The Red Knight

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.