The Fell Sword

Chapter Seven





North of Liviapolis – The Red Knight

Crossing a river is one of the most complicated and difficult tasks faced by an army and its commander.

Crossing at night isn’t even in the books – the books by Archaics on the art of war that the Red Knight had read and reread as a boy. He thought about them, and reading the strategem while lying full length in front of his mother’s fire – and while she thought he was studying a grimoire.

He smiled.

The company came down to the banks of the Meander out of the mountains, moving quickly. There were guides at every fork in the road, guides at every corner, every gap in the stone walls. The guides were all Gelfred’s men; Amy’s Hob and Rob the Beard and Diccon Browford and young Dan Favour, who was big enough to wear harness and clever enough to be a scout, too. They each had their own pages and archers, now – Amy’s Hob laughed to be considered a leader, but he was patient and cautious and his pages learned scouting quickly enough.

They’d point the column towards its next goal, and then canter away into the darkness, looking for Gelfred, who ran the chain from the back of his horse, a league in front of the Captain, with a small sphere of red mage light perched on the point of his peaked bassinet. Only the men on whom he’d cast his phantasm of sight could see the light. It made him relatively easy to find – by his own scouts, anyway – and allowed him to direct them at speed. Once they rejoined him, he sent each scout to his next guide post. He consulted the chart spread over his high pommel, and he used his not inconsiderable ars magicka to manage all the information brought to him by forty men, pinning their reports into non-dimensional pigeon holes in his memory palace image of the terrain.

Hermeticism and good scouting and a long summer spent in harness kept the company moving through the dark at the speed of a walking horse, across strange roads and through alien country. Because these factors made it look easy, the young sprigs of nobility who made up the new men-at-arms in the company thought that it was easy.

And so the company came down out of the mountains, through the olive groves, and to the banks of the Meander at the speed of a walking horse. Which is to say that they arrived like a thunderbolt.

The company rode up to the top of the ford in a column of fours, with the men-at-arms on their warhorses mounted in the outer files, and the carts, women, archers and pages in two files in the middle. This formation had been practised for two weeks without much explanation.

The Red Knight rode past Ranald Lachlan and a pair of his drovers, who were busy belaying a heavy rope. Lachlan waved. The Red Knight saluted with a smile that was just visible in the strong moonlight. The rain clouds were blowing off.

‘Gelfred?’ he asked. ‘This is a ford?’

Gelfred shrugged. ‘If we were all twice the height of Tom, here, this would be a ford,’ he said. ‘In dry years, they use this. Otherwise, it’s unguarded.’ He met his Captain’s eye in the moonlit dark. ‘Best I could do,’ he said.

We can do it, Harmodius said inside the Red Knight’s head. Almost five feet deep at the deepest point, just past mid-stream.

The Red Knight nodded to his invisible companion. ‘Very well. It’s going to be deep in the middle. My source says five feet.’

‘Sweet Jesus!’ Michael cursed. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, mostly to Gelfred, the only non-swearing man in the company.

‘The wagons will be wet through,’ Gelfred pointed out.

The Red Knight had an apple, and was eating it while watching the river.

‘And it will take time. If we get beat, we won’t get back across in daylight with our baggage,’ he added.

Bad Tom spat. ‘We won’t get beat.’

A dozen men made the horned sign of aversion. Wilful Murder spat and touched the wood of his buckler. Even Ser Jehan looked unhappy.

‘It would certainly be useful to know if the Vardariotes have accepted our offer and left their barracks,’ the Captain said aloud.

Ser Alcaeus winced, but he had no report to offer.

White moonlight fell on glittering armour and well-disciplined horses, who stood calmly; red leather saddles were brown-grey against the dusty grey of the ground and the dark green of the olive trees on either hand. A farmhouse, shuttered tight and dark, lay silent to the right of the road – really no more than a gravel gully between the walls – that led to the abandoned ford. And the moonlight shone down on the river, reflected in ten thousand shards that made a bright white road all the way to the far shore. The effect was so powerful that a simple man might think that the water was shallow.

No one on earth has that much power, boy. Not to walk across the water.

The Captain smiled. He stripped off his gauntlets and rooted in the draw-string pouch sewn to the front of his belt-purse – the one he wore even in armour. He came up with two bone dice.

‘Dice?’ asked Michael.

‘He’s a loon,’ Tom said.

Sauce shook her head.

The Captain stood in his stirrups, rattled the dice in his hand for a moment, and threw them as hard as he could out into the current of the river. If they made a splash, no one heard it.

‘Go,’ said the Captain.

Gelfred nodded and took the scouts across in a mass. Every man – and woman – watched them trot into the ford, up to their fetlocks and then their hocks, and then the horses were swimming – the men soaked – and then the horses were walking again. Rob’s page, Tom Hall, came adrift from his horse in mid-stream, but he kept his head and his horse’s mane, and despite being the smallest he got over and mounted again.

Gelfred flashed the red on his helmet three times, and the Red Knight nodded to his staff.

‘They’re across,’ he said. Among the men-at-arms, only he, Tom, Jehan and Milus could see the red light on Gelfred’s helm. It occurred to the Captain, then and there, that they should all have mage lights – in different colours – for night operations.

I’ll bet the ancients used mage lights.

Harmodius grunted, in an aethereal way. I never bothered with those books – but there are many on war. From the Archaic Empire, and even earlier.

You interest me, old man. The Red Knight looked around. But I need peace for a few hours.

It’s awfully dull in here. But very well. I’m sure you’ll call me when you need me to destroy something, the old man said with some bitterness.

In the strong moonlight he could see all his scouts fanning out across the river.

‘You asleep?’ asked Bad Tom. ‘You look half wode. And yer lips are moving.’

The Red Knight straightened, feeling the weight of command like a belt of lead on his hips. ‘I must be wode. I ride with Mad Tom.’ He looked around at his staff – larger since the spring, with more knights under his direct command. They were his reserve – itself an Archaic concept. Everyone was ready.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said.


Bad Tom laughed, and put spurs to his stallion, who put his steel-horned head down and plodded into the water on the upstream side. As he walked forward into the sluggish, sparkling water, he angled to the left, out and away from the main column.

Fifty men-at-arms mounted on their warhorses walked into the current behind him, in a long single file.

Sauce led fifty more men-at-arms off to the right, downstream.

‘What was that about?’ Cully asked Bent.

Bent shrugged. ‘Cap’n does strange things. You know that.’

Ser Michael leaned in between the two archers. ‘You gentlemen are missing the benefits of a classical education. When he threw the dice, he meant, “the die is cast”. As in, there won’t be any going back.’ He looked at the two senior archers, who stared back at him. Finally, he snorted, turned his horse, and joined Bad Tom’s file in crossing upstream.

‘Could have just said,’ muttered Cully.

‘Arrogant pup,’ agreed Bent.

The crossing took the company less than half an hour, and then they were moving at a cart’s pace along the track on the far side.

There was no crisis, but small emergencies slowed their march. Lis’s cart lost a wheel and had to be repaired. That meant sending up the column for the two wheelwrights that the company retained, and they had to go back down the column with their cart and enlist twenty archers to raise the cart bed. The actual repair was the work of two minutes and a portable anvil, but all together it took longer than crossing the river had.

Twice, the whole column had to halt because Gelfred was unsure of their way in the maze of unmarked roads that criss-crossed the fields of the Morean heartland. The field walls were all at least six feet tall and in many cases twelve feet tall – or rather, aeons of use had sunk the roads six feet into the stony soil, meaning that even a mounted man on a big horse couldn’t see over the walls on either side. The roads themselves were just big enough for a full-sized wagon or three horsemen abreast – sometimes narrower if an old tree grew out into the road bringing the attendant wall with it. Sometimes the old walls had tumbled down into the road and needed to be cleared, and the Captain moved the company’s pioneers – in effect, his peasant labourers – to the head of the column to clear the road as he went.

The Red Knight let Gelfred have his head. The huntsman was better at understanding terrain than anyone else; if he lost his way, it was best to give him time to find it again. So he sat, reining in his frustration as hard as he reined his warhorse, a big gelding with whom he was just beginning to have a warm relationship.

Gelfred rode ahead in person, vanishing into the slate grey. He came back two very long minutes later.

‘I have it,’ he said. ‘My apologies, my lord. Things look different in this light.’ He shrugged. His stress showed clearly on his face.

The Red Knight clapped him on an armoured shoulder. ‘Lead on.’

Gelfred had Amy’s Hob to hand, and his page. ‘Go fetch everyone in – we’re too far west,’ he said. To the Captain, he said, ‘We need to wait until the skirmisher screen is out again.’

The Captain looked at the wolf’s tail of dawn – it was a false dawn, but their time was running out. ‘I misdoubt that we have the time to wait for your men to collect themselves,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to be our own pickets.’

Gelfred nodded. ‘I’ll lead, my lord. You know the risk.’

The Red Knight laughed aloud. ‘We could be ambushed!’ he said. ‘Let’s go. I hear the early bird gets the worm.’

Gelfred winced.

Ranald Lachlan came up level with the huntsman. ‘Why is he so f*cking cheerful in the morning? But it could be worse – he could be blaspheming.’

Gelfred sighed. ‘I take your point,’ he muttered, and turned his horse’s head.

Unfortunately their troubles weren’t over.

With no scouts, there was no one to move early farmers off the road. And so it was, as they came to a major crossroads somewhere within a mile of their goal, they found the entire intersection filled from wall to wall with sheep. Hundreds of sheep.

The two shepherds were mounted on ponies, directing a dozen dogs with whistles and shaken staffs. Gelfred’s Archaic wasn’t up to the altercation. And the intersection was blocked as completely as it would have been if a company of armoured spearmen were standing on the same ground. Worse, the warhorses hated having the sheep close in among their vulnerable legs.

‘Just kill them and have done with it,’ shouted Bad Tom.

The Captain reached into his belt pouch and rode forward. ‘Toby!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Money!’

In a matter of moonlit moments the shepherds went from from terrified belligerence to eager cooperation. Whips cracked, dogs barked, and the vast, amorphous herd of sheep began to move back along the road and up one of the side roads. The shepherds bowed and called benedictions, and the company was finally free to move. The sky was definitely grey.

Gelfred’s scouts had caught up during the delay and finally they spread out again in front, covering all three branching roads. ‘Almost there,’ Gelfred said. He had gone as grey as the dawn.

‘Can you imagine what this would be like if we had to move and fight?’ asked Michael.

No one answered.

They moved at a trot now that their flanks were secure, and as the sun crested the city in front of them, gilding a hundred church towers each topped with a dome of copper gilt that burned like a new fire in the rising sun – as three thousand monks in fifty monasteries began to chant the hymns that marked the break of a new day – as seventy thousand cocks crowed their relief that the darkness was over – as a quarter of a million people rose to face another day of uncertainty – they reached the main road. It was a circuit road a thousand years old, build from hewn and matched stone, wide enough for six carts to travel abreast, and it ran all the way around the walls from the Gate of the Vardariotes on the eastern shore of the Morean Sea, around nine miles of walls to reach the Royal Gate at the north-west end of the circuit.

The company arrived at its chosen point – where the road dipped into a low vale. There wasn’t a scrap of cover for a long bowshot in any direction, except a single huge oak tree and a small villa well off the road.

The Red Knight didn’t have to dispose of his troops – every section rode to their place as they had practised twice in the last week, and dismounted.

The Red Knight joined hands with Mag the seamstress and Gelfred and the three of them threw a working over the company, and then tossed in a little ground fog at the bottom of the dale. The Captain, aided by Harmodius, placed the whole working inside a deep green peridot, a fine stone he’d picked up from a peddler. A good jewel helped focus a complex casting; the crystal also gave the complex working stability and thus durability.

Half an hour later, Gelfred rode back to the Captain and opened his visor. ‘Nothing behind us, m’lord. They haven’t passed this way.’

Twenty long minutes later, a great black and white eagle the size of a warhorse began to circle overhead.

Ser Alcaeus rode up to the Red Knight. ‘M’lord – that bird is for us. It can’t see through your phantasm. But it will mark our place to any Morean.’

The Captain sighed.

Working with Harmodius, he extracted the working from the jewel. With careful control, he adjusted the casting to open a sight line into the top of the illusion.


The bird spied them and stooped.

He closed the working and replaced it in the jewel. ‘That cost me more than half the working I can do in a day,’ he said sulkily. ‘The next crisis will have to be met the old-fashioned way.’

Alcaeus read the note while every horse within eyeshot shied away from the gigantic bird. ‘The Vardariotes are on the move,’ he said. ‘Last night – after midnight. They are armed and mounted in formation at the Gate of Ares.’

The Captain nodded. ‘Well, we did our part,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ve been too subtle?’

His men had begun to fidget. The sun rose; flies came. Horses grew fractious. The women with the baggage began to talk, and a low mutter came to the command group from the soldiers.

Dan Favour rode in just as the monks in the city began to celebrate matins.

‘Two thousand men,’ he said happily. ‘Less than a mile away.’

The Captain failed to hide his sigh of relief. He grinned ruefully.

‘Of course, we still have to win the fight,’ he reminded them.

The Morean stradiotes came down the road in good order, with a strong vanguard of almost six hundred men, and a hundred Eastern horse bowmen. They were late, and they were moving fast. Their main body was several hundred yards to the rear, almost two thousand horse, no infantry, no baggage. There were no banners, but in the centre of the main body were two great icons, held aloft by strong men on lances.

The Captain dismounted and put his peridot on a rock. Toby handed him a war hammer and stood by, holding his helmet and lance.

‘If we stay here, I’m going to want a straw hat,’ he said. The sun was hot.

The Moreans came at a trot, right along the road. From time to time, groups of Easterners would break off from the column and ride to look at something, but the column was in a hurry, and crossing safe terrain.

When the enemy vanguard was at short bow shot, the Captain raised his hammer and brought it down smartly on the peridot, which blew apart into a thousand tiny green pieces. The complex phantasm collapsed with the death of the stone, allowing every man covered by the working to see clearly.

Whistles sounded, and the archers nocked.

Before the Red Knight had his aventail over his head, the first flight of livery arrows leaped from his archers’ great white bows. Two hundred bowmen loosed five shafts apiece in rapid succession – most men were drawing their last shaft before the first one hit home.

The arrows struck, and the Morean vanguard disintegrated.

A group of horse bowmen who had ridden clear of the column to investigate the farmhouse were greeted by the combined bolts and shafts of all of Gelfred’s scouts. The survivors drew their bows from the cases at their hips and stood in their stirrups to loose, then turned and bolted for the safety of the main body, loosing further shafts over the rumps of their horses.

The battle was not quite two minutes old when the Red Knight stood in his own stirrups and roared, ‘Mount!’

Expecting the order, most of the archers were already up, as were all the men-at-arms – pages scrambled to find their own mounts after passing horses to their men-at-arms and archers. Inexperience showed; the older pages were ahead of the order and the new ones were behind it, and to the left of centre, in Ser Alcaeus’s lances, there was chaos. The Red Knight couldn’t see what was causing it. Nor could he wait.

‘En avant! ’ he called, and his whole company began to move forward in three mounted ranks, men-at-arms in front, pages to the rear.

The Morean vanguard broke. A third of them were down or dead, and they’d done their job – the ambush hadn’t fallen on the main body.

