His illusions struck with dramatic intensity, shocking new recruits and peasant levies all over the field. The fireball floated slowly, roaring like a blast furnace, to burst like a terrifying entertainment over the centre of the enemy army.
His string cutter left his hand and vanished into a protection.
The enemy archers raised their bows.
Annoyed, he cast again.
They loosed, and a volley of arrows rose.
He swatted them to earth with a simple wind harness he had prepared, to be safe.
The Thrakian infantry marched slowly forward. Their footsteps raised no dust from the frozen ground, but the ground shook with their matched step. Over to the left, the Thrakian peasants had no order, but they flowed over the ground like thirst-maddened wolves scenting water. The competing wind workings – from both sides of the field – created small vortexes, tiny hurricanes that buzzed as they moved and raised old leaves and mulch into the air.
Demetrius watched the infantry go forward, unscathed, and laughed.
‘Oh, Pater. How I wish you’d been here to see this.’
Wilful Murder stood a few feet behind the Red Knight, who had now dismounted and taken his place: at the centre of the line, with the banner.
The line didn’t shuffle. The lance points projecting from the pages in the fourth rank wavered – it took real strength to hold a heavy spear this long. And the archers moved. The order had come down to cease fire, but every man had a dozen livery arrows stuck point down in the ground by his back foot.
The enemy spearmen – the same hard bastards who’d almost pounded them at Liviapolis – were coming in untouched by long-range archery while the warlocks and sorcerers fought it out in the air over his head. The Captain had a pair of glowing shields – one of the reasons Wilful liked to be the Captain’s archer was that in battle he was covered by the Captain’s sorcerous crap.
When the fireball detonated, it was right on top of them. Wilful cringed away – and in the moment after it imprinted itself on his retinas, he patted his forehead and his arms. Then he laughed at the smell.
‘Someone pissed their pants!’ he called.
Rough laughter. The Captain turned his helmeted head. ‘That was just an illusion. There will be more.’
His eyes glowed red. The enemy spearmen were about a hundred Alban cloth yards away.
Bent roared, ‘Nock!’
I need you to get closer to Aeskepiles.
Harmodius had been decorously silent since his last burst of humour. The Red Knight had begun to hope – or fear – that the entity was gone. His words were immediately followed by a spike of pain, as if a sword thrust had gone in between his eyes.
Nothing I can do about that just now, old man.
In the palace, things were calm, and Harmodius stood decorously, younger than ever, like a page waiting to serve. He had the Fell Sword in his hand. Aeskepiles has increased in power – again. He has access to something, or someone. He’s swatting my wind workings around like a child killing moths, and-
I knew it was mistake to send Mag away.
You said yourself – only Mag can guarantee the safety of our women. Now let me take over.
Don’t keep hold of my body when I need to be fighting. Oh – Harmodius, the pain.
Never fear, boy. I’m leaving you soon. I promise. We need to get closer to Aeskepiles. Sweet saviour, where did he get all that power?
Harmodius took control of the Red Knight’s body. Without the other presence as an intermediary, he could cast more quickly – more cleanly. And he’d had six months to prepare for this moment. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get there.
‘Loose!’ roared Bent.
The front-rank knights and men-at-arms knelt. The archers leaned forward and loosed. At this range, their shafts had a travel time of about four heartbeats and required very little loft.
Bent was shooting needle point bodkins, cut square, sixpence a head from Master Pye in Cheapside. Hardened steel. The heads were five fingers long and tapered away to a wicked point like an ice pick. He chose his target carefully – the banner man in the front rank. Scale armour, and a magnificent gold helmet. Plate arms and legs.
The arrow weighed three Alban ounces and flew almost two hundred feet in a second. The head struck one finger to the outside of its target’s shield and passed through a bronze scale and between two iron scales beneath – through the elk hide base, through a layer of linen, through a finger of tightly packed sheep’s wool, through a second layer of linen canvas. Through a thin linen shirt.
Through skin into fat, and through fat to muscle. To bone. Slid along the bone almost half a finger and then into fat – and more muscle.
The man fell. The heavy banner fell forward, and twenty hands reached to pluck it up. But the arrow had not arrived alone-
Bent’s second arrow was on his bow before the first pierced the banner man’s heart. And his third . . .
Fourth . . .
The space between the centres of the two armies was a blizzard of archery, and all the shafts went in one direction. On the Red Knight’s left, Demetrius held back his mercenary cavalry for the death stroke – so that the ground in front of the Nordikans was empty.
They began to advance. At a shouted order, three hundred guardsmen raised their axes, screamed a shrill and very ancient cry, and started forward at the distant enemy cavalry. The Nordikans were packed so tightly that the man on the right of the line was scraping his magnificent gilded shield against the man-high stone wall of the main Liviapolis-Lonika road at his left shoulder. The Nordikans were only two deep and their line moved with a kind of supernatural precision. Each one of them had a heavy throwing spear – a lonche – with a head that weighed almost a pound, often inlaid in silver or gold or both, the shaft covered in gilded runes, the point of the best steel, blued, running out to a needle. Most of them also had a pair of darts behind their shields – lead weighted, on two-foot shafts. A practised man could hurl them eighty paces.
Fifth-
Sixth-
The Nordikans passed the end of the company line and continued forward, with Darkhair calling time in his own language. His voice had an eerie singing quality to it that rose over the vicious humming of the arrow shafts and the screaming that came from the spearmen.
The enemy spearmen came on through the hail of bodkins and broad heads, despite heavy losses.
The Red Knight was singing in High Archaic, and he had three different moving shields – one lavender, one a very heraldic red, one a blinding gold.
Directly across the field from him was an unarmoured man on a tall grey horse who also wore a succession of shields – green, purple, lavender, red, black. The black shield rose in response to a bolt of levin that came across the field like a cavalry charge. The black absorbed the lightning and it returned precisely down its line of attack.
And met a buckler of the same black stuff – a small shield not much bigger than the palm of a man’s hand, precisely focused.
The bolt spat back – to strike the front rank of the spearmen, where a man exploded, his guts emerging as superheated steam and boiled meat. A second man was killed by a piece of his skull.
Seventh shaft.
Eighth.
To the Red Knight’s right, the Vardariotes swept forward at the Thrakian peasant infantry until they were less than fifty paces away from the charging mass, and began to loose their own, lighter, cane shafts. Three hundred Vardariotes spread out across the flat plain and emptied their first quivers into men who could not make a reply. And as they charged faster in brave desperation, sprinting at the hornets stinging them with arrows, the Vardariotes slipped away – turning and riding a few paces and loosing another shaft at a range too close for a veteran to miss.