by Tuson, Mark
‘Venus? Mars?’ Atlosreg looked utterly puzzled. ‘What are they?’
‘They are planets, like…’ it then struck Peter: it wasn’t entirely inconceivable that Atlosreg might not have any idea what a planet was.
This amused Peter even more than his idea of putting the Werosaian innocents there at first, but then he realized it might help if he explained to Atlosreg about some of the more basic elements of astronomy: particularly what stars, planets and moons actually are. Atlosreg listened attentively, and when Peter finished, he looked out of the window, as the first stars of the night started to appear.
‘So each point of light is a sun like ours?’ He said.
‘Yes. Possibly each one has planets, like ours, too.’
Atlosreg looked awe-struck, absent-mindedly staring out of the window. It was a feeling Peter still sometimes had when he looked at them. The idea that there might be billions of lives surrounding each minuscule point of light had sometimes been a little emotional for Peter.
‘The problem is,’ Peter said after a few minutes, ‘that while Venus is the most like Earth in size and gravity, the atmosphere is completely wrong. Anyone goes there, and they are squashed flat and die.’
‘Could we not make it more suitable?’
‘No. It would take too long to get there, and we would have to change everything about the whole planet. I doubt there would be a magician alive who had that sort of power. Not even if they had –’ he raised the bone flute ‘– access to the force of the gods. It would just be too much.’
Atlosreg looked, a little sadly now, back into the room. It was amazing how childlike he could be at times. ‘We will have to make caves under Knifestone,’ he said soberly. ‘Like your Guild has.’
That was a thought, though building caves – or hollowing out a single cavern – would be a lot of work. Granted, it wouldn’t take anywhere near the levels of power that terraforming a hostile planet like Venus would, but it would still take plenty of brute force, magically speaking, to accomplish.
‘How would we do it?’ Said Peter. ‘We would need to hollow out enough space to build a decent-sized town. Y’know, a mile or two square, a few hundred feet deep. And then put supports in, find a way to light the place, whatever. We wouldn’t have time for anything else.’
‘I imagine we would. We are much more powerful now than we were a couple of months ago, both of us.’
That was true, but they were different sorts of power. Peter sighed, feeling exhausted from just thinking about the amount of work they would need to do. But, ultimately, it was the only option available to them.
Peter’s sleep was disturbed, that night, by images of laughing planets and dark-skinned Werosaians, dancing together wearing shimmering white cloaks which looked suspiciously like the Milky Way. They were all holding spades, and at the front of the crowd was Atlosreg, fencing with Eddie, who was also holding a spade. When, eventually, he woke up, the sky was still dark. He groaned in irritation.
They spent that day planning what they would need to do, and deciding what methods they could use for each task. It would, it seemed, be much easier to hollow out a vast, two-by-two-mile cavern under Knifestone, into which they could migrate the innocent Werosaian populace: if they did it that way, they would work by brute force, rather than using carefully controlled bursts of power to hollow out small rooms. Not only that, but there would be much less navigation required to find they ways out of the Big Hole they were planning to dig.
The biggest problem, actually, was nothing to do with hollowing out the cavern to create a place to settle the innocents: it was how to illuminate the place. Peter had suggested using lamps mounted on staves, at regular intervals within the cavern, to fulfil a similar role to lamp posts on the streets, but Atlosreg quashed the idea by reminding him that crops and animals need sunlight to survive. This threw Peter right back to first principles, wondering if there was any means by which they could pass natural sunlight down into the cavern.
This problem, and others, kept the two of them in animated discussion for quite a long time, and as more days dragged along, they started to share their time equally between defining the project, as it were, and continuing with their practicing.
Everything they were doing now had become more of a lifestyle than anything else, and some days Peter even forgot about the war, and the threats, and the Guild, and even Werosain and Rechsdhoubnom. They were simply sparring to improve their skills, and sometimes whole afternoons would skate by in a surreal haze, leaving only tiredness and an aching brain behind. But it was working: they were still both improving, constantly challenging one another. Peter was even having more success in his attempts to phase himself out of reality.
It came to him early one afternoon, and he performed the spell quickly. He walked outside and called to Atlosreg.
‘Atlas, I think I’ve done it!’
Atlosreg, however, seemed to be busy with some sort of meditation, sitting on the edge of the island completely still. Peter called again.
‘Atlas!’
He heard Peter this time, and stood up, calling back to him. ‘What?’
‘I think I’ve done it – I think I’ve phased myself out slightly.’
Atlosreg didn’t say anything in reply. Instead, he drew his wand and conjured a lightning bolt, which struck right on top of Peter. No – right through him. He didn’t feel a thing, but when he looked down he noticed the grass under his feet was smouldering slightly. Atlosreg walked up to Peter and looked between him and the grass.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you have done it.’
It took Peter an hour or two to remember exactly how to phase himself back into normal reality, but once he had done so, he held the flute in his hands, sitting on the wooden floor in the Hovel.
