Free The Grail War by Richard Monaco

then?”
    “I won’t,” Parsival obscurely concluded and walked on through the inner walled yard, stepping carefully over and around the bodies, armored and unarmored. The raw blood stink was still in the air.
    “It seems it were a good fight,” Prang observed quietly.
    Parsival didn’t respond. They’d entered the main hall. He’d been expecting it since crossing the moat and now he finally faced it completely, let the pain and shock in to himself, and realized he would survive it. So it was that he said nothing after lighting a torch and looking at his wife and daughter sprawled together, hacked to bloody tatters. He said not a word. The sooty torch fire billowed around him, flipping his distorted shadow around the bare stone walls. Neither face was intact; his child’s was shredded. But the necklace he knew glinted around her neck. He bent and took it, gripped it in his powerful hands as Prang came up beside him.
    “Good Jesus,” he said.
    Parsival just stood there in the flame and dark, the golden chain swaying in his fingers.
    “I won’t,” he whispered and shut his eyes against a terrible outcry he felt gathering within him. He stood there for a long time … And then he felt the movements before he actually heard the faint scrape of steel. He instantly threw the torch across the hall toward the open archway behind them. He moved Prang quietly aside as the arrow thummed past and clinked dully on the far wall. The flames showed an armored, shadowy figure standing there, with others at his back.
    “So,” said Prang, drawing his blade.
    “Wait,” Parsival said, trembling with suppressed energy.
    The bowman and two or three other knights entered the chamber. Their faces seemed to fill and hollow out as the flames wavered.
    “It were well we waited,” the leader said, “eh, Parsival?” He seemed philosophic. “You may as well stand still and take it like a man, you and your friend there. No sense in ducking about like a stricken goose.”
    “Pick up one of these swords here, my lord,” Prang muttered aside, “and we’ll show them something.”
    “No,” Parsival said. “Follow me. There are at least twenty more without.”
    “Eh?”
    “And armored.”
    “How can you tell this?”
    “I can tell.” As the men advanced across the floor in the sputtering light of the thrown torch, the chief knight nocked a shaft and half-drew his bowstring.
    “Prepare yourselves,” he said.
    “Follow me,” Parsival hissed. And he ducked back and to the side as the second arrow zipped by, stooped briefly to snatch up a sword and ax from the litter on the bloody stones, and hurled the ax (without breaking stride) at the lead knight, who deflected the terrific blow with his shield (staggered back) into the man on his right, who screamed and went down in a flash of sparks. “Christ,” murmured Prang, “what a recovery.”
    “Lancelot,” Parsival called out, sure of it now.
    The stocky knight threw aside his bow, stooped, and tossed the torch into the center of the chamber, where the fitful light outlined all of them.
    “There is no escape,” he pointed out.
    Parsival seemed quite at ease. Prang noted. His own heart was racing as if the whole space echoed with ii “Why?” Parsival wanted to know calmly.
    “Because you’re surrounded.”
    “Why is it necessary?”
    “What does it matter?” Lancelot said, advancing. “Why bear yet another burden into hell?”
    The stricken knight on the floor was sighing now, very rapidly. Prang could see him kicking sporadically in the wavering shadows. Several more men had entered the place and were keeping close along the far walls, gradually circling to cut them off.
    Parsival was silent, unmoving, concentrating, trying now to touch Lancelot in the way he’d learned from the monks: to grip him invisibly with the hands of his soul, to throw off his timing. But he was solidly blocked. A wall of will held him away. He decided the man must have a talisman. His master