Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (24 page)

Eddie said nothing, instead remaining absolutely deadpan except for raising one eyebrow.

It took a solid minute for Eddie to form an expression on his face, and as Peter waited quietly for him to say something, there was no way of telling whether whatever response he was going to give would be positive or negative.

Eventually, however, Eddie laughed slightly. ‘“might I have a bit of earth…”’

The reference wasn’t lost on Peter, but he continued waiting for Eddie to say something else.

It was another minute, which almost felt like a staring contest: if Peter could keep his resolve for longer, maybe he would be told that yes, of course he must find somewhere to work, provided he did no harm.

Eddie spoke again. ‘So… what do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose I just want you to know what I’m doing.’

Eddie nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, don’t be getting into trouble. As it’s related to your work, I’m not going to stop you.’

‘I’m not really intending to get into trouble.’

‘I know that.’

Eddie didn’t seem too enamoured with the idea, but he seemed to recognize that Peter was being serious, maybe he was actually proposing something that would be to the eventual benefit of the Guild as a whole.

‘Alright,’ Eddie said. ‘But you’ll have to work things like protection out for yourself. If it goes wrong, I can’t really afford to cover for you. Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. And good luck.’

Peter left, returning to his own room. He wasn’t sure why Eddie had been so ready to allow him to go about this, especially given that there was no apparent goal toward which he was working. Maybe Eddie trusted him. But he knew that, in organizations like this, trust can only be taken so far.

This, however, was not going to be the most productive train of thought to follow. Instead, he directed his attention to how he was going to get to Knifestone. Since he couldn’t get there directly, through a portal, he reasoned that the best way to get there would be to use a portal to get to somewhere close, possibly somewhere like Longstone, which wasn’t far away, and then either swim or raft across the half-mile or so of water that was between the two islands.

Longstone was a good candidate for this, because of the fairly well-known lighthouse there.
 
In turn, this meant that there was a permanent landmark to which he could anchor the outward end of the portal. That being the case, all he would need would be food and materials to take – which could be easily acquired from shops in the nearby areas of the mainland while he was there: a day-trip to the mainland to go shopping was, while not Peter’s idea of a good time, a lot easier than the notion of having to find everything in the wild, like he had to do before.

So, he realized, he was pretty much ready. All he had to do was get himself and his tools together. He already knew the spells to protect and veil the proposed site; all he needed to find out now was how he could expand the space around the site so that he could have an above-ground, open-air training area. Which meant there would just be one more trip to the library.

The interesting thing – at least to Peter – about looking in the library for that spell was that it was pretty much in the first place he looked. The technical details weren’t extraordinarily difficult to grasp, and once he understood the theory, he was confident in his ability to cast the spell. There were a few side-effects that he might possibly have to think about ironing out at some point, but these were mostly effects on gravity and time, due to the expansion and compression of space, and they would be almost negligible on the small scale on which he was going to be performing the spell. But it was always wise to understand where a spell may go wrong, and how to overcome any problems.

He studied and revised into the night, until he was confident in his understanding of everything he needed to. He was tired and slightly reluctant, but he knew now would be the best time to go: he was far less likely to be noticed at two o’clock in the morning.

So, after stopping to collect something to eat in the morning from the stores near the refectory and a tent and sleeping bag from where mission supplies were kept, he made his way to the Guild’s entrance.

A little sloppily, because he was tired, he wove the portal, binding it to the side of the lighthouse. For a moment he thought he had got it wrong, because nothing happened, but then it opened, the sea air wafting through the tear in space. He stepped through into the darkness, unseen.

The portal snapped shut behind him, and he paused for a moment to make double sure it was completely gone. Once he was satisfied that it was, he looked out in what he assumed to be a north-easterly direction.

Knifestone was just barely visible, a raised shadow against the water. The sea looked calm, though he could hear it
whoosh
-ing slightly in the background of his hearing, a not-unpleasant sound that reminded him of the island he had been exiled to. He had forgotten how personally satisfying that time away from civilization had been.

He paused again, this time to put some simple spells on his bags and clothes, to make them water-proof, then he stepped off the rocky side of Longstone, into the water.

He hadn’t ever been a fantastic swimmer, but being a magician had its advantages, and so he made it across the water in just a little less than ten minutes.

Knifestone really wasn’t a large place. A third of a mile always looks much bigger when it is seen in the context of a few streets in a populated area, but when it is seen as an island, unmarred by the influence of property development, it merely looks like an open space. Still, it was going to be big enough for his purpose.

He jogged to the centre of the island, which took him a few minutes, and then set up the tent. After walking around it a few times for a few minutes and tying a few spells to protect it from things like weather around it, he crouched inside and got into the sleeping bag. There was a lot to do here, but nothing was so urgent as to mean he couldn’t get some sleep first.

Of course, trying to sleep in a tent in the middle of a small island left Peter feeling somewhat exposed, and he didn’t sleep all that well. However, when he awoke in the morning he was rested enough to be able to consider what he needed to do next.

The main body of land on Knifestone was a grassy plateau a couple of yards above the sea, and over the water to the west he could see the lighthouse on Longstone. There wasn’t anything on here he could use for building, which meant he would have to bring everything he needed over from the mainland; food, wood, everything. But that wasn’t likely to pose too much of a problem now.

