We Stand at the Gate

A Short Story by James D. Pratt

Copyright 2012 James D. Pratt

Smashwords Edition

Cover image © HeroMachine.com

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Heinrich hated sentry duty. A grizzled
veteran at forty, he damn well should have merited exemption from
such menial tasks. That’s what new recruits are for, and there were
always plenty of new recruits. The mortality rate was high out on
the edge of the southern frontier, but such was a soldier’s life.
Dying from unnatural causes was part of the job and where the
Damned Company was concerned, there was plenty of unnatural to go
around. The Blight wasn’t going to guard itself, after all.

Granted, it was a small consolation that he
was sharing guard duty with Eobard Critchler. The younger man was
fairly tolerable as far as fresh recruits went. Most of the new
guys grew up rough and tumble and arrived with scars on their faces
and chips on their shoulders. With no prospects back in
civilization (unless you counted death by knife or noose a
prospect) they came south, lured by the promise of a generous
pension for a mere ten years of service spent in shouting distance
of the most dangerous place in the world. Heinrich didn’t just know
their collective story, he’d lived it.

As for the Damned Company, the outfit’s
nickname wasn’t just a colloquialism. Their job was to stand at the
threshold of damnation and with nothing more than swords and spears
protect the border against whatever might emerge from the
otherworldly wasteland known in legend as the Blight. Heinrich was
the last of the fellows he’d joined up with an eternity ago to
still be counted among the living. He had less than a year to go
till retirement, but figured it might as well have been a
thousand.

Heinrich suspected and most men agreed that
the only reason a member of the Damned Company could retire after
ten short years with full benefits was because nobody made it that
long. Not that he could remember, anyway. Heinrich had seen all
sorts of weird things emerge from the Blight (sometimes
materializing from thin air), scoop up grown men like a raptor
pouncing on a rodent, and escape lickety-split. He’d seen seasoned
soldiers silt their own throats after going mad from living in such
close proximity to the unnatural. But mostly, he’d known more than
a few men who simply vanished and were never seen again. Whether
they deserted under the cover of night or were taken by the Blight
in some unknown way Heinrich could only speculate.

Heinrich watched Critchler out of the corner
of his eye. Most of the men, even the veterans, hated being
outdoors after dark. The Blight was bad enough in the daytime, but
when night fell strange lights could sometimes be seen in the sky,
and strange shapes sometimes darted, crawled, or oozed across the
no-man’s land between the edge of camp and the towering guardian
pillars which marked where the sane world ended and the Blight
began. Sometimes those shapes were so bizarre the mere sight of
them could drive a man mad. A fair number of the men were even
willing to trade a month’s pay to avoid sentry duty. Not Critchler
though. He was one cool customer.

Critchler didn’t strike Heinrich as a
criminal (and it took one to know one) or a hard-case which made
his enlistment in the Damned Company all the more perplexing. The
soft-spoken young man was well-rounded for someone his age,
implying education, and was slow to anger, implying his childhood
hadn’t been a near constant struggle to survive. Heinrich was
curious about him but not so curious as to raise the subject of
Critchler’s background. He minded his own business and preferred
that others do the same. Critchler seemed to subscribe to that same
philosophy which suited Heinrich just fine, and perhaps that was
why Critchler’s question caught him off guard.

“What do you suppose is on the other side?”
Critchler asked him as they stood guard at the edge of camp that
night. In the distance stood one of the massive, rune-carved
pillars which marked the outermost boundaries of the nightmare
landscape beyond. The elf-runes glowed green and fierce as they for
thousands of years, their arcane power preventing the spread of
whatever unimaginable force had created the Blight.

“The other side of what?” Heinrich asked.

“The hole.”

Heinrich raised an eyebrow. “What hole? Did
somebody dig a hole?”

Critchler smiled and shook his head. “Out
there in the middle of the Blight is a hole. Or maybe crack would
be a better word. Yes, that’s what it is. It’s a literal crack in
the sky, letting the essence of some other reality leak into our
world. I guess you could say it’s the heart of the Blight.”

Heinrich looked sideways at Critchler. “What
the gob are you talking about?”

Critchler shrugged. “It’s not a given. It’s
just something I heard at the Magicians College.”

Heinrich snorted. “And what were you doing at
the Magicians College?”

“I used to go there.”

Even Heinrich knew the Magicians College
wasn’t the most prestigious of the royal colleges (the College of
Engineering held that distinction) but it was definitely the most
expensive. Magical research wasn’t cheap and the faculty was quite
willing to grant honorary degrees not worth the vellum on which
they were written in exchange for generous donations. “Yeah, and
I’m the bloody queen.”

“Your majesty,” Critchler said with a slight
bow.

Heinrich studied the younger man’s mild
expression. “You serious?”

Critchler nodded.

“You come from money?” Heinrich asked, more
surprised at himself than at Critchler’s revelation. It was the
first time he had asked someone a personal question in almost a
decade.

Critchler shook his head. “No, my parents
were sharecroppers. After they died during the last zombie plague,
my great uncle Tobin took me in. He wasn’t rich by any stretch of
the imagination either, but he was a retired professor of alchemy
with his own laboratory and everything. He taught me to read,
instructed me in mathematics and the natural sciences, and when I
showed an aptitude for basic spellcraft used some connections to
get me into the Magicians College.”

