1-7
Gilead, as it happened, had rushed into Carlisle late the previous evening, mere minutes before the gates closed. Ben Gibson and he had spent the night at the home of one of Ben’s cousins who still lived in the city, and it brought Gilead some amount of happiness to see that the old man could still smile and laugh when in the company of his relatives.
Once they’d awoken and had for themselves a quick breakfast of bread and jam, it was off to the commercial district to set Gilead up for himself. A jewelry store bought the golden crucifix, initially for thirty pounds, later revised up to forty once Ben offhandedly mentioned that Gilead was a newly-resurrected backarounder. Twenty pounds for each of them. Now there were some people in Carlisle who could live off of twenty pounds for a whole year, but Gilead was not one of those people. He had a plan, and he needed all the necessary supplies to carry it out.
Immediately after making his tearful goodbyes, Gilead set off on a grand quest to find himself a new horse, a quest which immediately ran into an issue: a horse cost substantially more than twenty pounds, let alone all of the tack for one, and never mind a horse that was strong enough to serve as steed for a proper knight. In the end, Gilead found himself with no choice but to admit that he would be forced to walk on his own two feet. He bought a sturdy frame backpack, imported from Furat.
Gilead learned a great deal about how much civilization had changed since his own time. Boot technology alone had advanced tremendously, and the idea of being able to walk through a door and find hundreds of sets of clothes pre-made and ready for purchase would have been a flight of fancy in his original time. Even the largest were still a little bit tight for him, of course. Gilead spent a quarter of an hour marveling at the invention known as the “can”, which preserved food against spoilage via encasing it in a metallic shell!
Even as he continued to stockpile the necessary goods for a journey, though, one thing eluded him: arms. He had long since discarded his wish for a proper harness, being as one of those was far more pricey than even a decent horse, but he would at least need a sword.
And yet, nowhere he went could anybody point him in the direction of a proper swordsmith. Again and again it was suggested to him that, if he so desired to be able to defend himself, he could acquire a gun, but that was absurd. Gilead had never held a gun, and while he believed that he could perhaps puzzle out their complexities given time, he didn’t need to! He had known the blade since he was seven years old, dammit!
Eventually, after several very confused conversations, a very kind young lady overheard Gilead arguing loudly with a police officer and informed him that she’d seen the Halmahera Importers on Wigton and 9th had been selling swords. He promptly thanked her, dismissed the cop, and started walking in that direction with all haste. About a block later, though, he came across a scene of calamity.
One of the sinew buses had crashed, its front entirely crumpled, though it was impossible to see what had done it. People were scattering, running for their lives, screaming about Pretenders and someone named Viscount Rutter. Gilead, of course, ran directly for the center of the mess, and found himself watching as a man shrouded in mystical glamour, his colors all magnified far beyond those of nature, threatened a woman who lay wounded on the ground.
The same woman who had robbed Ben Gibson two days before. She was a bandit, then. But so too was she a woman, unarmed and wounded, at the mercy of a brute of a man. It would take a far greater crime than the one she had committed, no doubt out of great need, for Gilead to hate her more powerfully than his sense of chivalry demanded he fly to her defense.
“Unhand that woman! Whatever ado with you she has brought up, this can be settled honorably!”
Slowly, the glowing man turned around, his beard twisting from an underlying scowl. He glanced at the men at either side of him; they were his lackeys, then.
“The fuck did he just say?”
“I think he’s makin’ a threat,” said one of the men. “Fella doesn’t like that we’re hurting the poor girl.”
“Indeed not,” said Gilead. “Knavery shall not be defeated with knavery. Hie from her, or else I will smite you down.”
Slowly, all of the men around the sorcerer turned in Gilead’s direction and began to draw weapons. Billy-clubs, long knives, hammers and hooks. Fifteen or so brigands of the street prepared for a fight.
“You gonna smite all of us, is that it?”
“Yes.” The world was growing simpler by the second. Gilead’s thoughts faded away as he fell increasingly into a combat stance.
