by Tuson, Mark
Suddenly feeling embarrassed and humiliated, he hurriedly mopped his eyes on his sleeve. Eric didn’t say anything, instead reaching under the desk and producing a bottle and two glasses. He placed the glasses on the desk and filled them, and then turned back to Peter.
‘Get that down ya, boy. It’ll do you good.’
He did. All of it in one gulp, the same as Eric. It was whiskey, deep and round and peaty, and it sucked the breath right out of him. Eric laughed as Peter struggled to suck a breath in. ‘Bit out of practice,’ Peter gasped.
‘So I see.’ Eric chuckled and took Peter’s glass from him, and refilled it and his own. They both drank more slowly this time, sitting in silence for a few minutes.
The whiskey was going to Peter’s head already. It made him feel warm and fuzzy, and removed his intention and ability to hide how tired he was. He went to take a sip, but at the last moment it manifested as a slurp.
‘You look like you got your hands on that just in time,’ said Eric. Peter looked at him.
‘Perhaps I did.’ Perhaps, hell. He wanted to get thoroughly plastered, he was sick of having to be civilized for these bastards. Bastards. Who sent people out to get killed and then made the newbie immolate their remains. Bastards. He exchanged another unashamed slurp of whiskey for a loud, ironic cackle.
‘Peter…’
‘Don’t.’ He wasn’t in the mood for anyone to start trying to help him feel better.
‘Peter,’ Eric said, more calm and a shade more concerned. ‘Let it out. We both know you need to.’
Did he? He was doing fine here, without the kind aid of an emotional punch-bag. ‘Maybe you don’t need me to.’
‘You’re being silly, dude.’
I’ll dude you, Peter thought.
‘I had to do the funeral after my first time in the field, too. There were six of us, and only another woman and I survived. Between us we had to bring four bodies home, and I’ll tell you now – they had much worse than broken necks.
I had to immolate them, one by one, just like you did with Sue. It wasn’t nice. First with seeing them get killed: one was cut in half – head to groin, not across the waist – one had all their blood turned into liquid nitrogen, one was turned inside out, and the last was electrocuted. All his skin turned to slippery… nonsense. It was fucking grim.’
Despite himself, Peter gasped. Eric carried on. ‘And then, because I was the newbie, they had me learn the lines, and they had me line the fire pits with clean stones and wood, and they had me ignite the bodies. One at a time. Shock on top of shock. I passed out when I’d done them all…’
They both, without prompting, downed the last of their drinks. Suddenly Peter was feeling a little less sorry for himself. Eric replenished their glasses again and carried on.
‘You want to know why you, as well as why fire. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s specifically to harden you. You can’t experience that horror again, not like the first time. In time you’ll be thankful that you did it.’
Peter snorted and took a drink from his newly-refilled glass.
The rest of the night proceeded in a more positive vain, with Peter and Eric drinking happily and sharing funny stories and telling dirty jokes. While the end of the night was a little hazy, he was grateful for the chance to let it out of his system a little, at least for that moment.
When he awoke the next morning, however, he didn’t feel all that much better than he had before visiting Eric. Sure, he had taken some relief in letting it out, but looking at himself and his feelings now, there wasn’t any overall improvement: not only that, but he had a slightly thick head with all the whiskey he had imbibed. He was glad they had arranged to have a drink, though. Maybe it would turn out to have done him good.
Six: Home Turf
He was still attending practice sessions with other members of the Guild, and now he applied himself with a renewed and active interest and dedication to developing his strengths, in every area. Not only that, but he also started thinking about the stone under the Guild again, and what pertinence it may have to the whole situation concerning the nature of the Guild and the seemingly eternal struggle between the Guild and Werosain.
He wondered about this because the stone, Peter thought, was a mystery which was literally at the foundation of the Guild, and it was supposed to be common knowledge within the Guild that the existence of Werosain and its ruler Rechsdhoubnom were the reason for that foundation. Ergo, in Peter’s mind, the stone was an integral part of the mystery. It occurred to him that that might be the reason why nobody was prepared – or possibly even able – to talk about it.
Over the following months, as he was learning more about how to attack and defend magically, he spared a lot of thought to the subject. He was concerned, though, about what had happened the last time he had been down there. Physical discomfort, uncomfortable dreams… he shuddered at the thought of going down there again. But again, the curiosity was growing ever stronger in him, and with it a desire to not be discouraged. There must be a way to defend himself against that effect, if it was some nature of defence against any possibility of interference with the stone.
Ultimately, though, he couldn’t think of anything to protect himself from whatever was causing the stone – and to a lesser extent the whole room in which the stone resided – to exert that effect on him. And he knew better than to ask: he wasn’t fond of finding out if there was an equivalent, within the Guild, of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
He wasn’t particularly noticing the time slipping away. Before he knew it, it had been six months since that frightful and hateful incident in Scotland, and Peter was only just beginning to come to terms with what had happened and what it had meant. He was slowly overcoming his feelings of guilt concerning Sue’s death, his survival, and how he had been made to conduct her funeral rite even though he hadn’t known – or even met – her, prior to the day she was killed. He was gaining a reputation for his strong defensive spellwork, particularly his feedback shields, which had been designed to cause painful resonance with malicious magic to discourage said. Altogether, he had put a lot of effort into moving on and improving himself, and to his own surprise it was working.
