Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I

by Tuson, Mark

  ‘Your defences are gone.’ Eddie said simply, in response to Peter checking them.

  ‘So I see,’ wheezed Peter defiantly.

  ‘Did you honestly think you’d get away with stealing somebody?’

  It seemed childish to admit now, even to himself, that he had thought anything like that.

  ‘I don’t suppose I did,’ he said quietly, after a moment’s pause.

  ‘Was that why you wanted to take an island for yourself?’

  ‘No.’ It was the truth, though whether Eddie would believe him or not was another question. ‘I thought Atlosreg might be able to help me learn about Werosaian magic, but that was after spending quite a while trying to figure it out for myself.’

  ‘Why do you want to learn about Werosaian magic anyway?’ It seemed a perfectly reasonable question, though Peter wasn’t actually sure he had an answer ready, other than…

  ‘Know your enemy? I figured that if I knew about their magic, I could defend against it better.’

  Eddie raised an eyebrow: he wasn’t satisfied with that. ‘I think there’s more to it than that,’ he said, matter-of-factly.

  Peter relaxed into his bond against the wall. ‘Either way, I don’t believe I’m doing any harm here, with Atlosreg in this house. Up until a few minutes ago the place was well-protected, and that meant he was too. I brought him here because I thought he might know things that could help me – help us, even – and I figured it would be better for him being in a place where he was allowed to be who he was without anyone thinking his brain was addled. Or at least, in the way they think it is,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘Has he had anything to say about it, himself?’ Asked Eddie.

  ‘He has refused to speak at all. He just sits in his room, picking at food that I give him, but not saying anything or doing anything.’

  ‘So what makes you think he wants to be here?’

  ‘What makes you think he wanted to be in a home?’

  Eddie snorted. ‘He wasn’t there by choice. He was there because it was the one place where he wouldn’t be in danger.’

  Peter closed his eyes and groaned. What was the point?

  Suddenly, the force which was holding him pinned to the wall gave way, and he slumped to the floor, landing awkwardly with his legs folded under him and his shoulders pushed against the wall in an uncomfortable position. He rolled onto his side and slowly stood up.

  He huffed as he squared his shoulders slightly. There was another reason why he wanted to learn about Werosaian magic. But Eddie would think he was mad if he said what it was. Wouldn’t he…?

  ‘There is a reason why I want to learn about that stuff,’ he said quietly. ‘If I can learn how they create portals to their world, and learn more about how their world and magic work at a low level…’ he breathed in deeply, preparing himself to voice this thought for the first time ‘…maybe I can undo the awful thing that Rechsdhoubnom did in the first place.’

  Eddie stared at him blankly for several minutes.

  ‘Are you proposing to destroy Werosain?’ There wasn’t anything like humour, fear, or even academic disbelief in his voice or facial expression. There was only a business-like curiosity now.

  Slowly, with an air of surreality, Peter nodded. ‘Yes.’

  All of a sudden, a loud crashing sound issued from one of the bedrooms, and the door opened.

  Atlosreg was standing in the doorway: his hundred-year-old frame oddly imposing in the lamplight. For the first time in five days, he spoke.

  ‘Why didn’t you say before?’ There was a youth in his voice that made him slightly frightening. He looked first at Peter, and then at Eddie, to whom he flashed a look of hatred. He licked his lips thoughtfully, and then began to rhythmically snap the fingers of both his hands.

  There was a sudden pressure beginning to accumulate in the room with them, and it only took a fraction of a second for it to become clear to Peter – and probably to Eddie too – that Atlosreg was preparing to cast. It was nothing of the sort that Peter had already observed: it had the feel of something big and military, designed not merely to kill but to destroy to the uttermost particle whatever stood in its way.

  Eddie reacted first, whipping his wand diagonally in Atlosreg’s direction. Atlosreg’s hands turned floppy and simply flapped around wildly in the air. Only a moment behind, Peter cast a Faraday cage spell on him, grounding any further magic he attempted to produce.

  Atlosreg’s face was pure rage as Peter forced a chair under him and conjured a rope, already tied around the chair and Atlosreg.

  ‘If you attack either of us, I’ll send you to a home again, and this time it won’t be just an old folks’ home. Got it?’ Peter wasn’t having any of it.

  Atlosreg growled.

  Eddie looked, his fury momentarily forgotten, between Peter and Atlosreg. ‘You can’t seriously expect anything to come of this,’ he said. ‘You’ve already made the rod for your back. Now you’re putting spikes on it.’

  Peter knew that, but he wanted to take this opportunity to find out whatever he could from Atlosreg before Atlosreg being sent back to a home shifted from being a threat to being an eventuality. He had already kidnapped him and brought him here, and Eddie had found out and was himself clearly in a state of controlled lividity: Peter had nothing to lose.

  ‘Look, Eddie,’ he said, ‘I know I’m in the shit.’ He was being careful to maintain a respectful tone. ‘But I honestly believe he could provide information to use that could be key to this.’

  Eddie’s face flashed fury and with fear. ‘You’re proposing to destroy an entire world. What makes you think that’s any better a thing to do than what Rechsdhoubnom did in the first place?’