The company closed up and went forward at a trot – the men-at-arms and squires were mailed leg to steel-clad leg, the line almost three hundred yards long. Gelfred’s huntsmen and scouts went wide to the right, angling towards the rear of the column’s main body.

‘Charge me or don’t,’ muttered the Red Knight, inside his helmet. He had the element of surprise but he was still outnumbered three to one; he needed his opponent to lose his nerve.

As if responding to this challenge, the icons in the centre of the enemy column went up and down, and the enemy column began to unroll – very professionally – from a column to a line, companies cantering to the right and left as the line unfolded.

The Red Knight raised his lance. ‘Halt!’ he roared.

The trumpeter made a noise much like a mating moose – twice – but the company knew what to expect. The line halted. They began to dress, the trailing left centre catching up, the wings unbowing, the centre already dismounting.

To the untrained eye, it looked like a disordered mess.

Tom flipped up his visor. ‘We could ha’e just charged them,’ he said.

The Captain shrugged. At his feet, Wilful Murder was handing his horse to Toby’s replacement, Nell, who got five sets of reins in her skinny little fist and led the brutes out of the line. Wilful got his bow in hand, nocked an arrow, looked left and right, and called, ‘Ready!’

The horses were coming out of the ranks.

More ‘ready!’ calls floated along the morning breeze.

The enemy line was almost formed, and the icons were moving up into the centre.

‘They are damned good,’ the Red Knight said.

Wilful Murder shook his head. ‘Pretty, but no plate armour and no infantry?’ he said. ‘It’s the archer’s dream.’ His questing eye found Bent, far to the right – the master archer raised his bow.

Wilful raised his own bow, saw Cully off to one flank and Bent off to the other.

‘Fast as you can, now, boys,’ he said.

And they loosed.

The end of the fight was messy.

The heavy shafts slaughtered the Moreans, whose charge was shattered before it was fully under way. But the Moreans were veterans of hundreds of fights, and if they had never faced such concerted, disciplined longbow fire before, they had good leaders and long experience of both victory and defeat. The shredded Morean line retired out of bow shot, and reformed. Some few of the Morean stradiotes carried Eastern bows, and they returned a few shafts.

‘Mount,’ said the Captain. He had never dismounted himself. He turned to Bad Tom, who was close at his heels. ‘This time we go right over them. I want to end this; we don’t want that force snapping at our heels tonight.’

Tom grinned and motioned at Ranald, who pumped a fist in the air to show his men that this was it.

Wilful Murder demurred. ‘My lord, I’d give ’em another dose of goosefeather before I put my horse’s head at them. They ain’t broke – look at ’em.’

The Captain watched their adversaries reforming. ‘Men are so much more complicated than facing the creatures of the Wild,’ he said. ‘I want to leave as many of them alive as possible. We’re killing our employers’ taxpayers and soldiers.’

The horse holders were getting a workout – little Nell came shoving by. ‘Take your f*cking horse,’ she spat at Wilful, who was standing at the Captain’s horse’s head.

This time Ser Alcaeus’s division was better ordered, and they started forward together.

A hundred paces from the enemy line the Moreans turned and began to ride away, expecting another arrow shower.

‘Charge!’ shouted the Captain.

From a fast trot to a gallop took three strides for a trained horse, and the men-at-arms were off. The trumpeter got the call right, and it rolled on and on – clearly it was the only one he’d really practised.


The Moreans took fifty paces to understand what was happening.

They were out-shot, and out-armoured, and now, all of a sudden, they were going to be out-ridden.

Their discipline came apart. It is almost impossible to rally troops who have already turned their backs on the enemy; it is harder to do it a second time, and even harder when the enemy is already charging with murderous intent. As a result, when the strategos reined in, faced his company about, and launched a counter-charge right at the Red Knight and Mad Tom’s lances, his red and purple clad stradiotes were alone. The rest had scattered, leaning low on their horses’ necks and riding flat out for the safety of the distant hills, or their farms, or the city.

Very few were caught. The heavier Gallish warhorses were lumbering after a hundred paces, and most were down to a canter after two hundred paces.

In the centre, however, the knights came together with the enemy general’s bodyguard with a crash that they could hear in the palace.

The strategos was a small man in heavy scale armour with bright red-dyed hardened leather covering his limbs and hard horn scales over his horse. He couched his lance like a Galle and aimed for the Red Knight, who lowered his own lance in response.

The strategos did not intend a knightly encounter – two paces from impact, his lance dipped, and he plunged his lance tip deep into the Red Knight’s gelding, killing the great animal instantly, but not before the Red Knight’s lance caught in the Morean’s shield rim and ripped him from his saddle. Knight, strategos, and horses all crashed to earth, and the dust rose as the melee spread around them.

Bad Tom unhorsed three Moreans in a row, crushing their leather armour and sending them crashing to the earth until his lance point caught in the mail of his third victim and spiked through it – mail, leather, padded linen, flesh, ribs, and lungs. The man fell, spitted like a capon, and dragged Tom’s lance with him so that the big man had to let it go. He was turning his horse, drawing his great sword, when he realised that his Captain was nowhere to be seen.

He turned his horse back into the rising dust.

The Red Knight got slowly to one knee and wrenched in a breath. The fall had taken him by surprise and he’d screamed as he struck a rock – only his back armour had saved him from a boken hip or spine. His sword was gone, his belt snapped in the fall.

He realised that his purse was under his foot, and his roundel dagger, a knife like a short iron spike, was strapped to it. He got it in his right fist. Then, peering through the dust and the slits of his visor, he searched for his sword as horses pounded past him in both directions and the rising dust choked him. He only had moments – there were hoof beats all around him, and the kettlepot rattling sound of a hundred men in armour beating away at each other with swords.

He pushed with his right leg and got his feet under him. A spike of cold pain pulsed in his right hip.

The Morean strategos came out of the dust like the inevitable villain of a romance. He had a heavy short sword in his right fist and a scarred shield with a beautifully painted figure of the Virgin Mary on his left arm.

‘Yield,’ shouted the Red Knight in High Archaic.

The strategos stopped. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Your army is beaten. Yield.’ The Red Knight flexed his hip carefully like a man testing a bad tooth. It wasn’t good.

No, there’s nothing I can do.

Thanks for that, old man.

A few feet away Ser Jehan hacked one of the icon bearers to the ground, swinging his long sword over and over into the man’s guard until he slipped and took the sword in his unarmoured face.

‘Heretic barbarian!’ the strategos shouted. ‘I am Michael Tzoukes. My ancestors fought the infidel and the irk when yours lived in straw huts and worshipped idols. I will not yield to you.’

The Red Knight sighed and stepped forward into the guard called ‘All gates are iron’. He crossed his wrists, held his dagger reversed in his right hand and grabbed it by the tip with his left. The roundel was a foot and a half long, triangular in cross section, and had steel rounds which neatly filled the top and bottom of his closed and armoured fist, making the hand a single, seamless steel surface to an enemy blade.

The dust of the melee was settling and sight lines were improving. The Moreans were utterly beaten – routed or, in the centre, smashed flat. More than a dozen of the Red Knight’s men-at-arms were closing in on the strategos.

They were still six feet apart. The Red Knight stepped back, tried and failed to open his visor and got a nasty pain in the back of his right leg for his trouble. He had to shout from within his helmet.

‘Stay back,’ he managed.

The strategos looked around him, growled, and leaped. His heavy sword fell like a lightning bolt—

—onto the Red Knight’s crossed hands and the steel bar that was his dagger. Cursing his hip, the Red Knight powered forward, slipped the dagger from his left hand for a moment, caught his opponent’s blade, and rolled on his hips – a sudden and unintended intake of breath and a stumble marked how much pain the hip could cause – before he uncrossed his hands, stripping the sword from the Morean and breaking the man’s elbow in a single fluid movement.

Ruthless to his own hip and to his opponent alike, the Red Knight stepped in again, holding the man by his broken arm, and rolled him – put a foot between his armoured legs and forced him to the ground through pain and the power of his leg lock – against his own steel-clad legs.

‘Yield,’ said the Red Knight, panting with pain and trying his level best to hide it.

‘I yield,’ spat the Morean.

Ser Alcaeus took charge of the Morean prisoners while the archers brutally and efficiently looted the Morean camp. The Captain said they had one hour and none of them intended to leave a single silver solidi behind. Trunks were dumped, clothes slit, tents thrown down.

Ser Alcaeus had the forethought to inform the Captain that the women in the camp were probably the wives of stradiotes and not trulls. The men-at-arms, under Sauce’s command, rounded them up and penned them where the Moreans’ spare horses had, until a few minutes before, been kept. If the women saw this as a merciful release from the threat of rape and violent death, they didn’t show any thanks. Rather they screamed, heckled, and cursed. Luckily, very few of the men-at-arms spoke any Archaic.

The company took all of the carts and animals.

The Captain was almost the only man who was injured. He tried to bite down on the pain, and he soaked up the strong sunlight and filtered through his newfound medical workings, trying to use it to heal the injury, but either he was doing something wrong or it was getting worse.

‘Trust you to find a good fight in the middle of a wasted day,’ said Bad Tom. ‘That was pitiful. I want to go back to fighting the Wild.’

‘Tom, we were outnumbered three to one. What do you want? We surprised them. I doubt we’ll be so lucky again.’ The Captain winced.

‘He put a lance in your horse, eh? Smart.’ Tom grinned. ‘Nasty fall. You weren’t ready for that.’

‘Clean against the laws of chivalry,’ Michael said. ‘Here, I just looted some really good white wine.’

‘I don’t think yon have quite the same laws,’ Tom said.

‘Did you have to break his arm?’ asked Michael.

‘He was trying to kill me,’ said the Captain.

Tom laughed.

When the hour was up, the company marched west around the walls accompanied by a hundred prisoners and twenty new carts, chased by nothing but the imprecations of a thousand unexpectedly destitute women.


The road was excellent, but it was still late afternoon when the company came in sight of the Duke of Thrake’s main army, drawn up in battle order facing the Gate of Ares. The Moreans weren’t taken completely unaware, and even as the Red Knight’s battle line, formed up a mile away on the move, came over the low ridge that faced the ancient field, the Morean army was wheeling back, giving ground to avoid being outflanked.

The Morean line was three times the length of the company’s line, and deeper. The Duke of Thrake had four good companies of infantry, with armour, long spears, and archers in the fifth and sixth rank, and they filled the centre of his line. He had heavy Alban-style men-at-arms on his left, and stradiotes flanked by Easterners on his right.

The Despot’s company of Easterners flowed further and further to the right, out on to the apparently limitless grass of the Field of Ares, galloping around the company’s flank. In response, the company formed a shallow box with the baggage in the centre.

‘I can feel their magister,’ the Captain said to no one in particular.

Ser Jehan trotted over. ‘We need to retire and secure one of our flanks,’ he said.

‘We should give them some ash shafts and then charge ’em,’ said Ser Thomas.

The Captain rose in his stirrups and his hip screamed in protest. His ugly, borrowed horse assumed that he was at liberty to rid himself of an unwelcome rider and did a four-footed bound, which the Captain reined in savagely.

Ser Jehan coughed. ‘Captain, the men are tired, we have already faced one action today, and the enemy is both more numerous and well armed and trained. I would like to respectifully suggest—’

Tom spat. ‘F*ck that. We can take them.’

Jehan narrowed his eyes. ‘Tom, you ain’t as smart as you think you are. This is foolery. Mayhap we can win. Put a lot of our boys in the dust – and what for?’

‘The Vardariotes will come into his flank and just like that, the campaign is won,’ the Captain said.

‘Or they don’t and we get gutted. Who cares? We’re paid the same either way. Christ on the cross – we’re mercenaries. What got into you two? Retire now and tomorrow we’ll drive him off with these whatever-you-call-them on our flanks.’

The Captain looked through him. ‘We’ll use the wagons to cover our flanks. Advance.’

‘You just want to say you’ve won two battles in a day, you arrogant pup. And men will die for your – your—’ Jehan was splutting with professioanl rage.

Tom laughed. ‘He’s a loon, right enough. Save your breath to cool your porridge, boyo. We’re going to fight.’

‘Look!’ shouted the Despot. He leaned out over the neck of his horse and pointed at the enemy. ‘He has both of our icons! Tzoukes has betrayed us!’

The Duke had not won every battle of his career, and he smelled a rat. He rose in his stirrups. ‘That’s crap. And saying such things aloud does you no credit.’ He looked under his hand at the glittering, steel-clad ranks of his new adversaries. The Vardariotes had thus far remained safely inside the gates of the city.

The magister began to raise power. The ops was rippled and strained. He was not the only workman in this brickyard, and the wound he’d taken from the Emperor’s spymaster and bodyguard was a distraction that weakened his casting. ‘They have a powerful mage with them,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘By the crucified Christ, my lord – they have two.’ He breathed, and then spoke as if he’d run a race. ‘No, four. Perhaps five— Parthenos, my lord!’

‘He beat Tzoukes and he has another force. He’s not showing me all his spears,’ the Duke said. ‘Nonetheless, he’s a barbarian and we are not. Let’s push him.’ He waved to his banner bearers. The trumpeters had horns made of wild aurochs, and they raised them, and the horns echoed like the cries of Wild creatures.

The Morean army marched. Their dressing was impressive – their own mercenary knights on the left, the five big blocks of infantry in the centre, and the Duke and his stradiotes on the right, with a thin second line a few hundred yards behind – mostly ill-mounted men and camp guards, but a second line nonetheless.

The army was small enough for a short speech so he rode to the centre of his line, tilted his steel cap back on his head, and stood in his stirrups.

‘Companions!’ he roared. ‘These foreigners are more of the same – barbarians who come to take our wealth and our daughters and leave us with nothing but the right to be slaves when our fathers were lords. This mercenary has nothing but his arrogance to sustain him. We have God on our side. Go with God!’

His men roared. The spearmen in the centre – his veterans from his first days – raised gilded helmets on their spearheads and bellowed his name, calling him Imperator.

Duke Andronicus cantered back to his small command group and gestured to his son. ‘We overlap him on both flanks. See to it that your Easterners turn his left so my Hetaeroi can finish him.’

Golden-haired Demetrius saluted smartly. ‘As you say, Pater!’ he shouted cheerily and cantered away to the right.

Kronmir sat comfortably on his horse’s back, watching the distant city gate. ‘It seems to me he is expecting help,’ he said.

‘He is merely arrogant. Galles and Albans – I’ve beaten them both.’ The Duke smiled soberly. ‘That sounds too much like hubris. But with God’s help—’ He looked west, towards his enemies.

The enemy baggage train was rolling forward.

As the Duke watched, walking his horse at the same pace that his marching spearmen were crushing the long grass, he saw the enemy baggage train split into two. There was confusion somewhere in the middle, and he smiled.

The enemy was in the process of dismounting. But their trumpet calls sounded tuneless, and the men at either end of the line were obviously unclear as to what to do. They were still three hundred paces distant, and Duke Andronicus watched his textbook attack roll into the barbarians. He looked to his left – the mercenary knights were drifting to the left, intentionally improving their flanking position and cutting the enemy off from the gate. Ser Bescanon knew his business.

On the right, his son was carefully maintaining the line. He wouldn’t swing wide until the fighting had started. Barbarians never saw anything beyond immediate threat.

