by Tuson, Mark
It took him nearly ten minutes to plot any kind of track to follow, based on the few things he could match between the map and the landscape. He had considered flying to the far continent, as he and Atlosreg had when they were fleeing, but the spell which facilitated flight like that would take too much out of him, and ne needed to save as much strength as possible.
What he guessed to be the first two days were incredibly tiring, yet completely uneventful. He had no way to keep track of time, which meant he was working entirely from guesswork, as far as time was concerned. There was a stark advantage to this, however, which was that he wasn’t constricted by day or night; he could simply walk when he was awake, and sleep when he was tired. With the hundreds of hybrid spells protecting him, he saw no real need in having any kind of shelter to keep with him. He did, however, put a spell on a small perimeter around himself, to alarm him should any potential threats appear.
On the third day – or what he guessed to be the third day – Peter was awoken by his alarm spell emitting an intolerably high-pitched note. He immediately awoke and had his wand ready, but nothing was there. Only after a few seconds did he notice that the dry earth had been disturbed to one side, and looking further in the distance, he noticed a number of wakka, running away, looking like a horde of demented top-heavy horses.
There was another sound nearby, coming from the opposite direction. After the moment it took him to discern it, he saw what it was that was chasing the wakka: a tiger-like animal, similar in colour to the dead earth, running hard. Peter stood, not knowing whether he should flee or stay still. The beast seemed intent on the prey it had put to flight, but it might opt instead for him, since he was standing there. His wand hung loosely in his hand, momentarily forgotten.
The creature didn’t stop for him. Instead, it ran straight past him, leaving a trail of disturbed earth floating behind it, which settled again after a few seconds. Only then did Peter remember his wand: he felt like a fool for not having used it to protect himself or disable the beast, or whatever the hell he might have done. Sighing, he snapped off the alarm spell and returned the wand to his satchel.
He ate a couple of the concrete-like hardtack he had been given, pausing after each bite so he could allow himself to fully resent it, and then he resumed his course across the dead land. By what little reckoning he had been able to do, he guessed he should be approaching the edge of the continent within another couple of hours, at which point he would follow the shore for another couple of days in what would, on Earth, have been an easterly direction.
When, eventually, he did arrive at the shore, he stopped again, to eat and to look at the sparse landmarks and calculate again how long he would need to walk before needing to think about crossing the sea.
The shore was nothing like the beaches Peter had seen on Earth: the ground simply ended here, and the translucent water began there. It looked a greenish colour, though it was reflecting the red of the sky: the effect was a somewhat distressing brownish purple colour, which made him think of poisonous chemicals, acids, and nuclear waste. Even though he highly doubted that any of those categories of material were in that water, he was very definitely not looking forward to having to cross it.
By the rough reckoning he repeated upon arriving at the shore, he confirmed the reckoning he had done just before setting off in the first place: it would be around two days from here to where he would need to cross.
As he continued walking, his mind wandered. The land looked all the same here: purplish-looking water to the left, and plain, desolate land to the right. By the time he was tired enough to assume it was night-time, the landscape he was seeing had changed so little that it would have taken no effort at all to convince himself that he hadn’t moved at all: the only evidence of him having done so was his mildly-aching legs.
His night’s-worth of rest was undisturbed, and when he set about walking again after waking up, he realized he was really starting to feel what it was he was doing. For one thing, the protective spells he was wearing like armour hadn’t been originally intended to be worn in such a way, and especially not for four and five days at a time – and however long he was yet to need them. They were already having an effect on him; he was starting to feel lightheaded, and his senses of touch and smell were somewhat faded.
He was also beginning to sink into something of a depression. He had had no contact with anyone in five days now. In and of itself, that wasn’t such a dreadful thing, though the last times he had been in a situation by which he was denied the contact of other people had all been self-imposed, and mostly they had been reversible. This was starting to feel more like he had done when he was away on the island, on trial. Memories which hadn’t even momentarily suggested themselves to him in over six years were now forcing their way into the forefront of his consciousness. Times when he had been without food or water, entire days when he hadn’t had the energy to move. There had even been a period of two or three days when he had been ill with what he presumed was some sort of infection, and he hadn’t been able to find any food. He hadn’t expected to survive, though somehow he had.
When he first remembered that occasion, he stopped walking for a moment, wondering why he hadn’t remembered anything about that before. He looked out over the water, noting how little it seemed to be moving. It made him feel sick.
After a moment, he reminded himself of the need to carry on. If he didn’t, he would be at risk of allowing himself to feel all the tiredness that was due to him, which he knew would stop him from being able to carry on at all.
The rest of the time it took Peter to move toward the point where he needed to cross the water felt like it might as well have been a year. The sea barely moved and made no sound whatsoever, and the sun hadn’t moved at all since he had arrived. While the sun not moving had been something of a novelty to him when he had first seen it, that week he and Atlosreg had spent with the village, it had become irritating and depressing very, very quickly.
He stopped at the place at which he would need to cross, trying not to feel too disgusted at the filthy water into which he was moments away from immersing himself.
