Miles Cameron - The Red Knight

‘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.

‘I should not do this today,’ he told the fattest cat. The big feline didn’t seem to care.

He knelt on the floor, not to pray, but to draw. Putting a sliver of wood into a slot in the slate, he used the string, shaking with the tension in his hands, to guide his hand through a perfect circle, and into the circle, with the help of the ruler and a sword, he inscribed a pentagram. He wrote his invocation to God and to Hermes Trismegistus in High Archaic around the outside, and only the clamour of the cats for their noonday feast kept him from attempting his work right there and then.

‘All three of you are man’s best practice for dealing with demons,’ he said as he fed them fresh salmon, new caught in the River Albin and sold in the market.

They ignored him and ate, and then rubbed against him with loud protests of eternal love.

But his words gave him pause, and he unlocked the heavy oak door to the tower chamber and walked down one hundred and twenty-two steps to his sitting room where Mastiff, the Queen’s man, sat reading in an armchair. The man leapt to his feet when the Magus appeared.

The Magus raised an eyebrow and the man bowed. But Harmodius was in a hurry – a hurry of passion – and little incivilities would have to wait. ‘Be so kind as to hurry and beg the Queen’s indulgence: would she do me the kindness to pay me a visit?’ he asked, and handed the man a plain copper coin – a sign between them. ‘And ask my laundress to pay me a visit?.’ He handed over a handful of small silver change. Some of the coins were as small as sequins.

Mastiff took the coins and bowed. He was used to the Magus and his odd ways, so he hurried off as if his life depended on the journey.

The Magus poured himself a cup of wine and drank it off, stared out the window, and tried to convince himself to let it go for a day. Who would care?

But he felt ten years younger, and when he thought of what he was about to prove he shook his head, and his hand trembled on the cup.

He heard her light step in the hall, and he rose and bowed deeply when she entered.

‘La,’ she said, and her presence seemed to fill the room. ‘I was just saying to my Mary – I’m bored!’ She laughed, and her laugh rose to the high rafters.

‘I need you, your Grace,’ he said with a deep bow.

She smiled at him, and the warmth of it left him more light headed still. Afterwards, he could never decide whether lust played a part in what he felt for her; the feeling was strong, possessive, awesome, and dangerous.

‘I am determined to work a summoning, your Grace, and would have you by me to steady my hand. I hope it will be wonderful.’ He bowed over hers.

‘My dear old man, she looked at him tenderly. He felt in her regard a flaw – she pitied him. ‘I honour your efforts, but don’t tax yourself to impress me!’

He refused to be annoyed. ‘Your Grace, I have made such summonings many times. They are always fraught with peril, and like swimming, only a fool does such a thing alone.’ In his mind’s eye, he imagined swimming with her, and he swallowed heavily.

‘I doubt that I can do anything to support a mighty practitioner such as you – I, who only feel the sun’s rays on my skin, and you, who feel his power in your very soul.’ But she went to the base of the long staircase eagerly and led him to the top, her feet lighter on the treads than his by half a century. And yet he was not breathing hard when they reached the top.

She kicked off her red shoes on the landing and entered his chamber carefully, barefoot, avoiding the precise markings on the floor. She paused to look at them. ‘Master, I have never seen you work something so – daring!’ she said, and this time her admiration was unfeigned.

She went to stand in the sun which now covered the east wall instead of the west. She stood there studying the equations and lines of poetry, and then she began to scratch the ears of the old fat cat.

He purred a moment, sank his fangs into her palm, and mewed when she swatted him with her other hand.

Harmodius shook his head and poured honey on the punctures the cat had left. ‘I’ve never known him to bite before,’ he said.

She shrugged with an impish smile and licked the honey.

He, too, removed his shoes.

He went to his wall of writing and pushed his nose close, reading two lines written in silver pencil. Then, taking up a small ebony wand, he wrote the two lines in the air, and left letters of bright fire behind – thinner than the thinnest hair, and yet perfectly visible from where either of them stood.

‘Oh!’ said the Queen.

He smiled at her. He had the briefest temptation to kiss her and another desire, equal but virtually opposite, to back out of the whole thing.

She reminded him of-

‘Bah,’ he said. ‘Are you ready, your Grace?’

She smiled and nodded.

‘Kaleo se, CHARUN,’ the Magus said, and the light over the pentagram paled.

The Queen took a step to the right, and stood in the full beam of the sun from the high windows, and the old cat rubbed against her bare leg.

Shadow began to fill the pentagram. The Magus took up his staff, and held the hollow golden end like a spear point between himself and the inscribed sign on the floor.

‘Who calls me?’ came a whisper from the fissure in light that flickered like a butterfly above the pentagram.

‘ KALEO ,’ Harmodius insisted.

Charun manifested beneath the shadow. The Magus felt his ears pop, and the sun seemed dimmed.

‘Ahhh,’ he hissed.

‘Power for knowledge,’ Harmodius said.

The shadows were drawn into a creature that was like a man, except he was taller than the highest bookcase, naked, a deep white veined in blue like old marble, with tough, leathery wings that swept majestically from well above his head to the floor in a perfect arc that any artist would have admired.

The smell he brought with him was alien – like the smell of lye soap being burned. Neither clean nor foul. And his eyes were a perfect, black blank. He carried a sword as tall as a man and wickedly barbed, and his head held both alien horror and angelic beauty in one – an ebony-black beak inlaid with gold; huge, almond shaped eyes, deep and endless blue like twin sapphires, and a bony crest filled with hair, like the decoration on an Archaic helmet.