Two hundred and seventy-five paces. The capture of his most faithful vicar and two battle icons was annoying, but Andronicus intended to rescue all three before the sun set. The sun was beginning to set now, so if the contest ran longer than an hour the rays would fall in the eyes of his men. A small thing, but the sort of detail that Imperial commanders were careful about.

The last of the barbarians were dismounted. He had to admire the discipline of their horse holders, and he cursed that the barbarians were rich enough to mount every man while the Empire scrabbled to afford a few hundred professional cavalry of their own.

The enemy infantry were archers. He’d known it – but he was still a little surprised by the density of their first volley, especially considering the range.

Men went down.

As his men stolidly marched forward, Andronicus strove to understand what had happened. Men in the armoured infantry had gone down.

The second, third, and fourth volley struck so close together that he lost track. The centre was staggered – it slowed, and the line bowed.


Ser Christos, one of his best officers and the Count of the Infantry, spurred out of the centre, took two arrows on his heavy shield, and still managed to raise his sword. ‘Forward, companions!’ he called, his high-pitched voice carrying like song, and the infantry surged forward, any momentary hesitation forgotten.

‘Now that’s an army,’ said Bad Tom with satisfaction. ‘Good thing irks don’t react like that, eh?’

Three horse lengths in front of Tom, the company archers were grunting and releasing their shafts as fast as they could, and the Imperial infantry were soaking up the volleys on their shields. There were men down, but their huge round shields were three boards thick and formed of leather and bronze as well, and the men behind them were big, tough louts wearing heavy mail or scale, and they were still coming – close enough now that the archers could see their faces.

The Captain looked to the right, where, instead of covering his flank with a wagon wall, he had a snarl of panicked wagoners.

Even as he watched, Mag the seamstress leaped up on a wagon and began to yell at the men around her. She did something hermetical – he felt the odd hollowness that practioners could always sense before another cast – and he saw a wagon freeze in place, horses vibrating like lute strings.

He wished her well, but whatever she did was going to be too late, because five hundred enemy knights were intending to turn that flank.

She’s using a great deal of power, and she’s attracting the enemy magister’s attention.

Shut up, Harmodius! The Captain put a hand to his head. If you make me sick now, we’re lost.

He turned. ‘Tom – there.’ He pointed with his lance.

Bad Tom grinned his mad grin. ‘With me, boys!’ he shouted. He must have seen Sauce, because he said, ‘And girls! Hah! Wedge, now – on me.’

The Captain had a third of the company’s men-at-arms gathered around him – Ser Gavin, Ser Michael, Ser Alcaeus, Ranald and all the Hillmen, and others.

‘Go!’ shouted the Captain.

In a moment he was alone behind the line of archers, and Tom’s wedge was forming, and Mag was still screaming at the men and women of the baggage train.

His hip hurt.

To no one in particular, he said, ‘I’ve f*cked this up.’

He backed his horse and turned the plug’s head to look off to his left. There, the wagons had formed better, and Bent already had the end of the line covered by wagon bodies while the wagoners unhitched horses and hitched chains. They’d practised this, but it was obvious they hadn’t practised it enough.

He looked at the oncoming wall of Morean infantry. There were holes in their line, and it looked a little like a waving flag. If he had another hundred men-at-arms, he could—

‘Gelfred!’ he called. ‘Go all the way past Tom’s wedge and do what you can.’

Gelfred’s scouts, well behind his command, were all he had of a reserve. The rest of the men-at-arms and squires were dismounted with the archers.

Off to their front left, ops swelled. He could feel the working emanating from someone very powerful indeed—

Harmodius . . .

I knew you’d need me.

Whatever the enemy cast, it sliced the grass on its way to the archers’ line. Men flinched, and then the great scythe was lifted as if it had never been there. A few men on the left felt an icy cold at their knees, and then they nocked and loosed.

Harmodius gathered power. Harmodius and the Red Knight had a shared problem – they seemed to have tangled whatever matrix of habit and aethereal training allowed them to access ops, so that instead of being two mages with two sets of power, they were two mages at the mercy of one another’s expenditures.

The Captain watched most of his ops crackle off across the scythe-cut grass and crash into the centre block of enemy infantrymen. Men burst into flame. One man stumbled clear, screaming, a horrible parody of a person.

Another flight of arrows hissed into the enemy charge.

They kept coming.

Duke Andronicus could see his line flanking the enemy’s, but he could also see the wagon wall the mercenaries had formed. He turned to Ser Stefanos, his personal champion. ‘To my son. Tell him to ride further around the enemy flank.’

Ser Stefanos saluted and galloped away.

Far off towards the city, Ser Bescanon’s men were starting to trot.

Andronicus began to look for the spot to place his killing blow. ‘Close up, Hetaeroi!’ he called.

The Captain dismounted next to Ser Milus with the standard and Ser Jehan, in the centre of the line. Ser Jehan still had his visor open, although the enemy was only fifty paces away.

‘We’re over-extended, and you were right,’ the Captain said to his senior officer.

Ser Jehan looked at him – a glance of pure disgust that ever so briefly reminded him of his father’s contempt.

He was stung by it.

‘Three more!’ Cully roared.

The last three flights did more damage than all the shafts loosed until then. The Captain had never, in fact, seen his company’s archers loose into men at point-blank range before.

At that range, the arrows went through shields, and men’s bodies. Through light helmets. Through horn scales. Through Wyverns’ hide.

A hundred Morean veterans died with each flight – men who had served for ten or fifteen years. The Duke of Thrake’s best men fell.

The two centre blocks of infantry shuffled, hesitated and were shredded.

On their flanks, the spearmen put their heads down and ran the last few paces into the teeth of the arrow storm.

Duke Andronicus couldn’t believe the evidence of his eyes as his handpicked veterans hesitated and then broke. His position on the right wing limited his line of sight and so he couldn’t see the intensity of the arrow storm, only the result – his centre breaking.

They were the men he’d commanded since he was the most junior centurione in the army, and he left his bodyguard and rode to them, rode among them. ‘On me! On me, companions!’ he roared – and they came. They turned and raised their heads – his men were crying in shame.

Duke Andronicus looked down the path of their charge and saw how few of them were left. ‘Christ Pantokrator,’ he said.

Ser Christos, wearing Gallish plate and mail and well mounted, had six arrows in his horse and two more in his breastplate. Even as Andronicus watched, the horse collapsed, feet rolling high, and the Count of the Infantry took too long to rise.

The barbarians immediately attacked from their centre, where their archery had proven so triumphant.

‘Charge,’ shouted the Captain. He had his sword in his fist and he started forward. Jehan shouted something, but the Captain saw their salvation and all around them archers threw down their bows and plucked out their swords and the dismounted men-at-arms went forward – the Captain ran towards the left. The men in front of him were not the immediate threat.

They caught the enemy infantrymen by surpise in their shielded flank and then all was chaos.

The Red Knight ran full tilt into the flank of the enemy block, hip forgotten. He knocked a man flat at impact, kicked him savagely with an armoured foot, stepped on the man’s shield and broke his arm then lunged with the point of his sword, which went between the scales of the next man’s flank, behind his shield, while he tried to turn and was hampered by the length of his own spear. He took a blow to his head, a spear blow that rocked him, and fell.

He started to rise – a spearshaft rang against his helmet and then he got his left hand on it and pulled, cut down without science, and his blade rang off the man’s helemet and he stepped in and crushed the man’s face with his pommel. To his right, Ser Jehan had cleared a space the length of his pole-hammer. Long Paw was cutting hands from spearshafts, and Ser Milus was using the company banner to shield himself from cuts while he crushed men with a mace. Cully tackled a spearman and Wilful Murder ran the prone man through with his side sword. Kanny fell with a spearpoint through the meat of his right leg, Big Paul died with a spearpoint in his throat, and John le Bailli stepped on his corpse and buried the point of his pole-axe in his killer . . . And as they pressed forward, the enemy infantry flinched back.


Bent’s archers and Ser George Brewe’s men-at-arms charged into the front of the spearmen and they broke.

‘Halt! Halt!’ roared Ser Jehan, while the Red Knight slumped, panting, to his left knee – his hip wouldn’t support him any further. They were far beyond the line of the wagons and just a hundred paces away they could see the enemy commander’s standard as he rallied the remnants of his broken centre.

The Red Knight looked around but Ser Jehan was herding the victors back to their own lines, leaving their dead and wounded intermingled with the enemy.

He got his feet under him, found an abandoned spear, and used it to limp back to their lines. As he turned, he saw the enemy’s knights begin their own charge, into his open right flank.

And his headache began with a pulse that nearly blinded him, as Harmodius cast again.

Andronicus watched his attack fail and, like a farmer who has seen bad weather before, put his head down and kept rallying his men. To his own right he could see his son swinging wide of the enemy wagons. To his left, he watched his own mercenaries begin their charge.

But his son was going too far. Perhaps worried by the flights of arrows, his son’s Easterners had gone off almost half a league in the high grass, and were only now turning their deep hook into the enemy flank.

‘Steady, my friends!’ Andronicus bellowed. ‘Steady! We’re not done yet!’

He looked around for the magister, but the man had stayed with his stradiotes, hundreds of paces away. Andronicus wished the man would do something.

In the aethereal, gouts of power spat back and forth over the battlefield like fireflies on a summer evening – and were extinguished. Aeskepiles had allowed one strike through into the Duke’s precious infantry, but he couldn’t be everywhere, and it was far more difficult to project a deflection than it was to deploy one closer to hand.

His adversary was nimble and subtle, and after attempting too many heavy blows Aeskepiles had to acknowledge that he was facing a peer. He prepared a layered attack, murmuring a reassuring invocation while using one of the rings on his left hand to power what he hoped would be a decisive strike.

In that moment between initiation and action, the enemy’s second magus revealed himself again and laid some kind of complex working – Aeskepiles couldn’t read it, but the potency of the caster caused him to alter his tactics yet again.

Self-protection was always Aeskepiles’s first priority. He raised a layered shield and allowed his own complex attack to dissipate, unpowered.

Bad Tom was the point of the wedge, with almost sixty knights and men-at-arms hastily arrayed behind him – two in the second rank, three in the third, and so on. He watched the enemy knights lower their lances and come forward at a trot, then a canter, and he grinned.

‘That’s more like it,’ he said. He put spurs to his horse.

The wedge emerged from behind the tangle of wagons Mag was trying bring to order out of equine and bovine chaos and turned east towards the charging knights. The ground shook beneath their charge.

The enemy knights had to wheel to face the unexpected threat, and their loose formation began to fall apart.

The right flank archers got several flights into the enemy, and the heavy arrows tore through them, striking the unarmoured rumps of their warhorses. Then Tom put his lance down, tucked his head, and the whole world became the point of his lance and the man in red and gold he had chosen as his target. He roared as his lance struck home, knocking his opponent down, the horse falling sideways, and Tom released his lance – hopelessly tangled in the man’s guts – and took the axe from his pommel as he ducked a lance aimed at him. His axe cut, rose to cover him against the shaft of another lance, and then he was deep into the enemy, past the lance shafts, his axe smashing into them, his battlecry a palpable thing inside his faceplate. He rose in his stirrups, caught a knight unawares with a smashing blow from above that caused the welds in the crown of the helmet to split and his brains to leak out like juices from a split melon. Tom roared joy and his mad laughter rang with his battlecry. Behind him, the picked knights of the company made a hole as large as their wedge, crushing the centre of the enemy charge, and then the wedge split open like a steel bud coming to flower and the enemy mercenaries, pinned between a wagon wall and a madman with an axe, chose the better part of valour and retreated.

Standing on a wagon box, Mag watched the enemy charge develop, tried to cast a single working to force all the horses to her will and lost the thread of it, and then saw the company’s mounted reserve hurl themselves onto the more numerous foe like a palpable salvation. The earth shook. The wagoners hid under their wagons and horses reared and kicked, bit each other – a wagon overturned, panicking the teams on either side, and somewhere a boy was screaming.

Somewhere off in the aethereal a familiar voice asked her to channel power and she reponded before she had time to think but Harmodius is dead.

‘Make what terms you can,’ Jehan growled. ‘Now, while we’ve stung them.’

The Red Knight’s armour was covered in dust and his red surcoat was dirty and he had several wounds he could feel. His hip didn’t seem to be broken, but something was very wrong and he couldn’t face mounting. He could see Duke Andronicus, patiently rallying his men.

But Tom had done it – not just held the enemy knights, but beaten them.

He looked off to his left, and saw the enemy flankers far out on the grass.

‘When he comes again, he’ll gut us.’ Ser Jehan had his visor open, and he panted every word. ‘By Saint George, Captain. Perhaps he won’t. But we can’t stop another charge like that.’

The Red Knight looked at his mentor in the art of war and made himself walk to his horse. ‘You have to. We have to. Whatever mistakes I’ve made today, the company held. We have to win this thing. Hold on.’

Jehan spat.

Cully was looking at his bow. ‘Sixteen shafts left, Cap’n,’ he announced.

The Captain eyed his ugly gelding and then with a desperate and inelegant lunge powered by his left leg, managed to get his right leg mostly over the saddle. The horse didn’t revolt – the Captain waited out the moment of agony and then got his arse into the seat and his right foot into the stirrup. He was up.

‘Jehan, you’re in command. I’m going for the Vardariotes. Don’t lose.’ He managed a smile. ‘That’s all I ask.’

The Duke had rallied the infantry line and men had collected their dropped shields and armed themselves. The enemy archers stood in dangerous silence, shafts visible on their bows, but loosing nothing.

The Duke watched the shattered remnants of the mercenary knights organise themselves, but he knew they wouldn’t charge again. They were unpaid, and fickle at best. He could see Ser Bescanon riding towards him across the crushed grass.

He looked the other way and saw an ashen-faced Aeskepiles doing what looked like shadow boxing. He turned away in disgust.

Close at his side, Ser Christos, remounted, shook his fist at the city. ‘Look! Ungrateful fools!’

The Gates of Ares had opened.

Clad in scarlet, mounted on matched bay horses, the Vardariotes were riding out of the city in a compact column of fours.

One scarlet figure detached itself from the enemy and rode, with a single companion, through the sun-drenched late afternoon, raising a line of dust. He met the red column emerging from the iron gates – and was swallowed by it.


The Red Knight rode to the head of the Vardariotes with only his trumpeter for company.

The officer of the Vardariotes was himself an Easterner – with deeply set eyes and leathery skin that had seen the endless winds and sun of the steppes. The man’s kaftan was red silk embroidered in gold flowers and trimmed in dark brown fur, and he carried a magnificently laquered Chin bow in a case that seemed to be made of pure gold, as well as a gold and enamel mace surmounted with a double-headed eagle worked in blued steel.

He smiled and circled his horse, and he and the Red Knight rode all the way around each other like two birds beginning a complex mating dance.

‘Your horse is crap,’ said the Easterner. ‘You have money?’

‘Your horse is beautiful. And I have money.’ The Red Knight turned his borrowed destrier’s head in and rode at the other man, who did the same, so that they met in a mathematical middle.

‘Radi and Vlach watched your little fight from the walls,’ said the little man. ‘You beat the Moreans hours ago. Where have you been?’

‘Looting,’ said the Red Knight. ‘How do you think I can afford to pay you?’

