by Tuson, Mark
But he knew it had worked as soon as he felt the magical film form around him. The bubble felt more cohesive, less like a bubble and more like an extra layer of skin. And it was heavy, almost like wearing a layer of physical armour.
Atlosreg laughed again, more heartily this time, and punched Peter in the face, putting as much weight into it as he could. Peter felt the old man’s fist make contact with his nose, but there was no pain. In fact, his nose didn’t depress as it normally would have done. Atlosreg went to punch him in the gut, but Peter expected it this time, and blocked hard, bringing his right arm up and brushing the incoming hand upwards and harmlessly into the air a few inches from his shoulder: the sum total of Peter’s knowledge of non-magical martial arts.
‘Good,’ said Atlosreg, examining the back of his hand. One of the knuckles was bleeding slightly. ‘Now, let’s see if it can withstand magic.’
Peter was ready, but he was also nervous when he saw how his shield was to be tested. Atlosreg was standing about ten feet away, having retreated there so as to be able to perform his spell from a safe distance, and had his arms stretch out straight in front of him, with his hands extended and angled so the fingers touched, palms facing out. He raised this gesture to point to the sky, and then let his left hand drop.
There was a flash and a bang which made Peter momentarily and detachedly wonder if his brain had exploded. It took a second for him to realize from the smell of ozone what had happened: Atlosreg had summoned a bolt of lightning to test the shield. Bloody hell, Peter thought, what if the shield hadn’t been as strong as it had looked?
But the shield had held: Atlosreg was nodding, looking satisfied.
Over the next few days, Atlosreg had Peter practicing that same shield spell over and over, drilling it into him so he could perform it without thinking, in a few seconds, at a moment’s notice. From what Peter could tell, he was being trained not only in military magic, but – to a degree – in military discipline as well. It was hard work, but as he performed the same spell over and over, he began to get a feel for it as an organic entity, rather than as a device to be used as and when required.
Peter was starting to feel that he hadn’t known as much about magic as he had previously thought, and the more readily he accepted that, the better he adapted to the new things he was learning. Once he had learned to perform the shield to a satisfactory degree of fluency and proficiency, Atlosreg started to don the same type of shield, and to teach Peter some more offensive magic.
They were outside, slowly circling each other. Between them was a torch, lit and driven into the grass by Atlosreg, and the object was for Peter to extinguish the torch with only magic, while at the same time fending off an attack by Atlosreg. If Atlosreg could prevent Peter from extinguishing the flame for long enough that the torch would burn out of its own accord, Peter would lose the match. Apparently, this was a standard training game among the Werosaian Militia.
As they moved, revolving clockwise about the torch, Atlosreg occasionally threw spells at Peter; to compromise his balance, expel his wand from his hand, or hit him with lightning – anything he could think of. Meanwhile, Peter was physically dodging and magically parrying the spells as they were being thrown at him, attempting to get a clear shot at the flame in between attempts to evade Atlosreg’s attacks. He was taking his time, attempting to identify a pattern to work between, but each time what appeared to be the pattern he was looking for began to gel, it shifted. The whole exercise felt like some sort of syncopated dance routine.
He was forgetting himself, using the spells he already knew to attempt to repel the spells Atlosreg was firing at him, and while it was working to a degree, the spells he was only just avoiding were getting closer each time, until finally he was hit square in the chest by what felt like a gyroscopic effect, which threw him back about fifteen feet, whereupon he skidded another six across the grass, all the while feeling a rapidly decaying and regenerating vibration across his ribs.
It was pinning him down; whenever he tried to get up, the effect would either throw him back again, or else up, forward, or off to the side. He struggled against it, bringing himself upright in something like a genuflexion, and roared as he fired his own lightning spell at Atlosreg, who jerked and then laughed as he noticed the torch. Peter looked too: it had gone out, having exhausted its fuel.
‘My game,’ said Atlosreg, scratching his head where the lightning had hit.
Peter’s chest came free, and he stood up, breathing in deeply. It annoyed him, how he always seemed to lose. He knew Atlosreg was better at all this than he was himself, but he had thought there may be a possibility that he might be able to at least pose something of a challenge to him while they were gaming or sparring. Maybe, he thought, it would be appropriate to take a step back, so as to allow himself to remember, each time, that he wasn’t to use the spells he was used to using, having used them for five or six years.
Atlosreg plucked the torch out of the ground and carried it over his shoulder, leading the way back into the Hovel. Peter sat down at the table in the centre of the main room, allowing the stiff wooden back of the chair, which he had made himself, to embrace his back. He was aching hither and yon, though not because of the physical exertion of moving around. Magic was tiring, especially when one was using it constantly. Living and working on Knifestone was vastly different to how it was at the Guild, because magic wasn’t used on an everyday basis. Over there, it was used only when necessary. The ones who used magic the most were the ones who were being tutored, and therefore had to practice every day. In fact, now he thought about it, it was the same position he was in again now. Wow, he thought, was it really that intensive, being a student?
He became aware that Atlosreg was talking.
