by Tuson, Mark
He suddenly burst out laughing, a resonating, vitriolic laugh which gave Peter a sick, cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘I killed them!’ Barked Atlosreg, overcome with some perverse hilarity which only he could sense. ‘I killed them with a single spell as soon at the portal was closed behind us. I turned them to ash and they just blew away!’
He continued to howl with laughter for several minutes, twitching so hard that at several points Peter wondered if he wasn’t laughing, but throwing a fit. Eventually, however, he stopped laughing, and merely smiled. He looked most decidedly pleased with himself, and for the first time since meeting him, Peter had a fleeting sensation of genuine fear, of the kind that doesn’t merely make one fear for one’s own future, but the for the future of reality: the kind of fear one feels when there is a threat of nuclear war.
Maybe Atlosreg had been mentally damaged in all those years’ incarceration, after all. Or maybe he genuinely did find it funny, but for some reason Peter couldn’t divine. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
‘We landed in the quiet, just outside the city to avoid attracting any attention, which was fine by me. Nobody would notice sixteen people appearing out of nowhere and then fifteen people turning into ash and floating away on the air a few seconds later.
‘I had not decided what I would do once I was on my own in this world, though. I know I thought about staying for a while and maybe getting in touch with your Guild, and building up an invasion force to come back to Werosain with. Tell the Guild all they wanted to know about the land and the way Werosain’s army works.
‘But when I realized I was on my own in this world, I must have got excited and forgotten what I was here for. I ran around shouting and laughing.
‘There were people in the streets, I think it was evening. On one road I grabbed some young man when I was walking past a place where people drink –’
‘A pub,’ said Eddie, emotionless.
‘Yes, and yelled that I’d done it, come in from another world and was going to stay here because Werosain and their false god-king were a lot of crap. But then I realized I had just grabbed him. I let him go, and one of the others asked if he was alright.
‘“Jack,” I think he called him…’
Odd thing to remember a name like that over such a long time, thought Peter. But then, it had been pretty much the first thing he had heard following his journey to Earth, and it was a big moment, so it stood to reason that he might.
‘I ran again,’ Atlosreg carried on, ‘and I laughed and laughed and laughed. All the people seemed to like being calm and quiet, and I must have made some people annoyed because I was not calm. I was excited, I was free!
‘I was stupid though, telling anyone who would listen that I had done it, after wanting to escape Werosain for years I had done it, I was on Earth and I was free. Nothing else mattered, especially it didn’t matter if people thought I was mad.’
That kind of thought didn’t take Peter by surprise in the slightest, considering that he himself had learned to have very little regard for what people thought about him. Granted, he hadn’t had anything like the rough life to which Atlosreg had been subjected, but he had long since learned that setting too much store by others’ opinions of him was nothing more than a psychological disaster on a countdown.
‘I do not remember properly what happened next,’ said Atlosreg. ‘There were policemen, and I was arrested for being a nuisance. I told them who I was, I said “I am Atlosreg of Werosain, and I want to destroy that world because it is evil,” but they thought I was mad –’
‘They normally do when they hear things like that,’ Peter said.
Eddie laughed nervously, which was singularly uncharacteristic for him.
‘– and they sent me to an asylum.’ The look on his face said it all: he knew that speaking openly about it had been the single most stupid thing he had ever done. But it was done, and the consequences had been distributed to him and lived with; there was no going back, and hadn’t been for eight decades.
‘For nearly eighty years, I was moved from one place to another, and for the first thirty of those I was given drugs and had electricity put through me.
‘Oh yes,’ He looked at Peter and Eddie’s bewildered faces, ‘if you listen to them talking for enough years, you start to understand. But at first I didn’t know I was being drugged.
