The Fell Sword (93 page)

Bent raised his war bow with his eleventh arrow. Experience told him he wasn’t getting in his twelfth. He leaned out over Ser Jehan’s shoulder in a rhythm that the two of them knew as well as old lovers know the rhythm of their lovemaking – his bow arm well past the knight’s right shoulder, his hip against the knight’s hip – and shot a veteran of twenty battles just below the bridge of his nose, where the nasal of his helmet stopped.

Bent tossed his bow up and back, over his right shoulder. It would land on the frozen, untilled earth about fifteen feet behind him and he’d find it again if he lived. He passed back a rank, leaving the squire in front of him and the spear of the page passing over his shoulder.

He drew a hand and a half sword from his belt – forty days’ pay – and took the buckler off the hilt. And braced his left shoulder against the squire’s.

Ser Jehan raised the head of his pole-axe by a distance of about a foot.

Morgan Mortirmir stood in the front rank, terrified. His armour weighed like lead on his limbs, and the spearmen looked like evil gods of war, carrying his doom.

The Red Knight had ordered him to maintain a shield over the whole of the front, and he did so. Well warned, he let the illusions crash among them, although he himself didn’t always see the workings as genuine until they were too late.

Stop this one.

Mortirmir threw effort into the pale gold of his shield. Fire roared all along the front of his corner of the battle, and licked both over and under his working. Frozen grass caught fire. He let it burn. The spearmen were closer, the noise was alien and suffocating, and he was desperate to escape the confines of his helmet. He couldn’t see anything beyond the hard eyes of the killers opposite him – almost close enough to touch.

His squire – a hard-eyed bastard provided him by Ser Michael – put his shoulder against Mortirmir’s back. ‘Get ready, ser!’

Mortirmir had decided to fight with sword and buckler. He set his feet.

‘Close yer fucking visor, ser,’ his squire said. A gauntleted hand slammed his visor down so hard he almost fell.

He looked through the slits and saw—

The spearhead came for him, trying reap his life, and caught on his chain aventail. He did nothing to parry it – it cut through the aventail, popping rings at their rivets. But the aventail was too big for the fifteen-year-old ‘man-at-arms’ anyway and the spearhead punched past him, over his shoulder, creasing his round shoulder pauldron and wrenching his shoulder in a way he’d remember in a hundred nightmares.

Mortirmir’s training took hold. His buckler flicked out and the steel boss slipped along the spearshaft. He nudged the point of the blade into line.

Phontia!
he said.

The spearman burst into flame inside his scale shirt, so that for a moment his face appeared to be that of a daemon from hell.

The old man had told him to remain on the defence. That was, he could see, a recipe for disaster. He pushed into the dead man’s place, the smell of burning meat strong in his nostrils even through his visor, and pointed the sword again. He put a quarter of his
potentia
into a single simple working.

Well, not so very simple.

A ball of fire has to emerge from somewhere. Fire, as an element, was parasitic – fire never exists without a source. The source is the hard part – creating the source of a ball of fire requires time and patience and practice. It is much easier if the caster works the source close to himself and much harder if he attempts to do it at a distance – hence, most battlefield casters worked up a heavy shield and then made the ball of fire, fuelled by wood or various gases, appear at arm’s length, and then, when they had a satisfactory pyrotechnic, they would move it as they might throw a heavy object. Except worked in the
aethereal
, of course.

This is where education was often a limiting factor on power. A young practioner who has been shown how to create coal oil is far more dangerous than one who has only learned to create beeswax.

A young practioner who has linked to Harmodius has access to a world of substances beyond the ken of most magisters. Rarefied alchemical creations. After all, an hermeticist who knew alchemy need only make a substance in real
once.

Mortirmir’s fireball burned so hot as it ignited six feet in front of him that he flinched away, almost lost his hermetic shield, and lost control of the fire. It drifted away. Then it vanished with a pop as he lost the fine control of his source.

Forty close-packed spearmen were incinerated. The left front corner of the enemy phalanx collapsed.