‘…forgetting to use what I have shown you,’ he was saying, ‘and that is…’
‘I know,’ said Peter without opening his eyes. ‘I’m trying to remember what you’re showing me, but it just seems to get lost in the moment.’
‘Not good enough.’
Atlosreg was being an arsehole, which wasn’t likely to make Peter want to cooperate.
‘Five minutes,’ he continued. ‘Then we go out again.’ With that, he began to measure fuel with which to refill the torch.
Complete arsehole. Though, as he realized, sometimes the teacher being an arsehole like that was required in order to push one to perform at their best. It was just something which, at thirty, Peter had hoped would be far in the past. But no such luck.
He took his five minutes, and then went back outside to where Atlosreg was replacing the torch in the ground.
‘Ready?’ He said.
‘Nope,’ replied Peter.
‘Good.’ He lit the torch and stood back.
Right, Peter thought, only use what Atlosreg showed you. He donned his shield spell again and stepped forward toward the flame, locking eye contact with Atlosreg and slowly sidestepping, so that as Atlosreg moved in his steady circle around the torch, he was always directly ahead of Peter.
A spell came straight to mind, which Atlosreg had shown him. Its intended use was to squeeze the air out of a person’s lungs. But it would take a little longer to prepare than Atlosreg would give him time for, which meant that he couldn’t do it. Or did it?
There was a lot about how magic was used on Earth that Atlosreg wasn’t likely to know, and there were things about how Peter worked which Atlosreg simply hadn’t a chance to know, which placed Peter at a distinct advantage. He cast auxiliary kinetic shields while he thought, repelling the spells Atlosreg was firing at him, and after maybe a minute he knew how to do it.
He threw a bright flame at Atlosreg’s face, and then wove the foundation of the asphyxia spell in a fraction of a second, anchoring it temporarily to the little finger of his left hand: he would have to move quickly now, or else he would lose his finger. He lashed at Atlosreg with a whip made from ice, and then added the preliminary effects to the asphyxia spell. His finger was already s
tarting to hurt as he threw himself out of the way of a shock wave Atlosreg had hurled at him, and as he rolled over he pulled the spell, whole, off his finger, completed it, and wrapped it around the torch. The flame struggled for a moment, and then vanished.
Atlosreg stopped and regarded the torch.
‘Well done.’ He plucked it out of the ground and held it up, examining it. He raised his eyebrow. ‘I have never seen it done that way before.’ He looked thoroughly puzzled.
Peter laughed inwardly to himself. Of course you haven’t, he thought. You shamans won’t have heard of modularity.
‘Maybe you have a thing or two to learn, yourself,’ he said. He was trying to act nonchalant and blasé, though privately he was every bit as impressed with what he had just done as it appeared Atlosreg was. It wasn’t something he had ever even thought about trying before, but once he thought about it, it seemed perfectly obvious that if magic was similar to programming a computer – even if only on some superficial level – and spells were performed one component at a time, it also stood to reason that each component could be performed at separate intervals.
Atlosreg sniffed, looking thoroughly unimpressed. Peter laughed again, though this time not privately.
He was feeling a lot better about his abilities compared to Atlosreg’s now, though he still appreciated that he had only been a magician for six years. Atlosreg himself had much more experience than he did, and on top of that had been the prodigy among his own people. Peter still had a lot to learn.
This last thought reminded Peter of something, which had been weighing on him, subconsciously, since he had first had the thought of speaking to Atlosreg at the home.
‘There is something I’ve been meaning to ask you about,’ he said.
Atlosreg raised his eyebrow. ‘What?’
‘How does it work, travelling between Werosain and here?’ He was visited by an image of poor little Oliver Twist, humbly stating his desire for more gruel.
A sarcastic smile teased the corners of the old man’s lips. ‘With a door.’
And that was that.
Atlosreg said nothing more about it, turning his attention instead to the grass outside, which was being gently disturbed by the passing breeze.
Peter knew he knew how it worked: he came to Earth from Werosain, after all, and it was frustrating to him that Atlosreg didn’t seem to want to say anything about how it worked – unless he simply thought Peter wasn’t ready to know. That might be possible, thought Peter, and it might even be possible that Atlosreg is right. But still, he didn’t much like the notion of other people deciding what he was and wasn’t ready for.
It was a couple of weeks before he brought it up again, and by this point he was able, during their matches, to pose much more of a challenge to Atlosreg, winning matches around half of the time. He wasn’t sure if Atlosreg was going easy on him or not, but he figured that if he was, it must only be enough that he could present a genuine challenge to Peter, without putting him in a situation in which he couldn’t win. It didn’t matter either way, because Peter was learning, which was the whole point in the game.
He seized his chance to mention how a door between Earth and Werosain might work one evening, after a long match which he had won, for the fourth time in a row.
‘Atlas,’ he said – having begun to call him that, partly because Atlosreg was a mouthful of a name, and partly because he often exuded an air of having the weight of his world on his shoulders – ‘are you willing to say anything more about the door? Between here and there?’
Atlosreg chuckled. ‘I have thought about it. The magic is not very different from any other portal. Just needs to be more stable.’
