It was all risk.
He slapped his visor up. “Galahad!” he roared in his father’s voice.
“My lord?” D’Acon called, from fifty paces away. All the knights halted.
“Take half and go north until you are free of enemies; cross the creek and then fall on their line. Watch your flanks.”
It was a huge, terrible responsibility for a royal messenger who’d been a knight for two weeks and was just twenty-two years old.
D’Acon put his fist to his visor. “Consider it done,” he said.
Ser Gavin left his visor open, passing forward along the road. A gust of snow swept in; they came to a gentle bend in the road, and there it was.
The enemy was holding the bridge. The new stone bridge, four men wide, a high arch over the ink-black waters. It was called The Warden’s Bridge because Gabriel had killed a daemon there.
Now there were a great many dead knights. Indeed, Gavin’s heart almost broke; a third of the Order lay there, and twenty more knights, some dead, some terribly maimed, and their horses screamed and kicked, impeding any further attempts to force the bridge. The Knights of the Order had erected a shield of shimmering gold-green; even as he watched, a great gout of ops slammed into it.
There was something on the bridge.
“Prior Wishart is wounded,” Ser Ricar Orcsbane reported. The young, usually silent knight was also wounded. “My lord, we cannot defeat this thing. Weapons will not bite on its hide, or armour; its weapons cut our steel like paper.”
“Cave trolls,” Grazias said, unnecessarily, at his shoulder.
Even as he watched, a Knight of the Order rode forward. His warhorse, despite massive armour and a heavy rider, leapt over the tangle of bodies that choked the bridge, and the horse’s steel-shod hooves struck sparks from the stones that looked like fire in the falling darkness, and the knight’s lance lined up with the great antlered thing’s chest, and struck home, and the antlered demon was rocked back …
… but the lance shattered, and the dark thing struck back with an axe, killing the knight’s horse in a single blow. The knight was thrown against the bridge. He didn’t rise.
“Where is Ser Gregario?” Gavin snapped. He’d left Lord Weyland in charge when he’d ridden back to look over the battlefield only an hour ago.
“Attempting to turn the position from the north,” Orcsbane said.
Another Knight of the Order saluted, made the sign of the cross, and charged. His horse sailed over the tangle of dead and dying and his lance, either perfectly managed or lucky, struck the antlered man in the forehead, between the sprouting antlers that stood out roughly parallel to the ground, two long black spikes. The thing had a dark coat, like matted sheepskin, and fire came from its mouth, and the lance knocked it flat, and the Knights of the Order on the road gave a great cheer.
It rose, muscles rippling, as the knight swept past and threw its axe, casually, and the axe split the knight’s head all the way to the root of his neck and he slumped forward and his body burst into flame, a dark, smoking flame that immolated corpse and horse, and his fine stallion shrieked in terror as he burned.
The thing on the bridge turned, faster than a man could turn, caught the handle of his axe, and pulled it from the corpse-torch and brandished it, and all along the streamside, the bogglins and daemons and irks cheered. There were thousands of them.
Gavin rode to the Prior of Harnden as yet another young knight launched his charge.
“We must retreat,” Gavin said. “This is foolishness.”
The prior looked up. He lay against a tree with his right arm gone from the elbow.
“No,” the prior said. “I’m sorry, but I must get into the abbey tonight. Everything depends on it.”
Gavin shrugged. “We can’t lose the rest of your knights.” He looked over his shoulder.
Another young knight was cut down.
“Stop it!” Gavin roared.
The slim figure in the black cloak who was working on the prior’s wound moved a hand.
“Ser Gavin,” she said. “Hard Hand. We must win through to the abbey or we will lose everything.”
“My lord,” Grazias said. “My lord. The dragon.”
Gavin turned, looking back along the forest road toward Albinkirk. The trees were mostly bare of foliage, and through them he saw a looming black shape, and then the bright sparkle of the dragon’s fire.
Judging from the position of the thing, it was setting fire to Penrith.
The loss of Penrith would collapse his center.