The Easterner snorted. If it was meant to be a laugh, it sounded more like the bark of a dog. ‘Just so you know, Steel Man. We are loyal to our salt. Some of my Aviladhars might choose to be offended that you think we could be bought.’

The Red Knight flipped up his visor. ‘I didn’t offer to buy you. I offered to cover your arrears of pay. Can we get to business? I want to hand the Duke his arse. Where have you been?’

The mace bearer grinned. ‘I’ve been right on the other side of the gate, watching you. You have a lot to learn about war.’ He barked a cruel laugh. ‘But your people are brave like f*ck, eh?’ He extended his hand, and they embraced, hand to elbow. The Vardariotes let out a very un-Morean shriek.

‘Call me Zac,’ said the Easterner.

The Red Knight shook his head. ‘Call me Captain,’ he said.

The Easterner grinned. ‘Cap-tan?’ he asked. ‘Strange name. But sure. Listen, Cap-tan. You want us to do something about our cousins, busy riding around your flank?’

The Red Knight stood in his stirrups, looked at the dust and nodded sharply. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Kill them?’ asked the Easterner. ‘Or recruit them?’

The Captain smiled. ‘It could be a busy summer, Zac,’ he said. ‘I’d rather you recruited them.’

‘Sure,’ said Zac. ‘Listen, Cap-tan. We’ll clear them away. What will you do? They have a powerful shaman.’

No argument there, Harmodius said inside the Red Knight’s palace.

More puissant than the mighty Harmodius?

You haven’t seen any lightning strike your knights, have you? I’ll need whatever little reserves of power you have available, if I might.

‘I plan to roll straight forward into bow range, put some arrows into his horses, and make him retreat – now that I can count on my flanks. I’d appreciate your support.’ The Red Knight bowed.

‘Good!’ said the smaller Easterner. ‘I’ll ride around, kill f*cking Krulla, who I hate, and then I’ll fall on the Duke’s northern flank, may that f*cking traitor rot in the ancient frozen hell of my people. Take good care of our back pay.’ He saluted with his mace, raising the back of his right hand to his forehead in an oddly graceful movement.

‘Krulla?’ asked the Red Knight.

‘My cousin’s brother-in-law, over there pretending to be a great khan. It is a grass matter, not a stone house matter.’ The smaller man smiled, and his eyes twinkled. ‘Then we go back to the city and maybe I sell you a horse. Not a crap horse. Yes?’

‘Sure,’ said the Captain.

The Vardariotes moved like a flock of birds who rise all together from a tree at the approach of a predator. But they were the pack of lions, and not the prey.

Duke Andronicus watched the Vardariotes leap from a stand to a gallop in a dozen strides – flow like water along the back of the enemy box formation, and then fly like an arrow from a particularly powerful bow at his son’s Easterners. The more lightly mounted Easterners turned like a school of fish and fled, hotly pursued by the scarlet-clad Vardariotes.

‘Son of a f*cking whore,’ he spat. ‘Marcos! Christos! On me. Kronmir! Take your useless trick-riders and find me a path north and east.’ He backed his horse.

The aurochs horns roared out.

Kronmir turned his horse, so his mount and the Duke’s were nose to tail. ‘You can still beat him,’ he said. ‘If we march away from the city now, we will lose most of our support inside the walls. And we leave—’ He looked both ways. ‘She will benefit at our expense.’

Duke Andronicus shrugged. ‘If I retreat today and I am wrong, I lose nothing. If I fight today and I am wrong, I lose everything. Aeskepiles says this foreigner has powerful sorcery. He’s already beaten Tzoukes. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.’ He looked at the other man. ‘As for that bitch, let her rot. She wanted to stab us in the back? Leave her to it.’

Kronmir fingered his beard. ‘I fear she may have planned it this way.’ He shrugged. ‘We did try to kill her,’ he said quietly. When the Duke had no answer, Kronmir saluted with his whip and led his scouts north, away from the battle lines.

Before the sun settled another finger, Demetrius rode up in a roil of sun-reddened dust and gold hair and gilt armour.

‘We’re retreating?’ he cried.

Duke Andronicus shrugged, suddenly very tired. ‘Look for yourself,’ he said.

His son’s face worked. His skin grew mottled, red and white, and his jaw jutted out like that of a very small boy whose wooden sword has just been taken away by an angry parent.

But he mastered himself with an effort. ‘On your head be it,’ he said.

‘That’s right, boy. When you are Duke – or Emperor – you can make these decisions. But today, I make them. And I say, let’s take ourselves out of here.’ He turned in the saddle. ‘Aeskepiles! Wake up, old man.’

The magister was grey, his ascetic eyes heavily lidded as if he was near sleep.

‘They have blocked my every casting,’ he muttered.

The Duke shook his head. ‘Don’t give me that crap, Aeskepiles. I need a little help. How about a fog?’

Aeskepiles sighed. ‘Not crap, my lord. I’ve made three efforts and failed on each.’

The Despot shook his blond head. ‘Why can we never see these great efforts?’ he asked.

Aeskepiles pursed his lips. ‘Fog,’ he said.

‘Saint Basil and all the phalanx of saints,’ said Lykos Dukas, the Duke’s standard bearer and a veteran of fifty fights. He pointed with his sword.

The Vardariotes were mounted on magnificent blood horses and the Despot’s Easterners had steppe ponies. The better mounted men were, even as Dukas pointed, riding down their enemy, closing on them, catching them.

There was a moment where the two forces met – a swirl of dust, and all of the horses seemed to stop altogether.

Then dust rose, obscuring the whole fight.

Duke Andronicus spat. ‘We have fifteen minutes until they are around our flank and cutting us off from home,’ he said. ‘Lykos, get the wagons moving. Anything that can be saved. Damn it, Aeskepiles, raise me some fog! Conjure the sun from the sky! Make it dark!’

Despot Demetrius put an elbow against his waist and turned in the saddle. He was a magnificent horseman, and his body and his horse’s seemed to flow together, as if they were one creature. ‘This flight is unseemly. Let us fight.’


Ser Lykos ignored him and rode for the baggage wagons.

Aeskepiles entered into the cool darkness of his basilica of power and prepared a complex working, moving from pillar to column, aligning the distant stars in his carefully ordered sky. A cooling; a force of attraction, an enhancement of moisture; binding, losing, and empowering.

It was very complex, and Aeskepiles enjoyed building the edifice that would support it, even as another part of his working mind gathered power from his staff and his ring of lapis. He still hoarded his own reserve of power.

He’s about to cast again, Harmodius said in the aether. I could use some help, here.

Instead of responding immediately, the Captain touched his horse’s sides with his spurs and cantered up the last low, round hill – so round that it appeared artificial – at the edge of the Field of Ares. Ser Jehan and Ser Milus followed him, while just ahead of him, the sides of his shallow box formations broke open and wheeled into line, extending his front by another three hundred paces. The tangle of wagons was left behind to the right and left.

From the top of his little hill, he could see from the city wall at his right, all the way across the Field of Ares to his left, some four leagues. He spared a moment for his own awe. He was on the Field of Ares, and the Empire had once been powerful enough to fill this field with soldiers.

Closer to hand, the Duke’s army was half again the size of his own, and it stretched off to the left, so that the enemy left far overreached his own right – except that out beyond the furthest fringes of the enemy line, the Vardariotes and the Despot’s Easterners had merged in a single dust cloud.

He’s raising a fog, Harmodius said.

Stop him.

I could use any small reserves you can spare.

Bad Tom had rallied the wedge and returned to the company’s line – now he cantered up like the embodiment of war itself, his huge black horse snorting foam. He raised his bloody axe and saluted. Then he pointed at the Moreans.

‘There is drill for ye and a’! Look at ’em!’ Tom’s waving axe sprayed droplets of brown red, but the awe in his voice spoke for them all. The Duke’s cavalry was wheeling by sections and retreating. It was a beautiful manoeuvre. The still afternoon air brought the sound of trumpets.

The Red Knight slipped into his palace and opened the door, so that a warm green breeze blew over the black and white marble floor to mix with the golden rays that soaked in through the distant clerestory windows to make a haze of power.

That’s better, said Harmodius. He made no use of the Red Knight’s palace – he was doubtless deep within his own working place.

Is he more puissant than you?

No, muttered Harmodius. But he’s cautious, careful, and capable. And we spent potentia like a sailor spends gold this morning on concealment, the river crossing and a dozen other extravagances—

Spare me.

‘They’re going to run,’ said Tom.

‘Let them!’ Ser Jehan managed a rare smile. ‘Jesus Saviour, we almost lost the whole line. Letting them march away would be good for everyone, wouldn’t it, Captain?’

‘Let’s see if we can fix them in place,’ said the Captain. ‘Double time. Trot!’ he shouted. His new trumpeter managed to get the call out, but the corporals had heard his shout and the company, already remounted, surged forward.

Behind the Red Knight, his new page, Nell, swung up onto her tall pony and swore. ‘On and off! On and off!’ she spat in fourteen-year-old disapproval.

Across the grass, five hundred paces away, the Duke’s army was wheeling into columns of march. The manoeuvre was complicated, and well executed, and despite that it was slow. Men began to look over their shoulders at the advancing wave of scarlet and steel.

‘Couldn’t we just let them go?’ asked Jehan.

The Captain shook his head. ‘If we let them go, we’ll have to fight them all winter. If we smash them now, we’re done.’ He looked under his hand, and then roared, ‘On! Canter! Dress the line!’ and threw himself forward.

Duke Andronicus sighed so hard that his cheeks blew up like a bladder and then deflated. ‘Why’s he so aggressive?’ he asked. ‘Aeskepiles!’

‘Watch, my lord,’ said the magister. He raised his arms, carefully balancing powers in his head.

Fog began to rise from the damp grass – first wisps, and then tendrils.

‘I still say that with one charge – envelop their flanks – we could roll them back to their barbarous homes,’ Demetrius said. ‘Pater – listen to Kronmir. We’ll lose support in the city—’

‘Christos Pantokrator!’ spat the Duke. ‘Demetrius! You are last out, since you are so full of fire.’

But even as the fog began to thicken, the mass of Easterners to the north started to move, and the hooves of their horses shook the earth. They were riding to cut the Duke off from his line of retreat. The first of his baggage wagons were only starting to move.

‘Marcos! Take the last Tagma and clear the Vardariotes out of our path,’ called the Duke. He turned to his son. ‘Do not – I repeat, do not – die here. What I do, I do for you and your own sons. Cover us, and then ride away.’

The fog rose like smoke.

And then the wind hit. It blew straight from their enemies into their faces, picking up dust and bits of grass. The first gust was like the breath of a tired man, but the second gust was as harsh as a mid-winter storm.

The fog broke like glass.

Across the field, the enemy was dismounting. Demetrius stroked his beard. ‘They’re out of range,’ he said aloud. ‘How can they—’

‘Look at their horse holders,’ said his father. ‘Once, the Empire put every man on a horse or mule – every infantryman, every archer.’

Just to his left, their own infantry were retreating in columns, well closed up, their shields lapped and their spears held high, the small wind-sock standards of the Thrakian border holdings suddenly rigid in the new wind.

‘Draw!’ roared Cully.

The better archers measured the distance by eye and sneered.

Kandy, the fattest man in the company, shook his head. ‘On my best day I couldn’t hit yon,’ he muttered. But he grunted and got his string to his ear.

‘Loose!’ Cully roared. A few men had already loosed – no man could keep a great war bow at full draw for longer than a moment or two.

Twenty paces behind the archery line, the Captain felt the surge of power. It was odd, vaguely upsetting even, to be both a participant and an observer in an arcane contest.

Even as the volley of arrows leaped into the air, the gust of wind off Harmodius’s working overpowered the enemy’s hermetical defence.

Borne on a massive pulse of air, three hundred arrows fell like a well-aimed hail on the nearest block of retreating infantry. The heavy quarter-pound shafts punched through the scale or leather of the mountaineers. In one gust of air, forty men fell—

The enemy volley of arrows did more damage than the Duke had thought possible. More men – his men, his own trained soldiers, veterans of a dozen campaigns – died. The screams of the wounded told every other man on the field that the enemy arrows were in range, and they were caught with their shields facing away from the enemy.

His men panicked.

Far off to the right, where Ser Bescanan had rallied part of the Latinikon, the mercenary Albans and Galles and Occitans broke and ran, leaning far out over the necks of their wretched heavy horses as they galloped away.


Demetrius didn’t mutter imprecations at his father. Instead, he turned to the magister. ‘Do something!’ he snapped.

Aeskepiles took a deep breath and flung up a hand.

A carpet of flame, so thin as to be transparent, flowed over the field from his hand to the enemy, crossing the four hundred or so paces in the time it took a man’s heart to beat three times.

The carpet of white flame ran at the archers like a rising tide – a tide moving at the speed of a galloping horse.

‘Stand fast! Nock!’ ordered Cully. Most of the archers obeyed, but some awkward sods were flinching away.

Cully watched the fire and hoped it was an illusion.

But just short of his position it parted as if cut by a knife and flowed away to the left and right, rolling along the front of the archers’ positions.

The fire was not wholly without effect, as it panicked the horses. One small page was only enough to hold six strong cobs under ideal conditions, and with a wall of fire bearing down on them, dozens of the stronger – or more wicked – horses put their heads down, pulled their reins right out of their handler’s hands, and ran free over the grass.

Nell lost the Captain’s wicked roan, was bitten, and punched the horse in savage frustration. The horse looked at her in surprise and she recaptured his reins. Cully’s nag tried to rip free, and reared, and she was carried into the air. Then the Captain’s roan pulled his head, and she was down, face first in the bloody dirt. She didn’t let go, and the roan dragged her right over the corpse of a Thrakian. She screamed when the man – not yet dead – screamed.

Then Long Paw, the nicest of the archers, was dragging her to her feet. She still had the horses. He smiled at her and turned back to the line.

‘Draw!’ Cully roared.

‘Loose!’ he shouted as the wind rose behind them.

The second volley rose ragged and lost more shafts as the wind struck. The archers were shaken by the fire. But more than a hundred shafts received the full lift of Harmodius’s working and they fell on the centre tagma of stradiotes; Morean gentlemen in chain hauberks, with lances and bows and small steel shields. At the range, few of them were killed through their mail, but their horses suffered cruelly and the small band seemed to explode away from the point of impact as men rode in all directions.

The Red Knight raised his hand and snapped a single coherent beam of emerald light at the source of the enemy’s magery.

Aeskepiles raised a shield like a mirror, the size of three mounted men.

Very clever, Harmodius admitted, and voided the casting as it came, reflected, right back at him.

The Athanatos tagma was shattered, and the panic of the mercenaries was augmented by the stradiotes. Andronicus watched the hermetical workings – back and forth like a child’s game.

‘My men are dying!’ he roared.

Aeskepiles reached deep and cast a working he created on the spot. He built extravagant displays for court – he could work with inanimate materials, given time. And cloth and wood had once been animate. It was a snap working – something from deep inside him created it and he let go.

Every bowstring in the front rank snapped. The bows gave an odd sound, almost like a scream. Men had their faces flayed – Cully almost lost an eye. Men flinched. A few archers fell.

‘Christ save us!’ said Cully, now firmly spooked and blood running down his face.

