by Booth, John
I shook my head.
“How did you know where to look with your metal detector?”
“I had a stupid dream. It was just dumb luck.”
“Do you like having sex with children?”
That stopped me and the other reporters dead. I looked up and saw the reporter who had spoken. He had the name of his paper on a lapel badge. He was grinning the way school bullies do when they know that you’re going to try and fight.
I curbed my instinct to scatter his guts over the North and South Poles. When I spoke my voice was ice.
“I will happily use all the money I get to sue your paper into extinction if you ever put that into print. Now you can go to hell.”
I wondered if the TV crew and cameras had caught any of that. It seemed unlikely as they’d fallen back after my answers to the first few questions. I left the reporters contemplating my words and stepped to the front door. Jenny was waiting on the other side and opened it as I approached.
“We weren’t expecting you this early,” Dad said jovially as I went into the kitchen. My family always congregated in the kitchen rather than the living room.
“I’ve poured you a cup of tea,” Mam put in.
“Did you sort out the registry office?” Dad asked Jenny. She nodded.
“The wedding’s on Friday. There’s no need to come. Mum and Dad have offered to be witnesses.”
Dad nodded, though Mam looked a little upset. “Until those people outside get bored I think we should stay here. We don’t want them following us to the registry office.”
I blushed, “Sorry about them, Dad. It never occurred to me that finding a few old things would create such a fuss.”
Dad blinked. “You’ve become notorious, son. What with your arrest over Bronwyn, which brought all those bodies you’ve found over the years to everyone’s attention, then the coma and finally Bronwyn’s reappearance. It is any wonder that they’re after you when a couple of weeks later, you discover the biggest treasure hoard ever found in the British Isles?”
Mam looked up. “It’s my fault. I put the idea in his head.”
“I lose track of the time. Most of those things seem as if they took place years ago.”
Jenny smiled and took my arm in hers. “If you knew what he’s been up to today you wouldn’t be surprised. Jake fits a whole year’s worth of adventures into a morning.”
Dad grunted and handed me a piece of paper. “Inspector Thomas wants you to contact him. I take it, it was you that found that missing boy?”
Jenny pulled me back down as I got up to hop.
“You can’t hop now. What if someone sees you at the police station? There are cameras that show you’re here.”
Jenny was right. I had to be careful now I was the center of all this media attention. The last thing I needed was more headlines.
“I’ll phone him.”
The Inspector seemed surprised. “I didn’t think you used phones?”
“Only when stalked by cameramen. Did you do anything about that webcam?”
“It’s gone.”
“Is the boy we rescued okay?”
There was a pause before he answered. “Dehydrated, Michael had been in that boot since the day he disappeared, but he should make a full recovery.”
“Who did it to him, and why?”
There was a longer pause. “Michael told us that the people who took him looked strange, not like normal people. They didn’t speak to him except just before they closed the boot. Then one of them said, ‘It will be over when the wizard comes.’”
Wheels turned in my head. Would one of the worlds annoyed with me use a child to flush me out? And why? They could only get to Earth by following my image, so why not attack me directly? It didn’t make any kind of sense.
“I don’t understand. What would be the point of getting me there, Inspector?”
Again, a long pause from the Inspector. “I thought at first it might be some kind of sick media stunt. To see if they could prove you could find missing people. But then video of you and me appearing in the dump would be all over the internet by now and there’s nothing. Then there’s this silver box.”
He didn’t carry on so I had to prompt him. “What box?”
“There was a thin silver box stuck to the boy’s tee-shirt. It looks like a cigarette case, though you’re probably too young to remember them. The lab think its solid silver and they drilled a test hole right through it to prove they were right, but who knows what people like you can do?”
“Is there anything written on it?”
“It’s brightly polished and apart from the hole the lab boys drilled though its center there’s not a mark on it. Do you want to come over and give it the once over?”
I considered the cameramen outside and the fact I was exhausted. “Not today. Is it urgent?”
“Not unless another child goes missing.”
“I’ll try and drop by tomorrow. Where should I go?”
“It’ll be with me.” Another long pause. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Jake?”
“No more than usual.”
Mam had made a brilliant cottage pie for dinner. I get lots of fancy food served to me in Salice, but when it comes right down to it, Mam’s cooking is the best.
Dad burped loudly at the end of the meal, much to Jenny’s amusement. Posh families like hers don’t burp where people can hear.
“That was grand,” Dad said with satisfaction.
I shoveled the last fork of mine into my mouth and immediately felt guilty. “The people in Salice may starve this winter because of me.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Jake,” Jenny said quickly.
“Bronwyn wanted me to exhaust my magic, setting fire to the forests and the crops were her way of doing it. But it was aimed at me, not at them.”
“That child has a lot to answer for,” Mam said quietly.
“So do I. If I’d realized what she went through in Barren I could have taken her memories and…”
Jenny cut in, “Taking people’s memories is horrible, Jake. It stops them being who they are. You didn’t know she couldn’t handle it.”
