The Fell Sword (78 page)

‘Relax, girl.’ The older woman put a familiar hand on her arm – skin to skin – and Amicia flushed. ‘When you are old and powerful, you will not fancy having some young sprig burst into your refuge either, dripping with
ops
and smelling of power.’ She nodded and arched an eyebrow. ‘The more so when the girl is your son’s lover.’

Amicia met the woman’s eyes. ‘I don’t plan to have a refuge. I will use my powers for good, and make people happier and better.’ She nodded curtly. ‘No man is my lover.’

At that moment, there was a pulse in the
aethereal
. The ring gave a flash of heat, and she felt her own store of
potentia
– blessedly unneeded in the fortress of Ticondaga – suddenly expended at a prodigious rate.
Someone
cast a working of healing – she felt it.

Ghause stepped away from her, and put a hand to her jewelled throat. She smiled in triumph. ‘But surely that was my son! You two are
linked
!’

Amicia sighed. ‘Your Grace, I know your son, and I am fond of him, but he and I have made different choices. I will give my love to all people – not one person.’

‘People are generally harder to like than horses or cats,’ Ghause said. ‘Come –
pax.
Eat with us at our feast – we will have carols.’ She nodded to Ser John. ‘Bring your patient. My husband wants to know if he really attacked a troll with his dagger.’ The older woman’s mouth twitched in mockery. ‘Men. There are so many more interesting things to discuss than war. Don’t you think?’

Liviapolis – The Red Knight

The palace Ordinaries spent Christmas Eve shovelling the snow from the great square, and laying down sawdust, and then rolling mats of woven straw over the ground. Barriers were built, and a mock castle, and four sets of stands in the ancient hippodrome, and then sailors from the fleet assembled canvas awnings from the cellars beneath the stables. Some of the canvas had rotted, but most of it was fresh and white, and in the frozen silence of Christmas morn, they laid it out along the newly rebuilt yards and roofed the ancient hippodrome and its raised timber stands with a great oval of cloth. When the snow began to fall gently outside, the whole hippodrome was covered, and a dozen adepts from the Academy finished the work with a hermetical reinforcement and a layer of sparkling light.

Morgon Mortirmir was assigned to work directly with the master grammarian, which indicated something of the speed with which his studies were progressing. The grammarian watched the workmen assemble the canvas roof far above them.

‘You understand the principle?’ he asked.

Mortirmir pulled on the beard he was trying to grow and stared at the empty stands.
Was this a trick question
? With the grammarian, you never knew. He looked at the question from half a dozen panicked angles and managed to say,‘Yes?’

‘Yes? Or maybe yes? Honestly, Mortirmir.’ The grammarian buried his hands in his voluminous fur-lined robe. Mortirmir threw caution to the winds. ‘It is not just a single principle, is it?’

Lip curling in disdain, the grammarian raised an eyebrow. ‘Explain,’ he said.

‘The
scutum
or
aspis
spell is among the most basic workings – one that uses
potentia
in a form that is almost raw. But placing the working into the cloth requires a different principle – the principle of like calling to like. The canvas alone would resist the rain or snow for some time, making it a kind of sponge to absorb our working, because our protection has the same intention? And then yet a third principle, because the canvas is woven from flax fibre, and was once alive, and thus is that much more interested in –
harmony.
’ Morgan stopped, surprised by the last word. When the grammarian didn’t interrupt or blast him to pieces, he added, ‘Without the canvas, it would require an incredible effort of will to roof the entirety of the hippodrome and more to maintain it all day. But with the solidity of the canvas here in the real, it is far easier to place our work in the
aethereal.
’

The grammarian smiled. ‘Not bad. Here, have some hot wine. Not bad at all. How many workings have you mastered?’

Mortirmir winced. ‘Four,’ he said. ‘Fire – as an attack. Light. I have several variations on light—’ he went on, but shook his head. ‘All of the series of
aspis
or
scutum
manipulations.’

‘Hence your presence here,’ the grammarian said.

‘A lock-breaking conjuration,’ Mortirmir added.

‘Two of the most difficult manipulations, but not one of the most basic elemental manipulations except fire.’ The grammarian nodded. ‘Memory problems?’

Mortirmir stared miserably at the ground. ‘I practise and practise but things don’t stick.’