  Peter already had his answer ready, but Atlosreg cut him off, speaking calmly and reasonably. ‘The world of Werosain,’ he said, ‘is made from injustice and… wrong. Ending it would be the first justice that world has ever seen.’

  Peter nodded slowly. He couldn’t have worded it better himself. ‘Like a canker on reality,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Eddie blinked. The look of disbelief on his face was almost cartoon-like; his eyes were too wide, his eyebrows too high.

  Peter stroked his beard and looked around the room. Could it even be possible to reverse or undo the spell the Fraud had cast, to call an end to Werosain? It seemed like a silly childish idea now he had put it to words, and he wasn’t sure whether he was more disturbed by having taken the idea seriously enough to actually voice it, or by Eddie and Atlosreg taking the idea seriously at all. For a moment, he felt like a child who had just, somewhat successfully, reasoned that Santa Klaus must exist after all. Which in itself was disturbing, because such childish arguments usually evaporate at the merest whiff of logic.

  But logic said a man couldn’t create a universe, or even a world. Though magic was – as best as Peter could gather – a low-level implementation of logic. It was programming reality, as one does a computer.

  And if it was like programming, then Werosain was like a forked process, spawned by the main process in a piece of software. In computer software, that happens quite a lot – otherwise, the computer could only run a single piece of code at a time, and nothing would get done while the operator still needed it. But sometimes a badly-written piece of code can cause problems, which can be fixed by halting the program, fixing the code, and starting the program afresh.

  In this case, however, the program that was reality couldn’t simply be halted and edited. It had to be debugged at runtime: the error had to be fixed while the program was running.

  To use a simpler analogy: it was like a violinist removing a damaged string from their violin, replacing it, and tuning it – all while in a live concert, performing a solo, without varying from the written music.

  This was a nightmare of a problem.

  ‘I know it’s the furthest thing from easy to even think about whether or not it’s even possible,’ he said. ‘But if so many of our p
roblems in thisworld stem from that world, whose very existence results from a violation of the First Law, surely it would be better all-round if that world didn’t exist?’

  Atlosreg sat back in his chair, relaxing into the ropes with which he was bound. ‘I once sought to destroy Werosain,’ he said. ‘But it was trouble, a lot of trouble.’

  Eddie seemed a lot less surprised than Peter felt himself. Atlosreg looked distant.

  ‘What happened?’ Peter said. ‘Where did it go wrong?’

  All of a sudden – and despite being tied onto a chair – Atlosreg appeared to be in his element. He paused for a moment, and then began.

  ‘All boys in Werosain are expected to join Rechsdhoubnom’s army and be prepared to fight for him, once they are old enough to use a weapon. There are not that many people in Werosain anyway, fifteen thousand at the most.

  ‘A lot of boys don’t know what the fighting is for, but they do it because Rechsdhoubnom wants them to, and Rechsdhoubnom is their god. They have to do what he wants. Most boys are maybe eleven or twelve years old when they are sent to join the army and start training.

  ‘I was nine. They always said I was a very clever boy, and I must have been because when I trained with the army I learned quickly, and was promoted quickly. A lot of the other boys, who were older than me, found it hard to believe that I could be so much younger than them but so much better. They were jealous, and they bullied me, which meant I had no friends, and more time to study and practice.’

  Peter nodded in spite of himself: he was familiar with that kind of feeling, from his own childhood.

  ‘Soon I was starting to learn about magic, and how it was used for better things than lighting stoves or making sure the rain doesn’t drown crops. Once I got to learning magic, all the teachers were surprised at how much better I was at magic than anything else, and I was already the best at everything else. By the time I was twelve I could make a building explode with the same effort it would take anyone else to light a small fire.

  ‘It was like I was made to cast magic, it was in my blood, in my heart!’ At this, he puffed his chest out and twitched his right hand, as though to strike his breast in pride.

  ‘They made me learn more and more magic, and I just carried on, I got better and better and better. I was a proud son of Werosain, and I was going to make my world and my god proud of me like I was of them, because I was the best in the world. Everyone thought I was some kind of chosen one, like a son of Rechsdhoubnom himself – there are legends in Werosain that describe him when he was young, and how he was the best at magic in the whole world at that time.

  ‘I wanted to be like him. So much. I wanted to make him proud of me – his son by power.’

  He was becoming more fluent in his speech by the moment, and more emotive. It was as though these were things he had been dying to talk about properly since he had first come to Earth, all those years ago.

  ‘But there was an accident at the place we were training at, when I was about fifteen years old. A big spell we were practicing; it was supposed to make a whole group of people die. Just die, simple as that.

  ‘There were four of us practicing this spell, and one of them was someone who I had become friends with. He was a good boy, but he didn’t like how the whole of Werosain seemed intent on invading your world. He was following orders because he would have had his head cut off in front of his family if he didn’t.

  ‘One of the others went wrong, and the whole thing backfired on my friend. His body exploded under all the power that was flowing through us.’

  He stopped talking, and his aged face contorted. He let out a single, howling sob.

