by P D Ceanneir
‘Melthonansa?’ frowned Telmar, ‘that was lost over five thousand years ago!’
As he spoke, Harlequin used the same strobe light on Telmar. ‘Stop that!’ said the baron.
‘Ah, I see. Dream Transference Projection, very rare, also extremely suspect, the Pyromancer is awakening it seems,’ said Harlequin
‘What?’ Telmar had no idea what the ball of light was saying.
‘You must wake, Master,’ Harlequin’s voice was coming from far off. The ruins of the city darkened and drifted away, along with the image of the Door.
‘Wake, Master, wake and unleash the power.’
Cold water hit his face and chest, and his eyes snapped open.
2
Scar Face leered down at him as he placed the water bucket on the floor.
‘He’s awake now, boss,’ he said and stepped away for Goatee to take his place. Telmar was in a small candlelit room tied to a wooden chair by tight leather straps. Someone had slashed open his left wrist so the bloodletting would weaken him to such an extent that he would not be able to use the Rawn Arts to free his bonds.
He looked down and saw his own blood filling up a white porcelain bowl. He felt a wave of nausea hit him and had to look away. Anxiety bloomed in his chest.
Goatee took another chair from the corner of the room, turning it and sitting down so that his arms rested on the wooden back. He looked into Telmar’s drooping eyes.
‘Young Baron Telmar, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Master Hendrix and the handsome chap behind me is Mister Sasha,’ he said. Scar Face grunted at the mention of his name.
‘What do you want from me?’ asked Telmar with a slight quiver of his lip. He was starting to feel cold and his head ached where Sasha had struck him.
‘All I want is a signature, that’s all, and we will let you go free,’ said Hendrix who watched Telmar with hooded eyes with no hint of emotion in them.
‘A signature, for what?’ asked Telmar.
Sasha pulled out a rolled scroll from a brown rucksack and handed it to Hendrix who untied the red securing ribbon and unrolled it so Telmar could read it. A professional hand neatly scribed the parchment outlining a formal Lawyers Deed of Land Acquisition. The acquisition in this case clearly laid out in the first paragraph Telmar’s ancestral lands of Tressel.
Even in his fatigued state Telmar frowned at the parchment. Then he laughed, which made the two men frown in return.
‘So the coward, Cormack, or his father, uses you two idiots to do their dirty work!’ he said, feeling braver than he actually was. However, he knew that his predicament was becoming dire; these two men looked as if they could not take a joke.
Hendrix sighed, turned towards his accomplice and nodded, then moved the chair out of the way and stood up against the far wall with his arms folded. Sasha stomped forward and rammed a fist into Telmar’s gut. The boy’s breath escaped from his mouth in a rush.
While drawing a harsh lungful of air back into his bruised chest, Sasha punched the left side of his face and Telmar’s head snapped back from the blow.
From the wall Hendrix said, ‘will you sign the document?’
Telmar moved his jaw from side to side; thankfully it was still hinged. ‘And give up my family land to a greedy power hungry bastard like him. I’d rather kiss this ugly ape.’ He said indicating Sasha towering over him. The stocky thug actually laughed.
Hendrix pushed himself from the wall and said in a low menacing voice, ‘I don’t think you realise who you are actually dealing with, boy! There are powers far greater than your pathetic little life and they call the shots.’ He unravelled the scroll again, took the chair he had been sitting on, using a small ink pot and quill as a paperweight to keep the scroll flat on the seat, he pushed the chair until it sat directly in front of Telmar.
‘Now sign!’ he said forcefully.
Telmar scowled at Hendrix. The anger in him mixed with the fear of his situation. He felt extremely stubborn and smiled, while at the same time rolled his tongue over his cut lip and spat blood onto the parchment. The red glob splashed over the surface to obscure the signature box.
‘Oops, silly me,’ said Telmar.
Sasha swung a roundhouse blow to his right side. Telmar saw stars for a few seconds and the pain in his head thumped along with the frantic gallop of his heart.
