Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (37 page)

Later that evening, the two of them were sat in the living room of the Hovel, Peter reading back through one of the notebooks he had been writing notes in, wishing it was a novel. It had been several years since he had read a novel, and right now he just wanted to be imagining himself somewhere else. He felt slightly off: not quite ill, but not quite well either. Probably the atmosphere left over from their visit to the Guild.

Something was bothering him, apart from the way things had been at the Guild, and after a while he snapped the book shut and walked around outside a little. The stars were coming out, with the Moon hanging low in the sky, looking much larger than it usually did, with a distinct red tint.

The colour of the Moon reminded him of what it was that had been bothering him: the Founding Flame. There had been something off about it, something not quite right. There was the colour of it, and the fact that the flame didn’t seem to be moving: it was as though it wasn’t quite in phase with the rest of reality. And whose skeleton was that? There was no way of telling, with it having been there for so long; he supposed the people who had known the names of the people who had known of the person whose skeleton that had been would have been dead for so many years that it was beyond pointless to try to find out. Though the answer would probably turn out to be obvious.

It was deeply disturbing, the whole affair, and it was just another thing that proved to Peter the rottenness and corruption which was at the foundation of Werosain. Though, if he played this game right, he might just be able to bring it to an end. But how? He knew he needed to extinguish the Flame, and he knew that in order to do that, he needed to destroy Rechsdhoubnom. But how the hell was he supposed to kill someone who was, to all intents and purposes, a god?

When he got back inside, he decided to ask Atlosreg about this.

‘That is a good question,’ Atlosreg said. ‘I do not know. He was a shaman originally, so possibly you would only need to remove his power from him. Take his drum and stick from him. That way he has no power.’

‘But when he attacked me he wasn’t using his drum. I don’t think he even had them with him.’

‘No,’ said Atlosreg thoughtfully. ‘But they were still belonging to him, his power could have still been coming out of them. They are only symbolic, remember.’

Of course, that was one of the things Peter
did
know about shamanistic practices: the power was in the drum, and the rhythm beaten on it with the stick. Some people even wondered if the magician’s wand, as a concept, was descended from the shaman’s drumstick.

‘Can it be that simple?’

At this, Atlosreg laughed. ‘Who said it was going to be simple? There is nothing simple about removing that creature’s power. You are going to have to find him, and defend yourself while you take it from him. And it is more than likely that he is still going to have some measure of power, even after you take the drum.’

That was a point; there was no telling how much protection he had layered over himself, and how many millennia he had been perfecting each one. Not only that, but Peter couldn’t discount the possibility that Rechsdhoubnom had developed some form of backup or failsafe, in case someone did exactly what Peter was after trying to do.

At the end of the day, however, it
was
simple: he was going to have to beef his own power up by orders of magnitude in order to have the vaguest chance of standing up to him.

‘So what do I do? Create some kind of defence he can’t penetrate, and some kind of attack method that’s going to be guaranteed to overpower him?’

‘Maybe. Remember you have your own advantages, which I have seen.’

He had a feeling what they were, but Peter asked anyway. ‘What advantages?’

‘You know magic as a science, with precision and logic and perfection. You can operate on what makes things what they are. Not only that, but you have a little understanding of the force of the gods, which you can use with your own knowledge of magic, to work out how to do things he would just call a bigger god than himself to do. He knows magic as banging on a drum – however good he is at is, that is all there is to magic on Werosain. It is different, not as good – not as effective – as what you and the Guild have here.’

There was an amount of sense to that, but still… however much of an advantage he had, he was twenty thousand years behind in practice, and it would take a hell of a lot of training to match that. He saw no way to attain that sort of power.

From that point on, they began a training regime which was so extensive and gruelling that, at first, Peter thought it was going to make him ill. The five o’clock mornings were particularly taxing, especially at first.

But the amount he was learning justified the early mornings and the long days of training, often extending after dark. The two of them were learning from one another and picking up each other’s techniques, and presenting fresh challenges to one another daily.

In between sessions, they discussed Werosain and the people there, trying to decide where that many people could be relocated to.

‘We’d have to find an island much bigger than Knifestone,’ said Peter one afternoon, after a sparring session. ‘There’s no way in hell they’d all fit on here, even with all the magic inflating the area of the island.’

‘It was your idea,’ Atlosreg said, not for the first time.

‘I know. I just don’t want to destroy the innocents with the rest of Werosain.’

Atlosreg readied himself for combat again, adopting his battle stance. ‘What if that is the only option?’

Peter followed suit, frowning. ‘Then I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do.’

This was the kind of moral dilemma Peter hated: the kind where all the answers were wrong, and the whole point of the exercise wasn’t to find a right one, but to find a least-wrong one. It filled him with anger and self-hate, making him want to curl up and never talk or do anything again.

‘You are learning,’ said Atlosreg, powering up his first spell.

They were battling much harder now, actually shooting to kill; the idea being that if there was genuinely something at stake, each one would fight harder to survive. Not only that, but if the spells they used were all genuinely harmful, the defences against them would have to be powered up high enough as to render them relatively harmless – which would in turn prompt the other to power up the offensive spell more and more. In short, they had instigated a sort of arms race between themselves, hoping that with the abilities each of them had, they would eventually be able to come up with the magical equivalent of something like a neutron bomb.

