According to Sam, Phineas spent a lot of time trying to find this alternative power. He reasoned, not incorrectly, that if there was another magic-like force on the continent that could achieve the same ends, then we would have found it by now. Leaving aside the inherent horror in that situation, he, therefore, moved onto the possibility that there would be another force that he would be able to tap into in one of the spheres that would be adjacent to our own. So he started to continue his research in that regard.

He was still cautious. He was aware of his limits when it came to power and the like so he never had a permanent lab. He would properly prepare and then he would perform the experiment, wait for the results and then move on. He became an expert in monitoring his experiments from a distance so that he could start the experiment moving and watch from another country with a load of monitoring spells to see what happened. There was even something to be said that if he had just taken those spells and told people about them, he could have made a fortune off it.”

“So that was why we didn’t catch him in Angral?” I mused.

“Precisely. He had set the experiment in motion and was already in a hideout in Temeria, watching, before Dorme even got anywhere near catching up to you before taking you off to wake the Vampire up.”

“Was Dorme in the cult?” I wondered.

Sam laughed. “Getting ahead of ourselves Freddie?”

I scowled

He laughed at my face.

“No, he wasn’t,” he told me. “Dorme’s drug of choice was power. I never met him and didn’t know he existed before Phineas told me about him. The cult had scouted him before Phineas had started his experiment to try and spread their influence, but had decided that Dorme’s personal ambition would leave them vulnerable. He just wanted power and even if he had not been successful, he would not have stopped with Angral. The future you predicted for Ariadne about the Imperial armies turning up and squashing her, would have happened to him in the end too.”

“They will do the same thing to you,” I warned him. I was trying to get the warning in whenever I could manage it. He was not being drawn on it though. He just smiled in response.

So Phineas continued his experiments intending to find this alternative power source that would make him more powerful. Both Sam and I had a little laugh at the man because if he had devoted all of the time and effort that he had to this alternative, to his actual studies, then he might have excelled. He spent so much time looking for his shortcut that he could have spent working on the proper method.

Something to be said about that. There’s a moral to the story there but I’m too tired and upset to think about it properly.

So Phineas worked and although he had been doing some sick shit beforehand to further his understanding, according to Sam’s account, this was where the really nasty stuff started to happen and those authorities that governed the mages at the time really started to take interest in what he was doing.

A lot of what he had found previously could be corroborated in books so he was better able to hide what he was doing with the facade of genuine research. But now… He was breaking into the tombs of otherwise heretical people to commit further heresies. And by heresy, I mean those horrific crimes that would just get you burnt. With the mages, the church and the governments all taking the time to stack some logs on the bonfire.

“He did some vile things,” Sam told me. “Some terrible things. I mean, I’ve done some dark stuff to get where I am today and there are some nightmares still in my future. But what I have done and what I am going to do pales in comparison to what Phineas did.”

I remember shifting in my seat uncomfortably as I failed to do my job. Any self-respecting scholar would know that when someone says something like this, you ask for examples. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to know the answer. I didn’t want to know whether Sam was using hyperbole or whether he had done some awful things. I mean, it would be easy to say that Sam had done some horrific things. I mean, I know he had. But what could be worse than that? And if I found out what Phineas had done, would that make what Sam had done seem better, or worse?

But I didn’t want to know. I felt myself retreating from the subject. I didn’t want to talk about it.

They say that the observer, the chronicler, has an effect upon that which they are observing and this is certainly one of those times when I know it to be true.

Phineas continued on his little experimental crusade to find some way that he could achieve power without having to and Sam quoted, “bow down to the tyranny of the established method”. He viewed the establishment of the council of mages and the Chapter of Mages as being this kind of tyrannical overseer that dictated how the world was run to confine people and ensure that they didn’t have the opportunity to reach outside of things.

“He genuinely seemed to hate them.” He told me.

“Was the hate fed, did someone teach him that hate or was it just something that occurred to him?” I wondered.

“It’s impossible to say,” Sam said. “There’s room to believe both. We know that the chapter of mages held strict controls over the magic users of the continent, even if some people including the rulers of the continent might wish that they had even stricter controls, those rules were still fairly strict. I can easily imagine that a certain kind of person, someone like Phineas would feel as though he was being held back. Was he?”

Sam shrugged before continuing.

“I actually don’t think so. I think he was limited by his own problems and his own weaknesses. I think…” He reached for a metaphor. “I am never going to be a painter. I could learn a lot about painting. I could study. I could learn about colour mixtures and I could learn about perspective and the technical aspects of being a painter but at the end of the day, even if I practised every day, I would, at best, be mediocre. Phineas was like that. He had the spark but lacked the talent. And then he was complaining that they wouldn’t let him paint the pictures that he wanted to paint. He would never be allowed to use the big canvases or the particular colour blends or the really expensive brushes.”

I nodded to show that I understood. “He was like the craftsman that kept blaming his tools.”

Sam nodded excitedly. “And then kept trying to invent his own tools to do the job.

“But gradually, it would seem that Phineas started to see something. It was distant, a long way off and he felt it was obscured by some kind of fog, or encased in a shell. He likened it to hearing a noise behind a wall of rock and knowing that if he just worked at it, he would find a way around the rock, or through the rock. He suddenly started to have that kind of inspiration that I know you cherish as much as I do. That moment, when a light is lit in your skull and you can see the alternative path, the other way of thinking and the new way to do something. Then life becomes that little bit easier.”

I was back to scribbling frantically as Sam spoke. There are always moments like this when you are interviewing someone when the conversation stops and all you can do is just sit back and let the subject talk. Despite my best efforts, those instincts were firing at me as I listened to Sam speak.

“He started to find new spells. Things in his brain that had always been tricky suddenly became simpler. Deductive leaps that he might once have struggled with started to become easier and easier and the wall that he had described started to feel as though it was made from a crumbly sandstone rather than the hardened volcanic granite that he had felt beforehand.

“He felt as though he was beginning to make headway, and the more he researched… And by research I mean the acts of Necromancy and the speaking across realms that might be considered Goetia depending on your point of view, the easier and more powerful he became.”

Sam stopped talking for a moment, staring at a point in the distance. It occurred to me that my brother was afraid.

“He told me that he knew, in detail, the moment when he realised that he had found what he was looking for. He said that it came to him in a dream. He could never remember where he was when he had that dream. He could not remember what he had been doing the day before to trigger the dream. All he knew was that he seemed to wake up in another place.

“He was standing on a flat, dark, glassy surface and automatically he looked up and he saw stars. Lots of stars arranged in constellations that were strange to him. But at the same time, they seemed to be much clearer. There was none of the normal sparkling patterns that seemed to be prevalent if you look at the stars from the ground. They just hung there in the darkness. He could see spinning clusters of stars like gigantic wheels, rotating and shooting off into the night sky. Two distant suns seemed to bathe the area in light. A larger, reddish one and a colder, blue-white one that hung in the sky, perfectly still, unmoving.

“Then he looked down and scanned the horizon. He was standing on this strange, mountainous range. He remembered thinking, or feeling that he was high up in some way, towering above the ground level. The mountains behind him were made out of this strange dark glass. He tried to look into the glass to see if there was anything behind it but it seemed as though it was obscured to him.

“Beneath him was a vast plain of this dark glass that stretched out from horizon to horizon. It reminded him of the ice plains of the distant north where the ice forms or when a lake freezes over. It was jagged and uneven, covered in peaks and troughs as though the surface had once been that of a sea. There were cracks in the surface

“But he was not standing on ice.

“The ground itself suddenly seemed to shake and he automatically looked down, looking for somewhere that he could grab onto in case of an earthquake to keep himself from falling. There was something beneath the glass. Something that had just shifted and moved. Now that he looked, he could see that it was pressing against the glass. Straining against the glass. It was… Pushing outwards, struggling to get out. It was trapped, working against its confinement.

“When it had shifted, the glass gave this awful groaning sound and somewhere something cracked. He looked back out and a great fissure had appeared in the ground. Some of the shattering pieces flew high in the air and did not come down. Some other pieces fell around him and he was covered in this strange dust. He automatically tried to brush the dust from his clothes but his finger caught on some of it and his fingers bled.

“He described the feeling as the most delicious agony that he could conceive.

“He looked further, a bit closer now and he could see figures moving amongst the cracks. Being a mage, he could recognise those creatures instantly. They were lesser vampires. Fleders, Alps and Echidnas and yes, the Elder Vampires that you and Lord Dandelion have described were there directing the others.

“Some of them worked at the cracks with their clawed hands. Some of them had crude tools that were seemingly made out of the same strange glass that Phineas was standing on. But that was not the only thing. Some seemed to choose a spot before fornicating on the edge. There were captives too, who were dragged into place before being tortured using every agony that Phineas could comprehend. And it seemed to Phineas that as they did these things, the more the captives screamed. The more horror that was bestowed upon them all, the more that the cracks in the surface widened.

“And he understood what was beneath the glass.”

