SIR DAGOBERT’S LAST BATTLE 
Jonathan Green


	I


	The first to die had been Argulf’s youngest.
	The child had been making daisy chains in the high pasture when the first of the greenskins emerged from the forest, gibbering and hooting with savage delight. The girl, barely four summers old, panicked and froze, howling for her mother as the cleaver-wielding greenskin cut her down.
	Reynard had witnessed the child’s savage murder with his own eyes, his face slack with shock, his voice stolen from him in the same moment that the girl’s life was taken. But that abrupt act of unthinking brutality had only been the precursor to the slaughter that was to come.
	The goblins poured from the forest in a tumbling tide of bone-knotted loincloths, flint-tipped spears, feathered headdresses and moss-coloured flesh. Despite their number, they were little more than a disorganised rabble. There were a few desultory arrows fired towards the village, but there was no cohesion to their attack.
	Reynard had fought for his feudal overlords in the armies of Gisoreux as a young man, when a proliferation of orcs had bled into the lands of Ombreux from the Pale Sisters to the north-east and laid waste to the fiefdom for miles about. And he would fight again now, despite having given up the life of a man-at-arms years ago, to protect his home and his loved ones. 
	Snatching up his pitchfork from beside the back door of his cottage, he ran to meet the goblins’ insane charge. The stringy specimens he had encountered when still a young man had at least demonstrated some rudimentary discipline, even if it had been forced upon them by their larger cousins. But the shambling mob he was facing now had lost all semblance of order. Some squabbled with their own kin and they were not above trampling each other underfoot as they poured down the wind-swept escarpment from the forest’s edge. Their chaotic charge made it look more like they were fleeing from something rather than hurrying to attack the village huddled in the valley below.
	But what they lacked in organisation, they more than made up for in numbers. Only now they were one down, a squirming mewling goblin skewered on the end of his improvised weapon. Bracing a booted foot against the creature’s chest, Reynard twisted sharply, the action accompanied by a grisly sucking sound. The squealing goblin fell silent and stopped struggling as the peasant pulled the pitchfork free of its filthy carcass.
	The horde had fallen upon Layon just as locusts had fallen upon the wheat crop three years before. The village had only just recovered from that disaster and now there was a host of greenskins at their door. The rampaging horrors trampled the corn that had been less than a week from the sickle and scythe, slaughtering the livestock that had been intended to feed the villagers during the bitter months of winter.
	Reynard blinked in the face of the smoke drifting across the village, seeking the source of the echoing hoof beats.
	A shadow fell across the village as light bled from the sky. 
	‘Reynard!’ 
	The scream snapped his attention back to the immediacy of the battle. It was his wife, Fleur. She stood at the threshold of their home, frying pan in hand, as a scrawny creature – no taller than a child of eight – bounded towards her, naked except for a strip of rabbit fur tied at its waist with grassy twine. It carried a rough axe in its bony fist, what looked like a large tooth set within it to create a serrated cutting edge.
	As the greenskin lunged at his wife, Reynard sprang, thrusting the butt of his pitchfork forwards, using it as he would a quarterstaff. The hard wood connected with the base of the goblin’s skull, knocking the creature was sprawling to the ground. Reynard followed up with a second sharp blow to its skull, smiling grimly as he heard the sharp crack of bone fracturing.
	Things were at their darkest now – the firmament the colour of pewter, the coming storm casting its pall across the face of the sun – as the greenskins rallied in the face of the villagers’ desperate defence. Men and women, as well as the young, the elderly and infirm, had all been forced into the fight, using anything that came to hand to help them save their homes from the tumbling tumult of shrieking greenskins, whether it was an axe from the woodpile or an iron poker from the hearth.
	The goblins were everywhere now, or so it seemed, swarming along alleyways, over the churned mud of the village square and around the flower-bedecked roadside shrine to the Lady.
	A shrill whinny carried to Reynard’s ears over the tumult of battle – the shrieking of goblins, shouted oaths to the Lady and the clash of billhook on axe – as if it rode upon a wave of power that deadened all sound before it. He turned, and his heart lifted. 
	On the ridge of the escarpment beyond the village, dark silhouettes against the beaten metal sky, was another ragtag band. Swords held aloft, they only numbered ten in all. But at their midst, sat astride a barded warhorse, was the unmistakable form of a noble paladin, the crest atop the warrior’s helm clear for all to see, even in the failing light that came before the storm.
	For this was not just any knight. Their saviour was a chosen champion of the Lady of the Lake, one upon whom the holiest of honours had been bestowed. A grail knight.
	The silent ranks of the knight’s entourage watched as the massacre continued unabated. Just as Reynard was expecting the knight to issue his challenge, the men dropped to their knees, bowing their heads in prayer. The knight’s tabard rippled in the breeze that heralded the oncoming storm.
	Reynard caught sight of a green blur from the corner of his eye and turned his attention from the silent men-at-arms back to the melee consuming Layon. He spun on his heel, sweeping the blunt end of his pitchfork before him, feeling the vibrations of the goblin’s bone-cleaver vibrating through his arms as the two weapons made contact.
	Knowing that a chosen champion of the Lady had come to their aid filled him with renewed strength. It felt as if the very life-blood of Bretonnia was flowing through his veins. 
	Sliding the improvised weapon through his hands, grasping the shaft closer to the prongs, he swung the longer end round sharply. The goblin’s blade slipped from the smooth wood, the creature stumbling forwards on its spindly legs and into the path of the whirling tip. The end of the weapon caught the goblin in the throat, the force of the contact throwing it onto its back in the battle-churned mud of the village square.
	With a cry of ‘For the Lady!’ the fighting unit lined up along the spur of high ground moved as one, pelting down the steep slope of the escarpment. Swords raised, shields hanging loosely at their sides, they hurled themselves pell-mell towards the battle while the grail knight watched from his position at the crest of the hill.
	Finally, with a harsh neigh from his steed, the paladin charged down the slope, a morning star swinging from the end of his outstretched arm.
	Reynard turned from the charging battle line, feeling hope and pride swell within him. There was fire in his heart, in every fibre of his being. The end of the pitchfork sticky with goblin blood, the retired man-at-arms headed back into the fray, a cry of ‘For Layon and the Lady!’ on his lips. 
	The bellowed entreaty to the Lady, that she might bestow her blessings upon the faithful, became an incoherent roar in the throat of the battle pilgrim known simply as Arnaud. With his blessed blade raised high, he had been the first to break from his position on the ridge. It was he who led the charge, a battle-cry of zealous fury on his lips.
	The blade he held so tightly in his right hand, knuckles white around the worn leather bound about its grip, was scarred and pitted with the patina of age. Its edge was no longer as keen as it might have been had it enjoyed the kiss of the whetstone a little more often. The man’s tunic was torn and patched, the rough fabric still bearing burn marks in places. The hair on his head was an unruly mess, his balding scalp forming a natural tonsure, such as those favoured by the faithful, while thick greying stubble coated his jowly cheeks like a rash. The end of his nose was swollen and purple with broken blood vessels.
	But for all he lacked in attractiveness he was thickset and still strong. Every drunken brawl that had left him with a broken nose, or missing another tooth, had also honed his skills, teaching him to fight dirty. And there was no doubting his faith in the Lady, or the high regard in which he held his master, the thrice-blessed Sir Dagobert.
	No individual among their number was greater than any other else, for all commoners were equal in the sight of the Lady. They were simple folk who had given up their former lives, turning their backs on the lot that accident of birth had handed them, that they might have the honour of serving the noble paladin who had been chosen by the Lady, whose personal crusade it was to rid Her fair land of the greenskin, the rat-kin and the beast-spawn. There was no one among their number who held dominion over any other, for all were as maggots compared to the shining example set by the grail knight. 
	But there was one among their number, nonetheless, to whom the others looked for guidance and approval, whose strength of heart and absolute conviction in his faith in the knight and the Lady was an example to them all. That one was Arnaud.
	Battle-cry still on his lips, the brawny pilgrim crashed into the goblin throng like a ship’s keel ploughing through foaming waves. His notched blade descended as he brought the pommel down on the head of a greenskin. Still running, he levelled his sword and thrust forwards, putting all his weight and momentum behind it.