Neither of them spoke for the next four hours, as they battled furiously, summoning lightning, fire, wind, water, and anything else they could think of to try and destroy the other. The combined effects of the magics they were throwing at one another were magnificent, and Peter thought at one point that he would be amused to see whatever reports would be being made concerning the weather in that area, what with all the rapid changes and strange effects floating around and buffeting the island.

That night, Peter went to bed early, and – as he usually did nowadays – went straight to sleep. Using magic as powerful as that, for such extended periods as that, was awesomely tiring. Each morning, he was surprised to find that not only had he successfully woken up, but he was even ready for more. It was like gardening: he was dead-heading his powers, using his reserves up and tiring himself out beyond the extent to which he even knew a mortal magician could be tired out, only to find that the power he had used came back more abundantly. There was an animal harshness, a gigantic brute force, to his power now, and they had only been training in this manner for a month. He had a feeling that if another member of the Guild were to take him on, they would find themselves completely crippled – or worse – within a matter of moments.

It seemed like a stroke of luck that Peter had found Atlosreg. The two of them had a voracious desire to learn, which, while it had been dormant in Atlosreg during his protracted tenure as a patient in various mental institutions, had awoken and returned in force. The chances of Peter meeting someone like this – like himself – had been infinitesimal; it was amazing to him that he had. In fact, he wondered at times if there was something Atlosreg was holding back: it made very little sense at all that Atlosreg would still be as lively and full of energy, be it mental, physical, or magical, at the age he was. There must be something there, some sort of longevity magic.

Peter, however, tried not to think about that too much. He had the problem of overpowering Rechsdhoubnom to consider, and it was a hell of a problem. He and Atlosreg had been conjuring destructive power that Peter hadn’t ever heard about when training at the Guild, the sorts of power which, in peaceful times, would have had them both in chains and branded as terrorists. But they were not peaceful times, and they hadn’t ever been: Peter knew the Guild would have the means to see what kind of magics were being used here, and had decided either to leave them to it, and see how the whole situation with Werosain played out, or else had decided to not risk getting themselves turned into ash. Either way, he was grateful for the lack of black suits turning up at the door.

There was more Peter wanted though. All of the destructive magic was one thing, but Peter knew that, even more important than that, he was going to need protection against every conceivable type of magical attack, from the mental and psychological, to the physical, and even to the metaphysical. To return to Werosain without – especially with Rechsdhoubnom being aware of him now – would be the most certain form of suicide Peter had ever heard of.

He talked about this a little with Atlosreg, who told him that, actually, that had been the main reason why he had been attacking Peter so ferociously. The shields they had developed between themselves, using their combined techniques and knowledge, should protect them from most elemental attacks, and all attacks on the brain or nervous system.

‘But still,’ said Peter, ‘there are attacks that he’ll know about that neither of us won’t. He’s had thousands of years to come up with attacks and methods and strategies that simply aren’t within our field of vision.’

‘What does that matter? All it means is that whatever they are, we cannot learn how to defend against them.’

That was true, even if it was infuriating to acknowledge. ‘There must surely be some way to come up with… with some absolute defence, like going out of phase with reality or something…’ he said after a few minutes, a little desperately.

Atlosreg frowned for a moment. ‘Something like that might actually work. Allow the attacks to go straight through your defences – and straight through you.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ said Peter, ‘but that would be a bitch to implement.’

‘Oh, there will be a way. You can use the flute too, remember.’

That was true, and Peter had forgotten about it recently in all the practicing with normal magic. Would there be a way to use the force the flute manipulated to generate some sort of phase distortion field around him? It was worth a try.

‘Okay.’ It was definitely worth a try. ‘I’ll see what I can work out with that.’

And so, on top of their usual training routine, Peter also returned to dedicating as much time as he could to working out how phase distortion might work, such that he could waver in and out of reality at will. As it happened, there was much similarity between the theory he started developing for that, and the theory at the foundation of tuning radios: the oscillation of the matter of which he was composed was “tuned in” to normal reality, and he soon realized that if he could shift the oscillation of that matter ever-so-slightly, he could “tune out” slightly. It was a fascinating idea, and one that he wished he could be investigating academically, maybe with one or two other members of the Guild. But such luxuries as that were currently – maybe permanently – out of his reach.

The theory, however, and the practice, were two completely separate things, and as such it took a good couple of weeks for him to figure out how it could be done, and even then it simply became more and more complicated.

It seemed a bit like a dead end, though Peter was absolutely certain there must be a solution to it, probably one which was patently obvious. But, for the time being, he let it drop, thinking that, if he were to leave it, he might well be able to look at it with a fresh mind next time he tried.

In the meantime, they needed to return to considering where they were going to put all the Werosaian innocents: although he had acknowledged that, if need be, he would have to be prepared to destroy them along with the rest of Werosain, he really didn’t want to do that. He knew there must be a way, and as it was a more physical problem than the one of creating a phase distortion field around himself, it was one with which his mind could grapple much more easily.

This time, it was Atlosreg who brought it up one evening, reminding Peter that he had been wanting to save them.

‘I’ve been thinking about that a little, on and off,’ Peter replied. ‘I just don’t know where we could put them.’

‘What about another island?’ Atlosreg offered.

‘No, I don’t know where there
are
any other islands big enough that’ll go unnoticed if we just colonize them.’

Atlosreg snorted. ‘Your world’s leaders really think they own the place.’