stand.
He stood.
Thrakian spearmen who had seen twenty fights in the Wild and a dozen actions with men fell back a pace. Toby, straddling him, was brushed aside – Ser Milus took advantage of the shock he gave them and cracked a helmet with his great two-handed hammer.
The Red Knight drew his sword. His draw was fluid, his hips rotated – he had seldom felt more alive. The great red sword flashed from the scabbard and the heavy point went over the shield of the next spearman.
‘Captain’s up!’ screamed Toby.
There was a sound like a watermill, a roar like a waterfall, and the whole company pushed.
The Red Knight disdains to kill his enemies by sorcery. And if I win this, I need as many of them alive as I can manage, he thought. He was under their spears – most of the Thrakians had short swords in their hands. He gripped his sword two-handed, and started hacking men to the ground.
On his left, Ser Milus saw something he didn’t and began yelling for men to join on him.
The Thrakians were pushed back another step, and another.
He turned his head – safe for a moment – and saw Milus and Francis Atcourt and a dozen other men-at-arms running to the left.
The company was pivoting on the centre, the right advancing, the left sliding back. And he had no idea why. Trapped in the airless, sweat-stink of his faceplate, he could see nothing beyond the next foe.
He stopped. Pivoted again and let Toby push past. The press was lighter – there was room. A wider space opened in the centre and the Thrakians backpedalled a dozen paces and stopped. Those men who still had spear points raised them.
The centre of the company shuddered to a stop.
Toby stepped past him, and then Cully. And then he was past Nell, who was white-faced and had a red slash from the base of her chin to the top of her left breast – right through her maille.
He had no time for her. He stepped back again. And again.
A boy was holding his warhorse. By an act of pure will he got into the saddle. Flipped his visor back after fighting the buckle. Washed himself in air. Wrenched crisp, clean breaths of it after the foul stuff trapped against his visor—
And saw the Nordikans were dying.
They’d killed a great many knights and more horses, but they were now an island in a sea of cavalrymen. The enemy’s stradiotes were mixed in with the mercenary knights – he could see Derkensun’s gilded helm, and axes still flashed.
Ser Milus, at the head of a third of the company, smashed into the side of the melee.
To his right, where young Mortirmir should have been anchoring the company shield, there was a light show unlike anything hermetical that the Red Knight had ever seen. Despite which, Ser Michael was far up the field, advancing at a steady walk – so far that he was almost at weapon’s length from Demetrius.
The enemy centre was moments from collapse – like his own left.
Aeskepiles – he could just see the man over the swirl of the melee – was writhing like a man fighting a pack of wolves. Except that he was alone, and his shields had all fallen.
And beyond him, further to the right, by the old road to Dorling, there was confusion in the ranks of the enemy’s main body of cavalry – confusion that cheered his heart. Even as he glanced that way, the Vardariotes and the Scholae went forward.
One deep breath.
It was all perfectly balanced.
It was not a time for chivalry.
He pointed his sword at the enemy’s mercenary knights, and he cast.
The Easterners hadn’t appeared.
Count Zac reined in from his latest feigned flight and, while his crack light horsemen rallied on their squadron banners, he cantered around the stone barn and looked west. What he saw made him smile.
He rode back to where the Scholae and the Vardariotes joined. ‘Change horses,’ he ordered.
Ser Giorgios had an arrow in his right thigh, snapped off short. He waved. He was white, but in charge of himself – to a man like Zac, that was worth high praise. ‘You are like one of my own children,’ he said.
Ser Giorgios nodded. ‘Hurts like poison,’ he muttered. ‘The centre seems to be holding,’ he said. ‘What do we do now?’
Zac nodded. ‘Now we win,’ he said. He pointed with his riding crop, to the west.
Ser Giorgios managed a pained smile. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘That’s why we win!’ Zac said.
The horse holders came forward and handed men their remounts. It took very little time for crack troops to change horses.
Opposite them, they only faced the right end of the enemy line. But that end was shifting, trying to remould itself across the road. They were good troops – they weren’t in chaos. But they were attempting a difficult manoeuvre in the face of the enemy.
Count Zac watched them for as long as a child might take to count ten. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘But wrong.’
He placed himself exactly between the two regiments.
‘Walk!’ he ordered.
As crisply as on parade, the two cavalry regiments moved forward, horses at a walk.
Zac had dreamed of this a hundred times – a stricken field, against long odds. A fresh horse and a sharp sword.
And an enemy trapped in place. It was the steppe nomad’s dream.
‘Draw!’ he roared. His horse walked six prancing steps before he called, ‘Swords!’
Five hundred sabres glittered like ice on a fair winter’s day.
The Vardariotes and the Scholae pressed into the centre as they had practised, so that they were a single mass of horseflesh and sabres. Or war hammers or small steel axes, as personal preference might dictate.
