The Red Knight

He was in the palace of memory. He reached out to Amicia, who took his hand and Harmodius’, and the Abbess’, and Miram’s. And Mag’s. And that of every surviving nun singing in the chapel.

He mastered his thoughts.

Cast his very favourite phantasm.

‘Holy Saint Barbara, Despoina Athena, Herakleitus,’ he said, pointing at each statue as he spoke the name, and the great room began to spin.

Prudentia reached down from the plinth and put a hand on his shoulder. She smiled at him. It was a sad smile. And she reached out and took his hand free hand. ‘Goodbye, my lovely boy. I had so many things to say. O Philae pais-’

He was flooded with power – power like pain, when it rises beyond any possible point of pleasure – like victory. Like defeat, like hopelessness and hope. And he stayed there, for an eternity, balanced between all and nothing.

Like love when love is too much to bear.

What did she mean, goodbye?

He was back in the acrid night air.

He wondered if the calm that suffused him was artificial.

Thorn leaned over him, blocking the stars.

You are ours. Not theirs.

The captain laughed, a laugh he treasured. ‘There is no us, Thorn. In the Wild, there is only the law of the forest and the rule of the strongest. And if I join you, I will subsume you to my needs.’

Just to make his point, the captain projected, as his mother had taught him, the imperative. Kneel.

More than two thirds of the surviving boglins feel immediately to their knees.

He was deeply gratified to see Thorn twitch so that his singed branches shook as if a strong wind had passed through a forest.

And even as he exchanged words with the Enemy, buying precious heartbeats, an agony of power rose inside him – the greatest power he had ever felt, as if love personified drove his phantasm. Between two heartbeats, the captain knew what she had done.

Prudentia had not opened the door, which would have invited Thorn to take him from inside.

She had ended herself, and as a phantasmal construct, she had poured her own power and the power of her making into his work. It explained the love.

Oh, the love.

I make fire, he said in the purest High Archaic.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt the swelling of power – such a sweet power, with a taste he had forgotten. He lost a thousandth of a heartbeat trying to identify it. Only then did he reach for his shield of adamantine will.

You don’t remember that taste, my sweet? That taste is love, and once, you were capable of it.

The lady was in his head – in his place of power – naked, exposed, and rendering him the same.

Confused – a storm of rage and hate – he struck at her.

In striking, he did not raise his shield.

Lissen Carak – The Abbess

The Abbess took her stand in the ruined chapel, in near darkness, her hair unbound, her feet bare in the shattered glass. Her nuns stood in close array behind her, and their voices rose in sacred music.

Harmodius stood beside her, his staff in his hand, riding the song of power into the darkness, into the labyrinthine mind of the young man on the field below, facing a monster-

She, too, faced a monster. A variety of monsters, many of them of her own making. That she had loved this thing which now sought the ruin of all she loved-

She hit him with her frustration and her love, her years of loss. She poured her love of her God into his wounds, and she added her contempt – that he had abandoned her to turn traitor to humanity. That he had taken her gift and made this depravity with it.

She hurt him.

And he struck back. But he was hampered, and still – still - he hesitated to hurt her.

She hit him again. She’d had years to expunge her hesitations.

Lissen Carak – Mag the Seamstress

Mag, standing in the former street of the Lower Town, nonetheless felt the old Abbess struggle with the Enemy. It was terrifying, but she felt the Abbess’s power and she raised her own hands in sympathy. Unknowing, untrained, the seamstress nonetheless poured her carefully hoarded power into the Abbess.

The Abbess smiled in triumph.

Father Henry rose from behind the altar, and drew his arrow to his mouth, and loosed.

And from the darkness, a cry of rage.

The Abbess screamed like a soul in torment, and was knocked flat on her face – dead before her head hit the stone floor.

Blood welled from her eyes and she lay still, a vicious black arrow in her back.

Fire – a pure fire of crystalline blue – Prudentia’s favourite colour – enveloped Thorn’s mortal shell. The heat of it was stupendous.

And from the fire, smoke – a rich, bright smoke, luminescent and alive, more than white, more than smoke, and the captain could feel Harmodius sending the smoke through him, through his place of power and down his arm and into the air about him. A subtle working – insidious, clever, a fog of a million mirrors.

She had hurt him – hurt him so much. And the dark sun had hurt him, and now he was screaming in agony. A moment’s remorse – and the cost had been cataclysmic.

But he was saved – she was dead, her light extinguished, and not by him. Some other power had struck her down and he was innocent of that crime, and he turned – strong enough to finish this pretender.

But he writhed inwardly in the knowledge that she was dead.

It had to be done.

It should not have been done.

And then – too late! He felt his apprentice’s working, the complex, layered phantasm that was that boy’s trademark – a coloured smoke, so quiet, so harmless, so complex-

He lunged back up the line of Harmodius’ casting, as he had attacked along the line of his lover’s.

Harmodius felt his former master’s power coming.

His counter-strike was so tiny, so very subtle, that it cost him almost no power. It relied on his enemy’s hubris and his sense of his own power.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn killed the apprentice effortlessly, although he couldn’t, for some reason, take the man’s not inconsiderable power for his own. Typical of the man – to squander his power rather than let his master have it. His former apprentice fell back amidst a choir of nuns. If he’d had time, Thorn might have exterminated the nest, but the dark sun was still pounding him with his strange blue fire.

If Thorn had been a man he might have laughed. Or cried.