Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I

by Tuson, Mark

  The biggest problem, of course, with using magic to perform a task like that was that he wouldn’t be able to use his own hands to gauge how loose the rock was, and thus wouldn’t how much power he would have to exert to lift it. If he used too much power, a rock that was looser than he thought would fly up into the air, and he wouldn’t be able to catch it. Likewise, if he picked a rock that was stuck fast, and he carried on using more and more power in his attempt to lift it, the rock could shatter – or even worse, detonate. It was never wise to use magic in a “brute-force” manner.

  Oh well. He walked around the island, occasionally stopping to give a stone that looked promising a gentle prod with his power; rock it a little and see how much it would take to work it free. Eventually he found one and, taking extreme care, he lifted it out of the water and deposited it onto the grass.

  That was the hard part of the job done. With that done, it took him just a few minutes to gouge a hole in the ground into which he could bury the majority of the stone. On what was exposed, he carefully engraved:

  KNIFESTONE – P.I.R.

  He stood to examine his handiwork. The engraving wasn’t the best he had ever seen, but it was passable, and it was good enough for this. Excellent.

  Stepping around it in what would have looked to an observer like a slow, solo waltz, he wove a spell on it so that he could use it as an anchor for the portals he was going to need to create to bring things that he needed onto the island.

  With that done, he stopped and sat on the rock and rooted in one of the bags he had brought with him from the Guild, finding the small hunk of bread he had packed inside last night. It wasn’t exactly a gourmet breakfast, but it was sustenance, and was all he could pack that wasn’t likely to make a mess of the bag.

  The following two weeks were quite a lot more difficult than he had anticipated. He had imagined it might be similar to when he had been on trial, but it hadn’t: the island he had been deposited on for his trial had been completely self-sufficient, with everything on it that he would need to live, not just survive. But Knifestone was little more than a lone field, sitting a way out to sea.

  After having placed his anchor stone in the ground, he had cast a number of spells on the island to prevent his presence from being detected by stray pathetes: whatever was there would appear blurred to anyone who was looking toward it from one of the other islands nearby; no pathetes would feel compelled to actually come to the island now; and those who did would be stricken with inexplicable panic, and bolt the moment they were above the ground of the island itself.

  He decided he would return home to the Guild at nights, where he could sleep in comfort and then have a decent breakfast in the morning. In the daytime, he was mostly either on Knifestone or else somewhere on the mainland, acquiring what he needed to build his facility.

  On Knifestone, it didn’t take a long time to build something similar to a small cottage, wherein there was space for a minuscule library and somewhere to sleep, simple cooking apparatus, and a stockpile of non-perishable foodstuffs. In building the structure, he took more time and care to physically construct it with more care, and imbue every individual piece of the structure with protective spellwork, which would all coalesce and link together once finished, to form a sort of magical chain-mail; if one part of the whole was damaged, that would be all that would be damaged. After this, he placed larger, more powerful spells on the whole structure: plate armour on top of chain-mail.

  The spells were similar to the ones he had used on his Hovel when he was on trial, but more powerful and complete due to the greater experience and confidence he had now. Protection from water, fire, wind, detection or penetration by unwanted would-be guests; it was all there.

  He left the hardest of the magic he intended to implant on the island until last, to ensure that there was no possibility of other spells looping into it and becoming dependent on it for their own continued existence.

  It was exactly two weeks after he had started. He stood in front of the cottage, which he had named the “Second Hovel” in homage to the original, looking outward toward Longstone. He was confident it couldn’t be seen from off the island, even by someone looking right at it.

  This final spell was the one to expand the space around the island, to make sure he was going to have enough room to practice the spells he wanted to practice: the nature of the spells was a large part of the reason why he had saturated the Second Hovel with so much protective spellwork, and all of the reason why he had wanted an island in the first place.

  Setting the perimeter wasn’t going to be difficult; it was merely a matter of having a continuously-defined and easily-recognizable border between the inside and the outside. He had initially intended to use the rocks on the outside of the plateau, which were the outer border of the island itself, as the perimeter, however that would have risked making it more difficult to create portals to the inside – space behaved slightly differently, and portals were a chaotic system that didn’t respond well to disruption, especially where spacetime was concerned. He also wanted to be careful concerning the Second Hovel.

  Eventually, he settled on a toroidal shape around the building, building a low fence around it to act as an inner perimeter, and another around the area that he wanted to expand, taking care to ensure that the anchor stone for his portal was outside the outer perimeter.

  He then slowly walked around each fence, casting spells on them and inside the area they were there to define. Working slowly, it took him nearly three hours to complete the spells. Once done, he wearily stepped into the area he had expanded.

  It was immediately obvious that the spell had worked; everything went slightly greyer in his vision, and felt more distant. For a fraction of a second, as he crossed the border into the expanded area, he experienced a sickening compression of his sinus and a fish-eye effect on his vision. But then, as the sinus and vision effects subsided, he looked around.