Sam stopped speaking for a long moment and I felt that I had to give him a little bit of a prompt.

“What was beneath the glass?” I wondered.

Sam smiled.

“He didn’t tell me that time. All he would say was that the thing beneath the glass was The God. And that was the thing, the being, the God that he was communing with. He told me more later and this is the only place where I will jump ahead in the story.

“He told me that he had never been more afraid in his entire existence. He had never felt or even comprehended something so vast. This was a being, an entity that was so large, so huge and so massive, that he felt his mind shearing off it. He couldn’t comprehend it. He had been standing there next to a mountain. And for all that he knew, that mountain was little more than a finger to this being. He felt dwarfed by it. Massively intimidated but then it all seemed to make sense.

“He rose from his bed and teleported elsewhere instantly in case the dream had drawn the attention of anything or anyone that he needed to worry about. And then, when he got back to work, he found his new method of casting magic. He was no longer drawing on the chaos, but he was drawing from this being that he had made contact with. The thing in the glass. He said that it suddenly seemed so simple and so sensible that he found himself honestly wondering why he had not thought of it before. Or why no one else had either.

“He did wonder if the thing in the glass had guided him to this point. If The God had been leading him to his inevitable destiny. If this had been the reason why he had never been properly able to use magic or do the things that his peers had found so easy.”

“Let me guess?” I wondered. “He decided that he didn’t care.”

“Bitter Freddie?”

“Do you remember what that man did to me, Sam? Drained my blood and put me through some of the worst horrors that I have ever experienced. I mean, I’ve been through some hellish circumstances in my time but that journey back from the North. The blood loss, the isolation and all of the shite that came with that.” I took a deep breath to calm myself. “I mean… I’ve never graded my experiences on which one was worst. The Beast of Amber’s crossing is still the worst, time will tell if this…” I gestured at my surroundings, “gets up the rankings. But that shit in the North?”

I shook my head.

“Looking back, that was the closest I’ve been to death. To actual death. I don’t know how much more I could have taken. When the Elves found me, I was staggering around with it all. Chireadean claims that I looked like a walking corpse and he nearly killed me as it was.”

Sam leaned back in his chair with the annoying attitude of a man who was patiently letting me get it all out of my system.

I wasn’t finished though.

“I know that Cavill ordered it, but fuck’s sake Sam. How much of that can be placed at Phineas’ feet? How much of what Kerrass went through, how much of what I went through. How much Sam?”

I realised that I was becoming frantic and hysterical. The horror of the past days and hours was beginning to boil up. It is a truth that you can hold onto this stuff for extended periods but sooner or later, it will all come boiling up to the surface and there will be nothing that you can do to stop it. This was not the first time that it had happened to me and I could feel it, almost literally, climbing up my throat.

But long practice helped me to realise what was about to happen and I was able to swallow it down. I turned away from Sam for a while and focused on my breathing until I couldn’t hear the blood thundering in my veins.

“He’s dead, Freddie,” Sam told me gently. “He’s dead. It’s not going to be a problem anymore. You won that one.”

“Fuck me dead Sam,” Rage this time. “Are you honestly trying to console me and make me feel better?”

“Would that be such a bad thing?”

“Sam…” I looked at him to see if he really did have that little self-awareness. “Sam… You have ruined my life. Of all of the people that I want comfort from, you are somewhere down the bottom of the list.”

The Fucker actually looked hurt by my words.

I felt like I had won some kind of point. A point in a game that I did not want to play and hated myself for even suiting up for.

“He uhh…” Sam took a deep breath and took a drink.

“Would you like to take a break?” I hissed, unable to help myself from allowing some of my anger to hiss through my teeth.

His eyes sparkled with annoyance.

“I would actually.” He told me. “But there is not enough time. I have things that need doing.”

He took another drink.

“Phineas found that he was a powerful mage now. He was able to do things, learn things and research things that were completely beyond his previous reach and even when you knew him, he was still growing in power. When he had first made contact with The God, he had been only a little bit more powerful than the kind of apprentice that they close off from their talent in the magical academies. But by the time I met him, he would have been able to stand toe-to-toe with any of the Lodge of Sorceresses. He would claim to be able to do such things and he was not boasting. You learn the difference between someone that is boasting and someone that knows what they are doing when you have been training for a little while.

“He also had a guide to follow and that guide sent him to the North. According to him he teleported into the middle of the rites to The God and made them all shit themselves.”

Sam laughed and I will freely admit that the image was certainly amusing.

“Apparently,” Sam went on. “They thought that he might have been the personification of The God coming through from whatever ritual they had summoned. They were almost disappointed when he pointed out that he was just a man and just a mage.”

I took a deep breath and forced myself to do my job.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He was soon able to prove that he had made contact with The God. He claimed that he found himself in quite an odd position. He was a mage, but at the same time, he felt a bit like a priest. Everything he had belonged to The God. The God had given him power, knowledge and skill. Trying to claim that The God did not exist was a pointless exercise. They knew that The God existed so why try and claim differently? He felt grateful to The God. He felt, not incorrectly, that he owed everything to The God.

“So he also seemed to worship The God. To my eyes, he behaved like a priest, but he would, often violently, refuse to be called that.

“I also know that he was incredibly disappointed with what he found. The then High Priest of the Cult was Kalayn. Still well before my time but I think it was Uncle Kalayn at the time. I didn’t pay attention to that part of things and truth be told, it wasn’t that important.

“He knew what the rites were about because he had seen it with his own two eyes. He had seen, in that dream, the other beings and the creatures that were being tortured and misused and he also knew what all of that was in aid of. Such a thing was unimportant to The God himself. What would something like that care with the sexual pleasure of something that, to it, was no bigger than a louse.

“But… What the rites did do and what Phineas knew that they did, was that they damaged the cage that was holding The God in check. He knew that that was what the glass was. The Glass was holding it. It was a prison that was keeping it locked up. Who the jailors were? I doubt we will ever know for certain. But it was a prison. And The God wanted to get out of that prison.

“It was trying to do that in ways that we can understand, by hurling itself against the walls of the prison to break free. But also by getting its slaves, its servants to damage the walls with its efforts. But you don’t damage a prison like that with hammers, chisels, files and picks. You do it with those rites that have already been described.”

I shook my head. The implications of what Sam was telling me were bouncing around inside my skull like lightning leaping around in one of those displays of physical science at the university.

“How awful,” I said.

Sam grunted his agreement.

“The problem was that the cult didn’t believe him. There’s that old saying isn’t there that the Prophet is never believed in his homeland.”

I nodded.

“Well, it turns out that Phineas turning up to actively explain what was going on made him the least popular element of it all. They all but hated him for turning up and telling them all that their practices were not correct and that they would need to work considerably harder to get anything worthwhile done. They laughed at him and took him to task for it. I suspect, although I can’t prove it, that they wanted Phineas to pay his dues in some way. So his efforts to try and leap to the top of the mountain and take charge of the cult were greeted with antipathy, to say the least.

“But what he saw was a group of people, playing at it. He tried to explain, demonstrate and show them exactly how much further they could go. But they wouldn’t listen and he was furious and massively disappointed. He had thought that he was going to be involved with the founding of a new religion, an actual religion with provable results and a provable power to worship.”

“Why didn’t they listen to him?” I wondered.

“Phineas’ opinion was that they were weak and lazy. My opinion is a bit more complicated than that. For all of his privileged position in the cult, the higher-ups never quite trusted him. With good reason as well because he made no secret of his scorn for the way that they were doing things. My theory is based on a bit more knowledge.

“The cult trusted me because they thought I was weak. Therefore, I sat in on meetings that I had no business sitting in on really and I heard their innermost thoughts.

“I think that Phineas frightened them. They saw the cult as a kind of… underlining of their own thoughts. It was a justification of their morals and their feelings. It proved to them that because they were nobly born…”

He stopped for a moment to consider.

“There is always fear in that strata. You have never really seen it because you have been a student and then on the path with Kerrass. Emma hasn’t seen it. After all, she is ostracised because she’s a woman and she has owned the credit slips. But what you don’t see is just how terrified the nobility is. They believe that their position is right. That they are justified in what they do. They see it as their God's given right to rule and to do whatever they like because if the Gods didn’t want them to do that then they would have been born at a different level of life. So that is their justification for their behaviour.

“Then someone like Father, Grandfather and the Coulthard family comes along. We show that anyone can become a noble if they get rich enough and can purchase their rank from a crown that needs the money. And that terrifies them. It suggests that their powers are an accident of birth rather than at the root of some God's given scheme. Then they start to wonder what else they are wrong about and when Father attains success by investing in his lands and his people…

“I mean, you and I both know that most of the reason he did that was to annoy his neighbours and because he couldn’t climb any higher, but we are reaping the harvest of what he sowed with all of that.

“But they look at that and they are afraid. Terrified even.

“So suddenly, here is a power. A God, even. That is telling them that they are right in their original feelings. That they are correct to feel secure in their power. That they are entitled to the work of their peasants and if they want to take the most beautiful girl in the village back to the castle and rape her to death, then that is their right according to this new God that they have found.

