Jake's Quest - Wizards V

by John Booth

  “I figured as much.”

  “I mean it. The worst danger will come when you think you are safe.”

  A thought occurred to me.

  “Have I changed the future? Now, you’re well, you know.”

  Betty laughed again. “You are always changing the future and mine has got much happier. Just don’t ever do it to me again.”

  “I promise.” I kissed her, hoping she wouldn’t notice that I’d crossed one set of fingers. I knew my limitations.

  15. Harlan

  The Bat Cave was still empty when I hopped into it on Friday morning. I had done the rounds saying goodbye to friends and family. Jenny assured me that Fluffy was well and was feeling self-satisfied in the extreme. He knew I was leaving this morning and yet he wasn’t here. I felt let down.

  Putting down the rucksack with my important worldly possessions, to wit, five tee shirts, a spare pair of jeans, and some comfortable slippers, I surveyed the cave and tried to conquer a sudden attack of first night nerves.

  I was about to go to Balmack to seek a place in Haldor University using a competition designed for hedge wizards from unaffiliated worlds. But my real motive was to find my cousin, Dafydd Williams, who was my only suspect for being the Bomber.

  All I had to do was win the competition, overcome the Balmack dislike of me, and find a man I had last met when I was four. When I put it like that it seemed so simple. I could be back by lunchtime if I cut a few corners.

  I picked up the rucksack and took a deep breath.

  “Wish me luck, Fluffy.”

  I hopped for Valhalla.

  The chamber was empty except for Meldar Lind.

  “No leaving committee to make absolutely sure I go?”

  Lind gave me a brittle smile. “You may need that sense of humor later. Take my hand.”

  “You’re taking me to Balmack?”

  “No, I am taking you to the Balmack Consulate. Take my hand.”

  I had seen a handful of rooms in Valhalla and it was a whole planet with another dozen or so allied worlds making up their empire, but it had never occurred to me that there might be consulates and ambassadors for other worlds.

  We hopped to just outside an imposing looking building. Meldar dragged me forward to an even more imposing door. She stepped forward to reach for the knocker, but the door opened inwards before she could touch it and a young man in a disheveled light blue robe stepped out.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” he said, speaking in Balmack. “Thank you for your university application.” He held out a hand to me and when I took it he gave it a loose feel and let go.

  Meldar looked as if she was going to say something, but the man shooed her away. “Thank you for bringing the applicant, err Councilwoman. I can take it from here.”

  She shrugged and hopped.

  “Tsk. So rude, these Valhallans. I can see why we don’t have a permanent ambassador. Come in Wizard Morrissey. You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? On some worlds Wizard is a term of abuse. Graduates in the Balmack Accord use Mage, much more classy and with none of the negative connotations.”

  I nodded my head as getting a word in edgeways seemed unlikely if not impossible. He stepped back into the building and I followed.

  Despite the imposing façade, the inside of the building turned out to be hollow, just one vast empty space, though the floor we walked on was polished marble. The young man’s voice echoed in the vast chamber as he walked towards the far wall.

  “We have this one size fits all approach for consulates. All of them look the same from the outside, constructed by magic, naturally. Some of them have ballrooms and majestic staircases and hundreds of rooms for all manner of work. But we only built this one so we can complain when Valhallan wizards arrive on our dependent worlds and started causing trouble. They do like creating little pocket kingdoms, you know.”

  “May I know your name? We haven’t been introduced.”

  He stopped and then to my surprise, he blushed. “I do beg your pardon. What must you think of me? It’s just that this is the first time I’ve been off world on official duties and I’m a bit excited. In fact, it’s my first time outside the Accord when not on an expedition. I’m Harlan Ertlz, junior lecturer in the Creature Magic Faculty.” He held out his hand again and this time I got to shake it properly before he let go.

  “What exactly does the Creature Magic Faculty study?” Okay, that was a bit of a stupid question, but I wanted to know.

  “Err… Magical creatures? Not the hominid branches, like elves and fairies, but the exotic sentient ones like unicorns and dragons.”

  “Have you met many?”

  Harlan laughed. “Well one hears rumors of them, but if they exist at all they must be very rare. After all, how many people do you know that have seen a dragon, let alone got into a conversation with one?”

  I thought about answering, ‘Just about all of them’ but decided that I didn’t want to antagonize the man.

  “Don’t you have access to the Temple in hop space? Balmack sent a representative to the Conference Between the Worlds so you should have.”

  Harlan looked wistful. “Only the most senior member of the government have access. You think I might find races of unicorns in the Temple? It’s restricted because some of those people are dangerous. Why only a couple of years ago our representative was killed by a monster from a hedge world. Murdered just like that while he was standing there minding his own business. There hasn’t been a murder in the Accord in living memory.”

  This brought up another interesting question.

  “What have you been told about me?”

  Harlan looked embarrassed. It was a comfortable look on him, as though it had been etched there from much use.

  “Hedge wizard Jake Morrissey. You applied for the undergraduate position we leave open for heathens, err disadvantaged branches of humanity. It’s a competition that attracts four or five entrants a year. The contest is great fun and everyone bets on it.”

