Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (30 page)

Just like that, Peter found himself in another world. It felt just the same as stepping through any other portal: clean and simple, one moment you were in this place, the next moment you were in the other. The moment had both the gravity of being the biggest thing he had ever done in his life to date, and the mundanity of being something that he had simply
done
.

There wasn’t much time, however, for Peter to even consider enjoying the moment, because less than ten seconds after they had stepped through the portal, they had been thrown against a wall by a guard of six Werosaian men.

The wall was cold, compressed earth; the floor was stone. The only light inside came from the feeble flickering of crudely made lamps. There was very definitely an otherworldly feeling to this dark place, which – even had he not been pressed against a wall under the combined weight of three men – wasn’t exactly welcoming or hospitable.

He turned his head, grinding the side of his skull into the stone and feeling it scrape his scalp, to see Atlosreg, who he saw had likewise been pressed against the wall, pinned by his shoulders, facing his assailants. They appeared to be being slightly more gentle with him; either because he was old or because he was obviously one of them – a Werosaian.

Atlosreg croaked something in the archaic language he sometimes slipped into speaking, and his aggressors jumped backward, yelling at him and each other in the same language. They looked furious and petrified, and went for their weapons, joined after a few seconds by the three who had been pinning Peter to the wall. Peter seized his chance and drew his wand, preparing a bolt of lightning to strike between all six of them, but he didn’t have time: another second later, they all fell to the ground clutching their throats and gargling and gasping, blood issuing from their mouths, noses, and from between their fingers.

Atlosreg laughed a deep, sickening laugh which, as it had done before, made Peter fell cold all the way through to his soul.

‘The fuck…?’

‘They would have killed us,’ said Atlosreg simply.

That’s as maybe, thought Peter, but the perverse bastard enjoyed killing them. Sometimes he really had no idea as to exactly how secure his personal safety was around him.

He must have seen Peter staring, sickened, because he grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘Come on, or more will come for us,’ he hissed.

Peter swallowed the urge to retch, and slid along the wall after Atlosreg.

Looking back into the room as they walked out, Peter saw a doorway set into the stone at the furthest wall from the door through which the two of them exited the room. It was identical to the one they had built on Knifestone, except it looked to be far more ancient.

‘What is this?’ He said.

Without turning back, Atlosreg spoke quietly, such that Peter had to strain to make out all the words. ‘Guard. There is only one door between Werosain and Earth, so all the people coming in or going out have to go through the same one. It makes guarding Werosain against any attacks a lot easier, because there is only this door to watch.’

That seemed simple enough. Outside the room was a flight of stone stairs which led straight up to ground level into what looked like a kind of barracks: straight ahead was a large wooden building which reminded him of a school sports hall, to the left was a large training ground – complete with mannequins resembling Wing Chun dummies in a long row along the near edge – and to the right was a large group of huts.

Everything looked slightly overcast and uncomfortable, Peter noticed, and there was a queer quality to the light. A sort of fast strobing effect, like a lamp-post not long after being turned on. It was a depressing sort of light, and it filled Peter with dread. He looked up. The sky was red, but not the sort of red he had seen at the beach when he was younger, when the Sun had been just dipping over the horizon. If anything, it the sort of red he had seen in pieces of iron turn when they were very hot.

‘What is this place?’

‘Militia’s training ground.’ He looked around, and then pulled Peter back to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Listen,’ he said urgently, ‘they will find out that I killed the guard down there. They probably know already, which means they are going to be looking for us. Running is pointless, and so is being invisible. There are spells around this entire place to prevent any portals from working except this one.’ He motioned the door back into the room they had just left.

‘Okay,’ said Peter, his heart starting to thump with the burden of the adrenaline suddenly flooding his bloodstream. ‘What do we do then?’

‘We walk. Slowly and calmly. You follow me and be ready to fight. Got it?’

‘Yes.’

‘That means be prepared to kill. Like I said, they
will
kill you if they realize who you are, and they won’t give you a chance to defend yourself. If they as much as look at you curiously, kill them.’

‘Got it.’

‘Good’ Atlosreg took his wand out. ‘We are going to need a disguise, so I am going to put an illusion us to look like young soldiers.’ Without waiting for a response, he drew a sigil in front of Peter’s chest, and the appearance of his clothing changed instantly to that of a long tunic-like robe of rough brown cloth, though they still felt like his own clothes. Atlosreg then turned his wand on himself. After a moment’s frowning hesitation, he drew a similar sigil pointing inward at his own chest, and his clothes changed to look like Peter’s illusion.

Something else had changed, as well. It took Peter a moment to realize, but Atlosreg now looked to be about the same age as Peter himself. The only things not to were his eyes.

They walked out briskly, Peter imitating Atlosreg’s rapid gait. After some minutes of marching, they reached the high wooden palisades which formed the perimeter. Two guards were stood at a gate, one on either side, looking very official and important as they stopped Atlosreg and Peter, saying something Peter couldn’t understand. Atlosreg responded, motioning once or twice toward Peter. This must have satisfied whatever reason they had for stopping them: they let them pass.

For ten minutes, the two of them marched side-by-side through the Werosaian countryside. The first two were terrifying for Peter, who marched straight, holding his head high and not daring to breathe.

After this, he started to calm down, and even started thinking this might be an opportunity to take notice of what the land looked like. Apart from the red sky and the resulting anaemic quality to the light, there appeared at first glance to be no sun in the sky, just an endless background of red, graduating toward a slightly darker shade of red at the horizon. After a few moments of staring around the area of sky he could see without turning his head significantly, he finally noticed that there was a sun after all: an ever-so-slightly paler disc hanging low in the sky, far off to his left. It appeared to be maybe ten or fifteen times the size, in the sky, of the Sun he was accustomed to seeing.

