Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (35 page)

He sighed and turned his attention to his own screen. There wasn’t any point in feeling sorry for them. They thought they were happy.

Looking for turkey farms wasn’t a difficult task, certainly not as difficult as remembering how to type. Where he had once been able to touch-type while having a conversation – even while looking at the person he was talking to – he now found himself using the hunt-and-peck method which, once upon a time, he had been so fond of making fun of. What goes around comes around, he supposed.

He didn’t stay in the library for long; just long enough to find a few farms’ addresses and scribble them on a piece of paper he had stolen out of the printer, and then he logged out of his workstation and left, catching the portal back home from between a few trees behind the library.

‘I know where there’s a few places,’ he called to Atlosreg as he walked in, ‘but what are we going to do – walk up and steal one?’

‘That is
exactly
what you are going to do.’

Apart from the questionable moral of stealing the bird, Peter noted how Atlosreg had said “you,” as though they weren’t in this together. ‘Me? You aren’t coming?’

‘I will come, but it is you who needs the flute. You are going to do the magic.’

That did make sense, but Peter thought it would have been nice for Atlosreg to show some preparedness to take part in the operation, other than as an overseer. Atlosreg acting like that made Peter feel slightly insecure, as though he were being evaluated or assessed on his performance, though he knew that, logically, he was being left to do some of these things on his own because, as Atlosreg had said, it
was
him who had to do these things. Maybe was more suitable to do them than Atlosreg? That could make sense too.

That afternoon, they went to the first of the addresses Peter had found at the library to locate the turkey Peter would be claiming. In theory it was going to be a simple operation: portal in, grab the turkey, portal back. However, just as Peter was about to open the portal back to Knifestone, Atlosreg stopped him.

‘No,’ he said, putting his hand on Peter’s arm, just as Peter was about to begin casting the portal. ‘It has to be untouched by magic. That is part of the purity it needs.’

‘You’re joking!’ Peter hissed, still holding his arm up. ‘Are you saying we just run away from a turkey farm with the turkey we just stole?’

‘Well, yes. It will not work if it is touched by magic, and you want it to work.’

‘Twat.’ Peter put his wand away and started nervously pacing, holding the bird in his arms as if it were a baby. Atlosreg took off his cloak and held it up.

‘Wring its neck, now,’ he said. ‘Then wrap it in this, nobody will see what it is.’

‘Good thinking, that man,’ spat Peter, shifting the bird under his arm and taking a grip on its neck. His heart was hammering too fast; he hadn’t ever killed with his own hands before. He hated the idea of killing anyway, but it really seemed that this was going to be the only way to get this task – as a whole – done.

After stopping for a moment to gauge how much torque he needed to apply, he took a firm grip and quickly twisted the neck of the protesting turkey, so hard and fast that not only did the turkey die instantly, but Peter had a distinct impression he may have injured his right wrist again.

He let go of the head, and it simply flopped, loose, and dangled off the rest of its body. He took another second to recover his nerves and take a few breaths, and then he accepted Atlosreg’s cloak, wrapped the bird in it, and slung the whole lot over his shoulder.

‘Right, what now?’

‘We leave, and look for somewhere we can cook that bird.’

No shit, thought, Peter. ‘We’re going to have to find a camping shop or something,’ he said, ‘so we can get some outdoor cooking stuff. We don’t have a chance of cooking it if we don’t have anything to cook it with.’

‘True.’

‘But,’ Peter continued, ‘we’re never going to get a pan big enough to cook the whole thing. Do I have to do that?’

‘I think you should be able to just use a leg. The thigh bones are quite big.’

‘Excellent.’ Though Peter was by no means certain as to whether it was actually excellent or not, as he had no idea to within the nearest hundred miles where there might be a camping shop, and even then he didn’t know if they would sell a camping stove.

The farm they had stopped at was a long walk from the closest town, and it took almost two hours for them to get there on foot, and for most of that walk he found carrying the burden of freshly-killed turkey increasingly difficult to carry. When they reached the town, they were both slightly disappointed in how small – and therefore unlikely to have a camping shop – it was.

All hope wasn’t lost, however; they stopped and asked behind the counter at a papershop where what they were looking for might be, and it turned out that there was one just in the next town over, rather a large place which, Peter thought, would be almost a cert to carry what they needed to get hold of. Peter still had some money from the last time he had needed to go out and buy things, and so their visit to this shop wasn’t a waste of time, he bought a bar of chocolate. It had been a long time since he had had anything like that, and he enjoyed it very much.

The next town over was likely to be another two hour walk away from here, which would take them past the time any shops would be likely to have closed, so Peter decided to acquire more money from an ATM, and they caught a bus. As they sat in transit, Peter amused himself at the sight of Atlosreg, the mighty Werosaian warrior and master magician, riding a bus. He supposed the thought would mean nothing to Atlosreg himself.

The bus ride took a little under twenty-five minutes, ending with them getting off at the terminus near the town centre. From there, they found their way to the camping shop. Once they were at the shop, it only took a few minutes to find everything he was going to need: a large square aluminium pan with a fold-away handle, some matches, a Swiss-army knife with a saw blade, a portable gas stove, and three canisters of gas. Atlosreg carried these things after Peter paid, and they then went along to a supermarket, where Peter bought a few two-litre bottles of table water.

Now they had everything, except a place to do what it was they were needing to do next. Peter understood it would take a long time to cook and prepare the bone, so they were going to need to find somewhere they could keep a camping stove lit constantly for that long a time, which, from Peter’s small experience of making soup from chicken bones when he was younger, was likely to be anywhere between two and four hours.