The grammarian nodded. ‘It is hard to come late to your powers. I didn’t
really
come to a full memory palace and an understanding of manipulation and illusion until I was in my fifties.’ He looked up at the sailors. ‘If one of them fell, could you catch him?’

Morgan ran through the sum total of his manipulations. ‘Er – yes. I think so.’

The grammarian sipped his bottle of hot wine. ‘Would you?’ he asked.

‘Of course!’ Mortirmir said.

The grammarian nodded. ‘My pater was a sailor. I hardly knew him. An old priest saw me working power – all green – and sent me here.’ He shrugged. ‘From then I never left. I like the hot wine. And lights that work. Why am I telling you this?’

Mortirmir managed a smile.

‘Can you work this on your own?’ the grammarian asked.

Mortirmir nodded. ‘I think so. I’m jousting later and I don’t want to be weak.’

The grammarian laughed. ‘Jousting? You mean that tomfoolery where you ride in a set of iron kettles until you slam into another man? Well, young scholar, your place is here, and if you run out of
ops
you can remember that you have used your powers in the service of the Emperor. Jousting indeed—’ The grammarian shook his head, and his brief moment of good will was snapped.

He put his hand on Mortirmir’s shoulder. ‘Open up,’ he said. ‘Let me see the prep work on your casting.’

Mortirmir disliked the invasion of his mind by any of the professors, but since the revelation of his powers they were more and more intrusive. And they left echoes of themselves behind – some very dark.

Nonetheless, it was merely part of a scholar’s life. He opened his memory palace and admitted the grammarian, who entered as a much younger man in scarlet and cloth of gold.

Mortirmir’s memory palace was four columns of the Temple of Athena, and a slightly hasty simulacrum of a blackboard with a piece of silver chalk hanging from a fancy silk cord. There were no seats, and around the four columns there was smooth white marble for a few paces, and then a featureless grey plain stretching to the limits of the
aethereal
.

‘Crucified Christ, boy, this is the whole of your memory?’ the grammarian looked about with disdain.

Mortirmir shrugged.

The grammarian smelled like heather, in the
aethereal
, a good smell. And his presence was very solid.

He walked over to the sand table that Mortirmir had built in his mind next to the blackboard, and examined Mortirmir’s notes. And his grammar.

‘Ahh,’ he said. ‘This is more like it. This – this is the surface area of the hippodrome?’

Mortirmir nodded eagerly. ‘I took it from a book of geometrika.’

The grammarian favoured him with a smile. ‘You have bettered me, then, young sir. I always meant to, but in the end I always guess.’ He ran his slim silver stick along the lines of the working itself, as yet unpowered. ‘I see two things that I would do differently,’ he said. ‘But I see nothing that is wrong, per se. So I will allow you to proceed.’

‘Me, sir?’ Mortirmir had prepared the casting as an exercise, and only because he’d been told to do so. He’d come to channel power for the master. That’s what students did.

‘You. There’s the Nautarchon waving at us. Let’s see it, young man.’

They stood in the real, on the finely groomed sand floor, looking up.

Mortirmir closed his eyes,
and summoned his workplace. The four broken columns stood like a reminder of his hermetical impotence, but he didn’t follow that image. Instead, he summoned power – the best of his skills, now – and, flooded with it, began to fuel the first set of his diplomatika.

At his side, the grammarian murmured, ‘Ahh.’

‘Look at that!’ called a sailor.

Morgan refused the distraction, and ran his fingers over the second part of his working, then dripped his power carefully – the canvas was delicate, and he could burn it.

The canvas took the hermetical power like dye – the golden light of the sun crept across it from the centre to the edges, and each panel flapped slightly as it filled – a line of sparks on the leading edge of the teenaged boy’s effort.

‘I love this part,’ called the sailor. His mate, on the next mast, laughed, and his laughter echoed hollowly.

Mortirmir’s first working had actually run lines of power up the masts and across the yards, and now his hermetical dye reached them in a flare of sparks, and the whole glowed a ruddy gold, as if the canvas was afire.

‘ASPIDES,’ Morgan said aloud.

All nine of the enormous canvas panels froze – the ruddy light flared and vanished. A careful observer could still note a line of light edging each panel, as fine as a thread.

