Arcanum

by Simon Morden

  “Well …” said Gerhard, and momentarily couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Well. In that case…”

  Everyone was looking at him. Of course they were. He was the Prince of Carinthia in his battle armour. But it seemed he didn’t command the total loyalty of all his subjects. Was this a deliberate snub? Why now? A thousand-year mutually beneficial alliance couldn’t be unravelling because of a few hundred barbarian horsemen, could it?

  What did this mean?

  He saw the confusion on his face spread to the rest of the hall, and he got a grip on himself. He was man enough to leave his wife in gasping, sweat-sheened exhaustion; he was man enough to call the Order to heel.

  “Perhaps it’s raining,” he said. “Or perhaps it’s too cold for them. Or perhaps it’s too early, and the messenger found them all in bed. True Carinthians don’t care about the weather, or the hour. We’re always ready for a fight.” He laughed. “Well then, when we turn up at their tower ready for the battle that they’re apparently unwilling to meet, perhaps we can shame them into joining us. Saddle the horses, form the men into files. I’m ready, and I’ll wait for no one.”

  He lifted his helmet up and over his head. He held it there for a moment before he pressed it down. The padding inside gripped his skull, and Trommler’s expression turned to one of pride.

  Gerhard gripped the arms of the throne and levered himself upright. “Carinthia rides,” he growled, a good deal more viciously than he had meant to. “Carinthia rides!”

  The room cleared, every man hurrying to do his allotted job. Even Felix and the Italian: had he seen a flash of fear in the boy’s eyes just now? Good. His heir needed to realise there was more to being a prince than being a good administrator.

  He walked to the side of the dais and down the steps, to the soft whisper of chain against plate. The day outside beckoned him, and he hesitated again. Why hadn’t they come? They’d come yesterday, unbidden.

  Or had they? A figure in a white robe, face veiled, had walked in, taken no part in the audience, then left again. It could have been anybody.

  There was only one way to find out, and that was to ask them himself.

  He marched outside, and was handed the reins of his horse. Everything in the courtyard was now orderly, where moments before it had been in chaos. The castle guards were arranged in a neat column. The other riders were already mounted, horses clattering their shoes on the stones, raising sparks and rattling their tack.

  Gerhard bent his knee and a servant quickly cupped his hands under it, pulling upwards and heaving the prince high enough for him to swing his other leg over. He settled himself in the saddle, and allowed his feet to be fitted into the stirrups.

  “So, signore” – Gerhard found himself next to his son’s tutor – “does your blood run hot at this sight? Are your sinews stiffened? Is your ardour stroked? Do you yearn for the ring of steel and the shock of impact in your arm?”

  Allegretti, with whatever Italianate armour he possessed stowed on one of the wagons, looked as though he was out for a leisurely ride. His green mazzocchio was tilted back on his head at a rakish angle, and his expression of gentle bemusement looked singularly out of place amid the Germanic seriousness of his fellows.

  “My prince, forgive me. My homeland is tormented by war, so I do not delight in these preparations.” Yet he still looked puzzled.

  “Then what?”

  “Do you not need more men?”

  Gerhard’s jaw jutted out. They hardly needed what they had: the men-at-arms and earls on horseback were only required to wheel the hexmasters into position. If he had to draw his sword in anger, he’d be surprised. He snorted at the sword-master.

  “We’ve more than sufficient to deal with a handful of barbarians. The fewer the men, the greater the honour.” He wheeled his horse around. “Have I entrusted my son to a coward?”

  “No, my prince: to a cautious man.”

  “Often the same in my book,” Gerhard sneered. He raised his voice: “Carinthia rides.”

  He nudged his heels into the flank of his horse, and it trotted towards the open gate. He was first through, and everyone followed in order, the cavalry, the infantry, and the spare horses, down the stone-edged road towards the outer wall. Of course they followed; he didn’t need to look back and check.

  Where were the hexmasters? Where were his hexmasters?