The Thrakian cavalrymen opposite them shuddered. That shudder was even visible; their ranks moved.
The Guards rolled forward as gracefully as a dancer at a party. Their precision was inhuman, and they inspired awe.
Zac turned his head and saw movement on the road to the right – a glimpse of steel.
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He laughed, stood in his stirrups and threw his long sabre in the air in a great whirling flash – up and up, and then down, and into his hand as if ordained by his own wind-blown steppe gods.
A screech rose in Zac’s throat. Unintended.
The Vardariotes answered him, and the Guards put their spurs to their fresh horses, and charged.
And in answer, from the Dorling road, came a great shout that rolled over the field like the hunting call of a great Wyvern or a mighty dragon – ‘Lachlan! Lachlan for aa!’
Harmodius stood among the cogs and wheels and foundry runs of Aeskepiles’ memory palace. He had time to marvel at the complexity of the man’s forming and the strain on it all. There were frayed ropes and chains at maximum tension and leaking buckets, and the water that turned the wheels that drove the workings was sluggish and thick, filthy with unredeemed pledges and treasons.
He flicked his sword, and a massive bellows vanished.
Harmodius allowed himself a grin. A thousand times, it had occurred to him that the hair he’d taken from the cutler in Liviapolis might belong to another man, and not Aeskepiles.
Aeskepiles’ aethereal form appeared. He was a big man with a black beard and a scowl, and two heavy black cords ran out of his forehead and away into aethereal space.
Begone! he snapped.
Harmodius smiled.
I am the lion, he said. And severed the chains that powered . . . something.
There was a mighty crash.
Aeskepiles – obviously panicked, even here – raised a wand of iron.
It won’t make any difference, Harmodius said. But that’s a bad way to go, loosing destruction inside your own head.
He stepped forward.
Who are you? demanded the sorcerer. How can this happen?
I am the lion, Harmodius said, and used his Fell Sword to destroy the sorcerer’s soul in a single cut.
Then he opened himself a little, and collapsed the dead man’s memory palace, appalled at the waste of energy and potential as the whole of a behemoth spell-working drained away into the aether and the real. He worked fast, scraping it away as a nomad woman scrapes a hide clean of fat.
And then he unpacked his own, neatly. He’d had plenty of time to practise, and it spooled out of his soul into the clean space. Some things fitted oddly. Some things might never be quite the same.
Harmodius remembered his first rooms, when he was a student in Harndon. They didn’t match his furniture. But they were his own.
The two black ropes that had been attached to the magister’s aethereal forehead remained, dangling, and as his own memory palace materialised around him, they transformed into the black pupil of a golden eye. A golden eye the size of a door.
‘Ahhh,’ said a deep and pleasant voice. ‘I see. I thought you were dead.’
The eye blinked. ‘You will not triumph,’ the voice said, as if this was the best of news. ‘But I grant you, this was clever.’
The sword flicked, and the eye vanished.
And Harmodius stood and shook in the midst of his new home.
When it was too late to matter, and all was lost, Ser Christos stood amidst the rout of his wing and readied his lance.
The Green Hillmen were the Thrakians ancient foes. They knew each other well. They stood shoulder to shoulder against the Wild, and they hacked one another to pieces over their borders.
The enemy was mostly afoot – big men in ring mail like the Nordikans, and just as ferocious. And they flowed like a tide. And Ser Christos cursed, because on another day, on an open field, he’d have rolled these arrogant clansmen up like a carpet.
But today his men could not fight in two directions at once, and they folded. And in truth, Ser Christos thought, fitting his lance in its rest, in truth, none of them believed it was worth dying for Demetrius, anyway.
One man amidst his adversaries was mounted: a giant man on a giant horse. Ser Christos knew the fate that awaited him, to be executed as a traitor, and determined to give his son a different view of his end.
He put his spurs to his horse.
The armoured giant saw him, and flicked his lance tip – an acknowledgement? And came at him. His horse’s hooves skimmed the ground, the sun had melted the surface of the road, and the movement of thousands of men tore the turf down into mud. But he and his enemy were on the road.
He gave his war cry, and his lance came down.
So did his opponent’s, and the man roared, ‘Lachlan for aa!’ and inside his helm, Ser Christos smiled.
They came together like a clap of thunder.
Ser Christos’s lance head went through the giant’s shield, piercing two layers of oxhide and the carefully laid-up panels of elm underneath – into the mail that guarded the big man’s armpit, which it pierced. His lance bowed and snapped in three places.
Lachlan’s lance struck him full on the shield, and broke it to pieces, and shattered, but the shortened stump of his lance struck the Morean knight’s shoulder and slammed him back in his saddle, and the force of the their meeting knocked both horses back on their haunches. Ser Christos’s horse was first to recover, and it scrambled away. The bigger horse bit at it savagely while both knights struggled to draw their swords and stay mounted.