“I took two years from her in the end. Was that better?”
There was a silence. That was the trouble with being a wizard, with having all this power at my fingertips. When I do things ahead of time, like making Anna a wizard, everyone bitches at me. But when I don’t do things, like taking a few hours of memories from Bronwyn, memories of her being tortured and raped, the consequences turn out much worse. Whatever I do, I’m wrong.
Dad spoke a minute or so later. “How much food would you need, do you think, to feed the people of Salice?”
“I have no idea.”
Jenny looked thoughtful. “It’s a very small kingdom. They only have one city and a couple of towns. And those are tiny by Earth standards. Even their villages have only a few people. It can’t be that much.”
Mam looked up. “It might not take much at all, to make a difference.”
“What are you thinking, Mam?” I knew that look. She had a plan.
“We might be able to fill Dan Griffith’s bus with food and make a few trips to Salice.”
“I don’t have any money, Mam.”
“The people that attended the wedding might help. You never know until you ask. Your Dad and I have a few pounds put away in our savings account.”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
Dad put his hand down on the table making it rock. “It’s not your choice though, is it son? What we do with our own money?”
It was all nonsense. There was no way they could buy enough food to make a difference. But it made me feel better all the same. My Mam and Dad were willing to spend their money to help people they had barely met. That’s the best of humanity in the end, our willingness to try to help each other with no thought of reward.
“I’ll call Dan in the morning and see what we can get organized,” Dad said.
“Brian Matthews might help, and h
e knows lots of business people,” Mam put in. I hadn’t realized they had become friends with Bronwyn’s parents, but then I had been somewhat occupied with my own problems in the run up to the wedding.
I hugged Jenny and she hugged me back. We were going to find a way to help, we really were.
17. Attacked
“He’s spying on me right now, isn’t he?”
Jenny shuddered as she reached her climax just after mine and then turned her head to grin at me. “Retnor doesn’t find sex interesting. Not the human on human kind anyway.”
“It’s still kind of off putting; especially now we have to find new positions to avoid the bump.”
“You shouldn’t have got me pregnant then. I was on the pill, remember?” Jenny collapsed onto the bed and I had to grab air with magic to avoid falling on top of her.
I thought it best not to reply. It wasn’t the slightest bit clear to me why my subconscious had got my women pregnant. Now I’d got used to the idea I was keen to be a father, but at the time when it happened it was the stuff of nightmares. Maybe I should go and visit a psychiatrist?
“Retnor wants me to tell you that he’s consulted with the dragons over the silver box and they have no idea what that’s about either. You should go see Esmeralda.”
“Fluffy wants me to see Esmeralda? Why?”
Jenny punched me playfully from close range. We had to snuggle on the bed because it was a single size and if we didn’t, we’d fall out. “That was me suggesting. I think you have to keep her up to date on happenings or she’ll worry herself to death.”
“She was keen to see me locked up in some Valhallan prison yesterday.”
“I can see the attraction. At least that way she’d know you were safe.”
Nobody had tried to kill me for over a day and I was convinced the worst was over. Besides, the last thing I wanted to do was end up on Valhalla again. The Valhallan language was like watching paint dry. It could take fifteen minutes to say ‘good morning’. I was certain that was the reason their wizards were such bad asses off Valhalla. It was probably the equivalent of screaming to let off steam.
I ran my fingers gently down Jenny’s spine. “I can’t go and see her.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because she treats sex like a cricket match and will insist she takes as many wickets as you. I’ll need Vitamin E injections and energy drinks just to level the score.”
Jenny giggled and the minx began to touch me in a very pleasant way.
“Let’s make it even more difficult for her then.”
Eventually Jenny let go and I staggered to the bathroom. As warm water splashed over me I tried to decide what to do next. Anything to avoid visiting Esmeralda until my bits had sufficient time to recover. I’d always believed you couldn’t have too much of a good thing, but it was beginning to look as though I was wrong.
There was that silver box to look at. And visiting the Inspector would establish if any more kids had been kidnapped. Assuming none had, after that I’d go to Fluffy and ask him for ideas.
Jenny was still in bed when I finished dressing. She flashed her breasts at me as I pulled on my trainers.
“One for the road?”
It was tempting in a mental way except that nothing rose to the occasion. Maybe we’d killed it?
“Got to go. See you later, love.”
“Don’t forget we’re getting married tomorrow.”
As if.
I hopped to the Inspector’s office, or rather I tried to. Instead, I ended up in hop space. Mists swirled around me. Trying to hop produced a feeling similar to hitting my head against a wall. Hop space shuddered around me.
There was nothing to see but mist. Normally there were galaxies and universes showing up as swirls of light. All I could see was a defused light that appeared to be coming from the mist itself. There was no ground beneath my feet. Those of us who walk this space created our own floor by assuming it’s there. This is a mutable place and everything was an illusion of one sort or another. I breathed air because I imagined I would.
