Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (18 page)

Peter accepted them and held them tight, hugging them to his chest. He nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you. I will.’

Eddie nodded once, and signalled to Peter to go; not so much a dismissal as an acknowledgement that he knew Peter wanted to leave, and was free to. Peter left, and made straight for his room, whereupon he stashed the notebooks in his satchel again and sat on the bed. He flopped back, staring at the ceiling.

He burst out laughing. All of a sudden it seemed hilarious beyond reason that he should be in this position: first he had been rescued from the Werosaian who had tried to kill him, and invited to join an ancient magical society and learn magic himself, and now he was a custodian of what could well be the oldest library in the world. Just like that. It was like a dream or a fantasy land. It made no sense.

Later on, he decided to go for a walk around the outdoor grounds. He had been away for three months, and though a lot had happened since he had got back, he had still only been back at the place he now considered home for around fifteen hours. He wanted to see the grounds again, and breathe in the fresh outdoor air.

Outside was a different place here to what it had been in and around Blackpool, which he never seemed to have noticed before. In Blackpool there was always wind and cars and seagulls, where here there was only a constant low level of rustling of the sparse leaves in the trees all around, as the gentle breezes fluttered through them. Without looking for it, he found the hazel tree he had taken his wand from all that time ago, and sat on the ground under it, with his legs crossed.

The light falling on him was the cool light of the start of spring. What warmth there was around was in the ground, building up in that secret world in the soil, preparing to push shoots and leaves and other living green things out of itself. That, he realized, was what life was all about now that he was a member of the Guild. That was the secret; the world is alive, and one’s place as a part of the world is to be alive with it, in partnership. Symbiosis, he supposed would be a better word for it. There hadn’t been any of that in Blackpool, where pathetes and their mundane and shallow values, artefacts, and devices reigned supreme. He felt sorry for them. Sorry that most of them wouldn’t ever experience life as it was meant to be experienced.

Things are made important by the importance that is ascribed to them, he thought. The tomb and the writing on it, those hadn’t been so important to him as they had been a collection of curiosities to be satisfied; that was how it worked. But they had
become
important – important in the extreme – all of a sudden, because the Werosaians thought it was important. And there was the secret library, which contained books important enough to warrant being buried in the magical equivalent of a thermonuclear bunker. The Guild
must
have come to think it was
that
important for some reason, whether it was paranoia or a genuine, proven need to implement that protection.

He sighed and stood up again; the surface of the ground was cool and damp, and slightly less pleasant to sit on than he had realized. He strolled around for a while longer before returning to the monastery for something to eat, and let his mind wander and eventually go blank for a while. Whatever there was in the library that was
that
important, simply was. There wasn’t much point, right now, in trying to divine whatever reason it would have for being so.

As it turned out, the secret library, while small contained a lot more books than Peter had initially realized. In fact, there weren’t only more books in there, but there was a far wider variety of books in there than he had imagined there would be: altogether. Granted, in the week following its revelation to him, he hadn’t got round to reading a whole shelf, let alone the whole library. He had spent that week dazedly reading all the titles and introductions – those of the books which were in a language he could recognize, at any rate – and attempting to compile some crude kind of index; a habit he had acquired when doing his degree, the better and quicker to be find information on a given topic when he needed to.

The index was nearly complete after the week, or at least as complete as he could make it, given the number of books in there which had been written in either unrecognizable ancient dialects of English (‘there are letters here I don’t recognize… how the hell do I pronounce “
þ
?”) or else Norse, Latin (
non difficile quoque
), or some even more ancient – and therefore totally incomprehensible – languages and modes of writing. He was half-surprised that there wasn’t any Elvish in there, but it was only a matter of time, he joked with himself.

Eventually, he found the book Eddie had told him about; a tutor in that archaic language. As excited as he was at the prospect of learning it, once he had the tutor in his hand the excitement lost a fair amount of its edge: the book had been handwritten nearly two-hundred years beforehand, and the handwriting was an old-fashioned kind of cursive script which would in itself be something of a translation exercise. After sitting and reading at it for four solid hours one afternoon, he concluded that, rather than actually try to study from it, he would be better served by copying it afresh into another, blank, book. That way he could get used to reading that mode of handwriting, and once he had completed it he would have his own copy to study from, and afterwards to keep.

The lamp flickered three times and snuffed out. In the pitch black, Peter licked the wick with the ignition spell. It gave a single flicker and died again. He squeezed the wick in his finger and thumb. It was warm and completely dry.

‘Crap,’ he said. He always prided himself on his eloquence in these situations. He held his wand in one hand and cast a small spell to throw out some dim light from the end, and left the room, ensuring that the door was locked on his way out.

Usually, replacing oil in a lamp by hand wasn’t something that needed to be done manually; the lamps around there were generally kept supplied with oil using an adapted gas pipe system, but apparently they had learned early on that using gas as fuel for lamps in an enclosed area where a lot of magic is likely to be used might not be the wisest thing to do, and so they had returned to using oil. Using magic for lighting likewise wasn’t viable, partly because of the vague likelihood that the ambient magic could interfere with other spells, and partly because even magic had, ultimately, to adhere to entropy and the laws of thermodynamics: the energy has to come from somewhere, and magical batteries were little more than Leyden jars, which couldn’t store enough to be useful in theory, let alone in practice.

In the case of the secret library, however, the lamp was “off-the-grid:” its very existence would have been exposed had there been a traceable pipe leading into it.