Gavin looked around—at the prior, at the tall woman by the prior, at Grazias and at his own knights and at young Orcsbane.
“Right,” he said. He bowed to the woman, and saluted the prior.
“Grazias,” he said. “Give me the other sword.”
“Other sword?” Grazias said. But he put his hand on it—the great black sword of Ser Hartmut.
He held the scabbard, and Gavin reached out and drew the sword.
“Time to fight fire with fire,” he said.
He wheeled Bess on her back hooves, so that the great mare spun like a top, and he put her head at the bridge. But he didn’t charge. Instead, he trotted up to the bridge, covered by the Order’s shield, and the shaman on the far bank launched a forked attack that was wasted on the golden leaves of the defence.
Gavin came to the tangle of dead knights and let Bess pick her way around it.
He reined in at the base of the bridge.
The antlered man came and stood at the very crest of the bridge. He … very emphatically he, with a parody of manhood between his heavily muscled legs, raised his great steel axe and shouted. His shout was echoed by irks and bogglins and by the wyverns who had begun to circle overhead like huge carrion crows.
Gavin saluted with his sword, and it burst into flame.
“Do you think your puny magic can harm me, mortal? I am a Son of Ash! I am immortal! Your day is over, and my master will make a new earth.”
Gavin listened, but his attention was not on the monster’s words, but on the sounds from the north: the ring of steel, and the round of horses, and a trumpet playing a particular set of notes.
“Did Ash promise that you would be immortal?” Gavin asked. His right hand reached out and gave Bess’s neck an affectionate pat. The black, fiery sword spat and crackled. It felt like a feather in his hand; beautifully balanced, but more than that. He was more than a little afraid of it, but at this moment, it was his hope of victory.
“Ready, my sweet?” he asked his horse. The trumpet sounded again. Darkness was falling.
He just touched his spurs to Bess’s flanks and she leaped forward up the bridge.
Gavin leaned forward a little, against the slope of the bridge, sword held, blade down, on his left side, where the monster couldn’t see it. His horse was passing the thing on his right.
Its axe swept up.
Gavin cut up. The thing’s head was as far from the ground as his own, and his rising cut met the axe at the haft as it descended.
Hartmut’s sword cut through the haft like a true sword through a twig. He wasn’t at a gallop so in the same tempo his sword cut back down the same line, the simplest of re-attacks.
The horned man twisted, sweeping up the haft and slamming it into Gavin’s right side under his arm; the blow rocked Gavin, the force was terrible …
… but not as terrible as the force of a mounted lance. His armour held; he shrugged off the blow and turned Bess, even in the tight confines of the bridge.
One long, spiked antler fell to the bridge with the sound of breaking crystal.
“Immortal?” Gavin asked. His sword licked out, faster than thought, fastidious as a house cat.
The other antler fell.
The denuded monster roared with anger and cut at Gavin with his staff.
Bess danced.
Gavin cut the monster’s staff at his hand. Fingers sprayed like blood and the shaft fell to the bridge. Bess planted one
steel-shod hoof on the thing’s chest, and then another, one, two, like the punches of a veteran boxer. Her hooves did the thing no damage, but her blows knocked it back. It stumbled, and the Knight of the Order who’d been thrown against the bridge put the butt of his broken lance between its legs as it struggled for balance, and it fell, back, over the wall at the edge of the bridge.
The knights roared.
Gavin pointed the sword over the bridge and Bess blew into a canter, the leap of a jousting horse; Gavin took a long moment to recover his seat, and then the daemon shaman was headless, slumping to the ground, and Bess was trampling bogglins.
Gregario’s trumpet was closer.
The Order’s knights began to come over the bridge; there were perhaps fifty left, or fewer, and behind them his reserve, the knights of Albinkirk.
Gavin burst through the back of the enemy and turned Bess in a shallow curve, filled with the spirit of combat, wanting to laugh and shout with joy, wanting to go sleep, wanting never to have to do such a thing again, and as he turned, he saw the dark thing coming up out of the streambed.
