Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (16 page)

Peter went through first this time, and the portal closed the moment Eric had followed behind him. Oh, there’s no place like home. He looked around, wide-eyed, remembering everything about the place. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed it.

He didn’t even notice Eric as he took off, running again, fuelled by adrenaline and brandy, not by magic, for Eddie’s office.

When he arrived at the door, he exploded in through it without knocking, opened his mouth to start talking. What he was going to say, however, nobody had a chance to find out, because he promptly passed out in the doorway.

His mind drifted. Before long, he became aware that he was surrounded by figures in black suits, all in a circle. Beyond the figures, there was infinite darkness, which contrasted to the bright spotlight that shone upon him. He was dancing, a waltz by the feel of it, with an old woman… the enthralled headmistress. She pulled away from him after a few minutes and started making garbled sounds that weren’t quite speech, and then he noticed that she was wearing academic robes, with a bright, phosphorescent hood which reminded him of glow-sticks.

Suddenly the scenery changed and he was sat at a wooden table, with her stood over him wearing a grey suit and a red lanyard around her neck. She was speaking English now.

‘You know why you’re in detention, don’t you?’

He went red and looked down at the dark, dense-grained wood of the table. It was the old-fashioned kind of table that he remembered from his earliest days of primary school, with a surface that could open to expose a small box, and an ink-well in the far right corner. He hadn’t been this embarrassed in as long as he could remember. His hands were on the table, but they weren’t his hands. Wait… no, they were. He looked up and around, noticing his reflection in the window. He must have been seven years old.

‘No, miss.’

She slapped his face so hard that his head ached, and he closed his eyes as he began to sob. The tears were hotter and stickier than they should have been.

‘Open your eyes, little pudding!’ The last word had a venomous cruelty to it that made him cry even harder.

He tried, but they were glued shut with his tears.

‘I said open your eyes!’ Her voice was full of raw, primal anger, which made him want to wet his pants.

‘I’m trying, miss!’ He could hear the anguish in his own voice, and he tried harder, contorting his mouth and making his eyes hurt with the effort. Eventually they opened, and he saw blurred streaks of dark crimson suspended in his vision. She was pointing at the table.

‘Do you know what that is?’

He looked, and noticed now that the desk was covered in red liquid, shimmering in the electric light from the ceiling. The liquid was bubbling up, out of the ink-well. He sobbed again, loudly and without shame.

‘What is it, boy?’ She shouted, angrily.

‘It’s blood, miss.’

He looked up at her, imploring, and she smiled, the glorious smile of approval, and she put her left hand in her jacket pocket and took out a piece of paper. From the paper she took a little sticker, which she put on the front of his dark blue, though now heavily blood-stained, woollen school jumper. He looked down. It was a small golden star.

‘Oh, thank you, miss!’ He smiled up at her, and she smiled back, ignoring the blood now ejaculating wildly out of the desk. She leaned down and opened the lid.

‘Look what you did, dearie.’

He did. At first he saw nothing but blood, up to about an inch below the top of the inside of the desk. After a few seconds, however, something started to appear. Hair. A forehead. A whole head. He giggled and writhed in his seat, full of childish pleasure.

‘Did I do that, miss?’

‘You did, Petey, aren’t you proud?’

‘Ooh, yes, miss.’

She knelt down and picked him up, holding him in a gentle, maternal cuddle. He had done his work, and she had given him his gold star.

But then everything went dark again, and suddenly the kindly headmistress fell away into the shadows, only to stumble forward, suddenly in a black suit and without a head. The body was flapping its hands, a sort of sick jive.

There was a heavy thud behind him. The desk had overflowed and spat the head out on the floor. It was Will’s. It spoke.

‘If you would be so kind…?’

Peter stooped down and picked it up, setting it carefully upon the shoulders of the body. The skin melded together and Will turned and walked away into the shadows once again. For a moment there was only the slight sound of footfalls on a polished floor, and then Will spoke again.