Harmodius seized control of the Captain’s body and cast, breathed, and cast again, draining his master’s reserves utterly. Reserves, he noted, which grew deeper every day.

Fire appeared to leap from the Captain’s hand. It wasn’t a beam of light, but rather a great round gout of raw fire that made a deep roaring sound as it burst into being.

Damn you! said the Captain. Let go! Damn it!

Us or him! Harmodius barked. He kept control of the Red Knight’s body and let fly his spell.

The travel time of the fearful ball of fire was slow, by hermetical standards. The casting was terrifying – the power of the ball of fire dizzying. Aeskepiles had little choice but to shield – he left himself almost nothing, and struck the fireball with a deflection, swatting it to the north.

Even as he displaced it, he felt its insubstantial nature, and the hair stood up on the nape of his neck.

Illusion.

Got you, muttered Harmodius through the Red Knight’s mouth, and he flicked a single point of light, a sphere the size of a pearl or a child’s smallest marble.

Aeskepiles managed to shield himself by draining his last amulet and his secret, invisible ring, but he was blown clear of his horse, which was killed in a spectacular manner, and the magister was knocked unconscious.

But the enemy archers were dismounted, their mounts had panicked and their bowstrings were cut. Both armies were filled with dread at the unsealy exchange of powers, a sight that filled them all with fear, and if the Moreans broke for their baggage train, the company soldiers stood rooted to the spot, unwilling to advance.

Harmodius was in full control of the Red Knight’s body. He flexed his fingers, and sighed, because he could feel that his opponent was dazed, and he himself was almost out of potentia.

He felt alive. He savoured it. He breathed, and watched the enemy break and run.

Bad Tom glared at him. ‘Bah!’ he said. ‘Come on, man! We can yet have them.’

The mad Hillman wanted to charge three thousand Moreans with two hundred Alban knights.

I don’t know what will happen if I smash this statue, said the Red Knight, deep inside his own palace. But I’m willing to bet it will end you, and I want my body back.

I just saved your army, you ungrateful whelp, Harmodius said. But with a last inbreath of the scent of grass and horses, he let go.

The Red Knight snapped back into full awareness, and he could see the men around him – Ranald and Bad Tom, Michael, Alison – straining in their saddles, eager to charge.

‘Advance!’ he ordered. At his side, the trumpeter raised his instrument and blew. The first call came out like the honking of a goose. The second rang as clear as day, and he repeated it once more.

‘That’s halt you idiot!’ roared the Captain. ‘Advance! Advance!’ he called, and rode out to the front where men could see him, his lance held high – but the damage was done. Confusion reigned supreme in his ranks for agonisingly long heartbeats.

By the time he had his lances moving, the last company of enemy stradiotes was retreating, a thousand paces away. The Vardariotes had wrecked the enemy Easterners, or perhaps subsumed them, and the enemy’s cadre of Alban mercenaries – the Latinikon – was scattered to the winds. Many were simply surrendering.

The Captain had a headache of monumental proportions, but he managed to indicate the surrendering knights to Bad Tom. ‘They look – look like men who want a new employer,’ he said.

‘You look like dog shit,’ Ranald said, and put a hand on his shoulder.

The Red Knight swore in a very undignified manner, and forced himself to sit upright and lead.

His knights rode forward as fast as they could in good order, and they pursued the retreating Thrakians over the Field of Ares. A mile out in the grass, they linked up with the scarlet-clad Vardariotes, and they rode side by side at a slow canter. Behind them, archers scrambled to retrieve their lost horses. Pages were cursed, but not very hard.

Cully took his horse from Nell and smiled at her.

‘Ain’t you goin’ ta follow the Cap’n?’ she asked the master archer. He and Long Paw were standing at their horses’ heads, but they weren’t mounting.


Cully looked down on her. ‘You’re a young ’un to tell me my trade, ain’t you?’

Long Paw nodded. ‘We’ve done our bit,’ he said.

The sun was going down in ruddy splendour over the city to the south and west behind them. When every basilica’s gilt roof was ablaze with the fire of the sun, the Thrakian infantry had to turn at bay or be ridden down in retreat. They were at the northern edge of the great field, and they halted between two of the low, round hills that defined the ancient drill field.

They faced about, got their aspides, their great round shields, off their shoulders, and they pulled their helmets down, set their feet, and prepared to give their lives. In the fifth and sixth ranks, archers restrung their bows and then moved out into the scrub on the hills and tried some long shafts at the Vardariotes.

The Red Knight watched it all with weary resignation. He formed his men-at-arms up in two companies under Ser Jehan and Ser Milus; both in broad, deep wedges.

The archers had emptied two Vardariote saddles when the scarlet-clad Easterners swept forward at the gallop – they rode all the way to just short of the enemy’s spear points and then shot down into their phalanx at point-blank range – and then galloped away, exchanging ranks with a dexterity that spoke of long practice and perfect horsemanship. When the dust settled, darkness was moments away and two dozen of the Thrakians were face down in the grass – but they closed their ranks grimly. And backstepped.

The Red Knight beckoned to Count Zac, who rode up. ‘I can do it again,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But they are not soft, these Thrakians. I don’t think they will break.’

The Red Knight shook his head. ‘If it were noon, we’d have them in an hour,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t, and we won’t. Let them go. I’m not willing to lose one more man-at-arms to break them. And they’re just his infantry. His knights are gone.’

Sauce laughed. ‘You sound like Ser Jehan,’ she said.

Ser Alcaeus shook his head in turn. ‘You need to learn to think like a Morean. His infantry are the heart of his army. His cavalry are not “knights”. They are soldiers.’

The Red Knight scratched at his two-day beard growth. ‘Let’s go see if Cully found any new bowstrings,’ he said. He looked at Zac. ‘You feel we should try them?’

Zac watched the infantry retreat into the gathering gloom. ‘No. Foolishness,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to the city. You pay me, I sell you a horse. We drink. ‘

The Red Knight looked around at his officers. He kept his tone light, although fatigue and his unspoken war with Harmodius made it hard even to think. ‘I think we’ve come to the right place,’ he managed.

Bad Tom sat watching the Thrakians, and he shook his axe at them and then hurled the weapon into their ranks and roared, ‘Lachlan for aa!’ like a lion baulked of his prey. He rounded on his captain.

‘I want the fight! Christ damn their souls to hell—’

The Captain waved to Lachlan through a fog of fatigue. ‘See to your cousin,’ he said.

The sun was gone from the sky when the Red Knight rode through the Ares Gate at the head of the company. He had Ser Gavin at his side, half his men-at-arms at his back, then all the archers and pages together, and then the rest of the men-at-arms, with the wagons bringing up the rear with all the women, and finally Long Paw and a dozen veterans with Gelfred and the scouts. Moreans stood in the gate and the square on the far side and cheered them.

Sort of.

The cheers were half-hearted. Many people simply watched them ride in without a comment, and there was some heckling after they passed through the gate.

There was a strong guard of men with long-hafted axes on the gate, and they stood in rigid silence as the mercenaries rode past.

‘Brother, you are a study,’ Gavin said.

‘I’ve had better days. My hip is killing me. We should have had the thrice-damned Duke today.’ He observed a pair of Moreans who watched him with open contempt. ‘And these people don’t love us for all that we just saved them from a siege and starvation.’ He was, in fact, seeing spots in front of his eyes.

Bad Tom, in the rank behind, hawked and spat. Ser Milus spurred his horse out of the column and rode right up to the two local men. ‘See something you like, gentles?’ he asked.

The two men looked right through him.

Ser Milus reached out with his riding whip and touched one on the shoulder. ‘Tell me what we’re laughing at, and we can all laugh together.’

The Red Knight reined in. ‘Leave it!’ he called.

Milus turned his destrier, unwillingness in every inch of his six feet of steel, and behind him, the two men smiled nastily.

‘They’re mocking us,’ he complained.

The Red Knight sighed. ‘Yes, they are. And as long as we’re paid, we don’t have to give a shit whether they love us or hate us.’

In the second rank of the second company, Sauce strained her eyes as they passed their third or fourth basilica. ‘By all the saints. I mean all the saints – they must have a church for every saint in the book.’

Ser Michael shook his head. ‘I had no idea,’ he said. He was looking at a bronze statue of a warrior of some kind. He couldn’t even identify what kind of warrior, but the quality of the statue was incredible – lifelike. The musculature – the strain on the man’s face—

‘Don’t gape like rubes,’ growled Ser Jehan. But then he smiled at Michael. ‘I thought you, at least, would ha’ been here afore.’

‘Never,’ breathed Ser Michael. ‘It even smells good.’

Ser Jehan nodded. ‘Sewers. From old times. See yon great bridges? I forget the word for them, but they carry water from the hills right into the city. In some houses, you turn a little tap, and fresh water you can drink flows right out. Crap goes right into the pipes and whish, it’s gone away. At least in good houses.’

Ranald couldn’t stop turning his head. ‘It’s huge!’

Michael leaned forward. ‘You’ve been here before,’ he said.

Jehan nodded back over the rump of his great warhorse. ‘Oh, aye. Ten years and more. I served here two years. Good pay. Not much fighting. A lot of standing around in draughty halls and listening to priests sing.’

Ser George Brewes caught a rose thrown from a high balcony by a young woman and tucked the stem behind his ear. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, marking the tall house with the red doors. But the street went on and on, and as they climbed the central hills, all of them realised that the city was seven miles across – fifty times the size of Harndon.

Conversation slowed.

You don’t have to be angry. I was handing control back.

Were you, though? I think perhaps it is time I was rid of you, sir. You are a troublesome guest.

Give me a little more time. This city – this is the very home of hermeticism. I might learn something—

You took control of my body, Harmodius. How can I trust you now?

Don’t be a fool, boy. I did it to save us both.

So you say. And you will rationalise it right up until the moment that you find yourself my master.

The Red Knight stamped down on his connection to the old mage and focused on the real, all about him. Count Zac had displaced Ser Gavin at his side.

‘You talk to the spirits?’ he asked, interested.

‘No,’ said the Red Knight. ‘Yes. Maybe.’


Zac tilted his head like an interested dog. ‘Which one?’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ said the Red Knight.

The Easterner made a sign with his hands. ‘Best be careful,’ he said. ‘Spirits are scary bastards. Listen to me.’ Then he grinned. ‘You know the city?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been here before,’ the Red Knight admitted.

Count Zac nodded. ‘The Porphyrogenetrix wants to see you.’ The Easterner, who had trouble with Gothic names, got out the Morean title with fluidity. ‘You know Blacharnae?’

The Red Knight shook his head. ‘Not the part of town I know,’ he said.

‘She’s going to garrison your men in the palace,’ said the Easterner. ‘As bad as spirits. Be careful.’ He shrugged. ‘When you are done at the palace, come and get that horse. Your horse—’ He waved at the Captain’s borrowed warhorse. Slapped his rear end, and laughed. ‘Listen, you like girls?’ he asked.

Through the haze of pain, the Captain had trouble following the Easterner. ‘Yes. I have, in fact, been known to like girls,’ he managed.

‘Then watch out for the princess,’ Count Zac said.

The gates of the palace were shut, and the company rumbled to a halt in the Great Square in front of the palace under the watchful eyes of Saint Aetius. Every man and woman in the company was looking around, gawping like the poorest peasant in a rich man’s house. The archers were talking so loudly that scraps of their repartee slipped up the column to the Captain, who sat calmly looking at the gates.

Never seen . . . made of fewkin’ money . . . with his parts hanging in the air . . . look at the tits on her! Most beautiful thing . . . made by gods or men . . . that bow’s too heavy to pull . . . no, you stupid sod, it’s a chariot . . . they used to wear those things . . . not solid gold . . .

Harmodius stirred, deep inside his head. May I speak?

The Red Knight sighed a little. Go right ahead. How can I stop you?

This is far more dangerous than I had imagined. The hermetical energy here is very like the Well at Lissen Carrak. I can feel the University. Across the square at the Academy are thirty men and two women each as puissant as I am – perhaps not quite, but very close.

There is a strong user in the palace, and more than a dozen competent weaker users.

I have never seen such a concentration of hermetical talent in one place . . . well, perhaps in my youth.

The Red Knight felt the pleasure in the other man’s thought as if it was his own. Where was that, old man?

Harmodius laughed in his head. Ifriqu’ya, lad. Dar-as-Salaam, the abode of peace. The very best hermetical study centre in the known world.

The Red Knight sat on his horrible gelding and watched the gates. The horse shifted and shifted again, grunted, tossed his head and tried to spit out the bit.

At the Captain’s shoulder, Ranald Lachlan spat – a more contemplative spit than the horse’s. ‘By all that’s sacred. It is like seeing the dragon. Like rain on a mountainside and the sun over the lakes. Is that a statue of Lady Tar? By the Blessed Virgin, is that sort of thing allowed?’

His cousin chuckled. ‘Boyo, I look around this square and all I see is a customer that can pay.’ Bad Tom grinned. ‘Mickle sly they are, to make us wait and drink yon in. Mayhap to make us know our place, eh?’ Despite his words, Tom looked where Ranald had pointed – spotted the golden statue of Tar with the green emerald eyes, and made a sign.

‘Christ on the cross!’ Ranald said. ‘We’ll all be burned as pagans.’

‘You spent too long in Harndon, cousin.’ Tom’s eyes crossed Ranald’s. Neither man flinched – but both put their right hands unconsciously on their hilts.

The Captain didn’t turn his head. ‘Gentlemen? While I will be the first to admit that a duel here in the Imperial forum would probably excite the locals, I suspect we’ll win greater love from the lady here if we behave with decorum.’

Bad Tom curbed his charger and laughed. ‘Just fun, Captain.’

Ranald said, ‘He didn’t get enough fighting today,’ and some of the archers laughed.

The Red Knight stood in his stirrups and called in his battlefield voice, ‘Eyes front!’

The company stopped its bickering, its commenting, its art criticism, and stood silently in the evening air. The horses’ tails swished at the late summer flies. A mule farted. A woman sighed.

Silence.

Men shifted, unlocked their knees – Sauce loosened her sword in her scabbard and her new warhorse, confused by the shift in her weight, stepped out of the column and she blushed. Wilful Murder, leading a hand of archers, tried to whisper to them about their pay, and his failed attempt to whisper floated like the sound of a small saw-mill over the column until Oak Pew leaned forward and flicked his ear with the force and accuracy of a schoolteacher. He yelped and subsided.

Silence.

A single horse hoof struck the stone flags in impatience, and rang out like a hammer blow. It echoed off the statues – across the square, in front of the Academy, stood a great bronze of the pagan god Cerebus, the multi-headed dog. It seemed to bark.

The sound of marching feet could be heard on the far side of the palace wall. They were marching in step – an art virtually unknown in Alba. The thin sound of a flute rose over the great walls.

A drum beat slowly. It was a low drum, and very large. Alien. Combined with the sound of the flute it was beautiful and wild.

Two smaller drums joined in, rattling like crazed woodpeckers. Prrrr-thump with the larger drums.

And the great gates began to open.

