The Red Knight полностью

‘I feed you, you wretch,’ Harmodius muttered.

The light continued to pour through the high windows, and to creep down the whitewashed wall, revealing calculations in chalk, silver or lead pencil, charcoal, even scratched out in dirt. The Magus used whatever came to hand when he felt the urge to write.

And still the light crept down the wall.

In the halls below, the Magus could sense men and women – a servant bringing a tray of cold venison to his tower’s door; a gentleman and lady engaged in a ferocious tryst that burned like a small fire almost directly under his feet – where was that? It must be awfully public – and the Queen, who burned like the very sun. He smiled when he brushed over her warmth. Oftimes, he watched others to pass the time. It was the only form of phantasm he still cast regularly.

Why is that? he wondered, idly.

But this morning, well. This morning his Queen had asked him – challenged him – to do something.

Do something wonderful, Magus! she had said, clapping her hands together.

Harmodius waited until the sun crossed a chalk line he had drawn, and then raised his eyes to a particular set of figures. Nodded. Sipped some cold tea that had a film of dust – what was that dust? Oh – he had been grinding bone for oil colour. He had bone dust in his tea. That wasn’t entirely disgusting.

All three cats raised their heads and pricked their ears.

The light intensified and struck a small mirror with the image of Ares and Taurus entwined on the ivory back – and then shot across the floor in a focused beam.

‘Fiat lux!’ roared the Magus.

The beam intensified, drawing in the light around it until the cats were cast in shadow while the beam sparkled like a line of lightning – passing above the chalk designs, through a lens, and into a bubble of gold atop his staff. Unnoticed by him, it struck a little off centre and a tiny fragment of the white beam slid past the staff to dance along the far wall, partially reflected by the golden globe, partly refracted by the mass of energy seething inside the staff itself. The intense light flicked up sharply, licked at gilding of a triptych that adorned the sideboard, struck a glass of wine abandoned hours before. And, still focused, it passed across the east wall, its rapid passage burning away a dozen or more characters of a spell written in an invisible, arcane ink, hidden under the paint.

The older cat started, and hissed.

The Magus felt suddenly light headed, as if at the onset of a fever or a strong head-cold. But his mind was abruptly clear and sharp, and the staff was giving off the unmistakable aura of an artefact filling with power. He saw the rogue light fragment and deftly moved the mirror and the focus to touch the staff perfectly.

He clapped his hands in triumph.

The cats looked around, startled, as if they had never seen his room before – and then went back to sleep.

Harmodius looked around the room. ‘What in the name of the triad just happened?’ he asked.

He didn’t need rest. Even after casting a powerful phantasm like the last, the feeling of the helios in his staff made him tingle with anticipation. He’d promised himself that he’d wait a day . . . perhaps two days . . . but the temptation was strong.

‘Bah,’ he said aloud, and the cats flicked their ears. He hadn’t felt so alive in many years.

He took a heavy flax mop and scrubbed the floor, eliminating every trace of the complex chalk pattern that had decorated it like an elaborate Southern rug. Then, despite his age and his heavy robes, he was down on his knees with a square of white linen, scrubbing even the cracks between the slate slabs until there was not a trace of pale blue chalk. However eager he was, he was also fastidious about this – that no trace of one phantasm should linger while he performed another. Experience had taught him that lesson well.

Then he went to a side table and opened the drawer, wherein was laid a box of ebony bound in silver. The Magus loved beautiful things – and when the consequences of bad conjuring were soul-destruction and death, the presence of beautiful things help reassure and steady him.

Inside the box lay a nested set of instruments made of bronze – a compass, a pair of calipers, a ruler with no markings; a pencil which held silver suspended in alum and clay and wax, blessed by a priest.

He wrapped a string around the pencil, measuring the length against the ruler, and began to pray. ‘O, Hermes Trismegistus,’ he began, and continued in High Archaic, purifying himself, clearing his thoughts, invoking God and his son and the prophet of the magi while another part of his mind calculated the precise length of string he would need.