“But then Phineas comes along and tells them that anyone can get the power that they have attained. That anyone from any walk of life can achieve the same power, the same pleasure that The God uses to reward the rites. They found that terrifying. Once again, some upstart mage, some peasant and craftsman knows more and can do more than they could ever have even dreamed of. They found that terrifying. And well they should as well. I think he offended them with his arrogance.

“Because he was arrogant. All of us are. Those of us that know a little bit more about something than the next guy. I know more about strategy and tactics, you know more about monsters, Witchers and the way life really works in the villages and the continent. Most of us hide it so as not to offend people. You, especially, are quite good at that although not perfect.

“Phineas… Not only did he not hide his arrogance, but he also didn’t see the point of doing so.”

I considered that for a moment. It was not an uncommon problem. There is a fine line between people’s perceptions of ourselves and how we actually come across to the people that we are dealing with. We see ourselves as knowledgeable and trying to get our points across to those people that have less knowledge of us. But they feel as though what we are doing is calling them stupid.

I have caught myself going on both sides of that argument on several occasions.

“So yeah… Here is another reason that he frightened them.” Sam mused, stroking his chin in thought. “And I only say this now with the benefit of hindsight as I’ve never really had to think about this before, is that… Look.” Sam leaned forward.

“Phineas felt nothing but gratitude towards The God for giving him that thing that he had always wanted. That gratitude was profound and in the end, it progressed towards genuine worship. He wanted to empower The God, he wanted to free the God from its prison. Leaving aside the rites and the things that would need to be done to make that happen. What would have happened to the cult if Phineas had succeeded?”

I considered it.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Neither did they and that frightened them. For the most part, The God, even while they had proof that he existed, gives them, in their eyes, the right to do what they want. They can rape, steal, torture and generally carry on to their hearts' content and the sensation from all of that is heightened in the presence of The God. Now, what if The God was freed? It would mean change. It would mean that their way of life would be over.

“After all, would The God even need those kinds of worshippers if he was free? The thought of that, I think, was quite scary. Suddenly, they would be slaves and they knew what The God and the followers of The God liked to do to slaves.

“But if they carried on the way that they were doing up until that point, they could enjoy themselves, keep having the supercharged orgasms that they were feeling and should The God eventually be freed then that would be the problem of their sons and grandsons.”

“But what would happen when they died?” I asked. “Do the devotees of The God go to it to serve? I’m not sure I would want to risk that kind of thing.”

“Freddie, you and I both know that the thought of such things is unimportant to self-righteous ass-holes who see religion as an excuse to do whatever they want. After all, you have been tortured by several such groups who have used that, the Cult of the First-Born not least.”

I grunted at that and Sam continued talking about Phineas.

“Phineas looked at what he had found and again, he was not patient enough to do things properly, which in this case meant that he would need to work his way up from the bottom level to be a mover and a shaker in the cult. He decided that he didn’t have time for that.”

“Another example of his impatience,” I put in and Sam gave me that point with a smile and a nod.

Like a professor acknowledging a point from a particularly stupid student. I have been on the receiving end of that gesture or a gesture like it far too often. It makes my fists itch and it did the same thing this time.

“So instead, he decided to make the best of the situation that he had at the time. He started to do some work with the cult to attract them to himself and to establish himself. He saw the potential for finally having a more permanent base of operations as well as a noble caste that would look after him should the need arise. He gave them some minor things, some pointers really, on how to make their rites that little bit more potent. To make the… uh… the climax that little bit more rewarding.

“He was working on making himself indispensable to them and he was mostly succeeding. By the time that you got to the North, he was in the councils of our enemies. But he was still not “one of them”. He was never going to be one of them because he wasn’t nobly born enough. And although he had been nobly born, his parentage was from the South which made him lesser.

“Whatever else can be said about Cavill and the rest of the cult, they were patriots.”

I had to force my expression into one of calm acceptance as Sam said that.

He continued.

“But he also found them frustrating. He knew how to make the rites even more powerful than they were. He knew how to further their goals and the stated goals of the cult, but they did not seem to want to go any further. He had ideas. He had several laboratories by now and would move between a lot of them as he worked. One large one was in the caves of the cult and in those laboratories and during his meditations, he came up with weapons that could be empowered by The God to carry the influence of The God throughout the continent.

“But the cult, Kalyan and Cavill did not use any of them. They liked the knowledge and they funded the research. Not just with money but with slaves, rites and all of the other sick things that you need to research that kind of thing. But for the more practical testing of the artefacts, Phineas had to go elsewhere so as not to draw attention to the cult.”

I nodded.

“Which is where Ariadne and Dorme came in.”

“Precisely,” Sam replied. “Phineas had already recognised the beings that were working on freeing The God in his dream and in his many and varied dream quests, or visions afterwards. So he reasoned, not incorrectly, that The God had some kind of power over the Vampires. This fact has since been borne out by your narratives in the South by the way.”

I nodded my acknowledgement of that.

“So Phineas’ theory was that there was a method of controlling the Vampires. He meditated on it and The God provided the necessary magic and method to create the totem that could then be used to control those vampires within the local area. He did the research, formed the plans and was then in Angral doing the more practical experimental parts of the process.”

“When Kerrass and I blundered in.”

Sam laughed. “Yes, he was quite annoyed by that. He claimed that it didn’t matter, that his mind was already made up and he knew what the missing link was. He claimed that he never intended for Dorme’s experiments to succeed. But I am not so sure. He was genuinely angry that you and Kerrass had thwarted his plans. He was nowhere near you when it came time to work on that kind of thing. So don’t feel guilty that you didn’t catch him at the time. But he was angry that things had fallen through.

“He was genuinely astonished that you had a link to the cult, no matter how tenuous it was. He was considering whether or not to take revenge on you and Kerrass when I met him, versus thinking that the final death knell of the cult had been sounded and that he needed to make preparations to leave. It was during that considering that he met me.

“He knew about what had happened from Cavill and had gone south with Uncle Kalayn, more as a scouting mission than anything else. Cavill wanted to know how dangerous you were and how dangerous the problems with Edmund were and whether or not Kalayn was actually going to do anything worthwhile about it all. So he was there as an observer.

“Then he met and saw me, figured out my part in things and then…”

Sam shrugged.

“I don’t mean to be condescending Sam.” I began carefully.

“But.” Sam prompted with a smile. “Something something anything said before a but is untrue something.”

I smiled.

“But what did he see in you? Serious question, I’m not mocking you, or him.” I considered it. “Well… maybe him a little bit.”

Sam smirked before turning his head to one side to consider.

“What he told me,” He said after a while. “Was that I had a will that was lacking in other people? He said that the cult in the North was complacent. That they were lacking in ambition and as such, they were satisfied with where they were and had no real desire to carry things further. Whereas in me, he saw a man with will and passion. A man that would be able to take things further and take the necessary next steps.

“He told me that, through me, The God would have a route forward. The God would never be reborn in my lifetime but I had the will to properly use the skills and the experience that he, Phineas, could bring to bear. I would be willing to use the tools that he had at his disposal to bring down my enemies. And in doing so, I would be working with him, Phineas, to further Phineas’ goals.”

“What were Phineas’ goals?”

Sam mused. “He told me that just by using the things that he had to offer, I would be working for The God and that was all that he wanted. I think…”

He did the thing where he leant forwards in his chair again, resting his elbows on the desk.

“You and I have been around people of faith our entire lives. I said earlier that Phineas was as close to being a true believer as anything I have seen and I meant it. We have, both of us and you cannot deny it, we have both seen men and women that claim to be people of faith that are not. Men and women go to church in order to be seen to go to church. Who listen to the sermons, nod, smile, sing and put their hands together in all of the right places but when you ask them to follow through on what the sermon was about, they will cast that aside like it was hot.

“You have seen it. I have certainly seen it. I’ve seen it in those people that worship the Sacred Fire. I’ve seen it in Knights of Kreve who prayed to Kreve for the strength of their arms before pushing everyone else forwards so that they would be as safe as they possibly could be on the battlefield. I have literally heard Knights tell their fellows that they are too important to die after begging Kreve for a good death back in the camp before the battle.

“Even fucking Cavill and the cult of the First-Born. They gave lip service to The God. They took his gifts and they were involved in the rites that were involved in all of that but when it came down to doing anything about it, all they were interested in was their own power and influence.

“God but I hated those fuckers.

“I have only known a few real men of faith. That Father Jerome of yours is one. Mark believes, but he is too much his Father’s son. He sees the church as a way to further his own goals and beliefs. Mother is too concerned with her own redemption. You are the closest to what I would consider a true man of the Eternal Flame as you seek to guide people to the light. You see it as your duty. But even you are a little selfish in that regard as you are desperate for the safety that the Flame provides.

“Phineas believed in it with all of his heart. Not only that, but he was grateful too. So in giving me the tools and showing me how to use them, I would be furthering the works of The God. That was his goal.”