The Outer Court beyond the gates was a mass of torchlight – torches flared in more than a hundred brackets, illuminating the mosaics which adorned every flat surface – the front face of the Imperial stables, the Mayor of the Palace’s offices, the barracks, the apartments of the Ordinaries. The image of Christ Pantokrator, hand raised in benison, in royal robes of purple and red; the image of the harrowing of hell, with Satan being driven from the field by a Christ armed with a longsword; the Virgin Mary dressed as an Empress, or the Queen of Heaven, in lapis and gold, glittered and seemed alive. Even the tiles underfoot were astonishing – black and white marble in a magnificent and endless geometrical pattern that stretched away from the viewer at the gate to run like a maze of mazes into the entrances.

Standing in the courtyard were hundreds of men; the Guard. A hundred Nordikans stood in knee-length hauberks, with five-foot hafted axes on their shoulders and round aspides on their left arms. Every man of them wore a magnificent helmet in the ancient style, tall helmets of bronze and steel with hinged cheekplates and tall horsehair crests in red, white and black, and long cloaks of Imperial purple with the gold double-headed eagle of the Emperor embroidered on their left shoulders.

Across the courtyard from the Nordikans stood the Scholae; almost twice the number, with spears and teardrop-shaped shields. They wore blued and gilt bassinets and coats of plate covered in scarlet leather over bronze scale haubergeons and hip-high boots of red leather. Every man had the same Imperial purple cloak that the Nordikans had.

At the back of the yard, three hundred Ordinaries stood in matching scarlet gowns with gold buckles and white leather shoes.

It looked like a vision of a particularly martial heaven.

An officer stood forth, marched briskly to the centre of the gates, and called out in High Archaic.

‘Halt! Who is there? Who dares come to the gate of the Divine Emperor?’


Harmodius chuckled in the Red Knight’s head. That must be really old. I don’t think we see the Emperor as divine any more – fascinating.

Could you shut up?

Bah.

‘The Duke of Thrake, Megas Ducas, commander of the Imperial Armies, and his bucellarii!’ roared the Red Knight.

The sound from within the courtyard was palpable. Men murmured.

The officer in the gateway paused, obviously at a loss.

The Red Knight sat on his horse and waited, enjoying the mess he’d just made.

That’s put the cat among the pigeons. Bucellarii – splendid scholarship.

Thank you, Harmodius. I was quite proud of it, I confess.

You are forcing her hand.

I am, at that. It would suit her to use me while keeping me at arm’s length – to retain the option of allowing the former Duke to return to the fold. I thought I’d save us all time.

You have a plan?

Yes.

Can I be of service?

I’d like to know why the Empire commands all this hermetical talent and these superb soldiers and yet remains so toothless.

See the boy coming out of the Ordinaries?

Ah, a message.

The boy was dressed in stark black and white parti-colour. Just like the Imperial birds – an Imperial messenger. He ran to the officer at the gate, knelt, and presented him a red ivory scroll tube.

The officer bowed deeply and kissed the tube. Then he opened it. He bowed again, and returned the tube to the messenger and pivoted sharply.

In High Archaic, he called, ‘General salute – the Megas Ducas enters the palace victorious!’

Six hundred feet stamped the ground. The drums rolled and rattled. Six hundred arms swept up in the Imperial salute.

The Red Knight didn’t even turn his head – he shouted, ‘March!’

The company – knights and squires, pages and archers and saddlers and armourers and priests and whores and wives and children and wagoners – marched neatly through the palace gates. If they lacked the formal dignity of the Nordikans or the magnificent plumage of the Scholae, they had a great deal of mirror-polished Gallish and Etruscan plate armour and their scarlet wool surcoats and matching white ostrich plumes in every hat or helmet made them any soldier’s envy.

It had been Mag and Lis who had provided every one of the company’s non-combatants with a neat red surcoat and a black wool cap with a white ostrich plume. The wool wasn’t the best and the boxwood dye would run in rain, but at night in a torchlit courtyard they looked like a magnificent embassage, or the retinue of a king.

The company rode to the centre of the great yard.

‘Halt!’ called the Captain. ‘Imperial salute!’

He was two horse lengths in advance of Ser Michael, who swept his lacs d’amour banner in a great figure of eight and then laid it across the marble parquetry under his horse’s hooves, the six-pointed star at the tip of the banner pole resting on the ground. Every man and woman in the company swept their right arms out straight from the shoulder, parallel to the ground and extending the line of the shoulder.

‘Ave, Kaisar!’ roared the company. They’d practised it in the hills, with Ser Alcaeus rolling his eyes at their bad Archaic and their lewd gestures. Tonight, by torchlight, in a two-thousand-year-old palace, it seemed – right.

‘Dismount!’ called the Captain, and the order was echoed by the corporals, and five hundred legs swept up and crossed five hundred saddles. The Ordinaries broke ranks and came forward to take the horses and in a moment the Outer Court appeared to be a riot of colour and movement, but it didn’t last. The Ordinaries had performed this task for hundreds of years, and the warhorses and palfreys were taken into the Imperial stables faster than the Red Knight would have thought possible. Indeed, he thought it was the greatest expression of raw power he’d seen yet – perhaps would ever see – that five hundred horses could be taken and stabled as fast as a man could say, ‘Hail Caesar.’

An officer of the Ordinaries appeared, along with the officer of the Nordikans who had stood in the gate and a pair of Imperial messengers – both, in this case, women.

‘Durk Blackhair, my lord Duke,’ said the Nordikan. His accent was thick enough to cut with a knife, even in Archaic.

The officer of Ordinaries bowed deeply. ‘My lord Duke, I am to take you to the throne. This would usually be the duty of the Mayor of the Palace but I regret to say that there is no such person at this time. No offence is intended. While I am unworthy to perform this task, I will make every effort to satisfy.’

‘You are the Captain of the Ordinaries?’ asked the Red Knight.

‘I have that honour,’ answered the Imperial servant. ‘May I add that your High Archaic is elegant? Bucellarii? The Imperial messengers had to consult a book.’ He gave the slightest nod to the two women and then bowed deeply and walked away into the torchlight.

‘Where will my people be placed?’ asked the Red Knight.

‘The Athanatos barracks were built for a thousand soldiers, and are currently unoccupied. As their former occupants have made some unwise choices, the Imperial will is that they be given to you. Bedding may be a trifle tight—’

The Red Knight caught Sauce’s eye and indicated that he wanted her. He turned to Toby, already at his shoulder, and as his squire took his helmet and gauntlets and changed his sword, he sent Nell for Ser Gavin and Ser Michael and Ser Thomas.

‘You cannot keep the throne waiting!’ said the Captain of Ordinaries.

‘I am not keeping the throne waiting. I’m seeing to my soldiers as quickly as I can, while preparing myself to greet the throne, which I cannot do in full armour.’ He smiled as graciously as he could. ‘Sauce, see to it that the wagons are only unloaded into the Athanatos barracks. Barrack by mess group; men-at-arms are responsible for the behaviour of their mess.’ He saw John le Bailli. ‘John! Collect the wagoners and barrack them together – draught animals to the stables. Mag – Mag!’

The seamstress was as self-effacing as usual, although when she stepped forward she was striking in her red surcoat over a black travelling gown. Her hat was – pert.

‘My lord Duke,’ she said with a curtsey that had just the smallest hint of mockery.

The Captain of Ordinaries grew pale.

The Red Knight, despite the throbbing at his temples, had to laugh. ‘Mag, can you see to all the non-combatants? I’ve meant to appoint you corporal – will you accept the job?’

‘At a corporal’s pay?’ she asked quietly.

‘Of course,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I’ll have Kaitlin as a lieutenant,’ she said.

‘Place them all together. Best behaviour all round.’

His soldiers saluted with their free hands, and Mag dropped another curtsy.

‘We have food for three days,’ John le Bailli said quietly to the Captain of Ordinaries.

The palace officer puffed out his cheeks in relief. He turned to another Ordinary, this one distinguished by a loop of white braid or rope on his right shoulder. ‘Are you following, Stephanos?’

The man saluted.

The Red Knight had light leather gloves on his hands, a small fur hat with a gold enamel brooch and a white ostrich plume on his head and the baton of his captaincy in his hand. He bowed to his officers. ‘Ser Gavin, Ser Thomas, Ser Jehan, Ser Milus, Ser Alcaeus – on me.’

Toby just got his ermine-trimmed cloak over his shoulders as he turned away and followed the Captain of the Ordinaries. The Captain’s leg harnesses littered the ground, but they were off, and the sabatons, and the arm-harnesses too, so that the Captain looked as if he might be wearing his breast and back by choice.


They passed together from the Outer Court to the Inner. The Red Knight turned to Darkhair. ‘My pardon, Captain. I needed to see to my men.’

Darkhair was not an old man. He grinned, and showed a mouth missing a great many teeth. He was the same size as Bad Tom – the two giants were already sizing each other up. He pointed with his axe – moving the three-pound head and five-foot haft like a child flicking a straw – and beckoned six men from the rightmost two files of the Nordikans.

‘Dismiss!’ he roared.

The whole body of Nordikans dissolved like salt into warm water and vanished into the torchlit darkness, pouring in through their barracks’ gate, which was six men wide. The Red Knight caught a glimpse of darkly carved wood, knot work, great gaping-mouthed dragons and running dogs and whitewash, and then he was past, and the six men in long chain cotes were swinging along, three on each side, every one of them the size of Tom or Ranald or the Gallish nobles.

‘I’m no captain,’ said Darkhair. He smiled again. ‘I’m acting Spatharios. That means—’

‘Sword bearer,’ chorused Ser Michael and the Red Knight together. They grinned at each other. Ser Jehan rolled his eyes.

‘There is no captain in the palace except the Captain of the Ordinaries,’ Darkhair went on. ‘The commander of the Nordikans is called – Jarl.’ He shrugged. ‘The Jarl was killed by the traitor.’

‘But of course, your men call you Captain,’ said the palace functionary. ‘I’m sure we can arrive at some mutually beneficial—’

The Red Knight smiled. ‘I’ll settle for Duke,’ he said.

Bad Tom grinned. ‘Duke it is, then.’

The throne was occupied by one very small, and very magnificent, young woman. She was dressed in purple and gold, and her hair was so wound about with pearls that it was almost impossible to determine what colour her hair might be. A veil of gold tissue hung over her face, and the vestments she wore must have rivalled the Red Knight’s armour for weight.

He walked down the purple carpet, painfully aware that his leather-soled shoes had grass stuck in them from the Field of Ares. The Imperial throne room was intended to strike barbarians dumb with wonder, and the Red Knight found it difficult to keep his gaze fixed on the princess. Over his head, the dome soared a hundred feet, with a round crystal window set exactly in the centre, through which distant stars glittered; the rest of the vault displayed a mosaic of the creation of the world, an hermetical artefact that moved as it retold the story.

Under the wonder of the dome was the Imperial throne, twice the height of a man in gleaming ivory and solid gold, with a single yellow-red cabochon ruby the size of a man’s fist set high over the canopy. It was hermetical, and it glowed from within, casting a rich golden light over the princess.

Sitting on a footstool by the throne – also of ivory – sat an older woman in midnight-blue robes embroidered with stars and moons and crosses. She had a pair of shears in her hand and appeared to be cutting a thread – an act that seemed bizarre amidst the incredible opulence.

The acting chamberlain raised his staff. ‘The Duke of Thrake!’ he called. ‘Megas Ducas of all the Imperial Armies, Admiral of the Fleets, Lord of the Mountains, the Red Knight.’

The Duke had been well briefed in his long walk through the palace – and, today, he was not interested in flouting etiquette. He made himself put one foot boldly in front of the other until he reached the edge of the throne, and then he went to one knee, sweeping his fur cap from his head, and then lay, full length, at the princess’s feet.

She might have been seen to smile, and extended one red-slippered foot.

He kissed her toe and then put his forehead back against the scarlet carpet. Even at this angle, with his head almost flat against the floor, he could see that the marble under the ivory throne was perfectly clean. Further back, among the hangings that partially covered a pagan mosaic by a small door, he could see the four paws of a cat.

He smiled to himself.

He lay on the thick carpet and felt the pain in his hip, the numbness creeping into the small of his back, the fatigue in his shoulders. It was, in fact, very comfortable at the foot of the throne.

Don’t say a word, he said to his annoying guest.

A mass of rattles, rustles, and clanks told him that his knights were throwing themselves to the floor as well. The cat started at the motion and put its head almost to the marble, looking under the throne to see if there was some threat to which it needed to attend.

‘We gather you have driven the traitor from the walls of my city and won a great victory,’ said the figure on the throne. ‘Accept the plaudits of the throne. We are most grateful. We would wish to meet you and your officers in private audience for further consultations.’

The Duke and his knights lay like effigies on the carpet. One did not speak to the throne during a full audience.

He smelled her perfume – a wonderful mixture of cedar and musk and lavender – as she rose to her feet. Slim, arched feet. He wondered if all the fuss about what kind of shoes the Emperor wore stemmed from the fact that his subjects spent so much of their time seeing him from ground level.

The cat was hunting a rat. The Red Knight could now see both of them.

The princess stepped down from the throne and swept out of the Great Hall with her retinue at her heels, leaving a trace of cedar and musk and lavender in her wake.

The acting chamberlain’s staff tapped the floor rapidly, and all the courtiers began to rise. The Duke gritted his teeth and got slowly to his feet, although his hip shot pulses of low, slow pain into his upper leg and torso like the thump, thump of the bass drum.

The Captain of the Ordinaries appeared at his elbow. ‘Follow me. Very elegant – well done,’ he said with well-practised effusiveness that the new Duke found suspect.

But he didn’t have long to be suspicious. His hip gave a click of protest, and he fell – his whole leg failed to support him. He hit his head, hard.

Ser Milus shouted something about blood.

They carried the new Duke to his new suite of apartments and laid him on a bed magnificent enough to use in a pageant, and he bled on sheets of purest white linen. Palace Ordinaries buzzed around him like wasps, and Ser Thomas grabbed the Spatharios by the shoulder.

‘He needs a doctor!’ Ser Thomas said, his slightly mad eyes bulging.

‘A doctor has been summoned,’ the Captain of the Ordinaries said with a bow.

Tom didn’t like the Captain of the Ordinaries. Something about the man was false – rotten to the core. Blackhair, on the other hand, might have been Tom’s twin brother – black hair, a forehead like the prow of a ship, and blue eyes that looked like they could cut you. Blackhair was tattooed from knuckles to eyelids – Tom thought he liked the look. And Tom was not a man to hesitate.

‘I would’na take water from him if I was dyin’ of thirst,’ Bad Tom said to Blackhair. ‘Do ye ha’ yer own doctor?’

The acting Spatharios shook his head. He turned and growled something in Nordikan at another giant, who pushed forward. ‘Harald Derkensun. I speak Alban – and Archaic.’

Tom watched the Ordinaries for a moment and shook his head. ‘I want these f*cking slaves out of the room an’ I want a doctor you trust,’ Tom said.

Derkensun nodded. He clapped his hands and rattled orders, and surprised Ordinaries fled the room.


The Captain of Ordinaries bowed. ‘I have sent for our doctor,’ he began, but Tom cut him off.

‘We’ll get our own,’ he said. ‘Ye can go, now.’

The Captain of Ordinaries sighed. ‘I’ll have water and bandages sent.’

Ser Jehan caught Bad Tom’s arm. ‘Mag. I sent for her. And for Toby and Nell and fresh men to stand guard.’

Bad Tom nodded. ‘Aye – thanks.’