  At the bottom of the hill, the wagons joined the back of the cavalcade, each one tended by a man with a long steering pole that he would occasionally slip under a wheel to keep the whole thing on course.

  The column turned to mimic the flow of the river, clopping and marching down the quay, with merchants and stevedores stepping quickly out of their way. Children waved, woman curtsied, men bowed. He thought briefly about acknowledging their acts of obeisance with some small gesture of his own, but he would be riding past half of Juvavum and whatever he did would become rapidly tiresome.

  So he stared straight ahead and concentrated on looking vengeful.

  He approached the main bridge, and it cleared spontaneously: crowds gathered on both sides, either because they could or because they wanted to cross. Gerhard wasn’t sure.

  Damn them to Hel. There was no sign of a coterie of white-robed figures at the far end of the bridge. It would have to look planned; there could be no possible intimation that the Prince of Carinthia had to go begging to the sorcerers to protect him.

  He was on the far side of the bridge now, and clearly the townsfolk were expecting him to head north, because they formed an arc across the road to the novices’ house, the rooftops of which were just visible above the trees.

  Just as he thought he was going to have to drive his horse into the people and force them to part, they parted by themselves. No, not quite: a single hooded hexmaster walked between the two straining rows of bodies to stand before him.

  “My lord,” she said.

  Gerhard’s heart hammered hard in his chest. How many masters were women? He didn’t know of a single one, yet this gave him an opportunity to save face.

  “Are you alone?”

  The hood turned, left, right. “So it seems.”

  Gerhard raised his hand to halt the column, and the order was shouted in repetition behind him.

  “So, hexmaster. Do you fly, or will you ride?”

  “Give me a horse, and I’ll ride for now.” She stepped forward and lowered her voice, quiet enough that the prince had to lean from his saddle to hear her. “I have to speak with you. Alone.”

  He looked around and saw that one of the spare horses was being brought up. It was already saddled, but it wasn’t suitable for a lady.

  “Can you …” he started, then coughed, “…cope?”

  The hood turned to look at the horse. “My lord will find I’ll cope more than adequately.”

  “Good.”

  The squire steadied the horse’s head, and the hexmaster – hexmistress? – raised her foot into the stirrup.

  Her legs weren’t that long, thought Gerhard, distracted. She’ll need the straps shortening.

  As her hands fastened around the pommel, her sleeves fell away. Both arms were covered with tattoos, dark and menacing. Then she swung herself up, and settled quite naturally on the horse’s back, sitting straight and holding the reins loosely.

  The prince tried to rub his chin with his mailed fist, but at first contact of metal on skin, he desisted.

  “Where did you learn to ride, hexmaster?” He asked because tradition had it that all sorcerers rode like a sack of shit, assuming they didn’t scare their horses half to death in the first place.

  “Byzantium,” she said, as if it answered everything. “My stirrups…”

  The squire who’d brought the horse forward quickly adjusted them, then returned to his place.

  “I’m ready, my lord.”

  “Damned if I am,” he muttered, but he kicked his mount into motion and deliberately let a gap grow between the two of them and the pair behind
him, Felix and the Italian. The hexmaster matched his pace, drawing up on his right quarter.

  “My lord?”

  “This is not private,” said Gerhard, continuing to look ahead. “Not yet.” The street was still lined with people, spilling out from the new town and leaning out of windows to see them pass.

  The houses finished, and the farms began.

  “And now, my lord?”

  He turned to her. She’d pulled her hood back, and she looked like a little Greek girl in white, riding a horse. Which she was. She encouraged her horse level with the prince.

  “I’m not supposed to see your face. No one outside your Order’s supposed to see your face.” Gerhard wondered if his armour would save him. It was rumoured that it would, though testing it to destruction with him inside it was something he’d rather avoid.

  “These are …” – and she pulled a face. Her skin was tight and unlined, showing just how young she was – “unusual times.”

  “So it seems. Are you really a hexmaster?”

