by Tuson, Mark
There was another thing that piqued Peter’s interest also. If people were coming and staying, that must surely mean that there would be some sort of doorway that could be opened and closed, more or less ad libitum. Were that the case, would it be possible that he could, at some point, travel to Werosain himself and find out what he could there? Of course, the doorway must be two-way, or else none of the Werosaian militias that occasionally travelled to our world would be able to return to their own.
After taking a break for lunch, his thoughts were drawn back to the previous day, when he had been practicing and sparring with the other magicians. He walked slowly to the Guild’s main library, where he started slowly looking through physical maps of Great Britain, wondering if there was anywhere that wasn’t populated; anywhere he could colonise himself eventually and practice the skills he was intending to try and learn. This was something of a break from the robotic reading and thumbing through the books in the secret library, and he looked slowly, almost leisurely, knowing that he probably wasn’t going to find anywhere in anything like a short time.
And he didn’t. He did, however, allow his mind to drift into something more of a relaxed state than it had been a few hours ago, when he had been in a frenzy of excitement at the notion of being able to meet a Werosaian who wasn’t going to try to torture or kill (or both) him. When evening came, he returned to the refectory an ate his dinner with the rest of the Guild – something which, due to Peter’s immersive level of dedication and concentration, very seldom had happened in the couple of months since he had returned from Blackpool.
As he was delivering his plate back to the counter, he saw Caroline sitting at a table nearby. He called to her.
‘Caroline, hi!’
She must have been drifting herself; it took Peter calling again for her to notice him. She did, however, and he went and sat next to her.
‘How are you doing nowadays?’ He said.
‘Oh, alright. Got another student – Lucy – and she’s been keeping me busy.’ She did look rather tired.
‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’
‘Something like that. What about you, nobody’s seen you around much for a while. I think yesterday was the first time I’ve seen you since you got back.’
‘No, well… I’ve been doing a research project.’ He noted the patient look on her face. ‘With Eddie’s approval, this time. In fact, he assigned it to me.’
She pursed her lips and then sighed. ‘You’ll spend your whole life in libraries.’
‘Probably,’ Peter laughed. ‘What about your new student, then, she looks very young to be a magician.’
Caroline straightened, donning the maternal look with which he was very familiar. ‘She was a truant from school, and a drug addict. She ended up here after having a near-miss with a mixed dose of heroin and cocaine. We’ve cleaned her up and given her… well, a bit of a new motive. She’s really startlingly bright, absorbs information like you wouldn’t believe. She had a bit of a crude magical ability before, which she hadn’t been really aware of, and it seems that it was that that had driven her to using drugs. She couldn’t identify it but it was there, and it upset her and she wanted to escape.’
Peter stared blankly at her. What she had said reminded him of something. Sherlock Holmes, and his seven-percent solution. And also of a novel he had once read, years ago, by a friend of his back in Blackpool, about a girl who had been addicted to being addicted.
‘Wow,’ he said finally. ‘That’s really… something. How long has she been here?’
‘Just under three years.’ She looked round, toward the door, and Peter followed her gaze until he saw Lucy, finishing off her own food. ‘In a week it’ll be time for her trial.’
Of course. The trial. He felt sorry for her, that she was going to have to go through that. But he supposed it was something they all had gone through. They were all so much the stronger for it – as magicians, and all-round as people – and she would be too. ‘Do you think she’ll cope?’
Caroline looked down at the table, and then closed her eyes. ‘I can’t tell. She could go feral out there, given her past as a depressive and a drug user. But on the other hand she could become the strongest of us.’
Peter nodded gravely. ‘I suppose that’s what it’s all about.’
‘Exactly. Every candidate magician will either get killed out there, or else come back stronger than they could have imagined. You… you were a big concern when you left. And yet you came back without a scratch, more or less.’
Peter looked down humbly. He had hardly ever stopped to think just how lucky he had been to survive as well as he had out there, and thus how hard it must be for people who maybe weren’t as lucky as him.
Peter spent the rest of that evening walking around in the darkness outside. It was quite windy, for which he was rather grateful. There was a power in the wind. As he walked, he thought about how much his life had changed since joining the Guild.
There was a lot happening. There always had been, but when he had been at the point Lucy was at now, everything seemed to be so much more big and scary. Once he had learned how normal this kind of life was to everyone here who lived it, he rather promptly accepted it, retreating as he always had into his own mind. But now he had been dragged out once again into a place where what life really was like here was a Real Thing – capital R, capital T – and had to be taken notice of, paid attention to, and lived.
Things actually happened, and people had their lives and their own private thoughts and motives. He thought of Lucy, the school-age drug addict, and how desperate she must have felt to lapse into using drugs to escape from what, really, was a rare and valuable gift, and also of how intelligent she really must be to, at nineteen, be already on her way to being a powerful magician.
