Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (14 page)

Slowly, he became aware that nobody was laughing any more. The woman was staring at him, studying him. He had a feeling that everything he had just thought, she had heard. If that was the case, she must be in his mind somewhere.

She smiled: yes, he had caught on. How very quick of him, but then he must have been clever to work out the things he already had. If they had him on their side, they could be a lot stronger, because of the potential – and stubbornness – that he had inside him. Oh, he had his principles, but everyone has a breaking point. She looked at him. Yes, she would be able to find a way. Everyone has their weaknesses.

He closed his eyes. There had to be a way he could close the connection, cut her off. If he could just find a way to think without her being able to see or hear it.

But of course, she must have heard that. She would have all her guards up.

Fuck. It didn’t seem like there would be a way out.

He could hear the other Guild members around him, all breathing in unison. That seemed too contrived to just be a coincidence… she was probably in their minds as well. Gently, he allowed his own curiosity to flood his thoughts, to become the one thing he was thinking about. What was she trying to accomplish, right here and right now?

His thoughts mingled with hers and his curiosity became something they shared: the wavelength they had in common.

There was an element of desperation in there. Oh yes, she was desperately in need of something, something she had only realized she was lacking very recently. Within the last week? No, within the last day.
But
what
the hell could it be that was bothering her?

That one was obvious. Or else it seemed to be, at least. She desperately wanted to
know
something. She wanted to know what he knew, and why he wanted to know more.

But he didn't know why, himself.

He let his mind drift, allowing hers to lead his. It was though they were dancing.

He could feel, through his connection to her mind, that she was connected to the others too, just as he had thought. Trying to find out, apparently, if any of them knew anything about what Peter was doing. Not that she was going to find anything; there was nothing there to find.

In his mind, he laughed openly. Probably he was laughing physically as well, but he was so deeply into the connection now, that he couldn't have said with any certainty. It was amusing, genuinely so, that she could be so adamantly searching for whatever he knew. She had already been in his mind – she was still there. She knew he wasn’t hiding anything.

But, of course, she thought, maybe he was using some sort of spell, or else some extreme mental discipline to occlude or obfuscate what was in his mind. Maybe if she pushed a little harder...

He screamed. It hurt, more than he could have imagined. She wasn’t even trying to cause him pain, all she was doing was probing, pushing a little harder, trying to break whatever techniques he might have used to hide what she was looking for. It was like torture, and he supposed in a way it was: put the mind under enough stress and eventually it will give up what it is hiding, simply for the sake of its own continued existence.

She couldn’t find anything. He could feel, vaguely, the horror that the others were feeling as they witnessed – both with their eyes, and with their own minds – what she was putting him through.

It felt like his head was in a vice, neurons firing randomly everywhere. Muscle spasms were happening here and there, and he was finding it hard to breathe. If she pushed any harder, she might risk killing him. But what was it to her if just one more magician from the Guild was killed? He was one man, from the other side’s army. He was worthless.

But he was capable, and for that reason she wanted to keep him alive.

Her felt her falter. Was she getting tired? Or had she merely exhausted her reserve of faith in the idea that Peter was hiding something. Even though she was decades older than he was, he had a feeling that it wasn’t tiredness. She was giving up, because she had finally accepted that there wasn’t anything there.

Slowly, as the pain in his mind – both the physical brain-ache and the mental pain and exhaustion – subsided, Peter began to stop relaxing his own will. She had made him weak, but she had opened a connection between them. Logically, he might be able to venture more fully into her mind, as she had into his.

She knew he was doing it, almost as soon as he started. He sprung upon her consciousness, pounced, careering straight into her mind, full of rage and fear of his own. He went in and started throwing the full weight of his mind around within hers.

She was in pain herself, now, and that was distracting her: she needed to end the spell, she needed to close the connection. There was no telling what disasters might befall Werosain if he learned everything
she
knew.

And then Peter caught a glimpse for the first time, through her mind, of what Werosain looked like. He saw dark, straw-like grass that looked like it was dead. He saw a deep red sky. And he saw her love for that world. It was a genuine love that bordered on mourning: her beloved Werosain, which had been doomed from the beginning, and all they were doing was trying to find a way to either make it better or hide on Earth, to have a real chance at life.

He felt her love for the perverse, half-dead world. He shed her tears. He retreated fully back into his own mind.

But the spell wasn’t over. He just felt her emotions now. He knew she was scared, wroth, and embarrassed. Her thoughts were growing more chaotic, more injurious to those present, and anything might go wrong at any moment. The connection, through her mind, to the others, was still there, and they all seemed to be thinking the same as him. Her mind was becoming like a wild animal. It was going to lash out, and there was a point coming, very soon, where there wouldn’t be any way to stop her.

It was like a physical pressure, building up toward its crescendo, ratcheting inexorably in the direction of certain doom, slowly, one click at a time, until...

One of the other connections he saw through her mind died away. An element of euphoric relief flooded through her into them. It was perverse, the notion that she could take that much pleasure from killing. It negated everything that Peter had just, in the last few moments, learned from her about her love for Werosain. It mooted his echo of it.

He couldn’t contain that level of combined upset and anger; neither did he want to. He pushed inward again, throwing his mind through and into hers.
Upon
hers, as she had to him. He didn’t simply look around now; it wasn’t the type of work that needed any knowledge of magic, other than the mental discipline that was inherent and requisite to learning.

What could he do in here? He knew that he could probably do what she had, but he didn’t know how to. What was more, he didn’t want to know. But still, he wanted to hurt her.