‘I would get angry, and try to leave, but always I was too angry to cast spells properly. So they would hit me and tie me to my bed and put pins in me. That’s what I thought at first, later on I realized they were putting drugs into me and making me take pills. They made me sleepy and forget who I was. Eventually I gave up trying to get myself free.’ He looked at Peter, and suddenly Peter was aware of a tremendous degree of self-awareness and suffering in him.
‘Bloody hell,’ he murmured quietly. He looked at Eddie. He was sat still, and bone-white.
Peter stood up and stepped toward Eddie. ‘Hey. Are you alright?’
Eddie blinked. ‘Yes.’ The answer of a robot.
Peter wasn’t sure what to say. There wasn’t anything he really could say, other than to apologize for how Atlosreg had been treated over all the years – and what use was that now?
A long, uncomfortable minute passed, with all three men alternately looking at each other and the floor. Eventually Peter stood up.
‘If I untie you, you aren’t to use any magic against us. Is that clear?’
A nod.
Peter stepped to the chair to which Atlosreg was tied, and untied the rope, coiled it, and dropped it on the floor.
‘I didn’t bring you here to carry on being a prisoner,’ he said. ‘I brought you here because I want to learn from you, but you are free. Not my prisoner or my patient, but my equal, my teacher – if you’re willing.’
Another slow, measured nod.
Eddie spoke, quietly. ‘The Guild was watching over you, from a safe distance. Making sure, for what it’s worth, that you were safe.’ He looked at Peter and addressed him. ‘That’s how I knew that you’d taken him from the home.’
Peter laughed and nodded, as Atlosreg had. ‘I had a feeling it might have been something like that.’
‘Do you think you have a hope to unmake Werosain?’ Said Atlosreg. ‘The magic that holds it together is old, and it would be hard for you to get inside it…’
Peter hadn’t actually thought enough about doing it yet to have put much thought into the process of destroying Werosain. Definitely not enough to realize what, exactly, that process might involve, other than somehow breaking Rechsdhoubnom’s spell – and with that being such a primitive magic, cast by a mortal just as Peter was, Peter had assumed that it would be possible, however difficult it might turn out to be, to unpick it.
‘I think,’ began Peter, ‘that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth trying. I need to know what you know about magic – not because I need to become the best, but because your technique might shed some light on the technique he used to create Werosain in the first place. I have knowledge of a lot of magic, and a fair bit about how the world – how the universe – works. So I think I might have something of a hope, yes.’
‘Do you really think that’s the right thing to do?’ said Eddie. ‘I mean, destroying a whole world.’
‘We’ve been through this,’ said Peter, ‘all of half an hour ago.’
‘What else is there?’ Atlosreg looked sternly at Eddie. ‘You and Werosain have been at war for twenty thousand years. It will carry on forever.’
Eddie opened his mouth and sighed. He must know, thought Peter, that Atlosreg was right. He stood up and went to the door and went to open it. At the last moment, he turned to face Peter and Atlosreg.
‘I’m not giving you my blessing. I can’t. But I’m not going to stop you. If you want to get in trouble, go ahead. But if you put our world at risk, I’ll use whatever force I need to stop you.’
‘Of course,’ said Peter.
Eddie walked
out of the door, but just as it closed Peter remembered something. ‘Oy!’ He called. ‘Come back here!’
Eddie came back to the door. ‘What?’
Peter pointed up, indicating the building, and then waved his open hand in front of him, indicating the island as a whole. ‘You took all my defensive spells down. They took me quite a while to put up, and you just came along and took them down. Are you just going to leave it like that, defenceless?’
Eddie raised an eyebrow as if to say ‘you’re kidding.’ But then after a few moments, Eddie frowned a little: if nothing else, it would have been terrible manners to destroy a comrade’s defences and then leave the place in that state. And, as much as Eddie didn’t see to see eye-to-eye with Peter’s methods or ethics – which Peter understood, he would probably have felt the same had he been in Eddie’s position – he did see that it would have been a pretty shitty thing to do, just leaving like that. Like going round to a relative’s house and removing the locks.