“By tools, you mean weapons?” I wondered.

“Yes.”

I felt myself nodding.

“What happened then?” I asked.

For the first time over our many conversations, Sam began to look ashamed.

“He played me like a damn lute.” He told me. “I was willing to be played of course, but that never changes anything. In the same way that Mark got you to read the Holy scriptures and the books of the prophet by telling you that they were too advanced for you and that you would never understand them.”

I grunted at that. That particular manipulation had been a source of some argument between us for a while. But Sam continued to speak.

“I remember it very clearly. This was the moment that began my path. I mean, the other day you argued that the poisoning of Mark was a significant act. I don’t think it was. I think it was this. I remember it very clearly.”

I’m switching back to Sam’s direct account for a while.

We were sitting there, out in the early evening sunshine. I remember it so clearly, the point of your life where you make a decision and down one pathway lies one life and down the other pathway lies another. We all have these moments. You have even talked about them in your diaries. Why did you stay at that particular inn the night that Kerrass came along? Why did you tell Father to go fuck himself? Why did you insist on investigating Father’s death? And on those rare occasions where these decisions are made, if you are really lucky, you get to see it happen. You get to watch.

And sometimes, even rarer than that, you get to see the moment coming.

I remember it so clearly. The two of us were sitting on one of those benches with a table between us. Picnic benches they call them although I never saw the point in calling it something like that. We were facing each other in the late Autumn, early winter months. The sun was going down but it was still warm out in the open air. There was the smell of meat roasting at a time when such things were still considered a luxury. I could tell from the smell that it would taste good but to let a few other people get their portions first because the outside of the carcass would be burnt.

The birds were singing in the trees, I could hear children playing in the nearby fields as they chased each other with sticks and played at warfare. They were young and by this point, the war was several years ago. Half a lifetime for many of those children and no longer an object of fear.

I remember it so clearly, the smoke hanging in the air, the distant strains of the bard that was plucking away at their harp in the main room of the inn. People were laughing and singing. They cheered when someone dropped a plate of crockery.

Phineas had been talking for a while. It had been a while since one of the wenches had last been with a jug of beer and I thought that I had better order one so that they didn’t get moody about the fact that we were taking up one of their prime spots. I also realised that I was hungry as well which was never a good sign.

So I signalled and procured us another jug of ale.

“So all of this is very interesting,” I said as I made sure that my dagger was still where I left it. “Interesting, and terrifying if I’m telling the truth.”

“It can take people that way at first.” Phineas agreed, seemingly entirely unconcerned.

“So what’s in it for me?” I began carefully.

Phineas nodded, as though I had crossed some item off his list.

“You wish to destroy the cult in the North.” He was not asking a question, he was making a statement. “You have destroyed their offshoot with the help of your brother, his Witcher friend and your mother and by dint of some manipulation, you are now also the Lord Kalayn which means that you have a large amount of territory in the lands of the cult.”

I nodded, trying not to be concerned that he knew so much of my plans. I think he saw that too because he smiled.

“I can help you.” He said.

“Why would you help me?” I asked.

He was prepared for the question.

“The cult is weak.” He told me. “They are weak people being led by weak minds who hold their authority over those that are lesser than themselves. They hold onto that authority without earning that authority and they have allowed themselves to become lazy, fat and indolent. You,” he pointed, I remember him pointing, “are the biggest threat that that cult has had since the day that they were founded and they don’t even know that you exist.

“They are falling. They don’t know it yet but they are already dead men walking. To The God, they are an insult to him, not followers and The God would be better off if they all died.”

“But they are your power base,” I argued.

“I don’t need them.” he waved his hands dismissively. “I don’t need them. If I help you, you can provide me with more than I could ever need. You could provide the same stability, if not more so than they have ever given me. With them, there was always the possibility that some passing priest or official would find out where they were so I have always been poised with one foot out of the door as it is.

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“But with you. You come from a known religious family. After you have destroyed the cult, you will still be there and you will have the power and the reach and the… trust to be able to work towards the betterment of The God without any of the rest of the nonsense that comes with it.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you would help me,” I told him. “Yes, I can do all of the things that you describe. I can keep you safe. I can probably fund your research and with the influence of my brothers and the family trading concern, I will likely have enough power to keep you safe, or at least to know that the hammer is falling when the time comes. That is true. But you could get the same guarantees from some priest or another. Why me?”

“Because you have what I need.” He told me.

“What is it you need?” I asked. It was an automatic question. The instinctual movement and I could no more have not asked that question than you could have.”

“Later.” He told me, waving me off.

I don’t know if he smiled then. As I have played back the memory in my head since then, sometimes he smiles in my memory and some other times he is expressionless.

“I can give you weapons,” he told me. “I can give you methods and powers so that you can overcome the mightiest army. I can make you, or your followers, stronger, faster and more hardy. I can even increase your skills and the speed of your thought. I can implant combat muscle memory into the body. I have forging techniques for weapons and ways that even the common person can throw magic around the place in ways that will not be monitored or guarded by the elitist fools that used to live at one academy or the other.”

It was my turn to hold my hand up to halt the tirade.

“And why should I trust you?” I wondered. “You are betraying one set of masters, only to approach me.”

He definitely smiled that time.

“They were never my masters…”

“Your allies then.”

He acknowledged that point with a nod.

“I can, and have, offered these same gifts to the cult in the North, but they have done nothing to follow through on those things. I could make them powerful. I could give them the rule over the North but they refuse to follow through on those things. All the while, The God languishes in his prison. Why should you trust me? All I want, all I have ever wanted, is to have a seat at the table. The God is important, he has given me everything. All I want you to do is listen to me and use the gifts that I can give.

“They cast me aside, you can listen to me.”

I nodded.

“Not really a compelling argument,” I told him.

He laughed.

“Then trust me because you already have.” He told me. “I could destroy you by virtue of taking your treachery to Cavill but I have not. I will not either and with every day that passes, I prove that you can trust me that little bit more.”

“Now that is more compelling,” I told him. “But I can’t help but notice that it’s also a threat.”

He was surprised. I genuinely think that he hadn’t thought of it like that.

“Not a threat.” He told me.

“So why would I want you?” I asked. “The threat works both ways. I could go to Cavill and the rest to tell them about your treachery just as easily as you are doing so now. I already have plans with which I can destroy the cult. I have allies and friends…”

“Do they know that they’re your allies and friends?” He asked with a slight smile.

“Do they have to?” I responded, making him laugh. “I cannot deny that the possibility of these things that you offer is interesting. I would be lying if I tried to claim that it wasn’t. But at the end of the day, I can do this without you.”

“You probably can.” He told me. “But two things occur. The first is that I can make it easier for you. I can ensure your success without risk. I can give you a fallback position so that even if your other plans fail, then there is a contingency in place to solve your problems.”

“What contingency?” I asked.

He just smiled at me, baiting my curiosity.

“So what is the other thing?” I wondered.

“You are an ambitious man.” He told me. “Are you honestly going to sit there with a straight face and tell me that you will be satisfied after you have destroyed the cult? Or will you want more? Will you want the next target and the next enemy?”

I didn’t like that thought.

“How would you do this?” I demanded.

“I have told you, have I not, about how I was working in the East with the Count Dorme? About how I was providing him with a method that he could use to control the Elder Vampire to use her as a slave?”

“You did.”

“The Vampires, as a race, were the slaves of The God. That is how I know about such magic. The other things that I can give you are mere trifles of the power of The God. Useful to be sure, but this… With this item, you could control that slave race and bend them to your will, whatever that will might be. I saw them, in my dreams and my visions as they hack away at the prison of The God. They are meant to be slaves and I know how to control them.”

“But you failed,” I argued.

“Did I?” He wondered with a smile.

“The fetish didn’t work,” I argued. “Ariadne was able to take control.”

“Dorme was a fool.” Phineas sneered. “He rushed and demanded. He was as much my subject of experimentation as the slave was. He proved that the basis of ‘the fetish’ as you call it was correct. But he was missing something. I did not forget. I knew exactly what was missing.”

“What was it?” I wondered.

He shook his head.

“Trust.” He told me. “I am placing myself in your power just as much as you are placing yourself in mine. I will tell you when I know that I can trust you. It didn’t work for him. But it will work for you if you want it of course.”

And he had me. He knew it and I knew it as well. I had to know.

I felt like I was banging my head against a wall. I was missing something and I had no idea what it was. You have described the feeling before when you talked about what it’s like to reach for an answer in the exam hall. I have never felt more connected to you than at that moment. I could see that there was a question that I could ask him that would call him out for some of his nonsense. There was a piece to the puzzle that he wasn’t telling me and it seemed vital to me that I knew what that piece was before I committed to anything.

I could see that answer, hovering, just out of sight in my mind’s eye and I strained to make that question manifest. It was like that moment when you forget a close friend’s name. Someone that you might not have seen for a few months but you were once close to. I think of some of my old war comrades like that. I knew that I needed to find that question so I backed off from it for a moment. I just… edged away from it to give the question room to breathe in my head and I wouldn’t be locked behind it.

