Thorn paused, and pointed his staff. They were passing to the north of the great fortress; it was just visible from here, high on its ridge to the south.
‘We will never take the Rock with the force we have,’ Thorn said. ‘I might act to destroy it, or I might not. This is not my fight. But we are allies, and I will help you.’
‘By leading us away from that which we wish to reclaim?’ snapped the daemon.
‘By unleashing the Wild against a worthy goal. An
Thurkan nodded slow agreement. ‘If we burn Albinkirk, many will know it and many will come.’
‘And then,’ said Thorn, ‘we will have the force and the time to act against the Rock, while the men worry over smoking ruins.’
‘And you will be many times more powerful than you are now,’ Thurkan said suspiciously.
‘When you and yours can again drink from the spring of the Rock, and mate in the tunnels beneath the Rock, you will thank me,’ Thorn said.
Together, they began to walk east.
Chapter Six
Prynwrithe – Ser Mark Wishart
Two hundred leagues and more south of the Cohocton, well west of Harndon, the Priory of Pynwrithe was a beautiful castle rising from a spur of solid rock, a hundred years old, with high battlements, four slim towers with arched windows, topped in copper-gilt roofs, and a high arched gate that made some visitors exclaim that the whole must have been built by the Faery.
Ser Mark Wishart, the Prior, knew better. It had been built by a rich thug, who had given it to the church to save his soul.
It was a very comfortable place to live. A dream for a soldier who had lived most of his life having to sleep on the cold hard ground. The Prior was standing in his shirt, in front of a roaring fire, with a piece of bark in his hand – a small piece of birch bark, which had just turned almost perfectly black. He turned it over and over in his hands, and winced at the pain in his shoulder. The she-bear had hurt him badly.
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.
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.
