Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (27 page)

Atlosreg blinked, holding his eyes closed for a few seconds. Peter still found the youth with which he spoke and moved rather astonishing: other than for the obvious signs which had accumulated over the decades, he could have been Peter’s age.

He started to speak again.

‘They wanted to know what it was about me,’ he said, ‘that made me so much better at magic than anyone else, how I could do it so easily. They even asked me to teach, so that if there was a secret to be learned, I could teach it to them. That way they could all be as good as me.

‘I refused without even thinking about it. “I don’t know any more about it than anyone else,” I told them, “I just practise a lot.” They were disappointed. They let me go, and from then on I practiced even harder and slept even less. It was a horrible life to live, but at the end of it I saw only good things, things that would make it all worth the torture I was putting myself through. But I tried not to think about it a lot. I just woke up, trained with the others, and trained for about two hours every night after everyone else went to sleep.

‘I was working toward the chance that I might get sent into your world on an attack, and I had my plan.’

There was a pause in which nobody spoke, or even breathed. There wasn’t a particular tension in the tone of Atlosreg’s voice, or necessarily in the content of what he was saying, but Peter was deeply interested in hearing what he had to say, and – despite himself – Eddie appeared to be as well.

‘The chance came soon after I turned nineteen. I was very young, but I was so much better than I had been even a couple of years before, when they asked me to teach magic. And I was better at hiding it.

‘Sixteen of us were to come into your world, near where you took me from.

‘We were supposed to set up a base there to take control of people, because there were such a lot of people there who were young, and the young have such weak minds.’ These last three words were dripping with disdain, almost hatred. ‘And minds that are ready to be filled, with the University nearby. It was the perfect opportunity, they thought.’

He suddenly burst out laughing, a resonating, vitriolic laugh which gave Peter a sick, cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.

‘I killed them!’ Barked Atlosreg, overcome with some perverse hilarity which only he could sense. ‘I killed them with a single spell as soon at the portal was closed behind us. I turned them to ash and they just blew away!’

He continued to howl with laughter for several minutes, twitching so hard that at several points Peter wondered if he wasn’t laughing, but throwing a fit. Eventually, however, he stopped laughing, and merely smiled. He looked most decidedly pleased with himself, and for the first time since meeting him, Peter had a fleeting sensation of genuine fear, of the kind that doesn’t merely make one fear for one’s own future, but the for the future of reality: the kind of fear one feels when there is a threat of nuclear war.

Maybe Atlosreg had been mentally damaged in all those years’ incarceration, after all. Or maybe he genuinely did find it funny, but for some reason Peter couldn’t divine. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

‘We landed in the quiet, just outside the city to avoid attracting any attention, which was fine by me. Nobody would notice sixteen people appearing out of nowhere and then fifteen people turning into ash and floating away on the air a few seconds later.

‘I had not decided what I would do once I was on my own in this world, though. I know I thought about staying for a while and maybe getting in touch with your Guild, and building up an invasion force to come back to Werosain with. Tell the Guild all they wanted to know about the land and the way Werosain’s army works.

‘But when I realized I was on my own in this world, I must have got excited and forgotten what I was here for. I ran around shouting and laughing.

‘There were people in the streets, I think it was evening. On one road I grabbed some young man when I was walking past a place where people drink –’

‘A pub,’ said Eddie, emotionless.

‘Yes, and yelled that I’d done it, come in from another world and was going to stay here because Werosain and their false god-king were a lot of crap. But then I realized I had just grabbed him. I let him go, and one of the others asked if he was alright.

‘“Jack,” I think he called him…’

Odd thing to remember a name like that over such a long time, thought Peter. But then, it had been pretty much the first thing he had heard following his journey to Earth, and it was a big moment, so it stood to reason that he might.

‘I ran again,’ Atlosreg carried on, ‘and I laughed and laughed and laughed. All the people seemed to like being calm and quiet, and I must have made some people annoyed because I was not calm. I was excited, I was free!

