Melanthrix the Mage

by Robert Reginald

  Then he shook himself free, moved to center floor, drew up his robes with whatever dignity he yet retained, and abruptly swept his hand around his head in a grand cir­cular gesture.

  The princes and nobles quickly settled down to watch, as Melanthrix made a second sweep of his arm over his head. The hundreds of candles illuminating the hall be­gan going out in the exact sequence of the movement of his right hand, as if a curtain was being drawn across the inside of the room, until the darkness was complete.

  Everyone gasped as a cold green flame sprouted from the sorcerer’s head, forming a sort of halo that bathed the multitude in a flickering, almost sickly, emerald hue. From his right index fin­ger a bright red lance of light stabbed into the night, tracing the outline of a huge ruby triangle hanging high over center floor. Within that bound­ary vague images began to swirl and form, coalescing sud­denly into a panoply of rolling green hills. Over them came running the images of three young women, their faces turned away from the audience, being hounded like wild foxes by a pack of dogs accompanied by the hunt of armed men on horseback.

  Doctor Melanthrix then began speaking in a flat, emotionless monotone:

  “Three demoiselles do I see

  Up and down the hills they flee

  Chased around the wedding tree—

  Kings and knaves and Forellës three.”

  “What does he mean?” someone asked.

  The crowds suddenly gasped as they heard the flut­ter of wings in the air, although they could see nothing un­til three great black birds emerged from the triangle and flew over their heads, sending gusts of wind everywhere.

  “Three Forellës do I see

  Caw, caw, cawing in a tree

  All fly up, but none go free

  Who can ’scape his destiny?”

  Something dark and formless reached out from the triangle and grabbed the birds one by one, hauling them squawking back into the depths from whence they had come. Then the triangle cleared, so that it appeared as if one were looking at the southern approach of the Great Kings’ Road to the city of Paltyrrha, flanked on either side by the large stone sculptures of the ancient Tighrishi kings.

  “Three Tighrishi do I see

  One is cloaked in infamy

  One is crowned in great glory

  One a king no more shall be.”

  But an earthquake seemed to strike the triangle, shaking the statues to the ground with an audible roar, top­pling them one against another and shattering each and ev­ery one. The crowd cried out in collective dismay. A lone sculpture remained intact, and as it revolved on its axis, they suddenly saw displayed the image of Barnim King of Pommerelia.

  “Three Walküri do I see

  One is what he seems to be

  Two shall find eternity

  One shall stop the anarchy.”

  Barnim’s mouth gaped wide, issuing a miniature an­gel that quickly grew in size. The heavenly messenger pulled from his robes a board for playing les échecs, and set upon it the stylized images of the Patriarch of Kórynthia and the Archquisitor of Pommerelia facing each other, one dressed in black and the other in white. Separating them was the small image of a monk clothed in dark green robes, a man with two faces who gazed in opposite directions si­multaneously.

  “Three archbishops do I see

  Two struck down in agony

  One shall perish peacefully

  Checkmated eternally.”

  Then the triangle vanished, and the bright green flame rose straight up from Melanthrix’s head to the rafters high above, illuminating everyone in the room, and his voice rose correspondingly to a high, excited pitch.

  “’Ware the Knave who cannot see

  ’Ware the Queen who would be free

  ’Ware the King, uncrown’d is he

  ’Ware the Demoiselles, all three!

  ’Ware the Dark-Haired Man to be

  ’Ware the Dead Man’s prophecy.”

  The magical torch was abruptly extinguished, leav­ing the crowd blinded by the dark, and when the candles were finally relit, Melanthrix was gone, nor could any trace be found of the man until the following day.

  Prince Arkády then dismissed the banquet, and all went off to their rooms, buzzing and whispering and seething over the visions that they had experienced so un­comfortably that night; nor could any of them, not a one, find the rest that they sought, but tossed and heaved and shook in their beds like a yacht buffeted by the rolling waves of some great storm, never to find safe anchorage in this world, never to sail home again unscathed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “WHY HAVE YOU COME?”

