The Fell Sword (95 page)

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.

Aeskepiles’
aethereal
form appeared. He was a big man with a black beard and a scowl, and two heavy black cords ran out of his forehead and away into
aethereal
space.

Begone! he snapped.

Harmodius smiled.

I am the lion, he said. And severed the chains that powered . . . something.

There was a mighty crash.

Aeskepiles – obviously panicked, even here – raised a wand of iron.

It won’t make any difference, Harmodius said. But that’s a bad way to go, loosing destruction inside your own head.

He stepped forward.

Who are you? demanded the sorcerer. How can this happen?

I am the lion, Harmodius said, and used his Fell Sword to destroy the sorcerer’s soul in a single cut.

Then he opened himself a little, and collapsed the dead man’s memory palace, appalled at the waste of energy and potential as the whole of a behemoth spell-working drained away into the
aether
and the real. He worked fast, scraping it away as a nomad woman scrapes a hide clean of fat.

And then he unpacked his own, neatly. He’d had plenty of time to practise, and it spooled out of his soul into the clean space. Some things fitted oddly. Some things might never be quite the same.

Harmodius remembered his first rooms, when he was a student in Harndon. They didn’t match his furniture. But they were his own.

The two black ropes that had been attached to the magister’s
aethereal
forehead remained, dangling, and as his own memory palace materialised around him, they transformed into the black pupil of a golden eye. A golden eye the size of a door.

‘Ahhh,’
said a deep and pleasant voice.
‘I see. I thought you were dead.’

The eye blinked.
‘You will not triumph,’
the voice said, as if this was the best of news.
‘But I grant you, this was clever.’

The sword flicked, and the eye vanished.

And Harmodius stood and shook in the midst of his new home.

When it was too late to matter, and all was lost, Ser Christos stood amidst the rout of his wing and readied his lance.

The Green Hillmen were the Thrakians ancient foes. They knew each other well. They stood shoulder to shoulder against the Wild, and they hacked one another to pieces over their borders.

The enemy was mostly afoot – big men in ring mail like the Nordikans, and just as ferocious. And they flowed like a tide. And Ser Christos cursed, because on another day, on an open field, he’d have rolled these arrogant clansmen up like a carpet.

But today his men could not fight in two directions at once, and they folded. And in truth, Ser Christos thought, fitting his lance in its rest, in truth, none of them believed it was worth dying for Demetrius, anyway.

One man amidst his adversaries was mounted: a giant man on a giant horse. Ser Christos knew the fate that awaited him, to be executed as a traitor, and determined to give his son a different view of his end.

He put his spurs to his horse.

The armoured giant saw him, and flicked his lance tip – an acknowledgement? And came at him. His horse’s hooves skimmed the ground, the sun had melted the surface of the road, and the movement of thousands of men tore the turf down into mud. But he and his enemy were on the road.

He gave his war cry, and his lance came down.

So did his opponent’s, and the man roared, ‘Lachlan for aa!’ and inside his helm, Ser Christos smiled.

They came together like a clap of thunder.

Ser Christos’s lance head went through the giant’s shield, piercing two layers of oxhide and the carefully laid-up panels of elm underneath – into the mail that guarded the big man’s armpit, which it pierced. His lance
bowed
and snapped in three places.

Lachlan’s lance struck him full on the shield, and broke it to pieces, and shattered, but the shortened stump of his lance struck the Morean knight’s shoulder and slammed him back in his saddle, and the force of the their meeting knocked both horses back on their haunches. Ser Christos’s horse was first to recover, and it scrambled away. The bigger horse bit at it savagely while both knights struggled to draw their swords and stay mounted.

The horses circled. Lachlan was bleeding from his right armpit. The Morean suspected that something was broken in his collarbone. He got his sword free and slammed it into the big man’s helmet with no obvious effect; a good blow, but nowhere near enough.

Lachlan reeled, and then got his sword free in time to stop a cut to his neck.

For ten heartbeats, both men exchanged blows as fast as their arms could drive their weapons. Sparks flew, and both men were hurt.

Lachlan’s stallion planted an iron-shod forefoot on Ser Christos’s mount’s right front leg, and it snapped. And his horse began to go down. He ignored the pain, reached out left-handed and locked his gauntlet over Lachlan’s sword wrist. Then his horse toppled, taking both men with him.

By this time, Ser Christos was the last of Demetrius’s men still fighting for a hundred paces in all directions. Men paused – those bent on taking ransoms, or leaning on blood bespattered axes and swords – to watch.

Men who had just surrendered paused and looked.

The two combatants rose together, and Ser Christos planted his pommel hard against Lachlan’s helmet, so that the bigger man’s head snapped back. Bad Tom retreated a step and his blade snapped forward, staggering the smaller man.