	The weapon’s tip pierced the spine of a stringy creature which died with a squeal as Arnaud barrelled into it, its skull crushed beneath his heavy hobnail boots. Then he was piling into the next, hacking at its legs, his weapon breaking the creature’s kneecaps and then stopping, its dull edge failing to sever the bone and gristle completely.
	The rest of Arnaud’s brethren had joined the fray now with bludgeoning swipes of axe and mace, their weapons relics of other campaigns the grail knight had prosecuted against all that was unholy and an affront to the sanctity of fair Bretonnia.
	‘Praise be to the Lady!’ a rangy, gaunt-faced pilgrim cried with evangelical glee, his eyes rolling into his head as the rapture took him, sinking what a woodsman’s axe, hung with pewter charms, into the head of another of the goblins. The man had to put both hands on its haft to pull it out again. ‘Praise be!’ he cried again, tears running down his grime-smeared cheeks as the axe came free at last.
	The press of goblins and desperate villagers soon brought the pilgrims’ eager charge to a halt. Surrounded by capering greenskins, Arnaud set about himself with renewed zeal. Every kick, every punch, every bludgeoning swipe he made with his shield, every head-butt, every barrelling body blow, every hack and slash of his blade was accompanied by an angry grunt or a bellow of pious rage.
	He lashed out with his sword wildly, the flat of the blade smacking another of the greenskins on the head. He followed this up with a punch to the beast’s face on the return stroke, the weapon’s cross guard gouging out an eye.
	Feeling teeth puncture the flesh of his calf he gave a cry of pain and annoyance. Dropping his shield, he grabbed hold of the wriggling green thing responsible, lifting it clear of the ground, kicking and snarling, before running it through with his blade. The blade came out again with a wet sucking sound, smeared with gore and what passed for blood among the greenskins. Dropping the limp body he met the charge of another of the vile creatures with a kick to the stomach that left it doubled up and in prime position to receive the kick to the face that followed.
	As the goblin dropped to the ground gasping for breath, Arnaud recovered his shield from the quagmire at his feet and brought its tip down across the back of the creature’s scrawny neck, almost slicing its head clean off.
	Shield in place upon his arm once more, his blade ready to meet the next ill-considered charge, Arnaud braced himself, catching his breath for a moment, surveying the pockets of fighting that filled the village.
	‘For Sir Dagobert and for the Lady!’ he shouted as he barged his way past startled combatants, making for the centre of the village where the fighting was at its most desperate and most savage.
	The sickle Reynard had snatched from where it hung on a peg in the cowshed slipped from his hand as the goblin toppled backwards, the curved blade having carved through the creature’s shoulder and into its neck. Returning his pitchfork to a two-handed grip, Reynard stepped out of the barn, leaving the distressed cattle anxiously lowing behind him, readying himself to meet the next charge. But none came. 
	Reynard looked across the village at greenskins faltering before the pilgrims’ relentless retribution, those that could still walk turning tail and running for the sheltering shadows of the forest once more. His heart rose. The greenskins were in retreat. The goblins had been routed. ‘Thank the Lady,’ he gasped, the adulation escaping his lips as barely more than a whisper.
	He could hear other cries of joy, supplications to the Lady and even cheers rising from the beleaguered defenders. The battle-hardened pilgrims, who had come to their aid when everything seemed at its blackest, dealt with the last of the greenskins that hadn’t had the sense to flee while flight was still an option.
	A few of the grizzled pilgrims looked ready to pursue the fleeing goblins until one of their number – a brawny, barrel-chested brute of a man, his nose broken in several places and purple from too much ale – shouted for them to hold.
	Reynard looked at the man. Who was he to command his fellow pilgrims before the Lady’s champion had even spoken? But then Reynard had not heard the knight issue one command since arriving at Layon. In fact, he could not even be certain that any battle-cry had issued from the noble paladin during the battle.
	Head bowed low, keeping his eyes firmly on the ground, Reynard approached the pilgrim throng. The other villagers held back, happy to let Reynard take the lead. As a retired man-at-arms and former aide to the seneschal of the lord of Ombreux himself, Reynard had seen far more of the world than many of the inhabitants of Layon, the majority of whom had never travelled beyond the perimeter of the valley. He also had a better understanding of how to speak to nobility.
	Nonetheless his heart was racing now, and not just from the exertions of battle. To speak out of turn to a knight was to risk the paladin’s ire at best. At worst, it could result in him having his head cleaved from his shoulders by the Lady’s champion.
	‘My lord,’ he stumbled, anxiety getting the better of him as he neared the pack of panting men, catching a glimpse of the fire that had yet to leave their battle-ready bodies. Taking a deep breath in an attempt to quell his nerves he tried again. ‘Most honoured lord, a thousand thanks. If you hadn’t happened by, it’s likely the greenskins would have done for us all. If there’s anything we can do for you–’
	‘Sir Dagobert needs nothing you could offer him.’ 
	Reynard started. He was sure it was the brawny battle pilgrim who had spoken out of turn again. Other gasps of shock came from those villagers assembled behind him. He was not the only one to have noticed the affront, and yet none of the pilgrim’s fellows saw fit to comment. 
	‘Sir Dagobert seeks only to serve the Lady.’
	How could the knight allow this disgrace to continue?
	Unable to help himself now, a melange of anger, fear and disbelief welling up inside him, Reynard slowly raised his head. And, for the first time since he had been aware of the knight’s presence, he saw things as they really were. 
	He took in the chainmail shirt and faded tabard hanging loose about the knight’s frame, and the morning star hanging limply from the knight’s still outstretched arm. He saw the sheared-off lance gripped forever in his other hand. He saw the horse’s battered barding, rusting at the rivet-joints, and the yellow gleam of bone beneath. He saw the votive trinkets draped across the knight’s shield and became aware of the four men who acted as the knight’s pall-bearers. And finally his eyes met the empty gaze of the skull locked within the knight’s helm.
	Reynard felt disappointment pour into him, filling the aching void that the aftermath of the battle had left. Their saviour was dead and had been so for a very long time.
	‘Sir Dagobert does not require anything of you,’ the burly pilgrim said, a cruel sneer making him appear even uglier. ‘But we do.’
	‘More ale,’ the pilgrim’s leader shouted from his place at the makeshift table – two apple barrels, a barn door and a couple of benches from the village shrine – upending the empty flagon clenched in his callused fist as if to emphasise the point.
	Reynard motioned for Melisande to hurry up with the two earthenware jugs she was filling from the barrel at the back of the house. She nodded, wiping away the tears she shed for her younger brother – fallen during the initial greenskin assault – with the corner of her beer-stained apron, before hurrying to obey as quickly as she could, encumbered as she was by two heavy pitchers.
	It seemed that half of those villagers who had made it through the goblin attack were now preoccupied with tending to the pilgrims’ needs. And those needs were surprisingly considerable for men who had supposedly given up all worldly cares when they had chosen to follow the grail knight in service to the Lady. 
	The holy reliquae the pilgrims carried into battle, that acted as both standard and inspiration to the rabble, had been set down before the village shrine and a number of the village children were preparing garlands of meadow flowers with which to adorn it.
	Curiously, with the routing of the goblins and the arrival of Sir Dagobert’s entourage, the wind had changed and the coming storm had passed them by. 
	Reynard stared at the reliquae. It was effectively a portable altar. Had the passing of the storm been a coincidence, or was there more to it than that?
	Before the girl could reach the pilgrims’ table, Reynard intercepted her, taking the foaming jugs and dismissing her with a nod. Melisande gave him a grateful smile before running home, the tears for her dead brother coming anew.
	‘So, brother,’ Reynard said as he began to refill the pilgrims’ cups, ‘to what do we owe the good fortune of your arrival? What brings you to Layon?’
	‘Not us, peasant, but Sir Dagobert, the thrice-blessed,’ the pilgrim’s leader corrected him. ‘His quest takes him where the Lady of the Lake wills. We merely follow.’ 
	Reynard glanced at the relics resting before the shrine. He could see quite clearly now that the saint’s bones had been mounted on a scarecrow frame of bound sticks, as had the bleached bones of his former steed. The numerous votive medallions had been tied on with ribbons, along with entreaties to the Lady scrawled on strips of parchment.
	‘So what was it that brought Sir Dagobert–’
	‘The thrice-blessed,’ the pilgrim added helpfully, the ugly, gap-toothed grin back on his face.
