Jake's Quest - Wizards V

by John Booth

  “It is as you said. The student Daffith Smith used Mind Control on Torthic, overcoming sophisticated blocks in Torphic’s mind that should have rendered the attack useless. His orders were to humiliate the four of you until you attacked him and then use self-defense as an excuse to kill you.”

  I nodded. Those had been my conclusions, though it hadn’t taken me four days to reach them.

  “He was ordered to regard Wizard Morrissey as particularly dangerous and to kill him as soon as possible.”

  “He put me in gli.. that half-hop space, which wasn’t going to kill me.”

  The Chancellor locked eyes with me.

  “The reason it is forbidden is that getting out without help is impossible, and if you had moved any distance, no one would have been able to get you back. I still don’t understand how you got back and how you lifted the mind control.”

  Jeram stepped forward. “We work as a team and our combined magic can do extraordinary things.”

  “And if nobody knows how we did it, nobody can stop us doing it again,” Lana continued.

  “We might even be able to locate every picture of me and dissolve the eyes of those looking at them,” Esta put in. She gave the Chancellor a smile Esmeralda would have been proud of, innocence laced with vengeful malice.

  It scared me, and I vowed to destroy the three images I’d received on message paper, as soon as I got back to my room.

  “There is no need to make threats,” the Chancellor said, though from the look in his eyes, that last threat had been particularly effective. I decided to turn the screw od Esta’s behalf.

  “That wasn’t a threat; it was more in the way of a promise. As soon as we find a way to limit the magic to the one looking and not everyone else in the room we will unleash it.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the Chancellor said firmly. “All the pictures will be destroyed before the end of the day.”

  Esta smiled, and this time it was genuine.

  The Chancellor wrote something on the message paper connecting him to Manda outside. I inverted the writing in my mind and read.

  ‘Issue the destruction order.’

  Manda replied and I read her words as they appeared on the paper.

  ‘What about the collateral damage?’

  ‘Do it now.’

  The Chancellor sighed and looked up at us.

  “You may go after Daffith Smith. The President and the Council have decided that it will be safer for the University and Balmack to send you all off planet and as it is what you want, we all gain something from the deal.”

  “What is Smith doing?” Jeram asked.

  “The world he is on is about to make the choice of whether to follow technology or magic. They have an abundance of both. Student Smith’s assignment is to observe their decision making process.”

  “Observe only?” Lana asked. I wouldn’t have bothered asking because I’ve seen too much sci-fi on television and knew how this worked.

  “No. He is expected to provide stimulus to see how it influences the population in reaching their decision.”

  That was a surprise.

  “It may be your only way of finding him,” the Chancellor continued. “Any major incident that affects their choice will probably be something he created. We have a small building in Bellweather, one of Whydar’s many capital cities. You will find local clothes there and possibly some currency, though Smith may have taken it all with him.”

  Jeram pulled up his sleeve and waved his bracelet at the Chancellor. “Will you remove these when we get there? They will cripple us.”

  The Chancellor hesitated. “I’ll ask the President, but I suspect the answer will be no. I’m sorry.”

  Jeram cursed and stepped back. Lana reached for the sword she wasn’t carrying. Obviously, I wasn’t all that bothered.

  “When can we leave?” Esta asked. Given all the salacious comments she’d had to endure these last few days I wasn’t surprised she wanted to get away from the university as quickly as possible.

  “Tonight, if you wish. Will that give you enough time to put your affairs in order?”

  “Tonight then,” I agreed. If the others had a problem with it they could stay behind.

  The Chancellor gave us a wave of dismissal and started looking at the papers on his desk. Jeram opened the door and shouts of anger greeted us.

  “Shut the door behind you,” the Chancellor said, raising his voice to be heard over the din.

  “I’ve lost every message I sent or received in the last year,” a young man yelled at Manda.

  “That’s nothing. My whole thesis just went up in flames,” another man said, almost in tears. It wasn’t exclusively men in the crowd, but they were in the majority.

  More people were jostling to get access to the office. It looked like we might never get out. Manda had had enough of the crowd.

  She walked around the desk and the students backed away. She struck an intimidating pose and grew as high as the office ceiling would allow.

  When she spoke it was like she was using a rock concert sound system. The walls trembled.

  “You all had pornographic pictures of this young lady.” She indicated Esta, who was looking pleased with herself. “Which could have got you expelled. Instead we destroyed all the message papers with her images on them. You should be thanking us for our mercy. Now GO AWAY.”

  People backed out of the office hurriedly.

  I turned to Esta. “Did you know he could do that?”

  “A little bird told me he could do something if I pushed him hard enough.” She took my arm in hers. “And you were magnificent.”

  “I don’t think we are going to be very popular around here,” Jeram pointed out.

  “Who cares?” Lana put in. “None of them are a loss.”

  I herded my friends out of the office and away from Manda’s hearing.

  “Did I mention I know how to nullify the bracelets?” I asked.

  “I knew it,” Lana said, and grinned wolfishly. “Am I better than your wives now you have been able to carry out a direct comparison?”