‘My king, he is dangerous.’

He woke up, paralysed, and Eddie and Eric were stood over him. He was in his own room. His throat was sore.

‘Peter.’

Peter gasped. ‘Christ have mercy.’ He coughed. Bloody hell, his throat hurt.

‘You were screaming, Peter,’ said Eddie. ‘Try not to speak. Try not to move either, you’ve been restrained; you were thrashing around and trying to cast.’

It had been a dream. He felt tears form in his eyes, well up, and overflow, running down his cheeks. He was relieved when some trickled into his mouth: it wasn’t blood. Eric turned his back on Peter and whispered something to Eddie. Eddie nodded, and extended his hand, with his wand in it. Peter fell back to sleep.

In the morning, Peter woke up to find he was no longer restrained. He sat up, forgetting about his broken hand for a moment. It didn’t hurt, other than a distant itch. They must have repaired it while he was asleep.

There was a glass on the table near his bed, full of water. He picked it up and gratefully drank, hoping it might help relieve the fiery pain in his throat. It turned out not to be water, however; it was sweet and cool, and sharp. It could have been diluted lemon juice and glycerine, or something like that. Not that he cared, he was just grateful for how much better it was making his throat feel.

Slowly, he got up, washed, and dressed himself. There was a fresh jacket in the wardrobe, and his satchel had been hung on the back of his chair, where he usually put it. He opened it and looked inside. Nothing was broken, but something was missing. His notebooks.

Crap. That was around three months’ work gone, and now without an Internet connection, he had no way of redoing it. He kicked the chair in anger, and sat down on the bed. He could possibly redo it, or some of it, from memory. But there was a hell of a lot of information in those books, which he had worked very hard to acquire.

But, he supposed, maybe carrying on would have been a bad idea. After all, doing that research had got him nearly killed yesterday. Maybe it really was very dangerous, maybe he had been dabbling in things that weren’t for people like him to know. But conversely, what if it was the other way round? Could it be possible that the whole reason why the woman had reacted in the way she had was that she – and probably Rechsdhoubnom and the rest of Werosain with him – was scared of what could be uncovered?

To hell with it. He had set out to speak to Eddie last night, but that hadn’t happened. He was going to take just enough pause to get some breakfast and some coffee (oh, he’d missed the Guild’s coffee!) and then he was going to go and talk to Eddie.

So, he put his satchel over his shoulder and set out. The short walk around the underground tunnel-corridors came just as naturally as if he hadn’t ever been away, and before he knew it, there he was again, in the refectory. Smells of food and coffee drifted into his welcoming and ready nose, and he drifted after them, all the way to the counter. Once there, he obtained the largest mug of hot, black coffee that was on offer, and a fried egg on toast. He ate the egg first, quickly, knowing that his need to get the food inside him was currently greater than his need to enjoy them. No, it was the coffee that he needed to relish and really get the most out of.

Once he was drinking it, the coffee alone made him feel strong again. Not that it was even remotely able to eradicate the psychological trauma he had recently endured. But it was a start. He sat for ten minutes, letting the warmth flow through his body, and the caffeine through his brain. It was the closest to real comfort he had experienced in what felt like a lifetime.

But the inevitable point came where there wasn’t any more he could squeeze out of the mug. He paused for a moment to mourn its depletion, and then carried its remains, and the plate his egg and toast had been on, and returned them to the counter, and then he carried on his way to Eddie’s office.

This time, when he arrived, he politely knocked, waiting to be bade to enter. He only had to wait a count of three.

The door opened, and Eddie stepped aside. ‘Come in.’ He sounded tired, but otherwise relatively at ease. He invited Peter to sit down in front of the table, and resumed his own seat before Peter had even stepped toward his. He sat down slowly, noticing that Eddie really did look tired. It seemed, also, that when he looked at Peter, he did so by way of sideways glances that didn’t seem to last more than a second or two at a time.

