by Tuson, Mark
Another month? Something may crop up. Also 3 months is a better chance than 2?
It was a good ten minutes before his phone beeped again, and during that time, Peter went into his small kitchen and made himself a mug of disgusting instant coffee. He winced, but grudgingly supposed that it was better than nothing. As he leaned on the counter and sipped at it, his phone beeped again.
Think you’re right. Everyone agrees. Another month. KBO. E.
The Churchill quote made him smile, and reminded him that the Guild mostly consisted of people who were of the same broad type as himself.
He had to admit, he was concerned about whether all their time here was going to waste or not. It seemed they were getting no closer to any sort of answer concerning the existence of this Werosaian base, and he had been beginning to get frustrated with the situation: that was a major reason why he had decided to continue his own research into early writing and his attempts to work out what the hell was scrawled all over that stone.
There wasn’t anything more he could do this evening, though. It was getting late, and he needed to up for work in the morning. It seemed a little like admitting defeat, but after what he had done this evening, he was mentally exhausted, and for all coffee has always been known to be a stimulant, all it was succeeding in doing was warming him up, which when combined with the tiredness he was already feeling, made him want to simply fall asleep, leaning on the kitchen counter.
The next day at work was a quiet one. They were usually rather quiet, but some days there was nothing to do but sit there – it was all down to whether maintenance or upgrades needed performing on the computer network, and whether someone had managed to break one of the computers. This was one of those days when there was no maintenance to do and no broken computers to fix, and so nothing to do in the office other than to pass time until either someone did break a computer or else five o’clock came.
It just happened, though, that Peter had something he could do while he was waiting for something to happen at the college: he had his research to work at. He felt no guilt at doing this: on days where there wasn’t anything to do, often the other technicians there would read, or play network matches of games like Unreal Tournament. It was normal and, as long as you were quiet about it, perfectly acceptable.
Thus, for most of that day, Peter was reading on various websites about palaeography, learning about the evolutions of a number of writing systems throughout the world, both extant and extinct. It was all fascinating, and not merely because of its link to what Peter was trying to find out. These ancient glyphs had a genuinely interesting appearance, and it made him want to learn more and more about them, and maybe even learn how to read and write using them, just for the fun of it. He had no doubt that he could; he had once learned how to read and write a simplified flavour of Egyptian hieroglyphs when he had been at primary school, along with the rest of his year.
There wasn’t anything here, however, that quite resembled what had been inscribed on the stone under the Guild. The closest that anything came to that was a precursor to the Latin alphabet, variously called Old Italic and Etruscan. It had the same broad appearance as some of the writing on the stone but there were differences that were big enough that he imagined transcribing it would involve a certain measure of imagination. All part of the fun.
Eventually, he started finding his way from writing toward cave paintings and similar early kinds of art, which often seemed to describe events – as though they were writing. Of these, caves at Font-de-Gaume looked promising, as did Rouffignac and Pech Merle. There were others too, but those three caves seemed, according to the Internet at least, to be among the few most well-known and well-documented occurrences of cave paintings in Europe. Not that he was planning – or even able – to go and see them.
Peter had been studying the markings he had transcribed for almost the whole month, and now he knew them pretty intimately. But he was no closer, really, to understanding what they were, or what they meant. His palaeographic research had forked into two directions: the one avenue being continued study into early writing systems and the possibility of finding out if there were any associated languages with an extant corpus from which the actual language could be extrapolated; the second avenue being cave paintings, some of which – like those he had been looking at the most – included symbols and glyphs which almost resembled writing.
He was still looking, in a careful and subtle way, for anything which might link anyone from the college to Werosain or the Fraud’s Army, but there wasn’t anything at all for him to find. As a matter of fact, it had become difficult to motivate himself to keep looking of late, though he knew he had to try: at the end of the day, if there was a large Werosaian base, or even a small one, nearby, that could potentially put the entire world at risk. It had to be found. But it felt to him like it was either an insoluble problem, or else he was simply looking in the wrong place.
For the most part, what this added up to was that he was having to spend a lot of his time making a conscious effort to do what he was there for, rather than give in and spend all his time trying to solve the problems he had created for himself. With that and being back at the old college campus again, it felt just as it had when he had been a student all those years before.
But, really, there was nothing for him to find. His boss didn’t have anything about him at all that was out of the ordinary, or even particularly unpleasant. In fact, Peter had come to this conclusion not long after starting to work at the college, and had been so intent on finding something that was out-of-place that he had ended up working the same spells on everyone with whom he was in regular contact. Again, nothing. It was infuriating.
So his mind invariably ended up working on the problem which was more interesting to him. The problem which, even if it did turn out to be insoluble, would involve Peter learning a lot, and that was a far more attractive situation.
