Chapter One
The door creaked open very slowly. Spiders’ webs crisscrossed the gap; like seaweed clinging to a dead ship. The room was filling with an opaque light which made it difficult to distinguish feature or form, and as the distance between wall and door extended to two feet, Rozelle edged forward. He felt like a sleepwalker as he pressed his hand against the door, stretching and breaking the web curtain. He had never thought of himself as a coward but he could feel the tingling of hair rising on the nape of his neck and, quite suddenly, the thought of entering this long locked sanctuary left him with a parched mouth and nagging belly. So many times as a child he had hoped to peak at what lay inside, climbing the stairs like a foreign spy, he would try the handle, which was always locked, and then press his head against the door and listen, with shallow breath and intense concentration, to hear what existed on the other side. His childish imagination had dreamed up strange beings, breathing back, but had it been his imagination? And still the door continued to move. Soft down, the cobwebs fell across his face, his eyes slowly acclimatising to the strange light.
Then he became aware that he was not alone. The windows of this, the top tower room, had been shuttered, but here and there, time and erosion had done their work and rats’ tails of twilight poked through the cracks. It was that light which exists just at the point where day surrenders to night, misty and ethereal, where a sane man can imagine all kinds of fanciful things. He knew that his sanity was not in doubt and, although he did have the odd flight of fancy, he had been pre-warned that there was such in this room to unsettle the bravest of men. Anticipation of the unknown he recognised was always worse than the actual event, usually, so he forced himself forward, then again, he thought, you could be wrong and his heart leapt to his mouth. There in front of him, not more than twenty feet away were a group of figures. He turned to look for Xavier, but there was no sign of him. Maybe it was a trick, some kind of test, one of the magician’s brilliant illusions. His eyes still could not decide. He inched forward, his hand moving down onto the hilt of his sword. He felt a gust of air and Xavier appeared in front of him.
“You will have no need to unsheathe that.”
The shock of this sudden appearance on his already jangling nerves almost gave Rozelle heart failure, and he stopped dead in his tracks. In front of him, seated on a raised dais in a full circle and facing outwards were seven figures. As he moved closer, he could see that in the centre of the circle there appeared to be a woman. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to stare into Xavier’s eyes.
“I know that all this,” Xavier said with a sweep of his arm, “appears outlandish, but believe me my boy, there is method in my madness.”
Rozelle watch as Xavier cracked his staff on the floor and light flooded the room. Twilight was replaced by the intense light of hundreds of candles floating in the air; the scene they revealed left him mute.
The figure in the centre was indeed a woman, and what a beauty. He put out his hand to touch, but failed to make contact. His hand stopped in mid air and no amount of pressure would make it move any further. He turned again to look at his father, his eyes pleading for an explanation.
“The lady, Rozelle, was your mother,” said Xavier, watching to see what effect his words might have on the boy.
He looked blankly at his father who had started to repeat, “She was your mothe……”
Rozelle halted him in mid flow, “If this lady is my mother, why have you kept her imprisoned here in this stinking tomb? What awful thing could she have done to you to make you do this? How long have you kept her here and who are these other poor souls trapped here with her? Go on father; tell me, if you dare...”
Rozelle ended his outburst by releasing his hold and pushed the old man to the floor. Each syllable he had spoken had been accompanied by an ever-increasing pincer grip on Xavier’s shoulders, and his nails had dug so hard into the sorcerer’s skin, that he had drawn blood. Xavier had risen to his feet but was moving away from him.
“Before I give you an explanation I would ask that you refrain from physical violence and take a seat.”
The murderous light in Rozelle’s eyes did not dim but he kicked shut the door and drew a chair from the wall and sat, watching Xavier knowing the boy who had been his son would never be the same, that something was lost this day.
He saw his father struggle to structure the words of what needed to be said, “You have read most of the books that this fortress holds. What I am about to tell you does not exist in the books, because books are written by the living, the victors, the dead are unnamed or defamed. So what I shall tell you now is the truth, known only to me, and now to you. Everything I have done over the past twenty years had been done for you and for a cause more important than either us, or anyone else for that matter. It may be that you will want to run from here when you hear what I have to say, and I wouldn’t blame you, or think any less of you, but I will warn you that it isn’t yet time for you to leave and I must have your sworn oath, Rozelle, that under no circumstances will you try to go beyond the forest for thirteen days.”