Ser Michael, who commanded the rightmost battle in the company, pointed his pole-axe – one-handed – at the charred ruin. ‘At them!’ he roared.

Aeskepiles had ridden his horse closer and closer to the point of impact – so that as the spearmen slowed, aimed and thrust with their spear points and the sound of their impact on the armour of his enemies exploded, he arrived at a point just fifty paces from the combat. He was secure behind the centre.

The closer two magisters were, the less able either was to deflect the castings of the other. At fifty paces—

An enormous ball of white-hot fire appeared to his left. He hadn’t felt it cast and hadn’t
seen
the caster.

As fast as the flash of terror that rippled through his system – making his horse shy as his spurred heels bit into her sides – he spat five words in the
aether.

The Red Knight felt the old man leave him as the breaking of a fever and the loss of an unwelcome memory. He wanted to say something. If only to know the man was gone for good.

But the enemy spearmen were two spear lengths away. Cully and Wilful Murder tossed their bows aside and slid back through the ranks – Toby, who fought with a heavy spear, slid it over his head. He raised his ghiavarina. He’d never used it in combat.

He was alone, and the headache was gone.

He took a deep breath. Rotated his hips back. He had the spear, head up, in the spear guard called
dente di cinghiaro
. As his opponent’s spear came at him – a long, committed thrust – he cut down into it. His blow should have batted the heavy spear
down
and safely away. Instead, his magnificent, dragon-gifted weapon cut
through
his opponent’s spearhead. The truncated, blunt iron end slammed into his helmet, knocking him backward. The force of his cut, which should have been dissipated on his adversary’s shaft, sent the head of the ghiavarina deep in the ground at his feet.

He ripped it free, stepped forward, and slammed it into his opponent’s head before he was even over the shock of its effect. But it didn’t
slam
into his opponent’s helmet. It sheared through it, severing the helmet’s top four fingers and one finger of the man’s skull so cleanly that for a half a heartbeat, brains, skull, arming hood, mail and helmet were a series of concentric circles like some wild nomadic art.

Another spear struck his left pauldron and bounced up and over his shoulder, and a third slammed into his breastplate, but Toby’s shoulder in his back kept him on his feet and he struggled to recover from his surprise.

Toby saved his life as an enemy second ranker got a hand on the haft of his weapon – the haft didn’t seem to have any special properties – and reached for him with a wicked dagger. It flashed past the bottom of his vision, limited behind his visor, and he felt the blow only as pressure.

Toby rammed his short spear into the man’s head. His skull went backwards, Toby passed his knight, stepped long, rotated the spear end for end and pushed the iron at the base of the shaft into the man’s aventail and crushed his throat.

The two sides were stable – pushing at each other. Here and there, men fought, but this was what older veterans called
the press.
A deadly shoving match, where the cost of failure was rout and death. The spearmen were deeper. The company had better armour.

There was a titanic flash of yellow-white light in the Red Knight’s right peripheral vision.

He tapped Toby with his right gauntlet – not trusting his weapon – and the squire pivoted on his hips, parried a last thrust from their new opponent, and passed back. The Red Knight got his body low and set his feet wide. And cut – small passes. All as precise as dagger flicks. He severed the spear shaft pressing at him, and severed a man’s hand at the wrist with the kind of motion that a man might use when fishing.

Then, as his next adversary stumbled back, hand severed and cauterised, the Red Knight stepped forward and swung.

Spears were severed. Men fell forward as they lost the support of their weapons pinned against opponents in the press.

He cut again, as if his sword-like long spearhead was a huge axe, carried by a giant Nordikan.

Everything the spearhead touched was cut – armour, leather, wood, and flesh.

A hole, the width of his swing, opened in the enemy phalanx.

He stepped forward again, and swung at five cringing men. Two died.

The weapon lodged deep in the body of the third. He pulled – and a spear shaft struck him in the back. Desperate, he wrenched at the thing and it slid out like any weapon, shimmering blue red in the spring sunlight.

Whatever properties it had had were used up. And he was six steps deep in the enemy phalanx.

