Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

told him about the original hunters of his order, who had not only mounted the heads of their kills as trophies but also bound the beasts’ spirits to those heads, as a sign of ownership ... but I didn’t. The sins of the past should stay in the past. I smiled at Sir Gareth.
    “Sometimes,” I said, “try a little tenderness.”
    “The reports were right,” he said. “You are weird. And someone’s going to have to clean up all these dead animals, but it isn’t going to be me. Come on; we have an elf sorcerer to deal with.”
    The elf was still leaning heavily against the wall at the end of the hall, trying to get his thoughts back together. Having a major working interrupted is never a good idea. He didn’t look up till Sir Gareth and I had almost pushed our way through the piled-up bodies; and then he forced himself upright and glared at both of us. But, being an elf, he still had to strike a dramatic pose before he could throw a spell, and while he was busy doing that, Sir Gareth threw his sword at him. The gleaming steel blade flashed through the intervening space and slammed into the elf’s thigh, pinning him to the stone wall. The elf didn’t cry out. He grabbed at the sword with both hands and tried to pull it out.
    He didn’t have a hope in hell of shifting the blade before we got to him. The blade had gone right through the meat of his upper thigh and sunk deep into the stone wall behind him. Golden blood streamed down his leg, and pooled on the floor. The elf was still tugging stubbornly at the blade when we got to him. He sneered at us, opened his mouth to say something, and Sir Gareth cut his throat with a knife. I had to step quickly aside to avoid getting soaked. Sir Gareth jerked the sword out of the dead elf’s leg with one hard tug. The body slumped forward, and Sir Gareth stepped aside to let it fall. I glared at him.
    “You didn’t have to kill him! He was helpless!”
    “He was an elf and a sorcerer,” Sir Gareth said mildly. “He could have cursed us both with just a Word.”
    “He was in no condition to work magic. He could have been useful. He could have answered questions.”
    “What questions?” said Sir Gareth, fastidiously shaking golden blood off his sword blade. “We know why they’re here and who let them in, and we know what they want. You over-complicate things, John.”
    “It’s the principle of the thing!”
    “Wait. You’ve got principles? We’ll have to update your file.”
    “You know nothing about me,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

    We came at last to the Main Hall, hundreds of feet long and half as wide, packed from end to end with a great surging mass of fighting men and elves. I never knew there were so many London Knights. The whole place was a battle-field, with two great armies hammering at each other with not one ounce of mercy or quarter. Neither side was interested in simply winning; this was a fight to the death. To the last death. The clash of weapons meeting, the shouts of triumph and the screams of the dying, made a sound loud enough to fill my head. It was like watching two great herds of deer slamming their antlers together in a blind fury. Sir Gareth might talk of honour and glory in battle; all I saw was butchery.
    Elven spells blasted through the air, or detonated in the crush of bodies, but mostly there was only room for one-on-one combat, man against elf, cold steel versus enchanted blades, one implacable force slamming up against another. But one figure stood out for me, walking untouched amidst the chaos, ignored by the elves, disdained by the knights. Jerusalem Stark, looking every bit as haunted and driven as he had in the portrait gallery, striding purposefully through the battle-field as though it weren’t there. And perhaps for him, it wasn’t. He didn’t care about any of it. He was looking right at me, coming straight for me, for what I had that he wanted. I met his gaze across the crowded hall and drew Excalibur. His step didn’t even hesitate as he saw the blade’s golden light. He kept on coming, and I went forward to meet him. Not for glory, or even for justice, but because some things just need to be done.
    I plunged into the battle with Sir Gareth at my side, but Stark and I only had eyes for each other. If an elf got in my way, or a knight got in his, we both cut them down and kept going. Our speed increased as we drew nearer, until finally we were running through the crowd, opening up a way through the