Certainly some would say it was unknightly of me, unworthy of a scion of the noble house of Jaboz. The Grand Chancellor would doubtless use it as the opportunity to launch another of his tirades about my father. The Archdeacon would shake his head and work some oblique comment into his next crusade sermon. But I am tired of war.

    I’ve heard the Grand Chancellor say that the Knights Improbablar exist to make war; that they are the hand of destiny, winnowing out the evil and bringing peace and order to the realms. I don’t agree. The Knights Improbable were founded almost a thousand years ago to serve justice. If that requires conflict then so be it. But war is a means, not an end, and a sad one at that.

    Listen to me! I sound like some old toothless campaigner doting in his cups. Yet I am but twenty-two, newly invested as a chevalier only two years ago: the day the Dimension War began.

    I was there. I remember the first flares in the sky as the dimensional mines went off all around the royal family. I remember the shock of looking over Avalon and seeing alien spires rising amongst our clean stone buildings. Those first crude bombs merged portions of our reality with those of the Esperines forever, linking our two worlds in a conflict that some say can only end with our genocide or theirs.

    Nobody was ready for such a fight. We’d battled monsters and madmen, toppled tyrants, even fought off beings from other worlds (back in the days before the nebulas covered the skies and all the other worlds died). But this was so unexpected. Suddenly our territory was theirs too, Swordrealm and Esperworld horribly tangled together, tower and minaret side by side. A farmer might find half his lands now belonged to some other man who spoke another tongue, who believed the land was his.

    And there was war. The Esperines used their sorcery of the mind to create monsters against us. Their battlepaths could rip apart a tank with their minds alone. Their mindwalkers could see our secret plans as soon as we conceived them. Avalon fell, and Ur, and the high places. Many brave men fell too.

    Maybe we would have won without the priesthood, maybe not. I acknowledge the debt that we owe to the Archdeacon and his church. It was they who showed us how to seal our armour from the mindwalkers, to temper our steel to resist the battlepaths’ touch. And so the Knights Improbablar rose again, and fought back. And there was more war, and more blood, and this time the Esperines did the dying.

    We tried to conduct the war properly. The first man I ever killed – for certain, not in some tangled confused melee – the first man was a soldier of the Swordrealm, as he sought to outrage a captured mindwalker woman who had surrendered to our squad. We fought, but we fought cleanly. With honour. Most of us.

    I rose quickly through the ranks. I suppose I should have expected that, given that my father is Sir Jados de Jaboz. But I was always the first to offer myself for the combat missions. And the gift of the Improbablars is strong in me, to dampen the supernatural powers. Before me even the strongest of the battlepaths found their minds weakening and their skills lessened.

    Two years on I can hardly remember what our world used to look like when it was whole.

    I was there at Dolmenguard for the last battle too. I held my brother Jerome in my arms as the life ebbed out of him, then I wept as I fought when we strove for the peak. I was one of the lucky few who broke past the shadow wyverns, through the cordon of psiwraiths, and breached the citadel to demand the surrender of the Circle of Nine.

    The war should have ended there, with that conflict. Doubtless the history books will say it did; but I spent three months more quelling the remaining factions, restoring order, burying the dead. They say we won. If so, we are little better off than the losers.

    Swordrealm is in chaos. The king and the rest of the royal family died in that first assault. The barons squabble over who will take the throne. Only the church and the Knights Improbable bind together any part of our society. And our realm is still merged with Esperworld. There must be a hundred thousand portals between our lands, maybe a third of the planet’s surface now merged with that other, alien place. We have conquered, but the Circle of Nine are still strong. I do not envy my father and the Archdeacon and the Grand Chancellor in the months to come.

    Nor do I like the Archdeacon’s crusade; but he offered us aid at our darkest hour and we gave our word. The Knights Improbablar will defend him and his missionaries as they spread the worship of their god, their Parody Master, across the Swordrealm and Esperworld. We will support them as they denounce and destroy heresy. And we will enforce the terms of surrender upon the Circle of Nine, and insist that their princess of the blood, most powerful of their mindwalkers, is rendered up to the Archdeacon to become a bride for his god.