They circled. Lachlan was bleeding from armpit and a hand, and had blood running from beneath his aventail. Christos had only one hand on his sword hilt, now, and blood was running down his left cuisse. He changed guard, rotating on his hips and putting his sword on the left side of his body, point back.

The Hillmen were chanting. Ser Christos had no idea what they were chanting, but he was determined to beat this one man, regardless of the cost. Or he would die trying.

When Lachlan cut at him, a monstrous, overhand cut that seemed to ignore the wounds he’d taken, Ser Christos cut up, into the blow, one-handed.

Lachlan’s strike was stopped.

The two teetered, sword to sword, for half a heartbeat.

Quick as a viper, Lachlan reversed his sword and drove his pommel at Ser Christos’s face. The Morean knight raised his hands to defend himself.

Lachlan passed his pommel over his opponent’s sword arm, locking it down. Then he passed his blade over the Morean knight’s head, using the anchored pommel as a pivot, so that he had Ser Chritos’s arms pinned against him in the prison of his body and his sword, crushing the man’s throat.

It happened so fast that Christos could only struggle, trying to wedge his blade against the giant’s crushing grip. He released his sword, the world dimming, and grabbed for his dagger.

The giant swept his feet from under him, so he was suspended in the air.

‘Yield,’ roared Tom Lachlan. ‘Gods, that was glorious!’

Ser Christos coughed. And subsided to the ground.

Bad Tom flipped open his visor and breathed like a bellows. His kerns were gathering over the downed knight. ‘Don’t kill this loon!’ he snapped. ‘I want him.’

Demetrius didn’t wait for his army to collapse. As soon as he saw the coward Aeskepiles turn his horse and bolt from the field – headed west, of all foolish ideas – Demetrius saw how the wind was blowing.

To the east, by the Lonika road, the mercenary knights had been decimated by a hermetical attack and were now breaking away from the remnants of the Nordikans. The centre was shattered – there was a palpable
hole
in the middle of his father’s veteran spear block and the Alban mercenaries were pouring through it. His father’s most trusted veterans were throwing down their weapons and kneeling in surrender.

And to the west instead of his Easterners, enemies had appeared.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

Dariusz shrugged, as if the whole subject wearied him.

Surrounded by his Guard, he rode south.

‘Gabriel!’

The Red Knight reined up and waited for the spike of pain in his forehead, but it didn’t come.

‘
Harmodius?’

‘I go my own way now. This field is yours – you’ll want to stop the killing as soon as you can.’

‘Tom will be outraged.’

‘I may not see you again. As Master Smythe suspected, Aeskepiles was a tool just as Thorn is. Ash is using them. One of the First. I have done something morally dark. I wish to ask a favour. I think, despite using your body for months, that you owe me.’

Gabriel knew – almost intuitively – what must have happened. Because there was no more lightshow.

‘You have taken Morgan Mortirmir’s body,’ he said.

‘No. That option presented itself, and represents a temptation which, thankfully, I resisted. I took Aeskepiles’body. In fact, I AM Aeskepiles. He is not.’

‘And your favour?’ Gabriel asked.

‘Don’t pursue me. Our goals are the same.’

Gabriel looked carefully at his mentor. ‘You have made a dark choice.’

‘
In a good cause.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘I will not pursue you.’

Harmodius extended an
aethereal
hand. ‘You will be very powerful now. Mortirmir – when he regains his wits – will eventually be even more so. With Mag and Amicia and some other allies you may still not last any longer than a candle in a rainstorm against our true foe. But you must try.’ The old man’s
aethereal
form shrugged. ‘You have a sort of ferocious luck that gives me hope.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘Thanks for the good rede, old man.’ He reached out, and the two embraced in the
aether
– a gesture of trust in that environment beyond the imagining of many practitioners.

‘Where are you going?’ Gabriel asked.

Harmodius paused. ‘Best you don’t know, lad. Desperate times, desperate measures.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve left you a set of my guesses as to what is going on.’ He handed over a scroll – an
aethereal
scroll, a concept that made Gabriel’s head ache.

‘Go with God,’ Harmodius said.

And then Gabriel was truly alone.

There is a point in a savage action where no prisoners can be taken; where men are too afraid, or too committed to destruction, to give mercy.

But there is another point, where both sides near exhaustion. Then, in sheer fatigue, it is possible to see past the fear and the blood rage.

When one of the captains of Andronicus’s veterans held out his sword by the blade Ser Michael saw it. He took the hilt and raised it – both arms high, armpits open to an attack. ‘They yield!’ he roared.

It took time. For the last man hacked down between Kelvin Ewald and Wilful Murder, it took too much time. Some men in closed helmets couldn’t hear. Other men couldn’t see.

As the surrender spread, some of the Nordikans had to be physically restrained. Ser Milus had a dent put in his helmet by Harald Derkensun, who was determined to wipe knights – all knights – from the face of the earth. Blackhair lay dead between his feet, pierced through with a mercenary’s lance.