That stood to reason. It was just a portal, after all; albeit one that worked, as best as Peter could guess, across a fourth spatial dimension as well as the first three, in order to access a world which spurred out from the ‘real’ world, existing at right-angles. He wasn’t interested solely because he was interested in going to Werosain, though he was interested in that. He was also interested in how that kind of spell could work. It was a branch of magic which hadn’t been treated in any of the Guild’s literature at all, and yet it was just as real as any other branch.
‘I understand that,’ he said. ‘But how much more stable.’
Atlosreg looked out of the window absent-mindedly. ‘How much more stable,’ he muttered, absentmindedly, ‘does a bird have to be to fly, when the closest thing you can do is jump.’ He looked at Peter, momentarily resembling a curious young child more than a hundred-year-old. ‘Imagine two rocks on top of a great hill. Making a portal is like hopping from one rock to the next. Now imagine another hill, just the same, but a mile away. You have no hope of hopping from your own hill to the next, you would fall off and roll down into the gap between the hills. And they are too steep to climb back up. You have to fly. Which means…’
‘…you need wings.’ Peter understood – or he thought he did. ‘If you can fly, going from hill to hill is broadly the same as from rock to rock. But we can’t fly without help. We can’t just make wings, or else we’ll end up making fools of ourselves like Icarus did.’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind, just some old legend. But people do fly, and people do make portals between Earth and Werosain. So it’s possible. We just need to make the wings, right?’
‘Exactly. But that is not easy. How would you make wings if you wanted to fly?’
Peter bit back another comment about Icarus, and turned his mind to aeroplanes. The Wright brothers, great pioneers of powered flight. But that wouldn’t be stable enough, surely? ‘This is where your door comes in, yes?’
‘Yes. The door helps make it stable. There is a doorway in Werosain, which we could thread our own doorway to. The spell is just the same as a portal spell, but it has much more power and has to reach much further – and has to be cast on a specially prepared doorway.’
‘Special, how?’
‘You are trying to make a pair of wings for yourself, remember. You are going to need to use certain materials to make the doorway – the frame, the shell, the door itself if you want to be able to close it. And you need to cast a lot of protective magic on it to keep it stable, because that much power going through a portal could make the whole thing shatter.’
It suddenly struck Peter how much Atlosreg knew about this. He had expected him to know a few details about it, but not as much as this. He had thought it was going to be long slog, trying to work out all the details Atlosreg didn’t know. But it seemed he had studied it at some point.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ Atlosreg said. ‘When we trained on Werosain to come here, we were taught all about how to make the portals, just in case we got lost and needed to get back.’
That seemed like a pretty big discipline to impart to members of an army, the aeroplane comparison Peter had made inside his own mind led to images occurring of armies on Earth being shown how to build ships and aeroplanes, just in case they – for whatever reason – ended up being stranded in an unfriendly area with no other means of escape. It was a ridiculous thought. But then, magic was different enough to physical technology that it would be perfectly plausible for a single person to create the spellwork necessary. It would just take a long time.
He nodded. ‘What do we need to get hold of, then, to make the door?’
Atlosreg looked thoughtfully out the window again. ‘Oak wood, thick, no knots, grain as straight as possible. Apple wood, but not as much. Thick wire, pure gold –‘
Peter laughed maniacally and rolled back in his seat. ‘You’re joking!’
Atlosreg looked deadly serious. ‘I am not. To bind the wood together, make sure the connections between the wood are perfect.’
‘Hmm. Okay then. Anything else?’
‘No.’
Right, well that should be easy. ‘How much gold wire do we need?’ He said.
Atlosreg held his hands in front of him, around two feet apart.
‘Why do you want to go to Werosain?’ Said Atlosreg.
‘To see what it’s like there, experience the place for myself. See what the innocents are like.’
Atlosreg huffed and then laughed openly. ‘You are an innocent fool,’ he said, ‘and you are looking for trouble.’
‘Also,’ Peter ignored him, ‘surely I would need to go to Werosain in order to call it to its close?’
Atlosreg stopped laughing, and frowned. ‘That is true. You are still an innocent fool, though.’
Peter laughed. ‘Maybe I am, but it’s got me this far.’
Atlosreg scowled, the lines on his face all concentrating toward his pursed mouth.
It was late. Time to turn in for the night, Peter thought. He stood up and closed the curtains. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said. ‘G’night, Atlas.’
‘Bhilis noqtis.’
That night, his sleep was troubled. The idea of building the door to Werosain had been an important one for a long time now, and the idea that it might be possible… it was a little overwhelming. His dreams showed him garbled images of hills covered in doors, with Icarus trying to walk through them but being unable due to his wings getting stuck; in the end he gave up, made a sound similar to a vuvuzela, and flew off into the distance yelling about how it would be easier if he just flew to Werosain.
The following day, he set about finding everything he would need to build the doorway into Werosain. The wood was the easiest thing, so he went out in the morning to find it, and brought it back to Knifestone just after lunchtime, along with some pies.