	‘The thrice-blessed,’ Reynard echoed. ‘What was it that brought him here, at the hour of our need?’
	‘I have already answered your question.’ The pilgrim fixed him with beady black eyes. ‘The Lady guides him. It was the Lady that sent him here now, when Sir Dagobert was most needed. Just as it was the Lady that sent him to join Duke Theobald’s campaign to purge the lands north of here of the greenskin menace. 
	‘But now we eat, for killing greenskins builds up an appetite like nothing else. And then maybe some women, that we might quench the fires of our ardour in their embraces.’
	The succulent smells of the suckling pig that was being roasted in honour of their guests carried to Reynard on the breeze, making his mouth water and his stomach grumble, realising how hungry he was after his own exertions to repel the goblins. He nodded to the armoured skeleton atop its hobby horse steed. ‘And will Sir Dagobert be joining the feast?’
	The knight’s spokesman could not hold back his guffaw of derisive laughter at that, and it was soon taken up by several of his fellows seated at the table. ‘Don’t be foolish, peasant!’ he snorted. ‘Sir Dagobert is fasting.’
	II


	It was cold inside the chapel, colder that the misty autumnal day beyond its walls, but the knight cared not.
	‘That which is sacrosanct I shall preserve. That which is sublime I will protect.’ 
	The words spilled from his lips in what was little more than a whisper. The sound of the water escaping the mouth of the stone lion above the font was a soothing counterpoint to the knight’s vow.
	‘That which threatens I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds. That which is sacrosanct–’
	Hearing the chapel door groan behind him the old man faltered, but only for a moment. The only indication that he was irritated by the interruption was a tightening of his jaw.
	‘That which is sacrosanct I shall preserve.’
	First there had been the squeaking of hinges, now came the sound of clumsy footsteps and a rough cough as the intruder cleared his throat. The peasant would have to wait; the old knight was at prayer.
	‘That which is sublime I will protect. That which threatens I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds.’
	Only then, with his pledge complete did the knight open rheumy eyes, blinking against the rainbow of sunlight that fell through the small stained glass window above the font. The painted panes were an inspiration to him, depicting the moment the Goddess had appeared to Dagobert and offered him the Grail, that he might drink of the restorative waters of the spring and be healed of the mortal wound he had suffered in battle with the dragon Crystophrax, the monstrous wyrm that had razed the Castle Perillus to the ground and made its lair within the ruins.
	Putting his weight on the pommel of his sword he eased himself up from his genuflection, old joints and weary muscles protesting as he did so, a twinge in his back making him catch his breath.
	The grimace of rheumatic pain on his face became a twisted scowl of annoyance. He did not need to lay eyes upon the one who had disturbed his vigil to know who it was. When he turned he would see the one who, for no obvious reason, had taken it upon himself to speak for the rest of the oafish rabble that dogged his every move, following wherever he led, although he had never asked them to and would have preferred to have been left alone. 
	But the pilgrims’ adoration was just another duty that fell to a knight who had been blessed by the Lady, and in the old knight’s opinion there was no duty more onerous. But bear it he did, for the sake of the Lady.
	The Lady called men from all ranks of society to fight for Her – to defend Her fair fields and meadows, woodlands and babbling streams – and so the old knight tolerated them too. But of all the oafish rabble, the one he found hardest to abide was their pompous, self-appointed leader.
	‘My lord,’ the ugly, gap-toothed oaf began. ‘Much as it grieves me to disturb you whilst you are at your vigil–’
	‘What is it?’ the old knight snapped. He was too old and life was too short for him to have to put up with another obsequious monologue from this jackanapes.
	The man blinked in surprise. He appeared almost affronted. His mouth gaped open, affording the knight an unpleasant view of his appalling teeth. A moment later the pilgrim recovered himself.
	‘My lord, I thought you should know…’ He broke off again, suddenly hesitant.
	‘Come on, man! What news could be so important that you broke my vigil to impart it?’
	To his credit, the man remained firm in the face of the old knight’s simmering anger.
	‘There is talk of ratmen in the region, the Lady curse them!’
	‘Rumours of ratmen? You disturbed my vigil to tell me this?’
	‘There is talk down in the village at the bottom of the valley, my lord. Word is that the vermin have crawled from their holes once more and are spreading like a plague across Vienelles, blighting crops and slaughtering livestock as they come.’
	‘You do not need to tell me the ways of the rat-kin,’ the old knight muttered. ‘And where did you hear these rumours?’ he growled. ‘At the bottom of a keg of beer, I’ll warrant. By the Lady, I can smell it on your breath from here!’
	‘Are you saying you don’t believe me?’ the peasant railed.
	The guardian of the grail shrine pulled himself up to his full height. He still cut an imposing figure in his chainmail and tabard, despite his age. His muscles were taut, his body made strong through a life of service to the Lady, and not one driven by the appetites of lesser men like the one before him now. He took a step forward and as he came between the pilgrim and the stained glass window, he was surrounded by a nimbus of radiant light.
	‘You forget yourself. You forget your place!’
	The vassal bowed low, though he didn’t once avert his beady stare from his master. 
	‘No, my lord, never,’ the pilgrim protested. ‘It’s just that a band of refugees arrived in Baudin last night. They had fled in advance of the horde reaching their doors. They said that Castain has already fallen.’
	‘I see,’ the knight said levelly, ‘and what would you have me do?’ 
	‘Lead us to war against the rat-things,’ the pilgrim faltered, the look in his eyes making it clear that he wasn’t sure if he was being tested. 
	The knight said nothing.
	‘Meet the abominations in righteous battle and soak Bretonnian soil with their vital juices.’ 
	Still the knight made no comment.
	‘It is an affront to allow these vermin–’ He spat the word, saliva flapping from his lips as he did so. ‘–to despoil the Lady’s fair lands a moment longer.’
	‘You doubt my sworn duty to the Lady?’ the old knight queried, taking another step closer to the pilgrim, raising the tip of his sword to point at the man’s chest as he did so.
	The other took a step back. ‘No, my lord, I…’ For once, the babbling wretch was lost for words, instead dropping to his knees before the knight, casting his eyes at the floor. ‘I beg your forgiveness if I said anything that might have offended you,’ he spluttered as he found his tongue again.
	The knight stopped in front of him. ‘And I grant it,’ the knight growled, suggesting that it was not given willingly.
	‘My first duty is to the Lady,’ the knight intoned, as if reciting another prayer. ‘My second is to this holy place that I raised from the stones of fallen Castle Perillus with my bare hands.’ At this declaration the old knight’s voice began to crack, not with age but with raw emotion.
	‘I swore to protect this holy place and I have not forgotten the vow I made in all the years since the Lady deigned to appear to me…’ The knight broke off, no longer able to speak. 
	He took a deep breath, his left hand bunching into a fist as he fought to compose himself. 
	‘...since She appeared to me here. This is hallowed ground and I will defend it until the Lady sees fit either to release me from my solemn duty or send me a vision that she wishes me to fight upon another field.
	‘My third duty is to the people of these lands.’ 
	He turned back to the gurgling font, the water droplets cascading from the font head into the catch bowl below, glittering like rubies, emeralds and sapphires in the light of the stained glass window.
	‘So, until the Lady wills it otherwise, I shall remain here and defend this shrine with my life’s blood.’
	An unaccustomed smile split his dry lips as he knelt once more before the shrine’s simple altar, the silvered fleur-de-lys that stood upon it having once adorned the lance that now stood propped in the corner, before he earned the right to bear the image of the grail itself upon his coat-of-arms.
	‘After all, if she needs me, she knows where to find these old bones.’
	‘Yes, Sir Dagobert,’ the vassal said getting to his feet and bowing once again as he left the shrine.
	III


	‘Do you remember that time Sir Dagobert – thrice-blessed be he – purged that nest of corpse-eating ghouls in La Fontaine?’ Arnaud demanded, his beery tones rising above the slurred conversations of his brother pilgrims.
	The hubbub of other voices dropped to a murmur.
	‘Aye, Brother Arnaud,’ said the gangly pilgrim whose name was Ambrose. The man had even less hair and fewer teeth that the brawny former blacksmith. ‘That was a great day indeed, praise be.’
	‘And do you recall the expression on the baron’s face when he discovered his own father was one of them?’ Arnaud gave a bark of laughter. 