Phineas and I talked about other things. We talked about what my immediate plans were for the future and I explained that I would need to take some steps to re-ingratiate myself with the cult. I needed to scout things and talk to people and get the pieces in place ready for the end game.

He was sympathetic and was in almost total agreement. He warned me about a couple of people, suggested some others that I might be able to recruit to my cause as well as reassured me about some people that I had thought were trustworthy but couldn’t be sure of.

Like Kristoff for example.

We were eating when the question came to me. Some of that wonderful roasted meat with the berry sauce served on a thick slab of bread and butter. I remember it like it was yesterday and I put off continuing the conversation while I just focused on enjoying the meal. There was a feeling that this was the ultimate question. The one that was going to have a major effect through it all.

So I waited until we had both eaten our fill. I moved the question around in my head a bit to make sure that I had it right and could make sure that I wouldn’t be struggling with anything and then, just as he was leaning back from his meal with a sigh of contentment, I pounced.

“But I do have another question.” I began.

He raised an eyebrow in curiosity. I’ve always wondered how people do that, the way they raise a single eyebrow, seemingly at command. I know that my body has control over the muscles in question as my squire and my comrades have all told me that they have seen me do it where an eyebrow has been raised in the questioning of some adjunct or another.

“You say that you have all these rituals.” I began. “All of these things, these weapons and magic that you have access to that you could use, both to further my goals but also to help empower The God.”

“That’s right.” He replied.

“Then why not use them,” I suggested. “Why do you need me at all, let alone why have you allowed the cult to continue as it has been doing for… however the fuck long. You could perform these rituals, you could make these weapons and then use those weapons to ensure the ascendance of the God or whatever it was that you needed it to. So why don’t you do them?”

He smiled. “That’s a good question and out of all of the people that I have ever made this offer to, you are the first person that has actually bothered to ask it. The answer is simple. Because I can’t.”

“Cannot, or will not. I have seen you standing on the edges of the rituals, being there but never quite taking part in the rites yourself. Never quite stepping inside the circles of power. I’ve seen you draw those circles but you’ve never actually been inside the circle themselves. So why do you not get involved yourself?”

He had sneered when I had talked about the rituals of the cult

“The answer is that I cannot. In that regard, I am lacking. Or rather if I ever had it, then that thing that I need is long since lost to me. The rituals of the cult are… weak. So weak that I find that I would prefer not to even bother. They are so behind on their devotions, so pointless and so…

“Think of it like wine which is a far better metaphor for it than sex. You get to the point where you are so used to the good wine that you actively don’t want to drink the shite wine that they serve in bad roadside inns.”

“Like this place?” I wondered.

“The wine here is actually quite good. But the wine amongst the cult is truly terrible. I would rather go thirsty than drink what they would offer. The God accepts it and gives of his bounty, but it’s barely enough to keep him going, let alone setting him or damaging his prison so that he can give us even more power.”

“Ok,” I said. “And I thank you for your explanation and I suppose that I asked the question. But I notice that you are still dodging the other thing that I asked about. Why don’t you do these things?”

“Because…” He took a deep breath and I could tell that he was thinking about his answer.

“Because there are rites that are involved. It is a ritual and that is the best way to think about it. Think of it in terms of a magical thing. Or like devotion in a church. You say your prayers, you donate things, you sing and you offer things to the Eternal Flame do you not?”

“I do.”

“And in The Cult, you perform acts and things.”

“Yes.”

“It would be the same. But some of these rituals require certain factors that you have, that I do not.”

“What factors?” I immediately demanded.

He smiled. “At the moment, although I am pretty sure, I am not certain. At the moment it’s pointless anyway. You do not need these things, at least not yet. There might be an argument for making certain preparations so that you have those tools and weapons in your back pocket so that they are there, should they become needed. But for now, I would suggest that you do not need them and as such, you should not worry about them.”

And he would not be drawn on the matter.

Back to the pair of us talking now.

“What was the factor, Sam?” I asked. “What was it that you had that he did not?”

“Do you not know?” Sam looked tired. Tired and infinitely sad.

“Flame…” I breathed. “Flame, but I hope not.”

Sam nodded and looked away for a long moment.

“We parted from that inn the following morning, putting our plans in place so that we could proceed. He didn’t answer the question that night or in the morning afterwards. We went our separate ways. I paid my first visit to my new lands but I did so in disguise. I arranged for those servants of the castle that might be loyal to the former Lords Kalayn to be quietly disposed of and those people that were not were encouraged to flee. Aunt Kalayn was already a wreck of a person, her body and mind were shattered a long time ago and she was only a shadow of her former self at that point. She went off to the dower house and I arranged that a couple of people that I could not and would not trust were assigned to “watch” her.”

“So you didn’t try to rescue her.” I was feeling more tired than angry. “Sam, she was a sick and dying old woman. She could have been looked after. I know those cultists were taking advantage of Ella….”

“Call it what it was, Freddie. They were raping and abusing her whenever they had the chance and when she wasn’t needed in her other duties. It does not do to look away from the crimes that others commit.”

I filed that comment away for future use.

“I also paid my respects to the cult.” Sam went on. “I talked to Cavill and some of the others to let them know that I was in the area. There were lots of very boring talks about what my plans were when it comes to Kalayn lands. For me, what that meant was that I ended up doing lots of nodding and smiling while I watched them dispose of the lands accordingly. I don’t think that they even consulted me as to what I thought of the entire thing. I was just going to live there, do what I was told and send any money that I made from those lands to the funding of the cult.

“It didn’t occur to them how impractical all of that was. I knew that Emma would want to know and would have some suggestions as to how I could monetize Kalayn lands as much as anyone else. I also knew that, given our rising to Imperial significance, there was more than a small possibility that some inspectors would turn up. You and Kerrass had already recommended that a Witcher and some priests turn up but those warnings were ignored.

“What they wanted was for Kalayn lands to operate as they always had and offset some of the risks. I think they had these visions that I would be some kind of glorified innkeeper. They would turn up ‘use the facilities’ as it were and then stand in the corner and serve them drinks while they conducted their “rites”.

“It didn’t matter that much anyway. My plans were in motion. The most important parts of those meetings were the before and afterwards. Where I could meet and talk to those people that might be sympathetic to my cause.

“Unfortunately, most of them were too cowed to be of any use. You spoke to Arthur and most of them were like that. Younger sons or bastard sons that didn’t even consider that if they all got together and made a concerted effort, then they could overturn the cult’s so-called Natural order.

“Kristoff was the exception. Like me, he had been away at war and had learnt something of his own value during that warfare. He was…”

Sam considered Kristoff for a moment.

“Kristoff was on the other side of your equation. You say, correctly, that education does not automatically indicate intelligence. But one of the side effects of education is that you can appear intelligent in certain circumstances. Kristoff is educated and is fairly clever but he lacks that last thing… I want to say that he lacks the imagination to be able to make reasoned leaps. He was angry that, after having been given access to units of knights and having fought in wars, he had returned home only to be ridiculed and lessened in the eyes of others. He was sullen and very angry.

“He thought that the cult was ridiculous. He had never been in a rite at that time and thought it was all nonsense designed to keep others down and he hated them. He was the most open to the changes that I proposed and I was able to arrange matters that he would be working with me while I took over Kalyan lands.

“But the other side of things was that I was mapping out the cult. I might have been a younger son and therefore not as important as others, but I was still important. I had influence in external courts and I was, of course, rich. The cult thought that I would be able to exercise influence over Emma and that therefore, I was a source of funds. They dismissed her as being unimportant of course and assumed that Mark, you or myself were operating her behind the scenes. That or she was some kind of stooge for one of Father’s lawyers.

“I began to realise that I was not as secure in my position as I thought I was. Emma was not as forthcoming with the money as they wanted her to be. Apart from anything else, I had my own plans for that money, legitimate plans as well. Plans which, at that stage, Emma agreed with. I knew that the cult was going to attack me. I was even planning the moment that I told them to go and fuck themselves with no small amount of relish. But the fact was that I couldn’t get any more money out of her. I didn’t want to get any more money out of her and that was beginning to upset people.

“Another problem was that, although everyone understood and agreed that there was little that I could do to prevent Edmund, Cousin Kalayn and their hangers-on from completely imploding, they wanted someone to blame and I was convenient. I was a younger son after all and I had been there. It was one of those strange situations. They knew I wasn’t at fault, but they also knew that the fault was mine.

“I got the impression that they would much rather have blamed Uncle Kalayn for it all but… That was impractical for any number of reasons. If they attacked the former head of the cult then they would be saying that the head of the cult was incompetent and therefore not the direct conduit of The God.

“I started to feel it, people talking behind my back, people muttering and making sly comments. I could probably have fixed it if that was the only thing that I was devoting my time to but I just didn’t have time. Francesca had done her job too well for my purposes. Her efforts along with you and your diaries meant that we, as a family, had come to the notice of the Imperial Court. As such, my movements were becoming more recorded and remarked upon. Therefore, the cult started to view me as a threat.”

