The captain nodded. ‘I feel as if he did. Or perhaps he didn’t like the taste?’ he tried to grin and gave it up. ‘A cup of water, Jacques.’
Jacques backed up a step, took the bolt from the action and used the goat’s foot at his belt to slowly unlever the string. ‘Loons,’ he muttered, as he left the room.
When he was gone, the Magus leaned forward. ‘How powerful are you, boy? Your mother never said a word.’
The captain’s heart beat faster at the word mother, and flashed on his beautiful mother, drunk and violent and hitting him-
‘Don’t mention my mother again.’ He sounded childish, even to himself.
Harmodius hooked a stool over with his staff and sat. ‘All right, boy, sod your mother. She was never any friend of mine. How powerful are you?’
The captain sat back, trying to recover his – his sense of himself. His poise. His captainness.
‘I have a good deal of raw power, and I had a good tutor until-’ He paused.
‘Until you ran away and faked your death,’ the Magus concluded. ‘Which of course you did with a phantasm. Of course you did.’ He shook his head.
‘I didn’t mean to fake it,’ the captain said.
The Magus smiled. ‘I was young and angry and hurt once, too, lad,’ he said. ‘Despite appearances. Never mind – cold comfort. I glimpsed your memory palace – magnificent. The entity within it – who is she?’
‘My tutor,’ the captain said.
There was a long pause. Harmodius cleared his throat. ‘You- ?’
The captain shrugged. ‘No I didn’t kill her. She was dying – my mother and my brothers, they . . . never mind. I saved what I could.’
The Magus narrowed his eyes. ‘That’s a human woman bound to a statue in a memory palace?’ he asked. ‘Inside your head.’
The captain sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Heresy, thaumaturgy, necromancy, gross impiety, and perhaps kidnapping too,’ Harmodius said. ‘I don’t know whether to arrest you or ask how you did it.’
‘She helped me. She still does,’ the captain said.
‘How many of the hundred workings do you know?’ the Magus asked.
‘The hundred workings, of which there are at least a hundred and forty-four, and perhaps as many as four hundred?’ the captain asked.
Jacques came in with a tray – apple cider, water, wine.
‘No one comes in,’ the captain said.
Jacques made a face that suggested that he was no fool – but perhaps his master was – and left.
The Magus fingered his beard. ‘Hmmm,’ he said noncommittally.
‘I can work more than a hundred and fifty of them,’ the captain said. He shrugged.
‘It was a splendid memory machine,’ the Magus replied. ‘Why – if I may ask – aren’t you the shining light of Hermeticism?’
The captain picked up his cup of water and drained it. ‘It is not what I want.’
The Magus shocked him by nodding.
The captain leaned forward. ‘That’s it? You nod?’
The Magus spread his hands. ‘I’m keep saying I’m no fool, lad. So your mother trained you all your life to be a magus, I’ll guess. Brilliant tutor, special powers. It all but drips off you – you know that?’
The captain laughed. It was a laugh full of anger, self-pity, brutal pain. A very young, horrible laugh he’d hoped he’d left behind him. ‘She-’ He paused. ‘Fuck it, I’m not in a revealing mood, old man.’
The old Magus sat still. Then he took the wine flagon, poured a cup, and drank it off. ‘The thing is,’ he began carefully, ‘the thing is, you are like a vault full of grain, or armour, or naphtha – waiting to be used in the defence of this fortress, and I’m not sure I can let you stay locked.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve discovered something. Something so very important that I’m afraid I’m not very interested in what men call morality right now. So I’m sorry for the hurt your bitch mother caused you – but your wallowing in self-pity is not going to save lives, especially mine.’
Their eyes locked.
‘A vault full of naphtha,’ the captain said, dreamily. ‘I have a vault full of naphtha.’
‘She taught you well, this tutor of yours,’ Harmodius said. ‘Now listen, Captain. The mind that opposes us is not some boglin chief from the hills – nor even an adversarius, nor even a draconis singularis. This is the shell of a man who was the greatest of our order, who has given himself to the Wild for power and mastery and as a result is, quite frankly, godlike. I don’t know why he wants this place – or rather, I can guess at some surface reasons, but I can’t guess what he really wants. Do you understand me, boy?’
The captain nodded. ‘I have a thought or two in my head, thanks. I have to help you, if we’re going to make it.’
‘Even in the moment of his treason, he was too smart for me,’ Harmodius said, ‘although, for my sins, I’ve only had to face my own failure in the last week.’ He shrugged and sat back. He seemed suddenly smaller.
The captain downed the soft cider in four long gulps.
‘I’d like to survive this, too,’ he said. He sighed. ‘I’m not against the use of power. I use it.’
Harmodius looked up. ‘Can you channel?’ he asked.
The captain frowned. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never done it. And besides, my strength is poor. Prudentia taught that we grow in strength by the ceaseless exertion of muscle, and that the exercise of power is no different.’
The Magus nodded. ‘True. Mostly true. You have a unique access to the power of the Wild.’ He shrugged.
‘Mother raised me to be the Antichrist,’ said the captain bitterly. ‘What do you expect?’
Harmodius shrugged. ‘You can wallow or you can grow. I doubt you can do both.’ He leaned forward. ‘So listen. So far, everything he has done is foreplay. He has thousands of fresh-minted boglins; he has all the spectrum of fearsome boogiemen of the northern Wild – trolls, wyverns, daemons; Outwallers; irks. He has the power to cast a cage on you – on you who can tap directly into the Power of the Wild. When he comes against us in full measure he will destroy us utterly.’
The captain shrugged and drank some wine. ‘Best surrender then,’ he said with a sneer.
‘Wake up, boy! This is serious!’ The old man slapped the table.
They glowered at each other.
‘I need your powers to be deployed for us,’ Harmodius said. ‘Can you take instruction?’
The captain looked away. ‘Yes,’ he muttered. He sat back and was suddenly serious. He raised his eyes. ‘Yes, Harmodius. I will take your instruction and stop rebelling against your obvious authority for no better reason than that you remind me of my not-father.’
Harmodius shrugged. ‘I don’t drink enough to remind you of your odious not-father,’ he said.
‘You left out the Jacks,’ the captain put in. ‘When you were listing his overwhelming strength. We caught some of them in camp, in our first sortie. Now he’s moved them elsewhere and I’ve lost them.’
‘Jacks?’ Harmodius asked. ‘Rebels?’
‘Like enough,’ the captain said. ‘More than rebels. Men who want change.’
‘You sound sympathetic,’ Harmodius said.
‘If I’d been born in a crofter’s hut, I’d be a Jack.’ The captain looked at his armour on its rack as if contemplating the social divide.
Harmodius shrugged. ‘How very Archaic of you.’ He chuckled.
‘Things are worse for the commons than they were in my boyhood,’ the captain asserted.
Harmodius stroked his beard and poured a cup of wine. ‘Lad, surely you have recognised that things are worse for everyone? Things are falling apart. The Wild is winning – not by great victories, but by simple entropy. We have fewer farms and fewer men. I saw it riding here. Alba is failing. And this fight – this little fight for an obscure castle that holds a river crossing vital to an agricultural fair – is turning into the fight of your generation. The odds are always long for us. We are never wise – when we are rich, we squander our riches fighting each other and building churches. When we are poor, we fight among ourselves for scraps – and always, the Wild is there to take the unploughed fields.’