“Lord Rutter, do you think we should leave him be?” said one of the men. “Bad press to kill a loonie, innit?”
“What press?” Rutter replied. “He just threatened a government official! Feel free to take out your aggression on him, that should make sure the Indian remains intact.”
There were a few rounds of chuckling, as all of Rutter’s men started moving in on Gilead, fanning out as they did. He had no weapon, no armor thicker than a wool jacket, and did not even have a wall to put his back to.
That meant the fight was only somewhat tilted in Gilead’s favor.
Without realizing it, one of the men had crossed into Gilead’s lunging range while he had his guard down. In an instant, his knife-arm was shattered, the bone broken in three places while he writhed on the ground in agony. The next man took a smashed face, then a bruised diaphragm when even that wasn’t enough to put him on the floor. One man, barely able to follow the course of the fight, tried to counter with a swift overhand from his billy-club, but Gilead was already too far away to hit again.
In a matter of seconds, five men were on the ground, broken, bleeding, choking. Gilead crouched down and pried from a set of broken fingers a long fish-gutting knife, the closest thing to a proper weapon that any of them had. He was silent, then, deathly silent, eyes half-focused or perhaps focused on everywhere at once, chest rising and falling mechanically.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, what is that?”
Rutter’s arms were folded across his chest, and he held a very serious expression. “A man.”
“A man, that’s not a fucking man, boss, did you see what he did to Nate? His arm’s not meant to do that!”
“Listen, lads, I’ve seen the supernatural. I’ve seen monsters, Pretenders, worse. He’s not anything more than you are; so if you wanna prove you’re not a bunch of bloody pansies, show this cunt what we do here in Carlisle, eh?”
The pansies in question didn’t look particularly enthused to keep fighting, but caught between a rock and a hard place, they chose the former. Slowly, carefully, they fanned out again, forming up into small groups and trying to get every possible angle.
“Don’t do this,” Gilead said.
It was the only warning he was going to give. Rutter’s men didn’t care, not at all, more concerned about maximizing their own chances against Gilead than listening to his words. He took a step forward, then when the group right in front of him all flinched at once, Gilead moved in for the kill.
Gilead had been given his first sword at seven years old, and while this knife was a far cry from a knightly weapon, it was nevertheless the case that he knew blade-work far better than he did wrestling or fisticuffs. He demonstrated this difference in skill for all to see when he rushed into the midst of three men at once. His first strike was a rapid stab that passed through the ribcage of the man with the best weapon—a long steel rod of unknown purpose—but all three of them were able to counterattack.
Gilead did not move like a normal man, then, for his reflexes and his thoughts were as one. It was as though he had practiced this exact motion against this exact set of attacks a thousand times, moving his blade and body in a perfect, dancelike pattern that parried and evaded each strike in turn.
Only then did the man who’d been stabbed in the chest realize that he was dead, and promptly fall. The instant after that, Gilead’s knife slashed at the right arm of the man next to him, cutting to the bone, sending his cleaver clattering to the floor and the screaming, bleeding mess of a man swiftly to follow. The third man started backing away, but he was still in a guarded stance, still ready to counter; Gilead struck twice, once to knock his hammer away and leave him open, and once to gut him like a fish.
Gilead was now covered in blood, and he’d torn open the shoulders on his jacket from all the movement. It had taken him three seconds.
“Well, shit. You really aren’t normal. What the fuck are you?”
“I am Sir Gilead du Carbennic, Knight of Camelot, He Who Healed the Fisher King, Sole Wielder of Ertanax, the Sword of the Strange Belt! Cease! To bother! That girl!”
Rutter grinned.“Well fuck me blind, an honest-to-God Knight of the Round Table? Shit, I used to think you were so terrific when I was a lad. I’ll have to pull my punches, I want you alive.”
Rutter took a step forward, and then he was right in front of Gilead, catching him off-guard for just long enough to punch him in the stomach at full force. Gilead was blown back a meter and a half, landing on his back, his entire abdomen a single knot of agony.