  “No, my lord. I’m an adept.” She looked over her shoulder at the tower on Goat Mountain, then stared up the road. The via stretched straight and true ahead of them.

  “Then where, in the gods’ names, are the hexmasters?”

  “I’m not going lie to you, my lord,” she said.

  “Good. Because that would be treason.”

  “There’s a problem with the magic.”

  Gerhard’s horse walked on, but he felt like he was floating above it.

  “Say that again, Adept?”

  She sighed and shifted. “I can’t explain this well. The masters still have some residual power, and enchanted items still seem to work. But very little else does. I may be the only adept left capable of casting a spell. The message you wanted to send to Leopold?”

  “Yes?”

  “Was never sent. The man tasked with it killed himself when he failed. Your summons this morning?”

  “Yes,” whispered Gerhard.

  “I was ordered – we were all ordered – to ignore it, and all other commands from the castle. Of course, you weren’t to know of this, at all. Ever.”

  The prince’s breathing was ragged, laboured, shallow.

  “But you can, for now…”

  “I was forbidden to leave the adepts’ house by the master, but I calculated that if my masters couldn’t answer your call themselves, they were incapable of stopping me. I remain, Prince Gerhard of Carinthia, your loyal servant.”

  “Your loyalty is commendable,” he said automatically. Then he blinked at her, at the world behind her, as if it was new and terrifying. “Is this some sort of joke?”

  She thought about it for quite a while before replying.

  “If it is a joke, my lord, it’s a joke on all of us.”

  13

  Nikoleta was given her own tent, and she assumed that was because she was a magician and not because she was a woman. She’d been around long enough to know that German women didn’t go to war, although they’d used to when the Romans looked down from the Alps and saw nothing but vast, rich, untamed forests. German women had been wild and proud, and, if the stories were to be believed, free.

  A thousand years of civilisation later, and they gave her her own tent.

  It was different in Byzantium, of course. Alaric had sacked only Rome, not her home city. She’d run away from there, eventually.

  They’d given her a bed, too, a low wooden trestle with stitched mattress and thick blankets, and a brazier, filled with glowing charcoal. Used to the privations of the novices’ house and the only marginally less austere adepts’ house, she found the confines of the fabric walls too hot and airless.

  They’d fed her. A board of bread, meat and cheese, and Frankish wine in a bottle.

  The one thing they wouldn’t do was talk to her. The mundanes were all scared of her – of course they were. Even though she’d got rid of her pointed hood at the beginning of the journey, her white robes were the only clothes she possessed. She was their hexmaster, so terrifyingly powerful she could defeat the Teutons single-handed.

  She looked at those hands in the ruddy light, and lit a blue-white flame in her right palm. Could she do it? She thought she knew enough battle-magic, sufficient at least to scare a collection of barbarian marsh-dwellers into turning tail and running.

  Then again, she’d seen their master of horse. He hadn’t frightened easily, despite being alone in the midst of his enemies. His men would fight.

  She didn’t know what she was expected to face, or expected to do. She could guess, or she could go and ask someone. And there was only one man she could ask.

  Picking up a blanket, she threw it over her shoulders and ducked through the unlaced part of the tent door. It was dark in the valley, and the soldiers the prince had brought with him were almost all crowded around the two large fires they’d made, their black shapes solid against the flickering flames and the ascending column of sparks.

  Almost all, because there were guards set outside both her and his tents, and the boy’s tent too. Presumably around the perimeter of the camp as well: it’s what she would have done had she not been able to sense the beat of a heart at a hundred paces, along with the spirit that animated it.

  “My lady?”

  “Take me to the prince. We have things to discuss,” she said, knowing that it didn’t matter if the prince was alone, with others, asleep or simply didn’t want to be disturbed. She wanted it, and she’d get it.

  As the guard led her to another tent, its leopard pennant flapping in the breeze, she wondered at the truth: if she was right about the hexmasters’ sudden impotence, she was the most powerful person in the whole of Carinthia.

