Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

Instantly he was in Harmodius’s memory palace. But nothing was crisp and clear except the golden door at his back and Harmodius’s mirror, a device he’d used. It was an internal artefact that allowed the user to “see” any potentia -any workings-cast directly on his person. Harmodius had spent too long imprisoned in another’s false reality to allow himself to ever be fooled in such a way again. Gabriel was briefly surprised that the old man hadn’t taken the artefact with him, but he smiled at the thought-of course, it was a memory artefact.

Harmodius’s abandoned memory palace stretched away from the centre checkerboard and the free standing mirror to a distant and dusty obscurity, like a summer house infrequently used. Gabriel moved cautiously across the parquetry floor and then-very carefully-began to examine some of the old man’s memories.

It was very dark, and he could only see things dimly. He was rarely frightened in his memory palace; casting in combat would have been too difficult otherwise, and the lack of time inside the palace usually gave a caster time to be calm and thorough, but here, in this unlit shadow realm of another man’s mind, Gabriel was scared almost to panic. He had no idea what rules guided his passage through Harmodius’s mind or memories. He only knew that as the man had occupied his head for almost a year, the red door must lead here. Harmodius had entered his own memory palace often enough, but this was only the third or fourth time that Gabriel had gone the other way, and the first time since it was-unoccupied.

And of course, with the guiding light of the other essence gone, it was dark.

“Summoning,” Gabriel said aloud.

It grew lighter. And he watched a memory flit across the floor in wisps, like a marred projection or a magic lantern slide with honey on it. It was an interesting memory; Harmodius was sitting with Queen Desiderata in a room and casting. She provided the ops .

Gabriel watched the summoning. Because it had involved the casting of a form, the memory was very clear, and he could follow the shadows of its casting around the chamber of Harmodius’s mind.

But the experience began to leach at him somehow. He couldn’t put a finger on the experience to name it, but he felt as if-as if he was Harmodius-so he was not Gabriel. And it was almost physically painful, almost like dreams of leprosy or watching another man get kicked hard in the groin.

There was more light.

He stepped towards the golden door, which seemed farther away.

The lights grew brighter.

Gabriel moved-decisively. He ran across the tiles, past the mirror and, to his immense relief, the door did not flee before him and he grasped the golden handle. He pulled the door open and found Prudentia standing at the other side with an arm outstretched to him and he stumbled through.

He stood in his own palace and breathed deep. The sun fell like golden fire from the dome overhead and outside his green door, great gouts of green potentia rolled and seethed like the sea in a storm.

“Something is coming,” Prudentia said.

Gabriel patted her ivory hand.

“Was it bad?” she asked.

“Whatever that was, it misses its master,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think I could face it again.”

He surfaced into the real and looked around. It was still a brilliant spring day. Squirrels were running along branches that overhung the road.

“Stay sharp,” the captain yelled.

After the captain’s shout, every man looked around carefully, and for fifty jingling strides, the only sounds were those of horse hooves on stone, the woodpecker in the distance and the rattle of armour and horse harness.

The captain pushed his aethereal sense out as far as he could. He was surprised how far that was. He was not broadcasting-to do so would be to announce his presence as far away as the villages of the Huran. Instead, he listened passively. He was able to detect a strong presence well to the east; another enormous presence the same distance and more to the north that almost had to be his mother.

The Wyrm was a dull warmth from over the aethereal horizon-a line that had almost nothing to do with the actual horizon. It had never occurred to the captain before that moment to ask why distances and horizons were different in the aethereal , but in that moment, he thought of how he might hide-if he could map the gradients of power.

Distraction is one of the most dangerous failings in a hermeticist. He was building a mapping process in his memory palace when he realized that his horse had stopped moving.

Ser Gavin gave him a look left over from childhood. “Fat lot of good you are, my overmighty brother,” he said. “Asleep?”

Gabriel looked round, disconcerted. The wagon was rolling to a stop in front of the goodwife’s house. The older girl had just run inside, calling for her mother, and the archers were leering. The girl had been on the porch, spinning, wearing only a shift.

Francis Atcourt was leering, too. Gabriel raised an eyebrow and the dapper knight raised his and grinned.

“Not something I expect to see in the woods every day-a girl that pretty,” he said.

Chris Foliak, Atcourt’s usual partner in crime, grunted. “And she’s coming with us,” he said.

“And we’re protecting her from the monsters ,” Ser Gabriel said slowly. “Not, gentlemen, being the monsters ourselves.”

“I won’t hurt her at all!” Foliak said, grinning. But when he met the captain’s eye, his smile vanished. “Only having a joke, my lord.”

Gabriel reached out again. There was something-

Father Arnaud emerged with the goodwife.

“How can you be sure it was my man?” she asked on the porch.

“We can’t. But having seen the signs, the captain feels you’re better in the walls of Albinkirk.” Father Arnaud glanced at Ser Gabriel.

“Shall I describe him for you? The old da, he was not a tall man-”

Father Arnaud shook his head.

“But what if there’s some mistake, and I pack and leave?” she asked. “And he comes back looking for his bairns and a spot o’ supper?”

“Mama,” the older girl said carefully. She had a low voice and she was still wearing only a shift. “Mama, these gentlemen think there’s somewhat unnatural, right here. They want to go. They ain’t stayin’. If’n we want to be with them, we need to go.”

The goodwife looked around. “It’s me home,” she said quietly.

“And I hope that in a month you can return to it,” Gabriel said. “But for the moment, ma’am, I’d request you and your oldsters get everything you can into that wagon.”

The goodwife wrung her hands for as long as a child might take to count ten.

“Yes,” she said. “But what if it were’n my old man?”

“We’ll leave a note,” Ser Gabriel said.

“Ee can’t read,” the goodwife answered. “You take the kiddies and I’ll stay.”

“I’d rather you came, ma’am,” Ser Gabriel said.

She went in, and her two eldest, a boy and a girl, went to help. When the girl emerged with the first armload, she was fully dressed in a kirtle and a gown of good wool, which showed that she had some sense, or quick ears.

The boys began to move wooden crates and trunks into the wagon, and before the sun had sunk a finger’s width, the children-all twelve of them-were up on top of the load.

“By Saint Eustachios,” the woman said. “It’s lucky we’d scarce unpacked. I hate to leave my good spinning wheel. There it is. And my baskets. Good boy.”