I do not like the atmosphere in this castle, Mordion thought, when he and Hume were seated at one of the humbler tables and supper at last was served. It reminds me too much of – of—The name House of Balance hovered on the edge of Mordion’s mind. He pushed it away, back into hiding. Everyone here was on the make, plotting to get the better of someone else, and the centre of it all was that dark woman in purple. The conjuring display, besides giving them a grand entry, had been planned so that Mordion could do some unashamed mind-reading. The plotting was no more than he had expected, depressing as it was.
While Hume beside him tucked into the best meal of his young life, Mordion explained to the squires at their table that the silver man was not real and did not require food, and went on finding things out.
The outlaws Yam had talked about seemed to be a real threat. Most of the talk was about the renegade Artegal and the villain Stavely, and just whom the king was planning to send against them. And it seemed that the king was about to be married to the lady in purple. The king, Mordion thought, had a distinct air of wondering how this had come about. Evidently the marriage was of the lady’s choosing. As he gathered this, Mordion was startled to hear his own name. A mysterious monk had appeared on Bannustide, it seemed, and denounced Mordion as a traitor, before touching the Bannus and vanishing in a ball of flame. This, Mordion gathered, had happened quite recently. His name was fresh in everyone’s minds. He exchanged looks with Hume, warning Hume to go on calling him Agenos. And he thanked his stars for the odd premonition which had caused him to tell that orange-haired seneschal that his name was Agenos.
As the dishes were cleared away, everyone went expectant. Someone on the dais signalled, and two of the sturdiest squires at Mordion’s table rushed up there to raise Ambitas on his cushions so that everyone in the hall could see him.
“We have decided,” Ambitas proclaimed, “to send a force of picked men against the outlaws who so basely threaten our realm. The force will consist of the forty mounted men of Sir Bedefer’s troop and will leave at dawn tomorrow. It will be commanded by our Champion Sir Fors.” He lay back on his cushions, looking unwell, and signed to his squires to carry him away.
There was uproar for a time. “Forty men!” Mordion heard. “This is mad! There are several hundred outlaws!” During the uproar, Sir Bedefer got up and walked out. Sir Fors watched him go with a sympathetic shake of his head and the wry smile of a nice, modest man. It was a smile that kept struggling not to become a smirk. Morgan La Trey gave Sir Fors a look of cool contempt as she beckoned her ladies and sailed out of the hall. After she had gone, but not until then, several people said that the king’s decision was certainly her doing, and that no good would come of it. She was evidently much feared.
Here a squire appeared at Mordion’s elbow and summoned him to the king.
“Get Yam to that room Sir Harrisoun gave us,” Mordion told Hume. Yam was lying in the boat over by the wall, pretending to be inanimate. Large numbers of people were trying to prod him to see if he was really a man in disguise. Hume nodded and hastened over there, while Mordion followed the squire.
He was led to a rich vaulted bedchamber with a huge fire blazing in its wide grate. Ambitas lay propped on an embroidered couch close to the hearth. Mordion wondered how the king could stand the heat. Sweat started off him even while he stood in the doorway.
“I need warmth for my great sickness, you know,” Ambitas explained, beckoning Mordion to approach.
Mordion loosened the neck of his jacket and threw back his cloak. “How can I serve Your Majesty?” he asked when he was as near the fire as he could bear. The form of his question gave him an uncomfortable twinge. He looked down at the king’s pink, ordinary face on the firelit pillows, and wondered how anyone could serve such a second-rate little man.
“It’s this wound of mine,” Ambitas quavered. “It won’t be healed, you know. They tell me you’re a great physician.”
“I have some small skill,” Mordion said, quite accurately.
“You certainly look as if you do,” Ambitas observed. “A sort of – er – clinical look – no offence of course, my dear Agenos – surgical, you might say. Do you think you would be so good as to look at my wound, perhaps apply a salve – you know – With my wedding coming on—” He trailed off and lay looking at Mordion anxiously.