There were more spells he knew, which would prevent his clothes from soaking, and other similar things which would make the journey a little less disgusting for him. He had wanted to build a raft, but there were no trees around as far as he could see. Thankfully, he was able to use the spells for stamina and strength, which he had used effectively before, to enable him to swim for the four or five hours it would take with a little more ease.
He cast the spells on himself and stowed his satchel into his backpack, which was itself practically made of protective enchantments now, and stepped into the water. He could tell it was cold, though with all the spellwork he was wearing he was merely aware of it, rather than being under any threat of hypothermia or any similar temperature-related maladies.
With the sun being static in the red sky, there was no way to gauge the time it took him to swim from the one continent to the next. This, however, had an advantage, in the sense that it meant he could keep on-track simply by ensuring that it was in the same position in the sky as he went.
It felt like forever he was swimming, though he wasn’t getting anywhere near as tired as he would have done had he not cast the spells upon himself that he had. Eventually, however, he made it to the shore of the continent he was aiming for, and one he was there he decided to settle for some rest, a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the water.
The following day, he set about locating the centre of the continent, which was a much greater challenge than it had been on the larger continent, because Atlosreg hadn’t noted any landmarks here at all, only the shape of the continent itself. This meant he was going to need to rely entirely on the position of the sun to keep him going in the right direction.
He had decided to spiral outward from the centre of the continent because, in his mind, that seemed to be the most logical way of finding anything: he imagined
that if anything was here it was likely to be at the centre because that would offer the most protection, simply by way of the amount of land surrounding.
It took another few days’ walking to navigate to the centre point he was looking for, and by the time he was coming within half a mile of where he had estimated it to be, he knew he was perfectly on track: right ahead of him was a valley, completely identical to the one in which the Guild was headquartered, even down to the woodlands scattered hither and yon about it.
He stopped to sleep with the valley just in sight. If Rechsdhoubnom was really in there, he was going to need to be well-rested. After he awoke, he cast every protective spell upon himself that he could think of in addition to the ones already there, ate a large breakfast – consisting of five of the hardtack he had been given, and almost half a pot of the honey he had been given – and slowly, attentively, and with the greatest of vigilance, he walked the final stretch to what he knew would be the entrance to a series of caverns, right between the hills.
He had never been there before, but the moment he arrived at the entrance of the place, he knew his way around. It was much darker inside here, and much colder. The earth was damp and smelled of decaying leaves, and the lanterns mounted on the walls appeared to have almost burned out.
Walking purposefully but quietly, he made his way to the bottom of the vast spiral, noticing along the way that none of the work that had been done at the Guild – floors, ceilings, walls, doors – had been done here. This was an identical copy of the Guild as it had once been, long ago. Given what he was looking for, Peter happily understood that this wasn’t simply a copy of the Guild: it was the crossover point, the place where the two worlds met. The navel of Werosain.
The bare earth walls and floors muffled his footsteps almost completely, and as he walked down to the tomb, he was feeling more alone than ever before: he was alone, in silence, under the earth on an uninhabited continent of another world. That was, except for the person he was hoping – and dreading – to meet.
When he reached the tomb, the resident field of preternatural force was weaker than it was on Earth; it was an echo or a shadow, without enough force of its own to be of any great threat to him or protection to itself.
His heart was drumming so hard he could feel the arteries in his neck pulsing, and his head throbbing. He even felt it in the bridge of his nose. But there was no going back – and there hadn’t been since leaving Knifestone.
Slowly, concentrating hard, he retrieved the flute from his deerskin satchel, and began to play. The force guarding the tomb gave way with very little effort, the stone door crumbled into non-existence and exposed what lay beyond. He replaced his flute in the satchel, and peered through the black hole of a gap where the stone door had been.
Inside the tomb itself, there was a dark red flame and a blackened skeleton, exactly as there had been in the tomb under the Guild. With no Atlosreg here to prevent him, and no other alternatives presenting themselves to him, he stepped inside.
Immediately, he found himself stricken with a nauseating sensation of being in two places at once, being torn into halves along the seams of his very soul. He fell to one knee, placing his fingertips on the ground to steady himself. He knew he had been right in assuming Rechsdhoubnom would be here; there was a strong presence in the tomb, manifest in the form of a feeling of a mounting level of energy. The feeling grew and grew, bringing with it the echoes of a woman screaming, a young man laughing.
But the echoes were getting louder, as though they were on a tape being played in reverse. The woman’s screaming grew less urgent, and the man whose voice was laughing grew younger and younger, becoming that of a child, and then a baby. When the baby’s voice faded into a foetal silence, the woman’s screaming segued into laughing, which was joined after a few moments by that of another man, similar yet different. More mature.
The voices slowly turned from laughter to sounds indicating something more pleasurable, and when they finally reached their crescendo, they fell into a resounding silence. The mounting energy was gone. Whatever it was that was happening had now happened.
It took a second for Peter to realize what it was, but then he looked up and saw. The woman’s skeleton had broken apart at the hip, the pelvis lying shattered. Behind her stood a man, twice as tall as Peter, clad entirely in pitch black leather armour.
It was Rechsdhoubnom, here in the place where he had profaned the very nature of creation.