He came back inside.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll help restore your defences. That way you’ll be safe at least from other groups of magicians who might find out about you and him being here.’ He indicated Atlosreg. ‘But I don’t like it. Not one bit.’
‘Understood,’ said Peter. ‘Thank you.’
Then, together, the two of them began to set about restoring the defensive spells on the Hovel, starting from the foundations: to repel water, quench fire, cushion in case of earthquakes, and other natural disasters which, however unlikely, might pose risks. As they went, Peter described the process of chaining the spells on the actual structure, which seemed to gain some approval, if only academic.
‘What you need,’ said Eddie, ‘is alternating layers of chained and monolithic spells…’
He spoke quietly, and the rest of what he was saying was lost to the sound of the water in the distance. It seemed he was talking to himself as he set about extending the cushioning spell all around the building single-handed, until the whole structure was enveloped completely in it. He then placed a single layer of repelling spellwork on top of the cushion, which would act as a solid barrier to any physical attacking spells. Peter stood back and watched; this was a degree of workmanship he hadn’t ever seen before. Sometimes it had been easy to forget that there must be a reason why a magician becomes the Steward of the Guild.
Eddie’s wand fluttered easily through the air, weaving spell after spell, seamlessly flowing from one into the other, in a way which reminded Peter of a classical musician playing a medley of operatic themes: a virtuoso violinist playing the Carmen Fantasie.
Eventually, Peter gathered enough confidence to join Eddie in the casting again, and felt the power Eddie was using. It was a subtle yet magnificent type of flow, and Peter pushed himself harder than he had ever done before to keep up. The look on Eddie’s face had turned from irritation to concentration, as though he was enjoying this intense magical exercise more than he had anticipated.
They worked for hours, and when they had finished, the Hovel momentarily glowed, as though some of the last of the day’s sunlight had been trapped somewhere within all those layers of spellwork.
‘You picked the right place to put this place,’ said Eddie, ‘I’ll give you that. With all the old Anglo-Saxon settlements nearby, there’s a hell of a lot of power left to tap into.’ He slapped the wall closest to him, and Peter heard something distant, like a bell and an enormous timpani being struck together several miles away. ‘This should hold for a while anyway.’ Should hold for a frigging eternity, thought Peter.
And then Eddie walked off and vanished, without any word of farewell.
With Eddie gone, it was just Peter and Atlosreg left on Knifestone, and now it seemed that Atlosreg was becoming friendlier with the idea of helping Peter in whatever way he was prepared to, it wasn’t going to be as awkward an experience as Peter had been thinking it was likely to turn out to be.
‘This is not where I want to be,’ said Atlosreg stiffly, breaking the silence which had formed following Eddie’s departure.
‘I know. But it must be better than the home you were in?’
‘Yes.’ Atlosreg’s speech softened slightly. ‘It was boring there, but it was easier to let them think I was mad.’
‘I can imagine.’
Atlosreg shook his head. ‘No.’
But he could. It must have been like some kind of hell, being in that position. Not being able to openly talk about who he was and what he had done without being taken for someone who needed all the mental health work he could get. That was one of the main problems with pathetes: they couldn’t perform magic, most of them, and so it was something which was scary to them. And pathetes have always had the most fantastic ability to not notice – or even wholly ignore – things which were scary to them, or outside their field of comprehension.
‘Why have you agreed to help me?’ Said Peter, after a moment’s thought.
‘Because it means I have done something. However meaningless it is.’
Eleven: The Door
The irony of ending up as a sort of teacher didn’t seem to be lost on Atlosreg. He made it clear to Peter that he didn’t have very much time for people who needed to be taught, considering he himself had made the effort to go and find information for himself – then again, he did understand that in this case, there wasn’t any other means by which Peter could gain the knowledge he needed to perform this task.