Peter had found this out in further scattered and brief conversations with Eddie over the last week, and while it was interesting enough in its own way, as an historical curio, in practice it was a pain in the balls. Usually he didn’t run out of oil, because he would fill a large phial in the morning on his way to the library, and while he had done that this morning, he had been working for longer than usual, and it had run out.

As he walked toward where the oil was stored, he thought he might as well stop for a coffee on his way – while he was up and about, it wouldn’t do him any harm. Usually this would have been where he had gone somewhere for a cigarette, but he had long since run out of what he had bought and not bothered to replace it; his relapse hadn’t lasted very long.

There weren’t all that many people in the refectory at this time, just the last few stragglers from dinner who were clearing their plates and slowly ambling their collective way out. There wasn’t anybody here whom Peter knew other than by sight, but as he passed a few he wondered – not for the first time – what was normal for people here to do to pass their time, when they weren’t working. For the most part, he didn’t even know what a lot of people did for their work here.

The notion of food suddenly reminded him of how hungry he was; as much as he liked food, and as much as he often was the first person in the room to get hungry, sometimes when he was thoroughly engrossed in what he was doing he would forget to eat – or even to consciously register the sensation of hunger. But thinking about it now, he felt faint with hunger.

Luckily, there was still something left, in the form of a thick Chinese-style chicken and sweetcorn soup, which made him feel warm and satisfied. After he had finished, he dropped his spoon into the bowl with a certain degree of abandon and thought that perhaps he should turn in for the night: there wouldn’t be much to be gained from secluding himself in the library even longer into the night.

His sleep that night was well-earned and deep, and when he awoke the following morning he felt more prepared to conquer more of his work than he had until that point. The books he had been reading were teaching him things, though mostly mundane things compared to the ultimate goal of his researches. His Latin had actually proven to be better than he had guessed it would be, probably owing to the five years he had spent being made to study French and Spanish at secondary school; thankfully he wasn’t needing to compose in Latin, but he could read it almost fluently by now. Of the older flavours of English, he hadn’t been able to tackle anything older than some of the mid-fifteenth-century Middle English, and even that had been a struggle.

It was a hell of a corpus, he thought as he went for his breakfast and then for an extra-large fill of oil for the lamp. From what he could see, the secret library not only recorded a hell of a lot of history, but a hell of a lot of linguistic development; there were books there in English that were so old that the English they were written in was just a dialect of German. There were books there in Gaelic. There were even what he assumed to be records in there inscribed in what appeared to be Oghams, recording what he suspected to be Pictish. The further back he looked among the books, the more diverse the languages were.

He arrived back in the library and lit the lamp, stashing a second bottle of oil under the table, just in case. He had decided on his way in that he would dedicate only the mornings to copying, and the afternoons to studying the books he could more readily read. That would ensure he didn’t fry away too much time doing what wouldn’t be immediately productive.

By lunch time, his eyes were aching for a break and his wrist felt like the bones inside it had been worn almost completely away. As he ate his lunch, he remembered that he was a magician, and hence he could dull the pain with a spell; he could use the spell he had used when his arm had been broken. He decided against doing that, however, on the grounds that pain like that was meant to warn a person that they were doing too much in one go.

Okay, the copying would just have to not happen for a few days. That was a pain: he hated set-backs, especially ones that were his fault and that could have been avoided.

On his return to the library after lunch, he picked up the next book back from the one he had finished the previous day before starting to copy. It was slim, with a slightly limp leather binding that made Peter think of some pocket Bibles he had seen in years gone by. The leather was soft to touch and the pages were stained with the light tan sepia colour of age, but the ink was as sharp and crisp and black as though it had just been written.

This one actually had something interesting and relevant in it. It was, it turned out, a treatise – or maybe digest would be a better word – on the Guild’s purpose and history, written by another Steward from about four centuries prior, called Bartholomew Hansill.

Apparently Hansill had read all of the books at some point himself, and had written this one as something of an instruction to future successors to the Stewardship regarding what the business of the Guild was. It started immediately by describing what was chronicled in the libraries – both the main library and the secret library – the events surrounding the beginning of Werosain and the establishment of the Guild.

It interested Peter that while this book was nearly a whole century older than the grammar of Old Common European he had been copying, it was far easier to read. The writing was in a graceful but purposeful hand, which seemed almost feminine with its inviting round sweeps and lovingly formed single letters: the author had been very careful to avoid abbreviations and even any leaning toward cursive script. Bartholomew Hansill, whoever he was, had written this book to be read. And reading it was a pleasure, like reading memoirs by his grandparents.

Werosain had been called into existence using some unknown, but extremely powerful, form of magic, by a young man whose personal name was unknown. He had assumed the title “Rechsdhoubnom;” the title was a dialect of some ancient language and likely translated to something like “King of this world.” How original, thought Peter. This had been approximately twenty thousand years prior to the present day as recorded then.

Rechsdhoubnom himself had apparently been a very accomplished magician, especially for his age, and a well-respected priest under his father, who was the tribe’s god-king and shaman. There had been some sort of event, some terrible crime, resulting in Rechsdhoubnom being stripped of his priesthood and the heirship to his father’s role, which had been the motive for him killing his father and creating his own world. The act of a child in the throes of a dangerous tantrum, said Steward Hansill in a footnote. Damn’ skippy, thought Peter.

The whole population of the tribe to which Rechsdhoubnom belonged had been kidnapped
en masse
and taken to the newly-formed Werosain, though nobody seemed to have ever known by what means. There were a few who resisted, a few of the other people who had known some limited magic, and while most of those were killed by either Rechsdhoubnom or the few whose minds he had taken control of, a handful survived and escaped.