Gavin blinked. “Fuck,” he muttered.
He saw the thing unhorse a knight with his fist, point at a second, and there was a burst of pus-yellow fire and a scream.
Gavin put spurs to Bess, who did not deserve any such.
His adversary let loose a torrent of sorcery, and knights and men-at-arms died in every direction—twenty, thirty in a heartbeat.
Bess went forward as if galloping through molasses.
Gavin rose in his stirrups and put the burning sword between him and the thing.
It loosed its bolt down the line at him.
Orley, if the armour of flesh and bone on Ash’s auxiliary consciousness could still be called Orley, drew on his master’s enormous power and began to throw his bolts against the vast, puissant shields of force that covered the whole of the abbey ridge and the towering fortress itself. Behind him stood a dozen of his own kind and twenty stone trolls lent him by the reserve; a host of bogglins who darkened the earth; and another thousand of the western daemons who, despite their dismay at the cold weather, were eager to fight their way into the warm caves beneath the fortress, their ancient and traditional hold.
They slammed weapons into shields.
Orley raised his arms and threw another impossible wall of power into the ancient wards.
Miriam was aware that she was losing. The loss was gradual; it might take the will aeons to break her, but its massive powers raged against her choir, her wards, and the impossibly ancient powers of the gates like a massive flood facing a very ancient dam. The water rose slowly, interspersed with sudden surges; the weight increased by degrees, on many levels, so that even as the allegory of the flood might be one reality, in another, Miriam’s very sanity was challenged; her identity, her sense of self, her faith, her gender, her confidence, her love. All undermined; all sabotaged.
No abbess was chosen for anything but this; that she knew herself, and had that kind of spirit that cannot easily be broken. Miriam’s identity was always a little malleable; her faith was open to doubt every day, her gender had never been the center of her being, her confidence had always rested in her faith in others, her sanity was always a matter for her private mind.
But her love for her people and all people she’d even known was like adamant.
And her choir was very, very good.
By the time that darkness was falling across the snowy fields at the base of the ridge, she had fought all day, resting her choir the way Ser Shawn was resting knights, but now the battle was approaching the inevitable climax and she was being forced, like a tiring swordsman, to resort to her last tricks.
She pointed at Sister Elisabeth, and the left choir, on note and on tempo, joined the Ave Maria.
Now she had both choirs in. Now there would be no rest until the end.
Miriam knew that the end was coming. She could see it; like a checkmate in chess, the inevitability inescapable. But she could postpone it as long as possible, in hopes of a miracle.
Gabriel, where art thou?
She dismissed Gabriel, and any dreams of glory, and focused on prolonging her own agony.
Beneath Ash’s mighty wings, chaos reigned. He stooped, ignoring a hail of darts and arrows, and breathed again on the ruins of Penrith, and the steeple of the church fell, the stone cross crashing to earth, and the flame of his breath burned among the foresters. Harald Redmede died there, and John Hand, and a generation of Alba’s best woodsmen. And then another of the antlered men led the bogglins forward, and crashed through the handful of men still able to face them, taking a few to eat alive and destroying the rest, scattering fire and lightning.
Ash’s magnificent wings beat, and he stretched out his neck in glee. The army of men was broken; his slaves poured through the ruins of Penrith like the waters of the sea through a broken dyke.
Command of the Alliance Army had devolved to Alcaeus. Lord Montjoy had taken his knights and charged into the maelstrom behind Penrith. He’d said he was going to try to stem the tide, but he left Alcaeus with the impression he hoped to die well before the collapse became general.
Alcaeus smiled a bitter smile. It was a very Alban attitude. But Alcaeus was not Alban; he was Morean; he had seen many bitter defeats, and many hollow victories, and his people resisted the impulse to glorious self-destruction. Moreans endured. They were patient.
He watched for as long as it might take a priest to say a hurried communion prayer. He watched the dragon breathe fire into the ruins of Penrith; he saw the knights strike home, rocking the enemy back; then he saw them slow, unable to face the heat of the burning town, as the enemy began to leak in around them.