‘Eddie, are you alright?’

Eddie clamped his mouth shut and shook his head, staring at the table. His mouth being shut didn’t have the appearance of him suppressing an urge to vomit, however; it was more of a ‘there is emphatically
no
need for words’ gesture.

‘What is it?’ He leaned forward into the table.

Eddie looked straight at Peter. ‘You,’ he said. ‘You scared the hell out of a lot of people last night, and very early this morning.’

Peter leaned his forehead on the table. ‘I scared the hell out of myself, too.’ He heaved a deep breath and straightened up again. ‘I’m sorry about the screaming. I had a bit of a rough night, you might say.’

Eddie raised his eyebrows, looking a little defeated. ‘That’s not really something that’s to be worried about right now. It can’t be helped. I’m sorry I didn’t let you speak. You fainted because I made you faint. Obviously I should have fully sedated you first, rather than after you woke up the first time. But right then the priority was getting your arm fixed, it was clearly broken. Plus you seemed somewhat… manic. Which would have prevented you from making any sense.’

Peter raised his injured arm and flexed his wrist. He was grateful for having been knocked out and healed, he couldn’t lie about that.

Eddie continued. ‘I think I might have an idea what it was you were so desperate to talk to me about last night. Eric and I spoke for quite a long time after I put you out last night, and he told me what you told him about. I’ve got to say he’s worried about you. And so am I. But I’d like to hear what
you
have to say about it.’

Alright, thought Peter. Are you sitting comfortably?

‘Well, I’m guessing you already know about everything that happened yesterday?’ Peter looked at Eddie, hoping that Eric had told him; he wasn’t very much wanting to explain everything after having had to live it - and damned near die it too.

Eddie nodded. Peter was relieved.

‘There was something disturbing about it, how insistent she was that there was more I knew than she could find when she was... probing my mind.’

‘Yes, Eric mentioned that. Tim was curious about it too, as well as a couple of the others.’

That didn’t come as much of a surprise. ‘So that’s got me thinking, what I’ve been reading about and trying to learn about must have touched a pretty raw nerve in them. Like what I’ve read about exposes something furtive. And she... she knows about a dream I had, something I recited that I’d heard in a dream.’

Eddie raised an eyebrow. ‘What was it you recited?’

After taking a breath to steady his nerves, Peter repeated again what he had heard the young man say in his dream. When he had finished, Eddie blinked, holding his eyes closed for a moment.

‘And what happened in the dream?’

‘I saw a village, with a large fire burning, large enough to be one of the buildings. It all looked very real. I was birds’-eye, as though I were floating over the whole scene. There was a young man, it was him who said what I just repeated now.’

‘That’s strange,’ said Eddie. He scratched his chin contemplatively. ‘And the tomb, what do you know about that?’

Wait. ‘I didn’t mention the tomb.’

‘I know you didn’t. But Eric told me that you’d found it, and that
she
seemed to think it was important.’

‘She certainly did that.’ Peter nodded and then closed his eyes, letting his head roll backwards as he sat fully in his seat, rather than just on the edge. It wasn’t appropriate, he supposed, given that this was a meeting and not a friendly visit. Not that he cared much about that any more.

‘She seemed quite badly frightened actually,’ he continued.

Eddie stood up and stepped toward the door. ‘I’m not at all surprised, to be honest.’ He opened the door and stood aside, holding it open. ‘And if you follow me...’ he paused, breathing slowly, as though he was fighting some deep internal protocol ‘... I’ll explain why.’

Peter hesitated, wondering where Eddie might be thinking of taking him. This whole situation wasn’t playing out anything like how he had been expecting it to, especially given Eddie and Eric, and probably more people besides who hadn’t said anything, knew that he had been wandering around the place, taking interest in things that he had assumed would be formally and officially None Of His Business. And yet it was turning out, now they knew, that he hadn’t done anything really wrong.