Hendrix picked up the parchment by the top corner; there was a look of disgust on his face as the red spittle dripped off it. He turned to Sasha, ‘I’m going to clean this up. Make sure the fingers of his right hand still works to hold the quill.’
‘Right, boss.’
Hendrix gave Telmar a baleful glare before leaving. He heard him stomp down a long corridor before silence descended again. Sasha took off his jerkin and rolled up his sleeves.
‘You and Master Hendrix may have the ability to heal quickly, but we mortals like to show off our scars,’ he said and Telmar noticed old scarring and thick growths of healed skin on his knuckles.
Telmar felt fresh fear, renewed pain and anger mix into a warm ball in his belly. He continued to stare at the thug with hate in his eyes.
Sasha noticed, ‘You want to kill me don’t you?’
‘I will.’
There was a strange tension in the air. Sasha looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘You won’t have the chance,’ he said without much conviction, ‘you’ll be dead before morning.’
Telmar forced his next words through gritted teeth as he felt a burst of renewed energy push up to his thumping head. ‘You will not see morning, dunderhead.’
Sasha laughed; ‘I have to admire your courage, but…’ he stopped talking, frowned and stepped back from the boy. Telmar’s face looked distorted to him as a large ball of heat floated in front of his face. It ballooned and shimmered as it bobbed several feet from the floor. Telmar was frowning in anger and concentration. He was shaking so much that the chair was in danger of collapsing.
Sasha immediately looked at the bucket where the boy’s blood was still dripping from his slit wrist. Surely, he was too weak to produce any of the four elements.
‘What the..?’ were the last words the scarred thug ever spoke as the ball of heat shot forward and enveloped him in a blazing cocoon. It lifted him off his feet and slammed him against the door. Before the door collapsed under his weight, his body instantly shrivelled as all moisture evaporated within, and around, his body. The charred flesh and bones of his body burst into a puff of black ash. The ball of heat took on the glow of brilliant white flame. It increased exponentially, ripped the walls of the tiny room and its roof to tatters as it burst through to the other side. It moved so fast that the sonic boom took two seconds to catch up with it. When the thunderous crash of noise finally resounded through the adjacent buildings, there issued a mighty explosion that destroyed the roof of the building Telmar was held captive in. Roaring flames quickly spread along the shattered skeleton of the structure and raised high into the darkness of the night.
3
Confusion, disorientation and a weakness in his bones marred any further memories of that night. Telmar remembered walking out of the flames and was dimly aware that the burning building was the odd shaped mill where his two captors had found him. He made straight for the stable on the other side of the yard and found my father still unconscious on the floor. The stable roof was aflame and it quickly spread over the hay in the loft. Telmar picked Vanduke up, carried him out to the main street, and safely away from the fire, before running back in to free the two horses still inside.
By the time people came running with buckets of water, flames completely engulfed the mill. The yellow and orange inferno licked high into the sky, towering over thick belching black smoke that wreathed the other buildings around it.
Vanduke woke to find Telmar sitting on the kerbside. His face was battered and bruised and he looked very pale. Tears streamed down his soot-blackened cheeks.
‘Telmar, what happened?’ he asked him.
Telmar looked at
him, yet not focusing on his friend. ‘The city burned, they died trying to protect it, the Door came and the city burned.’
‘What?’
‘Must talk to Harlequin…’ Telmar wobbled from side to side, his eyes half closed.
‘Who’s Harlequin?’ Vanduke frowned.
‘Must…Harlequin…find out…Dark Seed…Pyromancer…’ a very weak Telmar finally succumbed to his fatigue and collapsed to the ground.
My father, bless his heart, was a true friend that day. He used the confusion of the fire and carried Telmar away, unobserved. He made it back to the academy without the Watch Patrols finding them and ministered to his friend’s wounds, even weakening himself by using the Water Element to heal Telmar. Both boys slept throughout the next day, which was the first day of endweek and only used for study. Telmar woke well into the darkness of the next early morning and both boys talked of the events of the previous night.
Vanduke was shocked to learn of the scroll of Land Acquisition and tried to divert Telmar’s anger at the Keveni families attempt on his life.