  There was now what looked like well over a square mile of land he had that he could play with. From the outside, he imagined it would look incredibly distorted, like the air was lensing the area. He could live with that. Looking in the distance, he could see outside this area he had expanded, and noted that it looked more like a painted backdrop than a physical landscape. The same was true of the Second Hovel, in the centre. It looked like a doll’s house, stretched comically so that it was twice as tall as he was. Looking down, the grass had withered slightly. That made sense: after all, he had just reconfigured the space it was living in, and so it would need some time to recover its roots and grow properly again.

  He stepped through the gate into the area in which the Second Hovel was, and in this patch of normal space, everything was still in the correct proportion. He looked out of one of the windows, and was satisfied that he had done a good job – or at least a good enough job for now.

  Later that day, once he had checked and double-checked that everything had been done correctly and all the spellwork was stable and self-sufficient, he returned to the Guild. He had no intention of living on Knifestone permanently; the only reason why there was a bed and a stockpile of food was that he wanted to cater for the possibility that he might need to. But, for the most part, he wanted to avoid that becoming necessary.

  Ten: Atlosreg

  As he closed the portal behind him, back at the entrance, there was someone waiting for him. It was Caroline. She looked grave and somewhat angry.

  ‘Rutherford,’ she spat, ‘what have you been doing?’

  ‘Oh hi Caroline, how are you?’

  ‘What the hell have you been doing?’ She clearly wasn’t in the mood for small-talk.

  Peter squared up to her. ‘If you want to know, ask Eddie.’ He turned to walk to the refectory for something to eat, but she put a hand on his shoulder. Her grip was a lot firmer than he would have expected.

  ‘I have talked to Eddie. He didn’t want to talk about it, other than to say you’re working for him on something related to what h
appened in Blackpool. He says he trusts you.’

  That was quite gratifying to hear. He hadn’t thought people would stick up for him in any way, let alone say that they trusted him in the same breath.

  ‘If he trusts me,’ he said, ‘what’s your problem?’

  She pursed her lips for a moment. ‘I don’t know whether I do. All I do know is that you’re doing something that could turn very dangerous. Single-handedly casting a spell to expand space? When we built the base in Scotland, we had six people working on it: four casting in tandem, and two checking. It’s a dangerous spell. Not only that, but you’ve put a lot of protection and stealth spells on something.’ She paused and looked at Peter, dead in the eye. As if to acknowledge what he was thinking, she continued, ‘we can detect that kind of magic, you know.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, if you’re up to something, I’m not the only person who is going to be concerned about it. I know better, but there are people who could get worried that you’ve become a double-agent.’

  ‘That’s up to them. Eddie and I know that I’m not.’ He continued in a slow whisper, not wanting anybody else to overhear them. ‘If you really must know, I’m working on a project to try and understand Werosaian magic. If I can understand it, I can possibly figure out how to block it better.’

  Caroline’s face conveyed no emotion at all. After a moment, however, she nodded. ‘Alright. I believe you. Just be careful. You don’t need trouble.’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I don’t. But don’t you worry. I am being careful.’

  Caroline looked at him appraisingly for a few more seconds. He couldn’t work out whether she actually believed him or not; whether she was trying to convince herself he could be trusted.

  She walked away briskly.

  Whatever, thought Peter. He was hungry, so he went to the refectory and ate a large piece of cheese and onion pie.

  After he had eaten, he went to his own room, rather than returning to Knifestone. He wanted to think more about how he could work out how to make the magic he had been reading about actually work. Not that he thought that magic would actually be any use, other than – with a bit of luck – giving him a glimpse of what Werosaian magic might be like.

  But then he realized: he had made contact with a Werosaian, whom he might be able to persuade to show him a few things, in return for a degree of freedom.

  If he did get in contact with Atlosreg, however, could he be sure he would cooperate? That was something he wasn’t at all certain he could be confident in, however much he wanted to be.

  Even if Peter could persuade Atlosreg to teach him what he could, there wouldn’t be any way to openly discuss and share magical techniques at the home. So, if he was to try to persuade Atlosreg to do that, Peter would have to bring him out of the home first – and the only place they could go to would be Knifestone.

  Taking Atlosreg to Knifestone wouldn’t be all that difficult, when Peter thought about it. The most difficult thing about it would most likely be taking Atlosreg away from the home. Apart from that, all he needed to do was prepare the Second Hovel to have a second, permanent, resident.

  He looked up at the clock, which read half past seven, just starting to think about getting dark. He sighed, slightly disappointed: it was too late to start doing any work on the island to make the house better-suited to having another resident. He would just have to wait until morning.

  When the morning came, Peter rose early and, before traveling to Knifestone, bought enough wood from a workshop on the mainland to build a partition within the Second Hovel, and other things such as metal pipes: he would have to implement some sort of plumbing system for the house, to facilitate various hygienic functions. It irritated him now that he hadn’t thought to include things like a shower and toilet in there when he built the place, but of course when he had built it in the first place, he hadn’t intended for anyone to live there permanently. He just hoped the Second Hovel would live up to the job.

  The magic involved in altering the house was, thankfully, not quite as involved as it could have been, which meant the job only took three days. Nonetheless, they were still three days which Peter was glad were over, once they were.