  I pretended to think carefully about the matter before giving my answer.

  “Are you better than my wives in bed? Out of ten?” I tapped my finger on my lower lip as if striving to do a difficult mathematical calculation. “About a two, maybe as much as a three,” I suggested.

  Then I ran for my life.

  34. Through the Wardrobe

  We met up again that evening in the Chancellor’s outer office. Esta was wearing her Estan clothes and had strapped up her lovely breasts. She had a bow strung across her chest and knives at her belt. The disguise didn’t look effective at all. I was surprised I had ever taken her for a boy.

  Lana was in her amazon outfit and the sword strapped diagonally across her back completed her. Even when she wasn’t wearing it, it was as though it was still there and seeing it on her was the most natural thing in the world.

  Jeram wore monk’s robes while I was in the jeans and tee shirt I’d been wearing that morning. Jenny had tried to get me to change them a few days ago, but I had pointed out that might give my ability to hop away.

  Manda looked us over critically and then smiled at Esta. “You might be able to pass as a local if you wore longer trousers. Wizard Morrissey is probably wearing the most ubiquitous clothing, though Jeram will get by. The monk look is very common on all worlds. But you,” she stared hard at Lana, “You won’t get away with the sword, not in Bellweather in any case. Though there are still a few wild places in Newhome where you might be dressed appropriately. But swords are old fashioned over there. They have weapons called guns that shoot metal darts at you.”

  “I am an expert shot with a gun,” Lana said coldly. In the months we had been sleeping together she had told me almost nothing about her home world, except that it preferred technology to magic.

  “I am sure you are,” Manda responded equally coldly. Those two seemed to rub each other up the wrong way.
“Follow me, and I will take you to the departure point.”

  We used an elevator to descend many levels below ground. All I knew about this part of the university was that it was where they performed the dangerous research. It could be isolated from the rest of the university swiftly and I could feel tremendously powerful magic fields embedded in the walls designed to stop anything getting out.

  After taking us through a maze of corridors we ended up at what looked like the door to a safe, one of those big room sized ones where governments store gold by the ton.

  Manda held her open palm against the steel door and the door responded by making a sound like a choir singing. The door swung open and we walked into a room the size of a cathedral. Everywhere, on the walls and at many levels constructed up the walls were doors, thousands of them.

  “This is the Transit Room. The university maintains chain bridges to many worlds we do not have formal relations with. The doors you see are hardened and there is no magic or technology known that can break them. I will take you to the door you need.”

  Cast iron stairs and pierced ironwork floors connected the ground floor to higher levels. It looked a bit like the inside of a prison, a very harsh prison. Manda led us to the fourth level. Each door we passed had an engraved brass plate on it. Labelled with details of the world it connected too. I wondered if there was one connected to Earth.

  She tapped a plate on a door. It read.

  Bellweather Warehouse

  44 Backend Street.

  Storage District

  Bellweather

  GreenTrees

  Newhome

  Whydar

  #AAX4326KL##62BW674###96453.9873.5623

  “What does that reference mean?” Esta asked.

  Manda smiled, “The Universe, the Galaxy, reference from Centre of the galaxy, taken as a spherical polar reference from the end of the longest spiral arm.”

  “What if the galaxy doesn’t have a spiral arm?” I asked.

  Manda frowned. “Don’t be stupid.”

  I was sure I had seen some like that on an astronomy program, but maybe I was wrong.

  Manda tapped at a panel in the door. “There is a lever on the other side of the door. If you pull it, this panel will turn red. The guardians walk the doors twice a day, so if you want to return you may have to wait several hours before the door is unlocked. On the other side is a chain bridge. Follow me.”

  She pulled two massive bolts and swung the door open. It filled the walkway when opened, limiting access to the side we were on. She stepped into darkness.

  Lana went next and conjured a light, revealing a set of long fur coats hanging on a rail. Lana forced two apart and slid between them.

  “I wonder if they have a door to Narnia,” I said as I pulled the coats aside.

  “What are you talking about,” Esta asked irritably.

  “Home world cultural reference.”

  “We have a city called Narnia,” Jeram said. “Does your world have a bridge to it?”

  Now there was a question I couldn’t answer. I chose to ignore it.

  The coats were indeed inside a wardrobe. I stepped out into a large musty smelling room, with small high windows. Wooden boxes were piled up randomly across the floor.

  “This is the warehouse. It is on the outskirts of the city and I am told it takes at least an hour to walk to its center. They have local means of transport, but I know nothing about them.”

  “What is in the boxes?” Lana asked.

  “Clothes, tools, possibly money. Things collected by earlier students who have visited this world. You will have to open them to find out what is in them.”

  “Do you know the local language?” Jeram asked.

  “No,” Manda said curtly. “I checked and found that no one who knows any of their languages could be reached in the time available. You are on your own.”

  “Why make it easy for us?” I asked sarcastically.

  Manda snorted and returned to the wardrobe.

  “Good luck,” she said and then was gone.

  “The university is being so helpful,” Lana said.

  “It is as though they will spare no effort to help up succeed,” Esta agreed.