They walked for an hour, back toward the farm where from which they had stolen the turkey in the first place. Between the town they had just left and the place they had been before were long stretches of rural land, and as it was beginning to get dark, Peter was thinking there might be an ideal spot along this track; somewhere out of the way where they wouldn’t be too likely to be seen. Even if they were seen, nobody would think anything strange of two men sitting off the path, cooking on a camping stove: for all anyone knew, they could be backpackers or something. That didn’t bother Peter in the slightest.

As luck had it, the ideal spot presented itself in the form of a deserted park; it was clear from how badly maintained it was that nobody had spent any time here for anything honest in several years, so they set up their stove there, and Peter butchered the bird, taking the right leg off it, plucking and skinning it.

It took three hours to cook, altogether: first there had been cooking the leg, which had taken an hour, and then removing the meat, which Peter and Atlosreg ate between them as the bone cooled, and then boiling the bone again, skimming grease and foam off the top, poking the marrow out, and then simmering it for a while longer.

By the time the bone was ready to be turned into a flute, it was pitch black outside, and there was a smattering of stars across the sky. Peter had let the bone cool one final time, and then he started using the point of his knife to bore an embouchure hole in the narrow end, remembering how he had done with the reed flute he had made. Atlosreg didn’t stop him or correct him, so Peter assumed he was on the right track.

It took a few attempts to get the hole right, but when, finally, he obtained a high, sweet note from it, he held it up, resting on the palm of his hand. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I need to put finger holes in it now, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Daft question: does it matter about the scale?’

‘No.’

Neither did Peter; taking great care not to damage the bone in any way other than intended, he bored four holes in the bone, the idea being to create a scale which was roughly pentatonic, just as he had done with his reed flute.

When he was done, he blew a simple tune on it. He was well out of practice, and this flute played very differently to the one he had played before, but the tune was sweet to hear and seemed to carry a slightly eerie sound to it. Atlosreg nodded approvingly.

‘Will we be clear to take it home now, without polluting it?’ Peter said, wanting to take the rest of the bird and put it away, and maybe get some sleep.

‘I think so. It was making it that needed to be done without any magic.’

That was all Peter needed to hear. By the time Atlosreg had finished speaking the second sentence, Peter had opened the portal back to Knifestone.

‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m buggered.’

The next few days were, in different ways, both very exciting and very boring for Peter. Attempting to use manipulate magical energies using musical harmonics was simply
different
to manipulating them using a two-stick or a wand; the spellwork was one-dimensional, and there was no room at all for error or looping back to call on work which had been done before. There was a real bare-metal quality to it, far more so than to the use of a two-stick, which made even the simplest of spells excruciatingly long-winded.

There was an advantage to doing magic this way, however, and it was such a massive advantage that it made it worth the constant trials of Peter’s patience: energies were available to him which just weren’t there when he had used any other method. It was as though, due to this mode of casting being one-dimensional, it wasn’t limited to the three-dimensional operations he was used to working within. It was an utterly mind-bending concept, but it was one which he was very interested to explore as time and intelligence permitted.

Of course, he could only progress with this at a certain rate and, while it was faster than many would have progressed because he both understood a fairly large amount about magic
and
had played his reed flute for a time, this rate was much slower than he would have liked. He was nowhere near the first clue as to how he could possibly open the tomb at the foundation of the Guild, and as that was the main reason why he was wanting to learn about using music to cast magic, he was starting to feel as though he should have worked more out by the time four days had ground by.

‘You are being stupid,’ said Atlosreg when he voiced these thoughts. ‘You have started from nowhere, you knew
nothing
about it before, and you have learned everything you know so far by working it out for yourself.’

‘I know, I just…’

‘You have been learning for four days.
Four days
. In that time, you have taught yourself more than anyone else gets to learn in four
lifetimes
.’

Peter sighed. ‘Well, when you put it like that…’ He tooted a few notes, and the fire started to smoke slightly. He did it again, but the fire wouldn’t take light fully. He did it a third time, and nothing happened at all. In a momentary temper, he cast the spell with his wand, and did it so forcefully that some of the wood detonated, throwing a shower of sparks and splinters throughout the entire room.

‘Shit,’ he hissed.

‘You need to learn to control yourself,’ Atlosreg quietly said, without having moved to avoid catching a face full of splinters. ‘Magic is made of logic and pure truth, but it has feelings.’

Peter closed his eyes, biting back a retort. Eventually, he settled on ‘yes, I know.’

Given how impatient Atlosreg could be, it seemed wholly ironic, and slightly unfair, to Peter when he kept saying to be patient. It struck Peter as being slightly “do as I say, not as I do.” However, in many cases, Atlosreg was right – and Peter knew that. It was entirely possible that that was the exact reason why it sometimes seemed a little unfair to Peter.

As a few more days wore on, with Peter unrelentingly persevering down this ever-more difficult, ever-less exciting new avenue of study, it started to become more evident that he was finding it so difficult because he was trying the wrong kinds of spellwork with it. In fact, he became reluctant to call it spellwork at all – it was simply an operation.

With this in mind, he began to experiment with simple enchantments to alter the properties of materials or artefacts. He could only accomplish very small things at first, but these things showed him that – maybe – he might just be able to figure out how to open that tomb after all.

He realized, however, that there was a lot more he would need to know about the tomb, and about the forces which surrounded and secured it, and the only way he would be able to learn enough about them to be able to unlock and open the door would be to go back to the tomb and use what he had learned so far to try and look at what was there. He ran the idea by Atlosreg, fully expecting him to not entirely be prepared to entertain the idea.