‘I fear for mother,’ said Telmar.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll sent a message to Count Talien of the Withers to look out for her, but it won’t come to that. I will look into it. Pull some strings. Trust me.’
Telmar was confused. He knew that Vanduke, as De Proteous, was second only in power to the king, but he had never seen him use or speak about his royal authority. Clearly, there was more to his friend than met the eye.
‘If Cormack can make an attempt on my life here, he can do it anywhere,’ Telmar sighed.
‘Not if I have anything to do with it,’ Vanduke said. He slapped his friend on the back and Telmar groaned from the bruising he still had there. ‘You are, after all, the third in line to the Vallkyte throne. Who knows, maybe you will become king before I will. Frankly, you are far too important to assassinate.’
‘Oh that’s very reassuring.’
‘Don’t mention it. Moreover, do not worry, I’ll handle everything.’
Telmar groaned again, but it was not the bruising that bothered him this time, a flash of memory sparked in his head.
Vanduke listened carefully as Telmar described the rest of the night at the hands of his captors and the ball of heat that emanated from his body. My father, in those early days, believed Telmar had fallen into a delirious state from the beating he received. A waking dream, similar in its strange intensity to the frequent Door dreams they always talked about.
‘How do you explain the fire at the mill then?’ Telmar asked him.
Vanduke smiled at him, ‘I think you need your head examining, mate. You are a Rawn Apprentice. It would take the power of a Ri to create the damage you claim to have caused. You did not start the fire, someone else did.’
Telmar nodded slowly and acknowledged his friend’s explanation of the event, but deep down he knew the truth.
When Vanduke asked about Harlequin, Telmar went pale. He deliberately did not want anyone to know about the Powerball until he could better understand its personality through study. Therefore, he waved away his friends questions and put it down to his delirium of last night.
‘So what is a Pyromancer then?’ Vanduke asked.
‘What?’
‘You mentioned it last night. You wanted to speak to this Harlequin person about it!’
Telmar shook his head and looked away from Vanduke so he could not see the lie in his eyes. ‘I…I don’t remember,’ he said.
4
Whatever it was that my father did to “Sort out” Telmar’s problem with the Keveni Family, it worked. In the last few weeks of term he saw little of Cormack, and when he did, the boy was extremely cordial towards him. Telmar spent the rest of the winter season deep in study within the walls of the extensive palace library. It was there, while browsing through the “D” section looking for Dishelms - Concise Runeography, Volume II that he bumped into Master Ness.
‘Ah, young Telmar, how goes study?’ said the Ri looking up from a large book he held in his hands.
‘Very well, Master.’
Lord Ness snapped shut his book, ‘I believe this is the book you are after.’
Telmar took it and saw it was indeed Dishelms book. ‘Yes, thank you, Master.’
‘Now if memory serves, you’re in Master Hamblin’s class for Skrol Level Three, am I right?’
Telmar nodded, wondering where this was going.
‘He tells me that you have “surpassed student expectation” with your Perception Quota, and you received top marks for every test you attempted.’
‘Yes, Master Hamblin is a good teacher.’
‘Poppycock!’ interjected the Ri with a frown. ‘If he was such a good teacher you would not be down here studying up on Dishelms books, which are advanced seventh level material.’
‘Actually, Master, I’d already read all five volumes of Runeography by the time I was eight. I just wanted to brush up on several points of Trans Migratory Meditation,’ he said this innocently as was his nature. Telmar did not know how to boast.
Lord Ness raised an eyebrow and looked impressed. ‘Trans Migratory Meditation can be a little tricky without someone to aid you. As you already know, Telmar, my door is always open to you.’
‘Thank you, Master.’ He bid the Ri farewell and turned to walk back down the aisle of shelves when Ness Ri stopped him as an afterthought.
‘Tell me, have you deciphered the Skrol etchings on the pommel of your sword yet?’
Telmar shook his head, ‘I’m working on it, Master.’