	The pilgrims were virtually alone at their makeshift table now, with only a pair of desultory maidens still waiting on them. The day was drawing on and the villagers had left them to their feast, having no stomach for food themselves, and taking the opportunity to tend to those who had been injured during their encounter with the goblins, and to take care of the dead. 
	Bonfires had been raised at the edge of the village, those who had fought greenskins and their kind before knowing from bitter experience that their corpses should be burnt, lest their pernicious spores settle in a dark, damp hollow and give rise to another harvest of death. 
	One of the girls was tying a strip of cloth from the hem of her skirt around Groffe’s arm. Odo was muttering something through a mouthful of pork fat to Jules, who was slumped across the barn door-table, looking like he had already passed out. None of them were paying Arnaud much attention.
	‘Eh? Do you remember?’ Arnaud laughed, louder this time.
	‘We remember,’ Brother Hugo replied with less enthusiasm.
	‘I remember the time that wyvern almost did for us in the Pale Sisters,’ Waleran muttered.
	‘And what about the time Sir Dagobert led us to the Sisterhood of Saint Salome?’ Arnaud went on, ignoring Waleran’s doom and gloom recollections. Arnaud was never one to tire of the sound of his own voice. ‘I’d never seen so much sin in one place.’
	‘Yes, plenty to go around,’ Groffe chuckled crudely, putting an arm around his nurse’s waist and spinning her unceremoniously onto his lap. The girl gave a half-hearted squeal of protest, and when Groffe pulled her chin round to plant a beery kiss on her pretty mouth, she kicked him in the shins and pulled herself of his lecherous grasp.
	At this, Arnaud burst out laughing again, spiteful mirth shaking his corpulent frame.
	There was little left of the suckling pig now other than bones and grease. Tearing off a hunk of gritty bread from a hard end of loaf, Arnaud used it to mop up the congealing pork fat and stuffed the whole lot into his mouth.
	‘So where do you think Sir Dagobert will lead us next?’ one of the others asked, indicating the garland-decked reliquae outside the shrine with a casual wave of a gnawed rib bone.
	‘Where the Lady wills, Brother Gervase. Where the Lady wills,’ Arnaud replied, a thoughtful look on his face.
	‘Praise be!’ piped up Brother Ambrose.
	‘But not for a while, I think,’ Arnaud added, his gaze roving from the food on the table and the drink in his hand to the rolling hips of Groffe’s failed conquest. ‘No, not yet. I think Sir Dagobert – thrice-blessed be his name – likes it here.’
	Reynard missed the boy’s cries at first, what with all the noise coming from the pilgrim’s table.
	It was Fleur, who was fetching water from the well to wash the bodies of the dead in preparation for their journey into Morr’s kingdom, who heard the child first.
	Hearing her call his name, Reynard ducked under the lintel and into the street. Fleur pointed.
	The boy was pelting across the field, the forest that bounded its edge spread out across the horizon, an impenetrable darkness lurking between the trees. Dusk had already fallen within that primal woodland. 
	It was Tomas, the woodcutter’s son. As he came closer, not slacking off the pace for a moment, Reynard understood the look of blanching fear on his face. ‘Greenskins!’
	‘More of them,’ Reynard muttered under his breath. He turned to his wife. ‘Get the children back inside and warn the others.’
	He was running too now, joining the other men who had heard the boy’s fearful warning, gathering up what weapons they had and what could be turned to the defence of the village.
	‘What was that?’ the leader of the pilgrim band demanded, rising unsteadily to his feet and moving to join Reynard at the periphery of the village.
	‘There’s more coming,’ Reynard informed the pilgrim dejectedly, the fight all but gone out of him already.
	‘More you say?’ the pilgrim railed. ‘More of the heathen abominations?’
	The pilgrim turned, shouting to his brothers who were already rising from their seats at the makeshift table.
	‘To arms!’ he shouted. ‘To arms! Ready yourselves, brothers! The bastards are coming back for another taste of our lord’s fiery zeal, and we wouldn’t want to disappoint them now, would we?’
	‘Praise be!’ his gangly companion declared, leaping for the sword he had left propped beside a barrel.
	Others moved to raise the reliquae upon their shoulders, ready to carry the dead knight into battle once more.
	IV


	Dagobert slowly opened his eyes. His eyelids were sticky with rheum. Something had brushed his cheek, something as light and as soft as goose down. He looked down at the inlaid marble tiles of the sanctuary floor. 
	There it was: a tiny thing, nothing really, just a single curled white petal.
	He blinked himself alert, startled by the presence of the flower. He inhaled sharply as he caught his breath in surprise–
	–and suddenly the chapel was filled with the heady scent of apple blossom, petals falling like snowflakes all around him – on his head, his outstretched arms, his open palms – as moisture filmed his old eyes.
	He peered beyond the drifting petals to the stained glass window above the altar. A blaze of light shone through the painted panes as the first rays of morning touched the shrine. The image of the Lady realised in glass and mineral pigments was shining like silver moonlight, her hair like spun gold ablaze with holy light, her eyes sparkling like stars in the night sky.
	And at the edge of hearing he caught the lilting melody of angel voices singing.
	As he stared at this radiant image of beauty divine, he fancied the Lady turned to him, reaching out to him from the glass. But it was no longer the grail she was holding in her lily white hands, but his blessed blade.
	He reached for the sword with shaking hands, clutching at the blade with trembling fingers, the tears coursing down his cheeks. But the blade dissolved like mist at his touch and he stumbled forwards, putting out a hand to stop himself from falling.
	And there was his sword before him, the polished metal alive with myriad rainbow colours, light picking out the letters inscribed upon it. The letters that spelt out the blessed blade’s name: Deliverer. 
	Sword in hand once more, Dagobert rose stiffly to his feet.
	The door to the chapel burst open and a panting pilgrim entered the shrine at a run. He skidded to a halt on the stone flagged floor, struggling to catch his breath. Before he could open his mouth to speak, Dagobert fixed the man with his sapphire stare, silencing him.
	‘It is time,’ the knight said. ‘The Lady calls.’
	They came to him then, the penitent, the faithful, those who had given up everything to follow him, that they might receive the blessing of the Lady and, in return, purge the land of all unholy things that would despoil its sacred groves, its fertile fields, its abundant pastures and clean wells.
	As the words of the grail vow spilled from his lips in a ceaseless declaration of honour and duty and love, the pilgrims helped him don his armour, and hand him his holy weapons of war.
	And so, when all was ready at last, Dagobert stepped through the chapel door and out into the world once more.
	There stood his charger, Silvermane, eighteen hands high, the magnificent white warhorse also ready for battle. His steed’s barding draped with the knight’s personal colours, the horse was champing at the bit, impatient to be about the business of killing vermin.
	Stepping up into the stirrups, the old knight swung himself up into the saddle with the grace and ease of a man half his age.
	The mists crept through the knots of grey trees, their roots worming between the tumbled stones of the tower that had once stood at this spot.
	‘The rat-kin are that way?’ Dagobert asked, taking his lance from a retainer and pointing through the cloying fog towards the spot where the village of Baudin nestled at the foot of the valley.
	‘Yes, my lord,’ the gap-toothed pilgrim confirmed, making a respectful bow.
	‘Then to battle,’ the old knight said.
	‘That which is sublime I will protect!’ Sir Dagobert bellowed, his declaration of duty a furious battle-cry. Silvermane whinnied, the stallion bringing its hooves crashing down on the armoured head of another of the black-furred vermin. The blow from the mighty warhorse caved in the mutant’s bladed helm and splintered its skull. The ratman gave a brief tortured squeak which abruptly cut off as soupy brain matter bubbled from its ears.
	‘That which threatens I will destroy!’
	As the horse wheeled and turned, Dagobert swung the morning star clutched tight in his right hand again, deft flicks of the wrist sending the spiked metal ball whirling in a killing arc. Silvermane pounded towards the scrabbling rat bodies, the air thick with the reek of the musk they involuntarily sprayed in fear as the pack broke. But they couldn’t outrun Silvermane.
	The morning star found its target, smacking into the back of another rat skull as the snivelling creature bounded from the knight’s charge at a hunched run, practically moving on all fours. The blow sent the thing flailing into the dirt, to be trampled by the rest of the pack, their only concern saving their own flea-ridden hides as they poured over one another in a rippling torrent of greasy fur and scabrous flesh.
