But now? How few Warlocks remain. Two at the Levant, perhaps a dozen at the Couchant. There is no luxury now for such spectacles.
But for just one night, for such a short space of minutes even, the past was resurrected. We were treated to a true duel of wizards.
The pause stretched like a taut wire between Scavian and Lascari, crackling with coals and embers. The younger man, his hands crooked into claws, eyes surging and blazing with a power he could barely keep inside; his senior hunched like a crow, sour as vinegar, bitter as gall. No words were said, and Emily felt the heat radiate from them both so that the air shimmered and sparked all about them.
‘Get out of my way, boy,’ Lascari ordered flatly. Defeated, robbed of his desires by Emily’s sheer bloody-mindedness, he had no wish to stay in her presence any longer. He stomped towards the door, but Scavian still blocked it.
‘Move, boy,’ Lascari commanded him.
‘I will not,’ Scavian said.
‘Giles,’ Emily said, scrabbling off the bed, ‘please, don’t do anything foolish.’
‘You had best do what I tell you, boy,’ Lascari snarled at him.
‘You have no rule over me.’ He seemed so calm, did Scavian. The fury was visible in every line of him, in his face, his stance, the very tilt of his head, but his voice was as mercilessly calm as a cloudless sky.
‘Giles, just let him go,’ Emily urged him. He spared her only a brief glance. His fierce expression brought tears to her eyes.
‘Listen to her,’ said Lascari, and moved to push Scavian away. Fire leapt between them, and the older man flinched and hissed.
‘Defy me, boy, and you defy the King.’
‘I am the King as much as you are,’ Scavian replied.
‘Get out of my way!’ At last Lascari broke and physically threw himself at Scavian, knocking him out of the doorway as flame seared out across the both of them. It flashed across Emily’s face and she drew back, then rushed forward again to see them roll to the ground, and break apart. When she herself got to the door they were each kneeling on the damp earth outside, random quirks and snakes of fire dancing over them.
‘You do not want to make more of this,’ Lascari warned. He looked tired, terribly tired; hopeless and empty.
Scavian just stared back at him, and the older man broke eye contact first.
‘How can you invoke the King’s name?’ Scavian demanded. ‘How do you hide behind his name to do such things?’ He rose and went to Emily, as she stood in the doorway in nothing but her nightgown. He turned his back on Lascari fearlessly and the older man did nothing, just watched. ‘Did he hurt you?’
He would have raped me. How much more hurt is there? ‘No. No, he did not.’ She could have taken revenge, willingly and without guilt, but she did not want to risk Giles on a throw of that coin. He meant more to her than did any retribution exacted on Lascari.
But his hand lifted to touch at her throat, and she felt the sudden pain, the tenderness there in the shape of Lascari’s hand, like her own anointing. There was a burnt patch, too, over her thigh, that showed a similar mark. Scavian’s face adopted a calmness even more dreadful, for there was cold-blooded death in it.
‘In the King’s name,’ he said again, fixing Lascari with a look. ‘The very thought would sicken him. Assault of a woman, attempt at rape – are those the deeds you were anointed for?’
Around them there was quite a crowd now, fractious and whispering. Emily saw Doctor Carling’s wife there, saw Caxton’s pale and nervous face, and Brocky’s bulk.
‘Giles, please, don’t do anything rash,’ she said, as softly as would still carry to him.
Scavian looked straight at her. His face was set, brave and terribly young. ‘I believe in the King,’ he told the world at large.
‘Then go away.’ Lascari levered himself to his feet. ‘Walk away.’ He looked old in the lamplight, old and sick of it all. ‘I have no liking for you, but no quarrel.’
Scavian said simply, ‘You are not fit to wear the King’s mark.’
A deadly quiet descended on the watchers. Emily felt her heart lurch with the look of old, sour hatred that descended on Lascari.
‘I have worn this mark for twenty years, boy. How long has it been on you? Two seasons? Three? When were you made a wizard? After all the real Warlocks