Sullenly he agreed.
“I am close to three hundred years old and have limited time left, so I would be much obliged if you could dispense with the sulking and give me a fair hearing.”
For the first time since his father had started talking Rozelle looked directly at him, with a look of complete incredulity, “I knew you were old but I never suspected you were that old.”
Xavier had smiled at him, “Sometimes I forget how old I am myself. But when I was a young man I was apprenticed to an Eastern sorcerer called Ahrim, an exceptional man, a great man, and one who was genuinely recognised as being a truly good man. He was engaged as tutor to teach the Knights of Mertolan in the ways of the ancient mysteries of the arcane arts and I, as his apprentice, went too. When finally Ahrim succumbed and entered his ‘sleeping state’, I became the Sorcerer of Mertolan, and continue to teach the Knights until about one hundred years ago. At that time the secular authorities of the Empire seemed unable to reconcile themselves to the mysteries, so although there was no inquisition or witch-hunt, arcanism generally fell into dis-use. The Emperor was no longer the Marischal, that honour had passed to the next ranking member of the Royal House. The Knights themselves began to disband and only a hard loyal core remained, but, whenever there was a war, it was always the Marischal who raised and led the army. And he was never defeated. Twenty years ago, the Marischal was a great nobleman, first cousin to Emperor Fane, and he was popular with the court and the commons alike. His name was Rutger, Marischal of the Order and Duke of Aquilane. At that time only the Marischal and his seven faithful comrades still followed the laws and chivalric institutions of the Mertolan Order.
Rozelle glanced toward the seven armoured men sitting in the circle and then back at his father.
“Yes these are the Knights, but to continue. An ancient prophecy was written three hundred years ago by a noblewoman who possessed ‘the sight’. She foretold of a marriage or mating between a dark knight of the Royal House of Mertolan and a Red Dragon woman of the House of Dragonard. She said the result of this match would be the birth of a child who would re-write the history of known and perhaps unknown worlds with his triumphs. The prophecy passed into legend and would have remained forgotten except for one thing. Emperor Fane began to take an interest when he found out that the House of Dragonard had produced a daughter, a red haired daughter, the first female of that line in over seven generations. He began to take the prophecy to heart and believed himself to be the knight in the prophecy and Abarella, your mother to be the woman,” Xavier continued the narrative up to the point where Rozelle had been born, “Now you understand dear boy. I am not your father, though I would have been justly proud to have had you for my own son. But most importantly, I would never have hurt your poor mother. As she gave birth to you, I knew, as sure as the passing of autumn into winter, that she could not survive. Your mother was not just a beauty, Rozelle, she was known to be a talent in the arcane arts, and although I never got to know her in life, I did come to know her in death. We have communicated through dreams I sent out a spell ward to protect her physical form so that one day you could see her for yourself. Your father’s knights brought you both here at her request. I am sorry my boy but I can do nothing except preserve her likeness however much I would wish it different. She comes to me still sometimes, in a dream, to ask about you and I tell her that you have turned out fine and grow more like your father every day.”
With a gesture of his hand, he indicated toward the seated men.
“With these men it is a different matter. They are not dead. I have kept them in dreamstate; preserved exactly as they were the second I put them under, awaiting this day, the day when you will have to begin the fulfilment of your destiny. That is the truth boy, and now I need to know if you have indeed become a man because the path you must follow will lead to either greatness for you and yours or disaster for us all. Once I free these men then the die is cast and there can be no turning back. I will leave you now to think on the matter but please do not take too long, time is now precious.”