‘I was stupid though, telling anyone who would listen that I had done it, after wanting to escape Werosain for years I had done it, I was on Earth and I was free. Nothing else mattered, especially it didn’t matter if people thought I was mad.’

That kind of thought didn’t take Peter by surprise in the slightest, considering that he himself had learned to have very little regard for what people thought about him. Granted, he hadn’t had anything like the rough life to which Atlosreg had been subjected, but he had long since learned that setting too much store by others’ opinions of him was nothing more than a psychological disaster on a countdown.

‘I do not remember properly what happened next,’ said Atlosreg. ‘There were policemen, and I was arrested for being a nuisance. I told them who I was, I said “I am Atlosreg of Werosain, and I want to destroy that world because it is evil,” but they thought I was mad –’

‘They normally do when they hear things like that,’ Peter said.

Eddie laughed nervously, which was singularly uncharacteristic for him.

‘– and they sent me to an asylum.’ The look on his face said it all: he knew that speaking openly about it had been the single most stupid thing he had ever done. But it was done, and the consequences had been distributed to him and lived with; there was no going back, and hadn’t been for eight decades.

‘For nearly eighty years, I was moved from one place to another, and for the first thirty of those I was given drugs and had electricity put through me.

‘Oh yes,’ He looked at Peter and Eddie’s bewildered faces, ‘if you listen to them talking for enough years, you start to understand. But at first I didn’t know I was being drugged.

‘I would get angry, and try to leave, but always I was too angry to cast spells properly. So they would hit me and tie me to my bed and put pins in me. That’s what I thought at first, later on I realized they were putting drugs into me and making me take pills. They made me sleepy and forget who I was. Eventually I gave up trying to get myself free.’ He looked at Peter, and suddenly Peter was aware of a tremendous degree of self-awareness and suffering in him.

‘Bloody hell,’ he murmured quietly. He looked at Eddie. He was sat still, and bone-white.

Peter stood up and stepped toward Eddie. ‘Hey. Are you alright?’

Eddie blinked. ‘Yes.’ The answer of a robot.

Peter wasn’t sure what to say. There wasn’t anything he really could say, other than to apologize for how Atlosreg had been treated over all the years – and what use was that now?

A long, uncomfortable minute passed, with all three men alternately looking at each other and the floor. Eventually Peter stood up.

‘If I untie you, you aren’t to use any magic against us. Is that clear?’

A nod.

Peter stepped to the chair to which Atlosreg was tied, and untied the rope, coiled it, and dropped it on the floor.

‘I didn’t bring you here to carry on being a prisoner,’ he said. ‘I brought you here because I want to learn from you, but you are free. Not my prisoner or my patient, but my equal, my teacher – if you’re willing.’

Another slow, measured nod.

Eddie spoke, quietly. ‘The Guild was watching over you, from a safe distance. Making sure, for what it’s worth, that you were safe.’ He looked at Peter and addressed him. ‘That’s how I knew that you’d taken him from the home.’

Peter laughed and nodded, as Atlosreg had. ‘I had a feeling it might have been something like that.’

‘Do you think you have a hope to unmake Werosain?’ Said Atlosreg. ‘The magic that holds it together is old, and it would be hard for you to get inside it…’

Peter hadn’t actually thought enough about doing it yet to have put much thought into the process of destroying Werosain. Definitely not enough to realize what, exactly, that process might involve, other than somehow breaking Rechsdhoubnom’s spell – and with that being such a primitive magic, cast by a mortal just as Peter was, Peter had assumed that it would be possible, however difficult it might turn out to be, to unpick it.

‘I think,’ began Peter, ‘that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth trying. I need to know what you know about magic – not because I need to become the best, but because your technique might shed some light on the technique he used to create Werosain in the first place. I have knowledge of a lot of magic, and a fair bit about how the world – how the universe – works. So I think I might have something of a hope, yes.’