Peter’s confidence in his protection faltered for a moment, but then he remembered the small old cygnet ring he was wearing. He kept it at the ready, on the little finger of his right hand.
‘I am here,’ he said, firmly meeting Rechsdhoubnom’s eyes.
He didn’t wait for a response. He drew his wand in a single, fluid motion, and cast an explosively powerful spell, directly upward.
There was a deafening, head-splitting CRACK-ing sound as the tomb was blown apart, and the earth above with it. For a full minute, Peter’s vision consisted entirely of decreasingly dark brown static, reminding him of a noisy signal on an old television.
When the dust began to settle, Peter saw it had worked: he had blown the entire cavern apart, exposing the bottom of the tomb to the deathly light of the Werosaian sun. He looked at Rechsdhoubnom defiantly, and noticed that none of the dust had fallen on him. He looked over himself and saw that not much had fallen on him either.
Rechsdhoubnom began trying to invade Peter’s mind again, throwing disturbing images into it. Peter, however, activated the out-phasing spell he had prepared, before the images could fully form in his head. He laughed and performed a moment’s cocky dance at Rechsdhoubnom. However, he didn’t have time to dance for more than a second or two, because Rechsdhoubnom had hefted a great lump of rubble in his massive hands and thrown it at Peter. The out-phasing spell couldn’t protect him from physical attacks; it only phased him out of reality by a small enough margin to prevent magic from outside the field from getting any traction on him. He rolled out of the way and put Atlosreg’s flying spell on himself, rocketing out of the tomb, up to the remains of the valley above.
Rechsdhoubnom followed, darting through the air like a bird, and when they were both clear of the crater, he launched himself at Peter, flying so fast that the sonic boom he produced nearly knocked him out of the air. Peter deactivated the out-phasing spell and flew back toward Rechsdhoubnom, charging himself with static electricity from the air. As the two of them collided, he gave Rechsdhoubnom a huge shock, making the armour smoke. He followed it immediately with a freezing wind, which whipped them both higher and higher into the air. Rechsdhoubnom responded with a flaming plume of lava from his shaman’s drumstick, which froze upon the wind and fell, breaking apart into so many fragments of pumice as it spun to earth.
Peter dived at the ground, once again activating the out-phasing spell as Rechsdhoubnom began launching bolts of lightning at him. However, the lightning went straight through Peter and struck the ground, leaving huge patches of flaming woodland, and scorching the ground around.
The atmosphere was magnificent, Peter battling against a god. Even though they hadn’t been fighting for more than two minutes, it was clear that Rechsdhoubnom was becoming rather incensed at having been challenged so successfully as he had. He screamed at Peter: ‘you stand no chance!’
‘You are no god!’ Peter replied. ‘And you are doomed!’ With that he phased back into reality and barraged lightning of his own at him, along with fire and hailstone. Rechsdhoubnom’s armour, of course, was orders of magnitude stronger than Peter’s, but that wasn’t what Peter was doing: he was attempting to make Rechsdhoubnom lose control of himself and his magic, and forget about the magical power he was wielding.
Just then, a voice appeared in the back of Peter’s mind. It was Atlosreg, using a spell the two of them had developed for this exact purpose: it told him that they had successfully moved all the willing innocents from Werosain to Knifestone – some seven thousand – alo
ng with enough seeds and livestock for them to be able to recreate their farms in the cavern under Knifestone. Peter knew it wasn’t Rechsdhoubnom tricking him, because it had been arranged between the two of them that Atlosreg would say it in such a way as only they would be able to comprehend.
Peter took a surge of confidence and strength from this news, and began to attack the Werosaian countryside instead of Rechsdhoubnom. He flew in a vast circle around him, making the land beneath them explode, cratering the continent, cracking it, digging through the craters with new ones, until the crust of the planet broke.
Rechsdhoubnom screamed: his world was being mortally wounded by the mite of a young man who had barged in. He caused a chunk of stone the size of a small island to fly upward, straight at Peter, but Peter saw it coming and darted straight down, smashing into it with a combination of his own magical armour and great speed, shattering it into a cloud of gravel, which ballooned like a puff of smoke, and then started to fall back down into the fiery chasm beneath them, a hail of stone.
Peter threw the same explosive spell at Rechsdhoubnom, who caught it, whole, in his left hand, and flung it behind him at the sky, where it harmlessly careered away into the cold depths of space.
Again and again, Peter cast spell after spell at Rechsdhoubnom, hoping to make him lose his temper, but it wasn’t working. He was dodging Peter’s work, flashing up and down, left and right, circling him. Peter was becoming more and more alert, as though the spells he and Atlosreg had developed were having greater effects on him now he was engaged in genuine combat – which for all he knew, might have been Atlosreg’s intention; his gift, and contribution to this final effort.
One spell missed Rechsdhoubnom and flew straight at the sun, making a dark spot on it that grew into a storm, like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, only much, much larger. The storm raged hard, casting a night-like darkness over Werosain as Peter flew straight up, coursing as high in the thin atmosphere as he could to bombard the sun with more and more explosions. Each spell thrashed into the now-storming sun, until the whole disc was raging with pulsing, undulating spots and flashes of lightning.