Those thoughts led me to create a small friendly room around me. Banishing the mist, I set up a fireplace against a wall and created a roaring fire. A padded leather armchair appeared behind me and I sat down facing the fire weaving a powerful shield around me for protection. As I couldn’t leave, I might as well wait in comfort until whatever had caught me turned up.
The flames in the fire took on the shape of a face of sorts. It was nothing like anything that existed on Earth, but it was still a face.
“The Braton Stars extend their greeting to you, Wizard Morrissey.”
The voice sounded warm and peaceful. It was difficult to believe I faced an attack.
As the fire spoke, tendrils of magic stretched out from it and examined my shield. I fed in more power as the magic attempted to breach it. There was no violence about the probe, being more akin to the way water carves rivers through solid stone, but it was an attack all the same.
“We do not mean to hurt you.” There was a tenderness in the voice’s tone, soft as silk and tenuous as a cloud.
“Then why are you trying to get through my defenses?”
“We mean to finish your existence, but not with pain. It is unfortunate because you are not a force for evil, but evil is closely tied to you and it is not possible to separate one from the other. What we do is not done from malice.”
“Thanks for the consideration, but I’d sooner not die if it’s all the same with you.”
The flames leapt across the room and slid against my shield. Power was draining at prodigious rates from my reserve, but it would still take an age for them to empty me. I still didn’t feel truly threatened.
“Do not resist your death. It will only result in unnecessary pain and suffering.”
The flames rotated like a Catherine Wheel and I felt the shield being penetrated. It wasn’t happening for lack of power on my part; it was more as if the spinning flames were pushing through the shield while leaving it otherwise untouched.
I focused my magical sight on the flames. The look of fire was an illusion and I stripped it away. What lay beneath were beings that looked a little like slugs, if you can imagine slugs being glorious light and glowing diamonds. There were uncountable millions of them arranged into a donut shape, each moving the shield aside a fraction as the donut spun.
Magic is often best thought of in metaphor. What I could see was that each of the wonderful, beautiful slugs nudged my shield as they passed by, each nudge being less than the thickness of an atom. Before the shield could fill the gap created, another slug pushed it a little further away. They were spinning as fast as thought and would be through the shield in less than ten seconds.
I concentrated on a single slug, seeing into its body. There was plasma, electricity and light, so wonderful that I can’t describe it, except as glorious. I saw that these were not creatures that could survive on Earth or on any planet. Their lives were sustained by pressures and temperatures that only exist in the heart of a star. That was why they had come to attack me in hop space. Only in a place where all conditions exist simultaneously could we ever interact.
I had no time to consider other choices. What I was about to do was terrible and unforgivable, but it had come down to them or me.
Pure magic does not exist in any plane of existence. I had learned that when I constructed my sword against the Knights. As it didn’t exist it could go anywhere, but it was only when directed by thought that it interacted with reality.
I streamed magic through my shield and through their many protections, before coalescing it deep inside their donut. Liquid hydrogen at temperatures so cold its atoms were effectively stationary boiled away to gas as quickly as I created it with the magic. It probably only reduced the temperature of the donut by a thousand degrees, but it was enough to kill every slug that it touched. The ring shattered and the creatures that survived were flung across the room.
I felt sick. So many
of them killed to save one life.
The fireplace showed a few flickering flames.
“I am sorry.” And sorrow was exactly what ran through me. These were creatures far too wonderful to kill. “My shield has been modified and for you to touch it now will mean your certain death.”
“We thank you for your mercy in not destroying us and for your compassion.” There was no detectable irony in their words. If anything they sounded contrite, even though I was the monster in the room.
“I’m sorry so many of you were killed.”
“Half of all of us that there are have been extinguished this hour. Many stars will lack a guardian for millennia to come. We were ill advised to seek your death, Wizard Morrissey.”
Bile rose in my throat. I had wiped out half of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Though I saw them as microscopic, I knew that was a hop space illusion. Out in the multiverse each of these creatures was bigger than Jupiter. What the hell had I just done?
“I’m sorry.” My words were so inadequate.
The flames left the fire and I dropped the shield as they came closer. I would not be responsible for any more of their deaths regardless of what they planned to do to me.
“We were wrong. The evil is tied not to you, but to us. There will be mourning throughout the multiverse and many stars will flare to an early death lacking a guardian to nurture them. But the fault is not yours.”
“Maybe I am evil? Is my life worth all those I have just killed?”
The flames moved closer and I thought for certain that they were going to kill me. I forced down the magical response rising up in me in instinctive self-defense.
“Compassion and mercy are all that separate good from evil.” The flames touched my face and I flinched, but the heat imparted was no more than the caress of a warm hand. “You could have destroyed us all.”
The flames moved back to the fireplace. “Beware the Brethren, Wizard Morrissey. They tricked us into this mission against you. They will try again.”
“Wait.” I knew they were about to leave and I needed to ask them one last thing. The flames hovered, waiting patiently.