“Of course. If Your Majesty would be so good as to disrobe the afflicted part,” Mordion said, and wondered what he would do if the disease was beyond him. Magic, as he had discovered trying to realify Hume, could only do so much.
“Yes, yes. Our thanks.” Very slowly, with a number of nervous glances at Mordion, Ambitas drew up his gold-embroidered tunic and the cambric shirt beneath to display his bulging pink side. “What’s your verdict?” he asked anxiously.
Mordion stared down at the large purple bruise over the king’s ribs. It was a yellow and red and brown bruise, as well as purple, going rainbow-like the way bruises do when they are getting better.
He fought himself not to laugh. It came to Mordion then that there had been many times when he had wanted to laugh at such a man as this, but there had been some kind of physical block – acute nausea that stopped him even smiling. Now there was no block, and he had a fierce struggle to keep his face straight. He also, to his surprise, remembered how Ambitas had received this so-called wound.
They had gone into the farmhouse, he and this little man, and another, bigger man, where they had suddenly been confronted by a youth – the same orange-haired youth people now called Sir Harrisoun – swinging an enormous sword at the little man. Mordion had leapt to stop the sword – well, anyone would, he thought uncomfortably, remembering the quite inordinate, unreasonable, sickening shame he had felt when Sir Harrisoun proved to be coming from exactly the opposite direction. It was as if Mordion had seen the attack in a mirror. He felt true despair at being fooled. He remembered the thwack as the flat of the sword met Ambitas. He remembered whirling round. Then nothing. It was bewildering.
“It’s an awful wound, isn’t it?” Ambitas prompted him, mistaking the reason for Mordion’s bewilderment.
Mordion understood this part of the matter at least. “Indeed it is, Your Majesty,” he said, and bit the inside of his cheek, hard, to stop the whinny of laughter he could hear escaping into his voice. “I have a salve here in my pouch that may ease it, but I can promise you no healing for such a wound as that.”
“But in view of my approaching wedding—” Ambitas prompted him again.
“It would be unfair to both you and your lady to marry just at present,” Mordion agreed. He was forced to stroke his beard gravely in order to hide the way his mouth kept trying to spread. He wished he could tell Ann about this! “In view of the seriousness of what I see there, I would advise you to postpone your wedding for at least a year.”
Ambitas stretched out both hands and grasped damply at Mordion’s wrist. “A year!” he said delightedly. “What a terrible long time to wait! My dear magician, what reward can I give you for this expert advice? Name any gift you like.”
“Nothing for myself,” Mordion said. “But my young assistant wishes to be trained as a knight. If Your Majesty—”
“Agreed!” cried Ambitas. “I’ll give Bedefer orders about it right away.”
Mordion bowed and more or less fled from the king’s hot bedroom. For a short while, he struggled with the whinnies of laughter that kept bursting out of him. Some vestige of decorum made him feel it was not quite right to laugh at the king. Besides, he ought to get to Hume and give him the glad news. But before long, he was staggering about. In the end, he had to pitch himself into the first empty stairway he came to, where he sat on the stone steps and fairly roared. It seemed to him that he had never enjoyed laughing so much in his life.
Morgan La Trey stood in the tower room she had discovered and taken as her own. The occult symbols drawn on the walls flickered in the light of the black candles that surrounded her. A pan of charcoal smoked in the ce
ntre of the round room, filling it with incense and the smell of burning blood.
“Bannus!” she said. “Appear before me. Bannus, I order you to appear!”
She waited in the choking smoke pouring up from the pan.
“I command you, Bannus!” she said a third time.
A brightness came into being behind the smoke – a brightness that was very pure and white, but which cast a dull red light on the groins of the ceiling. The redness seemed to be caused by the scarlet cloth that covered the great flat chalice floating behind the smoke.
Morgan La Trey smiled triumphantly. She had done it!
The smoke and the smell were absorbed into radiant scents of may blossoms and bluebells in an open wood. Under the red cloth, the intricate gold work of the chalice was clear and dazzling in its beauty. A voice spoke. It was deep for a woman and high for a man, and as beautiful as the chalice.