It was ten past six, Friday afternoon. He had stayed the extra ten minutes after work just in case something happened. He had arranged it: this would be his last day. Of course, the college didn’t know the real reason for this was that he hadn’t found what he was looking for, but he did let them know that it had been interesting to work there, and that he had enjoyed it. It was true, he had enjoyed being there – but again, the reason for this wasn’t anything like what they at the college would have thought, which was likely to have been something about the challenge of doing something different, the varying pace of the workload and the like. Sure, there was an element of the challenge of doing something different, but for the most part the challenge didn’t even come into it. Peter had enjoyed it merely because it was so vastly different to what he had been doing with the Guild for the previous five years. Hell, only around a year ago he had been stuck on an island with only himself and a bamboo flute for company.
It hadn’t escaped him, either, that the life he had been living back here in Blackpool for the last three months had been pretty much all he had ever wanted, all he felt he deserved, when he had finished doing his own degree here. There was no “entitlement,” as people called it, borne of the intellectual snobbery of the academic, not like there was perceived in a lot of other people. No, all he had wanted was a chance, an opening through which he could enter the world and be allowed to make an effort to make his own living and, dare he have thought it, his own fortune.
He got back to his flat for seven o’clock. There wasn’t much he needed to pack, he had mostly been storing his clothes in his suitcase in case he needed to make a quick escape. His satchel was hung at the end of his bed; he went and fetched it, hanging it over his shoulder.
Was there anything else? He couldn’t think of anything else that needed packing, or attending to. His suitcase was mostly packed already, his clothes were clean, his satchel on his shoulder. His phone was charged and had fresh credit in it, just in case he needed to contact any of the other Guild members while in transit – or they needed to contact him.
/> There wasn’t a rush, though. He didn’t need to be moving immediately, they weren’t returning to the Guild until the Sunday, though he didn’t know what he would spend two days doing, unless he got out his archaic laptop and spent those two days trying to see what more he could find out about cave paintings and early writing from between the Upper Palaeolithic to the late Bronze Age.
Though, actually, he had found out a lot, and he had started to learn how he could extrapolate the meanings of some of symbols in what he guessed were the newer markings, the ones which looked like they could be Old Italic. It was an interesting subject in and of itself, consisting of just the right balance of science and art.
By the end of Saturday evening, however, Peter had found himself unable to find anything he didn’t already know. So, he decided to call it a day. Everything he wanted to keep hold of, in terms of knowledge, was copied into a small handful of exercise books he had bought one weekend early on in his part of the operation, which were now residing in his satchel.
That being done, he performed a factory reset on the laptop, and set it aside, deciding that tomorrow, before he left for the Guild, he would leave it as a donation at the first charity shop he saw. He didn’t need it any more, and there wasn’t any way he could use it back home, with there being no electrical power or Internet connections within several miles of the Guild.
Sunday morning came, though Peter was there first. He didn’t sleep well, and when the daylight of the new day came he felt neither tired nor energetic. He was simply there.
All was packed and ready. He was, once again, in his Guild-issue black suit and shirt, with his deer-skin satchel over his shoulder, his suitcase packed and locked, and the laptop in a few layers of carrier bags. Everything else that was there in the flat had either been there when he got there, or else wasn’t worth the effort of packing.
He sent a text message around to all of the other Guild members who had been away on this operation alongside him.
All set to go home here.
Within ten minutes, everyone else had responded that they were likewise.
It was actually an exciting thought to him, the notion of going home. He had enjoyed his time away in Blackpool, but it had only been fun in the sense of being novel. There was still a slight surreality to being here, but he had been here for three months and had very quickly remembered that, really, there wasn’t anything interesting. Not considering that that was near enough where he was from.
He caught a bus, with everything he was carrying, to the town centre, and walked from there to the train station, stopping as he had planned to get rid of his laptop. All that involved was simply walking in, putting it on the counter, and leaving. No words uttered.
As he left the shop, his phone beeped. Wondering what any of the others might be saying to him, what couldn’t wait until this evening now, he checked.
P run now caught run dont stop for anything e
Something seemed to have Eric slightly worried.
Seven: The Traitor
It was only a few steps before he realized how grave a situation Eric must have been in to send a message like that. He stopped and looked straight ahead, frowning.
And then it hit him. His blood froze.
No way was going to run away. He needed to find his comrades. Maybe there was something he could do to assist them: he had the advantage of having not been found, attacked or captured – he was outside the situation.
But he wasn’t; a blank white Transit van stopped beside him and two short, stout-looking men picked him up, suitcase and all, and threw him into the back. The door was closed, throwing him into darkness, and then he was moving. He didn’t have time to shout, and he didn’t think that would help anyway, given how accustomed the folk of Blackpool were to shouting in the street.
