The Red Knight полностью

One Leg and Three Legs and the trebuchet and the top third of the great North Tower vanished in a flash of light. The explosion that followed destroyed every window in the fortress – the stained glass of the saints became a hurricane of coloured shrapnel.

Father Henry, head down behind the altar below the great window, had his back flayed bloody. His robes were all but ripped from his body although his head and arms were covered. He screamed.

The captain reached into his palace and drew power through the ring.

He had the charred cloth in his gauntlet, where he couldn’t lose it in the dark, and he funnelled the power through it.

Four feet beneath the duck boards at the base of his trench, beneath the boglin horde, ten fuses sprang alight.

Above him, in the fortress, a single massive pulse of power ripped through the night air – the concatenation almost cost him his seat on Grendel.

But the fuses were lit, and now-

Now it was a hundred long heartbeats to Armageddon.

He had reached the base of the slope and now he followed the path between the first of the blue lights across the rubble to the town’s back gate. Grendel couldn’t move quickly here, and this was the weakest part of the whole plan. If he could see Thorn then Thorn would see him. Indeed, the whole point was that Thorn should see him. And yet even now, the daemons were starting to shift. They must already know that their trap was in the wrong place. And the huge shapes around the enemy were new.

Thorn had already struck the trebuchet, and destroyed it.

We’re too late.

He was halfway across the town, Grendel was moving at a trot, and one bad step on rubble and he would be down. The risk was insane.

Fifty heartbeats.

He turned in the saddle and looked back. Tom was right behind him, and the sound of the column of knights filled the darkness robbed of other sound by the force of the explosion.

He rose in his stirrups as Grendel stepped over a downed roof beam – the blue lights seemed to ripple – and then he was over the outer wall and in the field. Bad Tom passed the wall right behind him, and they reined in together.

He turned Grendel and pointed his muzzle at the horned figure, now at eye level, just two hundred paces away across the plain. Behind him, his sortie shook out into a wedge as they got free of the tumble of rocks and roof tiles that had been a town. In the dark.

The captain thought, Damn, we’re good.

He raised his right arm, lance and all. He used a little power to light the tip of his lancehead – not just light it, but make it burn like a star.

He swept his lance down.

Grendel gave a little start, and went from a stand to a gallop in three strides, as if they were in a tiltyard.

Thirty heartbeats.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched the dark sun come at him, and he waited with a curious mixture of elation and loathing for the misshapen thing. It was like a man, but it was not like a man. He was some odd fusion of man and Wild. He might have pitied it, but he hated it, as well – because its fusion was different from his.

It was coming, just as his secret friend said it would. But not by the path it had said it would take. That meant the secret friend was compromised.

And that meant . . .

The dark sun held a power that shouted itself to every Wild creature on the battlefield.

This was his first clear look at the thing, and Thorn felt a tingle – not of fear, precisely. But in that creature was something that bellowed a challenge to him. Like a vast predator roaring defiance across the swamps of the Wild. And every Wild creature felt that call. Some flinched from it. Some were attracted to it.

That was the Way of the Wild.

. . . and so the dark sun must be a creature of the Wild, and that meant-

It was too fast. Thorn’s discovery came very, very late. He had allowed himself to ponder the thing’s creation for long thuds of his great, slow heart, and in that time the man had crossed the ruins of the Lower Town like a dhag – so fast that even as his hidden ambush of daemons sprang from their concealment and raced to save him they were already too late to strike a blow. The wedge of knights was past them.

Something was slowing him!

Bitch he roared in his head. She was working her will on him-

He shook himself free of her enchantment, even as-

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

He put his spurs to Grendel – just a pressure of the pricks to the sides, so that the great horse knew not to stint. This was the great effort.

Thorn was standing facing the fortress, and his bodyguard of misshapen horrors were shoulder to shoulder holding massive bill hooks and spiked clubs, wearing armour of wood and leather. They glowed, not with the healthy summer green of Thorn’s workings but with a sickly putrescent colour.