Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (33 page)

There were no dreams, only blackness. He could have quite happily died.

But it didn’t last. In the morning, he awoke in his bed, apparently clean, but his whole body was aching as though every individual muscle had been pommelled. He groaned and sat up, and then retreated once he saw how bright the sunlight was. Slowly, bracing himself against the light, he sat up, and then cautiously got himself dressed, and left his room.

Atlosreg wasn’t in here, and he wasn’t in his own room either. There were some basic supplies Peter had brought along when he started living here, with which he made the big mug of coffee for which he had been waiting for over a week, and then he walked out of the house. Atlosreg, he could now see, was walking slowly around the outermost boundary of the island, outside the area of stretched and veiled space. It looked like he was casting spells around the perimeter. Adding to the protection, Peter assumed.

He knew better than to disturb him. Instead, he went back inside and finished his coffee quietly, which alleviated his aching a little, and stopped him from wanting to cower in a dark corner. Once he had finished, he went outside again and looked for Atlosreg. He was still slowly circling the island and casting. Peter decided to look at what he was doing, see if there was any way in which he could assist him – or if there was just something he could learn.

The spellwork, Peter learned quickly, was designed to not only repel anything which attempted to enter the island unbidden; it was designed to destroy it. Peter followed, examining the traces of woven energy, and found fifteen layers of the same spell, all interacting with and reinforcing one another.

‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered to himself. ‘The old bugger must have been doing it all night.’

Eventually Atlosreg noticed Peter and, after completing the spell he was casting, stopped.

‘You should be better now,’ he said. ‘I thought you should rest. How do you feel?’

‘Much better, thank you.’ He paused. He was embarrassed thinking about it. ‘And… thank you for cleaning me up and putting me into bed.’

Atlosreg snorted. ‘That was not the first time I have had to do something like that.’

Peter didn’t want to ask. So, instead, he asked about the spellwork Atlosreg had been layering around the island.

‘It is military magic, but I made some changes to make it much more difficult to break. Even a master magician would not try breaking more than one layer at a time, and I am putting layers on top of layers, chained in three dimensions. That way, if someone tries to come here and break apart one of these spells, at least nine spells will kill him before he even starts.’

That was interesting, and familiar: it was the same principle he had worked on when he had started casting the protective spells on the house, though none of his spells were supposed to kill. At first, he didn’t seem too enthralled by the idea of the spells killing anyone who might try to enter Knifestone unbidden, but the more he thought about it the better an idea it seemed to be. He would have to warn the Guild, though.

‘But… what if the Fraud tried to come through?’

‘Not a chance. What happens when a world is forsaken by its god?’

‘Umm…’

‘It stops being there.’

‘But Rechsdhoubnom isn’t a god.’

At this, Atlosreg held his left hand up, palm facing Peter. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He is, of a sort. He is not immortal, and he cannot create anything from nothing. But he has the highest power in Werosain. He created it, so in a sense that world owes its allegiance to him. If he ever leaves, it no longer has him there to owe it to. And it gives up.’ He said the last sentence with a tone of quiet melancholy.

But it was a relief to Peter to know Rechsdhoubnom wouldn’t leave Werosain, even if he could send his Army to Earth. Whether they would look for Peter and Atlosreg, he didn’t know, though he did assume there would have been a glimpse of Knifestone available for anyone to see while the two of them were moving through the doorway.

‘Can I help at all?’ Peter thought it might not be a bad idea at least to offer, even if all he was able to do was mimic the same spell Atlosreg was casting, so as to double up how quickly layers were being added.

‘I have nearly finished.’ He indicated the edge of the island, where the border defined by the spellwork lay.

‘What about some kind of backup work, or an alarm or something? Early warning…’

Atlosreg looked out over the water, apparently applying what Peter had said in his mind. ‘I think a string of alarm spells could be a very good idea.’

Okay, thought Peter. To put an alarm around Knifestone, the most effective way to do it – no, the
only
effective way to do it – would be to float around the island, maybe twenty feet or so, so the alarm could trip before any potential assailant could begin any attempt to breach the protective spells on the island itself. So, he would need to build a raft; that wouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

There had been enough wood left over from the construction of the Hovel that Peter wouldn’t need to go out and acquire any, which a relief. Likewise, building the raft wasn’t going to pose much of a challenge: being a magician had its advantages; among those advantages were the abilities to bind the component pieces of wood together, protect them from water, and propel them.

Ten minutes later, Peter was afloat on the water surrounding Knifestone, on what was essentially a bundle of planks. The alarm wasn’t a difficult spell – just a simple boundary of power that would invoke a reaction of some kind if it was crossed, maybe a bell or something – and so it only took a couple of hours to lay it all around the island. Once that was done, he ran the raft around and hopped off.

‘We need to get a bell,’ he called to Atlosreg, ‘so’s the alarm’s got a way to let us know if it’s being crossed.’

‘Go and get one, then.’

Okay, he thought, that’s a journey to the mainland. But then a thought struck him.

‘Hey, will I still be able to portal off the island and back?’

‘Yes.’

With that, he left the island, picking a town at random from those he knew of, and started looking around places such as charity shops for something appropriate. It didn’t take very long to find the appropriate thing – a small brass bell with a mahogany handle, probably originally bought for someone as a joke – maybe an hour, most of which he had spent walking between shops rather than actually looking around them, and then he took it back to Knifestone with him.

He took it into the house and hung it from the ceiling above the door, and then bound it magically to the alarm spell he had put down before, so that it would respond to the boundary being crossed.