I jumped in.

“You would have thought that they might have seen our, and therefore your, rising for the opportunity that it was.”

Sam grunted.

“There you were.” I argued, “a man with contacts and friends at court. An agent and a spy that they would have access to… blah blah blah.”

Sam chuckled. “You know that and I know that but you are putting your finger on the problem that the cult had as a whole. They were not a meritocracy. They had a very rigid social structure. The most incompetent First-Born son in the world had authority over the most competent second-born true son. And on and on down the line until you reached the bastard-born sons. And below them were the women.

“You have to understand this. It’s a difference in the brain. You are still working on the presumption that they saw the Empress, Emma and all the rest as being rivals. Intelligent and powerful women to be sure but rivals nonetheless. But that is wrong. Women were seen as being lesser in every way. It was not just an insult that they bowed down to a Queen or an Empress; it was actively against nature that this could be allowed. It was inconceivable to them that I could not order Emma about. They just… couldn’t comprehend it. They didn’t get it. At all. It was its own peculiar form of madness.

“So as a result… Yes, you are right. It would have been a benefit to have me in court. But they didn’t see the benefit there. They didn’t see that The Empress was an important figure. ‘How could she be important? She is a woman? They would say these things but they never did. Why? Because in saying those things they would be forced to acknowledge that other people would think otherwise.

“They didn’t need an agent in the Empress’ court because it was the Empress’ court.”

“Holy Flame,” I breathed.

“Now you begin to understand the scope of my problem. I was being pulled in all different directions. I needed to be in the South, getting ready for the coming tournament for the Empress’ coronation, because I needed to train given that my jousting skills were rusty. Not being in the tournament was unthinkable given my status. In fact, not being in the tournament would draw more attention than being in it.

“I was needed in the North to repair my relationship with the Cult as I was not ready to rebel against them. I did not have the trust capital with the Redanian forces to give me the troops. The Inquisition and the church couldn’t send anyone as the Imperial lawmakers had made it clear that changes were coming regarding the laws governing religious inquisitions. I could not work with Emma or work against the cult and suddenly it all started to seem like it was too much.

“Against the vast might of the cult. I had the promise that you and Kerrass would come North when you had finished with your errand in the South. The coronation of the Empress meant that you would be further delayed. I would also have the aid of the churches of both Kreve and the Eternal Flame should they be able to pull their fingers out and send me some help. If the Inquisition was going to come then the Redanians would send someone. I knew that my authority as well as Kristoff’s authority would be able to scare up some troops between us.

“I planned that I would install myself in Kalyan lands as their lord with you either on your way or already there. Then I would send messages to the cult instructing them to take their fat, privileged arses and swivel on my middle finger, or my sword point, whichever they were most comfortable with. I knew that they would then attack me and start to exert more control over Kalayn lands themselves.

“From there, I expected that you would investigate what was going on. Kerrass would go with you as well. If you didn’t then I had the redundancy of expecting the Inquisition to investigate. I was less enamoured of that idea at the time given that they might unearth some of my own activities. Remember that this was before the Empress had decided that Inquisitorial courts were no longer allowed to summarily try and execute people.

“So it was about six weeks before the coronation was due to start. I was taking advantage of the fact that we now had a Sorceress in the family and influenced enough that we could use the transport gate that had been established in Toussaint to acclimatise to their warmer weather and get used to how they do things down there. Then I would dash North to make plans with Emma about what we were going to do with Kalayn lands. And then I was needing to go further North to fight the fires that had spread in my absence.

“Into all of this, strode Phineas.”

Sam and I both shifted our weight in our chairs a bit. I had a horrible sick feeling that I knew what was coming, even though I didn’t know what it was. Thinking back, people have warned me about Sam over the years. But also there have been various supernatural entities, the woman on the Skeleton Ship, Kerrass’ Goddess and I’m sure that there are more, that have warned me that the answer that I have been looking for is right in front of me but I had not been willing to see it.

Of course, at the time of writing, I know what Sam was working his way up to telling me, but at the time, sitting in his study waiting for Sam to get to the damn point. I had no idea. All I could feel was a growing sense of doom. I had gone utterly still. My right hand dipping my quill and scratching the spider’s lines that make up my own shorthand as I took my notes, was working automatically by this point. So I was just waiting.

“We had been in touch a couple of times since our last meeting. He was one of the people that had warned me that the cult hierarchy was unhappy with me. I might even have considered that a manipulation but for the fact that other, independent sources were telling me the same thing. We talked some more about The God, this and that and the other thing. Ways that he could help me and other stuff as well.

“So I was in Toussaint. I had been exercising my horse, acclimatising to her and her to me. She was not a warhorse and she was not a riding horse. She was a jousting horse and had been trained to joust. Emma must have spent a fortune on her. I think she’s a breeding mare now for the Knights of Francesca or something.”

He stopped for a moment and considered this.

“What a grotesque thought.” He said quietly

He shook his head and carried on speaking.

“But regardless of where she was, I was exercising her and getting used to her. I had stopped in one of the roadside taverns for a small skin of wine so that she could have something to drink and rest as I was still testing her limits and didn’t want to push her too hard. This was about us learning about each other after all.

“So I was sitting there, watching the world go by when someone asked me if anyone was sitting in the chair next to me. I waved them away on the assumption that they would just take the chair and move off, but instead, Phineas sat down in it.

“‘So how are things going down here?’ he asked. I remember that he was smiling as he said it and not for the first time, I felt this urge to smack him in his mouth.

“‘So-so,’ I replied. ‘Busy. How are things in the North?’

“‘You should really be up there.’ He replied. ‘Things are getting tense and there are people openly commenting about having you killed so that they can take over Kalyan lands. They want to arrange so that you leave everything to one of Cavill’s whelps as well as your Coulthard lands, title and wealth and then you will be killed.’

“I smiled. It was not a new fear and the answer was the same.

“‘Emma’s lawyers will have them for breakfast.’ I told him. ‘Not only that, but it would be seen to be a forgery because why wouldn’t I leave everything to my younger brother? Also, Mark isn’t dead yet so at the moment, the cult would get that village on the white cliffs and the old manor house there that I’ve still not set foot in. Also, a five per cent stake in the family business which, between them, the rest of the family would buy out in moments. So to get everything that they want, Mark and Freddie would need to die as well and they would need some kind of hold over Emma. Good luck trying to get her to marry one of Cavill’s sons. She’ll rip his balls off first.’

“Phineas nodded. ‘I know that and you know that, but will Cavill know that? Or will he do it anyway and be damned to the consequences.’

“I had nothing to say to that so I tried to turn it back on him.

“‘Anyway.’ I said, ‘What are you doing down here? The place is crawling with members of the Lodge of Sorceresses and I’m told by very smart people that Lady Yennefer is one of the more powerful members. Shouldn’t you be avoiding Toussaint like the plague?’

“He shrugged. ‘Nah.’ He said. ‘The Bitch of Black and White chased me for years and never caught me, and little miss Fringy the Entitled is not motivated enough to do anything about it. If we came face to face then I might struggle but they would both underestimate me anyway. But also, they cannot detect my magic anymore because my magic comes from The God, not this formless and irrelevant chaos that they think so much about.

“‘I came to warn you.’ He told me. ‘That’s all.”

“I had nothing to say to that. For a long time, I had been trying to tell myself that my fears were all in my imagination and that I was really making something out of nothing. But Phineas’ declaration somehow made it seem more real to me. I went through all of the argument points with him again. Talking it all through and making sure that he knew everything that I was talking about and that all of these things were being considered. Then he said something that kind of knocked the wind out of me and I didn’t know how to respond to it.

“‘All of your arguments are sensible.’ He said. ‘All of them and I agree with every single one of them. The problem is not that you are wrong, but you are presuming that you are dealing with a rational mind.’

“That knocked me onto my back foot, I will freely admit that. I had no idea how to respond to that and as I sat there in the still-warm Toussaint sunshine… Have you noticed that? You were there last winter, even in the middle of winter, their sunshine is abnormally hot,”

I just nodded, not allowing myself to be drawn. It was not an unfair observation but Sam was stalling and we both knew it.

“I suddenly felt the sense that things were getting away from me.” Sam carried on “I felt the urge to run. To maybe write you a letter of warning as to what was coming and then fleeing. Maybe over the desert or something. That confirmation of fear that Phineas had brought was absolute. It felt as though the world was closing in around me and I didn’t know what to do with it or do about it.

“‘Anyway,’ Phineas said, pushing himself to his feet. ‘I must be off as well if I’m going to make sure that I can guarantee my own safety, let alone yours. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.’

“I remember that I seemed to sit there for what felt like hours although it must have been heartbeats at most.

“‘What?...” I said without really meaning to. He stopped and turned to look at me. His face was a picture of polite, slightly concerned curiosity.

“I took a deep breath and took the plunge.

“‘You once told me that there was a weapon that you had access to.’ I began carefully.

