The Red Knight (27 page)

The bitch was using arcane powers on him.
And he found himself unable to speak. It was as if his tongue had gone to sleep. He couldn’t even form a word in his mind.

He staggered back, scarred hands over his mouth, all of his suspicions confirmed and all of his petty errors transformed into acts of courage. She had used witchcraft against him. She was a
witch – an ally of Satan. Whereas he—

She turned to him. ‘This is an emergency, Father, and you were warned. Return to your chapel and do penance for your disobedience.’

He fled.

North of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn strode east as fast as his long legs would carry him, a swarm of faeries around his head like insects, feeding on the power that clung to him like moss to stone. ‘We
continue,’ he said to the daemon at his side.

The daemon surveyed the wreckage of tents and the scatter of corpses. ‘How many did you lose?’ he asked. His crest moved with agitation.

‘Lose? Only a handful. The boglins are young and unprepared for war.’ The great figure shook like a tree in the wind.

‘You took a wound yourself,’ Thurkan said.

Thorn stopped. ‘Is this one of your dominance games? One of them distracted me. He had a little magic and I was slow to respond. It will not happen again. Their attack had no real affect
on us.’

The great figure turned and shambled east. Around him, irks and boglins and men packed their belongings and prepared to march.

Thurkan loped alongside, easily keeping pace with the giant sorcerer. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why Albinkirk?’

Thorn stopped. He despised being questioned, especially by a troublemaker like Thurkan, who saw himself – a mere daemon – as his peer. He longed to say, ‘Because I will it
so.’

But this was not the moment.

‘Power summons power,’ he said.

Thurkan’s head-crest trembled in agreement. ‘So?’ he asked.

‘The irks and boglin hordes are restless. They have come here – was that at your bidding, daemon?’ Thorn leaned at the waist. ‘Well?’

‘Violence summons violence,’ Thurkan said. ‘Men killed creatures of the Wild. A golden bear was enslaved by men. It cannot be borne. My cousin was murdered; so was a wyvern. We
are the guardians. We must act.’

Thorn paused, and pointed his staff. They were passing to the north of the great fortress; it was just visible from here, high on its ridge to the south.

‘We will never take the Rock with the force we have,’ Thorn said. ‘I might act to destroy it, or I might not. This is not my fight. But we are allies, and I will help
you.’

‘By leading us away from that which we wish to reclaim?’ snapped the daemon.

‘By unleashing the Wild against a worthy goal. An
attainable
goal. We will strike a blow that will rock the kingdoms of man, and that will send a signal throughout the Wild. Many,
many more will come to us. Is this not so?’

Thurkan nodded slow agreement. ‘If we burn Albinkirk, many will know it and many will come.’

‘And then,’ said Thorn, ‘we will have the force and the time to act against the Rock, while the men worry over smoking ruins.’

‘And you will be many times more powerful than you are now,’ Thurkan said suspiciously.

‘When you and yours can again drink from the spring of the Rock, and mate in the tunnels beneath the Rock, you will thank me,’ Thorn said.

Together, they began to walk east.

Harmodius Magis

Prynwrithe – Ser Mark Wishart

T
wo hundred leagues and more south of the Cohocton, well west of Harndon, the Priory of Pynwrithe was a beautiful castle rising from a spur of
solid rock, a hundred years old, with high battlements, four slim towers with arched windows, topped in copper-gilt roofs, and a high arched gate that made some visitors exclaim that the whole must
have been built by the Faery.

Ser Mark Wishart, the Prior, knew better. It had been built by a rich thug, who had given it to the church to save his soul.

It was a very comfortable place to live. A dream for a soldier who had lived most of his life having to sleep on the cold hard ground. The Prior was standing in his shirt, in front of a roaring
fire, with a piece of bark in his hand – a small piece of birch bark, which had just turned almost perfectly black. He turned it over and over in his hands, and winced at the pain in his
shoulder. The she-bear had hurt him badly.

It was a chilly morning, and from the glazed glass window, he could see that there had been a frost – but a mild one. Spring was in the air. Flowers, crops, new life.

He sighed.

Dean – his new servant boy – appeared with a cup of small beer and his clean mantle. ‘My lord?’ he said, an evocative question, for two words.

The boy was far too intelligent to spend his life pouring hippocras for old men.

‘Hose, braes, double, and a cote, lad,’ the Prior said. ‘Summon the marshal and my squire.’

Thomas Clapton, the Marshal of the Order of Saint Thomas of Acon, was in his solar before the Prior had his hose laced to his doublet – something he could not get used to allowing a
servant to do.

‘My lord,’ the marshal said, formally.

‘What’s our fighting strength, right now?’ the Prior asked.

‘In the priory?’ the marshal asked. ‘I can find you sixteen knights fit to ride this morning. In the Demesne? Perhaps fifty, if I give you the old men and boys.’

The Prior lifted the birchbark and his marshal went pale.

‘And if we make knights of all our squires who are ready?’ Ser Mark asked.

The marshal nodded. ‘Then perhaps seventy.’ He rubbed his beard.

‘Do it,’ said Ser Mark. ‘This isn’t some minor incursion. She would never call us unless it was war.’

Harndon Palace – Harmodious

Harmodius cursed his age and peered into the silver mirror, looking for any redeeming features and finding none. His bushy black and white eyebrows did not recommend him as a
lover and nor did his head; he was bald on top with shoulder length white hair, the ruined skin of age and slightly stooped shoulders.

He shook his head, more at the foolishness of desiring the Queen than at his reflection. He admitted to himself that he was happy enough with his appearance, and with its reality.

‘Hah!’ he said to the mirror.