When he went to bed that night, he was unable to sleep as well as he would have liked. He kept waking up, sometimes in excitement at what he had found out about people coming from Werosain to live in our own world, and sometimes in concern for Lucy, even though he hadn’t ever actually met her.
Eventually, when half past five came, he gave the night up as a bad job and got up. The refectory wasn’t open until seven, so once he was washed and dressed he went into the library to do a little more reading before breakfast. He was tired and lightheaded and wished he could have at least had a coffee – he would have to investigate the possibility of acquiring brewing facilities to use in his room – but he was awake enough to be able to successfully gain information from what he was reading.
The book he picked up next was an interesting volume, to say the least, and all at once more than made up for the disappointment of the previous day. Handwritten in what looked like it could have been the hand of a child, with smudges and blots and scratches in the paper where, apparently, the nib had been pressed too hard, was an account of a Werosaian coming to join the Guild, in his own hand and words.
Suddenly, Peter was wide awake, his heart pumping too hard, as he shakily sat at the table to read.
I write here my journey from Werosain to Senekstlokos for the record of the magicians of that world. In my childhood I was taken to learn how to be a soldier for the army of Rechsdhoubnom, which is normal for boys in my world. All the tribes in Werosain send their boys to train for the army when they are first able to hold a bow, and the training is how to shoot a bow and use a sword, and how to use magic. Most people know about magic but they cannot use it except for small spells like lighting a fire for cooking. The army don’t like other people using it because they are afraid of rebellion. When I was sent away to become a soldier in the army of Werosain I was excited because it meant I was becoming a man. I would be fighting for my world and for my god, who had created our world because Senekstlokos where he came from was an unfair and broken world. I was doing my part to make my world a better place. One of my first memories is my naming ceremony which was done when I was old enough to talk. My parents called me Risdeio because I was a laughing baby.
I cannot remember much but it was a happy day. I remember that morning clearly. I was woken by my father and mother together calling me. I got up and was taken outside to where the army was waiting. Father came with me. Mother stayed at home as always and told me she was proud that I was now a man. I was proud too. We all walked together through the land until the village was a long way behind. All day we walked without eating and I felt sick and tired. Father told me I had to keep going just like he did when he was younger. I could not see in my mind father being small and weak. I was so tired when we got to the army’s village. It was big and scary and the shadows were bigger and scarier but I had to be brave and strong to make everyone proud. We all sat in a circle around a fire in the middle of the camp and ate cakes that hurt my teeth and made me feel more sick. They taught me and gave me magic so I could fight and then when I was bigger and strong they told me I had to go to fight with magicians from Senekstlokos because we needed to destroy them and take over the world from them and make it fair. I did not understand but I did it. It was what I was there to do and why I was given fighting and magic. I was proud to help my people so I went through the door with the other soldiers into the world Senekstlokos to fight the magicians there. But as soon as I saw what Senekstlokos was like I did not want to hurt it. The sky was a pretty colour and there was warm in the air. In Werosain our sky is red and cold all the time. Senekstlokos was so much more pretty it made me want to cry. But I fought anyway. We did not win so we went back home after some days. But I wanted to go back and live there. Only live there and be part of that world because it was so pretty and alive. If I had to stay in Werosain forever I would rather die. So I ran away in the night and made the guardians of the door between worlds sleep deeply and walked into Senekstlokos but they were already waiting and they attacked me. I wanted peace so I held my hands up open and high and shouted my people’s word for peace PAGS PAGS but they tied me up. They needed someone to understand my tongue which was hard for them because nobody spoke it. In the end they made me write things down which they could read slowly. That they could do more easily. They did not believe I wanted peace at first but I told them things about how the army in Werosain worked so they would. They did believe me in the end and then they gave me their tongue and gave me work to do with them. I am now so proud to live in such a pretty world with people who are so much more nice to each other. In Werosain people are never scared to hurt each other. I do not like that. It hurts me.
Peter turned the next page and found it blank. It was only a small volume anyway, and looked a good hundred years or so old. He flicked through the rest of the book, turning each page individually until he reached the back cover. Nothing except slightly age-yellowed paper. He wondered why only the first ten or so pages would have been written in, when there was twice that much again left empty. Maybe it had been given to him to write in, or maybe he had acquired it himself. Either way that was all there was in it.
He shakily returned it to the shelf. That was in every way far more than he had expected; he had been more prepared for a long search and a string of undetailed second- or third-hand references. Not an account written by a Werosaian. It also amused him, just for a moment, to see his own world referred to by another, ancient, name from another world: Senekstlokos.
It was definitely time for at least a coffee: his head was swimming in so many thoughts at once that he needed something to do that would require little effort yet still provide him with a focus through which he could try and relax a little, at least until later on.
The refectory had only just opened when he got there; the queue for breakfast and coffee was slowly getting smaller, so he joined end of the line, trying not to let his excitement show too much. If he did, he wasn’t sure what he would have been able to say, so he preferred to not risk saying anything.
