The Red Knight

The captain turned to Michael. ‘Get me a Knight of the Order,’ he said. Then he turned back. ‘They are superb healers.’ he said. Unfortunately, they had gone on a sortie to clear the trench at dawn, and they hadn’t returned.

‘I know,’ she spat. ‘How long?’

‘A few minutes,’ he said, hopefully.

‘She doesn’t have a few minutes,’ the woman said, her face cracking. She seemed to clamp down on a sob. ‘She’s lost a great deal of blood.’

‘Who has?’ he asked as he tried to get a leg over the gunwale. A dozen oarsmen reached to pull him into the boat.

‘The Queen,’ she said. ‘I’m Lady Almspend. Her secretary. This is Lady Mary, chief among her ladies.

The Queen.

The Red Knight ignored the people gathered around the figure on the deck. The woman lying on the deck was losing blood at a tremendous rate. He could feel it.

And he had very little strength, at least in terms of power. What he had he’d squandered, fighting boglins. And to heal her here, now, would give himself away – at least as a Hermeticist.

So much blood.

She was young – imbued with power, herself.

In that moment, he realised that if she died, he could take her. As he had taken the boglin chief. She was defenceless – wide open, trying to use her power to strengthen herself. She drank in the sun’s rays – the pure power of Helios. She was very potent.

He put a hand on her back.

‘Well?’ Lady Almspend asked, impatient. ‘Can you help?’

Vade Retro, Satanus, the captain thought. He took his arming cap off his head, and pushed it into the wound. Put one finger on the cap as it turned from dirty white to brilliant scarlet.

He almost grinned. He was linked to a legion of healers. It was easy to forget that.

The palace seemed empty without Prudentia. He knew the basic phantasms of healing now – he wondered if he could release the power of Mag’s bindings to power them. And keep the power – and funnel it through workings he knew mostly from long ago lessons.

‘Amicia?’ he asked.

She was there. ‘Hello!’ she said. She took his hand, smiled – and let his hand drop.

‘I need to heal someone.’ He wished-

‘Show me,’ Amicia said briskly.

He took a moment to kneel by the fallen statue, and brush a hand across Prudentia’s marble back. ‘I miss you, ‘he said. ‘Help me, if you can.’

Then he took Amicia’s hand and laid it on the Queen.

She pointed to workings he now knew – through her – in a mind-wrenching moment, he was on her bridge using her memory palace even as he stood on Prudentia’s pedestal and collected what was left of his power.

It wasn’t enough.

Amicia shook her head. ‘I have nothing to give,’ she said. He looked up at her, and even in the aethereal her exhaustion was obvious. ‘So many wounded,’ she said.

Sighing for the loss, he tested the binding of power on Mag’s cap. He cast, as Harmodius had taught him, guided by Amicia’s sure hand on his – three workings, each contingent on the other, like nested equations on the chalkboard. The loosing, the binding for power, the healing. He used what was left of the life force he had taken from the boglin chief.

‘Saint Barbara, Taurus, Thales. Demetrios, Pisces, Herakleitus. Ionnes the Baptist, Leo, Socrates!’ he invoked, pointed, pivoted, and the room moved – the gears of his imagined rooms turning at the speed of a man’s muscles, so that the room spun like a top.