(Sara had been watching everything that went on with a mixture of horror and awe. Even awestruck and so badly wounded, she was still thinking, analyzing. Finally it hit her.)
“He’s a giant!” she called out. “Everything he does is magnified, strength, toughness, weight, even stride length!”
The shout distracted Rutter for a crucial second. “Tricksy bitch, you figured me out! Well, that makes it a bit more boring.”
Gilead fought his way up onto his knees; his vision swam and his body rebelled, but he had fought through worse wounds in the past.
“Speaks she sooth? You are a giant?” Gilead said.
“You have to stop talking like that, mate. But yeah, if it makes you feel any better about losing, we were never on an even playing field.”
Gilead grinned. “I have fought passing many giants.”
Gilead popped up onto his feet, now with a second weapon, a cleaver, in his off-hand. He shifted into an odd stance, the cleaver held reverse-grip against his side in case of attacks from behind.
Rutter moved in, hands up in a boxing stance, and struck with a full combination, one-two-three, each punch holding inside of it the force of a stampeding warhorse aimed in a perfect line at Gilead’s face. Gilead weaved out of the way, ducked to the side, then went in, slipping past Rutter’s side with a low cut to his thigh as he went.
The pattern repeated a few more times, Rutter relentless on the attack, even stepping around Gilead to strike him from behind, but always Gilead was able to evade him, and sometimes even make a counterattack. The knife cut only very shallowly into Rutter’s legs: slashes that should have bit down to the bone from the sharpness of the blade and Gilead’s sheer strength instead barely cut through the skin, leaving only shallow trickles of blood in their wake.
Finally, with his initial endurance beginning to fade and frustration at Gilead’s refusal to be defeated overpowering his common sense, Rutter overextended himself, throwing his whole arm and shoulder at Gilead’s head level in a wild, sweeping haymaker. That gave Gilead the opening he’d been looking for; he easily ducked the strike and slipped around, then with all of his might jammed the point of his blade downward, into the back of Rutter’s thigh.
The giant fell. The very cobblestones cracked where his knee struck the ground, and leaves could be seen to be blown back from the enormous force of his falling. Gilead expected that that would be the end of him, that he would collapse in agony from a shattered kneecap at bare minimum, but no. He was wounded, his face a rictus of pain, but even as the seconds passed he pulled together his strength and began to stand again.
Gilead retreated to where Sara still lay. It was not a motion made with much thought at all. In the heat of combat, he had categorized her in his mind as being friend rather than foe, and that was that.
“That should have worked,” he said. “Giants cannot fall and remain uninjured, their bodies are so heavy that their bones break.”
Sara pondered for a moment. “He’s still human-sized. A giant would have fallen two, three times that distance. You need to drop him further.”
“Any thought of how to do so?” Gilead asked.
“One or two,” said Sara, and jerked her head to a spot on the ground a little behind Gilead. He looked over and saw a manhole cover. He didn’t understand what it was for, and he lacked the time to ask about its meaning. In that instant, as rational thought returned for a brief moment, he could have decided not to trust the bandit who’d stolen from him. But she’d chosen to help him fight. Better to return the favor than keep fighting until his luck ran out and Rutter turned his skull into pulp.
From her position on the ground, Sara retrieved one of her charges, then tossed it onto the ground roughly between where Rutter and Gilead were standing. Gilead immediately rushed forward, placing himself barely a meter behind it.
Rutter was on his feet by then, shifting his weight from side to side and rolling the knots out of his shoulders.
“Do you really think I’m that stupid? I know what that is, you know. Too damn many of my boys got got by one of those while we were trying to chase you down.” Rutter frowned. “How many of the bloody things do you even have?”
“This is my last one,” Sara said, hefting another block in her throwing hand, an asymmetrical wolf’s-grin splitting her cheek.
Rutter rolled his eyes, but before he was even done making the motion, he was stepping forward and vanished. Gilead knew he was right behind him, and leapt forward, rolling over the bomb placed directly before him, then spun in place and hurled the butcher’s cleaver end-over-end into Rutter’s face.