  “What happens to the losers?”

  Harlan swapped embarrassment for confusion. “Why they return home, I suppose? Once they’ve been eliminated everyone loses interest in them. But we must get on.”

  We walked to the far side of the building and Harlan opened a small door. There was a corridor beyond which was about six feet long. A guard stood to attention at the other end with his hand resting on the handle of what looked like an old fashioned paper cutter. A small silver chain, the sort a girl might hang a pendant from, passed under the blade of the cutter, ran across the floor and joined to a pin fastened into the floor on our side

  On the magical plane, the corridor was surrounded by a vortex of magic. Forces flowed around it like a magnetic field around an electro magnet.

  “Please lock the door behind you, sir,” the guard requested.

  Harlan complied and started to walk to the other end of the corridor. I didn’t like the look of that field and stayed where I was.

  “It’s just a chain bridge. You must have seen one before?”

  I shook my head.

  Harlan was nonplussed. “But everybody uses them. It joins two places together so people can travel from one world to another. I know the Valhallans use them to link their worlds. Everybody does. After all, how else would you move produce and people between worlds? Wizards can’t hop much more than they can carry.”

  That answered a lot of questions I had never thought to ask. How else could the Diamond Worlds exist? They had to have some cheap and easy method to travel between their worlds. I felt like a moron.

  “And the chain?”

  “Maintains the bridge. Cut it and the link is severed. That is why we call them chain bridges.”

  Well that was one way to make me seem stupid. I walked down the corridor.and didn’t feel the transfer, but I suddenly felt disoriented as if the corridor was spinning.

  The guard had snapped some kind of bracelet round my wrist and the spinning got much worse.


  Harlan held me to stop me falling and helped me out of the door at the far end. He then hopped us to a white room with a bunk, toilet and wash basin.

  “The disorientation will soon pass. The bracelet prevents you from sensing where you are in the multiverse. You will not be able to hop further than you can see until it is removed. We do it to applicants to protect the Accord from invasion.”

  I started to wretch and he helped me over to the toilet.

  “We will talk later, when you have recovered.”

  And then he was gone, leaving me to empty my stomach into the toilet. It took a long time.

  16. Trapped

  I think I slept for a day. It was a sleep disturbed many times as I rushed to the toilet to be violently sick. My eyes couldn’t stay focused on a single point and everything would spin around at the slightest movement of my head. All my life, I’ve known exactly where I was. Now I didn’t have a clue.

  It didn’t help that the room and everything in it was white. The door meshed into the wall so perfectly that I couldn’t see the join; there were no windows, no shelves, just a white bunk with white sheets, a white toilet and a white sink, perfectly color coordinated. The walls merged into a ceiling that glowed the same shade of white as the room. There was nothing to fix my eyes on to help me orient myself.

  I tried scuffing the floor with my trainers, but it didn’t scuff. I hated the room and the bastards that had put me here. If this wasn’t meant as torture then they had just got lucky because it certainly felt like it. I drifted back into a fitful sleep.

  I woke without vomiting. What my watch indicated was two mornings on from my arrival. I scanned the room using magical sight. The door was clearly visible but I couldn’t see beyond it or through any of the walls. A lattice of magic forces created an obstacle that masked the world beyond.

  I couldn’t hop home because to do that I needed to know where I was. It was like being a satnav without a signal. I examined the bracelet on my right wrist. It appeared to be made of two pieces of silver, hinged at one side with a lock on the other. To my magic sight it appeared solid. As far as I could tell I still had access to my magic, but the bracelet was impervious to everything I tried on it.

  Just to prove my magic worked, I changed the color of the walls and floor, using a primary color for each. That worked, but was painful on the eyes. I settled for making the door black, the floor grey, the toilet and sink pale blue and embossed some of my favorite Banksy graffiti on the walls, which were otherwise a soothing off white.. The place now had a student bedroom feel to it and I felt much better.

  The hole where my sense of place used to be was like a missing tooth. I couldn’t stop picking at it. But not everything was gone. I still knew where the place outside the multiverse was. That was interesting and presented a possible way to escape.

  However, the plan was not to escape, the plan was to win the scholarship so I could search for my cousin. But there was no doubt about it, the possibility that I might be able to escape if I wanted to, perked me up no end.

  The door opened and Harlan walked in. He looked around the room in bemusement.

  “Those are very strange drawings. What do they mean?”

  I grinned. “Ancient magic from my home world. They provide me with protection.”

  Harlan looked extremely surprised. “We mean you no harm.”

  “Then you don’t have to worry about them.”

  Harlan pulled himself together, though I noticed his eyes kept drifting back to the image of the soldier carrying the flowers behind me.

  “You have no doubt deduced that the bracelet prevents you from using your spatial senses. You can teleport locally, anywhere you can see, but not beyond. The bracelet is to prevent you from knowing where Balmack is. I am sure you can understand why.”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” Harlan slapped his thigh. “Breakfast awaits and then we will go to straight on to the first trial.”

  “Which is?”

