Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

"Ironhair," I whispered, "I have a gift for you." I attended a meeting of the Council of Camulod the day after that, and left before the business was concluded. I knew few of the Councillors after my absence of so many years, and I found I had no patience now with the minutiae of government. On leaving, I sought out Tertius Lucca and asked him to walk with me, and as we strolled outside the gates of the fort I informed him that I intended to ignore my brother's request to send him personally with the extra thousand horsed His place, I said, was here in Camulod, where he was particularly suited, both by nature and by training, to oversees the conduct of the collective garrisons of the surrounding outposts and to work with the Council. I would send Philip with the cavalry reinforcements, I told him, and would hand over full command again to Lucca, until such time as Ambrose returned.

He listened, keeping his eyes cast down, and when I had completed what I had to say, he nodded, then saluted me, accepting my decree. I left him standing there beneath the walls and made my way to the bathhouse, feeling a grim excitement welling in my breast.

A short time later, I sat alone again in my own chambers, bare to the waist, repeating something I had once seen Lucanus do. I held one of Tressa's longest needles in my hand and I was sticking it gently, but judiciously, into my chest, moving it from place to place and taking note of what I felt. In most places, I felt the pain of a piercing needle. In many others, however, at least half a score of them, the metal needle slipped into my flesh without producing any sensation at all. Eventually I stopped what I was doing and sat there, staring into nothingness, empty and unmoved by the discovery. I had noticed the discoloured patches while lying in the steam room earlier: areas of whitish, dead looking skin, roughly circular in shape, the body hair within their boundaries already turning grey. Not lesions, yet, but growing. Mucius Quinto's "minor ailment of the skin. " Leprosy.

After a time, I rose and dressed again, wearing my finest leathers, and then sent for Philip, Falvo and Rufio. When they arrived, I told them to prepare to leave for Cambria in two days' time. I spent the remainder of the day poring through the warlocks' chests.

That night, I sought out Donuil and Shelagh to tell them I would be leaving Camulod for a time, and that they should not worry about me. Donuil I charged with looking after things while I was gone; Shelagh I charged with looking after Donuil. When Donuil sought to embrace me, I thrust him away and he fell back, abashed. Shelagh merely kissed her own palm and then laid it gently on my cheek. I heaved a deep, shaking breath, swallowed hard and left them.

Hours later, when the only people stirring were the night guards, I visited the stables, where I found a light, two wheeled cart and a plain, sturdy horse to pull it. I harnessed the animal and took it to my quartets, where I loaded four cases onto the cart. One of them contained Uther's armour.; Two more were the warlocks' chests. The last held a variety of things I thought I might need—clothing, and twine, a small hand axe, some coils of iron wire of varied thickness, some knives of varying sizes, fish hooks and lines, a matched set of shortsword and dagger, made by Publius Varrus, a polished mirror that had been my Aunt Luceiia's, my own long sword and Excalibur in its long, wooden case. ; I also took foodstuffs, scavenged from the kitchens: some? bread, slabs of both salted and smoked meat, a bag of flour, ; a smaller bag of salt, a clutch of onions and some corms of garlic, and the remainder of the olive oil, olives and wine brought to me by Germanus and carried safely home to me by the chief quartermaster. When I. had loaded everything,;! I swathed myself in an ankle length, black, threadbare garment which resembled a cloak, save that it had long, deep sleeves and a peaked, capacious hood that obscured my face. Then I hauled myself up to the cart's bench and set the horses moving, pulling the hood's deep cowl forward over my face. I had appropriated the garment that afternoon, from a peg outside the refectory where it had been; left hanging while its owner went in search of food. In return! I had left a heavy, woollen cloak of my own, sleeveless but" far finer than the one I took and much too fine for my intended purposes. As I expected, when I steered my cart out through the gates, shortly before dawn, the guards paid: no attention to my passing.

I reached my little, hidden valley of Avalon as the sun climbed high enough to throw long shadows from the surrounding trees down onto the waters of the tiny lake concealed within its depths, and I was keenly aware that seven whole years and more had passed since I had last been here, and that my Tress had lived her life and died without knowing of its existence. Cassandra's grave was barely noticeable now, its mound sunken to the level of the surrounding ground, and the door to the stone hut was still securely closed. This was my sanctuary; the world held no dominion over me here. The ropes that formed the cradle of my old bed were still strong enough to bear my weight, and I soon fell asleep, only to awaken within the hour, well rested and filled with a profound sense of calm as I listened to the song of birds in the woodlands around the tiny lake.

I spent some time thereafter gathering firewood, then lit a fire in the old firepit just beyond the door of the hut. I made a meal of cold, smoked meat and some of the bread that I had carried from the fort, and then I sat by the fire and opened up the warlocks' chests, retrieving my own copious notes and studying them closely. I must have been lost in them for many hours, because when I looked about again the sun had vanished and my fire was almost out, though I had fed it several times throughout the day. I coaxed it back to life again, noticing that the hoard of fuel I had amassed that morning now was almost gone, and thereafter I sat staring into the flames, lost in my thoughts as the light about me faded into dark.

Carthac was fearless, utterly so; Ironhair had said so in my dream. Strongarm had said the same: invincible, invulnerable, fearless, afraid of neither man nor beast. Horsa's Danes were fearless, too, according to all reports that I had heard. Savage, they were; invincible in their ferocity; implacable in their fierce hatred of any that withstood them or sought to thwart them; afraid, in all their godless pride and arrogance, of neither man nor beast.

My men were fearless, too, in war: invincible in their sure strength and confident that no mere human force could withstand diem. And yet I knew my men, in Camulod, had once known fear of me when I was young—not of my human strength, but of the mere suggestion that I, Merlyn, possessed powers that were more than human. Their fears had been unfounded, for the deeds that awed diem had all been achieved by trickery and mere suggestions fed by me into their willing minds. The most notorious of those had concerned the disappearance of Cassandra from a guarded room in the dead of night, and that had been no mere mischief. I had feared for the girl's life at the hands of some unknown assailant and had smuggled her away unseen before the guards were set to protect an empty room. The mystery came later, when I claimed to have been wakened by a dream that she was gone, and a subsequent search had proved this to be true. For years thereafter, soldiers walked in awe of me and watched me surreptitiously, awaiting further marvels. Those fearless soldiers, scorning man and beast, had nonetheless feared me and what I whispered to their minds of darknesses where their swords could not save them.

Now I had ranged before me, in the flickering firelight, an entire armoury of dark and fearsome tools, all of which could bring death and other terrifying effects, all of them garnered by two men whose evil minds possessed no other wish than to bring terror to the minds of ordinary men by causing death through awesome, mystifying and unnatural means. I had small, black, envenomed thorns that would bring instant, painful death to anyone they pricked, and I possessed a green and noxious paste that carried fiery poison that would burn a man to death from within, from the merest scratch. I had tray upon tray of unguents and oils and powders and salts and crystals, dried, withered berries, seeds and nuts, and crushed admixtures of all kinds; grasses and twigs and unknown, fibrous substances that burned with noxious, stultifying smoke; and all of these things brought death, in one form or another.