The Steward and the Sorcerer

by James Peart

  He stopped when he arrived at the East tower which looked out over the entrance to the stronghold and part of the wild land around it. Weaving his hands in a particular pattern of movement, he summoned the green fire, fire that could draw matter into this world from another. It could also bring into being matter that didn’t exist anywhere but in the mind of the summoner. The bright green flame danced between his twining hands until the outline of something solid appeared, gathering mass and density as the flame burned. When it was over he held in one hand an object that resembled a stick. It was less than a foot long and three inches wide, thin and flat. He stood looking at it for a time then grasped both ends, one in each hand, and swiftly brought it down against his knee, splitting it in two. He placed the shorter end in a pocket inside his robing, then reached up to one of the windows and fastened the other end to a hook on the window shelf that overlooked the entrance to the keep. He stood back and admired his handiwork, satisfied the object wouldn’t move. It was called a Drey torch. If placed anywhere it would offer you a view of whatever it was directed at, the image summoned by the half you kept on your person, no matter how far you travelled. He would need to repeat the process for the West, North and South wings of the castle.

  When he had finished he negotiated a series of corridors and passageways until he arrived at a large chamber in the deep interior of the keep. It was a bare room, devoid of a single item of furniture, used for some purpose or other in days past which had largely been forgotten now.

  Daaynan lifted both of his hands, arching each, winding and twisting them in a precise sequence known to him through his years of training. Black fire shot from his fingers, sent everywhere at once, its smoke bursting in all directions, enveloping the space inside the chamber. He inhaled some of the smoke, leaned forward and wretched to dispel it, keeping his mind’s eye on his task, peering through the jetting flames to spot what the magic had been called on to achieve.

  There it was: a hole in the fire the size and shape of a doorway. It had materialised suddenly and quickly; one moment not there and present the next. The doorway was opaque, impossible to see past, though there were unusual markings seemingly carved in the air above the arch of the passage.

  The Druid stepped through it without thinking, definitively glad to be free of the oven the room had become. He walked through into something unknowable, somewhere few, if any, people had ventured before, and did not look back. As he did so he felt an instant of deep and sharp regret, something that bordered on panic, as if he had left behind a vital part of his soundness and reasoning that would not easily be recovered. He brushed this feeling aside, however, pushing through and out of the familiar surrounds of Fein Mor.

  His first thought was that it was bright here, wherever this was. He felt a great heat against his skin, as if he stood in the beam of a dying star. The warmth subsided, however, yet in the after-image of that star-like heat he could not see anything but light. Outlines slowly began to materialise, and with them solid shapes. They were columns, countless pillars stretching everywhere for as far as he could see. They were filled with light; alive, to his reckoning, and thrumming with whatever life sustained them. They were arched, like the doorway he had passed through. The nearest of them carried the same strange markings as the portal, three of them somehow carved into the light substance just within his reach. He walked toward the pillar to better examine them. They looked like small shields on which rune carvings were grafted though the patterns were unfamiliar and irregular. They could be buttons, he thought, activating he did not know what. It would be better if he left them alone.

  He was inside a temple of some kind. But this temple was the largest one he had ever seen and it seemed to have no boundaries. He glanced up and discovered that the columns stretched upward further than his vision allowed. Looking back down he decided it would do to explore some of this place. He reached into an inside pocket of his cloak, producing a wand, small in length, fitting easily into the palm of his hand. He leaned toward the column and marked it at the level of his eyes, a small stain that he could easily notice on returning to this spot. He left a slightly different mark on an adjacent column and two others, creating a square inside which he had entered the temple. Standing back, he examined his work, satisfied.

  He walked in more or less a straight line from the centre point of the square, stopping to look at the natural markings- but what was natural about this place?- on the other columns. Each set of runes he observed was an exact copy of those he saw on the first pillar; as far as he could tell they were all like that. He walked for several minutes then stopped. Looking back, he could no longer see the pillars he had marked. The temple had not changed, the columns of light it housed stretching for as far as he could see.

  It would have to be here. He took out the marker and stained each of the four columns that immediately surrounded him, drawing an arrow on one that pointed back in the direction he had come. Pocketing the marker, he stood before the nearest column and considered what he was looking at. The pillars filled with light were doorways to other worlds, he felt sure. There must be thousands, perhaps an infinite number of them. He thought he would not need to summon the black fire to pass through them, although how exactly he would cross over into one of these worlds he was not sure. Perhaps it was simply a matter of walking into the light.

  This temple must be an interim place, he reasoned, a world between worlds.

  There was another thing. He felt a pressure around him. It had been gentle at first, barely noticeable, but had now grown strong enough to announce itself. It felt very much like a brand of sorcery, though at the same time different from what he would term ‘sorcery.’ He remembered the Brightsphere telling him he would encounter other kinds of magic. Did it mean here? It seemed repelled by his own magic, so whatever inducement was carried in its force did not work its full effect on him. It whispered to him to forsake his duty, lulling him into a peaceful state of mind where memory or purpose did not matter. Whether it was malign or simply benevolent he did not know, but he understood that he could not stay here for very much longer or he would be carried away by its soft urge.