  Before the rosy-fingered Dawn could welcome the arrival of her brother, the Sun, Hereditary Prince Arkadios transited through the viridaurum mirror mounted in the Hall of a Hundred Kings to the chambers of the Symboulion Magôn Christianôn, which is to say, the Covenant of Christian Mages, being the very first member of that august association to arrive for the meeting that he himself had just called.

  This was an organization which had been founded during the Millennium Year celebratio of the birth and as­cension of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus of Nazareth, sur­named the Christ. For it had happened, mirabile dictu, that the Byzantine Julian Emperor of the time, Antiochos vii, had fortuitously encountered the Holy Roman Cæsar, Mar­cus Ætherius i, in the Basilica of the Risen God in Hi­erosolyma on midsummer’s day, and despite the many centuries of antagonism resident between the two great powers, had forthrightly strode up to his counterpart and embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks; and turning widdershins, had proclaimed then unto the multitudes, “This is my brother, in whom I am well pleased.” And, wonder of wonderments (for God doth work His magic in unfathomable ways), the Emperor of Rome then reciprocated, in the first overt display of good will between the emperors that the world had witnessed in some four hundred years.

  Thereafter, these two great men had erected a coun­cil of protection, for their own safety and for that of their citizens, they said, consisting of an equal number of mages deriving from both spheres of influence, and presided over by a neutral individual, whose chore it was to arbitrate between the disputes that might cause either side to unleash the dogs of war, as had happened so often in the past. Thus, in the intervening years only one such conflict had broken out, some four decades earlier, but it had not es­caped the confines of the Carpates Spinæ Mountains, thanks be given unto the Almighty, and also to those men and women who had worked so hard to prevent this war and others like it from spreading any further.

  One of those individuals, Hereditary Prince Arkády, now collapsed wearily into a seat near the end of the great oaken roundtable, and considered for a moment suckling upon one of the kokaphyllon leaves he kept wrapt in a preservation skin within his purse, but finally thought better of the idea. He had another meeting to attend later in the morning, for which he would yet require both his wits and his wisdom to remain active; and his little restorative, while effective for as long as half a summer morn on occasion, tended to leave one with the same feeling that resulted from the overindulgence in les esprits de la liqueur. Thus it was that he just allowed himself to doze, counting on the others to rouse him whenever they chose to arrive.

  As he drifted in and out of sleep, a dozen men and women silently filed into the room and seated themselves ’round the table. He abruptly stirred himself awake, prompted by an ache in the small of his back, and then re­alized that something was very wrong here, for he recog­nized none of the faces staring back at him, and the thir­teenth seat of arbitration situate at the head of the table had been occupied by an elderly woman with green-gold eyes peering out from underneath her peasant’s hood.

  “Who are you?” he asked, sitting up straight. “What are you do­ing here?”

  “You engaged the covenant, good sir, as the law doth provide in the canons laid down by Muravyóv and Bathyány,” the lady replied, her voice a mere whisper of sound, “and so we have responded, each to our own, emerging from th
at place where we first found rest, as you yourself may have occasion to judge, o King-To-Be.”

  As he examined more closely the individuals seated around the great slab of polished ochre wood, it suddenly occurred to him that, despite their evident vitality, none of the mages facing him might actually dwell within the Land of Living Men.

  “The just man requires neither judge nor jury to justify his actions,” the prince finally replied. “So, why have you come?”

  “Why?” she said in her soft voice, the merest shadow of an exhalation. “You ask why? The answer to that question would require a dissertation, princeling, a veritable treatise, an entire volume of words and ideas and notions, and still you would not understand.

  “There is no covenant where the law reigns not supreme, over the kings and nobles of the land, over the servants of the state and those whom the state doth serve. We espy a Charybdis lurking within the body politic, a grand discontinuity in the æther which, if left unto its own devices, shall enswallow intact the lands of Nova Europa and all the realms sheltering therein. We feel the crisis come upon us. The men and women and entities inhabiting this vale shall soon be asked and soon be required to voice their ‘yeas’ and ‘nays.’ No one shall be exempt.