He ate in a silent frenzy, eager to return to the library and see what more there was to find. Of course, it had been what could be considered an insane stroke of luck that he had found what he had so far in all of two days, but to him that meant that either he was going to find out more today or that it was going to be a hard slog before he found anything worth finding. Either way, it was only logical that there must be more there to learn, more hidden in those pages somewhere, and it stood to reason that if he patiently continued looking for, reading, and digesting information, he must learn.
Only he couldn’t help feeling a little impatient. There was so much there, and given how difficult some of this was to digest, he hadn’t made more than an insignificant dint in the total corpus that was there for him to upload into his mind. His mind felt like his stomach did after a big meal: distended, slightly queasy, but nonetheless it would inevitably be far more sensitive to hunger when the time came for its next meal.
Before long, he was back in the library, reading the next book. Here and there were references to Risdeio, and to other specific people who had come to Earth under similar circumstances. There was a sort of resemblance between each case – though only the person about whom there was any real detail was Risdeio, which supported Peter’s idea that he had written what he had on his own initiative – and that resemblance was that there was always an unpreparedness to damage the world that was more complete and obviously better than the inherently corrupt excuse for an existence from which they fled.
The people weren’t the only thing that had Peter’s attention engaged, however. Peter was interested in the mechanics of it as well; there must be a method by which they can travel from that world to this, with some degree of ease. Did that mean that there would be a similar way in which people from Earth could visit Werosain?
It was a stupid question, not least because even Peter could easily understand that wanting to visit Werosain and being in one’s right mind were mutually exclusive. But still, for the sake of theory, it would be interesting to learn more about. When the time came: for now, of course, he had more pressing researches to conduct. He only hoped that his carte blanche in the Steward’s secret library was warranted, and that what he was doing was going to actually be of any use.
That was the problem with being in this kind of position. It was akin to a position of self-employment or self-management in the pathete world; he was in charge of his own time and goals, and therefore by definition had nobody stood behind him with a figurative cattle-prod, pressing him to progress in a particular direction. Even when he himself had been a pathete, that was most emphatically not the sort of life he would have wanted or even felt capable of living.
He blinked slowly and stood up, yawning and stretching. The book he had just finished reading through hadn’t taught him anything he hadn’t already learned. He suspected he was, after all, looking for something which, ultimately, he wasn’t going to find.
It was a little under a week before he found anything more that appeared to be at least vaguely interesting, but that was in Middle English, and was thus somewhat more difficult to read. In fact, the only effective way he had so far found to understand Middle English so far was to read it aloud, phonetically, and listen to what the words sounded like; much of that ancestor of English was the same, but the spellings were rather difficult to understand, given that he wasn’t quite used to it.
The text contained, it seemed, a transcript of an interrogation of a group of Werosaians who had been captured. In it, there was mention of a door in Werosain (‘Varsayn’) which was kept guarded at all times. There was only that door in Werosain itself, through which their forces would come to this world, and when they wished or needed to return, they performed a spell to effectively summon themselves back to that doorway. Never was a doorway left permanently in place on Earth. According to the text, the interrogators then attempted to find out exactly how they returned themselves to Werosain, at which point they each, in unison, killed themselves.
‘Selfish twats,’ said Peter. He slapped the book shut, forgetting that it was nearly seven hundred years old. He realized that one, single moment too late and looked do
wn to find that the spine had snapped.
‘Look,’ he peered menacingly down at the broken-backed book, ‘do I look like I care?’ With infinitely more care, he lifted it up and examined it. Maybe he would be able to repair it. He replaced it onto the table and drew his wand, drawing power from the air and using it to knit the leather back together. He pictured the individual skin cells from which the leather was composed returning to their unbroken state. When the spell was complete, he looked closely at it: it seemed to have worked. He picked it up to return it to the shelf, and it broke again.
‘Oh, bollocks.’ Maybe it was time to leave it for now, if only to give himself time to calm down before another book potentially fell victim to his over-demanding expectations.
He went for a long walk around the wood above the Guild, moving quickly until it was pitch black outside, and until he was very tired.
When he got into bed, he was tired enough from the vigorous walking that the anger wasn’t any more to him than the dull ache in the legs was. He needed to make sure he was up in the morning, because it was going to be something of a big day – for Lucy, at least: the start of her trial.
These thoughts weren’t in his mind for long, however. Soon after, he was asleep, and for the time being unaware of books, aching legs, or trials.
He awoke at six, as he had intended, and was washed and dressed by six-twenty. He knew the trial was being held in another twenty-five minutes, and that he wasn’t part of the detail of ceremonial guards which would accompany Eddie, in his official role of Steward, to rudely awaken Lucy – an event, he guessed, which would be happening around ten minutes hence.