The Red Knight

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.

Urgent business calls me to the north. Please tell the king that I have the gravest fears that I have been manipulated by an ancient enemy. Be on your guard.

I remain your Majesty’s least humble servant,

Harmodius

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.