  “And so we return to this place to offer our assis­tance for the struggle soon to come, knowing that the issue will be closely fought, that the stakes of the game inflate with each day and every hour that passes. A mere scatter­ing of men and women stand now before the gate, guarding the exit and entrance into this place. Swing the aperture one way, and the world turns, perhaps just a nudge, to­wards God’s grace; swivel the door elsewise, however, and thou venturest down that broad and easy way into strife, death, and destruction, where the darkness eats away the hearts of the decent folk who form the very center of our existence.”

  “But how can one man alter destiny’s dictatorship?” Arkády asked.

  “Such answers are beyond our ability to provide,” came the reply.

  “Then what possible help can you be?” he said. “I didn’t ask for this task, and I surely didn’t request your assistance.”

  “Oh, but you will!” the old woman said, flashing a crooked smile. “You will, dear Arkásha...!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “WHAT PROOF DO YOU HAVE?”

  “...Arkásha! Arkásha!”

  The prince heard the words as from a great distance, and struggled with some difficulty to bring himself back up to the world.

  “Arkásha, awake!”

  He found himself looking into the familiar, plump face of a woman in her mid-sixties. Her neatly dressed white hair was partially enshrouded with a black-and-gold striped shawl stitched with a tughra similar to that etched on his ornate buckle of silver. Hanging from a gold chain around her neck was a small globule of smoky green glass, within whose confines one could espy, if one looked very closely, a slow, swirling movement of smoke or perhaps vapor.

  “Auntie!” he said with some evident relief. “Why, why I just had the strangest dream.”

  “Oh really?” she said. “Well, dearie, Homêros says that dreams are just the visions dispatched to us from God. Of course, I experience such revelations all the time, but nobody pays any attention to my visions, save for my little lovies. The dear sweetums, they always follow my lead.”

  Arkády quickly glanced at the ten council members (Mordekaí was missing, he noted) who had now taken their assigned seats at the table, and nodded his head when he recognized them all. Then he recovered himself.

  “What did you say?” the prince asked, suddenly re­alizing that he had missed part of the conversation.

  Without waiting for her reply he turned to the entire council and said: “My father was almost killed tonight, shot with a crossbow bolt to his chest while attending a banquet in Paltyrrha.”

  Some of the attendees gasped in surprise, but others seemed unaffected by the news. Old Laössoös, slumped in the senior position at the other end of the table, just snored.

  “My people blame the Walküri, of course. So my question, Count Zhertán”—he turned his eyes directly to the tall, bald septuagenarian sitting halfway down from him—“is simply this: did King Barnim or his government order this ill-advised assassination attempt?”

  “Just one moment, sir,” exclaimed Kulmann Graf von Einschlag, a burly, light-complected man in his thirties who represented Lothar King of Franconia.

  He sat straight across from Arkády, constantly twirling his long, curled, blond mustachios.

  “What proof do you have?” he asked. “What have you shown us? Why, nothing! Nothing at all! To accuse a Teutonic monarch of such crimes without any presentation of evidence whatsoever is certainly unacceptable to me, and also, I suspect, to the other august members of this body.”

  Zhertán, who represented the kingdom of Pom­merelia, held up his right hand.

  “It’s quite all right, Kulmann,” he said. “Prince Arkády has every reason to pose the question, and I invite all of you to test the truth of my reply. This psairodak­tylios encircling my finger is my bond.

  “King Barnim did not order an attack and neither did I, and I’m in a position to say that no one else in our government had anything to do with it, at least in an offi­cial capacity.”

  “I didn’t really think your people were involved, but I had to ask,” the prince said.

  “But,” Zhertán added, “I would certainly like to know the details, because whoever’s responsible is obvi­ously intent on driving us all towards war.”

  Arkády spent a few moments giving them an ac­count of the attack.

  “This entire business has a most curious feel about it,” said Philodème Duc d’Albérique, the goateed younger brother of Tancrède ii King of Neustria.