‘Do you really think that’s the right thing to do?’ said Eddie. ‘I mean, destroying a whole world.’

‘We’ve been through this,’ said Peter, ‘all of half an hour ago.’

‘What else is there?’ Atlosreg looked sternly at Eddie. ‘You and Werosain have been at war for twenty thousand years. It will carry on forever.’

Eddie opened his mouth and sighed. He must know, thought Peter, that Atlosreg was right. He stood up and went to the door and went to open it. At the last moment, he turned to face Peter and Atlosreg.

‘I’m not giving you my blessing. I can’t. But I’m not going to stop you. If you want to get in trouble, go ahead. But if you put our world at risk, I’ll use whatever force I need to stop you.’

‘Of course,’ said Peter.

Eddie walked out of the door, but just as it closed Peter remembered something. ‘Oy!’ He called. ‘Come back here!’

Eddie came back to the door. ‘What?’

Peter pointed up, indicating the building, and then waved his open hand in front of him, indicating the island as a whole. ‘You took all my defensive spells down. They took me quite a while to put up, and you just came along and took them down. Are you just going to leave it like that, defenceless?’

Eddie raised an eyebrow as if to say ‘you’re kidding.’ But then after a few moments, Eddie frowned a little: if nothing else, it would have been terrible manners to destroy a comrade’s defences and then leave the place in that state. And, as much as Eddie didn’t see to see eye-to-eye with Peter’s methods or ethics – which Peter understood, he would probably have felt the same had he been in Eddie’s position – he did see that it would have been a pretty shitty thing to do, just leaving like that. Like going round to a relative’s house and removing the locks.

He came back inside.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll help restore your defences. That way you’ll be safe at least from other groups of magicians who might find out about you and
him
being here.’ He indicated Atlosreg. ‘But I don’t like it. Not one bit.’

‘Understood,’ said Peter. ‘Thank you.’

Then, together, the two of them began to set about restoring the defensive spells on the Hovel, starting from the foundations: to repel water, quench fire, cushion in case of earthquakes, and other natural disasters which, however unlikely, might pose risks. As they went, Peter described the process of chaining the spells on the actual structure, which seemed to gain some approval, if only academic.

‘What you need,’ said Eddie, ‘is alternating layers of chained and monolithic spells…’

He spoke quietly, and the rest of what he was saying was lost to the sound of the water in the distance. It seemed he was talking to himself as he set about extending the cushioning spell all around the building single-handed, until the whole structure was enveloped completely in it. He then placed a single layer of repelling spellwork on top of the cushion, which would act as a solid barrier to any physical attacking spells. Peter stood back and watched; this was a degree of workmanship he hadn’t ever seen before. Sometimes it had been easy to forget that there must be a reason why a magician becomes the Steward of the Guild.

Eddie’s wand fluttered easily through the air, weaving spell after spell, seamlessly flowing from one into the other, in a way which reminded Peter of a classical musician playing a medley of operatic themes: a virtuoso violinist playing the
Carmen Fantasie
.

Eventually, Peter gathered enough confidence to join Eddie in the casting again, and felt the power Eddie was using. It was a subtle yet magnificent type of flow, and Peter pushed himself harder than he had ever done before to keep up. The look on Eddie’s face had turned from irritation to concentration, as though he was enjoying this intense magical exercise more than he had anticipated.

They worked for hours, and when they had finished, the Hovel momentarily glowed, as though some of the last of the day’s sunlight had been trapped somewhere within all those layers of spellwork.

‘You picked the right place to put this place,’ said Eddie, ‘I’ll give you that. With all the old Anglo-Saxon settlements nearby, there’s a hell of a lot of power left to tap into.’ He slapped the wall closest to him, and Peter heard something distant, like a bell and an enormous timpani being struck together several miles away. ‘This should hold for a while anyway.’ Should hold for a frigging eternity, thought Peter.