‘I’m going to have to think of a way to do that a lot faster, aren’t I?’ He said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well.’ He hoisted himself up and sat down properly, on a chair. ‘If magic goes straight through me because I’m slightly out-phased from everything else, surely it’ll mean that any magic I do would just go straight through him?’
‘Yes, I think it probably would,’ said Atlosreg. ‘But what are you thinking of doing to make it quicker?’
Peter had no idea. ‘I have no idea.’
‘That helps.’
Peter looked sideways at Atlosreg. It was strange, hearing him speak ironically or sarcastically. ‘What do you suggest I do?’
Atlosreg straightened in his seat. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you could enchant an object to carry the spell for you. That way you could have it already cast, ready for you to apply the enchantment to yourself at will.’
‘Have you done that before?’
Atlosreg nodded slowly. ‘Some of the bigger military spells, used by large groups, are kept that way. The spell is cast and stored, and then used when needed. Sometimes we use it for healing too, field medicine.’
‘Like, potions?’
‘Sort of, but from what I have heard about how your world thinks about potions, it is not quite the same thing.’
Peter hadn’t thought it would be. All this magical ingredient stuff – it worked in fiction, but in real magic the only way to achieve effects similar to those of potions was to perform spells on oneself – or on another person. Potions, as fiction described them, just didn’t exist.
He would have to do some tweaking to the spell itself in order to be able to hold it on an artefact and activate it at his leisure, but he sincerely doubted it would be outside his capability. Therefore, from that point on, he dedicated the time which, up until recently, had been dedicated to working out if he could phase out of reality in the first place, to working out if he could imbue that same spell into an item, to be used as needed. He was in his element, working as a programmer properly – adapting something from one use to another, and it was a fascinating problem for his mind to chew on.
They continued working each other hard, training and improv
ing their strategies and their technical abilities, simply because those were worthwhile ways to prepare for an uncertain future, and they also continued with their preparations for hollowing out the cavern underneath Knifestone.
The problem of lighting was still very much a problem, however, and Peter was considering all sorts of options: he could use a similar spell to the one he was trying to integrate into an object, to allow an amount of sunlight to simply pass through the surface of the island – though that would be too big a procedure to attempt to undertake alone, so he stopped thinking about it pretty quickly after having first had the idea.
Another thought he had was that it may be possible to have some form of lighting, which mimicked natural sunlight, come from the ceiling of the cavern. This would still be an awful lot of work, but it seemed to be a better idea than phasing the light through the roof, or putting lamp posts on the ground within the cavern.
He took that idea to Atlosreg as they finished their lunch, one day. He seemed to approve of it, and even had a suggestion or two of his own to add.
‘Would you be thinking,’ Atlosreg was saying, ‘of copying what the sunlight is like on Werosain?’
‘I’ve got to admit,’ said Peter, ‘that thought didn’t even cross my mind. I was just thinking of having a glowing blue sky that stopped glowing when it was night outside.’
Atlosreg looked out of the window at the actual sky. It was pale blue, with assorted kind of clouds floating hither and yon. The weather was neither here nor there, but the two of them had been grateful for it not raining.
‘I think that could be a good idea, for itself,’ said Atlosreg, sounding slightly absent-minded, ‘but I do not think the majority of Werosaians will find it easy to get used to. Dark red might be easier for us, more familiar for them.’
Peter thought about it. It would be a lot simpler that way, now he thought about it: there would be no day-night cycle to try and emulate, and the soft glowing would be a lot easier for him to create magically. There were still going to be the various types of light which come from a small - or brown dwarf – star to think about, but he imagined that getting those right would consist mostly of looking at the different wavelengths of light which come from our own Sun.
There was a lot of work ahead, a hell of a lot of work. But it would be worth it for the possibility of saving a myriad lives.
Sixteen: To War
Peter awoke with a start: he must have fallen asleep in the chair. Atlosreg was in his room, probably still asleep. The alarm he had set on the perimeter of Knifestone had sounded for the first time, and he picked up his wand, ready to strike.
As he stood up, there was a knock on the door – ta-ta-ta, tap-tap-tap, ta-ta-ta. SOS in Morse code. ‘Okay, I’m coming!’ He called. Who the hell could have got past those defences with enough strength to knock on the door? And what the hell could be so urgent as to have them knocking a Morse code distress call on his door. Oh well, it got his attention, and gave the moment a little dramatic urgency. He wasn’t sure, however, how fond he was of that.
He strode to the door and opened it, noticing first the dark thundery night and the rain. The person at the door looked familiar…
‘Lucy? Come in.’ He pulled her inside by the shoulder and rammed the door shut, and lit the lamp on his desk. In the light he saw Lucy looked much older than when he had last seen her; her black hair was a lot shorter, and she was thinner than he remembered. She looked anxious, edgy.
‘Peter, the Guild has been attacked. A lot have gone down, nearly a third of us. They even got to the Guild itself – our defences have been compromised bigtime.’ She stopped for breath.
Peter’s heart began thumping in twelve-eight time, ba-ba-ba-ba-bam, and he instantly picked up his cloak and his satchel, and put them on. He banged his fist on Atlosreg’s door. ‘Atlas, TIME! Get your shit together!’