  Summoning the blue fire, he directed it at the pillar that was nearest to him, its bright contrails flaring at his fingertips, the seeking flame pouring into the column of light until it was lost from view. He waited some moments, anticipating a disruption in the flow of magic he had issued, some tell-tale sign that all was not right, but none came. Perhaps the place that stood the other side of this portal was harmless, or it could be his magic was unable to read it. Whatever the case, he knew he must make a decision.

  He drew what remained of his sense of purpose tight around him and walked into the column of light.

  6.

  Whilst Daaynan was wrestling with his decision to leave the space between worlds, on another world, in another age and time, the Earl of Ainsworth, Christopher Went, waded through a lagoon provided by a low sandbank on a foreign shore. Small wavelets lapped occasionally at his ankles, crashing softly against the arches of his feet and, at times, his lower legs, his trousers having been rolled up to the knees. He waded slowly further away from the shoreline, his head bowed in silent contemplation, his movement elegant, carrying a sort of agile grace, bent as he was in a private reverie that looked to the close observer a helpless meditation.

  He was being watched from the interior of a beach house not sixty feet away. Two people, one of them a member of his own family, were discussing him with an examining scrutiny that he would have accepted with feeble uncaring.

  “He doesn’t drink out of a sense of enjoyment anymore,” Simon, his friend, said.

  “How is it between you two?” Christopher’s mother asked Simon. “I mean, we hear stories of what you both get up to at Cambridge, but I put it down to recklessness of youth, that sort of thing.”

  Simon looked uncomfortable, Isobel noted, and he’d flinched from her question. “If that’s all it is,” she pressed, “then Lord
knows I’m happy to endorse it. What I’m worried about is the other thing. His drinking, I fear, is only a symptom of a greater disease. I believe that’s le mot juste; he’s simply not at ease with himself.”

  A tiny frown line appeared on Simon’s brow. Why was she trying to be so damn relevant? He’d seen this trait in other members of Christopher’s family. His friend had a problem with drink and they, in their attempt to seek its cause with such precision, fearing the worst, namely that he was drinking to try to escape them in some way, did not understand the true reason. He understood it, or at least thought he did. Christopher and he had been great friends since going to Eton together. During their first year at University they had remained close, yet forces- a wider social development for Christopher, the lure of academic life for him- drew them apart. When they encountered each other again, soberly, under the harsh light of day during Michaelmas term in their second year, they did so as young men, not boys, and truths which had been running beneath the surface in the shallows of their adolescence, churned under the roil of deeper waters and became exposed. Christopher needed people around him, a dependence that at Eton had made him seem interesting and, given his gift for conversation and the natural quirk of his personality, exotic. His dependence grew as he matured, however, and as Simon and others in Christopher’s entourage gained a measure of understanding of themselves and began to cultivate interests elsewhere, he began to fear the world outside. He drank more, not to deepen a bond with his fellow man and align himself with these interests but to escape back into a realm where his boyhood dreams stayed inviolate, rooted in a childish Elysium. He broke from the company of their fellowship and forged new connections, not in any progressive way but in a sort of degenerative retreat. Tiring of his peers, he began at first to drink with freshmen, then formed an alliance with the college’s undesirable types: activists and fervent Charismatics, individuals whose families were marked with a slur on their names. He invited locals from surrounding village pubs to stand choir in the quad outside the bursar’s digs and sing bawdy songs at varying pitch and degrees of lewdness.

  Now his mother wanted him to approach Christopher and worry the cause of his unhappiness. He gazed out at his old friend and wondered what he would tell her.

  There was a man on the beach, emerging from a nearby cove, walking toward the lagoon Christopher was situated in. This man was easily the tallest human being Simon had ever seen. Six feet eleven, perhaps seven feet. He was dressed in a long, thick black cloak which whipped around his legs as the wind caught his stride. There was a sense of purpose about his movement and although he could not see the man’s face clearly, he caught an impression of something grim and harshly commanding. The man’s eyes roved around the bay, eyes that missed nothing, seeming to peer deep into the Went’s beach house as they swept his way, fleetingly connecting with his own, he swore, before moving past.

  “Who on Earth?” Isobel started, turning to Simon, and he found he had to conceal a smile before he could react properly. The theatricality of it was overwhelming: The Reaper coming for her son, crashing through the forest to claim yet another reluctant life...only the woodland was a mile south of here and this was no mythical being. There was something horribly real about this man, though he couldn’t put his finger on it. On closer inspection there were markings along the side of his face- burn marks, he would guess from this distance- and a slight hitch to his gait suggesting an injury resultant from some unknowable encounter. Something gleamed at the edge of his fingers on one hand and he lifted it in the approximate direction of where Christopher walked. Simon and Isobel looked on in a sort of light trance as the figure closed the remaining distance between itself and the young man.