Blows began to fall on him like hail, and he was driven to his knees by a crashing, two-handed blow by a desperate man wielding a spear shaft like a two-handed flail.

The press closed around him.

Another man stripped his weapon from his hands – they were all around him, too close – but he got his right hand on his new dagger hilt and flicked it out.

And then it was just the fighting.

In full plate, he was lighter and more mobile then his adversaries in calf-length chain and scale. They had heavy shields and long spears – some were discarding them and others were not – and as they pressed him down, he burst into the frenzied routines his father’s master-at-arms had taught him since boyhood. He caught the right arm of the man who had stripped his spear, rolled him, broke his arm and stabbed him in his unarmoured neck below his ear. Grabbed the next man, slamming his steel fist into the unprotected face, caught his shoulders and used the point of his beaked visor to smash the man’s teeth even while his steel sabatons mangled the man’s feet and shins. Blows fell on his back – on his right shoulder, exposed in the melee – two blows so hard they moved his whole body and struck his helmet. He was dazed.

His hands and feet kept killing. He kicked a spearman between the legs, the steel point of his sabaton crushing the man’s testicles even as he held the man’s spear – his right arm shot out, and the hardened steel flange of his own elbow joint ripped the nose from the face of another spearman who was trying to climb his back.

His left leg was caught in something. It threatened his balance, and he was fighting so many men he had no time to spare to free it.

He knew, with awful clarity, that he was going down. The loss of balance was incremental. He got his dagger, point down, into a man’s scale-protected back – and the triangular point punched through like an awl through hardened leather.

He tried to use the dagger as a sort of climbing iron to hold himself erect.

Then something gave in his left knee.

Damn it. I tried
, he thought, and down he went.

The mercenary cavalry watched the madmen come at them. It was a well-known fact that infantry cannot charge cavalry – that it was suicide to do so.

They came on anyway.

The lead knight – a Southerner from distant Occitan – pointed his lance. ‘Sweet friends,’ he said, in the language of romance. ‘These are brave men and worthy foes. If they want a contest—’ He smiled. ‘Let us give them their wish.’

He reached up and closed his visor – tossed his head to make sure his great helm was firmly seated in his steel cap. Lowered his lance into his rest. ‘For Saint James!’ he roared.

The mercenaries were not all from Occitan, and a polyphony of war cries emerged. The knights lowered their lances and rumbled towards the axe-wielding madmen.

The moment of impact was like an explosion of flesh. Axes severed the front legs of warhorses even as lances punched through layered byranies. A generation of Nordikans died in the front rank – a fifth of their number reaped by death in a single instant.

The survivors didn’t flinch. The great axe heads swept up again. The horses fought – hooves flashed – and in the centre four friends stood together, the axes had hewn two horses to the ground and the other horses couldn’t get past them. That firm point in the centre of the Nordikan line became like the prow of a ship in a storm.

As the knights slowed, their horses became more vulnerable. Lances were dropped, swords swept out.

No shield on earth can stop an axe wielded by a man as tall as your horse. And even when your hardened plate stops the
cut
of the weapon, the force of the blow can still rip you from your saddle.

But while the murderous giant shifts his weight and sweeps the axe up for another crushing blow, he is very vulnerable.

Great men died. Knights and warriors, veterans of a dozen wounds, died in heartbeats, without even knowing their killers.

The horses pressed on. And the Nordikans stumbled back.

The Thrakian peasants broke.

They’d lasted longer than anyone had a right to expect, their bravest men running at a full sprint after the laughing Vardariotes, and dying with carefully aimed arrows in their bodies. The best were killed, and the hesitant and the slow were left. In the end, like scavengers beaten off a corpse, they turned and ran.

The Vardariotes – old hands at this kind of fight – had allowed themselves to retreat all the way back to the stone outbuildings of the isolated farm. They rallied, and changed quivers, and let the remaining Thrakian peasants live.

Count Zac counted the horses. He had lost one man.

‘Where’s Khengiz?’ he called.

‘Girth snapped!’ an avildahr called out. Men laughed.