But… there was still the stone, which had been weighing on his mind a lot, but not quite enough to prompt him to actually go and investigate it again. Not until one Wednesday night, after he had already spent most of the day practicing the same electric spell that Will had used to incapacitate the man who had killed Sue. He had made it an ambition to learn how to use that spell himself.
He was sat on his bed, with his head rolled back. He sighed, and half-way through the sigh became a yawn. He was very tired, having been up and about since six in the morning. Spellwork was known to be tiring when done in more than short bursts, and he had been working himself very hard all day.
Thinking about whether he was going to give in and get into bed, he looked at the clock, half-expecting it to be at least midnight. It was only ten o’clock, but he momentarily considered getting into bed anyway. But then he remembered the stone again, and somehow he found himself standing up.
‘If I’m going to do it, I might as well stop pissing about and actually go and do it,’ he said to himself. He laughed for a moment; the last time he had said that to himself, it was when he was considering asking a girl out when he was at school. In the words of the poet, “our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.”
He put on his jacket and shoes, and left his room. He didn’t feel quite so tired now. Quite the opposite: he had stopped feeling tired at all, he felt his pulse racing and his mind working. He felt full of beans.
After the walk all the way down to the very end of the coil-shaped corridor, Peter descended into the last, bottom room once more. He took the lamp and lit it again, as he had before. The same sensation was starting to affect him slightly, as it had done the last time he had come down here, but he noticed it wasn’t anywhere n
ear as bad. He approached the great ovoid stone without so much fear as curious vigilance, and he began to study it closely, choosing wilfully to turn the slight light-headedness he was beginning to experience into a state of mental receptiveness. He intended to be as receptive as possible.
There was a lot to see here, and a lot to learn.
Boldly, this time, Peter approached the stone. He was holding himself together mostly through force of will: he wasn’t entirely sure if that was why he wasn’t feeling the need to hold himself together quite so much as he had the last time he had been here. Just about the only thing that was making anything difficult for him was the viscosity of the air. That in itself started to make him struggle slightly after a minute.
He persevered. He wasn’t letting it beat him, there were things to see and learn here, and he wasn’t giving up because of a silly little thing like asphyxia.
There were symbols here, drawings carved and scratched into the stone, flickering with the light from his lamp, giving them the appearance of life. He tried to study them, but he wasn’t able to breathe at all. The air was just too thick for him, and his vision was starting to go dark.
In desperation he ran back and flung himself at the wall, as far away as he could, to try and get some air into his lungs. That had been close, and while he didn’t want to give up, he also was growing less fond of the idea of drowning in what he believed to be pure magic. He did have an idea, though.
Drawing his wand, he cast a small spell on himself, which would normally allow him to gain oxygen while trying to breathe underwater. It wasn’t designed for use in air, but Peter imagined that he would probably be able to use it to gain what little oxygen from what little air he was able to take in near to the stone.
The spell took effect almost immediately. It sent him dizzy: he was effectively breathing pure oxygen. He held his breath, noting that he would probably be able to hold his breath for several minutes quite safely, and ploughed forward once more.
It was a lot easier now. He could make out what looked like crude pictures of people, along with primitive buildings, very faint in the stone. There were animals too, and what looked like it could be writing. In fact, there were several sets of symbols which could all have been writing, as though there had been several ages in which this stone had been a feature. Here were lines and zig-zags, and there were circles and concentric squares and rectangles. The only thing that Peter recognized – and then only partially – was something that looked somewhere between Runes and early Latin. But there were symbols among them which, again, he hadn’t ever seen before.
The whole thing seemed more and more strange and arcane to Peter. There was a deep, deep link to some extreme power in the past here, whether it was related to the creation of Werosain or not. In fact, it was as though this was the whole inspiration for people imagining a myriad different dark strangenesses surrounding magic. For all he knew, it might well have been.
He spent a good twenty minutes staring at the inscriptions on the stone, but as hard as he stared and as hard as he thought, he couldn’t make any sense of them. He tried a few detection spells, but – just the same as the last time – not a single one of them gained any traction. They just slipped apart, like he was trying to run on ice. This really was Something Else.
It was time to give up, at least for now. He snuffed out his lantern and his breathing spell, and returned to his room for the night.
His intention, of course, had been to return the following evening with a pencil and some paper, and make some attempt to copy what he saw onto the paper, such that he could study it and work out what he needed to research from the safety of his own room.
However, it evidently wasn’t to happen as soon as that: when he woke up in the morning, he found another note, slipped through the crack under his door. He knew what it was going to say.