“Why do you call upon me, Morgan La Trey?”
She was almost awed, but she said, “I must have your help in dealing with my enemy. He has risen from the grave to haunt me again. Tonight he arrived at this castle disguised as a magician, and he’s with the king at this moment, poisoning the kings mind against me.”
“And what help do you wish me to give you?” asked the beautiful voice.
“I want to know how to kill him – for good this time,” she said.
There was a pause. The chalice hovered thoughtfully.
“There is a poison,” the voice said at length, “clear as water, that has no smell, whose very touch can be fatal to those who have lived too long. I can tell you how to make it if you wish.”
“Tell me,” she said.
The Bannus told her, while she wrote the ingredients and method down feverishly by the light of it. She noticed, as she wrote, that it floated just where she could not reach it all the time. She smiled. She knew she could always summon it again. But she had things to do before she was ready to seize the Bannus and take command.
Sir Fors and his company rode away soon after dawn the next day, making a brave show of pennants fluttering, gold on green and red on white, as they thundered over the wooden bridge across the lake. Hume and Mordion watched from the battlements along with most of the other people in the castle.
“I wish I was going!” Hume said.
“I’m glad you’re not. I think there are far too few of them,” Mordion told him.
“Of course there are too few!” said the man standing next to them. “Even if the outlaws were unorganised, which they’re not, they should have sent a decent-sized force and made sure!”
Mordion turned. It was Sir Bedefer, looking very sturdy and plain in a buff-coloured robe. Sir Bedefer stood with his feet wide and surveyed Mordion. Both of them liked what they saw.
“The outlaws don’t love us,” Sir Bedefer said, turning back to watch the soldiers ride glinting among the trees on the other side of the lake. “We raided them for food. Not what I would have chosen to do, but I didn’t have a say.” Then, in an abrupt way, which was clearly the way he did things, he said, “That silver man of yours – did you make him?”
“Remade him really,” Mordion confessed. “Hume found him damaged and I mended him.”
“Skilful,” Sir Bedefer commented. “I’d like to take a look at him if you’d let me. Does he fight?”
“Not very well. He’s forbidden to hurt humans,” Mordion said glancing at Hume. Seeing Hume beginning to glower, he added, “But he speaks.”
“Doesn’t surprise me somehow,” said Sir Bedefer. The last soldiers had disappeared among the trees by then. Sir Bedefer looked at Hume. “Is this the lad that wants to be a knight?” Hume nodded, glowing. “Then come with me now,” said Sir Bedefer, “and we’ll set you drilling.”
They walked together along the battlements towards the steps that led down to the outer court. “Think he’ll make it?” Sir Bedefer asked Mordion quietly, nodding at Hume.
“I think he’ll be wasted on it,” Mordion said frankly, “but it’s what he wants.”
Sir Bedefer raised his eyebrows. “Sounds as if you’re speaking from your own experience, magician. You trained once, did you?”
A shrewd man, Sir Bedefer. Mordion realised that he had, once again, in the way Ann always objected to, been confusing his own feelings with Hume’s. If Hume were to grow into someone like Sir Bedefer, it would be no bad thing – except that Sir Bedefer was probably wasted on it too. “Yes, I trained,” he said. “It did me no good.”
A group of ladies began to descend the steps. “Thought so,” Sir Bedefer said, as they all stood back politely to let the ladies pass. “Pretty sight, aren’t they?” he added, nodding at the ladies.
They were indeed, with their slender waists, floating headdresses and different-coloured gowns. Mordion had to admit that this was not a sight you could get in the forest. As the girls rustled past, talking and laughing, he saw that one of them was the pretty blonde lady who had lent him her girdle. Hume was staring at her, just as he had done last night. He seemed utterly smitten. The next lady to go past was shorter, plumper, with tip-tilted cheekbones.
“Ann!” said Mordion.
He knows me! Vierran whirled round and encountered Mordion’s amazed and amazing smile. The hard misery in her innards broke up before a huge spreading warmth. “My name’s Vierran,” she said. She could feel her face beaming like Mordion’s.