  Harlan smirked. “I can’t tell you. All the contestants will find out together and I have money on another candidate winning.”

  “Traitor,” I said as I stood. “Breakfast had better be good, I’m starving.”

  Harlan decided to take my words as a joke and put on a false smile.

  I pointed at the soldier. “Bow to him before you go if you want to avoid bad luck.”

  “You talk such nonsense.”

  Despite his words, I saw him nod his head towards the graffiti before he turned. Score one to me.

  Breakfast was good. We ate in silence in a bare room with a small table and two chairs. I spent the time magically probing the bracelet, looking for weaknesses. I didn’t find any. The bracelet projected a field through my wrist, locking it to me. When I tried forcing the field away it moved microscopically. That was promising. If I used enough force I might be able to hop away from it. If I got it wrong, I’d arrive at the other end with one hand short of a set. I was fond of my hands,

  After we’d eaten, we walked down a long white featureless corridor towards a solitary guard. He opened a door as we approached and the air was suddenly alive with the sound of a thousand people cheering. Ahead of us was a balcony and as we approached I saw we were in some kind of stadium. There was only one vertical stand and the balcony was part of it, pretty much dead center from the way voices came at us from all directions.

  The balcony was occupied with a motley collection of people, all of them standing and staring at me. I guessed the short bald guy in the fanciest robes was in charge. The other people in similar colorful robes were probably other officials, while the four people in different outfits were most likely my competitors. Naturally, I focused my attention on them. Especially the gorgeous girl dressed in not very much of anything.

  “Harlan, you’re late,” Bald-in-charge-guy snapped as we approached. For some reason his tone of voice wasn’t quite right. Almost as if he wanted to apologize to us rather than the other way around.

  “Sorry Chancellor,” Harlan said meekly.

  The Chancellor gave me the kind of look someone gives when they find a slug eating their salad.

  “Wizard Morrissey, Representative for Valhalla, I take it.”

  Harlan gave me a shocked look. Though like with the Chancellor earlier he reaction seemed a little off. I suspected he’d known who I was all the time. It was most likely some kind of office politics where you had to pretend you didn’t know what you actually knew. Harlan didn’t fool me for a second.

  “And you are?” I asked.

  “Saul Landow, Chancellor of Haldor University.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” I proffered my hand and wasn’t the least bit surprised when he ignored it.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said, his voice booming out with magical amplification. “We are gathered here this morning to witness the first trial in the four thousand and twenty seventh contest for special scholarship to the university.”

  There was a roar of approval with only a few voices shouting ‘Get on with it.”

  “We have five contestants this year.” There was a louder roar to this news and I wondered why.

  “I will now introduce them to you.” He indicated that the young man with the bow and knives strapped to his waist should step closer. “Wizard Estan Coin from Prion.”

  The youth gave a stiff bow and there was a roar of approval. Estan glared at me as though we had met before and I had insulted him. I wondered what he thought I’d done. I had killed so many people by accident it was entirely possible he had an actual reason to hate me.

  The Chancellor pushed Estan away and urged an old man in monk’s robes forward. The man carried a silver headed walking stick which he seemed to need.

  “Wizard Jeram Wist of Notton.”

  Another round of applause, along with a few catcalls. Someone shouted ‘Go home old man.’

  Wist stepped back as soon as the applause stopped. The Chancellor indicated the small man in black should step forward.
He looked like a ninja straight out of the movies to me, complete with curved sword He walked like a ninja too.

  “Bob.” The Chancellor said and a roar of approval rang out. It looked like this guy must be the favorite, though I wondered at the shortness of his introduction. Still, it was an easy name to remember.

  It was me or the girl next. She was dressed like an Amazon might be dressed for a porn film. She was young, blonde, blue eyed and exuding sex appeal like it was going out of fashion. The short sword sheathed on her back just reinforced the image. She was smiling at me in a very come hither way. The competition was looking up.

  “Wizard Lana d’Fallon, from Willdone.” The Chancellor proclaimed to whistles and a scattering of obscene suggestions. The Chancellor chose to ignore the latter.

  I stepped forward as Lana turned and stepped into me. Her breasts pressed against my chest and I felt a hand squeezing my buttock.

  “Apologies, my mistake,” she said as she gave me an outrageous wink.

  I surreptitiously adjusted my jeans, which had become over-tight.

  The Chancellor glared at me as I stepped up to stand by him.

  “Our last nomination, the infamous murderer, Wizard Jake Morrissey of Valhalla.”

  There were loud boos from the crowd. It didn’t look like I had any supporters.

  When the crowd quieted we followed the Chancellor to the edge of the box. Two hundred feet below us was a small lake and beyond that a jungle. The lake and jungle were enclosed by a high boundary wall with a diameter of about half a mile.

  He waved a large old fashioned looking key in the air.

  “The first trial is to recover a golden key like this one from the jungle below. There are five such keys and they have been carefully hidden. The applicants will be judged on the time taken to recover a key, among other things.”

  “What other things?” Lana asked.

  “That is for us to know, young lady,” the Chancellor said, clearly irritated by the interruption.