One of the boglin chiefs stood at his side, his milk-white chiton all but glowing in the setting sun.
‘Tell your people that they will feast. Anything they catch is for their own.’
Exrech saluted with a sword. He released a cloud of vapour – part power and part scent. And then he was away, racing loose-limbed up the ridge with boglins following like a brown tide at his heels.
West of Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain tried to be the last man, shoving his flagging pages along before him by force of will, but the weaker among them were used up. One, a little plumper than he ought to have been, stopped to breathe hard.
The enemy were fifty paces away. Closer with every heartbeat.
‘Run!’ roared Tom.
The boy threw up, looked behind him and froze.
A boglin paused and shot him with an arrow.
He screamed and fell, kicking, into his own vomit.
Tom heaved the writhing boy over his shoulders and ran. His sword licked out – caught an irk in the top of the knee, and the thing screamed and fell, clutching at the wound.
The captain paused – they were trying to surround him. He punched at the nearest and impaled him, took two cuts on his leg armour, and suddenly it had been worth it to wear the stuff all afternoon.
There were, in moments, hundreds of boglins. They seemed to boil up out of the ground in terrifying numbers. They moved like ants and covered the forest floor as fast as he could back away. Their armoured heads rose above his knight’s belt.
Behind him, he heard a trumpet call and Cuddy’s voice, as clear as on parade, called ‘Nock! And Loose!’
The captain was still on his feet, but there was a sharp pain in his left thigh where a boglin was trying to sink its jaws into his flesh, and his legs were all but immobilized by the press of creatures when something reached for his soul through the aether.
He panicked.
He couldn’t see. The brown boglins were everywhere, clamping onto him, and he wasn’t fighting anymore, he was just trying to keep his feet, and the pressure of the phantasm was bearing down harder and harder on his soul.
Then, even through his helmet and his fear, he could hear the hiss of the warbow arrows, like the fall of vicious sleet.
The arrows hit.
Three of them hit him.
West of Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn paused at the top of the ridge to watch the last moments of the raiding party. The boglins weren’t as fast as the irks, but the irks were running the enemy down. The tide of boglins would finish the fight.
Any fight.
He prepared a casting, gathering the raw force of nature to him through a web of half-rational portals and paths.
At the base of the ridge, one of the fleeing raiders paused.
Thorn reached out for him, grasped him and felt his will slip off the man like claws around a stone.
And then fifty enemy archers stood up from concealment, and began to fill the air with wood and iron.
West of Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain was hit more than a dozen times more. Every strike was like being kicked by a mule. Most fell on his helmet, but one ripped across his inner thigh, cutting through his hose and his braes. He was blind with pain, dazed by the repeated impacts.
But he was armed cap a pied in hardened steel armour, and the boglins trying to kill him were not.
When every one of Cuddy’s archers had loosed six shafts, the v-shaped space between the arms of the ambush was silent. Nothing was left alive.
Cuddy ordered his men forward to collect their shafts as the captain raised his visor, aware that there was still something-
At the top of the hill, the figure of horror stepped out where they could all see him, and raised his arms-
He still functioned through the panic because he’d been afraid so damned often he was used to it now.
The captain touched Prudentia’s hand. Above his head, the three great levels of his palace spun like gaming wheels.
Don’t open the door! Prudentia said. He’s right there!
Faced with imminent immolation, the captain opened the door.
There was an entity of the Wild. Right outside the door to his mind.
He made a long, sharp dagger of his will and punched it into the entity, leaning out through the door to do so.
Prudentia caught him.
The door slammed shut.
‘You’re insane,’ she said
In the world the great figure stumbled. It didn’t fall, but the intensity of its gathered power stumbled with it. And dissipated.
‘To horse!’ he captain roared. Behind the monstrous figure on the ridge he could see thrashing tentacles approaching and fresh hordes of monsters.
The massive thing, like two twin trees, reared up and a flash of green fire covered the hillside. It fell shorter than it might have, or more men might have died, but archers were reduced to bones – a page burned green like a hideous barn-lamp for three heartbeats before vanishing – and dozens of wounded creastures on the ground were immolated as well.
Behind him, men were mounting – pages and archers hurried horses to their riders. This was their most practised movement; escape.
But the captain’s sense of the enemy was that he’d get one more gout of fire in.
He got a leg over Grendel’s saddle and
Passed back into the palace.
‘Shield, Pru!’ he called. He pulled raw power from the sack hanging on her arm as the sigils turned above them – Xenophon, St George, Ares.
The first spell any magister learned. The measure of an adept’s power.
He made a buckler, small and nimble, and threw it far forward, into his adversary’s face.
Behind him, the corporals ordered men into motion, but they needed no urging, and the company moved away, down the hill.
The captain turned Grendel and rode, running as fast as the heavy horse would allow-
The two-horned thing in the woods reached out with his staff-
The captain’s shield – his very strongest, smallest, neatest casting – vanished like a moth in a forge fire.
The captain felt his shield go – felt it vanish – had a taste of the sheer power of his adversary – but training told.
Quick as a cat pouncing, the captain spun his horse to face the foe and
reached in and cast again – a wider arc to cover horse and rider
The green fire ran across the ground like a rising tide, immolating everything that lay in its path – scarring trees, reaping grass and flowers, boiling squirrels in their own skin. It struck the air in front of Grendel’s chamfron-
It was like watching a sand-castle give way under the power of the waves.
His second shield was weaker, but the green fire had crossed hundreds of paces of ground and its puissance was ebbing – and still it eroded the shield – slowly, and then more quickly as Grendel half-reared in panic, alone in a sea of incandescent green.
He put everything he had – every shred of stored power
He could smell burning leather, and he could see – trees. Upright and black.
Grendel screamed and bolted.
All he wanted to do was sleep, but Cuddy needed reassurance. ‘You was in full harness-’ said the Master Archer.
‘It was the right decision,’ the captain agreed.
‘I can’t believe we hit you so many times,’ Cuddy said, shaking his head. Even as he spoke, Carlus, the armourer and company trumpeter, was working with heat and main strength to get the dents out of the captain’s beautiful helmet.