“Huh. Okay, so do a trick. Make that rock
float or disappear or something.” Heinrich’s eyes widened. “No,
wait. I’ve got it. Turn it into gold.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Critchler said.
“It’s not like in the stories where the wizard just says some silly
words and waves a stick. Even the simple stuff takes preparation.
And even if I could turn that rock into gold, after awhile it would
just turn back into a rock.”

“Why’s that?” Heinrich asked, frowning.

“Have you ever tried telling a rock not to be
a rock?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Heinrich admitted.
He tried to bite back the next question but curiosity got the
better of him. “Okay, so how do you go from the Magicians College
to guarding the southern border from mutant rabbits? You kill
somebody with a curse or something?”

“I quit school to come here and enlist,”
Critchler said casually.

“You quit… You get a free ride to one of the
Royal Colleges then quit just so you can join… Why the gob did you
do that?”

Critchler stared out into the dark for a few
moments before replying. “Guess which instructors they go through
the fastest at the Magicians College,” he finally asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Just guess.”

Heinrich thought for a moment. “Diabolists?
They’re the demon-guys, right? I don’t know, necromancers,
maybe?”

“Diviners. They go crazy after a while. You
wouldn’t think it but divination is the most dangerous form of
magic there is. When you start poking around in the outer gulfs
beyond space and time, there’s always the danger of something
poking back.”

Heinrich grinned. “Oh, I get it now. You
figured out just how dangerous all that hocus pocus could be and
decided to get as far away from there as possible. Coming all this
way seems a bit like overkill to me but I can’t say I blame you.
When I was a lad I ran with an itinerant wizard for a while. That
crazy bastard showed me things that still haunt my dreams every now
and again.”

“No,” Critchler said, shaking his head. “I
enjoyed what I was doing. I was even studying to be a diviner.
Uncle Tobin wanted me to be a thaumaturgist because that’s where
the money is, but after reading a book on planar cosmology, I
became fascinated with the idea of other worlds and realities.
Diviners can see into more than just the past and future. They can
pierce the dimensional membranes and-”

“Focus, Critchler.”

“Sorry. Okay, I had a divination professor
named Sturgis. He was from a town in the Drakenwald, just like you,
I believe. Like most diviners he ended up going crazy, but he also
managed to do something no one else had ever done before. He saw
into the Blight, all the way into the very heart of it. He even got
a glimpse of what was on the other side.”

“The other side of the…what was it you said?
The crack?”

“Yes. See, there are a lot of theories about
what the Blight really is. Some believe it was left in the wake of
a sorcerers’ battle or magical catastrophe, back in the time of the
serpent people of the Sunken Lands or maybe even before that.
Here’s my personal favorite. Do you know what a dimensional
membrane is? No? It’s like a wall, separating one dimension from
another. Now imagine that something one dimension over has been
banging on the wall since the beginning of time, trying to break
through into our universe.”

Heinrich wasn’t known for his imagination,
but in his mind’s eye he saw a great scaly fist smashing into a
crumbling stone wall. “And the wall finally cracked?”

“Right. And that’s where the essence of that
other dimension started leaking through, killing or mutating
everything it came in contact with and creating the Blight in the
process.”

Heinrich spent a few moments letting that
sink in. “Is that what you believe?”

Critchler shrugged. “It’s just the theory I
find most interesting. Nobody knows what really happened. Even the
elves claim they don’t know, and they were the ones that erected
the guardian pillars in the first place. If it wasn’t for them, the
Blight would have spread across half the world by now.”

Heinrich snorted. “Yeah, well, elves say a
lot of things. For all we know, those pillars don’t do a damn
thing.”

“Maybe. But you have to admit, the line of
demarcation is pretty abrupt. Just one step past any of those
pillars and it’s like you’ve walked into a nightmare.”

Heinrich had to concede that point. The
imaginary cartographer’s line connecting one pillar to the next
represented an invisible boundary he wouldn’t cross for a year’s
pay. “Okay, okay. So what about the professor? The diviner
guy?”

“One night he and some other professors were
sitting around, drinking and talking and the subject of the Blight
came up. So Professor Sturgis told them his theory which another
professor, a transmogrification specialist named Hengler, took
great pleasure in deriding. Professor Sturgis sat their stewing for
the rest of the night. By the time he got back to his quarters, he
decided he was going to show Hengler what real wizarding was and
determine the nature of the Blight once and for all.”

“So in other words, wizards are just as full
of it as the rest of us,” Heinrich observed.

“More so. Now, from a wizarding viewpoint the
simplest solution would be some sort of scrying spell, like say
clairvoyance, but if it was that easy somebody would have done it a
long time ago. Something prevents remote viewing beyond the
guardian pillars, maybe some property of the pillars or even the
Blight itself. But Professor Sturgis had hated Hengler for years
and wasn’t going to give up so easily, so he decided to try
something no one else had tried before. Not because nobody else
thought of it, mind you. Everybody else just figured it was
suicide.”