	Yeomen fought side by side with Dagobert’s followers, fending off the serrated blades of the vermin-kin, matching them in ferocity if not in number, and they were slowly gaining the upper hand. Bowmen stuck the ratmen with arrow after arrow.
	Bodies lay all around him, the corpses of downtrodden peasants as well as the carcasses of the rat-kin.
	Out of the corner of his eye he saw a yeoman, clad in hauberk and helm, pulled from his horse by myriad clawing hands. The weight of the man’s armour only made the task easier for the rat-things. The yeoman’s mount screamed as the vermin tore its belly open, ripping out the animal’s entrails with chisel-sharp incisors.
	Dagobert heard arrows zipping overhead and saw the trails of smoke and flame arcing through the clammy air. These were followed by more shrill squeals and enraged hisses of pain as the brazier-lit barbs penetrated armour and cauterised the flesh of the rat-things encased within.
	Pulling hard on the reins, Dagobert brought Silvermane round again, the warhorse crushing another pair of fleeing ratmen under its hooves, breaking backs and splintering skulls.
	As the vermin parted before the unstoppable charge of the Lady’s champion and his powerful steed, something monstrous lifted its malformed head from where it had been busy gnawing at the carcass of another horse, the purple-grey ropes of equine intestines hanging from between its over-sized yellow jaws. The sheer size of the monster gave Dagobert, veteran of a hundred battles, reason to pause, but only for the briefest second.
	A sound that might have been a deep-throated squeak, but which sounded more like a wolfish bark, escaped the monster’s jaws as it snapped at the air with tusk-like incisors, catching the paladin’s scent on the breeze. It was to one of the rat-kin as an ogre would be to a man. Its mere presence dominated the battlefield. As broad across its abnormally muscled shoulders as it was tall, its rodent head was disproportionately small, making the wobbling throat sac stitched beneath its chin seem even more grotesquely distended. Its hide was patchy and scabbed, and between clumps of mangy, matted fur the knight could make out the criss-crossing scars of clumsy stitching. In other places the unholy, claw-scratch ideograms that passed for script among the under-dwellers had been branded into its taut flesh.
	It came at them at a loping run, clearing a path through the scrabbling throng of men and rats, claws like scythe-blades gutting and dismembering any and all that got in its way.
	As Silvermane closed with the rat ogre, Dagobert thrust the grip of his morning star under the rim of his saddle and pulled the huge warhorse round sharply, spurring his steed away from the massively-muscled abomination.
	Several villagers watched in bewildered fear, believing that the knight was quitting the field. But Dagobert had no intention of running away. He just needed the right tool to take the monster down.
	Running down more of the rat-things that suddenly found themselves frantically fleeing towards the charging knight, Dagobert reached the spot where he had thrust his lance into the ground before he had engaged with the enemy, in case he should he need it later in the battle. 
	He needed it now.
	As Silvermane drew alongside the waiting lance, Dagobert grabbed hold and pulled it from the soft loam. Silvermane whinnied. The knight could sense the warhorse’s excitement as he turned it back towards the bounding rat ogre.
	‘That which threatens, I will destroy!’ the grail knight bellowed, his pious battle-cry matching the ferocity of the guttural roar that escaped the monster’s throat at his challenge. 
	Positioning the lance against his side, he lowered its tip, aiming it directly at the monster’s chest. 
	‘For my holy wrath will know no bounds!’ he declared, his strident voice ringing out across the battlefield, filling the muster of Bretonnia with the resolve they needed to keep fighting.
	Silvermane galloped past battling pilgrims, struggling peasant villagers and desperate, cornered ratmen. And then suddenly there were less than five horse lengths left between the knight and his quarry.
	Dagobert’s grip on the lance tightened, the tip barely wavering from its target as the horse thundered over broken bodies, discarded weapons and shattered, unnatural war machines in its urgency to engage with the foe. He saw too late that the brute beast was swinging its huge paw-hands together, intending to deliver a double-fisted sideways swipe as Silvermane closed. 
	The rat ogre was more intelligent than Dagobert had first thought, choosing to strike the knight’s steed rather than the warrior himself.
	The savage blow smashed the lance out of the way, splintering its smoothed ash tip even as the devastating punch connected with Silvermane’s caparisoned head, ramming foot-long splinters through the animal’s throat and into its eye. 
	Dagobert heard the sharp crack of bone over the screams of the rat-things, the clamour of battle, and the barking of the rat ogre. 
	The horse’s forelegs gave way, Dagobert instinctively leaning back in the saddle as his steed ploughed into the ground. But it was no good. The horse’s back end came tumbling over its head, such had been the force of its charge, and Dagobert was sent sprawling in the stinking mire of blood and mud.
	Finding himself with a face full of the befouled soup, Dagobert felt the dead weight of Silvermane’s body fall across his legs, pushing him still deeper into the sucking morass.
	Dagobert knew there wasn’t a moment to lose. The adrenaline rush of battle lending him the strength he needed, he pulled himself out from under his dead steed, using the broken haft of the shattered lance still in his hand to push himself to his feet. 
	He glanced back at the motionless corpse of the horse. Any one of the half a dozen dagger-sized splinters now sticking out of its head would have killed the warhorse had the rat ogre’s blow not already broken the poor beast’s neck. 
	Dagobert could tell that the beast was almost on him again by smell alone. Its foul stink was a noxious combination of foetid animal musk and the putrid reek of a septic war wound.
	Barely on his feet, the old knight took a stumbling step forwards, his feet slipping in the liquid slurry, twisting his body around as he did so, the lance still in his hand. At the same moment the rat ogre pounced, as if Dagobert were the mouse and the monster the hunting feline.
	The squealing roar that issued from the rat ogre’s swollen throat sac as the broken spear of the lance pierced its sutured flesh was an appalling sound, but it could only mean one thing.
	The creature arched its knotted back, its claws ripping the armour from the knight’s body where they caught, the guttural scream showing no sign of abating as the creature writhed and jerked on the end of the ruined lance. 
	Bracing the end of the lance against his foot, Dagobert put all his weight and power against the planed ash, pushing it further inside the monster’s cavernous chest. His own roar of rage escaped teeth gritted against the effort.
	Thick black blood gouted from the wound as the broken shaft ruptured the monster’s enlarged heart. Its death throes pulled the shattered lance from the knight’s grasp as a primal rage and insatiable appetite for slaughter kept it fighting to the last.
	But the Lady had decreed that the beast must die. Unsheathing his sword, he felt its divine power coursing through him. With an incoherent cry of rage on his lips he swung the keen edge at the struggling rat ogre. The sword took the monster’s ill-proportioned head from its shoulders with one clean cut.
	The creature’s hulking body slumped to the ground, thick black blood pumping from the stump of its neck, and was still at last.
	Dagobert turned from the massive corpse, but he was not done yet. The unit of black-furred ratmen were almost upon him. Hefting his holy sword in both hands, he laid about him with the mighty weapon, prayers to the Lady accompanying every grievous wound he laid against the enemy. The vermin-kin’s defence could not stand in the face of his holy wrath.
	As the last of the verminous bodyguards fell, a host of squealing rat-slaves parted, and there before the old knight crouched the warlord of the pack. It was clad in armour, like the grail knight. But where Dagobert cared for his plate mail, keeping it in immaculate condition so that it might serve him as well in battle as he served the Lady in all things, the rat-thing’s armour was scarred and pitted with some unknown, green-black deposit. Where Dagobert wore a fine helm upon his head, a sculpted chalice rising from its crown and the polished metal glinting silver where it was caught by the sun, the ratman had a crudely hammered helm topped with a crest of cruel blades.
	‘For the Lady!’ the knight cried, raising the blessed blade Deliverer in his hands once more, putting the aches and pains from his mind with a prayer to the divine damsel. 
	Meeting his challenge, the verminous warlord gave a furious hiss, foul spittle spraying from its elongated snout. Slabs of muscle rippled and bunched under its scabrous hide as it took up what looked like a halberd looted from another battlefield. The tempered steel of the once finely-wrought weapon was blackened and corroded, despoiled by the runes scratched into it, and it pulsed with a sick green light. Totems of rats’ skulls and human hands had been bound to the haft with knotted leather cords.