The horses circled. Lachlan was bleeding from his right armpit. The Morean suspected that something was broken in his collarbone. He got his sword free and slammed it into the big man’s helmet with no obvious effect; a good blow, but nowhere near enough.
Lachlan reeled, and then got his sword free in time to stop a cut to his neck.
For ten heartbeats, both men exchanged blows as fast as their arms could drive their weapons. Sparks flew, and both men were hurt.
Lachlan’s stallion planted an iron-shod forefoot on Ser Christos’s mount’s right front leg, and it snapped. And his horse began to go down. He ignored the pain, reached out left-handed and locked his gauntlet over Lachlan’s sword wrist. Then his horse toppled, taking both men with him.
By this time, Ser Christos was the last of Demetrius’s men still fighting for a hundred paces in all directions. Men paused – those bent on taking ransoms, or leaning on blood bespattered axes and swords – to watch.
Men who had just surrendered paused and looked.
The two combatants rose together, and Ser Christos planted his pommel hard against Lachlan’s helmet, so that the bigger man’s head snapped back. Bad Tom retreated a step and his blade snapped forward, staggering the smaller man.
They circled. Lachlan was bleeding from armpit and a hand, and had blood running from beneath his aventail. Christos had only one hand on his sword hilt, now, and blood was running down his left cuisse. He changed guard, rotating on his hips and putting his sword on the left side of his body, point back.
The Hillmen were chanting. Ser Christos had no idea what they were chanting, but he was determined to beat this one man, regardless of the cost. Or he would die trying.
When Lachlan cut at him, a monstrous, overhand cut that seemed to ignore the wounds he’d taken, Ser Christos cut up, into the blow, one-handed.
Lachlan’s strike was stopped.
The two teetered, sword to sword, for half a heartbeat.
Quick as a viper, Lachlan reversed his sword and drove his pommel at Ser Christos’s face. The Morean knight raised his hands to defend himself.
Lachlan passed his pommel over his opponent’s sword arm, locking it down. Then he passed his blade over the Morean knight’s head, using the anchored pommel as a pivot, so that he had Ser Chritos’s arms pinned against him in the prison of his body and his sword, crushing the man’s throat.
It happened so fast that Christos could only struggle, trying to wedge his blade against the giant’s crushing grip. He released his sword, the world dimming, and grabbed for his dagger.
The giant swept his feet from under him, so he was suspended in the air.
‘Yield,’ roared Tom Lachlan. ‘Gods, that was glorious!’
Ser Ch
ristos coughed. And subsided to the ground.
Bad Tom flipped open his visor and breathed like a bellows. His kerns were gathering over the downed knight. ‘Don’t kill this loon!’ he snapped. ‘I want him.’
Demetrius didn’t wait for his army to collapse. As soon as he saw the coward Aeskepiles turn his horse and bolt from the field – headed west, of all foolish ideas – Demetrius saw how the wind was blowing.
To the east, by the Lonika road, the mercenary knights had been decimated by a hermetical attack and were now breaking away from the remnants of the Nordikans. The centre was shattered – there was a palpable hole in the middle of his father’s veteran spear block and the Alban mercenaries were pouring through it. His father’s most trusted veterans were throwing down their weapons and kneeling in surrender.
And to the west instead of his Easterners, enemies had appeared.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
Dariusz shrugged, as if the whole subject wearied him.
Surrounded by his Guard, he rode south.
‘Gabriel!’
The Red Knight reined up and waited for the spike of pain in his forehead, but it didn’t come.
‘Harmodius?’
‘I go my own way now. This field is yours – you’ll want to stop the killing as soon as you can.’
‘Tom will be outraged.’
‘I may not see you again. As Master Smythe suspected, Aeskepiles was a tool just as Thorn is. Ash is using them. One of the First. I have done something morally dark. I wish to ask a favour. I think, despite using your body for months, that you owe me.’
Gabriel knew – almost intuitively – what must have happened. Because there was no more lightshow.
‘You have taken Morgan Mortirmir’s body,’ he said.
‘No. That option presented itself, and represents a temptation which, thankfully, I resisted. I took Aeskepiles’body. In fact, I AM Aeskepiles. He is not.’
‘And your favour?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Don’t pursue me. Our goals are the same.’
Gabriel looked carefully at his mentor. ‘You have made a dark choice.’
‘In a good cause.’
Gabriel nodded. ‘I will not pursue you.’
Harmodius extended an aethereal hand. ‘You will be very powerful now. Mortirmir – when he regains his wits – will eventually be even more so. With Mag and Amicia and some other allies you may still not last any longer than a candle in a rainstorm against our true foe. But you must try.’ The old man’s aethereal form shrugged. ‘You have a sort of ferocious luck that gives me hope.’