by Tuson, Mark
That seemed to be about the best he could have hoped for. ‘Than–’
‘FUCK OFF.’
Not wanting to find out how intimidating a third invitation to leave was likely to be, Peter and Atlosreg left the room. However, rather than leading him back to the entrance and opening the portal home to Knifestone, Peter led Atlosreg to the tomb.
‘There’s magic here of a kind I’ve never seen before, or even heard about,’ he said to Atlosreg as they descended into the large round hollow at the bottom of the Guild.
Right on cue, the magic began to take its effect on Peter, making him feel slightly giddy as he walked slowly onward toward the tomb at the exact centre. Atlosreg, did not follow.
‘It is not just magic,’ said Atlosreg, with a reverence which he seemingly couldn’t help but betray.
Peter turned back and looked at Atlosreg’s dark frame by the wall.
‘What do you mean?’
He bowed his head slightly for a few seconds. ‘Have you never wondered what magic is?’
‘I know what magic is.’
‘So. What is it?’
Peter frowned. ‘Residual energy. And the technique by which that energy is manipulated.’
Atlosreg laughed, triumphant. ‘Residual from what?’
Peter stood and thought, but nothing came to his mind except the obvious. It troubled him suddenly that, until now, he hadn’t ever stopped to wonder.
‘…Creation?’
‘Exactly.’ The frail frame shifted slightly, becoming tall, strong, and proud. ‘What is in this room is not merely magic. It is the creative force of the gods.’
Peter sat down. He didn’t realize he had until he felt the cold earth against his backside. ‘The force of the gods…’ What gods?
Atlosreg didn’t elaborate. Instead he slowly, humbly, began to approach the tomb.
‘You want to know how it is opened.’ It wasn’t a question, Peter noted, but a statement.
‘Yes.’
‘There is no magic to open it. Your magical rules don’t apply here, and neither do mine. There is a way to open it, but it is more basic than anything you will have heard about before.’
‘How do you mean, basic?’
‘More…’ Atlosreg paused, apparently struggling to find the right way to word what he was trying to describe. ‘More down to the truth. You have to resonate and harmonize with the most basic concepts of reality.’
It seemed suddenly to Peter as though Atlosreg was talking about more complex science than he should know. Resonate with the basic concepts of reality? That wasn’t even the kind of phrase Atlosreg should be able to understand, let alone originate. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how would I do that?’
‘With sound.’
‘Sound…’
‘Sound.’
How did he even know about this sort of thing? Even for someone who had been privy to some of the things he did know, like how to build the doorway from Knifestone to Werosain, but if there really was a “creative force of the gods” which transcended even magic…
‘How do you know about this?’
‘We have to know about it so we can protect it, like I said before.’
That was all he said.
Peter walked around the tomb slowly, wondering how sound could resonate and harmonize with reality, wondering and wondering until it struck him: it was the most obvious thing he could have possibly realized.
‘Music?’
Atlosreg nodded very slightly. ‘Yes. Played on a simple kind of flute.’
How simple… Peter wondered. He slipped his hand into his satchel and withdrew the bamboo flute he had made while he was on trial, and held it up. ‘Something like this?’
‘Similar, but that would not work.’ There was something in Atlosreg’s tone of voice which seemed to be taking pity on Peter for not knowing about these things. It was a little embarrassing to Peter.
‘Why not?’
‘It needs to be something primitive, something so primitive it would be possible that could happen naturally. But you need to make it, because if there are any in this world, there will be no hope of you getting to look at them, let alone hold them or use them.’
‘So, how do I make it more primitive than out of a reed?’
‘A bird’s bone.’
Wait: that sounded familiar. In his youth, Peter had read news articles about archaic bone flutes being found, instruments which were so old that it was disputed as to whether they were actually purpose-made musical instruments or simply damaged bones. And Atlosreg was right: some of these instruments being in excess of fifty thousand years old, there wasn’t going to be a chance in hell of him seeing one in person.
‘So what do I do, go and buy some meat…?’
‘Kill it yourself. Cook it. Eat it. Save the bones.’
Peter couldn’t help but laugh: for a moment he could have almost been taking instruction on how to make the best gravy.
They turned away to leave the tomb, ascending into the higher levels and slowly walking toward the entrance of the underground monastery.
‘So I need to, what, find a bird and kill it? Find a farm, or what? What kind of bird do I need?’
‘Something large,’ said Atlosreg patiently, ‘but apart from that it is not important what kind of bird it is. Eagle, turkey, goose, anything big enough to have a bone big enough to make a flute from.’
‘And what makes it into something that can be used to cast magic?’
‘Purity.’ Atlosreg left it at that, remaining silent until they were both safely back on Knifestone.
He and Peter just sat thinking for the rest of the day, though Peter didn’t have the first idea what Atlosreg was thinking about. Himself, he was thinking about how much trouble he had very nearly been in with Eddie, and potentially with the rest of the Guild. He felt beyond lucky that Atlosreg and himself hadn’t been arrested – or attacked. He was also thinking about how much more he must have to learn if there was – as there appeared to be – an entire superset of magic, something greater of which magic as he knew it was only a small part.