  It occurred to both of them to act, which they did synchronously, freed of their paralysis, bursting through the house’s pavilion door. “Christopher!” his mother yelled, waving her arms, and his friend turned about, breaking momentarily from his reverie. But Simon sensed all at once the futility of her warning and grasped one of her arms to lower it, letting go and running ahead of her and toward his friend. The man ignored both of them, green fire issuing from the fingers of his raised hand, swallowing the air it touched, Simon was convinced later as he replayed the event over and over in his mind. The flame streaked from the man’s fingers like the flash of a gunshot, or the afterimage of a very powerful camera, and carried toward his now stumbling friend. He wasn’t close enough to reach Christopher but- in a decision that took a fraction of a moment and one he spent a long time since bitterly reviewing- he threw himself in the path of the flame, hoping to deflect its course.

  His efforts were in vain as the fire consumed them both.

  7.

  Daaynan walked through the bursting light and emerged into a world of half-light.

  He was inside a building of some description, or at least part of a building as a substantial portion of it had been eroded and exposed to the outside, long ago by the look of it. A red-shadowed haze covered the sky and his first thought was that he had arrived in the night. As he looked up into the sky, however, he disconfirmed his suspicion: an enormous red sun filled the heavens, far closer to the Earth- if this was the Earth- than he had ever seen the sun in his Northern Earth. The stars were faintly visible in the patch of sky not absorbed by this sun, a thing he would have thought impossible but for the weak light it provided. It was surely no stronger than the moon back on his world.

  The portion of building he stood in was, or had been, a giant hall, a vast rectangular chamber that stretched at least 200 metres in length and 50 in breadth. There was nothing inside it, not a stick of furniture or even paintings on the walls, but its great columned arches rising to the elaborate ceiling artwork faintly took one’s breath away. There were images carved into the plasterwork that depicted men and women in various states of work and rest, the carvings elegant and exquisite. They captured a certain hauteur in the expressions of the people, even those at work. This was, or had been, a palace of Kings, he thought. It would do to explore it further.

  To his right stood an arched entryway that led into a chamber smaller than the hall but still very large. Here there were pictures on the walls, and tables surrounded by chairs, one very long table featuring prominently in the centre of the room. There was a smell of dried bones, immediately apparent on his entering the room, the cause of it leaning forward onto the table, back against the chairs, or collapsed in heaps on the floor. There were the remains of what had once been food set out in bowls and plates at the centre of the table, with mats and utensils that had grown rusted. A skeletal feast, his mind japed, as he turned to dry-retch on the stone floor. Gathering himself a moment later, he felt alright once more.

  At one end of the central table and to either side of this end were three seated skeletons, almost fully intact. The one seated at the table end wore a crown of some description, made from what appeared to be gold, with small engravings along the band. They were indecipherable, he noted, and different from the markings on the columns of light in the world between worlds. He bent close to what remained of the face beneath the crown: in the structure, in the angle of bone, he detected the same hauteur he had seen in the plasterwork carvings, only magnified, the long cheekbones and the delicate, threadlike nose hinting at elevated sovereignty. The frames of the two to the ‘King’s’ right and left held a more subdued arrogance. Daaynan suspected they had once been heads of state, or perhaps royal advisors.

  Standing back from this scene, he first noticed the plinth and the marble column resting square in its centre to one side of the room. He stared at it. There were three markings carved into the marble that were exactly like those he’d encountered in the temple before entering this world. Rune markings, like in the temple, their patterns irregular in the same way. He studied them now, eager to discover their importance. The first was a rudimentary symbol depicting a planet. This one? Yet all the light columns in the temple carried the same symbol, and each column presumably led to differe
nt worlds, different planets. A generic symbol then. The central one was a more intricate marking denoting a figure engaged in an activity of some kind, the depiction too small for him to decipher what. To the right of this was a marking that showed the figure of the central marking surrounded in a halo of light, its background deliberately blurred.

  He looked at them and looked and finally he understood.

  They were buttons, to be pressed in a sequence from right to left. The first symbol selected the world in which he now stood, the second chose an individual from this world, while the final button expedited his or her- in this case his- entry into the temple.

  This was, after all, what he had come here to do: choose a person, perhaps more than one, from another place or time and bring them back to the Northern Earth. It was clear what he should do: touch each button in the right order and set in motion a chain of events that would allow him to confront Karsin Longfellow of Brinemore and expel tyranny from the Northern Earth. Still he hesitated. What manner of creature would he summon from this or any other world? How many of them would he gather? The answer to the second question came easily. He was not looking for an army. Stealth and manoeuvrability were the key to the plan he had hatched to infiltrate Brinemore. Strength to stand up against those they would encounter in the citadel would have to come from two men, three at the most. They would need to be strong, yet he had planned for this too. He smiled. There were benefits to being Druid of Fein Mor that lay far beyond the grasp of ordinary men. The only thing that bothered him was the type of individual he would get. It seemed he had little control over that detail. If he were correct about the buttons and what they did, there was also the question of consent. Would any of the people he recruited choose to come of their own free will? Did the temple factor this element in its selection of those he could take? How, in point of fact, did it determine its selection? Was it merely random or was there purpose to it? If the latter, was that purpose in line with his own aims?