Rozelle watched Xavier leave the room and walked over to look more closely at the woman who had been his mother. It was all so unreal. For two decades he had believed the old man to be his father. When he made the odd enquiry regarding his mother, perhaps naively, he had always accepted the old man’s explanation that his birth had been so traumatic that he did not want to talk about it, and so eventually, he had stopped asking. He had assumed that she must have been some kind of witch or sorceress, someone who would be a fitting mate to the old man, or perhaps some homely countrywoman who had fallen for the sorcerer or vice versa. He had eventually given up thinking of the various scenarios as he despaired of ever getting an answer. By the Mother he had been so slow; a locked room which held his past, present and future.
One by one he looked into the apparently sleeping faces of the knights and wondered what kind of people they were. He was so close he could have sworn he could feel their breath on his face, all that is except the lady. As perfect in death as she had been in life, no breath, just the face of a plaster cast saint. So this was his mother, or is, if Xavier was right about the dreams.
Perhaps with more concentration and training he could do the same. He knelt in front of the slender woman.
“I am your son, I don’t know if you are still here somewhere and if you can hear me or not, but I will believe that you are and that you can. I am the one you carried through those long and difficult months and whom you held for the briefest of moments. Father’s knights stayed faithful and are here now with you. I wish I knew what was expected of me and what the Mother of All intends but I will try to make sure that I follow a path which would make you proud.”
He rose to his feet and bowed to his mother and just for a second, and a trick of the light, he could have sworn he saw a teardrop forming in the corner of her eye. Behave yourself; you are becoming fanciful again and with a last backward glance to ensure that he had not been dreaming, he closed the door.
He stood with his back on the cold stone of the stairwell and felt shame at how he had treated Xavier. Great behaviour for the heir to a great knight he thought. He walked slowly down the steps he had bounded up earlier, feeling older but no wiser.
As he entered Xavier’s study he noticed that the torches were lit and realised he must have been in the tower room much longer than he had thought. Xavier was standing beside the window, his eye fixed to the looking glass of the stargazer. Minutes passed, and still the old man’s attention seemed fixed on the heavens, and Rozelle wondered if he even knew he was there. He was about to speak when Xavier motioned him over. He put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and led him to the chair behind the desk and sat him down. He then took the seat opposite, a seat he had sat on every day of his whole life, a life that he no longer knew.
“What is my destiny? Is that what you were studying in the stars or is there more that you haven’t told me?”
Xavier leaned forward on the desk, his long thin fingers clasped as in prayer, tapping them against his chin.
“I left you alone to think boy. Are you sure you really want to know? For once this starts there is no turning back, although believe me, there will be times to come when you will wish to The Mother you could,” Xavier stopped, his voice questioningly high, almost hopeful.
“You keep talking in riddles, and I can give you no good answer until I know what lies ahead. You have always taught me to use my mind, to follow the road of logic. I will follow my destiny but I need to know in what direction it lies. Veiled threats are not going to put me off, I think you had better tell me don’t you.”
“Would you take a course of action which could lead to power and wealth greater than any man has ever had before?”asked Xavier.
Rozelle smiled, “Only a fool would not chart such a course, and you didn’t work so hard to raise a fool.”
“But if I was to tell you that such a road had an equal chance of leading you and anyone with you to a death so horrifically unimaginable that the ground would rend open and gush tears of blood across the land, would you still be willing to follow the road?”
Rozelle rose and walked to the window and looked out over the misty mountain range that had always been his home and his haven. In one breath he was being offered a death so terrible that even The Mother of All would mourn his passing, a moribund proposal and then an image of his own mother passed his mind’s eye and he saw himself kneeling before her with his head in her lap and in that brief second he experienced the pain and the fear which had been endured to ensure that he would live to reach this day.
He knew that he was perhaps signing his own death warrant and that of any man or woman who went with him but he had to follow the road to where the fates were pointing. To do otherwise was to betray the dead.
“I will follow the path wherever it leads; tell me my direction Sorcerer of Mertolan.
He heard his father sigh and he was not sure whether it was from sadness or from relief, he felt different somehow, He knew he could succeed with Xavier’s help and guidance.
His ‘father’ rose and clasped his shoulders, “Well Rozelle we must enter the upper room again and see to your knights. They have been asleep far too long.”