“I always thought it ought to be longer than Ann,” he said.
Everyone edged round them and left them standing together at the top of the steps.
“What changed it?” asked Mordion. “The name. The Bannus?”
“Damn Bannus!” she said. “I’ve a bone to pick with it when I catch it!” It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him exactly why, but she looked up into his face and realised he still did not know. The face smiling down at her was not the Servant’s, nor was it quite the Mordion of the wood. But he’s getting there, she thought. And I’m not going to spoil this moment for anything! Instead, she said something that struck her as just as urgent. “How old do you think I am?”
Mordion surveyed her, up and down. Vierran was glad to see he seemed to enjoy doing that. “It’s hard to tell,” he said. “You look younger in those pretty clothes. But I’ve always thought you were about twenty.”
“Twenty-one really.” Vierran’s face was hot at the memory of herself perched in that tree. “Do you know how old you are?”
“No,” said Mordion.
Vierran knew the Servant was twenty-nine. She did not tell him. She picked up the trailing skirt of the pretty dress – which was a terrible nuisance, but if Mordion found it pretty it was worth it – and began to go down the steps. “Were you just put in the castle, like me?” she asked.
“No, we had to make our way here,” Mordion said. “Yam objected of course. And—Oh, and can we be overheard here? This is screamingly funny.” They looked round and found they were quite alone, so as they slowly descended the steps he told her about the famous wound of King Ambitas. By the time they reached the courtyard neither of them could speak for laughing.
They spent the rest of the day together – or maybe it was several days. As usual, with the Bannus, it was hard to tell. Sometimes they walked about, but most of the time they spent sitting together on a bench against the wall of the castle hall, where someone could find Vierran when Morgan La Trey wanted her.
Being called away to La Trey was a great annoyance to Vierran. As far as she was concerned, life centred around that bench in the hall, where things seemed to get better and better and ever more joyful, moving towards something that was even more splendid – though Vierran did not quite put into words what that might be. She just seemed to be waiting for it, breathlessly. When she trudged off to attend to the wedding dress again, she was in a state of suspended animation.
“Keep your mind on what you’re doing!” La Trey snapped at her.
“Sorry, my lady,” Vierran mumbled around the pins in her mouth.
br /> “You’ve lost your head to that magician creature, haven’t you?” said La Trey. “Don’t bother to tell me. I know. How far have you been fool enough to go with him, that’s what I want to know. Do you intend to marry the man? Do magicians marry?”
Heat surged across Vierran’s face in waves. She seemed to have spent most of today blushing. She bent her head to hide it, and considered.
La Trey was being bitchy. But as Reigner Three she was probably genuinely trying to find out whether Vierran had obeyed Reigner One’s command. It would help Mordion no end if both these Reigners lost interest in him, which they might, if they thought there were new Servants coming along. And the Bannus had given Vierran a way to fool them. Hume. Vierran spat the pins out into her hand and raised her head. At the thought of what she was going to do, her face was so red that her neck felt swollen, but who cared if it helped Mordion? “I have made a child with Agenos, my lady,” she said solemnly.
“What a perfect little fool you are!” said La Trey. “Run away and don’t come back until you can concentrate.” And she smiled as Vierran left, in a way that Vierran was not sure she liked at all.
Hume himself was in the hall when Vierran came back. He had been appearing there from time to time all day, dressed in a squire’s cloak and tunic of the same faded blue-purple he always wore. Each time he came in, he was harder and leaner as if he had put in many days of training. Hume was a sore point with Vierran at that moment. She felt shaken and drained and irritable after her confession to La Trey. She looked sourly across the hall and saw that Hume was once again hanging wistfully around Lady Sylvia. He seemed to have had a lot of time to do that. Lady Sylvia was being very kind and adult, keeping Hume at a distance without hurting his feelings. Nice of her, Vierran thought irritably. But then Siri – if not Lady Sylvia – had had a lot of practice.