	‘That which is sacrosanct, I shall preserve. That which is sublime, I will protect. That which threatens, I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds!’
	The grail vow swelling to become a bellow of holy rage, Dagobert charged.
	V


	At least Layon was ready for the goblins this time.
	The first greenskin attack had found the men grown complacent after twelve summers of peace, with nothing to threaten the tranquillity of the valley beyond the occasional beastman incursion. But the goblins’ initial chaotic assault had left the survivors suspecting that they had not yet seen the last of the forest dwelling primitives.
	And so when young Tomas passed on his dire warning, the villagers and the grail knight’s retinue set about preparing the defence of the village. Sharpened stakes were raised and thrust into the ground in a ragged line between the village boundary and the perimeter of the forest, forming a barrier of adze-sharpened points with which to greet the enemy.
	With the non-combatants safe behind this defensive rampart and a line of bowmen protecting them, Reynard and the rest of the fighting men took up what weapons and shields they had – treasured family heirlooms and swords their ancestors had brought back from the crusades in Araby – and marched out across the field to deal with the greenskin threat once and for all.
	The bones of Sir Dagobert went before them, the last rays of the sun, the colour of embers in the hearth, catching the myriad votive tokens – silvered fleur-de-lys and gem-encrusted medallions – and setting them blazing as if aflame.
	When they were half way across the field, the men-at-arms came to a halt as one man, as the hollow echoes of falling timber and the splitting of sundered saplings reached their ears. The sounds were coming from the shadowed gloom of the forest where night had already fallen.
	The reverberating beat of a drum boomed from beneath the trees. It was echoed by the hammering of Reynard’s heart as the stressed organ beat its own tattoo of nervous anticipation inside his chest.
	Giving voice to a multitude of shrieking cries, the goblins burst from the treeline. Clad in loincloths, bedecked with feathered headdresses and waving crude spears, the scraggy greenskins bounded across the field, whooping in delight.
	‘For the Lady!’ the pilgrim leader yelled, his fellows adjusting the position of the reliquae poles resting upon their shoulders. Sir Dagobert’s devotees picked up the pace as they commenced their charge across the field.
	With the near-naked greenskins bounding towards them, leering faces and wiry bodies daubed with war-paint, Arnaud spied something approaching through the forest: a vast shadow still hidden by the trees.
	It demanded his whole attention and he took his eyes off the goblins, staring at the unsettling shape picking its way between the crowding crooked trunks.
	‘By the Lady…’ he heard Groffe gasp behind him, as the goblins’ monstrous ally hauled its grotesque, quivering bulk through the natural archway formed by a pair of ancient oaks.
	Sir Dagobert and his entourage stumbled to a halt. The sense-numbing effects of the ale evaporated like alcohol fumes in an instant, leaving Arnaud with a queasy feeling in his belly.
	Reynard had never seen anything so huge that hadn’t been a building or part of the landscape. The thing didn’t just look like a spider, it looked like it should be the primogenitor of arachnids everywhere. Glutted on blood-rich offerings, grown fat from decades as a prime predator, it now pulled its incredible bulk from the forest on eight chitinous limbs, each as long and as thick as a tree trunk.
	As it emerged from the shadows, its carapace assumed a toxic yellow hue, a multitude of shining black eyes, like spheres of obsidian, reflecting the last light of the day. As big as a hill, capable of taking an ox between its crushing jaws as a normal spider might a fly, across its back had been lashed a sturdy platform of broken branches and filthy webs, which teemed with more of the deranged greenskins.
	It was all Reynard could do not to soil himself. His worst fears regarding the fate of Forwin the woodcutter were confirmed when he caught sight of the bound body dangling from a gossamer rope as thick as an arm. The silk-bound parcel jerked with every movement the spider made as if it were a broken marionette.
	He had heard tales told about such things before – fireside tales of the mythical arachnarok that he had listened to intently at his grandmother’s knee, savouring every gruesome detail – but he had never actually believed such a thing could be real.
	Now that his childhood nightmare had taken on an unnatural life of its own, Reynard dearly wished that it had stayed in the realm of myth. Worse yet, there could be more of the horrors waiting beyond the treeline in the primeval darkness of the ancient forest.
	Arnaud cursed. Doubt had no place in the soul of one of the faithful. To have doubt was to have lost faith, and he who lost faith did not deserve the blessing of the Lady of the Lake. Sir Dagobert would never have faltered in the face of a fight, and neither would he now. 
	As the immense spider emerged from the forest, its myriad legs moving with a jerky peristaltic motion, the pilgrim saw great rents in the softer flesh of its under parts, arrows sticking from its bony shell, cracks in its carapace where lumps of masonry fired by a field trebuchet had found their target and claw marks made by some great beast, congealing with the foul purple ichor that passed for the spider’s blood.
	The abomination was injured, a victim of Duke Theobald’s purge, the same campaign that Sir Dagobert and his faithful had been a part of, the aftermath of which had led them to Layon in pursuit of the routed greenskins. But the spider was not dead yet. It still moved with a predator’s gait and its gigantic mandibles worked ceaselessly, droplets of some deadly toxin dripping to the ground to form steaming puddles.
	It was not dead yet, but it was dying, and it would be a worthy adversary for Sir Dagobert.
	‘Destroy that which threatens,’ Arnaud announced, his voice as clear as his purpose. He raised the worn blade in his hand, what might have been incised script blazing in the light of the setting sun.
	Hefting the reliquae upon their shoulders, the pilgrims resumed their bold march towards the monster. 
	Beneath its chainmail hood, the burnished skull of Sir Dagobert – polished to a lustrous sheen like mother-of-pearl – shone gold.
	VI


	Dagobert twisted as the rat deflected his blade with a sharp swipe of its own weapon, the halberd scraping along Deliverer’s keen edge. Foul sparks were thrown from the corroded metal and the rat used its momentum to carry it forward under the old knight’s guard. 
	Turning his sword to deflect his enemy’s attack, Dagobert brought the blade down swiftly, parrying the thrusting halberd. The warlord hissed again and rolled away from the paladin, throwing itself onto the ground and twisting its spine so that it was able to catch the bloodied blade against the haft of its weapon.
	Dagobert spun round, raising an iron-shod foot, ready to bring it down on the rat-thing’s skull. Moving with deceptive speed, especially considering it was clad in armour, the rat scrabbled out of his way. It was on its clawed inhuman feet again in a second, back hunched, chittering in a horrible high-pitched unvoice, holding the halberd with both hands, as if it were a quarterstaff.
	His vow on his lips, gauntleted hands tight about the grip of his sword, the knight thrust the weapon’s lethal point towards the pack-leader as the ratman angled its own hooking blade to parry the blow.
	Dagobert rained blows upon the horror while the rat-thing tried every underhand tactic at its disposal to best the knight’s skill with a sword. 
	To the pilgrims who fought with him, Sir Dagobert was a living saint, an inspiration to them all, a paradigm of what a life dedicated to the Lady could achieve. Every blow he laid against the warlord’s battered armour gave them the courage they needed to push the chittering horde back still further. For every one of the faithful that fell to a poison-coated blade, five of the mangy vermin paid with their miserable lives as the pilgrims exacted their revenge.
	But with his battle rage as hot as dragon’s breath, Dagobert’s attention was fully focused on the twisting, perfidious thing before him.
	Where the knight was honourable, the rat-thing was conniving and treacherous, prepared to try any devious trick to gain the advantage. Where the knight was bound by oaths of duty to the Lady, the rat-spawn was motivated by nothing but its own loathsome self-serving nature. Where Dagobert’s sword was straight and true, the rat’s halberd was serrated and fashioned with snagging hooks. And every time the two blades connected, Dagobert’s weapon threw virulent green sparks from the rune-etched halberd.
	A bone-numbing, wearying pain was creeping up Dagobert’s arms, but despite his failing strength, his faith in the Lady remained steadfast. And faith was the greatest weapon of all against such a foul and unholy enemy.
	The warlord made a sudden lunge for the knight, ducking in under the smooth arc described by his sweeping blade. Contrary to expectations of age, Dagobert managed to jerk his torso round so that the warlord’s blade scraped along the mail protecting his stomach, splitting the links of chain and sending more of the poisonous green sparks flying from the sundered steel rings.
	The rat gave a squeal of enraged frustration as its lunge carried it forwards, exposing it to Dagobert’s counter-attack.