  ‘He was dead before it started, I think. I hope. His eyes had no life. And then his body shook like he had been struck by lightning. His hair fell out with the force of it. His eyes fell out and popped. And then all his veins burst. And then his heart burst, and finally his whole body exploded.’

  On cue, Eddie and Peter gasped, horrified.

  ‘That was when I realized,’ Atlosreg continued, ‘like he had, that Earth was not at fault, but Werosain. I saw the horrible kinds of energy we were using, for a force we blindly followed – most of us followed to death.’

  His composure shifted from one of torment and grief to a sense of logical, reptilian fury.

  ‘I decided to do what I could to put an end to Werosain and its ways of killing and destroying. I wanted to bring the whole world to an end, just to stop any other good people from getting killed for a cause they didn’t want to fight for. If we had to exist, why not have peace?

  ‘But the world is wrong, and the people of Werosain believe honestly that that is all there is. The ones who know better think the only answer is to destroy you and take your world. They love their god and their people, truly, but they do not see that there could be peace.’

  Peter understood this: it reminded him of the heartbreak he felt through the mind control spell he had been subjected too at that warehouse near Blackpool.

  ‘But now I wanted to destroy Werosain, because all I saw was a dead world that could only live as a parasite from your world. I know of how Werosain came to be created, and I have, ever since being fifteen, thought that everything would be better if Werosain didn’t exist.

  ‘I waited, and worked even harder than ever to become the best at magic and at fighting. Not just in Werosain, but in all of Werosain’s history.

  ‘It was all a secret. I worked harder during the day, and then practiced on my own for a few hours every night after everyone else had gone to sleep. It was hard work but it was worth it. I would be able to kill off as much of the army as I could.

  ‘I came to understand more about how magic works than I think anyone else in Werosain ever knew, because I immersed myself in it completely. I was not just a magician. I was magic. I became one with magic.

  ‘But it was hard to keep the abilities I was learning secret for long. After a year the rest of the army started to notice that I could work the kind of magic that was really hard for them, while I was doing something else. Most of the time I did not even know I was doing it. We would be training, playing war games to practice attacking and defending, and I would cast a shield spell at the same time as fighting with a sword.

  ‘At first I think they thought it was just happening by accident. But they saw it happening more and more, and by the time I was seventeen, I was taken to see the head of the army.

  ‘I was so embarrassed. I couldn’t even tell you how embarrassed I was. It was like my mother had found me mating. I remember thinking, “I wish they would go away.” I was scared that they would want to use me as a weapon in your world, when I didn’t want to attack anyone but them.

  ‘“Atlosreg,” they said, “you’re the best magician anyone here has ever seen. Better than any of the teachers, better than the best magicians in the world.”’

  He hung his head, his chest leaning forward, his weight straining against the ropes that held him to the chair. Peter looked at him intently: it was like hearing a story about the War from grandpa. It was fantastic – literally, the unbelievable stuff of fantasies. Atlosreg here was, or had once been, the best magician in his whole world. And it was possible that he wanted to be on their side – or on Peter’s, at least. It was incredible.

  Eddie massaged the side of his neck absent-mindedly, his scalp shining slightly in the dim light inside the room.

  Peter and Eddie looked at each other. In Eddie’s eyes, Peter saw what looked like a hint of the same child-like curiosity he was feeling himself. First, he wanted to know what happened next; second, could he really be willing to work with them, after all this time?

  Atlosreg blinked, holding his eyes closed for a few seconds. Peter still found the youth with which he spoke and moved rather astonishing: other than for the obvious signs which had accumulated over the decades, he could have been Peter’s age.

  He started to speak again.

  ‘They wanted to know what it was about me,
’ he said, ‘that made me so much better at magic than anyone else, how I could do it so easily. They even asked me to teach, so that if there was a secret to be learned, I could teach it to them. That way they could all be as good as me.

  ‘I refused without even thinking about it. “I don’t know any more about it than anyone else,” I told them, “I just practise a lot.” They were disappointed. They let me go, and from then on I practiced even harder and slept even less. It was a horrible life to live, but at the end of it I saw only good things, things that would make it all worth the torture I was putting myself through. But I tried not to think about it a lot. I just woke up, trained with the others, and trained for about two hours every night after everyone else went to sleep.

  ‘I was working toward the chance that I might get sent into your world on an attack, and I had my plan.’

  There was a pause in which nobody spoke, or even breathed. There wasn’t a particular tension in the tone of Atlosreg’s voice, or necessarily in the content of what he was saying, but Peter was deeply interested in hearing what he had to say, and – despite himself – Eddie appeared to be as well.

  ‘The chance came soon after I turned nineteen. I was very young, but I was so much better than I had been even a couple of years before, when they asked me to teach magic. And I was better at hiding it.

  ‘Sixteen of us were to come into your world, near where you took me from.

  ‘We were supposed to set up a base there to take control of people, because there were such a lot of people there who were young, and the young have such weak minds.’ These last three words were dripping with disdain, almost hatred. ‘And minds that are ready to be filled, with the University nearby. It was the perfect opportunity, they thought.’