The Red Knight by Miles Cameron Read Free Book Online

shrieked. ‘Show her what happens when evil is defeated!’ He took a step towards the wagoner—
    And the bear moved. She moved faster than a man would have thought possible.
    She had his head in one paw and his dagger in the other before his body, pumping blood across the crowd, hit the dirt. Then she whirled – suddenly nothing but teeth and claws – and
sank the heavy steel dagger into the ground
through
the links of her chain.
    The links popped.
    A woman screamed.
    She killed as many of them as she could catch, until her claws were glutted with blood, and her limbs ached. They screamed, and hampered each other, and her paws struck them
hard like rams in a siege, and every man and woman she touched, she killed.
    If she could have she would have killed every human in the world. Her cub was dead.
Her cub was dead.
    She killed and killed, but they ran in all directions.
    When she couldn’t catch any more, she went back and tore at their corpses – found a few still alive and made sure they died in fear.
    Her cub was dead.
    She had no time to mourn. Before they could bring their powerful bows and their deadly, steel-clad soldiers, she picked up her remaining cub, ignored the pain and the fatigue and all the fear
and panic she felt to be so deep in the tame horror of human lands, and fled. Behind her, in the town, alarm bells rang.
    She ran.
     
     
    Lorica – Ser Mark Wishart
     
    Only one knight came, and his squire. They rode up to the gates at a gallop, summoned from their Commandery, to find the gates closed, the towers manned, and men with crossbows
on the walls.
    ‘A creature of the Wild!’ shouted the panicked men on the wall before they refused to open the gates for him – even though they’d summoned him. Even though he was the
Prior of the Order of Saint Thomas. A paladin, no less.
    The knight rode slowly around the town until he came to the market field.
    He dismounted. His squire watched the fields as if a horde of boglins might appear at any moment.
    The knight opened his visor, and walked slowly across the field. There were a few corpses at the edge, by the dry ditch that marked the legal edge of the field. The bodies lay thicker as he grew
closer to the Market Oak. Thicker and thicker. He could hear the flies. Smell the opened bowels, warm in the sun.
    It smelled like a battlefield.
    He knelt for a moment, and prayed. He was, after all, a priest, as well as a knight. Then he rose slowly and walked back to his squire, spurs catching awkwardly on the clothes of the dead.
    ‘What – what was it?’ asked his squire. The boy was green.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said the knight. He took off his helmet and handed it to his squire.
    Then he walked back into the field of death.
    He made a quick count. Breathed as shallowly as he could.
    The dogs were mostly in one place. He drew his sword, four feet of mirror-polished steel, and used it as a pry-bar to roll the corpse of a man with legs like tree trunks and arms like hams off
the pile of dogs.
    He knelt and took off a gauntlet, and picked up what looked like a scrap of wool.
    Let out a breath.
    He held out his sword, and called on God for aid, and gathered the divine golden power, and then made a small working.
    ‘Fools,’ he said aloud.
    His working showed him where the priest had died, too. He found the man’s head, but left it where it lay. Found his dagger, and placed a
phantasm
on it.
    ‘You arrogant idiot,’ he said to the head.
    He pulled the wagoner’s body off the mangled corpse of his daughter. Turned aside and threw up, and then knelt and prayed. And wept.
    And finally, stumbled to his feet and walked back to where his squire waited, the worry plain on his face.
    ‘It was a golden bear,’ he said.
    ‘Good Christ!’ said the squire. ‘Here? Three hundred leagues from the wall?’
    ‘Don’t blaspheme, lad. They brought it here captive. They baited it with dogs. It had cubs, and they threw one to the dogs.’ He shrugged.
    His squire