It bounced off his forehead, leaving only a shallow cut before flying to the side and clattering uselessly on the cobblestones. But it had accomplished its task: Rutter was distracted for a split-second, just long enough for Sara to hurl the block of explosives onto the ground right by Rutter’s feet. She made sure to command the detonation downward, a hammer-blow of concussive shock directly at the ground beneath Rutter’s feet.
The second explosive charge was right at Gilead’s feet. He knew instantly that whatever Sara had planned to do, the one charge she’d had hadn’t been enough. While Rutter was still reeling from the impact, his hands slammed over his ears to palliate the deafening loudness of the blast. Gilead had one chance.
He kicked the block of explosives, sending it skittering across the cobblestones with enough speed that it threatened to go right past Rutter and blow up somewhere else. Sara, though, was watching it keenly, and had developed perfect timing with her command over all things explosive: she set it off instantly as it passed between Rutter’s legs. The giant, rocked by two consecutive blasts, fell backwards. The stones beneath him shuddered, shook, and crumbled. Gilead dodged backwards out of the way, but only just; when the cloud of dust settled, he was crouched on the edge of a five-meter deep sinkhole.
Also revealed when the dust settled was the fact that Rutter was, in fact, still very much alive and coughing raucously. He had fallen forward in the collapse, and one of his knees didn’t look right at all, the dome of his kneecap crumpling like a steel bowl that had gotten hit by a sledgehammer.
While Gilead slid down the treacherous edge of the sinkhole and into the exposed sewer pipe beneath, Rutter levered himself upright, using his other leg, the one that was merely fractured. He spat rubble out of his mouth, and glared at Gilead with an expression of purest rage.
“Second Pretense: Let Sleeping G—glarghk!”
Rutter’s speech, as it turned out, was not faster than Sir Gilead; or rather, Sir Gilead’s knife, which lashed out in a neat arc, slashing open his mouth and tongue and filling Rutter’s mouth with blood.
Rutter swung his fists frantically, trying to knock Gilead away, but he was immobilized from the waist down and in total agony, rendering his movements childishly simple to dodge for an experienced knight. Still, they were enough to keep Gilead at bay, at least for a few seconds until he figured out what he was doing. Then he went for the wall, circling up and around like a race-car going over a steeply-inclined bend, placing himself directly behind his opponent. Rutter tried to turn himself, but it was entirely futile: even trying to shift his position with his arms caused him to cry out in pain from his broken leg.
Gilead had slain giants before. This one was trickier, mostly because he was smaller, rendering his weak-points harder to hit. But still, Gilead was able to apply the same technique. He grabbed Rutter by the hair and shoved forward, forcing his chin to his chest and exposing the back of his neck. He placed the point of the knife at the space between the second and third cervical vertebrae and pushed.
It wasn’t easy, but killing the supernatural rarely was. Rutter’s flesh was impossibly dense, like pushing a blade through hard soil or gravel, but Gilead had a strong arm, and while standing over his opponent could put most of his body’s weight behind the tip of the knife. After a handful of seconds spent struggling, blood gurgling in his mouth, the blade reached his spinal cord. Rutter jerked once, then fell still.
No sooner had he died, though, then a horrible transformation came over him. The oversaturated colors faded from his body, returning him to normal form; but a second or two after that, great vermillion bubbles began to form on his skin, something red and dewy spilling out through his pores. Gilead stumbled back, falling into a combat stance in spite of his exhaustion, but the liquid was merely liquid. At least, aside from the fact that when it began to drip away from Rutter’s corpse, it did not drip down, but up.
When all was said and done, a fist-sized sphere of vermillion liquid hovered in the air above Rutter’s body, its surface swirling with darker and lighter tints as it remained perfectly still at about chest-height. Gilead, afraid of whatever sorcery this was the result of, beat a hasty retreat out of the sinkhole.
“Is he dead?” said Sara.
“Conclusively, good lady. Though there remains some sort of magic about him even still; a liquid red budded from his skin and has begun to hove above the corpse. I think it more relevant that we discuss the matter of the robbery you committed against my friend.”