It was fairly obvious that whatever he was going to use the flute for wasn’t going to be the same as this so-called “force of the gods,” but it was clearly not the same kind of power as the magic he had been used to using for so many years now, either. The notion of magic being so much bigger than he had known before was an exciting one, but also a daunting one. It made him feel tiny, insignificant.
He went to bed, expecting the half-dozen trains of thought down which he was concurrently wandering to keep him awake all night. However, almost as soon as he got into bed, he found himself waking up the following morning. It was as though the daytime had been turned back on while he was in the act of getting into bed.
It was something of a slow morning at first, with Peter feeling tired and sluggish and not quite being able to identify any particular reason. However, as the morning wore on and approached midday, he began to remember fragments of dreams. Nothing particularly strange or disturbing; nothing worth remembering, and he doubted he would. As he pottered and went about his routine of waking up, he was increasingly aware that Atlosreg was patiently waiting for him to be ready for something.
‘I think turkeys would be a good idea,’ said Atlosreg, breaking the silence after lunch. ‘They are very big, so you should find some fairly large bones in them.’
‘Okay,’ replied Peter, ‘we just have to look for a farm or something then, right?’
‘Yes.’
Sometimes Atlosreg seemed not to be even slightly interested in maintaining any modicum of conversation, but on those occasions Peter had to remind himself that, after all, Atlosreg had spent eighty years confined in mental institutions and care homes, surrounded by people with whom conversation was likely to have been challenging at best.
In the afternoon, they set about looking for farms where turkeys were reared. It was one of those things, Peter thought, which would have been far better fa
cilitated by the use of an Internet connection, and when that day’s efforts turned out no usable information, he decided that the following day he would set about finding one.
Libraries were the most obvious option he could think about; otherwise he would have to pay for some kind of hardware and a connection, and for the sake of locating one single piece of information, it wasn’t worth it.
For the sake of knowing his way around, he used a portal to travel nearby to where he had lived before becoming a magician. It was highly unlikely that he would bump into anyone he knew, and after six years it was even more unlikely that if he did they would recognize him. He had to subtly persuade the computer to allow him to use it without the need to log in, but for a seasoned magician who was fore-armed with a good knowledge of computers – out-of-date though that knowledge was – it was little more than a moment’s effort.
When he had been younger, he remembered, this had been where some of the children’s books had been kept. Logging into the computer in front of him, he looked around and saw all sorts of people sitting around, eyes glued to the glass panels which were their windows to the world. He felt sorry for them; for most of these people, this is what a library was, and books weren’t really a part of it.
He sighed and turned his attention to his own screen. There wasn’t any point in feeling sorry for them. They thought they were happy.
Looking for turkey farms wasn’t a difficult task, certainly not as difficult as remembering how to type. Where he had once been able to touch-type while having a conversation – even while looking at the person he was talking to – he now found himself using the hunt-and-peck method which, once upon a time, he had been so fond of making fun of. What goes around comes around, he supposed.
He didn’t stay in the library for long; just long enough to find a few farms’ addresses and scribble them on a piece of paper he had stolen out of the printer, and then he logged out of his workstation and left, catching the portal back home from between a few trees behind the library.
‘I know where there’s a few places,’ he called to Atlosreg as he walked in, ‘but what are we going to do – walk up and steal one?’
‘That is exactly what you are going to do.’
Apart from the questionable moral of stealing the bird, Peter noted how Atlosreg had said “you,” as though they weren’t in this together. ‘Me? You aren’t coming?’
‘I will come, but it is you who needs the flute. You are going to do the magic.’
That did make sense, but Peter thought it would have been nice for Atlosreg to show some preparedness to take part in the operation, other than as an overseer. Atlosreg acting like that made Peter feel slightly insecure, as though he were being evaluated or assessed on his performance, though he knew that, logically, he was being left to do some of these things on his own because, as Atlosreg had said, it was him who had to do these things. Maybe was more suitable to do them than Atlosreg? That could make sense too.
That afternoon, they went to the first of the addresses Peter had found at the library to locate the turkey Peter would be claiming. In theory it was going to be a simple operation: portal in, grab the turkey, portal back. However, just as Peter was about to open the portal back to Knifestone, Atlosreg stopped him.
‘No,’ he said, putting his hand on Peter’s arm, just as Peter was about to begin casting the portal. ‘It has to be untouched by magic. That is part of the purity it needs.’
‘You’re joking!’ Peter hissed, still holding his arm up. ‘Are you saying we just run away from a turkey farm with the turkey we just stole?’
‘Well, yes. It will not work if it is touched by magic, and you want it to work.’
‘Twat.’ Peter put his wand away and started nervously pacing, holding the bird in his arms as if it were a baby. Atlosreg took off his cloak and held it up.
‘Wring its neck, now,’ he said. ‘Then wrap it in this, nobody will see what it is.’
