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.
&nb
sp; 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.
The tip of his staff glowed a delicate shade of violet, and he began to move it around the room.
The violet remained steady for some time until, as he paused with the staff held up, to look at his own chalk marks on one wall, the tip flared pink and then a deep, angry red.
He waved it again.
Red.
He leaned closer to the wall. He moved the tip of the staff back and forth in ever smaller arcs, and then he muttered a second casting, speaking stiffly the way a man does when he fears he’s forgotten his lines in a play.
A line of runes was suddenly picked out in angry fire-red. Wild runes, concealed under the paint on the wall.
Across the middle was a scorch mark that had erased a third of the writing.
‘By the divine Christ and Hermes saint of Magisters,’ he said. He staggered back, and sat, a little too suddenly. A cat squalked and twitched its tail out from beneath him.
Someone had placed a binding spell on the walls of his sanctum. A binding laid on him.
On a hunch, he placed his staff where he had positioned it yesterday, to power it. He sighted along the line from his crystal to the head of the staff-
‘Pure luck.’ he said. ‘Or the will of God.’
He stood in thought. Then he took a deep breath. Sniffed the air.
He gathered power slowly and carefully, using a device he had in the corner, using an ancient mirror he had on a side table, using in the final instance a vial filled with shining white fluid.
In the palace of his mind, on a black and white tiled floor like an infinite chessboard, pieces moved – like chess pieces and yet not like. There were pawns and rooks and knights, but also nuns and trees and ploughs and catapults and wyverns. He slowly resolved them into a pattern, each piece positioned on a tile of its own.
He poured his gathered power slowly out on the altar in the centre of the floor.
With the casting hovering, potent with a will to locate but still unrealised, in his mind, he climbed the twenty steps from his sanctum to the very top of his tower. He opened the door and stepped out onto a wooden hoarding, like a massive balcony, that ran all the way around the top of the tower. The spring sun was bright and the air was clear but the breeze was cold.
He saw the sea to the south-east. Due south, Jarsey spread like a storybook picture of farms and castles, rolling away for leagues. He raised his arms and released his phantasm.
Instantly, he felt the power behind him, in the north.
No surprise there.
He walked slowly around the hoardings, his staff thumping hollowly on the wooden planks. His eyes stayed on the horizon. He looked due west, and there was, to his great enhanced vision, a faint haze of green off to the west along the horizon. Just as it ought to be, where the Wild held sway. But the border was farther than a man could ride in five days on a good horse, and the tinge of green stemmed from the great woods beyond the mountains. A threat – but one that was always there.
He walked around the tower.
Long before he reached the northernmost point, he saw the bright green flare. His spell was potent and he used it carefully, tuning his vision to get every scrap of knowledge from his altered sight.
There it was.
He refined the casting, so that instead of a complex web of lenses bouncing light, he reduced his effort to a single shining green strand, thinner than a strand of a spider web, running from the north directly to his tower. He had no doubt it ran to the very runes on his wall.
Damn.
‘Was I fantasising about the Queen a moment ago?’ he asked the wind. ‘What a fool I have been.’
He didn’t sever the strand. But he let go most of the Aethersight that had allowed him to see the threats displayed, and he reduced that, too, until he could just see the glimmer of his thread. Now his great phantasm took almost no golden light to power it.
He strode down into the tower with sudden purpose, and carefully shut the door behind him.
He picked up his staff, took the first wands to come under his hand and a heavy dagger with a purse, and went back out of his library, leaving the door wide open. He went down one hundred and twenty-two steps to the floor below, picked up a heavy cloak and a hat and fought the urge to pause there. He walked through the open door and shut it behind him, aware that all three cats were watching him from the top of the stairs.
He longed for an ally and, at the same time, doubted everything.
But he had to trust someone. He chose his Queen, stopped at the writing desk beyond the door and wrote.
Urgent business calls me to the north. Please tell the king that I have the gravest fears that I have been manipulated by an ancient enemy. Be on your guard.