“He sat down, all polite concern. I took another deep breath.

“‘You said,’ I went on, ‘that there were things that would need to happen. Ingredients to the preparation of that weapon that I have that other people do not.’

“He nodded.

“‘What are those ingredients?’ I asked finally.

“He nodded and considered for a while. ‘The short answer.’ He began carefully. ‘Is that you have a sister.’

“I remember nodding.

“‘How would it work?’ I asked him.

“‘Well, obviously.’ He began, ‘This would have to be a thing of last resort. But before we can do anything, we would need unfettered access to one of your sisters so that things would need to be fine-tuned. But we need one of your sisters.’

“‘Is there a line of no return?’ I asked. ‘So could we do things in preparation and then leave certain things until they absolutely need to be done?’

“He considered this for a while.

“‘There are many stages to the ritual in question. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that there are a series of rituals that need to be committed to make all of this work. You would need to be present for some of those ritual, but not all of them. There would also need to be some things done that would have an effect on you. These things will change you. But yes, there is a line.’

“So, in theory,” I said slowly, ‘we could make preparations and then, when the situation becomes dire, I could take the next and necessary steps?’

“‘Yes.’

“I took another deep breath.

“‘Then which sister would be best?’ I asked.”

Sam stopped talking. He was watching me carefully. It suddenly occurred to me that a couple of the guards had moved so that they were more closely surrounding Sam. Sam was tense and some long unused training from Kerrass…

Flame… Poor Kerrass. I wonder if he ever warned me about Sam. I can’t remember at the moment.

But I remembered that training from Kerrass and I looked at Sam. He was ready for a fight. He was tired, pale, and probably fairly ill and there was all of the other stuff that was involved in what was happening, the things that he was taking and all of the stuff that those things had done to him.

So what guards he had in the room with us had kind of formed around him. They were expecting me to attack him outright.

It is an interesting thought. Until I saw what was happening with them and figured out what they were afraid of. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I would attack him over this.

But there it was. The answer that I had been looking for, for nearly two years. Sometimes openly and sometimes hidden even from myself. My brother had taken Francesca in order to save his own skin.

For a long moment, I felt like I was falling into a dark hole full of suffocatingly dark water and I had to force myself to breathe in and out to stay conscious. I wasn’t angry, not really and dimly in the back of my head, it occurred to me that I might get angry later. Instead, I felt hollow. Immeasurably sad and so incredibly tired.

I rubbed my head and looked back up at Sam.

“So it was you that took Francesca.” It was not a question and we both knew it.

“Yes.” He admitted and I remember nodding.

I subsided again. I want to say that my thoughts were spinning, echoing and bouncing off each other in an effort to make sense of it all, but that would be untrue. I felt hollow and my mind was blank. Instead, I took refuge with the oldest ploy. I buried myself in my work.

“Ok,” I said before taking another deep breath. “Ok. I have so many questions but first I will ask something that I need to know. I know that you don’t like to look ahead and want to tell the story in its proper order, but if you don’t answer it, then I will put down my pen and I don’t care if you torture me or anyone else for that matter, I will simply not start work again.”

He nodded.

“Is Francesca still alive?” I asked. “Because if she’s going to turn up out of some side door and…”

“No,” Sam interrupted me. “She is dead.”

I nodded and I felt the first tear gather in the corner of my right eye. A sharp lump appeared in the back of my throat which made me feel as though I was trying to swallow past a blade of some kind. It took several clearances of my throat for me to be able to speak again.

“So I suppose.” I cleared my throat again. “I suppose that the next stage of our conversation is to talk about what happened with Jack and what happened in Toussaint.”

Sam nodded.

“But first of all, not that I would trade and if you try and make this about which of my sisters is my favourite then I swear that I will gouge your eyes out with this quill.”

“I won’t.”

“I’ll do it, Sam, don’t try and use that as a ploy because I really will find a way to…”

“I won’t do that Freddie.”

I could hear the hysteria in the back of my throat and I took another moment to calm down.

“Why did you choose Francesca and not Emma?” I asked.

It was Sam’s turn to take a deep breath.

“There were a number of components to that.” He said. “The most obvious one was that Phineas told me that because she was younger, then Francesca’s contributions to the ritual would be more potent because she was younger. The other thing was about utility. As you would later point out, Emma is vital to the running of the trading company. Without her, the entire thing would fall apart. Some lawyer could take the reins, but that would leave the company without a master for several months while the new guy got up to speed. In the meantime, could the new guy ever be trusted not to be using the company to line their own purse?

“But the other consideration was purely a matter of making sure that we got away with it.

“With the use of Phineas’ magic that came from another source, spriting Francesca away was not the difficult part. The difficult part was ensuring that we would get away with it in the long run. That was the hard part. So we came up with the plan that we needed to have a way to ensure that there were so many suspects that people wouldn’t be able to see the forest for the trees. We needed to make any kind of investigation so that it would be like looking for a particular needle in a haystack’s worth of needles.

“We’ve talked about the family having lots of enemies in the past. Thaont is still true and I don’t think that that is going to go away any time soon. But also to that, one of the people that was going to be investigated most closely would be me. There were plenty of other people that would have a reason to kidnap Emma but one of the ways that that would fall would be that I would be investigated particularly closely.

“But Francesca? Not only would the enemies of the Coulthard family be involved in such a hunt, but so would all of the people at the Imperial Court that had been involved with her in either an official or a personal level. Also, given that the people around the Empress, who would certainly be the people conducting the investigation on such a level, would concentrate on that link before all others. So it would not be a case of asking who had the motive to remove Francesca from the Imperial Court, but more of a case of who didn’t?”

“But the suspicion would still fall on you.” I protested but then the realisation fell. “And then I proved your innocence.”

Sam smiled and a flash of pure hatred went through my skull as I saw him smile.

“Yes, you did.” He said. “Thank you for that by the way.”

“Yeah,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “Go fuck yourself. Talk me through it.”

“Toussaint really was a horror show at that point. I understand that a lot of changes have been made, but back then… The North still had its cult but Toussaint had a more destructive cult if you ask me, the cult of Chivalry and even worse, the entirety of the countryside had bought into it. So I could see the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. The Knights Errant wandered around being full of themselves. There were some good men amongst them, that’s not in dispute. But there were also some greedy, rich and entitled fuckwits there as well.

“Mostly it was Phineas’ plan. He would invent a serial killer, picking someone out of the crowd who he would magically enhance so that they could act the role that we had assigned to them. We looked to your own writings and the story of Jack for inspiration and that struck us as being suitably macabre. The God provided the ability for Phineas to implant Jack-like abilities and behaviours in that man and then he went to work.

“In the meantime, we needed to work on my innocence. Ideally, Phineas couldn’t be in Toussaint. Not only because of his innate cowardice but also because, despite his use of magic from a different source, he would still be detectable if he was transporting Francesca in and out. So we hit upon the plan of hiding her in plain sight and by the by, proving my innocence by making it look as though I had been framed.”

My sense of just general fatigue grew. I had seen it, I think, at the time. But I had refused to acknowledge the possibility that Sam could have been involved. I had not wanted to believe it and had refused to believe it. I had been looking for reasons why it couldn’t possibly have been Sam that had been part of the efforts to take Francesca. And in doing so… I had allowed her to be taken.

Kerrass’ often repeated line about it being the simplest solution that was true came to mind.

“So it really was you.” I began carefully. “It was you that walked up to the messenger booth and had a secret message sent to Francesca.”

He actually laughed and I felt my fist clench with the desire to punch him in the face.

“Yes. I’m sorry about that. But also, thank you for proving my innocence with that. I had hoped that it was going to be you that saw that.”

He sniggered and pulled over a piece of paper and dipped his own quill.

“My handwriting is still as you have known it for many years. At first, it was a genuine weakness and then, as I said last time, I started to pretend to be worse than I actually was with my writing in order to pretend weakness in the face of Edmund’s nonsense. So my penmanship is still… not great. I’ve never thought it was the most important skill we were taught when we were younger. If I need a letter to be sent, I can always get someone else to write it after all but… Let’s see if I can still do it. It’s been a while since I’ve practised.”

He stared at the paper for a long moment before he leant forward and his pen flew across the paper. There were a couple of pauses where he ran out of ink and then had to retrace some of the letters to get into the proper flow of the message but then, he was there, handing over the paper to a servant that brought it over to me.

He either didn’t trust me to get within arm's reach of me, or his illness or medicines were robbing him of the strength to get up and hand it over himself.

I kind of hope that it was the first of the two options.

I don’t have my notes with me and as such, I cannot guarantee that the message that Sam showed me in his study was the same as the message that was what lured Francesca out of her rooms that fateful night. But it looked similar. “Close enough” was kind of what I thought of it. Both the flowery message and the shorter, to-the-point message. He was setting aside his paper and the pen and ink.

“Wait,” I told him, setting aside the messages. “Write the same thing again as I made you do it, to prove your innocence.”

