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.
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.