Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (23 page)

Another thing had been getting to Peter: he had once again fallen out of the habit of honing his magical skills. The problem as he saw it was that, in order to practice the things he wanted to practice – including one or two concepts he had read about and been intrigued by in the secret library – he would need a lot more room than he had. He also was beginning to feel rather depressed about hardly ever being outside and seeing daylight.

The Guild itself, as a physical structure, was hollowed under a valley, with the topmost floor level being some thirty feet under the trough, and around it were the woods he had been shown around when he first joined the Guild, and often walked around on his own in these years since. It was a nice place to look around, but he never seemed to get to appreciate it.

Appreciating the scenery, however, was far from Peter’s primary motivation to spending more time above the ground. Among the things he had been wanting to explore were attempts the writers of the books in the secret library hade made to reconstruct earlier models of how magic worked, which Peter assumed would at least be likely to resemble the magic used by Werosaians. He wanted to try them out himself, as simple as they were, to learn about what kinds of principles were at the foundation of that type of magic – what magical paradigm, as it were. Most of the reconstructed spells were centred on village life; ensuring that plants which could be eaten would grow well, slowing animals down so they could be hunted, and the like. Not things which could be very effectively experimented with in a cave.

What he needed – or at least wanted – was a kind of research facility, where he could practice the magic he had read about, and whatever other magic he felt he needed to practice more, safely. Some of the ideas he had read about had the potential to be incredibly dangerous, since all that was known about them was what had been reconstructed, based on principles which hadn’t been understood natively in many generations of magicians.

Of course, in the meantime, there were the Wednesday practice sessions which Peter was still attending, though he hadn’t ever been exactly thrilled at the idea of focusing on that kind of work, even if the Guild was primarily a military outfit. He once again become an academic.

He was walking around the wood above the Guild, looking between the trees. He had always liked walking around among trees and nature. Earlier in his life, it had been because it had contrasted so sharply with working on computers, and the inherent limitation of everything about them except the hardware to being virtual. There was nothing virtual about the leaves and bark on a tree, though to his trained mind there were similarities between trees and types of computer programs, though they were very subtle. In different types of trees, the various aspects of the tree – the nature of the wood, the leaves, the bark, the way the branches grew – all followed a pattern that could be easily recognized, just like different pieces of computer software followed a pattern: all holly trees have spiky, oily leaves that are either dark green or dark green with a yellowish edge; all word processors have controls for fonts, page sizes and layout,
et cetera
.

These patterns became more obvious to him once he became a magician. As he walked around, he could see the different trees, and what kinds of magic they were best attuned to. All notions of the traditional so-called magical attributes of trees, it turned out, were descended from the truth about them: oaks are large and long-lived, and their wood is dense but open-grained; wands made from oak wood are good at focusing large amounts of power, but not fantastic at holding power for a spell that need the energies to be built up before being executed. They are good for protective magic, as are pines and hollies. He still had no patience for those types of mystics and Wiccans though; they were naïve, and they annoyed him. They thought themselves to be magicians on some level, but all they were, as far as he knew, was pretentious, groping in the dark for concepts which hadn’t availed themselves to them.

He tripped over a root and lost his footing for a moment, nearly sending him face-first into a hawthorn, but he caught himself and stopped.

‘Pillock,’ he rebuked himself aloud. He didn’t much fancy having two-inch spikes driven into his eyes.

He was bored, and it seemed to him the more bored he was, the more bored he was doomed to become. After standing around for a moment, he decided to walk back to the Guild, and possibly get something to eat. Walking around aimlessly wasn’t going to be much use as far as finding somewhere he could practice magic alone was concerned.

As he walked back, he wondered how he might be able to come by an area large enough for his purposes. Ideally, he would have a large area that could be secluded from anywhere populated, that way any risk of being disturbed while working would be practically non-existent, as would any risk of disturbing other people. He knew of a number of ghost towns around the country, but as far as he knew they were mostly the property of the Ministry of Defence, and had been since the Second World War. There weren’t any other large areas in the country that hadn’t been settled already.

And then he realized, just as he was approaching the entrance to the Guild: what he needed was an island, like the one he had been sent to when he had been on trial. He had learned a hell of a lot while he had been in exile there. Of course, it wouldn’t be the same if he was living there voluntarily, with the ability to bring resources in from outside, but he would still be able to do and learn a lot.

He wondered what islands there were that would be big enough for him to set up some kind of personal base – and where he wouldn’t draw attention to his presence or activities; he wasn’t any more eager to be caught effectively stealing an island than he had been just before to take a face full of hawthorn spikes. Maybe there would be somewhere large enough that he could hide somewhere, or maybe use some kind of veil to occlude whatever he did and built there.

Veiling was not something Peter had ever attempted on a scale larger than that of his own body, and he had never even considered anything permanent before. There were also protective spells he would have to look into, in case anything or anyone hostile found out about what he was doing there – especially Werosaians.

But of course, he would have to actually
find
an island before it was actually going to be worth knowing much about hiding or protecting it. Moreover, finding an island was naturally going to involve sitting in the library looking in books. It seemed to Peter, sometimes, that there was not anything he could do, or want to do, that would not involve him looking things up in a book at some point. It was a fact of life, but it was often less frustrating to him while he was actually doing it than when he was thinking about it, either before or after. However, in each of the cases where it was what he ended up doing, the research tended to prove essential.

