The Red Knight

‘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.

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