There wasn’t much to do other than attempt, in the darkness, to orient himself. His case was in there with him, and his satchel was under him as he had landed. He didn’t think anything was damaged – or, at least, he hadn’t heard or felt anything break. He took out his wand and tried to come up with some sort of spell that might help him, but nothing could get any traction, though for the opposite reason to why nothing would take in the room under the Guild: it was more like there was simply no magical energy here, as though it was grounded.
‘Shit.’ He said it slowly and carefully. Some expletives have a power of their own, outside of anything preternatural. His wand wasn’t any use: back into his satchel it went.
It didn’t seem that the van was being driven terribly fast. The movement seemed, in Peter’s limited perception, to be somewhat slow and purposeful. Or else they were stuck in traffic, which, now he thought about it, was the more likely case.
Where the hell were they going, though? That was bothering him, along with who the hell had taken him. But given that the back of the van was – or at least seemed to be – magically grounded, and they had specifically picked up him and not someone else, immediately after the message that Eric had sent…
His blood ran cold again. He didn’t know where, geographically, he was going, but he knew that wherever he was going was likely to be the postulate Werosaian base, and that he was probably not far off seeing the other Guild members.
He lost track of time. It maybe could have been twenty minutes, or forty. Eventually, the van stopped moving, and the engine gave a shudder and then cut off. Wherever they were going, they were there. There was a feeling of inexorable doom that had an effect of surprising calm on Peter. He was possibly – or probably – going to die soon. There was nothing he could do about that. That being the case, he just had to make sure to make it a worthy death.
The door was torn open, and he was pulled out by the lapel, tearing his jacket in the process. He noticed as he fell out, into the road, that they weren’t in Blackpool any more. This was a different town. There was a pungent smell of fish in the air – ah, of course he knew this place. He kept a fast grip on his satchel as he was dragged up onto the pavement and ordered to walk. At first he refused, but then thought it best to comply after he found himself seeing stars.
He was pushed into a building that he had known – or at least thought – to be derelict since as long ago as he could remember. Everything was boarded up, door and window alike, and it was straight into one of these boarded doors that he was pushed.
And then he was in the corner of a large room. Chinks of light leaked in through cracks in and between the boards on the windows and doors, adding to the light that was issuing from a number of lamps in the room and on tables.
The room itself was massive; it must have been half of the ground floor of the building.
Nearby, the others were tied to chairs, in a circle, all facing outwards. Those who could were facing him, looks of mortified disappointment and terror etched into their faces. Eric was among them, but on his face was only despair.
‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ said Peter. He saw stars again, but quickly recovered and drew his wand again, in the blink of an eye firing a lightning bolt at the person who had hit him. It hit home perfectly, causing him to land, shaking and grunting, on the floor. He started to erect a shield around himself when someone stepped up from behind him and brought their hand down, open, palm down, and slapped the wand out of his own hand.
Well, that was a novel way of doing it.
He swung his arm wildly in an attempt to strike the person who had slapped his hand, but stopped in pure shock when he saw a small, older woman standing before him.
‘That’s enough of that,’ she said. Without seeing them, Peter felt the people behind him, near the door, receding. So, it was mother herself who dropped the bomb after all. She looked up at Peter in a way that somehow felt more like she was looking down at him, and pointed at the others. ‘We saved a seat for you.’
‘How kin– ‘ he began, but she slapped his face.
‘Sit.’
He knew he was powerless to refuse. He could kick or hit her, but Pete
r had no idea how many people she had following her orders here. At least three or four, including the one who had just ridden Peter’s lightning.
So he conceded. Slowly, he took a step toward the others, but the woman stopped him.
‘Bag.’ She held her hand out.
Of course. He sighed and took it off, dropping it on the floor in defiance, rather than actually relinquishing it to her. He then continued walking toward the others.
He felt ashamed of himself for allowing himself to be caught, after Eric’s warning. He should have fought. He should have found a way to take control of the situation. He bowed his head.
He sat, hands on knees, and immediately his hands and legs were locked in place. He could breathe, and move his head, and probably speak, but nothing else.
The woman followed him, holding her head high enough that it looked like she was trying to grow. When she reached the circle of chairs, she began to walk around it, with her hands clasped behind her back.
‘So,’ she said. ‘The Guild of Magicians found us.’
Silence.
They were joined by the rest of her people. There were five of them; the one who Peter had put lightning to had recovered just enough to walk and look menacing. They stood in a line, all wearing jeans and various T-shirts, by the wall nearby.
‘What were you hoping to achieve?’
Peter found himself reminded momentarily of that night, five years before, when he had first happened across Eric duelling a Werosaian. Only, now he wasn’t being asked who he worked for. He giggled.
Tim spoke up. ‘We know you’re trying to infiltrate us.’ His voice was strong; he sounded confident, even in the face of death. ‘We know you’re trying again to make the Guild fall, from the inside.’
The woman nodded slowly, exaggeratedly. Her five men sniggered openly.
And then one of Peter’s comrades stood up and calmly walked to the woman’s side. It was Will.
