The Steward and the Sorcerer by James Peart (small books to read .TXT) 📗

ready to stay here and help that madman fight his battles for him.  You absolute beauty!”  He walked up to Christopher and kissed him on the top of his head.  The other pulled away from him, flustered, but he was grinning sheepishly.

“We still have to find out how the sticks work.”

“You mean does each part need to be reunited with its other half?  Let’s test that here and now.”

Simon produced the stick and held it up in the poor light of the study, warding his friend clear of where it was directed.  He swung the torch in the manner of a switch, right and left in quick succession.  He slowed the tempo, brushing it gently from side to side in a series of leisurely strokes.  He caught it in both hands, rubbing it with the inside of his fists to try to work the magic loose and swished it again.  Nothing worked.  He tried a combination of other efforts yet to no avail.  Producing the other torch halves, he repeated what he had done with the first with the same results.

Finally, he looked over at Christopher.  “We need to find the other halves.”

It was a simple matter of approaching each wing of the keep and searching all the windows there.  Simon explained to Christopher that Iridis was effectively imprisoned beneath the ground floor of the castle, as he had sprung the lock on the trap door releasing them into the study chamber, sealing him beneath.  Christopher looked doubtful, saying something about this place likely having more than one entry point to the basement, yet he countered this with the statement that even if Iridis escaped his confinement in Fein Mor’s lower levels, he wouldn’t be able to negotiate the maze of rooms and corridors with ease, unfamiliar as they would be to him.  “And do we know where we are going?” Christopher asked.  “We do,” came his answer, “as all we have to do is follow along inside the curtain wall until we reach every wing.  The windows will guide the way.”

Christopher, predictably uptight about the whole idea, more so because he was increasingly being forced to engage with the world that existed around him, eventually began to relax.  As the minutes wound on he even contrived to look happy.  His family, Simon reflected, would no doubt have said it was because he was ‘interacting’ with the ‘environment’ once more with a ‘concrete goal’ in mind.  He remembered last Christmas spent with the Ainsworths at Hastings Glen, their family seat in Warwickshire.  Christopher’s outburst on Boxing Day.  The train of counsellors imported into their home, summoned by his mother Isobel.  Armed with their peculiar jargon, they tried to dissect him, to no measurable gain.

The goal of reaching England was shared by Simon among only himself.  Christopher could not have cared less for it.  His happiness was temporary at best.  He was distracted by their plan.  It amused him in some obscene way, Simon thought, like an overfed Roman watching a gladiator strategize his way toward victory in some ghoulish Carthaginian re-enactment.

Still, it had been a long time since he had witnessed his friend to be so alive, so ‘there.’

“What’re you thinking about?” he ventured to ask him.

“Just wondering what dear Mama would be doing at this particular moment.”

“You miss her?”  Simon thought about his own family for the first time.  It simply hadn’t occurred to him earlier, what with all that had occurred and the speed in which it had happened.  They must be worried out of their minds.

“Oh no,” Christopher said, a look of almost tender abandonment on his face that disquieted Simon.  “I merely wish she would stop trying to take care of me.  All my life, she’s done it.  Now, for a change, I’m helping to take care of someone.”

“You mean...Daaynan?”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”  His eyes drifted to the stonework of the external wall as they walked along, lost in private contemplation.

“No, I really do.  What do you mean?”

“He’s important to you, this Druid, isn’t he?  You’d do anything for him.”

“Are you mad?”  Simon choked the words out.  “He’s obsessed with that steward of his.  He’s blindly devoted to a cause, would do anything in its name, regardless of the consequences to him, or for that matter those around him.”

Christopher smiled.  “I know.  You’re so like him.”

Simon let out an absurd burp of laughter, his reaction tempered between hilarity and outrage.  “This is rich!  So, you think you’re helping me, as if I were as lost as he is?”  But Christopher had retreated into silence once more and would not be tackled further on the subject.

He could not let the comment pass, however, and tried several different tacks to get him to open up again.  Nothing would do, until he asked him if they didn’t succeed, would he miss England?

“I would miss the medievalism of places in England...and other things...” his mind seemed to wander, “...perhaps the folk festival.”

“And this place isn’t barbaric enough for you?”

“I suppose...what do you think of it?”

“It has all the hallmarks of a feudal system.  That steward Daaynan talks about seems little better than a military Shogun, conferring favours on occupied states for remaining loyal to Brinemore.  Daaynan told me he forbids trade between occupied and free states.  And he governs his city with a constabulary that would our post war bobbies to shame.  No, we’ve stepped back in time coming here.  A one man show like Daaynan couldn’t ordinarily hope to exist in a system like this, but his magic sort of levels the playing field.  I suppose I’m curious as to what will happen between the two men.  It’s like Heracles versus Eurystheus’ army, when Heracles was aided by the Olympians.

“I’m fascinated by that temple.  If the worlds in it were more clearly marked, and it didn’t rob you of your strength, I would like to rove about in them for a while.  Just imagine what sort of information I could bring back to the Think Tank at Downing’s.