The evening was coming, and Peter was getting tired. He could only imagine how tired Atlosreg must be, having clearly not slept the previous night.

The two of them settled down inside the house, having spent all the daylight working. There was still much to do to make sure the island was comprehensively defended and protected, but they couldn’t do it all in one go, and they both knew it. They would just have to get back to it in the morning.

Peter brought out some canned chicken soup from the cupboard he kept stocked, and heated it in a pair of tin bowls. It wasn’t exciting, and it was definitely not as nice as the wakka they had been eating in the village, but it was edible, and it made them feel like they might be able to carry on in the morning.

When they had finished, Peter put the bowls to one side and resumed his seat.

‘We should talk to the Guild at some point,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes. We should.’

Peter had been trying not to allow himself to get too worried about it, but now it was bothering him. The Guild was protected by spells almost as old as Werosain itself, but given that he and Atlosreg had waltzed into Werosain and flirted with mortality in such a way as they had, it seemed more than likely that an attack might be launched by the Werosaian Militia against them, and possibly on a larger scale than anything else in recent history. That was, of course, if such an attack hadn’t already been launched.

‘They aren’t going to be happy.’

Atlosreg answered with a simple look, as if saying ‘yeah, no shit’ would have been putting it too mildly. Peter stood up and stretched.

‘The whole thing is profoundly stupid,’ said Peter.

‘
You
are profoundly stupid for thinking it was a good idea,’ said Atlosreg, deadpan.

‘So are you.’

‘Yes.’

They both laughed: it was hilarious. Well, no it wasn’t, but at that moment it felt to Peter like the only thing
to
do was laugh. Otherwise, he might have folded himself into a foetal position and hidden away forever. He felt stupid. He felt beyond stupid. And what was more, he knew that going to the Guild to warn them about any impending Werosaian attack was going to be tantamount to a confession of his own stupidity. Or even worse: they may interpret it as a confession of some dreadful crime, maybe related to espionage, having led to whatever attack that might be about to happen.

But still Peter laughed. He couldn’t give up on this, not with how far they had come already. Granted, they were nowhere near their ultimate goal of putting Werosain out of its misery, but he had a feeling he might be on the right road to finding out just
how
it might be done. And something told him it was going to be easier than it would be to destroy a ‘real’ world, one which had a solid foundation of physics and mechanics.

His thoughts drifted for a while, flitting between feelings of relaxed contentment (what will happen will happen, and all I can do is try) and panicked depression (everyone’s going to get killed, and there’s nothing I can do, and it’s all my fault). Eventually, he decided his bed would be a far better place to do that in, so he stood up to bid Atlosreg a good night and retreat to his room.

However, now his attention was in the room, he realized the light was out, and Atlosreg wasn’t here – he must have gone to bed already.

Sleep didn’t come easily to Peter that night, and when it did it visited so briefly that he wasn’t sure whether it had or not. When the day came, once he and Atlosreg were both awake and ready for action, they continued laying a deep web of spellwork on Knifestone. In that manner, they continued for the rest of the week, first creating chained foundations of military magic in case everything else was breached, and then working on the more subtle defences, such that eventually Knifestone itself was effectively invisible, other than the continued presence of the island – now appearing completely empty – a little under a mile north-east of Longstone.

However, even when the defences were completed, Peter felt no more secure than he had when they had first arrived back from Werosain – or, for that matter, than he would had he been stood on a precipice, naked, in a bad frost. He wanted to run, not just away from Knifestone or the Guild but from magic and, if possible, from Earth itself.

Going to the Guild was the only thing left to do, and while Peter knew it was of the uttermost urgency to do so, he dreaded going in and explaining to Eddie, grunt-to-commander, just how big the fuck-up he had made was. But, even if it spelled the final cut for him, the Guild and the rest of the Earth were infinitely more important than he was.

And Atlosreg would have to come with him. Whether that would be merely to corroborate Peter’s story, or to provide briefings on what he knew of the modern Werosaian military structure, tactics, weapons, whatever, Peter couldn’t say.

There was another reason why Peter wanted Atlosreg there, however; a topic which he broached carefully, not knowing exactly how much Atlosreg knew about the Guild.

‘What do you know about the Guild of Magicians?’ He said, while they were preparing to leave.

‘They are the most important of the magicians on Earth,’ he replied. ‘They look after Earth, and defend it from… well, people like me.’

That hadn’t quite been what Peter meant, but it wasn’t far off the official reason for the Guild’s existence.

‘What about the place?’

‘The place,’ Atlosreg echoed, and then paused. ‘As far as I know, it is a spiral of caves that was dug around the Founding Flame.’

The Founding Flame. That wasn’t something Peter had ever heard of before. ‘What’s that?’

‘The flame from which Werosain was first kindled. It lies at the root of the Guild. What that place was first built to guard.’

That sounded… familiar.

‘Guard?’

‘Use your imagination.’

He did. He imagined that Atlosreg was talking about the oldest part of the Guild. The bottom floor, the centre of the spiral. The tomb… it was a door in that great stone after all, concealing…

‘How do you know this?’

‘The Militia are told about it when they train, so that they can find it and guard it from anyone trying to put it out if there is ever a great enough threat to Werosain.’

It was unnerving to Peter, how much Atlosreg knew and was able to simply rattle off without thinking; these same things which Peter had studied years to find out – most of which he hadn’t actually found out – had been told to Atlosreg when he was younger, and were apparently little more than common knowledge among his people.