    It’s another kind of war, and I am tired of it all.

    I will do my duty.

    I was angry the day the Circle of Nine yielded to the invaders. I was angry the day they signed that craven treaty of appeasement. The day they agreed to send my sister as human sacrifice to the Swordrealm’s mad god I damn near hurled Magister Flavian over the white tower to his death. If Elsinore hadn’t intervened I would have, and good riddance to him!

    I was so angry that everyone was surprised when I volunteered to act as companion to my poor sister on her journey to Avalon. As if she could go without me! As if I was going to let Elsinore walk that dark path alone and friendless, amongst those cruel knights and their cold iron, their thoughts stabbing at her with their malice, their hearts sheathed in steel like their bodies.

    Nobody could gainsay it. I have been at Elsinore’s side since I could first walk. I was there when she took the tests, demonstrated her lineage gifts, took up the tiara of First Princess of Salem. If she is to be destroyed, I will walk with her to the last.

    If she is to be destroyed. There are many things that can happen between now and the Archdeacon’s altar.

    The Swordrealm sent their Knights Improbablar to collect Elsinore, of course. Perhaps they expected us to tremble before those steel-shod bullies, their silver armour trimmed with blue and grey, gleaming in the moonlight. The soldiers marched in perfect formation from the vessel they had sent – a graceful wooden ship that sailed the skies on telluric currents, I have to admit that was beautiful. They ranged out into the broken courtyard of Dolmenguard and took up station, like so many golem statues waiting to spring to life.

    Their captain was John de Jabez. I had seen him before, the night the citadel fell. I was pleased to see that the wound on his cheek where I had caught him with one of my telekinetic knives had not yet completely healed. He was young for his task, but I have heard that he is the son of the Praetor of the Knights Improbablar. Doubtless his daddy pulled some strings to make him slaver-in-chief for this piece of political theatre.

    My sister was ready, of course, arrayed in her wedding finery. The journey would take six days, for many of the telluric currents were disrupted now by the dimensional rifts and by the mana bombs that had been detonated in the last weeks of the war. She greeted de Jabez politely. I would have spat in his face; but I was on my best behaviour here with mother and the other Nine watching us. I had to be mild, obedient, biddable. Nobody had to suspect what I intended when the time came.

    “Lady, I am come to escort you to your wedding,” the Chevalier said with an arrogant little bow.

    “Thank you, Sir John,” Elsinore answered him.

    They say that de Jabez is a suppressor, that he has the trick of dampening down telepathic talents. Let’s see how good he is at doing that with a steel girder through his chest when the time comes.

    Princess Elsinore does not deserve a forced marriage, or whatever fate truly waits her at the Archdeacon’s altar. She is a sweet, kind person, quite unlike the bloodthirsty witch I imagined the daughter of one of the Council of Nine to be. I sense no evil within her.

    We spoke at dinner in the main cabin last night. She asked me what Avalon was like.

    “A city of towers and white stone,” I told her. “Some of it is beautiful still, when the wind stirs the apple blossoms along the old streets and the sun hangs low over the sea-marshes. It has suffered in the conflicts, but it will be rebuilt more wonderful than ever.”

    “So many of our wonders have been lost,” the First Princess mourned. “In my world, the fey have withdrawn to their raths and may never return. Many halls of memory have been shattered, the thoughts and moods preserved there lost forever.”

    “That’d be because of you,” the Second Princess told me, her eyes staring madly. “When you brought your war against the innocent and the sacred.”

    “It was not I nor the Knights Improbablar who raised monsters against civilians,” I argued. “It was not us who attacked without warning and murdered without remorse. You offer up one princess. We lost our royal house.”

    “We attacked without warning? It was you who began this senseless conflict when you detonated your vile dimensional bombs and imposed your iron and stone across our world!”

    I had heard this untruth before, the denial of culpability for that cowardly first attack. I turned to disabuse the hellion of her deceptions. But just then the captain rushed in.