The door creaked open very slowly. Spiders’ webs crisscrossed the gap; like seaweed clinging to a dead ship. The room was filling with an opaque light which made it difficult to distinguish feature or form, and as the distance between wall and door extended to two feet, Rozelle edged forward. He felt like a sleepwalker as he pressed his hand against the door, stretching and breaking the web curtain. He had never thought of himself as a coward but he could feel the tingling of hair rising on the nape of his neck and, quite suddenly, the thought of entering this long locked sanctuary left him with a parched mouth and nagging belly. So many times as a child he had hoped to peak at what lay inside, climbing the stairs like a foreign spy, he would try the handle, which was always locked, and then press his head against the door and listen, with shallow breath and intense concentration, to hear what existed on the other side. His childish imagination had dreamed up strange beings, breathing back, but had it been his imagination? And still the door continued to move. Soft down, the cobwebs fell across his face, his eyes slowly acclimatising to the strange light.
Then he became aware that he was not alone. The windows of this, the top tower room, had been shuttered, but here and there, time and erosion had done their work and rats’ tails of twilight poked through the cracks. It was that light which exists just at the point where day surrenders to night, misty and ethereal, where a sane man can imagine all kinds of fanciful things. He knew that his sanity was not in doubt and, although he did have the odd flight of fancy, he had been pre-warned that there was such in this room to unsettle the bravest of men. Anticipation of the unknown he recognised was always worse than the actual event, usually, so he forced himself forward, then again, he thought, you could be wrong and his heart leapt to his mouth. There in front of him, not more than twenty feet away were a group of figures. He turned to look for Xavier, but there was no sign of him. Maybe it was a trick, some kind of test, one of the magician’s brilliant illusions. His eyes still could not decide. He inched forward, his hand moving down onto the hilt of his sword. He felt a gust of air and Xavier appeared in front of him.
“You will have no need to unsheathe that.”
The shock of this sudden appearance on his already jangling nerves almost gave Rozelle heart failure, and he stopped dead in his tracks. In front of him, seated on a raised dais in a full circle and facing outwards were seven figures. As he moved closer, he could see that in the centre of the circle there appeared to be a woman. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to stare into Xavier’s eyes.
“I know that all this,” Xavier said with a sweep of his arm, “appears outlandish, but believe me my boy, there is method in my madness.”
Rozelle watch as Xavier cracked his staff on the floor and light flooded the room. Twilight was replaced by the intense light of hundreds of candles floating in the air; the scene they revealed left him mute.
The figure in the centre was indeed a woman, and what a beauty. He put out his hand to touch, but failed to make contact. His hand stopped in mid air and no amount of pressure would make it move any further. He turned again to look at his father, his eyes pleading for an explanation.
“The lady, Rozelle, was your mother,” said Xavier, watching to see what effect his words might have on the boy.
He looked blankly at his father who had started to repeat, “She was your mothe……”
Rozelle halted him in mid flow, “If this lady is my mother, why have you kept her imprisoned here in this stinking tomb? What awful thing could she have done to you to make you do this? How long have you kept her here and who are these other poor souls trapped here with her? Go on father; tell me, if you dare...”
Rozelle ended his outburst by releasing his hold and pushed the old man to the floor. Each syllable he had spoken had been accompanied by an ever-increasing pincer grip on Xavier’s shoulders, and his nails had dug so hard into the sorcerer’s skin, that he had drawn blood. Xavier had risen to his feet but was moving away from him.
“Before I give you an explanation I would ask that you refrain from physical violence and take a seat.”
The murderous light in Rozelle’s eyes did not dim but he kicked shut the door and drew a chair from the wall and sat, watching Xavier knowing the boy who had been his son would never be the same, that something was lost this day.
He saw his father struggle to structure the words of what needed to be said, “You have read most of the books that this fortress holds. What I am about to tell you does not exist in the books, because books are written by the living, the victors, the dead are unnamed or defamed. So what I shall tell you now is the truth, known only to me, and now to you. Everything I have done over the past twenty years had been done for you and for a cause more important than either us, or anyone else for that matter. It may be that you will want to run from here when you hear what I have to say, and I wouldn’t blame you, or think any less of you, but I will warn you that it isn’t yet time for you to leave and I must have your sworn oath, Rozelle, that under no circumstances will you try to go beyond the forest for thirteen days.”