Jehan pursed his lips. ‘I didn’t like the look of the pompous bastard either,’ he said.

Mag had the potentia to heal, but it was not her strongest hermetical skill, and she settled for easing the pain and manipulating the hip until she had the cracked bone aligned and then placing a light binding on it. ‘Don’t let him move,’ she told Toby.

Toby gave her the look that boys usually save for their mothers. ‘How’m I ta do that, ma’am?’ he asked, more than a little whine in his voice. He looked at Nell. Nell stared at the ground.

Mag stretched and looked at le Bailli, who was rubbing his chin. ‘Christ, I need some sleep,’ he muttered.

Mag turned to Bad Tom. ‘We still need a doctor. A good one.’

‘One of the Nordikans says he knows one – an old Yahadut with powers.’ Bad Tom jutted his chin at the door, where two axe-bearing giants stood. ‘In the Hills, we have great respect for the Yahadut.’

Mag shrugged. ‘Never met one,’ she said. ‘If he’s a doctor and we can trust him, then send for him. Captain’s not too bad for now – but he’ll want to be up, and I’m not sure I set that hip right.’ She yawned.

Derkensun bowed to Mag, and grinned at Bad Tom. ‘I can send a runner to my friend. He’ll find the old man. But it will be morning before we see him. And the princess will be wanting to meet as soon as possible.’ He looked back and forth from Tom to Mag. ‘You are doing the right thing – be wary.’

Tom nodded and pulled his leather bottle over his head. ‘Only water from our canteens until we’re sure we’re safe. Got me, boys?’

The other men in the room nodded.

Later in the night, Nell brought two of the company mutts up from the stables. It took her almost an hour to find the horses, and more time to find the stall where the dogs had been penned. Then she lost her way coming back through the endless corridors and the mutts tried to bite an Ordinary.

Everything is an adventure when you’re a page.

When she presented them to Toby, the squire offered both dogs water in bowls. The younger pup drank enthusiastically. The older bitch smelled the water and whined.

In an hour, the pup was dead.

The company went on alert, and began to mount a separate guard. Exhausted men and women laid plans to defend the Athanatos barracks in case of need, and Ser Milus cleared every man, woman and child out into the night and went from room to room with ten knights in full harness and torches – sweating archers opened every trunk and every wardrobe. Beds were upended.

Two men were caught. Both struggled, and both were killed.

Bad Tom looked like a devil incarnate in the torchlight of the courtyard, his sword red with the second man’s blood – a uniformed Ordinary.

The Captain of the Ordinaries refused to be summoned.

Ser Milus looked at Ser Michael’s plan for the defence of the barracks and approved it. ‘Where’s the guardroom?’ he asked.

Ser Michael indicated the room they were in – a long, open hall with access to the interior and the main hall of the building. It was floored in black and white marble, and had battle scenes on the walls.

‘Well done, Youngling. You ha’ the first watch.’ The older knight grinned. ‘Thanks for volunteering.’ He nodded at Ser Michael’s stylus. ‘You can pass the watch making out a watchbill.’

Mag sat by the Red Knight’s bedside. He was pale and and his skin had the odd clarity of the very sick, and she wondered somewhat hopelessly if she’d set the hip badly, or somehow drained his ops with her own working. It was one of the great risks of healing.

She knew that her hopes to find a doctor were largely to do with her own desire to see the Captain in someone else’s charge. Healing was not her field.

She sat, and sewed. Worried and slept.

But when the hermetical working attacked, she felt it coming. She had time to take a breath, raise a shield over the bed, and stand up.

One of the Nordikans died – his blood boiled. The other put a hand on his sword hilt, and whatever malevolence had targeted him washed over him like a thin ink and was gone.

Mag spread her hands as she had learned from the Abbess, and the foul working cleared and the power that washed over Nell’s sleeping form only made her cry out and wake.

‘It eats the stars!’ Nell said, and her eyes closed.

The surviving Nordikan knelt, put a hand on his partner’s forehead, and rose, shaking his own head. ‘F*cking cowardly witches,’ he said.

Mag reached down. Workings have causes. Every stitch leaves a hole in the fabric, however small. Even when the stitches are pulled, a seamstress can see where the old work ran.

She raised her arms and spoke aloud, and the thread that tied her opponent to his working appeared, running out into the corridor.

She summoned the dog – the dead puppy – and set it on the scent. Filled it with her own ops to animate it for a few minutes, and sent it, mindless, to hunt for her.

Harald Derkensun watched the dead dog rise and sniff the ground with dismay; he even backed away and drew his sword against the nice old woman.

She nodded at him. ‘You have nothing to fear. Not all witches are cowards.’

Her voice rang with power.

The dog leaped up like a hound and bounded down the corridor outside.

Derkensun was shaken. ‘It was dead.’

‘Still is, more’s the pity, as it was my daughter’s,’ Mag said. ‘Needs must as the devil drives,’ she added.

The dog had only one purpose, and that was to follow the scent. It followed the working, and after running some way the scent of it grew stronger. And stronger still.

The source! It towered over him, and kicked at him.

He became – light.

She felt her sending subsume. She narrowed her eyes and just for a moment, the Nordikan thought he saw one of the vicious old witches of the myths of his people – feral crones who guarded an icy hell.

‘Got him,’ she said. And sagged into her chair.

Dawn brought the doctor.

He was old – so old that his moustache and beard had the wispy quality of bad wool. He wore a small cap on his head and carried a tall staff. He arrived with Derkensun, Ser Michael and a young man who was not introduced. Four more Nordikans came, placed the dead guard on a shield and carried him away.

The Yahadut leaned over the bed and put a hand on the Captain’s head – then snatched it back.

‘God of my fathers,’ he said. ‘What blasphemy is this?’

He started to turn, stumbled, and froze.

Ser Michael ignored the old man’s antics. ‘A man was killed in the kitchens, Mag. Killed hermetically – he had burns inside his skin.’

‘He killed the guard – he tried to kill us all,’ Mag said wearily.

‘Bad Tom caught a pair of them too,’ Michael said. ‘This place is riddled with treason.’

Harmodius made a fresh, desperate effort.

Yahadut scholar!

The man halted.

We need your help!

It is blasphemy for two souls to occupy one body, the old man said. But the sheer rarity of the thing caught his interest. I see. Ahh – I see. Your body is dead?


It is, Harmodius said. I need to leave my host. I’m killing him.

So I see, said the scholar, now fully intrigued. Ah! You are Harmodius?

I am.

Yosef ben Mar Chiyya, at your service. You know Al-Rashidi . . .

I do. I was his student. And you?

We correspond. Your host is not so badly wounded. I regret to confirm you are the source of the problem. You must leave him.

I felt it. I seized control—

This is evil! You must not!

—to save him. And myself, of course. Yosef – I am powerless in here. Can I be moved to an artefact?

Never. The soul is too complex. Only to another host. Surely you know this?

If Harmodius had had a corporeal body, he would have shrugged and sighed, too. I have such reasons to live!

Yosef ben Mar Chiyya’s eyes opened, and he turned back to the Red Knight’s body. In the comfortable, slightly shabby sitting room of his great library-palace, he fell into an armchair. I am well armoured against you, daemon. Come and sit.

I am no daemon.

Anything that seeks to seize control of a man’s body is a daemon. But you will not tempt me. I’m too old for temptation. Who is the woman who burns like the sun?

Mag. A seamstress. She has a natural talent.

By the horns and drums of Judea, she is like an angel of fire. Unlike you, daemon. You must die.

If I must, so be it. Wait – wait. What if you drugged him? Can drugs help?

They can help – but you will still be there.

Damn it! Rashidi would find a solution!

Rashidi is ten times as powerful as I, and would yet say that the solution is easy – you will simply not accept it. Let go. Die!

I will not.

The Yahudat took a deep shuddering breath and muttered an invocation, hand on the amulet at his chest. There was a flare of pure white light.

The Captain’s eyes opened.

He met the eyes of the old scholar. Took a deep breath as his friends crowded around the bed.

‘He’s gone,’ whispered the Red Knight.

The scholar shook his hand. ‘Not hardly, the wicked old thing.’ He put a hand on the Red Knight’s brow. ‘I simply forced him down for a while. Listen – I will make you a drink. A posset. It will help for now.’ He frowned. ‘But in truth, you must rid yourself of this troublesome guest.’

Mag leaned forward. ‘What is he talking about?’

The Captain’s eyes fluttered. ‘He’s babbling, Mag,’ he said.

The doctor met the seamstress’s eyes – in an eternity of no time, they both knew.

‘Ah, I see,’ Mag said.

An hour after the Captain drank off the posset, he was up, and possessed of ferocious energy.

He reviewed their arrangements, heard about the various attacks in the night, and paced his room until Nell brought him fresh clothes and a basin in which to wash.

Nell drew the water herself, brought it to the room, and Mag heated the water hermetically.

He sent Ser Michael – who was barely able to stand from fatigue – to inform the Captain of Ordinaries that he could meet the princess at her convenience. He exchanged a handclasp with Harald Derkensun.

‘Mag says I owe you for the excellent doctor and the warning, too. I’m sorry for your man.’ He met the Nordikan’s eyes.

The other man nodded. ‘There is much you should know,’ he said. ‘You are the Megas Ducas of the Emperor. I have eaten the Emperor’s salt and owe fealty to no other. No matter what their blood tie.’

The Captain heard the Nordikan out, and at the end, said, ‘You have given me much to think on.’

‘Blackhair knows,’ Derkensun said. ‘And Giorgios Comnena of the Scholae.’

The new Megas Ducas leaned against a wall. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Forewarned is forearmed, they say in Westwall.’ He seemed far away, then rallied. ‘What can you tell us of this Aeskepiles? The Emperor’s magister?’

Derkensun shrugged. ‘Little. Some men call him Vulcan. He was a smith, or a jeweller, before he came to power. Or so I have heard.’ He shrugged. ‘In truth, we Nordikans hate witches.’ He smiled a little. ‘We hate what we fear.’

‘You seem well informed to me,’ the Megas Ducas said.

‘I have a friend who is a warlock,’ Derkensun volunteered. ‘He would be rid of the smith. That is, Aeskepiles. We try not to say his name.’

An hour later, all of the night watch were abed. He’d left the apartments in the palace – the former Duke of Thrake’s apartments, of course.

He followed Toby and Nell all the way out of the labyrinthine corridors to the Athanatos barracks, where he found that Mag – prescient, as always – had kept him an officer’s suite of three rooms – sitting room, bedroom, orderly room. She already had it furnished with his camp furniture. And she was yet awake.

He took her hands and kissed both cheeks. ‘You are—’

She laughed. ‘I try to think ahead. Someone has to.’ She leaned over and

Entered his palace. Harmodius is alive! she said.

Yes, he admitted.

She smiled. Oh good – I liked him.

He makes a restless companion – like a bad housemate, except inside my skull. The Yahadut’s drugs are to suppress him.

Oh! she said. Tell me if I can help.

Her paramour, John le Bailli, handed his Captain a pair of wax tablets. ‘Here’s the billeting arrangements as best I understand them. Things got chaotic at the end, and this place is incredible – there’s a legionary eagle over the mess hall. The building must be more than a thousand years old.’ He held out a scroll. ‘We caught a pair of spies, and Tom killed ’em.’

‘Of course he did,’ the Captain agreed.

Sauce came and leaned in the doorway of the orderly room. ‘People are saying we’re to call you Duke.’

He grinned at her. ‘I like it. It outranks earl.’

‘Duke Gabriel?’ she asked, greatly daring.

His grin faltered.

She came into the orderly room, where Toby had his field desk open on a table and his sealing wax hot. He had a stack of parchment scrolls on one side of the desk and a couple of hides’ worth of cut parchment on the other side.

‘It’s not like the old days,’ Sauce said. ‘Gavin – is on your side. A fair number of people know, or suspect – Alcaeus, for one. And if he knows, the princess knows.’ She shrugged. ‘When it was just you, me, and Jacques . . . then things were different.’

He leaned back. ‘Once, it was just me and Jacques,’ he said.

Mag took her man’s elbow and dragged him out of the room. She waved over Sauce’s head.

Meanwhile, Sauce blew the newly minted Duke a kiss. ‘You don’t scare me. I’m a knight.’ She shrugged. ‘I hear you had a bad night. We all did.’

‘Actually, I got the best night’s sleep I’ve had in two weeks. Go and lie down, woman.’

She shook her head. ‘Can’t. Michael tagged me for this watch, and I’m the duty officer.’ She grinned. ‘Duty officer. Think I’ll ever tire of it?’

‘No,’ agreed the Captain. ‘How’s reading and writing?’

She winced. ‘Not so good.’

The Duke pointed at the stack of scrolls at his side. ‘See all those? The duty officer and the corporals should be handling most of this, but Michael and I are doing almost all of it right now. Reading and writing are not optional for company officers. Clear?’

She saluted. ‘Yes, my lord Duke.’ She giggled. And got out the door.

Ser Michael returned. He fell into a stool. ‘Now, if you can do it,’ he said.

The Duke nodded. ‘Fetch the officers. Leave Sauce here – we could be attacked at any time and I want a good officer on duty. I know, you already took care of it, I’m just enjoying having my mind work again.’

Ser Jehan cursed and Ser Milus looked his true age, but they came – in armour. With their pages and squires, they crossed the Outer and then the Inner Court, climbed two staircases and clanked and scraped their way along a corridor that seemed as the whole road from Lissen Carrak. Finally, they paused outside a pair of oak doors, the old dark wood richly carved.

There were two Nordikans on guard at the doors. They raised their axes and clashed them together, smiling through their long beards.

‘Ave, Imperator!’ they said together.

Taken aback, the Duke looked over his shoulder before he realised that they meant him.

‘I, too, am something of a scholar, my lord Duke,’ said a light voice from inside the room.

The Emperor’s daughter sat on a low-backed oak chair set in ivory. She wore a long scarlet kirtle with an overdress of silk that seemed to change colour in the light – between dark red and pale green. She had three peacock feathers in her hair and a veil of nearly transparent silk. Her almond-shaped eyes were rich and dark like thick velvet, and her hair shone like black brocade in the light of so many candles that the room itself seemed to be on fire. The Duke realised that every double pair of candles hung in front of a bronze mirror that reflected the light over and over in a ruddy-gold profusion. It wasn’t like daylight – it was like the light in the last moments of a magnificent summer day.

The Duke lowered himself again to the floor – all the way, and lay flat. There was something round and gold wedged under a bookcase behind her feet – which were still encased in the same red slippers.

Her scent was the same.

This room was not as well swept at the throne room – dust had gathered in riotous profusion under the parquetry cabinets – Etruscan work, a meticulous trompe l’oeil of books piles in bookcases, astrolabes, rolled charts and hermetical and scientific tools in gilt and carefully stained wood, so lifelike that a casual observer in the ruddy light would take the parquetry for the real thing.

The newly minted Duke thought it all needed a dusting and a coat of walnut oil.

‘You need never perform the full obeisance to any but the throne, my Lord Duke,’ she said. ‘I am but the Emperor’s daughter – it is arguable that I don’t deserve it even when I sit on the throne.’

‘On the contrary, Majesty, your beauty commands my utter devotion wherever I find it,’ said the Duke.

The woman with the shears clapped her hands.