    “Sir,” he reported, “the warning crystals are picking up a dimensional disturbance. Very near.”

    “A dimension bomb?” I was already on my feet, sword in hand. “Get these ladies to their cabins.”

    “Like hell,” said Lileblanche, shouldering the captain aside. “If there’s danger out there I want to know about it!”

    “To their cabins,” I repeated. “Captain, go to battle stations, bring us around, and let’s see what we’re facing.”

    The ship creaked as we heaved across the telluric currents, the wind buffeting the hull as we bent from the flow. The sailors lit the searchlights while my Knights assembled on the deck. If this was Esperine treachery then we were ready for it.

    A flash lit up the sky, brighter than the blue nebulas that shone above us. A strange and colourful object plummeted like a rock, dropping towards the forest. Then at the last minute it seemed to right itself, skimmed the tops of the trees, and vanished with a crash into the woods below.

    So I settled for willing the lock open. The Swordrealm fools think that iron stops telepaths as it stops the fairy creatures. Perhaps it works on the lesser talents. Anyway, I opened the lock and slipped out to follow De Jaboz and his knights as they left the ship to investigate the fallen star.

    The Chevalier knew his business, I’ll grant him that. I suppose two years of butchering our brave warriors, of co-ordinating the slaughter of women and children must have taught him something. He certainly knew how to shield his thoughts from me. And he did a very competent job of quartering the woods, quickly picking up the trail of broken trees and finding the extraordinary object that had dropped from the skies.

    It was a vehicle, a curious metal tube with fins and windows, painted in hues of purple and pink.

    The Knights surrounded it and took a defensive formation as the back door lifted up and an armoured being came out.

    “Oh great,” the stranger said, and his voice sounded hollow and buzzing, “just what we need. Indigenous lifeforms with pretensions of ferocity. Surrender and die!”

    “Hold!” warned de Jaboz as his Knights shifted forward. “Sir Knight, name yourself and your purpose.”

    “Oh yeah, I’ll be doing that. Right after I pick the pieces of idiots-with-swords off my chestplate.”

    The conflict seemed inevitable until another voice called out from inside the vehicle. “Stop!”

    “Why?” demanded the strange knight. “I can slaughter these bozos in twelve seconds flat. Seven if I’m allowed to be creative.”

    A scholar came into view. His mind was a dizzying swirl of lore, his brain a fine instrument. I didn’t read any aggression in him, just a mild frustration with his servant and a boundless curiosity about the Knights Improbablar. “I don’t want any killing. Any more killing,” he said. “The dimensional jump went somewhat wrong. These people can perhaps tell us where we are.” He turned to de Jaboz. “I’m Lee Bookman, of the Intergalactic Order of Librarians. How do you do?”

    “What is your purpose here, Lee Bookman?” the Chevalier demanded suspiciously. “Are you seeking to liberate or harm the First Princess?”

    “We are not to be wanting to be harming of anyone,” came another voice from inside the craft. Then a handsome young man in black silks strode out grinning at the knights. “We will be liberating of First Princess if she is to be wanting of it, of course. Hello. I am Yo.”

    Yo’s mind was… I can’t describe it. Except there were a lot of bunnies in there. And it makes me happy to remember it.

    Hello, cute-Lileblanche! Yo thought to me as I probed him. And he winked.

    “You will surrender to me,” de Jaboz told the strangers. “You are my prisoners.”

    When I say we were under fire, I mean we were ambushed by the Z’Sox assassin fleet on behalf of the Parody Master. They had intelligence they shouldn’t have had about our itinerary, and the Astrovids had paid the price. So instead of concluding our negotiations with the Astrovid Defence Minister and then seeking their aid in projecting us across the transdimensional vortex as far as Technopolis, we cobbled up an emergency jump that used the energies of the Z’Sox plasma guns as a raw power source.

    And we ended up back on Earth.

    It wasn’t any Earth we knew, of course. It was one of the broader variants in one of the dimensional backwaters. Well, two of the broader variants to be more precise, since there’d been a fair bit of tangling between Swordrealm and Esperworld. But it was soon clear that we’d jumped right into the end of a bitter nasty war in a most unusual universe.