Lord Ness nodded. ‘Interesting craftsmanship,’ he said, ‘I suggest using Dishelms meditation techniques when studying the pommel. It may open a few doors into understanding it better. Good day, Telmar.’
Telmar watched the Ri walk away, surprised at his last statement about “opening doors”. There were times in his young life, since meeting the Ri, when he wondered just how much Lord Ness actually knew about him. This was not an overall concern. In fact, it made him feel safe that someone like Ness Ri could be a trustworthy friend in his future.
Little did he know that in a few years from now, when his Pyromantic Curse became uncontrollable, Ness Ri would let him down considerably, through no fault of his own.
5
Soon, the two months of the summer break was upon them, and he was surprised to discover Count Talien and his Honour Guard had come to the citadel to escort him home. The count said little about the arrangements and put it down to a favour owed to the De Proteous.
At Tuen House his mother, who looked well but had aged somewhat since that last time he had seen her, warmly welcomed her son. The Phage, he believed, was upon her. Namwi was also there to welcome him home. She had been working on the farm for most of that month and was looking forward to seeing him. She had grown into a beautiful young woman; her time at Law College in Dulan-Tiss was making her more confident in her abilities. Certainly, she was not as shy as she used to be.
The first night was a time of celebration at the return of the young lord. Count Talien, a tall thin Rawn Master with a stern face and a friendly manner, agreed to stay for a few drinks at the insistence of Telmar’s mother, but more so to entertain Namwi. Thankfully, Telmar sighed with relief, the count did not stay long and soon departed with his company just after dark. Lady Catlyn and Namwi were eager to continue with the night’s festivities but Telmar feigned tiredness from the long journey and retired early. In truth, he wished to talk to Harlequin. He had not had a chance to hold Basilisk until he drew it out of the armoury on the day of departure from Aln-Tiss, and since then he had left the sword wrapped up in a thick layer of waterproof gauze and rag.
Now he unwrapped the coverings and stared for a long time at the beautiful craftsmanship of the weapon. He lent it up against the wall, and taking up sticks of charcoal and paper, sketched the sword and especially the Glemmarstone orb of the pommel, at every angle with meticulous detail. Once he had finished he put his sketches away and
called to the Orb.
‘Harlequin,’ he said. He knew, from his father’s instructions that the Powerball answered to his voice only, but he was unprepared for how quickly Harlequin answered. No sooner had he finished saying the orb’s name, when it spun inside the cradle of its emerald cup and issued a soft white light. The sword itself leapt off the wall, balanced perfectly on its tip, and then did not move. ‘Yes, Master Telmar.’ The tone of the voice from the glowing orb made Telmar suspicious, it sounded expectant, as if waiting to speak.
‘Tell me about Dream Transference Projection?’ he asked.
‘The hypothesis that an individual can transport ones conscious mind to any plane of existence,’ said the Powerball without missing a beat.
Telmar nodded, ‘the textbook answer. What about Trans Migratory Meditation?’
The answer came quickly again, ‘a theory supplied by the Elder Sevaris the Mage that conscious thought is separate from the subconscious. In addition, an ethereal plane of thought exists between worlds. He went on to articulate this plane is where the Old Gods came from, because they are linked with “Personified Thought”...’
While the Powerball spoke, Telmar held up a hand for him to stop. When Harlequin continued talking, he slashed a hand over his throat to indicate to the orb to cease, but it would not stop talking.
‘Stop’ said Telmar and the Powerball did so. ‘Tell me, Harlequin, are you blind?’
There was a second of uncertainty, which made Telmar smile. ‘Yes,’ said Harlequin, then with a little sarcasm. ‘I have no eyes.’
‘How do you know what is around you?’
‘I have the ability to detect my surroundings by emitting low energy wave thematic plasma and acoustic sensory pulses too low for humans to hear.’
Smiling again, Telmar nodded and inwardly congratulated the Elder Styx and his father for creating something as complex and wonderful as Harlequin. However, for all his intelligence, Harlequin had flaws.
‘Are you not curious as to why I’m asking these questions?’
The white orb continued to spin in its cup. ‘You ask, I answer.’