He got to his room and sat down. There was always going to be more to do, or so it seemed. Though he very much looked forward to doing it. It was just the next step, and this was something Peter often reminded himself about when he was feeling like he wasn’t making any progress.

He was in the library again this afternoon – the main library, this time – looking at maps of Britain and the surrounding small islands. It turned out that there were a huge number of islands dotted hither and yon about the mainland, but these islands were mostly either large enough to (and almost always did) support human populations, or else too small to be suitable for anything larger than a small tent and a disposable barbecue. Both kinds of island would be equally useless, which Peter found most decidedly infuriating.

However, looking at maps as he had been recently had been doing turned out to be a welcome change to Peter. It was so different to the arcane works he had been looking at for most of the time he had been at the Guild: as far as land was concerned, there was little that could go missing or be lost in translation. As long as the land was there and the cartographer was good at his job, the land would be on the map.

All he had to do to find an island he could quietly claim for his use was look at the maps, make notes of the islands’ sizes and whether or not they were populated. This had proven to be a far smaller task than he had expected: it only took three days, at the end of which he had found the perfect place.

The place he had found wasn’t exactly huge, but it was large enough for him to be able to use similar magic to what was in place at the base in Scotland, and thus go unnoticed by anyone, unless they actually knew it was there.

It was called Knifestone, and was among the Farne Islands of which Lindisfarne is the most famous. At around a third of a mile long, there wasn’t much room, but that wasn’t going to be too much of a problem. In fact, quite the opposite: it meant that Knifestone wasn’t large enough to be likely to be the home to anything. That said, not much seemed to have been written down about the island, so he didn’t actually know if there was anything really interesting about the island other than its somewhat unique name.

The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea, to the point where he found himself becoming rather excited to go and see the place. However, creating a portal to the island, as he had done to the home in Oxford, wasn’t going to be possible; he didn’t have any pictures of the place, and he didn’t have any ideas what permanent landmarks there might be to which he could anchor that side of the portal. So, he would just have to get there the old-fashioned way, or at least part of the way.

This would involve tooling up for a journey, which he hadn’t consciously realized he would have to do until he became suddenly aware that he had been gormlessly staring into space for almost half an hour.

He shook his head to wake himself up. ‘C’mon, Peter,’ he told himself, ‘wake up and get your arse into gear.’

He got up and stretched his arms above his head, relishing the feeling of the muscles pulling, and then picked up the large book of maps he had been looking through and walked it over to the shelf he had taken it from. The weight of the volume in his hands was satisfying to carry. He returned to his room and checked what he had, what he could take with him.

There was his satchel, to which he was as attached now as ever, hanging on the back of his chair. In it were the same things he always kept in it: his wands, his two-stick, and the little bamboo flute he had made. The books he had written in while he was away in Blackpool now resided atop his table, though he hadn’t felt much of a need to read through them in some time. He picked them up, and slipped them into the bag. If he was going to set up anything like a base of his own, he wanted his books there with him. He might even need to acquire more, but that was something he wouldn’t necessarily know until the need actually arose.

He put the satchel over his shoulder and left his room, making his way toward the refectory. It was rather early for the evening meal just yet, but there was likely to be something available to eat. Usually it would be something simple like soup, or sometimes leftovers from breakfast or lunch.

Nothing was left over from either meal, however; only the Guild’s own version of minestrone was on offer. Not that Peter had a problem with that; all their soups were delicious, and minestrone had always been a favourite of his.

The soup did its job as well as it always had, and after he finished he went to leave the refectory.

However, he realized something just before he reached the door. He stopped and snapped his fingers.

‘I should tell Eddie,’ he whispered to himself.

Not that he specifically wanted Eddie’s blessing, as far as Knifestone was concerned. He just didn’t want him thinking that he had wandered off to create mischief. The last thing he wanted was other members of the Guild finding out about the island and thinking that is was some furtive movement related to some new Werosaian outpost. That shit would be too deep to crawl out of.

As he walked to Eddie’s office, he couldn’t help starting to feel slightly nervous. It was entirely possible that he would find himself dismissed from the office with a raised eyebrow and a wave of the hand, or that he might think Peter was up to something he didn’t want anyone to know about, or whatever else. But as far as Peter knew, he wasn’t doing anything particularly wrong. He just hoped that Eddie understood as well as he usually did.

He knocked on the door and then opened it immediately, without waiting for Eddie to acknowledge him.

Eddie was stood with his back to the door, apparently reading something he had just taken down from one of the shelves.

‘Peter, won’t you come in,’ he said. Apparently he didn’t need to be able to see the door to know who was banging on it.

‘Hi Eddie,’ said Peter, trying to sound as though he wasn’t about to propose stealing an island. ‘How are you?’

Eddie put whatever it was that he had been looking at back on the shelf and turned to face Peter, looking at him deadpan. ‘Alright. You?’

‘Alright.’

‘What do you want this time?’ Eddie sat down and motioned to Peter to do the same.

Peter sat down. ‘I’ve been thinking for a while, I should find somewhere I can practice magic in private, out of the way, in case it’s more dangerous than it looks. There’s some stuff written about in some of the books I’ve read in your library, but there’s not an awful lot there and I’d like to see what I can… extrapolate… from what little there is. For the sake of trying to understand how Werosaian magic works.’