    There was no IOL here. In fact I couldn’t pick up any galactic signals at all. The night skies held no stars, only the pink and blue of nebula bursts where whole galaxies had been exploded. Yo and I were quite alone, except for A.L.F.RED, my almost-trusty robot.

    We set ALF.R.E.D to patching up the Galactibus (there was a nasty ding on the fender) and retooling the dimensional jump engines, then Yo and I set out with the locals to travel to their capital, Avalon, and consult with the Grand Chancellor and the Archdeacon, who apparently run the place.

    The Knights Improbablar allegedly died out on the main Parody Earth hundreds of years ago, although some say they developed into the Improbable College. On the world we now found ourselves they had prospered and become the major military force of the planet. We found ourselves in the main cabin of one of their warships, a fantastic creation that rode the skies on power drawn from earth leys across the world.

    “Is to be very nice of you to be picking up of hitch-hikers,” Yo smiled at the ship’s captain and at Sir John de Jaboz.

    “I don’t know what to do with you,” the Chevalier admitted candidly. “I’m taking you to my father so he can sort you out.”

    “Sir John wouldn’t want to be forced to think for himself,” mocked another of the cabin guests, an Esperine princess called Lileblanche.

    I couldn’t help but think that both princess and knight looked somewhat familiar to me. Were they dimensional counterparts of people I had seen in the Library archives? Lileblanche, Second Princess of Salem, was a spirited girl of perhaps twenty with flowing blonde hair and cat-green eyes. John de Jaboz had a classic muscular body with a square jaw and sandy hair that was usually covered by his chainmail coif. They argued like cat and dog.

     The most difficult thing about the dimension we were stranded in didn’t become apparent until the next evening, however. We were all gathered at the captain’s table, enjoying a very fine brandy and some honeyed roast beef (Swordrealms cuisine – the Esperines favoured more spiced Eastern dishes) when Yo turned the conversation to the court at Avalon.

    “Yo is very much looking forwarding to be meeting of cute-Sir John’s father and all of other importanting people. Yo is to be asking of them many questions. Who is to be people that Yo is to be taking of diplomatic messagings?”

    It took the young Knight Improbablar a moment to translate Yo’s somewhat irregular speech patterns. But at last he answered: “Well, the court is still in disarray since we lost the royal family in the war. Military matters are the purview of the Improbablars, which means my father, Sir Jados. Political affairs are the grand Chancellor’s responsibility for now, until a royal succession can be resolved. And the judiciary is the Archdeacon’s purview. You’ll probably need to speak to all of them.”

    Lady Lileblanche leaned forward. “Do you think the Archdeacon is really going to give audience to a heretic from the stars? I’m surprised he’s unbending enough to take my sister to his sacrifice altar.”

    “Sacrifice,” scowled Yo. And Yo doesn’t often scowl. “What is?”

    “Lileblanche is being provocative,” said Princess Elsinore. “As usual. Sir Yo, I am going to a political marriage arranged as part of the… peace settlement between the peoples of Esperine and Swordrealm. My sister disapproves.”

    “Many Esperines disapprove,” Lileblanche glowered. I wonder if anybody else noted the knives on the table tremble slightly?

    “Yo is wondering whether cute-Elsinore is wanting of to be going to married? Is to be best to be wedding of somebody you love, yes? Is there to be someone you are loving?”

    The first princess of the Esperines looked down. “Of course not.”

    Yo glanced at Elsinore, then at Lileblanche, and then at me. “Yo will be to be talking with this Archdeacon,” s/he determined.

    “Rehearse your catechisms, then,” Lileblanche advised. “You’d best know your answers if he decides to quiz you on his god, that supposed Parody Master!”

    “That who?” I blurted, spilling my drink.

    Yes, it was true. The war between the Swordrealms and the Esperines had been concluded through the intervention of the clerics of the Parody Master. Elsinore was to be his bride.