	‘That which is sacrosanct, I shall preserve!’ the old knight declared, with a bellow of vindication. Reaching the end of his sweeping swing and twisting his arm at the elbow, he turned Deliverer deftly in his grasp. The tempered steel sang as he brought it down towards the rat-thing’s exposed neck. 
	‘That which is sublime, I will protect!’
	But the rat proved just as fast as the knight, and even more agile. It twisted its back, bringing its defiled weapon to bear once more, braced before it in both paws.
	Dagobert would not be denied. 
	‘That which threatens, I will destroy,’ he chanted as he brought the blade down, muscles in his arm on fire as his faith in the Lady granted him all the strength he needed. ‘That which threatens, I will destroy!’
	The worn shaft of the halberd splintered beneath the blessed blade’s keen edge, the gleaming steel catching the light for a moment as the sun burnt through the cloying mists at last. Just for a moment it seemed as if Deliverer burst into flame. The tip of the blade connected with the creature’s breast, parting the exposed flesh between neck and sternum. 
	‘For my holy wrath will know no bounds!’
	Dagobert’s declaration of faith rang out across the battlefield for all to hear. The vermin-kin squealed in fear. The knight’s faithful followers rallied, driving home their advantage as the rat-things fled the battlefield, making their own evangelical calls to the Lady, routing the enemy with vigour.
	Dagobert forced the tip of the blade home, ramming it through the throat of the struggling thing, skewering the rat to the ground with his holy sword. The warlord’s shrieking screams dissolved into choked gurgles.
	A sudden spear of pain burned in the knight’s side. 
	Dagobert gasped, staggering back from the stricken ratman, releasing his hold on his sword that still pinned the treacherous creature to the ground. And then he saw the tip of the halberd clasped in its left hand, the dizzying symbols pulsing with sick green light. The knight’s blood smoked as it ran down over the rune-etched blade.
	Even with the tainted blade removed, the acid agony remained. The burning pain was joined by a pernicious cold that radiated from the point where the halberd had pierced his side with a creeping malignity.
	He could feel his legs giving way under him. His stumbling steps carried him down the rugged hillside towards the babbling waters of a stream that ran pink with the blood of the men and vermin that had met their end upon its banks.
	His vision greying, Dagobert made for the brook, his mouth suddenly dry, wanting nothing more than to sup of the waters that tumbled from the same holy spring that filled the font in the Lady’s chapel. The Lady had chosen him to be Her champion and she gave succour to those who needed it and peace to those that had earned it. 
	Reaching the stream, he gave in at last to the numbness spreading throughout his body. He fell to the ground, feeling the damp earth beneath him as the soil of Bretonnia welcomed him with its soft embrace.
	As he attempted to draw the waters of the stream to his mouth with one quivering cupped hand, the words of the vow he had first taken as a youth – so many years ago now – tumbled unbidden from his parched lips.
	‘When the clarion call is sounded, I will ride out and fight for liege and Lady. While I draw breath, the lands bequeathed unto me will remain untainted by evil. Honour is all.’
	And so the last thing on his lips when oblivion took him was the first vow he had taken on setting out upon the path to honour and glory in the Lady’s name.
	VII


	The monster’s bile-yellow shell was thicker that a knight’s plate armour. The creature must have survived for centuries within the lightless depths of some primeval forest, having nothing to fear from man or greenskin, growing fat on the flesh of forest goblins and the offerings they made.
	Thorn-like protuberances studded the spider’s carapace, forming symmetrical patterns across its back. Some of these spines had grown to enormous proportions, becoming great spears of bone-like chitin that thrust forward over its head, protecting it from attack as sharpened stakes did the ranks of Bretonnian bowmen.
	Buoyed absolute faith in the divine blessing the bones of Sir Dagobert conferred upon them, Arnaud led his brother pilgrims across the field, despite the fact that the men of Layon’s charge had already faltered with the monstrous spider’s emergence from the forest.
	Bellowing in triumph before they had even engaged the enemy – so sure was he of their forthcoming victory over the greenskins and their monstrous mount – Arnaud led Savaric, Aluard, Fulk and Elias as they bore the reliquae at the head of the pilgrims’ zealous charge.
	The spider moved with stilted steps, the gargantuan arachnid favouring its right side and yet still covering as great a distance with one rocking stride as the bier bearers did running at full pelt.
	But the pilgrims’ charge did not falter, even as the gibbering greenskins hanging from the web-strung platform rained crude arrows down upon their heads. Brother Hugo fell with a bolt through his thigh but the holy warrior continued on.
	Brother Aluard stumbled and went down, a lucky goblin arrow piercing his eye. For a moment, the reliquae bearers – robbed of one of their number – stumbled too. Jules stepped up to take Aluard’s place and the pilgrims surged on across the field.
	Through the encroaching gloom and the haze of battle-lust, Arnaud saw again the spears and lances protruding from blackened rifts in the spider’s side, the hafts of the buried weapons clattering together with every stalking step the monster took. He saw that one monstrous eye was gone, ichor oozing from the savage wound the monster had been dealt.
	And yet, despite having suffered injuries that would have levelled an entire regiment of men-at-arms, the spider was still standing. More than that, it was still striding towards Layon. But the knowledge that it was hurt made one thing perfectly clear to Arnaud. If the monster could be injured, then it could be killed.
	‘In the name of Sir Dagobert! For the Lady! And for fair Bretonnia!’ Arnaud bellowed as the pilgrims closed with the horror. ‘Attack!’
	Sir Dagobert met the monstrous beast in battle.
	A spearing tarsus came down among the pilgrim mob, running Brother Luc through from shoulder to groin and lifting him clear of the ground, screaming in agony. Another spider claw came down almost on top of the reliquae itself, missing Sir Dagobert’s bones but snagging a piece of Silvermane’s caparison and tearing it free.
	Despite the best efforts of the spider and its frenzied passengers, the pilgrims found themselves directly beneath the monster’s furiously working jaws. Strings of corrosive venom drooled from fangs the size of ploughshares, burning smoking holes in the crumbling raiment of the knight’s tabard where they touched.
	In no more time than it took Arnaud to blink in startled surprise, the spider struck. 
	Moving far more quickly than should have been possible for something so vast, the monster’s discoloured fangs snapped closed about the body of the knight. The crushing bite punctured steel plate and splintered bone as if Sir Dagobert was nothing more than a scarecrow of sticks and straw. The idiot beast delivered a great jolt of poison through its fangs deadly enough to drop a giant, pumping the relic-knight’s remains full of venom that corroded the smooth surface of his polished armour and dissolved the links of his chainmail.
	Rising up on its hindquarters, the spider tore the reliquae apart, sending tatters of cloth, broken bones and pieces of armour raining down about the pilgrims. 
	With Sir Dagobert preoccupying the beast, his faithful followers made the most of the distraction and, out of range of the shrieking goblins, ran for cover beneath the bloated arachnid.
	Caught within the cage of the spider’s legs, Arnaud froze. The beast’s underbelly seemed to pulse with disgusting peristaltic ripples as if something was moving beneath the white puckered flesh. 
	Myriad tiny spiderlings swarmed over its leathery hide to drop down onto the pilgrims crouched beneath their monstrous brood-mother. They scampered across the ground around the spider as well, scuttling up the legs of the unwary, squirming inside jerkins and into hose, delivering crippling bites and making the men cry out in pain and horrified surprise.
	‘Come, brothers, do not fail Sir Dagobert now when his work here is almost done!’ Arnaud shouted, tightening his grip around his blade. ‘Stand firm and let not your sword-arms fail the Lady and Her champion!’ With that, he thrust his own blessed blade high above his head.
	It pierced the pulsating sac of the spider’s abdomen and he pushed it home with both hands, feeling internal organs rupture as he forced its tip deeper into the monster’s belly. Following their leader’s example, the faithful hacked, pierced and bludgeoned the spider’s soft flesh.
	The spider made a sound like a high-pitched hissing scream and the pilgrims redoubled their efforts, chanting prayers that called down the Lady’s divine retribution about the unholy monster.
	Viscous fluid poured from the beast’s wounds, drenching the pilgrims in a stinking torrent, but still they did not relent. The men hacked and slashed, opening up even more grievous wounds in the monster’s abdomen. Brother Baldric lost his dagger inside the beast as the slime-slicked weapon slipped from his grasp. Reaching for the broken end of a splintered lance still hanging from the spider’s side, he rammed the weapon further inside the beast, screaming with the fury of a zealot.