Sullenly he agreed.
“I am close to three hundred years old and have limited time left, so I would be much obliged if you could dispense with the sulking and give me a fair hearing.”
For the first time since his father had started talking Rozelle looked directly at him, with a look of complete incredulity, “I knew you were old but I never suspected you were that old.”
Xavier had smiled at him, “Sometimes I forget how old I am myself. But when I was a young man I was apprenticed to an Eastern sorcerer called Ahrim, an exceptional man, a great man, and one who was genuinely recognised as being a truly good man. He was engaged as tutor to teach the Knights of Mertolan in the ways of the ancient mysteries of the arcane arts and I, as his apprentice, went too. When finally Ahrim succumbed and entered his ‘sleeping state’, I became the Sorcerer of Mertolan, and continue to teach the Knights until about one hundred years ago. At that time the secular authorities of the Empire seemed unable to reconcile themselves to the mysteries, so although there was no inquisition or witch-hunt, arcanism generally fell into dis-use. The Emperor was no longer the Marischal, that honour had passed to the next ranking member of the Royal House. The Knights themselves began to disband and only a hard loyal core remained, but, whenever there was a war, it was always the Marischal who raised and led the army. And he was never defeated. Twenty years ago, the Marischal was a great nobleman, first cousin to Emperor Fane, and he was popular with the court and the commons alike. His name was Rutger, Marischal of the Order and Duke of Aquilane. At that time only the Marischal and his seven faithful comrades still followed the laws and chivalric institutions of the Mertolan Order.
Rozelle glanced toward the seven armoured men sitting in the circle and then back at his father.
“Yes these are the Knights, but to continue. An ancient prophecy was written three hundred years ago by a noblewoman who possessed ‘the sight’. She foretold of a marriage or mating between a dark knight of the Royal House of Mertolan and a Red Dragon woman of the House of Dragonard. She said the result of this match would be the birth of a child who would re-write the history of known and perhaps unknown worlds with his triumphs. The prophecy passed into legend and would have remained forgotten except for one thing. Emperor Fane began to take an interest when he found out that the House of Dragonard had produced a daughter, a red haired daughter, the first female of that line in over seven generations. He began to take the prophecy to heart and believed himself to be the knight in the prophecy and Abarella, your mother to be the woman,” Xavier continued the narrative up to the point where Rozelle had been born, “Now you understand dear boy. I am not your father, though I would have been justly proud to have had you for my own son. But most importantly, I would never have hurt your poor mother. As she gave birth to you, I knew, as sure as the passing of autumn into winter, that she could not survive. Your mother was not just a beauty, Rozelle, she was known to be a talent in the arcane arts, and although I never got to know her in life, I did come to know her in death. We have communicated through dreams I sent out a spell ward to protect her physical form so that one day you could see her for yourself. Your father’s knights brought you both here at her request. I am sorry my boy but I can do nothing except preserve her likeness however much I would wish it different. She comes to me still sometimes, in a dream, to ask about you and I tell her that you have turned out fine and grow more like your father every day.”
With a gesture of his hand, he indicated toward the seated men.
“With these men it is a different matter. They are not dead. I have kept them in dreamstate; preserved exactly as they were the second I put them under, awaiting this day, the day when you will have to begin the fulfilment of your destiny. That is the truth boy, and now I need to know if you have indeed become a man because the path you must follow will lead to either greatness for you and yours or disaster for us all. Once I free these men then the die is cast and there can be no turning back. I will leave you now to think on the matter but please do not take too long, time is now precious.”