  “I have been in worse situations,” Jeram said helpfully.

  “Suck it up,” I suggested to a row of baffled faces, but I think they got the message even if the phrase meant nothing in Balmack.

  “Let us open a few boxes,” Lana suggested.

  The boxes were a disappointment. Tin cans, newspapers and books we couldn’t read, mechanical toys, there were a lot of mechanical toys, and a wallet with a few crinkled notes of paper money.

  “We could copy them?” Lana suggested.

  I shook my head. “I have a better idea, but before I do that I need to sort out your bracelets. This is going to be a bit disorienting.”

  Before anybody could object I grabbed Lana’s hand and laid the magic on my bracelet over hers. She staggered around and then vomited.

  “You next,” I said to Esta and did the same trick to her with identical results.

  Jeram was backing away and I saw fields of magic leaping from his hands.

  “Now take your medicine like a good boy.”

  I did the deed and hopped before Jeram’s attack could reach me.

  I arrived in a dusty apartment in Los Angeles. A few moments later, the front of the safe in the wardrobe floated away revealing wads of paper cash and coinage from across the multiverse. I sent a magic sliver after currency that matched the ones in my hand. A three inch thick wedge of paper drifted out from the piles.

  “Thank you Dafydd, you bastard.” I said to the room. The front of the safe rejoined the rest of it and I hopped back to the warehouse. Mission accomplished.

  Six hands grabbed me and dragged me over to a couple of boxes as I materialized. Magic wove around me, holding me helpless. It would take me several seconds to break free. I was forced to bend over the boxes and no sooner had I been bent than the flat of a sword hit me on the backside. It hurt like hell and I lost my concentration.

  “Hit him harder,” Esta urged, and I realized it was she and Jeram who held me.

  “My pleasure,” Lana said and there was a swishing sound followed by excruciating pain.

  Another four strokes followed before they let me go, their magic dissipating. I healed my body in seconds as soon as I could focus my magic. There was nothing more than a few bruises, though the memory of the pain remained.

  “What was that for?”

  “Something I think we have all desired to do for a long time,” Jeram said cheerfully. “I see you obtained some more money. Did you rob a bank?”

  “The safe of Daffith Smith.”

  “That is the second best thing to happen since we got here,” Esta said in neutral tones, though she couldn’t keep the smirk from her face.

  35. Arrogance

  Before I could think of a suitable response to my companions’ actions, Jeram spoke.

  “I need to return home and tell my wife all that has happened. Do not go exploring until I return.”

  He vanished.

  Lana sighed. “I also need to go home. All the indications are that my weapons and clothing will be out of place here. I have some guns which might prove more useful and can be easily concealed.”

  She vanished. I turned to Esta. “Don’t you want to go back home? Tell the husband what you’ve been up to?”

  Esta’s face flushed. “You know I am not married. Women are slaves on my world, much as they are on yours. I ran away and ended up here with you. I might as well have stayed home.”

  “Whoa, hold on a minute. You came to my room and offered sex.”

  “You could have refused. I was obliged to make the offer, but you were not obliged to take it.” Esta took a swipe at a box filled with toys, and box and its contents flew across the room, the toys scattered when the box hit the floor.

  “Women on my world are equal with men,” I said.

>   Her face showed outrage mixed with astonishment.

  “You cheat on your wives; you even cheat on your mistress. Do they cheat on you?”

  Well, Betty does, not that it’s cheating, exactly. But I knew what she meant.

  “I feel guilty about it.” That sounded weak even to me and I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

  She stood in front of me and pushed me with both hands. “You feel guilty about it? And that makes it all right, does it? The sex and guilt balance out do they?”

  Esta was getting to me. I pulled myself together and spoke unnaturally calmly.

  “If you knew Esmeralda, you would not talk about inequality, at least on her part. She is in charge of her own destiny and knows about the things I do.”

  Esta looked at the floor. “And your other wife, Jenny?”

  “Doesn’t want to know. Puts up with it. I don’t know.” And I didn’t. The guilt was always about Jenny. I loved her, but I didn’t seem capable of being faithful to her.

  Esta sat on a box and continued to stare at the floor. “You don’t know anything about any of us. What made Lana who she is? Why I came to Balmack dressed as a man? What is Jeram here for? You know nothing at all.”

  She had a point. I hadn’t even known Jeram was married until he mentioned his wife a few minutes ago. I hadn’t been much of a friend to any of them.

  “So tell me.”

  Esta checked to see I was actually interested. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to spend our time alone having sex?”

  Difficult question, but I knew the right answer. “Tell me.”

  There was a long silence. When Esta started to speak it was in a voice so quiet I could hardly hear her.

  “On my world a woman is little more than breeding stock. Something to be traded by the head of the clan. We must be educated so we can impress our father or our husband’s guests with how clever we are. Our virginity is a prized commodity. Did you know how much you cost my father when you took it?”

  She didn’t act like a virgin during that session. In fact she gave me the impression she was better educated in sex than I was. As if reading my thoughts, Esta continued.