‘I am sure that flattery will, in fact, leave the most favourable impression,’ said the princess, a trace of amusement cutting through her controlled voice.

‘That’s my experience,’ said the Duke. ‘May I rise?’

‘Perhaps I shall measure the full force of my beauty by the duration of your willingness to lie in the dust at my feet,’ she said.

‘Are you by any chance missing a gold button shaped like a hawking bell?’ he asked.

‘Where did you find the word bucellarii?’ she asked. ‘The capture of my father made only slightly more stir than your claim to be at the head of your bucellarii.’ She smiled, and a slight glow came to her ivory face.

‘But you know what it means,’ said the Duke.

‘I am something of a scholar. And you? Do you know why the Nordikans saluted you?’ She nodded. ‘It will be very difficult to converse with you if you insist on lying on the floor.’

‘If Your Majesty would care to spend a day in armour on an inferior horse, smiting Your Majesty’s enemies, she might find that the floor of the Imperial Library as comfortable as I do.’

Her voice was as controlled, contrived, accented and pitched as an actress’s or a great singer’s. It sounded almost hermetical. ‘Well, as you insist on lying on the floor, I am, in fact, missing one of my favourite buttons.’

The Duke rose slowly, favouring his right hip, and knelt on one knee before her. ‘If one of the Ordinaries could fetch it, I believe it lies under the middle bookcase. If there is a maid responsible for dusting this room, perhaps her eyesight should be checked.’

She smiled at him.

He had difficulty breathing for a moment.

‘Can you defeat the traitor and recapture my father?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He felt the probe of her hermetical enquiry.

The Duke nodded his head. Very, very quietly, he said, ‘In Alba, that would be considered very rude. Or even an attack.’

Her expression did not change. ‘I am quite desperate,’ she said with crushing honesty. ‘Where I sit, there are no rules at all.’

One by one, they introduced their officers – his mercenaries, and her palace officers, military and civil.

‘It is my intention to treat you as my Megas Ducas,’ she said. ‘You are indeed the commander of my armies and navies, which currently consist of a single armed galley at the Imperial mole and the forces you have seen tonight in the palace, with the addition of your own men. And perhaps the Vardariotes?’

‘I took the liberty of paying them a year’s arrears of pay,’ the Duke said. Sitting wasn’t any better for his hip than standing, and his armour felt as if it was a machine built to break his body.

The Captain of Ordinaries and the acting chamberlain both coughed.

The Lady Mary looked at Ser Alcaeus, who gave her a very slight nod.

‘I know that you are Earl Muriens’ son,’ said the princess.

‘I know that you are Ser Alcaeus’s mother,’ the Duke said to the woman with the shears. ‘And the knight at the end of the table, seated by Acting Spatharios Darkhair, is my brother. Just in case all of this becomes a family affair.’

‘You paid the Vardariotes, my lord Duke. I do not have the means to make such a payment – or to repay you. Even if I did, I’d use that money to buy some of my Thrakian lord’s allegiances. I would like to know what you plan to do to defeat the traitor and retake my father.’

The Red Knight – the Duke of Thrake, now – inclined his head. ‘Majesty, your palace is riddled with spies and traitors, and I intend to be very careful to whom I disclose my plans.’

The princess frowned. ‘I agree that my palace has spies. Palaces generally do. But those in this room can be trusted. We are only twelve people.’

‘Jesus only had twelve,’ the Duke said. ‘Look how that came out.’

The Moreans had less experience of blasphemy than Albans, and they gasped. The princess looked physically pained.

The Duke shrugged. ‘At any rate,’ he said. ‘I intend to win over the Academy and build you a fleet. Since both of these will require a great deal of public action, there’s no sense in hiding my intentions.’

She pursed her lips. ‘The Academy is loyal,’ she said. It was the first sign she’d shown of hesitation.

The Duke paused. ‘The Academy has enough hermetical firepower to overthrow the Emperor and the church together, if that’s what they wanted. They allowed the Magister Militum to turn against your father. I suspect that they are unhappy with something.’

The princess looked away. ‘I have no money for a fleet.’

Her new Megas Ducas nodded. ‘I will borrow the money to build a fleet,’ he said.


Lady Maria spoke for the first time. ‘The Etruscans will burn your new fleet on the stocks.’

Bad Tom grunted. ‘Let ’em try,’ he said. He was never at his best without sleep – this morning, he looked like a black boar made into a man, with the hair at his brow curling up like a satyr’s horns.

Lady Maria leaned forward, interested. ‘I had assumed we would buy the Etruscans aid with trading privileges. It has worked before – offer Genua concessions, or Venike, and play them against each other like barbarian tribes.’

‘When you are yourself strong, you can afford to make concessions,’ the Duke said. ‘With a fleet to back your Imperial will, you can dictate your terms to the Etruscans. Right now, they are blockading your ports, shutting out your primary sources of Imperial revenue.’ He shrugged. ‘Besides, we will need a fleet to raid the traitor’s lands, as you call him, and to trade with Alba.’

‘We have no trade with Alba,’ said the princess. She paused, and for the first time, her hands fidgeted. ‘I suppose we have a little.’

The acting chamberlain spoke up hesitantly. ‘We do have trade, Majesty – over the mountains to Albinkirk. Only a trickle, I’m sure.’

‘And that cut off by the Wild,’ said the Duke. ‘Alba is richer and more vigorous than your father or grandfather imagined, Majesty. I, too, am a scholar, at times. And I have a friend who is a great merchant. I enquired at length before coming here. Your silks – some of the finest brocades in the world, made within the walls of this city – travel all the way to Venike before they come back to Harndon, which is just a few hundred leagues along the coast.’ He smiled. ‘And there are other things we share. The fur trade.’

‘A few bolts of brocade will not save the Imperial revenues,’ said the princess. ‘And the furs come from the north – Thrake lies between us and our border revenues. We will not see any furs this season.’

‘Will we not?’ the Duke asked.

Lady Mary put a hand on her mistress’s arm.

‘This is the whole of your plan?’ asked the Imperial princess.

‘No, Majesty. This is the very tip of my spear, and will itself serve to cloak my other activities.’ The Duke smiled. ‘If you’d rather, I suppose I can gather my bucellarii and ride away.’

She sighed. ‘You are the very barbarian mercenary I imagined. Your manners are better, and you speak the High Archaic, but your arrogance is staggering.’

‘Majesty, your arrogant barbarian mercenary would not have a plan to restore the Imperial revenues while maintaining the quality and numbers of the Imperial Army. For fifty generations, your forefathers have squandered their inheritance and purchased foreign soldiers to protect them and maintain the rump of their Empire – and now you think I am arrogant?’ The Duke met her eye squarely. ‘You should get out of this palace, Majesty, and see what the rest of the world is like.’

‘And you imagine that you can save me?’ she asked.

‘I believe I can defeat the traitor and rescue your father,’ he answered.

‘You failed today,’ she countered.

Lady Mary put her hand on the princess’s arm again, but Princess Irene brushed it off.

The Duke nodded. ‘It didn’t help that the traitor knew I was coming, and had already placed his right flank nearest the gate,’ he said. ‘Nor was I warned that he had a most puissant mage waiting to cut my men’s bowstrings and fire the grass. Mmm? Majesty?’

She nodded. ‘I am not responsible for these things,’ she said.

The Duke shrugged. ‘To me and my men, you are entirely responsible. You are the Captain of your Empire.’ He met her eyes.

The princess had the look of a young man trapped in an alley by footpads. Brave enough to fight it out. But aware of the inevitable outcome. She rose. ‘You accuse me, for your failure, my lord Duke? Or you imagine that I betrayed you?’

He shook his head. ‘Let us deal with political realities, and not accusations. If you can rule – if you can hold the palace and the city – I can defeat the old Duke and the Etruscans. If you wish to be rid of me – let me stress this, Your Grace – you have only to bid me go.’ He met her, eye to eye. ‘There is no need to assassinate me.’

They looked at each other long enough to become lovers. The look stretched on and on, neither blinking.

Lady Maria stood. ‘The princess will withdraw. We thank you for your efforts on our behalf, my lord Duke. In future, you must use a little less familiarity in dealing with the Imperial presence. Princess Irene is not used to so much confrontation and finds it irreverent and confusing.’

The newly minted Duke stood straight, his hip screaming at him now and joined by an unsealy chorus of bruises, abrasions and pure fatigue. He ignored the polyphony of pain and knelt, took a handful of her hem as she swept by and kissed it.

The princess blushed. ‘You think me ungrateful,’ she said. ‘You find me defenceless, with a traitor at the gate. This Empire has been the bulwark of civilisation for more than a thousand years, and I fear—’ her hand toyed with the diamond cross at her throat ‘—I fear to be the cause of its fall.’

He smiled into her gown. ‘A knight can make a tolerable gate keeper,’ he said. ‘You are not defenceless. There is no chance that the traitor will take this city. Let us build on that.’

She smiled, reached down – cautiously – and touched his hand. Then she glided away.

Lady Maria paused in the doorway. Ser Alcaeus bowed deeply and kissed her hand. She smiled. ‘You have done brilliantly,’ she said to him. Then she turned to the Red Knight. ‘The patents of your appointments are being drawn up even now. I love the boldness of the idea of building a fleet.’ She shrugged. ‘I simply cannot imagine it succeeding.’

Everyone bowed, and the Imperial party swept away, leaving only the Captain of Ordinaries. He turned to the Duke. ‘She touched you!’ he breathed.

The Duke ignored the man. ‘Leave him, Tom,’ he said, without turning around.

Tom lowered his arms and spat at the Captain of Ordinaries’ feet. ‘Your turn is coming, dog,’ he said.

The man turned white and grabbed the cross at his breast. ‘I’m innocent!’ As soon as the Albans were gone, he turned to his lieutentant and murmured, ‘Barbarians.’

Bad Tom appeared in the Captain’s doorway. ‘You two f*cking, or can anyone come in?’

Sauce was leaning over the writing desk, shaping the word omega with her mouth, tongue in her teeth. The Duke was holding her hand as it drove the sharp stylus into the wax.

Toby fled.

The Duke looked up without releasing Sauce’s hand. ‘Tom, do you know that some people could find your sense of humour offensive?’

‘Really?’ asked Bad Tom. He sank onto a camp stool, which groaned. ‘Jehan, as usual, thinks you are selling us down the river. Could you pat him on the head?’ The big man chuckled silently at Sauce’s discomfiture.

Sauce glared at Bad Tom like an angry cat. ‘You can go f*ck yourself,’ she spat.

‘Does the truth hurt, baby?’ Tom asked, and his eyes were hard as flint.

Sauce took a breath and smiled. ‘Jealous? You just want him for yourself,’ she said.

Tom’s right hand shot to his sword hilt.

Their Captain had gone back to work, and ignored their exchange.


Master Random,

If you would be so kind – I need a loan of a hundred thousand ducats and two Master shipwrights. Also a table of values for brocades, silks, and northern furs on the dock at Harndon. In haste—

He tended to stick out his tongue slightly when he wrote too fast, and he sucked it in and clenched his teeth as he finished.

Toby returned as if summoned, sanded the finished document and laid it on a side table.

‘You two done?’ the Red Knight asked.

Bad Tom tore his eyes away from Sauce. ‘You paying the archers after mass on Sunday? Also we need a cleric of some kind. A priest.’

‘We have two priests, I believe. Father Peter from Albinkirk and the mendicant friar—’

‘He’s wode – clean mad, lost his wits.’ Tom crossed his arms.

‘You ought to like him, then,’ said Sauce.

‘A regular chaplain. It’s been mentioned a fair amount by the lads.’ Tom looked at Sauce. ‘And the lasses.’

‘I’ll look into it.’ The Captain went back to writing.

‘I gather we’re to call ye Duke.’ Tom’s voice was itself a warning.

‘Yes. I like it. My lord Duke.’ The Captain sat back.

‘You ain’t our lord. Y’er our Captain.’ Tom shook his head. ‘I mislike it.’

The Captain met his eyes for a moment over his pen. ‘Your reservations are noted,’ he said coldly.

‘Like that, is it, boyo? Don’t get to big for yer braes.’ Tom got up and leaned over the table.

‘I’m not. I’m tired and injured and listening to two posturing idiots puts me in a foul mood.’ The Captain paused. ‘I had enough of it at the palace.’

Tom shrugged. ‘Aye. Well. So you’ll pay the lads on Sunday?’

The Captain met his eye. ‘Perhaps.’

Sauce shook her head. ‘Of course he’ll pay them – Tom? What are you on about?’

The two men were staring at each other.

‘He gave all our money to the f*cking Easterners. We don’t have ten silver leopards together. Do we, my lord Duke?’ Tom put both hands on the table. The action was threatening.

The Duke smiled. ‘Tom, it is ten o’clock in the morning, and I’m tired and pissed off. Yes – if that’s what you want to hear – I spent all our money to buy the Vardariotes. It’s no matter. I can get more.’

Bad Tom shook his head. ‘For once, my lord Duke, I’m with Jehan. This is a tom-fool contract with no gold and no gain and too many enemies. Let’s go back to killing monsters.’

The Captain leaned back and put his hands behind his head. He closed his eyes and stretched a little, favouring his right hip. Then his eyes opened. ‘Want a good fight, Tom?’

Tom smiled. He looked at Sauce. ‘Anytime, baby.’

‘Would you settle for catching the spies in the palace?’ he asked.

Tom’s smile came more slowly.

‘Look around you, Tom. This is the richest city in the world. The diamond cross on the princess’s neck would pay the company for a month.’ The Duke stretched again. ‘I have the right to tax this Empire for our pay. Think a little bigger, Tom. There’s never been a contract like this.’

‘Best pay the archers on Sunday then,’ Tom said. He grinned. ‘Christ’s skinny knees, you bought me with hunting spies. Will there be fighting?’

‘You can kill anyone you catch, but Tom, how about we extract a little information from them first, eh? Gelfred will have the bulk of the fun but, before Christmas, we’ll have a good fight.’ He rose. ‘Friends, I have to go to bed.’ He handed three scrolls to Toby. ‘See these placed on the birds. Yourself.’ He turned back. ‘And while I’m handing out tasks: Sauce, I want you to learn everything you can about Aeskepiles. Start with the Nordikan, Derkensun. Do not ask anyone connected to the princess.’

Toby nodded gravely.

Sauce raised a dark red eyebrow. ‘We don’t trust the princess?’

The Red Knight sighed. ‘We absolutely do not trust the princess.’

Tom put his hands on his hips. ‘Sweet Christ, Captain my Lord High Duke Commander! We don’t trust our employer?’

‘I need sleep, sweet friends,’ the Duke said. ‘Our employer, for good or ill, is the Emperor. Not the princess. That’s our legal and quite possibly our moral stance, as well.’

Bad Tom caught his Captain’s arm. ‘I can’na wait to see how this comes out. But – you know I have to go in the spring.’

‘And drive the cattle? Of course you do, Tom. I’m counting on it.’ The Captain smiled. And vanished through the curtain to his sleeping room.

Tom turned and looked at Sauce. ‘He’s counting on it? What the f*ck does that mean? I hate it when he does that.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t really mind that he’s smarter than most folk,’ she said. ‘I just hate it when he rubs my nose in it.’

‘Amen, sister,’ Tom said.