The reason for this was that, while the biggest issue with bringing anything onto Knifestone was going to be getting portals to anchor here, anchoring here wasn’t going to be difficult now he was here. He was going to have to place a landmark of his own and force a portal anchor onto it.

He packed the tent and sleeping bag away; neither of those were even remotely permanent enough to fulfil that purpose. He then started walking up and down, slowly pacing the length of the island.

‘Right,’ he said to himself. What he was thinking about, what was suggesting itself to him, was placing a stone lozenge in the ground, along the lines of the stones which can be found at the borders of old towns and cities:
you are here
. If he could find a large enough stone, he could bury everything except the topmost few inches; that would make a sufficiently durable – and therefore permanent – feature of the land to facilitate a portal anchor.

He walked to the edge of the island and began walking around its circumference, looking for a large stone loose enough to be lifted out of the water. The weight of the stone wasn’t going to matter: however large or small it was, if it was going to be suitable for his purpose, it was going to be too big for him to lift out unaided, so he would have to use magic.

The biggest problem, of course, with using magic to perform a task like that was that he wouldn’t be able to use his own hands to gauge how loose the rock was, and thus wouldn’t how much power he would have to exert to lift it. If he used too much power, a rock that was looser than he thought would fly up into the air, and he wouldn’t be able to catch it. Likewise, if he picked a rock that was stuck fast, and he carried on using more and more power in his attempt to lift it, the rock could shatter – or even worse, detonate. It was never wise to use magic in a “brute-force” manner.

Oh well. He walked around the island, occasionally stopping to give a stone that looked promising a gentle prod with his power; rock it a little and see how much it would take to work it free. Eventually he found one and, taking extreme care, he lifted it out of the water and deposited it onto the grass.

That was the hard part of the job done. With that done, it took him just a few minutes to gouge a hole in the ground into which he could bury the majority of the stone. On what was exposed, he carefully engraved:

KNIFESTONE – P.I.R.

He stood to examine his handiwork. The engraving wasn’t the best he had ever seen, but it was passable, and it was good enough for this. Excellent.

Stepping around it in what would have looked to an observer like a slow, solo waltz, he wove a spell on it so that he could use it as an anchor for the portals he was going to need to create to bring things that he needed onto the island.

With that done, he stopped and sat on the rock and rooted in one of the bags he had brought with him from the Guild, finding the small hunk of bread he had packed inside last night. It wasn’t exactly a gourmet breakfast, but it was sustenance, and was all he could pack that wasn’t likely to make a mess of the bag.

The following two weeks were quite a lot more difficult than he had anticipated. He had imagined it might be similar to when he had been on trial, but it hadn’t: the island he had been deposited on for his trial had been completely self-sufficient, with everything on it that he would need to live, not just survive. But Knifestone was little more than a lone field, sitting a way out to sea.

After having placed his anchor stone in the ground, he had cast a number of spells on the island to prevent his presence from being detected by stray pathetes: whatever was there would appear blurred to anyone who was looking toward it from one of the other islands nearby; no pathetes would feel compelled to actually come to the island now; and those who did would be stricken with inexplicable panic, and bolt the moment they were above the ground of the island itself.

He decided he would return home to the Guild at nights, where he could sleep in comfort and then have a decent breakfast in the morning. In the daytime, he was mostly either on Knifestone or else somewhere on the mainland, acquiring what he needed to build his facility.

On Knifestone, it didn’t take a long time to build something similar to a small cottage, wherein there was space for a minuscule library and somewhere to sleep, simple cooking apparatus, and a stockpile of non-perishable foodstuffs. In building the structure, he took more time and care to physically construct it with more care, and imbue every individual piece of the structure with protective spellwork, which would all coalesce and link together once finished, to form a sort of magical chain-mail; if one part of the whole was damaged, that would be all that would be damaged. After this, he placed larger, more powerful spells on the whole structure: plate armour on top of chain-mail.

The spells were similar to the ones he had used on his Hovel when he was on trial, but more powerful and complete due to the greater experience and confidence he had now. Protection from water, fire, wind, detection or penetration by unwanted would-be guests; it was all there.

He left the hardest of the magic he intended to implant on the island until last, to ensure that there was no possibility of other spells looping into it and becoming dependent on it for their own continued existence.

It was exactly two weeks after he had started. He stood in front of the cottage, which he had named the “
Second Hovel”
in homage to the original, looking outward toward Longstone. He was confident it couldn’t be seen from off the island, even by someone looking right at it.

This final spell was the one to expand the space around the island, to make sure he was going to have enough room to practice the spells he wanted to practice: the nature of the spells was a large part of the reason why he had saturated the Second Hovel with so much protective spellwork, and
all
of the reason why he had wanted an island in the first place.

Setting the perimeter wasn’t going to be difficult; it was merely a matter of having a continuously-defined and easily-recognizable border between the inside and the outside. He had initially intended to use the rocks on the outside of the plateau, which were the outer border of the island itself, as the perimeter, however that would have risked making it more difficult to create portals to the inside – space behaved slightly differently, and portals were a chaotic system that didn’t respond well to disruption, especially where spacetime was concerned. He also wanted to be careful concerning the Second Hovel.

Eventually, he settled on a toroidal shape around the building, building a low fence around it to act as an inner perimeter, and another around the area that he wanted to expand, taking care to ensure that the anchor stone for his portal was outside the outer perimeter.