He smirked and started writing. I lost my patience about halfway through.

“Ok, that’s enough.”

He raised an eyebrow with a smirk.

“Write this, as you would normally.” I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch his penmanship. “The riders will come with the dawn, cold will be their breath, icy their armour and their blades shall be as shards of ice. They smile as they come, the snow obscures them and muffles the hoofbeats of their skeletal horses. Their hounds play among their feet.”

I opened my eyes to see that he was just finishing.

“Flowery,” Sam said, passing the paper to one of the guards to bring it over to me for inspection. There was an echo of that somewhere in the back of my brain. It felt like he was quoting something or someone.

“Professor Dandelion’s Saga of the Wild Hunt,” I told him. “Or thereabouts anyway.”

“I’ve always wondered something.” He told me as I looked at his penmanship. “Why do you always call him that? Not Dandelion the bard, not Viscount Julian or whatever his name is. Why do you always call him Professor?”

“Because that is the title that he earned,” I replied, tilting the paper towards the light.

“Some would argue that he is a disgrace to the office of the Professorship.” Sam countered. I could tell that he was trying to get a rise out of me. “Some would say that his behaviour is reprehensible.”

“And yet we still made him a Professor, and if he is still a disgrace I have never heard of an effort to remove the title from him. Therefore we should own it. He is a Professor.” I responded. “I also do it to remind him that he’s a professor. Whether he likes it or not. He wants us all to think that he’s an entertainer, a bard or at worst, a minstrel. But he’s also an educator. One of the things that Kerrass and I, as well as some of the other Witchers that I have met, have to work against is Professor Dandelion’s portrayal of Witchers. People think of Witchers as these heroic Knights Errant when they’re not they’re just…”

I sighed and set the paper aside. I had been speaking absently while I examined the penmanship. Sam might have known what I was going to say after I had begun, but even if that was the case then he would not have been able to keep up with my speech. The penmanship was better than his old form although I could see his old writing style in the rounding off of some of the letters and some of the sloppier pen strokes. There were also a number of ink splatters that would need the attention of some blotting paper if this was going to go anywhere. It was, unquestionably, my brother’s handwriting though and finished in a fraction of the time that I had been expecting.

I felt incredibly depressed. Sam had been playing me for years. I had loved my brother and he had been betraying me. I had defended him before others. I had gotten into trouble at our Father’s dining table, for protecting him and defending his poor academic capabilities.

“Witchers are just… what Freddie?” He asked.

I tried to remember what I had been saying.

“Witchers are just professionals,” I told him. “They get hired to do the job, they cannot afford to do it for free. They do the job, then they get paid. Professor Dandelion’s stories portray Lord Geralt as some kind of magnanimous hero that protects the weak and allows the truly desperate to get away without having to pay him. Nothing could be further from the truth. He might not go on a bloody rampage when someone tries to con him, but he still takes steps when people try to get him to work for nothing. There are accounts from the road of him simply walking into houses and taking anything that can be sold to a merchant in order to make up the shortfall.”

I sighed and waved the writing up to my brother.

“So you’ve been lying to me,” I told him. “Since we were little, I’ve… I defended you, Sam.”

“I know, and I’ve never not been grateful, even when you didn’t need to.”

“Yes, but Sam. You say that you want to bring me over to your side. Knowing this…” I waved the paper again. “How can I ever…”

And then I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” He asked.

“You’ve just told me that you took Francesca and in all likelihood, that means that you were party to her death. You killed Kerrass, enslaved and tortured Emma, Laurelen and Ariadne as well as performed untold cruelties on numerous other people. You have enslaved me. And this is the thing that I’m angry about.”

I started to laugh again and this time he joined in.

“The human brain is a wonderful thing.” He told me.

“I defended you before the head of Imperial Intelligence,” I replied.

“I know, and I’m just as grateful that you did that. Just as I was grateful whenever you defended me before Father.”

I considered this.

“That doesn’t help,” I told him. “That doesn’t help at all.”

His face honestly fell a little bit.

“What was the plan if I didn’t argue for your innocence?” I asked him. “You know, if I hadn’t figured out why you were innocent, what would be your scheme?”

“My squire,” Sam told me. “I had always hoped that you would come to my defence as you always had in the past so that was what I wanted. It would mean more coming from you anyway. I wanted it to come from you. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t done it. I want you to know that Freddie, I wouldn’t have been angry with you. It would have been perfectly understandable to say that you were in shock at the kidnapping of Francesca as well as all of the things that had happened beforehand.”

“My engagement you mean.” I put in.

“Yes,” Sam responded, completely missing the acid and anger in my voice. “But it was going to be my squire. My squire was innocent in such matters but eventually, Phineas was going to give a couple of people dreams. Kristoff was in Toussaint at the time. You won’t remember him but he was competing in the tournament. He had been knocked out early, partially that was deliberately on our part. But he had Francesca in a place away from where the search had begun. One of the deserted cottages that litter the landscape, or one of the hidden, former bandit hideouts. I had no idea where deliberately so that it couldn’t be read from my mind.

“Then when Johann was given the inspiration to argue that I was innocent and that had been secured.”

“I nodded.

“Talk me through it,” I told him.

“It was really simple.” He told me. “I sent the messages and then made sure that I was watched and seen. It all happened at night. I arranged the messages during the day and then made sure that plenty of people saw me during the course of the day. After that, I went to bed in my assigned guest quarters and that was that.

“From there, Francesca slipped around the circle of guards keeping her safe to meet ‘me’ at the waterfall but our false Jack was waiting for her there instead. He took her to his den and then Kristoff took her from there while we were all hunting the Fake Jack through the streets, so as to leave a bit of a false trail. He kept her in one of the caves in the countryside while the jousting camp was searched and then she was moved into one of my travel trunks during the time where the search had passed over me and was heading for the cave. She was teleported away while still asleep and drugged in my biggest trunk.”

I nodded, it made sense. The simple solution. The simple solution is always the easiest.

“The night we hunted for Jack?” I asked.

“Yeah.” he shuddered and I think he meant it. “One of the more terrifying nights of my life. I had known what Jack, the entity was, and I knew what Phineas was planning, but until I actually saw it, that…” He shuddered again. “And later, he would admit that he actually toned down the figure that we faced that night against what the actual entity is capable of. I won’t lie, Freddie, I read about your final meeting with him and when he called you friend, I have been living in fear of that for a while.”

I nodded. It was almost reassuring to know that some elements of my brother were still human.

“But Phineas…” he continued. “Reassured me that if the Entity Jack took an interest in what we were doing, then his wrath would fall on the poor sap that he had chosen to make our patsy. And then I took further reassurance that if Jack took it past that, then his wrath would fall on Phineas first before it came to me. I felt shielded in many ways.”

I nodded. I could feel my brain just beginning to slide off matters. I wanted to weep, rage and shout and scream and just sit and stare into space for a while.

“Where did you put her?” I asked. “When you left Toussaint?”

“That small and stupid parcel of land that I was given as part of being a Knight? The White Cliffs? She was kept there.”

And that was the point where my mind just shut down.

“Ok,” I said, standing up abruptly. “I give up there. I’m done. I need some time to…”

The guards and things were momentarily surprised by my sudden movements.

“We still have much to get through Freddie.” Sam began, irritation in his voice.

“THEN WE CAN HAVE ANOTHER MEETING.” My rage was sudden and it took me by surprise, let alone the other people in the room.

I took a breath and was disturbed by how much it shuddered in my throat.

“Sam, you have been lying to me since we were little, manipulating me to your own ends.”

“Freddie…”

“NO SAM.” I snapped. “I spent a year and a half hunting for Francesca. I nearly died looking for her. Not only that, but I nearly killed myself looking for her. I nearly drove away everyone that I care about, including you, by looking for her and you had her the entire time.”

“Freddie, there’s more to tell you…”

“I KNOW THERE’S MORE TO TELL ME.” I wailed. “I know, but I’m barely taking it in now. I need time to process this. I need time to think. I need… I need a break.”

I turned to go for the door. It honestly didn’t occur to me what would happen if those guards would try and stop me.

“All of this will make sense,” Sam told my back. “When we are free of Southern tyranny. When we have carved our own North out of the wreckage that has been wrought for us. I promise you that it will come right.”

I heard him take a breath. I was standing still listening to him, I didn’t remember deciding to stop walking.

“I promise you.” Sam went on. “I promise, we will be brothers again Freddie.” He told me.

I turned back to him.

“You don’t get to call me that,” I told him. I could hear the tears in my own voice. “Only my friends or the people that I love get to call me Freddie. Friends loved ones… FAMILY get to call me Freddie. You are none of those things. Never call me Freddie again.”

He nodded and I wondered if I was imagining the tears in Sam’s eyes.

“I will earn that right back, Frederick,” he told me.

I had nothing to say to that and left the room.

(A/N: Sorry it couldn’t be a happier chapter during the festive season. It should have been out before Christmas but Coivd and life got in the way. Still have a small cough over three weeks later. See you next time.)