I remain your Majesty’s least humble servant,
Harmodius
He walked rapidly to the head of the twisting stairs and started down them, cursing his long staff and making as much haste as he could. He was trying to remember when he had last come down the stairs. Had it been yesterday?
He cast a very minor working ahead of him, now afraid that there might be spells to prevent his departure, but he could see nothing. That didn’t help. If his fears were correct, his eyes might betray him, or be a tool of the enemy. Did his vision in the aether function in the same manner as natural sight?
Richard Plangere used to ask us, ‘What is this natural of which you speak’ and we’d all be silent.
Richard Plangere, the spell on my wall stinks of you.
Caught up in his thoughts, Harmodius almost missed a step. His foot slipped, and for a moment he hung at the edge of a forty-foot fall to the cobblestones below, and the only enemy he was fighting was old age and memory. He got the rest of the way down the stairs with nothing worse than a pain in his side from walking too fast.
His tower opened on the main courtyard, fifty paces on a side and lined with the working buildings of the king’s government, although there were more of those down along the west wall as well, where there high windows looked down on the mighty river.
He walked to the stable. Men and women bowed deeply at his approach. His actions were scarcely secret, and he wondered briefly if he would have been better served leaving in the dark of night. Anyone could be an informant. Equally, he feared to go back to his chambers.
What am I afraid of?
Have I lost my mind?
He built a mental compartment around his chambers and all his associated thoughts and fears and closed the door on them. I may be at the edge of madness, or I may have just discovered a terrible secret, he thought.
There were two grooms in the stable, working quickly and efficiently to unsaddle a dozen royal horses in hunting tack. They stopped when they saw the Magus.
He tried a smile. ‘I need a horse,’ he said. ‘A good one, for a journey.’
Both of them looked at him as if he was insane.
Then they looked at each other.
Finally, the older nodded. ‘Whatever you like, m’lord,’ he said. ‘I can gi’ you a courser – a fine big mare callit Ginger. If it please you?’
Harmodius nodded, and before he could grow any more afraid a big bay was led out, a light saddle on her back. Harmodius looked up at that saddle with an old man’s despair, but the younger groom had anticipated his look and moved to help, bringing him a stool.
Harmodius stepped up on the stool and forced his leg up over the horse’s back.
The ground seemed a long way down.
&nbs
p; ‘Thank you, lad,’ Harmodius said. The boys handed him up his staff, two wands, and his purse, dagger, and cloak. The elder boy showed him how to stow it all behind the saddle.
‘See that this note makes it to the Queen. Deliver it in person. This is my ring, so you may reach her – every guard in the palace should know it. Do you understand me, boy?’ he asked, and realised that he was a figure of terrible fear to these two boys. He tried on a smile. ‘You’ll get a reward.’
The younger smiled bravely. ‘I’ll take it, Master.’
‘See you do.’ He nodded.
And then they were gone, and he was riding.
He rode through the gate without so much as a nod from the two Royal Guardsmen who stood there, either scanning the approach or sound asleep. The brims of their ornate helmets hid their eyes.
His horse’s hooves rang hollowly against the drawbridge. The palace and its surrounding castle was merely the citadel in an extensive series of works – three rings of walls and two other castles – that towered above the ancient city of Harndon. Twice in Alba’s history the entire Demesne had been reduced to the people that could huddle inside these walls.
When the Wild came.
He rode down the slope of the castle mound into High Street – the main street of the city of Harndon, that ran from gate to gate until it became the High Road and passed through the countryside, out to the town of Bridge where it crossed the mighty river, in the first of seven bridges. The river ran like a great snake from the north to the south of Alba, while the road cut straight across it.
Here the road was a steep street lined with magnificent white-walled houses, each as tall and turreted as small castles. They were adorned in gilt and black iron with red or blue doors, tile or copper roofs, marble statuary painted and unpainted, and windows, clear or stained, high or wide. Each house was a palace and had its own character.
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