  Her guard spoke to Gerhard’s, and though permission to enter was granted quickly enough, she knew he wouldn’t be pleased to see her.

  He wasn’t alone, either. He had a boy with him, the child Felix – she’d seen him before and knew who he was – and another man, who she couldn’t place. He dressed differently to the rest of the Carinthian court, and when he stood to greet her, his body betrayed a lean and natural grace.

  “My lord prince,” she said. She didn’t have to bow, and if it had been just the two of them, she probably would have forgone the formality. As it was, she dipped her head for a moment.

  The tall man with the strange floppy hat remained standing. He was staring at her, weighing her up and deciding whether she was a threat. No, not quite. He was trying to work out her weaknesses.

  Adepts had very few of those: the gross ones had been beaten out of them, the subtle ones already exploited by their peers.

  Gerhard sat in his travelling seat and growled. “You know my son. This long streak of piss is his tutor, Signore Allegretti.”

  She gave barely perceptible bows to both, noting that Allegretti carried two swords in the Italian fashion and that he could probably use both equally well. “My lord, we need to …” – and she shrugged – “talk.”

  Gerhard bared his teeth for a moment, then pulled back from whatever feral curse he was going to make. “The boy should sleep. We’ll break camp at dawn and see what welcome brother Bavaria has to offer.”

  Allegretti’s face was unreadable, but he turned to Felix. “Come, little man. A tired swordsman is one stroke closer to disaster than a well-rested one.”

  The boy was clearly revelling in his father’s company, and the separation came as a grave disappointment. But he was obedient. He slid from his seat and hugged the suddenly surprised prince. “Goodnight, Father.”

  Gerhard’s hands waved ineffectually in the air for a moment before coming to rest on the boy’s back. “Goodnight, Felix.”

  Then it was just prince and adept. She didn’t wait to be asked to sit; she just sat, taking Allegretti’s seat and leaving Felix’s empty between them.

  “Do you have a name?” asked Gerhard.

  “Yes,” she said, “though revealing your true name when it can be used against you isn’t wise.
Or particularly survivable.”

  “And am I ever going to be in a position to exploit that?”

  She lowered her head so that her hair covered her face. “Nikoleta Agana.”

  “Your German’s good, but you weren’t born here, were you? Byzantium, you said?”

  “Yes,” she answered. Her head came up. “I am loyal to you, my lord. More loyal than you could possibly imagine.”

  “Given that the rest of those snakes-in-white have chosen to abandon me in my hour of need, that’s not saying much.” Gerhard wiped his face with his hand. “One hundred and fifty years since we last asked you to turn out in force.”

  “Two, three months ago, your call would have been answered. The masters would have been elbowing each other out of the way to show what they could do.” Nikoleta looked at her hands again, feeling the spark just under her skin. “I don’t have an explanation for you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. All the signs are there, though. The novicemaster can’t enchant the simplest tattoo on the most willing arm. That sort of thing should be child’s play – for him, at least, as he’s the one who inked me ten years ago.”

  She pulled up her sleeve and bared her forearm where, in among the black shapes and arcanum, was a simple circle centred on her wrist. Her pulse flexed the circumference – that was, in fact, the point. The needle had hurt like a bastard, but she hadn’t cried once. When it was over, yes, but more out of relief that the tattooing had taken than from any physical release.

  “It still works,” she said, “for me, at least.”

  “What does it do?” Gerhard leant forward to inspect it.

  “It allows me to see magic. Mundanes…”

  “Mundanes? Is that how you think of us, of me?”

  She let her sleeve fall. “Yes. I’m sorry if that offends you.”

  “Offends me?” Gerhard’s voice rose for a moment, before he remembered that he was separated from his men by a single layer of cloth rather than a privacy-enforcing thickness of stone. “Carinthia gave you everything you wanted. Including money. Lots of money. And you dare to look down your nose at my royal person?”