  He stayed there for a further three days, without returning to the Guild at all, to make sure it had everything it needed to comfortably support a permanent resident, and then, once he was satisfied it did, he decided that everything was ready.

  Stopping back at the Guild only to shave and put on a fresh suit, Peter silently set out on his journey. This time, he was going to crossing a barrier for certain, and was putting himself at risk not only with the Guild, but potentially with the law and the civil authorities as well. His heart pounded against his ribs, which made him feel sick and lightheaded, as he jumped through the portal back to Knifestone, and then immediately again straight through to Oxford.

  It was raining, which immediately made Peter feel not only lightheaded and shaky with nerves, but also wet and pissed off. He paused for a moment to compose himself, and then rounded the corner to go into the home.

  This time, when he went in, he didn’t bother to introduce himself. Instead, he cast a cloaking spell on himself as he walked, so that as he walked through the door he faded out of view of anyone who might have seen him. He took a moment to crack through the network port into the computer they used, as he had before, but this time he removed all records of Mr Adam Richards from the system, and for good measure nudged the temperature of the computer just above the threshold at which a computer ceases to be comfortable, with the result that it simply turned itself off.

  When the network connection died, he felt a momentary electric shock in the back of his skull, like the piezoelectric clicker from a stove lighter, which he knew would happen.

  Confident now in his invisibility, Peter strolled to Atlosreg’s room, and cast a spell on him that put him into a deep sleep: the old man never saw or heard him coming. At this point, Peter was grateful that he had a strong back, because the only chance he stood of getting Atlosreg out of the room – let alone out of the building and back to Knifestone – was to pick him up and carry him.

  He paused to look around the room. There were no personal effects in here that he could see, either on the tables or bed, or in any of the drawers. Not even a set of clothes: the staff here must keep clothes elsewhere, Peter thought. Or Atlosreg had tried to do stupid things like escape or hang himself – or someone else.

  The old man himself was slumped back on his armchair, with his head rolled back and his arms straight out at his sides. Peter threw another invisibility spell at him and then picked him up in a fireman’s lift, taking care to not hit anything with either of their invisible bodies.

  Holding Atlosreg steady with his left hand, Peter sidestepped out of the room and back toward the reception desk, where a number of the staff were huddled around the computer station, apparently trying to get it to turn back on. Oops, Peter thought, stifling a chuckle: he must have warmed it up a little too much. While they were there, he removed all memories of Atlosreg and himself from their minds, and left a trace of the spell there to filter through to the rest of them through contact with the building, so that within forty-eight hours none of them would have a clue who either of them were. After that time, the spell would evaporate.

  This had been almost too easy. He strolled out of the door and around the corner and waved away the invisibility spells from both Atlosreg and himself as he walked through the portal, which he had left dormant to await them both.

  A few steps later, there they were, back on Knifestone. Once again, Peter felt this operation had been almost too easy to believe he had executed it as fluidly as he had.

  Peter carried Atlosreg in a fireman’s lift, still unconscious, into the house. Once inside, he put him down on a bed in one of the two small bedrooms he had prepared and retreated to the doorway and ended the spell that had been holding Atlosreg in a state of sleep.

  Slowly, Atlosreg op
ened his eyes. ‘Qoi en eibho…’ he started. Peter didn’t know what it meant, but something about the rough way in which he enunciated the last word made him think it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

  His heart was hammering in his chest again, thinking about what kind of trouble he was liable to get into if anyone found out about this. He hoped against hope that he had gone about this little operation in a way that couldn’t be detected easily, but he supposed that only time – and a lack of someone banging on the door – would tell whether or not that was the case.

  Peter stood there for a long while, probably fifteen minutes, locked in some strange sort of staring contest with Atlosreg, but Atlosreg wouldn’t yield. It appeared that, for now at least, there was a sort of stalemate between them: Peter couldn’t get Atlosreg to say anything other than what sounded like profanities. Peter’s gaze was met with a calm look of passive non-cooperation, and eventually, he decided to give up, at least for the time being.

  The following few days seemed equally futile to the first, and eventually Peter began to wonder if there had been any point in this exercise in the first place. It was infuriating: on some level Atlosreg must have known why Peter had brought him here. He was being purposefully uncooperative.

  On the evening of the fifth day after Peter brought Atlosreg over to Knifestone, there was a bang on the door. It was raining quite heavily, and initially Peter wondered if it was possible that something heavy had been caught in the wind and blown into the door. But no: it happened again. He looked round through a window near the door, and saw a person standing there, wearing a long coat which looked like a cassock, and holding a wand.

  Shit, he thought: they must have found him.

  Gingerly, Peter opened the door to see Eddie standing there, with a look on his face like the wrath of God himself. The wand slashed through the air and Peter was thrown back against the wall. Peter scrambled for his own wand and checked the defences on the island; they should have prevented this from happening – but they weren’t there. Eddie made a jabbing motion with his wand and Peter was pinned against the wall, held there by some inexorable force.