Rozelle watched Xavier leave the room and walked over to look more closely at the woman who had been his mother. It was all so unreal. For two decades he had believed the old man to be his father. When he made the odd enquiry regarding his mother, perhaps naively, he had always accepted the old man’s explanation that his birth had been so traumatic that he did not want to talk about it, and so eventually, he had stopped asking. He had assumed that she must have been some kind of witch or sorceress, someone who would be a fitting mate to the old man, or perhaps some homely countrywoman who had fallen for the sorcerer or vice versa. He had eventually given up thinking of the various scenarios as he despaired of ever getting an answer. By the Mother he had been so slow; a locked room which held his past, present and future.
One by one he looked into the apparently sleeping faces of the knights and wondered what kind of people they were. He was so close he could have sworn he could feel their breath on his face, all that is except the lady. As perfect in death as she had been in life, no breath, just the face of a plaster cast saint. So this was his mother, or is, if Xavier was right about the dreams.
Perhaps with more concentration and training he could do the same. He knelt in front of the slender woman.
“I am your son, I don’t know if you are still here somewhere and if you can hear me or not, but I will believe that you are and that you can. I am the one you carried through those long and difficult months and whom you held for the briefest of moments. Father’s knights stayed faithful and are here now with you. I wish I knew what was expected of me and what the Mother of All intends but I will try to make sure that I follow a path which would make you proud.”
He rose to his feet and bowed to his mother and just for a second, and a trick of the light, he could have sworn he saw a teardrop forming in the corner of her eye. Behave yourself; you are becoming fanciful again and with a last backward glance to ensure that he had not been dreaming, he closed the door.
He stood with his back on the cold stone of the stairwell and felt shame at how he had treated Xavier. Great behaviour for the heir to a great knight he thought. He walked slowly down the steps he had bounded up earlier, feeling older but no wiser.
As he entered Xavier’s study he noticed that the torches were lit and realised he must have been in the tower room much longer than he had thought. Xavier was standing beside the window, his eye fixed to the looking glass of the stargazer. Minutes passed, and still the old man’s attention seemed fixed on the heavens, and Rozelle wondered if he even knew he was there. He was about to speak when Xavier motioned him over. He put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and led him to the chair behind the desk and sat him down. He then took the seat opposite, a seat he had sat on every day of his whole life, a life that he no longer knew.
“What is my destiny? Is that what you were studying in the stars or is there more that you haven’t told me?”
Xavier leaned forward on the desk, his long thin fingers clasped as in prayer, tapping them against his chin.
“I left you alone to think boy. Are you sure you really want to know? For once this starts there is no turning back, although believe me, there will be times to come when you will wish to The Mother you could,” Xavier stopped, his voice questioningly high, almost hopeful.
“You keep talking in riddles, and I can give you no good answer until I know what lies ahead. You have always taught me to use my mind, to follow the road of logic. I will follow my destiny but I need to know in what direction it lies. Veiled threats are not going to put me off, I think you had better tell me don’t you.”
“Would you take a course of action which could lead to power and wealth greater than any man has ever had before?”asked Xavier.
Rozelle smiled, “Only a fool would not chart such a course, and you didn’t work so hard to raise a fool.”
“But if I was to tell you that such a road had an equal chance of leading you and anyone with you to a death so horrifically unimaginable that the ground would rend open and gush tears of blood across the land, would you still be willing to follow the road?”
Rozelle rose and walked to the window and looked out over the misty mountain range that had always been his home and his haven. In one breath he was being offered a death so terrible that even The Mother of All would mourn his passing, a moribund proposal and then an image of his own mother passed his mind’s eye and he saw himself kneeling before her with his head in her lap and in that brief second he experienced the pain and the fear which had been endured to ensure that he would live to reach this day.
He knew that he was perhaps signing his own death warrant and that of any man or woman who went with him but he had to follow the road to where the fates were pointing. To do otherwise was to betray the dead.
“I will follow the path wherever it leads; tell me my direction Sorcerer of Mertolan.
He heard his father sigh and he was not sure whether it was from sadness or from relief, he felt different somehow, He knew he could succeed with Xavier’s help and guidance.
His ‘father’ rose and clasped his shoulders, “Well Rozelle we must enter the upper room again and see to your knights. They have been asleep far too long.”