‘Good thinking, that man,’ spat Peter, shifting the bird under his arm and taking a grip on its neck. His heart was hammering too fast; he hadn’t ever killed with his own hands before. He hated the idea of killing anyway, but it really seemed that this was going to be the only way to get this task – as a whole – done.
After stopping for a moment to gauge how much torque he needed to apply, he took a firm grip and quickly twisted the neck of the protesting turkey, so hard and fast that not only did the turkey die instantly, but Peter had a distinct impression he may have injured his right wrist again.
He let go of the head, and it simply flopped, loose, and dangled off the rest of its body. He took another second to recover his nerves and take a few breaths, and then he accepted Atlosreg’s cloak, wrapped the bird in it, and slung the whole lot over his shoulder.
‘Right, what now?’
‘We leave, and look for somewhere we can cook that bird.’
No shit, thought, Peter. ‘We’re going to have to find a camping shop or something,’ he said, ‘so we can get some outdoor cooking stuff. We don’t have a chance of cooking it if we don’t have anything to cook it with.’
‘True.’
‘But,’ Peter continued, ‘we’re never going to get a pan big enough to cook the whole thing. Do I have to do that?’
‘I think you should be able to just use a leg. The thigh bones are quite big.’
‘Excellent.’ Though Peter was by no means certain as to whether it was actually excellent or not, as he had no idea to within the nearest hundred miles where there might be a camping shop, and even then he didn’t know if they would sell a camping stove.
The farm they had stopped at was a long walk from the closest town, and it took almost two hours for them to get there on foot, and for most of that walk he found carrying the burden of freshly-killed turkey increasingly difficult to carry. When they reached the town, they were both slightly disappointed in how small – and therefore unlikely to have a camping shop – it was.
All hope wasn’t lost, however; they stopped and asked behind the counter at a papershop where what they were looking for might be, and it turned out that there was one just in the next town over, rather a large place which, Peter thought, would be almost a cert to carry what they needed to get hold of. Peter still had some money from the last time he had needed to go out and buy things, and so their visit to this shop wasn’t a waste of time, he bought a bar of chocolate. It had been a long time since he had had anything like that, and he enjoyed it very much.
The next town over was likely to be another two hour walk away from here, which would take them past the time any shops would be likely to have closed, so Peter decided to acquire more money from an ATM, and they caught a bus. As they sat in transit, Peter amused himself at the sight of Atlosreg, the mighty Werosaian warrior and master magician, riding a bus. He supposed the thought would mean nothing to Atlosreg himself.
The bus ride took a little under twenty-five minutes, ending with them getting off at the terminus near the town centre. From there, they found their way to the camping shop. Once they were at the shop, it only took a few minutes to find everything he was going to need: a large square aluminium pan with a fold-away handle, some matches, a Swiss-army knife with a saw blade, a portable gas stove, and three canisters of gas. Atlosreg carried these things after Peter paid, and they then went along to a supermarket, where Peter bought a few two-litre bottles of table water.
Now they had everything, except a place to do what it was they were needing to do next. Peter understood it would take a long time to cook and prepare the bone, so they were going to need to find somewhere they could keep a camping stove lit constantly for that long a time, which, from Peter’s small experience of making soup from chicken bones when he was younger, was likely to be anywhere between two and four hours.
They walked for an hour, back toward the farm where from which they had stolen the turkey in the first place. Between the town they had just left and the place they had been before were long stre
tches of rural land, and as it was beginning to get dark, Peter was thinking there might be an ideal spot along this track; somewhere out of the way where they wouldn’t be too likely to be seen. Even if they were seen, nobody would think anything strange of two men sitting off the path, cooking on a camping stove: for all anyone knew, they could be backpackers or something. That didn’t bother Peter in the slightest.
As luck had it, the ideal spot presented itself in the form of a deserted park; it was clear from how badly maintained it was that nobody had spent any time here for anything honest in several years, so they set up their stove there, and Peter butchered the bird, taking the right leg off it, plucking and skinning it.
It took three hours to cook, altogether: first there had been cooking the leg, which had taken an hour, and then removing the meat, which Peter and Atlosreg ate between them as the bone cooled, and then boiling the bone again, skimming grease and foam off the top, poking the marrow out, and then simmering it for a while longer.
By the time the bone was ready to be turned into a flute, it was pitch black outside, and there was a smattering of stars across the sky. Peter had let the bone cool one final time, and then he started using the point of his knife to bore an embouchure hole in the narrow end, remembering how he had done with the reed flute he had made. Atlosreg didn’t stop him or correct him, so Peter assumed he was on the right track.
It took a few attempts to get the hole right, but when, finally, he obtained a high, sweet note from it, he held it up, resting on the palm of his hand. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I need to put finger holes in it now, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Daft question: does it matter about the scale?’
‘No.’
Neither did Peter; taking great care not to damage the bone in any way other than intended, he bored four holes in the bone, the idea being to create a scale which was roughly pentatonic, just as he had done with his reed flute.
When he was done, he blew a simple tune on it. He was well out of practice, and this flute played very differently to the one he had played before, but the tune was sweet to hear and seemed to carry a slightly eerie sound to it. Atlosreg nodded approvingly.
