The Red Knight (28 page)

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.

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.

‘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.

I used to dine here. And here. How long have I been under?

The pressure in his chest eased as Harmodius rode down the hill, looking at the palaces of courtiers and great knights and wondering how it was that he had never visited any of them.

He rode through the Inner Gate without glancing at the guards. It was chilly in the wind, and he struggled with his cloak as he rode through Middle Town, and peered out into the High Cheaping,
the city’s principal market. The Cheaping was a market square two or three times the size of the courtyard of the castle, and packed with stalls and the bustle of commerce. He watched it as
he passed, and then he was into the lower town, the Cheaping in local dialect, crossing Flood Street at the Bridge Gate, and his heart began to beat faster. He saw no threat – but he expected
one.

The men at the Bridge Gate had all of their attention on a magnificent retinue of knights and armoured men-at-arms entering the city. Harmodius looked at it from under his hood, trying to make
out the blazon and guess whom the lord might be – not anyone he had ever seen at court. A tall man, heavy with muscle.

The guards clearly wanted no part of making the decision to let the giant and his men into the town. Nor did they have any attention to spare for solitary old men riding out.

The knight commanding the retinue did, though, and turned to watch him as he rode by. His glance sharpened – and then the Lieutenant of the Lower Gate appeared, armoured head to toe and
holding not a wax tablet and stylus but a pole-axe, with four more knights at his back. The foreigner stiffened, and Harmodius rode past him while he was distracted.

Through the gate, down the slope past the lesser merchants who were only allowed to display their wares outside the walls – in the Ditch, as men liked to call it. He rode past the
mountebanks, the players, and the workmen building bleachers and barriers for the Whitsunday Play.

He pursed his lips and touched his heels to the horse’s flanks, and the mare, delighted to be out in the spring and bored by the pace, sprang forward.

Harmodius cantered along beside the market and continued past the outer ring of homes, the poorest still associated with the city, and past the first fields, each surrounded by a ring of rocks
and old, painstakingly cleared tree stumps. The soil here was not the best. He cantered along the road for a further half a mile, pleased with his horse but still in the grip of fear, and came to
the bridge.

Still no one challenged him.

He crossed the first great span, stopped, spat into the river, and worked two powerful spells while he was safe in the bright sunshine at the centre of the bridge. Hermeticism functioned best in
sunlight; while most workings of the Wild couldn’t cross running water without enormous effort or the water’s Hermetic permission. There was no power on earth that could take him in
bright sunlight, in the middle span of flowing fresh water.

And if there was such a power, he had no chance against it anyway.

Then he went the rest of the way across and took the road north.

The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Robert Guissarme

Robert Guissarme was tall and cadaverously thin despite his intake of mutton and ale. Men said that his appetite for food was only exceeded by his appetite for gold. He called
his company of men a
Company of Adventure
, like the best Eastern mercenaries, and he dressed well in leather and good wool, or in bright armour made by the best Eastern smiths.

No one knew much of his birth. He claimed to be the bastard son of a great nobleman, whom he was careful never to name – but he was known from time to time to lay a finger to his nose when
a great man passed him on the road.

His sergeants feared him. He was quick to anger, quick to punish, and as he was the best man-at-arms of his company none of them wanted to cross him. Especially not right now; he was sitting
fully armed on his charger, in deep fog, looking at a pair of peddlers who had passed them the night before, and who now stood in the middle of the road. They had been carefully butchered, flayed,
and then set on posts in the road so that their heads seemed locked in endless screams of abject agony.

Since yesterday, he had pushed his convoy north-west along the bad road that connected Albinkirk to the east – to the Hills, and then over the mountains to Morea, and the land of the
Emperor. He’d started his convoy in Theva, the city of slavers, and had pushed his men so hard that their horses began to fail. As for the long chain of slaves that was their principal cargo
– he no longer cared much whether they lived or died. They had been entrusted to him in Theva; a long line of broken men and women – some pretty, some ugly, and all with the blank
despair of the utterly beaten human being. He’d been told that they were a valuable consignment, being skilled slaves – cooks, menservants, housemaids, nurses, and whores.