The land itself was dry and cracked, with odd weeds which superficially resembled some kind of grass poking out hither and yon. There were hills visible off in the distance, and trees dotted sparsely about the landscape.

There seemed to be no other features Peter could see, and it struck him how desperate this place really was: a world which had already been dead when it was created, the only thing left for it do during its entire existence being to rot and decay. He felt chills shimmer down his spine, like so many shards of glass, each one cutting deep into him and exposing more flesh for the next.

When they were both sure that they were outside the Militia’s range of sight, they stopped, and Atlosreg removed the spells he had put on them to change their respective appearance.

‘There is a village around here. Between those hills.’ He pointed at two hills in the distance. ‘About an hour’s walk, unless you want to run and get there faster?’

‘Wait a sec,’ said Peter, taking out his wand. ‘We can run there in about ten minutes if it’s an hour’s walk.’ He took his turn to cast spells on each of them: the combination of spells he had used when he was running away from the Werosaian forces near Blackpool: speed, stamina, heightened reflexes and more efficient respiration. To cast on both of them took about ten seconds.

‘Will you be alright running?’ Said Peter.

Atlosreg chuckled; a rare thing, which in itself was a little frightening. ‘Follow me.’ And he set off, momentarily moving fast enough to make Peter wonder if he had a hope of keeping up, before remembering the spells he had cast a matter of seconds ago and setting off himself.

Even though he was running at what was probably a little under twenty miles per hour, the effort Peter was exerting to maintain that pace felt more like that of a leisurely jog. As he followed Atlosreg across the dry, cool land, he ceased to notice the deadness of it: scrolling by, the whole thing seemed to merge into a continuous loop of dead earth.

The thoughts drifting through his mind were dark and depressing; realizations of how grim it really was drove him past merely wanting to be sick straight into wishing he could vanish into his own nihilistic realm of calm surreality. He and Atlosreg had been in Werosain for less than an hour – more like half – and between them they had already killed half a dozen people and infiltrated a military installation. It didn’t feel right in any way, and Peter started to have doubts concerning whether or not he would be capable of committing such a vast a magnificent act of destruction as calling an end to this world, if he had had misgivings about something as insignificant – by comparison – as killing a few enemy militias. He supposed time would tell: they weren’t here to call an end to the place just yet.

One other thing concerned Peter greatly, and that was whether, given the guard at the Army’s compound, and how they would surely be looking for Atlosreg and himself by now, they would be able to get home. He didn’t much like the idea of being killed here, and he liked the idea of being stuck here for the rest of his life even less.

They were reaching the hills Atlosreg had pointed out, and in the space between them was what looked at this distance like a group of piles of sticks. As they came closer to the place, he saw they were actually houses. Some looked like large tipis, around fifteen feet wide at the base and twenty feet tall in the middle; some had vertical walls and more obtusely-angled roofs, though they were still round; some again looked as though the builders had simply made two straight walls out of bundles of branches and then leaned them against one another, forming an invert V shape. At first these basic types of architecture seemed completely alien to him, but after a moment he realized that he had seen buildings like these before, in the dream in which he had seen Rechsdhoubnom first declare himself. This was Palaeolithic architecture, unevolved in spite of all these thousands of years.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, under his breath.

They stopped about fifty yards away from the closest of these buildings, and Atlosreg signalled Peter to remove the spells he had put on each of them. When he had, Atlosreg spoke.

‘This is where I came from.’

There was a certain wistfulness in Atlosreg’s bearing, as though he was loath to admit he had missed the place, on the principle of having risked his very life to leave this whole world behind. Peter wanted to ask if he was feeling alright, but he had a strong suspicion that if he did, he would very quickly come to regret it.

They continued walking. There weren’t any people around, Peter guessed they must all be at work, doing whatever it was they did. Tending crops, looking after children, whatever. They moved between the houses, toward the centre of the settlement, where there was a circle built of loose stones, holding fragments of wood, charcoal, and ash. Fire must be a communal activity, Peter thought. He could see, further off in the direction they were walking, a slim brook. It couldn’t have been flowing with any force, however; it wasn’t making a sound.

He stopped walking, about ten feet from the circle of stones, and turned slowly on his heel, looking around and taking in his surroundings. It was a dilemma: he couldn’t make up his mind whether he pitied these people and their plight, or hated them for having not made any apparent effort to improve their situation.

Something was slowly fading into audibility, which initially sounded like the brook had started to flow with a little more force. After a few seconds, however, the sound became closer and clearer, and it was obvious that it wasn’t flowing water. It sounded like people walking and talking and laughing. He turned to face the sound, and saw the village’s residents walking toward where he and Atlosreg were standing.

‘They have been hunting,’ Atlosreg observed. ‘It must be evening here.’

Peter frowned. Commenting about the time of day made no sense, other than it felt a little like evening. It didn’t seem like a very astute thing to say, unless there was some more significant meaning behind it, which Peter hadn’t been able to divine. He shrugged inwardly, deciding that if there was some significant meaning, he would find it out sooner or later. Asking would have made him seem stupid, and he wasn’t much in the mood for that.

The people began to approach where they were, near the fire pit at the centre of the village, and as they came closer Peter looked at them. There were all sorts of shapes and sizes of people, just as there were on Earth, though they all had a set of common features: they were well-built, fairly muscular people, with broad shoulders and faces, dark brown hair, and darkish skin; a broadly Mediterranean look, which made no evolutionary sense given the lack of bright sunshine.