Good morning Peter. Please meet at refectory at nine o’clock. Pack a case and bring whatever you deem necessary for a stay outside the Guild.
Eddie Harrison –
He tore it up. ‘Fucking fuck,’ he spat.
It was eight. He had an hour to pack, and he had no idea what he was packing for. He huffed, and gathered a couple of each type of clothing, and made sure all of his tools were in the satchel he had made during his exile, which he mostly kept slung on the back of his chair these days, but still, he liked knowing it was nearby.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to use as a suitcase, though. However, he didn’t have to worry for more than a moment or two, because, as chance would have it, there was a knock on his door – someone delivering a plain brown suitcase, as per Eddie’s orders. Well, it seemed he had attended to everything.
Everything he needed for a stay away was packed by ten to nine, and then he left, with his satchel over his shoulder and his suitcase dragging behind him on the floor.
There was Eddie, of course, and a crew of another few people, including Will, Tim, and Eric. The atmosphere was far more formal than it had been the last time.
‘Pete.’ Eric nodded. Peter was starting, finally, to get used to Eric calling him that, though he still couldn’t quite shake the pirate image from his mind. He was just grateful that his name wasn’t William.
Most of everyone else here knew one another, and there were more faces here that he recognized from various places around the Guild. As Eddie talked, it became clear to Peter – and, he assumed, the others – that what they had learned in Scotland was useful after all: the outpost there had been taken by the Army of the Fraud, and since retaken by the Guild in operations which had taken place since Peter had gone; Tim had been there for most of those, it turned out.
The problem was, Eddie explained, that while they had managed to dispatch a lot of the Fraud Militia and restore the Guild members who, at that outpost, had been enthralled, there was a growing presence of the Army, at various other places. What they were here for specifically this morning was to begin a long-term operation to gather information concerning what the Guild believed to a Fraud base, located in the north of England.
This made Peter prick his ears up. He was from the north, and it had of course been in the north that he had been attacked.
‘How long do you think this base might have been there?’ He said.
‘We’re not sure,’ replied Eddie.
Eric spoke up. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Pete, and I think I agree.’ He cleared his throat. ‘If it’s been there for all this time then there’s a massive danger that they’ve established failsafe bases elsewhere.’
That hadn’t been exactly what had been bothering Peter, but Eric had a good point. ‘How come nothing’s been done until now then?’
Tim raised his hand in a ‘wait a moment’ gesture. ‘We didn’t know.’ He shook his head slightly. ‘What I’ve seen suggests that it’s been there a long time, but until now we’ve not seen or heard anything about any base, all we’ve had to go in is the odd isolated event.’
For a fraction of a second, Peter was on the edge of coming out with a retort along the lines of ‘yeah, right,’ but he thought better of it. The Fraud and his Army had been at this a long time as well, which Peter had found easy to forget, so it would only be logical that they would be able to elude even the best that the Guild had to offer for at least a short time. It brought him up a little short; having forgotten momentarily that the Army was an organization, and one which had had as much time to develop complex strategies and manoeuvres as the Guild had. He had fallen into the trap of allowing himself to think that it was a rag-tag group of dark magicians with little in the way of project management or organizational skills.
Eddie had started talking again. ‘Anyway, the plan is that I’ll be sending you all to Blackpool. You’ll be there for a few months; we’ll sort it out so that you have jobs, places to live, and money – all you have to do is find out what you can and report to me.’
Blackpool. It had been five years since Peter had even thought about that place. It seemed
alien to him now, like it had been a previous life. Then again, he supposed it had been. He imagined it would be a lot different now to how it had been before he had joined the Guild. For just a moment, he felt his old life, who he used to be, tugging at the thread that was still attached to who he was now.
Nobody else seemed to have anything of a reaction to the naming of the place. It meant nothing to them. But then, he hadn’t supposed it would. It wouldn’t have meant anything to him, after all, had Eddie named one of the places they were from.
They all ate a large breakfast, and then they were to leave. They weren’t going by portal this time: it wouldn’t have been wise for them to all simply appear out of nowhere in a busy place like that, especially if they were going to be staying for a significant time. Besides, if any of the Army might have been watching – which wasn’t exactly impossible – they didn’t want to arouse any suspicion.
They were all going by different modes: some would be going by coach, some by car. One woman, a short ageless creature with a blonde pixie-cut hairstyle, proclaimed that she would be taking this opportunity to ride her motorbike. Peter was distracted by the mental image that conjured for a moment. He himself was to be traveling by train.
It had all been arranged in advance over the previous few days: that way, the whole operation could be executed smoothly. Places to live had also been arranged, so all each person had to do was find the place that had been found for them, and settle in. Among them, there were two train journeys happening: Peter was leaving from Manchester, and the other from Leeds.
As they were all to set off from different places around the country, they were sent to their respective starting points via portal.
It was time to go. Eddie gave each of them an envelope containing one hundred pounds in ten pound notes, whatever transport tickets were required, and a card with their new addresses and details about their respective job on it.