There was derision inside here; she had hurt them and she was happy about it, she was laughing both inside her head and out. There was still something of a connection to the others, though it was mostly through Peter himself, as he was the one in whom her primary interest seemed to be.

But that had been her downfall: in creating such a connection to him as she had, she had allowed him a wider path through which he could backtrack.

Further in he went, seeing parts of the plan relating to the formation of this base, and further back to her own indoctrination by a Werosaian – she had been a headmistress at a school nearby until she had been caught and enthralled by him using similar mind magic to what she, in turn, was using on Peter.

Slowly, as he saw more, pushing deeper still, into her subconscious and into the very fabric of her mind, the firmware and the ROM on which it ran, she found the enthrallment spell that had been put into her. It was like a piece of computer code, injected into what was already there, like a modification in a computer game.

The spell itself was an ugly, deformed piece of work, and it was tightly knotted back into itself. But, patiently holding her psychologically pinned by way of main mental force on his part, he traced it back to its root, and pulled. The whole path through which he had entered her mind contracted in pain and anguish, but he persevered. Each knot, each section of the weave, became more difficult to grip as her mind contracted around his, but he adamantly continued, patiently pulling apart
each small component of the spell, until eventually the whole started to fall apart.

All at once, the woman’s mind fell into a turned-off state: she passed out, her mind relaxing. He withdrew his own consciousness from her brain.

The spell that had been holding Peter and his comrades paralysed fell apart. Apparently it had been powered almost entirely by a constant stream of power – or will – from her mind. Maybe she had intended to release them at some point, or maybe it was just a feature of the mind-reading spell.

Tim and Eric stood up, and Peter followed, carefully acclimatising to being in his own mind again.

Will looked over them, looking in his own black suit like the wrath of hell itself. He smiled.

‘You’re not leaving. You know that, right?’

Wait, Peter thought. If the woman’s own enthralment had ended, his should have ended too: a dependant daisy chain kind of effect. That it hadn’t meant...

Eric and Tim simultaneously fired spells at Will, the combined effects throwing him back against the wall in a rush of sparks and purple smoke. Will bounced forward again immediately, as though his back were a springboard, flying toward them all. En route, he kicked the woman’s unconscious body aside and roared, an inhuman sound that both petrified and enraged Peter at the same time.

Peter launched himself at the floor and retrieved his satchel, and got up to find surrounded by the Werosaian agents.

‘No you fucking
don’t
,’ he said. He drew his wand and gestured with it frantically, trying to keep calm but finding himself unable: all he could think about was the shitstorm that had happened in Scotland, and having had to immolate Sue’s body afterward. He wasn’t going to do that again.

The spell he was casting came out rather slap-dash, a rough version of what he had intended. The five men who were setting upon Peter found themselves glued to the spot, though he had intended for them to become completely paralysed. However, something like that wasn’t going to hold for long, especially when it had been cast in the quick, rushed way in which it had. Now wasn’t the time for being fussy about how perfect his magic was, though; it would give him a few seconds.

He joined Tim and Eric, firing spells at Will like bullets, tearing the chairs apart and panes of glass from windows and beating him with them, leaving him covered in cuts and welts, but apparently still unaware of any pain. He threw balls of fire at Eric, which Tim extinguished with gusts of arctic wind, while Peter and a couple of the others, whom he didn’t know, worked as a team to set a gravity trap to keep Will from running away. But every time he came close to being taken in by it, he just skidded past and the spell fell over, leaving them all to start over.

Taking a collective leaf from Will’s own book, the whole team began hurling white-hot balls of flame at him, peppering him with... nothing. On their approaches, each ball merely fizzled out, as though they had run out of fuel along the way.

Unthinking, except in fear and rage, Peter then picked up the remains of a chair and swung at Will’s head with it. Will didn’t have the time to stop him; the blow landed, but it immediately became obvious that he was still far from down. Blood was issuing from Will’s ear, and while he looked rather uncomfortable, he didn’t betray any other signs of being in pain.

Damn’ Guild and their mental integrity training.

Everything stopped at the sound of Peter starting to laugh wildly. Oh, he didn’t find anything funny. He was just fucking terrified. He had gone from being alright, on his way home from a long Guild operation, to being kidnapped and about to die at any moment, to being alright, with a chance of escape, to being probably about to be killed by one of his own fucking comrades. It was fucked up and he didn’t like it.

Still laughing, that sound in the silence reverberating surreally in the large building, he approached to punch Will in the face.

Will caught Peter’s fist in his open hand, gripping it hard, and pulled Peter close, twisting. Twisting, and twisting, until Peter felt his wrist snap. With his left hand, he dug in his pocket, wherein he had kept a knife ever since being sent on his exile trial. He howled in agony and terror and fury, and plunged the blade into Will’s throat, guessing where the carotid artery should be and struggling to draw it across.

Blood gushed everywhere, and Will fell. Peter felt all the blood fall from his own face at the thought of what he had just done.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he shivered and shook, struck by the guilt of it, staggering backward and falling onto his backside. ‘I’m a murderer.’

There was silence as they watched Will twitch and eventually exsanguinate. There was definitely no escaping it: Peter had killed a fellow human being. Everything was dim and distant, and he wanted to fall into a black hole where he could either pay for the crime he had just committed or else escape from the terrible burden of guilt he had just created.

He suddenly felt himself being hoisted into his feet by his lapels and slapped hard across the face. Eric’s face swam into focus.