Miltiades rubbed against him, and Harmodius looked down at the old cat.

‘The ancients tell us that memory is to reality as a seal in wax is to the seal itself,’ he said.

The cat looked up at him with aged disinterest.

‘Well?’ he asked Miltiades. ‘So is my memory of the image of myself in the mirror a new level of removal? It’s the image of an image of reality?’ He chuckled,
pleased with the conceit, and another came to him.

‘What if you could perform a spell that altered what we saw between the eye and the brain?’ he asked the cat. ‘How would the brain perceive it? Would it be reality, or an
image, or an image of an image?’

He glanced back at the mirror. Pursed his lips again and began to climb the stairs. The cat followed him, his heavy, four-foot gait an accusation and a complaint about overweight infirmity.

‘Fine,’ Harmodius said, and turned to scoop Miltiades up, putting a hand in the middle of his back at the pain. ‘Perhaps I could exercise more,’ he said aloud. ‘I
was a passable swordsman in my youth.’

The cat’s grey whiskers twitched a reproach.

‘Yes, my youth was quite some time ago,’ he said.

Swords, for example, had changed shape since then. And weight.

He sighed.

At the top of the stairs he unlocked the door to his sanctum and reset the light wards he’d left on the place. There was very little to guard here, or rather, his books and many artefacts
were supremely valuable, but it was the king that guarded them, not the lock and the wards. If he ever lost the king’s confidence—

It didn’t bear thinking about.

Wanting Desiderata must be the common denominator of the entire court, he thought and laughed, mostly at himself, before going to the north wall where shelves of Archaic scrolls, many of them
gleaned from daring raids into the necropoli of the distant southlands, waited for him like pigeons in a cote.
I used to be a very daring man.

He deposited Miltiades on the ground and the cat walked heavily to the centre of the room and sat in the sun.

He began to read on the origins of human memory. He picked up a day-old glass of water and drank from it, tasting some of yesterday’s flames and a little chalk, and said ‘Hmm,’
a dozen times as he read.

‘Hmmm,’ he said again, and carefully re-rolled the scroll before sliding it back into the bone tube that protected it. The scroll itself was priceless – one of perhaps three
surviving scrolls of the Archaic Aristotle, and he always meant to have it copied but never did. He was tempted, sometimes, to order the destruction of the other two, both held in the king’s
library.

He sighed at his own infantile pride.

The cat stretched out in the sun and went to sleep.

The other two cats appeared. He didn’t know where they had been – and suddenly wasn’t sure he could remember when he’d adopted them, or where they had sprung from at
all.

But he had found the passage that he remembered, about an organ in the tissue of the brain that transmitted the images from the eye for the mind.

‘Hmm,’ he said to himself with a smile, and reached down to pat the old cat who bit his hand savagely.

He jerked his bloody hand back and cursed.

Miltiades got up, walked a few steps and settled again. Glared at him.

‘I need a corpse. Perhaps a dozen of them,’ he said, flexing his fingers and imagining the dissection. His master had been quite enamored of dissection . . . and it had not ended
well.

It had led him to make a stand with the Wild at the Field of Chevin. The old memory hurt, and Harmodius had an odd thought – he thought
when did I last think about the fight at
Chevin?

It poured into his mind like an avalanche, and he staggered and sat under the impact of the memories – the strange array of the enemy, with Jacks on the flanks and all their monstrous
creatures in the centre, so that the kingdom’s knighthood was raked with arrows as they rode forward through the waves of terror to face the creatures of the Wild.

His hands shook.

And his master had stood with them. And thrown carefully considered workings designed to baffle and deceive, that had led the king’s archers to loose their shafts into their own knights,
and to fight each other—

And so I attacked him
. Harmodius didn’t treasure the memory, or that of the king begging him to do
something.
The suspicion of the barons, each assuming he would betray them
and join the Wild as well.

His master’s eyes when they locked wills.

He cast, and I cast.
Harmodius shook his head.
Why did he join our enemy? Why? Why? Why? What did he learn when he began to dissect the old corpses?

Why have I not thought on this before?

Shrugged. ‘My hubris differs from his hubris,’ he said to his cats. ‘But I pray to God that he may yet see the light.’ At least enough to reduce him to a small mound of
ash, he continued in his head. A really powerful light. Like a lightning bolt.

Some things were best not said aloud, and naming could most definitely call. He had triumphed over his master, but no corpse had ever been found, and Harmodius knew in his bones that his mentor
was still out there. Still part of the Wild.

Enough of this,
he thought, and reached for another scroll on memory. He scanned it rapidly, took a heavy tome of grammerie down from a high shelf, referred to it, and then began to write
quickly.

He paused and tapped his fingers rapidly on an old beaker while trying to think who could provide him with fresh corpses for his work. No one in the capital. The town was too small, the court
too full of intrigue and gossip.

‘Who would feed you if I took a trip?’ he asked. Because, already, his pulse was racing. He hadn’t left his tower in – he couldn’t remember when he’d last
left Harndon.

‘Gracious Divinity, have I been here since the battle?’ he asked Miltiades.

The cat glared at him.

The Magus narrowed his eyes suddenly. He couldn’t remember this cat as a kitten, or where the cat had come from. There was something out of step in his memories.

Christ
, he thought, and sat in a chair. He could remember picking the kitten out of the dung heap by the stables, intending to dissect it. But he hadn’t.

How had he lost that memory?

Was it even a true memory?

A spear of pure fear lunged through his soul. The beaker crashed to the floor, and all the cats jumped.

I have been ensorcelled.

He drew power quickly, in a whispered prayer, and performed a small and subtle working with it. Indeed, it was so subtle it scarcely required power.