Gabriel Muriens, the Red Knight, the Captain, the Megas Dukas, the Duke of Thrake, and possessor of another dozen titles heaped on him by a grateful Emperor, took a long pull from his own jack of black, sweet winter ale and beamed. “We’ll have forage,” he said. “It’s been warmer in the Brogat. It’s spring on the Albin.” He smiled. “And this is only a tithe of my company.” The smile grew warmer as he watched the recruiting table set against the wall. The adventurous young of six counties and three nations were cued up. “But it’s growing,” he added.
Forty of the Keeper’s people, most in his livery and all his kin, stood like soldiers at the long counter and served ale at an astounding rate. Gabriel watched them with the pleasure that a professional receives in watching others practise their craft-he enjoyed the smooth efficiency with which the Keeper’s wife kept her tallies, the speed with which money was collected or tally sticks were notched, and the ready ease with which casks were broached, emptied into pitchers, the said pitchers filled flagons or jacks or battered mugs and cans, all the while the staff moving up to the counter and then back to the broached kegs with the steady regularity of a company of crossbowmen loosing bolts by rotation and volley.
“They all seem to have coin to spend,” the Keeper admitted grudgingly. His elder daughter Sarah-a beautiful girl with red hair, married and widowed and now with a bairn, currently held by a cousin-stood where Sauce had been and sang an old song-a very old song. It had no chorus, and the Hillmen began to make sounds-like a low polyphonic hum-to accompany her singing. When one of the Morean musicians began to pluck the tune on his mandolin, a rough hand closed on his shoulder and he ceased.
The Keeper watched his daughter for long enough that his wife stopped taking money and looked at him. But then he shrugged. “They have money, as I say. You had some adventures out east, I hear?”
The Red Knight settled his shoulder comfortably into the corner between a low shelf and a heavy oak cupboard behind the bar. “We did,” he said.
The Keeper met his eye. “I’ve heard all the news, and none of it makes much sense. Tell it me, if you’d be so kind.”
Gabriel paused to finish his ale and look at the bottom of his silver cup. Then he gave the Keeper a wry smile. “It’s not a brief story,” he said.
The Keeper raised an eyebrow and glanced out at the sea of men. Ser Alcaeus was being called for by the crowd, and his name was chanted. “I couldn’t leave you even if I wanted,” the Keeper said. “They’d lynch me.”
Gabriel shrugged. “So. Where do you want me to begin?”
Sarah, flushed from the effort of singing, came under the bar and took her baby back from her cousin. She grinned at the Red Knight. “You’re going to tell a story?” she said. “Christ on the cross, Da! Everyone will want to hear!”
Gabriel nodded. Ale had magicked its way into his silver cup. The magick had been performed by a muscular young woman with a fine lace cap. She smiled at him.
“It’s not an easy story to start, sweeting.” He returned the serving girl’s smile with genteel interest.
Sarah wasn’t old enough to take much ambiguity. “Start at the beginning!” she said.
Gabriel made an odd motion with his mouth, almost like a rabbit moving its nose. “There is no beginning,” he said. “It just goes on and on into the past-an endless tale of motion and stillness.”
The Keeper rolled his eyes.
Gabriel realized he’d had too much to drink. “Fine. You recall the fight at Lissen Carak.”
Just behind the Red Knight, Tom Lachlan roared his dangerous laugh. Gabriel Muriens snapped his head around, and Lachlan-the Drover, now, almost seven feet of tartan-and grey-clad muscle, with a broad, silver-mounted belt and a sword as long as a shepherd’s crook-flipped the gate back on the bar and stepped through. “Boyo, we all remember the fight at Lissen Carak. That was a fight.”
Gabriel shrugged. “The magister who now styles himself Thorn-” He smiled grimly, paused, and pointed at a glass-shielded candle on the cupboard. A dozen moths of various sizes flitted about it.
Across the press of the crowd, Mag felt the pull of ops. She tensed.
He stood on the bright new mosaic floor of his memory. Prudentia stood once more on her plinth, and her statue was now a warm ivory rather than a cold marble, the features more mobile than they had been in his adolescence and her hair the same grey-black he remembered from his youth.
He knew in his heart that she was now a simulacrum not an embodied spirit, but she was the last gift that Harmodius the magister had left him, and he loved having her back.
“Immolate tinea consecutio aedificium,” he said.
Prudentia frowned. “Isn’t that a bit… dramatic?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’m renowned for my arrogance and my dramatic flair,” he said. “He’ll be blind and with a little luck, he’ll attribute it to the said arrogance. Consider it a smokescreen for our visitor. If he’s coming.”
She didn’t shrug. But somehow she conveyed a shrug, perhaps a sniff of disapproval, without moving an ivory muscle.
“Katherine! Thales! Iskander!” he said softly, and his memory palace began to spin.
The main room-the casting chamber-of his palace was constructed, or remembered, as a dome held aloft with three separate sets of arches. In among the arches were nooks containing statues of worthies; his last year as a practitioner had clarified and enhanced his skills to add another row.
On the bottom row were the bases of his power-represented by thirteen saints of the church, six men, six women, and an androgynous Saint Michael standing between them. Above the saints stood another tier, this one of the philosophers who had informed his youth-ancients of one sect or another from various of the Archaic eras. But now, above them stood a new tier; twelve worthies of a more modern age; six women and six men and one cloaked figure. Harmodius had installed them, and Gabriel had some reservations about what they might mean-but he knew Saint Aetius, who killed his emperor’s family; he knew King Jean le Preux, who stopped the Irk Conquest of Etrusca after the catastrophic collapse of the Archaic world; he knew Livia the empress and Argentia the great war queen of Iberia.
As he called the names, the statues he indicated moved-indeed, the whole tier on which they stood moved until all three tiers of statues had moved the figures he named to the correct position over the great talismanic symbol that guarded the green door at the end of the chamber. Recently, there had appeared another door, exactly opposite the green door-a small red door with a grille. He knew what lay there, but he went out of his way not to go too close to it. And set in the floor by Prudentia’s plinth was a bronze disc with silver letters and a small lever. Gabriel had designed it himself. He hoped never to use it.
“Pisces,” he said.
Immediately under the lowest tier of statues there was a band. The band looked like bronze, and on it were repoussed-apparently-and engraved and decorated in gold and silver and enamel a set of thirteen zodiacal symbols. This band also rotated, although it did so in the opposite direction to the statues.
Clear golden sunlight fell through the great carved crystal that was the dome above them, and it struck the fish of pisces and coalesced into a golden beam.
The great green door opened. Beyond it was a sparkling grate, as if someone had built a portcullis of white-hot iron. Through its grid came a green radiance that suffused the casting chamber and yet was somehow defined by the golden light of the dome.