The Red Knight

The young knight rolled away, closing his eyes. ‘Like you would know. Go away and let me sleep. Oh, Blessed Virgin, am I doomed to be a monster?’

‘I very much doubt it,’ Harmodius said, but he knew that his own slight doubt was not very reassuring.

‘Please leave me alone,’ the knight said.

‘Very well. But I’ll be back to check on you.’ Harmodius reached out with a tendril of power and it was his turn to recoil at what he saw. Gawin saw his reaction.

‘What’s happening to me?’

Harmodius shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he lied.

An hour after full dark, the enemy struck. There was a whistle of arrows from the darkness, and two of the guildsmen on guard fell – one silently, the other with the panicked screams of a man in pain.

Guilbert had the wagons manned and alert in a hundred heartbeats. Which was as well, because a wave of boglins, announced by a sinister rustling, exploded into the north face of the wagon-fort.

But Guilbert was an old campaigner, and his dozen archers shot fire-arrows into the piles of cane and brush left around the old clearing, and most of them caught. And then, by the flickering light of spring bonfires, the guildsmen and the soldiers killed. Having negotiated the raspberry cane walls, the boglins were almost incapable of climbing the tall wagons after, and they died in dozens trying.

But the red arrows arching like vicious dragonflies over the fires began to annoy the defenders. The arrows lacked the potency to penetrate good mail, and their flint heads shattered easily, but they sunk deep in exposed flesh, and men who took them, even as a scratch on the hand, became fevered in an hour.

Harmodius went from man to man, pulling the poison by grammerie. He’d had a day to gather power and rest, and he was full of sunlight, his aids charged and ready except for the two wands, whose charging required greater time, attention, and investment.

When the fires burned down, he cast a powerful phantasm of light on a tree way out at the edge of the raspberry thicket. He repeated the spell six times, all the way around the wagon-fort, to back-light their attackers and blind their archers. But the Hermetic cost was immense, and he was shouting his power to the world.

As his sixth light casting began to fade, and the deadly, wasp-like arrows began to come in again, Harmodius felt the presence of an enemy. A practitioner.

Another magus.

There was a moment’s warning – possibly as the other one raised a defensive ward.

Harmodius raised his own. And then, like a man fighting with a sword and buckler, he pushed his ward across the open space between himself and the other source of power. If his ward was held close to his body, it could only cover him. Held close to the other magus, the ward could cover the whole convoy.

A simple exercise in mathematica that most practitioners never learned.

It cost a fraction more energy to maintain the ward over there than here. Energy exploded against his ward and was deflected. Irks and boglins died under the onslaught of phantasms which should have been supporting them.

Harmodius smiled wickedly. Evidently whoever was out there had a great deal of raw power and very, very little training.

In his youth, Harmodius had been an accomplished swordsman. And the practice of hermetical combat had many close analogues in swordsmanship. Harmodius had always meant to write a treatise on the subject.

As his adversary prepared another attack, Harmodius dashed through the labyrinthine palace of his memory, stacking wards and gardes in a sequence he’d practised but never used.

His opponent’s next attack came with more force – a titanic, angry upwelling of power that came as a lurid green stripe across the night.

His first ward was voided. The enemy had moved off line, realising the strength of his forward defence.

His second ward, however, caught the attack and subtly displaced it – and the third ward reflected it down yet another line – right back into the caster, who was struck squarely by his own phantasm.

His wards flared a deep blue-green – and Harmodius struck. In the tempo of the opponent’s own attacks, he launched a line of bright, angelic white – a line like a lance that connected his index finger and the enemy’s wards. It cost Harmodius almost no power, but the enemy, having over-committed to warding in the wrong place, now used his reserve ward to block . . .

. . . nothing. The light beam was just that. Light. There was no force behind it.

Like a fencing master going for an elegant, killing thrust, Harmodius drew power for his attack, and launched it, all in a tenth of a beat of a panicked guildsman’s heart. And as the blow went in – over one ward, under a second, and through the weakened energies of the third – he felt his enemy collapse. Felt him experience the despair of defeat.

And without intending to, he reached out and seized something – just as he had taken power to save the young knight. But this time, he took the essence of the enemy sorcerer much faster and more thoroughly.