	The gargantuan spider spasmed with every sword thrust, every axe that cleaved its flesh drawing from it more hissing screams. The creature twisted, trying to catch its tormentors in its terrible jaws, throwing screaming goblins from the howdah as it did so. But the pilgrims were sheltered beneath its belly and with every blow they dealt the beast, its strength ebbed, making it harder for the gigantic spider to keep out of reach of their vengeful blades.
	Soon, the spider was possessed by the paroxysm of its death-throes, the forest goblins howling in terror, unable to believe that their god had been bested. 
	Sir Dagobert’s followers had at last finished what the muster of Duke Theobald had begun.
	VIII


	Dagobert slowly opened his eyes. Flickering shadows resolved into jostling figures and, as his sluggish senses finally caught up, he realised that someone was tugging at his body.
	He could feel his slack limbs being pulled this way and that, but felt like he barely had the strength to breathe, let alone resist the attentions of the looters.
	He could hear the babbling of a brook close by and smell the mingled scents of blood and fire on the air. Realisation came to him at last as he remembered where he was and what had happened.
	He could still feel the burning pain of the death wound the warlord had delivered with its cursed halberd. And yet he was not dead and the hole in his side burned less than it had. Even the numbness was beginning to pass. He would yet live to fight another day.
	He had lain dying of his wounds in the sacred stream, as if age itself had finally caught up with him, but the waters of the Lady’s blessed well had saved him, washing the poison from that last grievous wound, and setting him on the road to recovery. With rest and time, and the ministrations of a grail damsel, he would recover, and even return to protect the Lady’s shrine. But there was another obstacle he would have to overcome first.
	Dagobert understood what was happening to him now. With the ratmen routed, his idiot followers – clearly believing him to be dead already – had returned to claim what relics and other trinkets they could from his body, whether it be a piece of his armour or some token of the Lady that he carried about him.
	‘I’m not dead,’ he tried to say, defiant to the last, but all that escaped his parched lips was a hoarse whisper. Swallowing hard, trying to draw saliva to his mouth, he tried again. ‘I’m not dead.’
	A dark shadow passed across the canvas of the featureless white sky and resolved into the lumpen features of the pestering pilgrim. What was his name? Dagobert seemed to recall that the man had been a blacksmith before joining the knight’s entourage. He was staring at the knight, an imbecilic grin splitting his ugly face. Arnaud, that was his name.
	‘Arnaud, help me,’ Dagobert commanded, but his voice that was still little more than a cracked whisper. It was certainly unlikely that any of the other pilgrims had heard him. ‘I’m not dead.’
	Arnaud knelt down beside him and whispered in his ear. ‘I know, my lord.’ 
	For the briefest moment, hope filled the grail knight’s world. But only for a moment.
	‘And I know, too, that you will live forever,’ the pilgrim went on, his voice acquiring a disconcerting quality. A distant look glazed his eyes, as if the pilgrim could see a secret future the old knight could not. ‘You will be an inspiration to all who follow you – to the downtrodden, to those in peril or in fear for their lives – a champion to the threatened and the oppressed. And you shall serve the Lady until the coming of the end times.’
	Dagobert suddenly felt a great weight pushing down upon his ribcage, making it even harder for him to breathe. He fought against the pressure, struggling to even lift his head to see, blinking to clear his greying vision.
	The pilgrim was sitting on his chest, examining the blessed blade that was now in his hands, turning Deliverer over and over as if scrutinizing its craftsmanship in minute detail. 
	‘But I’m not dead!’ Dagobert spluttered, gasping for breath.
	Arnaud leant over and whispered in the knight’s ear again. ‘You are the thrice blessed; blessed by the Lady when you took up the mantle of a knight, blessed by Her when you drank from Her holy cup, and she blesses you again now with the honour of serving her forevermore.
	‘You are a living saint, an inspiration to us all,’ the pilgrim went on. ‘But saints are only ever really appreciated when they’re dead.’ 
	Dagobert wanted to thrash and kick and fight against the dying of the light, as he felt the pressure building behind his eyes and his vision began to fade. But he didn’t even have the strength to lift his arms.
	Arnaud didn’t meet his gaze again. Holding the knight’s sword in his right hand, the thug reached over and, without looking, put a firm hand on Dagobert’s brow, forcing his head under the churning current of the holy stream.
	Every fibre of his being fought against the pilgrim’s unyielding grasp, but the warlord’s toxic blade, having failed to kill him, had nonetheless robbed him of strength.
	The pressure increased and deep inside himself, for the first time in a long time, Dagobert began to panic. The very waters that had saved his life twice now threatened to take it from him. 
	He could hold his breath no longer. He opened his mouth to cry out in rage at the pilgrim, to give a shout that the whole world might hear and realise he was not done yet. But rather than a wrathful roar, his final breath burst from his lungs in a torrent of furious bubbles.
	As his greying vision gave way to the blackness of oblivion, Dagobert saw white flowers falling through the dark. The scent of apple blossom was in his nose and he heard the Lady calling to him across the gulf of eternity, guiding him to his long-deserved rest.
	IX


	The spider was dead and the goblins gone, having fled back into the forest in shrieking fear after witnessing the agonising death-throes of their forest god. And yet that night only the snores of the grail knight’s entourage disturbed the darkness. No one else in Layon slept a wink.
	With the rising of the sun came the thankless task of disposing of the dead. The howdah mounted atop the monster’s carapace loaded with the greenskin dead and set alight, the flammable webs soon catching and the fire spreading until it became a great conflagration that reduced spider, goblins and all to nothing but ash.
	As far as Arnaud was concerned, only one task remained: recruiting others to the pilgrims’ cause. There were those in the village who heeded the call of his rabble-rousing, men who had lost everything in the goblins’ attack other than their pitiful lives. With nothing left to live for, and nothing to keep them in Layon, they readily rallied to the pilgrims’ totem. With freshly tonsured scalps, they joined Arnaud and the others in reconstructing Sir Dagobert’s remains from what was left of the grail knight’s bones after the spider’s desecration of the holy reliquae, making up any missing parts with what they could scavenge from the village shrine, their own family heirlooms and even the charcoal-black bones left after the funeral pyres had burned down.
	‘We cannot tempt you to stay?’ Reynard asked as the battle pilgrims did what they could to reassemble the bones of the grail knight and his steed, shoring up the reliquae with copious sticks and borrowed twine.
	‘Do not seek to tempt me, peasant!’ Arnaud said, glaring furiously at Reynard. The reek of alcohol was still strong on his breath. ‘But you could lend us a few more of those apples and a couple of flagons of ale to see us on our way.’
	‘So where will you go now?’ Reynard asked, once the requested victuals had been scraped together from what was left of the village reserve stores.
	Eleven of the original fourteen battle pilgrims remained, but another eight had joined their number since the battle with the spider. As four of them raised the rickety reliquae upon their shoulders once more – Brother Gervase taking up the dead horse’s hooves once more and giving an equine whinny – Arnaud looked back towards the ridge, from where Sir Dagobert’s hunting party has first set eyes on the village of Layon only the day before.
	‘Sir Dagobert’s quest is done,’ he said, Reynard uncertain as to whether the man was gazing into the distance or into the future. ‘He desires only to be laid to rest within the shrine that he raised himself from the razed ruins of the Castle Perillus.’
	‘Then I bid Sir Dagobert–’
	‘The thrice blessed,’ the other interrupted.
	‘–and you and your fellow brethren, farewell.’
	Ignoring the hand Reynard offered him, Arnaud pointed towards the horizon with his cleaned blade once more and Reynard noticed for the first time how letters etched into the surface of the blade reflected the sun, spelling out a name.
	Deliverer. 
	‘In the name of the Lady of the Lake we march for Holy Well!’ Arnaud declared, taking the first step on the path that would lead the pilgrims back up the escarpment to the ridge above.
	Reynard watched until the pilgrims were no more than dark silhouettes against the skyline. Turning his back on the brooding hills, Reynard suddenly stopped and sniffed, catching the smell of something familiar, and yet out of season, on the breeze.
	It was the subtle scent of apple blossom.