There wasn’t much other speaking needed. They communicated symbolically when they needed to, but when words were needed they were used sparingly. It was clear to each of them that the other had his own agenda, and that was fine – but they also each recognized the value of teamwork, especially in a venture like this. They didn't have to like one another, merely to respect one another and work together; a sort of professional courtesy.
Peter did, however, have more than a simple professional level of respect for Atlosreg. He was fascinated by him, and wanted to get to know him and develop some sort of friendship with him, however childish that might have been to admit to Atlosreg, or even to himself. He looked forward to working with him and learning from him, and to seeing if their shared goal could be realized.
As Peter had requested, Atlosreg began to tutor him in some simple flavours of Werosaian magic, and it instantly struck Peter how simple the Werosaian theories concerning magic actually were: it was almost as though they hadn’t ever grown out of their shamanistic roots. It also, however, struck Peter how far Atlosreg himself had developed magic on his own, having reasoned for himself quite a lot of the founding principles.
This meant that Peter and Atlosreg would have plenty to learn from each other, rather than it simply being a one-way student/mentor relationship.
With Atlosreg’s style being as highly developed as it was, and therefore similar to Peter’s in some subtle ways, it was far easier for Peter to assimilate what he didn’t already know than he had expected. Even so, the differences which were there were sufficiently great as to require the application of a certain measure of will, in order to actually wrap his head around them.
Atlosreg hadn’t ever used any of the civilian magic Peter had heard about; the farming and irrigation spells which had been detailed in some of the writings in the Steward’s secret library: only those who actually used it were ever trained in that kind of magic, much the same as the military spellwork.
Peter, on the other hand, was equally interested in both areas, and while he appreciated that Atlosreg didn’t know any civilian magic, he had a feeling that the broad style of the casting could be extrapolated from the broad style of the military work, in a similar way to how a linguist might infer how a dialect will treat certain subjects once one has a general feel for how other subjects are treated by that same dialect.
It wasn’t easy. The first week saw Peter being subjected to Atlosreg’s style not only as a magician but as a military commander: he was tough and rigid in his expectations, and if someone und
er his charge was not performing to the set standards – well, they could go away and come back when they were ready. During their lessons, Atlosreg had Peter cast shields and veils of types Peter hadn’t ever seen before, even during his own encounters with Werosaian agents. It was as though they were now only sending people with the most mundane skillsets to Earth, unless Atlosreg’s own skills really were that rare among his own kind. Own kind or not, Peter thought, these are some pretty impressive spells.
They were outside the first time Peter successfully got one of the shields Atlosreg had shown him – an hour’s gruelling work, at which Atlosreg laughed. The Sun had been setting, and through the shield, Peter could see the light of the Sun on the horizon being subtly split into its component spectra, as though the shield was made from a layer of fine prisms.
He was tired, and his hands ached from the work. It had taken a lot more brute force to get the spell off than anticipated, but he had done it, and with some more practice he could possibly have a hope of actually using it in a confrontation.
But again, Atlosreg just laughed.
‘What do you call that?’ His voice sounded slightly muffled to Peter, as though Peter was as the bottom of a swimming pool. There was something cruel and derisive in the laugh.
Peter started to respond, but before a word could form in his throat, Atlosreg’s finger – his finger – descended and made a long vertical slit in the shield. For a moment, Peter could see the shield shimmer, see the gap form, and then it punctured. The shield deflated and collapsed.
‘Unstable,’ said Atlosreg. ‘Unstable. Useless. Try again.’
Cunt, thought Peter. But he tried again, this time paying more attention to the parts of the spell from which the stability came, and realized immediately that he had made a mistake: in the spell, as Atlosreg had explained to him in the first place, it had seemed to Peter that the power was being drawn in greater bulk than necessary, which could have been a compensative move, considering there wasn’t as great a quantity of background energy available in Werosain as there was on Earth. He had un-compensated, thinking the immense power that would be drawn otherwise could become incredibly dangerous if he made any mistakes in the rest of the work.