I caught up with him more easily this time. Excalibur was providing me with all the strength and speed I needed. He shot me a quick grin. An enchanted blade had opened up a long groove along the armour over his left ribs, and blood had trickled down the gleaming steel. But his eyes were bright, and his smile was infectious. He laughed at the expression on my face.
“Is it not a glorious thing, to be a knight in armour and strike down your enemies? To punish the guilty with your own hands, to be brave and strong and know that everything you do matters? This is what it is, John, to be a London Knight!”
“You speak for yourself,” I said. “Trust me; I am not warrior material. It’s only the sword that’s keeping me going.”
“Excalibur couldn’t bring it out of you if it wasn’t there to begin with. A reluctant hero is still a hero, my friend.”
I was still trying to come up with an answer to that when we burst into the Hall of Forgotten Beasts. An elven sorcerer was standing at the far end, clad in sweeping crimson silks. He smiled easily at us, as though we were guests arrived just in time for dinner, then he made one sweeping gesture with a pale long-fingered hand, and every trophied head mounted on the walls opened its mouth and cried out in pain and rage.
They weren’t alive; but they were awake and aware, and they knew what had been done to them. They rolled their eyes and snapped their mouths, and strained against the mounting boards that held them to the walls. Great cracks appeared in the stonework round each head, the old stone splitting apart as though some unimaginable weight and pressure had been set against the other side of the wall. And then the heads surged forward, and the rest of their bodies crashed through the stone after them. They were complete again, all the great lost beasts of history and legend, and each and every one of them had revenge and retribution on their minds. They were long and sleek, huge and powerful, swift and deadly; and they only had eyes for Sir Gareth and me. Hundreds of enraged beasts and one really big, really pissed-off dragon.
“Oh shit,” I said.
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Sir Gareth. “Do you think it would help if I explained we’re much more into conservation these days?”
“You go ahead and try. I plan on running. Try and keep up.”
“Love to join you, John, but unfortunately the way to the inner chambers, and the Redoubt, lies at the other end of this hall.”
“Oh shit.”
“Couldn’t agree more. So, forward into battle it is. Try and keep up.”
Sir Gareth strode forward, sword at the ready, not intimidated in the least by the odds against him. I stayed right where I was. Excalibur seemed almost to leap in my hand, pulling me forward and urging me on, but I rejected its call and put the sword away. Courage is all very well, but sometimes all it can get you is a glorious death. I know overwhelming odds when I see them. I’ve faced them before. And I know from experience that you don’t beat them by meeting them head-on. You win by thinking outside the box, and by blatant cheating.
I still couldn’t find it in myself to see these long-dead creatures as a threat. They were the victims here. They hadn’t asked to be killed and mounted on a wall, then brought back again by a sorcerer’s spell. Poor bastards. So I raised my gift, and used it to find the magic the elf sorcerer had used to haul them back into this world. It turned out to be a series of silver threads, trailing back from the head of every animal to the sorcerer’s upraised hand. So many puppets on magical strings. Elves have always preferred to let others do their dirty work and not give a damn about the pawns they use. And so it was the easiest thing in the world for me to sever all the threads in a moment and set the beasts free.
The elf sorcerer cried out in shock and pain, and the psychic backlash from the ruptured spell sent him staggering backwards, clutching at his head. All the undead beasts in the hall dropped to their knees and crashed to the floor, released from their new existence and the undead bodies they never asked for. Finally dead, at last. For with my gift and my Sight raised, I Saw the ghosts of hundreds of ancient beasts rise up, freed at last, and turn away from the world to face a new bright light that called to them. One by one they moved away in a direction I could sense, but not See, leaving the Hall of Forgotten Beasts forever. Going home, at last. Bound to this place no longer.
The Questing Beast was the last to go. It turned its noble head to look at me, with huge, kind eyes. And then it bowed its great head to me briefly before hobbling off after all the others.
Sir Gareth looked about him, his sword drooping unheeded in his hand. He looked at me. “John, did you do this? What did you do?”
I could have told him about the original hunters of his order, who had not only mounted the heads of their kills as trophies but also bound the beasts’ spirits to those heads, as a sign of ownership ... but I didn’t. The sins of the past should stay in the past. I smiled at Sir Gareth.
“Sometimes,” I said, “try a little tenderness.”
“The reports were right,” he said. “You are weird. And someone’s going to have to clean up all these dead animals, but it isn’t going to be me. Come on; we have an elf sorcerer to deal with.”
The elf was still leaning heavily against the wall at the end of the hall, trying to get his thoughts back together. Having a major working interrupted is never a good idea. He didn’t look up till Sir Gareth and I had almost pushed our way through the piled-up bodies; and then he forced himself upright and glared at both of us. But, being an elf, he still had to strike a dramatic pose before he could throw a spell, and while he was busy doing that, Sir Gareth threw his sword at him. The gleaming steel blade flashed through the intervening space and slammed into the elf’s thigh, pinning him to the stone wall. The elf didn’t cry out. He grabbed at the sword with both hands and tried to pull it out.
He didn’t have a hope in hell of shifting the blade before we got to him. The blade had gone right through the meat of his upper thigh and sunk deep into the stone wall behind him. Golden blood streamed down his leg, and pooled on the floor. The elf was still tugging stubbornly at the blade when we got to him. He sneered at us, opened his mouth to say something, and Sir Gareth cut his throat with a knife. I had to step quickly aside to avoid getting soaked. Sir Gareth jerked the sword out of the dead elf’s leg with one hard tug. The body slumped forward, and Sir Gareth stepped aside to let it fall. I glared at him.
“You didn’t have to kill him! He was helpless!”
“He was an elf and a sorcerer,” Sir Gareth said mildly. “He could have cursed us both with just a Word.”
“He was in no condition to work magic. He could have been useful. He could have answered questions.”
“What questions?” said Sir Gareth, fastidiously shaking golden blood off his sword blade. “We know why they’re here and who let them in, and we know what they want. You over-complicate things, John.”
“It’s the principle of the thing!”
“Wait. You’ve got principles? We’ll have to update your file.”
“You know nothing about me,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
We came at last to the Main Hall, hundreds of feet long and half as wide, packed from end to end with a great surging mass of fighting men and elves. I never knew there were so many London Knights. The whole place was a battle-field, with two great armies hammering at each other with not one ounce of mercy or quarter. Neither side was interested in simply winning; this was a fight to the death. To the last death. The clash of weapons meeting, the shouts of triumph and the screams of the dying, made a sound loud enough to fill my head. It was like watching two great herds of deer slamming their antlers together in a blind fury. Sir Gareth might talk of honour and glory in battle; all I saw was butchery.