The master grammarian nodded. ‘Lovely, Master Mortirmir. Multiple shields, not just one.’

‘If one fails, the others will keep people dry,’ Mortirmir said.

‘And each panel is its own unity,’ the grammarian went on. ‘Do you see a problem with that?’

Mortirmir shook his head. ‘No, Maestro.’

‘You’ve never built a roof, have you?’ The master grammarian was smiling, so Morgan began to experience real triumph. The sailors were applauding.

‘No, Maestro.’ Mortirmir looked up.

The maestro lifted his staff and said, ‘Scutum.’

With no flare at all, something changed. Mortirmir ran his tongue over the edges of his working – in his mind. All solid.

‘Between the panels, my young scholar. You made every panel whole. But you didn’t unify them. Snow would come in between them. Not much, and to be frank, I doubt anyone would notice. Your work is well done. You understood all of the principles involved, and your grammatical expression was excellent.’ The man bowed slightly. ‘Mind you, you have good teachers.’ He smiled. ‘But a roof is always a unity.

Mortirmir sighed. ‘I feel like a fool,’ he admitted.

The master grammarian nodded. ‘Good. That’s the feeling we all get when we learn something. I try to experience it once a day. Now go joust. I may even come back and watch.’ He paused. ‘You really must work on your memory, my boy.’

‘Yes, Maestro.’ Mortirmir bowed, and the master grammarian returned his bow.

He walked off the sand, and several sailors came and shook his hand. Their praise delighted him.

The Nautarchon bowed to him. ‘If you ever pass as a weatherworker, Master, I’d be delighted to have you on my ship.’ He pointed above them. ‘You treated the canvas – well, I saw it. Lovely. In a storm, a good mage can hold the sails like that – with
ops.
A well-found ship can stand a winter storm with a mage holding the rigging.’

Mortirmir hadn’t expected so much praise. He flushed, looked at the ground, and muttered something that he wasn’t sure of himself.

And his feet tangled around the blade of his sword as he walked away. Which hadn’t happened to him in weeks. He stumbled, looked around, and saw a dozen Academicians standing at the great entrance, in their robes. They were clapping.

Antonio Baldesce was laughing.

Mortirmir didn’t blame him. And he summoned up a smile as he crossed the sand, mindful that resentment at the needling he was about to receive would only make the whole thing worse.

Tancreda put a hand on his arm as he walked up. ‘He smiled! Gracious Mother of God, Plague! You made the master grammarian smile!’

Mortirmir shook his head.

Baldesce grinned. ‘And old Donatedello. He seemed to like you.’

Mortirmir’s arm tingled where Tancreda had touched it. He blushed.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the others.

‘I’m – I’m in the Christmas tournament.’

Baldesce laughed again. ‘I hope you remember the little people like us who helped you on your way,’ he said.

Kronmir read the message written in wax on the blade of a scythe and winced. The code was old and the message was baldly done, the wax visible to anyone, and the messenger – a girl no more than seven years old – had waited in the snow by his inn, thus making it possible for an enemy to take her and her message – and him. It hadn’t happened, but he shook his head, patted the girl, and gave her a gold piece.

‘Do you have a mother, girl?’ he said.

She shook her head. In that head-shake, she revealed the whole of her future – a future Kronmir wouldn’t wish on an enemy. Especially not at Christmas.

He added a second gold byzant, a valuable coin. And the thirty copper coins he had in a bag.

‘Listen, child,’ he said. ‘Men will kill you for the gold I’ve given you. Can you leave the city?’

She nodded.

‘Will you go to Lonika, if I send you?’ he asked.

She nodded again.

He took a piece of Eastern paper and folded it in a particular way, and wrote on it in lemon juice. ‘Take this to the same blacksmith who sent the scythe blade, child.’ He put a hand on her head, which was very warm – almost hot. It gave him great pleasure to do such a good deed at Christmas.

However much she might bridle at a life spent in a convent, it would be better than what awaited her in the city, without parents.

When she was gone, he rubbed the wax twice to make sure the message said what he thought it said, and then he tossed the scythe blade in the fire until the wax was utterly gone.

Then he set out across the city to find himself an assassin.

He went to a certain door, and knocked six times, and then walked away. That was all that was required to order the death of the Megas Ducas.