  “Did you examine the weapon yourself, Arkády?” he asked.

  “I did,” the prince said. “It’s an ordinary cross­bow and quarrel. There’s no indication of any magical ap­paratus involved, nor any curse, hex, jinx, or other device or taint that might have been applied.”

  “But who could have loosed it?” Zhertán said.

  “Well, that’s just the problem,” Arkády said. “The weapon was mounted on one of the great wooden cross­beams overlooking the hall.”

  “But the ceiling must be, what, fifteen or twenty feet high, at the least?” Metropolitan Euphronios said. He stood in lieu of Autokratôr Dêmêtrios iii in Julianople.

  “At least,” Arkády said. “I don’t have an an­swer, Ephron. One of my soldiers spotted the thing after we’d removed the guests. He reported that the bow was tied to the rafter. There were no obvious footprints or handmarks left on the beam, just minor disturbances in the dust. We also don’t know how the thing was aimed or fired. We thoroughly examined each of the guests as they departed, and none could be connected to the incident.”

  Philodème clucked his tongue. “I wonder, my friends, about the intent here. Surely the attacker knew that the king’s physician would be standing by, that medical assistance would be available al­most instantly. If they had really wanted to kill him, why not soak the bolt with poison? I think we’re being played with.”

  “Why, indeed?” said Mösza, the soi-disant Countess of Rábassy, who represented Harûn Emir of Umm az-Za­kkár.

  Then she noticed Arkády’s expression.

  “There’s more, isn’t there, nephew?” she said.

  “Yes, auntie,” the prince said. “This is the sixth such attack against King Kyprianos during the last year, each one worse than the last. The first occurred in Faülniß: a cinch broke and the king slipped from his horse, severely bruising his thigh. He was very lucky the leg didn’t break. We originally thought this an accident, but later found that the strap had been partially severed.

  “This was followed by a series of similar incidents, including the collapse of a wall into the street just before the king arrived at a dedication ceremony in Daphnéa, the loosening of a brick in a stairway used only by the royal family, t
he toppling of a transit mirror just before the king was scheduled to use it, and so forth.”

  “I’ve heard nothing of these events,” Zhertán said.

  The prince sighed. “We’ve been able to keep them fairly quiet thus far, although this latest incident cannot be hidden. There’s an­other problem, too. The king is convinced that the person responsible for these assaults is the Dark-Haired Man.”

  “What?” said Jerzy Count Waledynski of Poló­nia.

  “Absurd,” said Kulmann. “The Dark-Haired Man is a myth.”

  “Perhaps so,” Arkády said, “but that’s what he believes, and each subsequent attack has just strengthened his conviction. He’s also come to identify the Dark-Haired Man with King Barnim, for no reason that anyone can dis­cern. I and several others in the court have tried to move his mind, but nothing that we’ve said thus far seems to have had any effect. In the past few months, he has begun active preparations for a military campaign in the west. I now think that war is likely.”

  “If true, this is a misfortune of the highest order,” said Zhertán. “Men have forgotten the devastation of the last conflict between Pommerelia and Kórynthia, al­though I recall it only too well, and how long it took for the Teutonmark to recover from the aftereffects. We sim­ply cannot allow another such test.”

  “No one here would disagree with you, I think,” said Arkády. “But the question remains: how do we stop what’s already begun? I have no answers to offer at this wretched time of the night, alas.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT THE DARK-HAIRED MAN?”

  Then he abruptly changed the subject. “What do we really know about the Dark-Haired Man?”

  Ancient Laössoös, representing the Lakedaimônian Laconians, finally stirred himself at the other end of the table, slowly raising his eyes.

  “They say,” he said, “that Death snatches even the coward as he flees his every yesterday. They say...that man is but a breath and but a shadow, a phantom in time who quickly fades away. They say...that Kyprianos will cross the Carpathian Spine to keep his guilt at bay. They say...that He waits within us all to capture our souls when we look the other way.”