The dragon passed along them, and again his fire lashed men; hundreds died.
But then the dragon turned suddenly, his long, terrible neck curling north and west, and the titanic wings beat, and the vision of hell passed suddenly west, wings beating so hard that the wind raised a curtain of snow.
Alcaeus watched the dragon depart with narrowed eyes.
He looked down at his people: five thousand Morean veterans, the very last of Livia’s ancient legions, armoured in long shirts of maille and armed with heavy spears and round shields. Some had fought all the way to N’gara and back; others had guarded Liviapolis until a few days before.
A man grinned at him. “Lead us, Alcaeus,” he said.
And Syr Christos nodded. “We can save this,” he said.
Alcaeus pointed at the very center. “Christos, go. All the way down the hill, and restore the center. I will go to the right …” He was looking at the base of the ridge, where 1Exrech and his legions still held. “I will go to the right and attempt to … do …” He smiled. “Something. Damn it, Christos. I’ll try and do something.”
“And so will I,” Christos said. He saluted. “For the emperor.”
“Wherever the hell he is,” Alcaeus said.
Ser Gavin Muriens
The bolt struck Gavin’s flaming sword, or perhaps he parried with it; the bolt was split into two, and each went into the ground, churned to mud by the blood and intestinal fluids of a thousand dead sentient creatures and a hundred horses’ hooves, and he leaned forward, pressing Bess to do her best, and she responded, her stride opening.
The antlerless demon slammed a fist into Bess’s armoured head; he crumpled the great spike, and her great strength was no match for its malevolence. Gavin went back over his crupper like he was practicing in the tiltyard.
He hit hard; the ground here was almost frozen, and he had a flare of pain in his shoulder, and then he was up, moving, and the realization that he had lost Hartmut’s sword was almost perfectly twinned with the sight of it pinned neatly under the demon’s outstretched foot.
But it was an ungainly position for a monster with legs so long.
“Now,” the thing said. “Now I will eat your soul .…”
It was bigger than he was, but not immeasurably bigge
r, and its posture was ridiculous, and Gavin used the whole spiked peak of his bassinet on its abundant testicles as it pounded a fist into his armoured back, but it was toppling, its weight overextended, and Gavin, despite the crunching of his ribs from the blow, stumbled back and got his hand on the hilt of Hartmut’s sword, and it burst into flame.
He cut at the nearest part, a flailing near-human hand, already missing a few black talons, and he severed it, and black blood began to come in great gouts, as if being pumped out by a strong boy at a summer well.
It pointed the bleeding stump at him and he was showered in its terrible blood, but he cut again, this time blind, but still a good cut, a simple fendente that caught something. Gavin stumbled back, threw up his visor, and saw it clutching his face.
“Noooo!” it said. “Noo! I am powerful! I am indestructible! I am immortal!”
Despite the burning of his skin, and despite a mote of pity in his heart, Gavin stepped in close and swung the sword right to left, a simple, snapping blow.
Its head fell clear of its body.
Ash felt the death like a blow. He already felt giddy; his memory was being attacked by a wave of unaccustomed memories and doubts, and yet a sort of bubble of success was rising in his dark heart as his slaves rolled forward in the last light, sweeping all before them.
And then …
One of his creations was injured. It should not have been possible; it represented a flaw in his foresight, as he realized that he’d left undone things that he ought to have done, which was of a piece with all the revelations in his innermost mind; why was he suddenly recalling a terrible betrayal an aeon old?
His creature died at the hands of a mere man.
The humiliation was immense. He felt revealed as a failure; he felt …
He paused, and wondered if he was being attacked by the will.
He could find no trace of such an attack, but the fire of self-doubt was burning strong, and he had to wonder …
And something was happening at the gate.
It occurred to Ash, too slowly, that he was being played. That the will had used him to distract the men from the main effort. That his own captain, Orley, was directly serving the will.