He sat Lucy down at the table and made a cup of tea, which she accepted and gulped down in one. Atlosreg came out of his room, looking calm but alert, and sat down with Lucy and Peter.
‘What?’ He said.
‘Werosaians, they came in to the Guild – just materialized in the entrance – and started fighting their way down to the bottom.’ Where the Founding Flame was, Peter thought. ‘It was a nightmare. I’d only just got back from being on trial, like a week before, and I had to fight them.’ She looked Peter in the eye, a teary. ‘I had to kill people. It felt awful…’
For a moment, it seemed she wasn’t going to be able to carry on talking, but Peter put his hand on her shoulder. ‘It felt awful for me too, believe me.’
She sniffed and sighed, and then carried on talking. ‘Eddie nearly got killed, but he did some really big magic that turned them all into ash. It was scary.
‘But the next day, they came again, more of them. We don’t know how they found out how to get in, but when we looked our defences weren’t even there any more. Eddie made us all help with the spellwork to put new defences up, and we’re all on active service with orders to kill Werosaians on sight.’ That was a sure sign that things were getting pretty desperate; that would be the only reason a Steward would issue a standing order to violate one of the Laws of Magic.
Atlosreg looked at her and raised an eyebrow. Peter laughed nervously. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean you,’ he said.
Lucy shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘Actually…’ she began, and then she coughed and started again, speaking slowly, quietly, and purposefully. ‘Actually, Eddie has been talking about you and him quite a lot. Caroline and Eric have stepped in a few times to calm him down. There’s a lot of people there who’d really like to kill you. Eddie’s most of them.’
‘Why are you here, then?’ Peter said, a little tersely.
‘I think we need your help. You’re obviously a very powerful magician. You must be to have done some of the things you’ve done, and to have made the kind of trouble you’ve got into over the years.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘It would be a great help to all of us if you came back to the Guild and helped us fight, helped us put some of the protection back on the place.’
Peter stared out of the window. He wanted to help, and he and Atlosreg were, to all intents and purposes, finished with setting up the cavern under Knifestone, but still – he had his principles to stand by, and those principles said that if Eddie, who was essentially the Guild as a single man, wanted him dead, then he could go and fuck himself; Peter wasn’t going to help. He had a feeling Atlosreg would quite probably feel much the same.
‘You just said you put all the protection back?’ Said Peter. There was no need to guess why, from what she had just said, he hadn’t been called to assist when this was first happening. Which made him wonder… ‘Also, how long ago was this? You’re making it sound like you’ve been under a deluge of attacks for the last year.’
‘About four months. We can’t afford to let any more happen, we’re going to run out of places to defend, and people to defend them.’
Four months wasn’t a year, but it still a long time to be under constant attack. It was also a testament to exactly how huge the forces available to the Werosaian Army were: five thousand men in active service, and who knew how many supplementary forces had been drafted back in after retirement.
But what could he do? He wasn’t convinced he could be much use in any attempts to add more security on the Guild as a place, though he knew he and Atlosreg probably had a greater knowledge of offensive magic and shields than anyone else at the Guild – possibly than anyone else who had ever had membership of the Guild.
‘If I come, what guarantee do I have that they won’t kill me?’
‘You’ll be with me.’ She said it simply and with a sudden authority. Peter wondered how she had survived when she was away on that island, and how much responsibility she must have had to shoulder since her return.
‘What about Atlas?’
‘Will he be coming?’
They both looked at
Atlosreg, who looked back and raised an eyebrow. After a moment, he looked at the window, which was rattling ominously under all the wind and water with which it was being barraged from the outside, and said quietly, ‘why should I come?’
‘You’re probably one of the most powerful magicians in this world,’ said Peter. ‘You and I are a bloody good team, and you can’t deny that. And at the end of the day, the Guild might be being a lot of cunts at the moment, but they are my people.’ He paused, assessing the look on Atlosreg’s face, which seemed to be unmoved. Peter carried on, slowly. ‘You left Werosain because you felt the opposite of what I feel. I would have hoped for a better time for you to have come, when you might have seen fit to join the Guild, as people like you have done before.’
Atlosreg sighed, and looked tiredly at Peter. Suddenly he looked every day of a century old. ‘I left because I wanted to not be a soldier any more. I wanted to destroy Werosain, like you do now, but when I started living in this world I thought it would be nicer to just live into my old age and eventually die, like I was supposed to.’
Peter stood up, incensed. ‘Fine. Don’t come. Or come. It makes no odds to me.’ He cast some of the protective spells he and Atlosreg had developed onto Lucy and himself: his new hybrid style seemed to catch her attention. ‘I’ll tell you about it some time,’ he said, and then he took her by the hand and led her out of the door. Before closing it, he paused a moment to give Atlosreg one last chance to come with them, but he shook his head. The look, however, that he gave Peter was one of apology, more than anything else. Peter nodded to him, and then locked the door.
The weather outside was atrocious, and Lucy and Peter sprinted to the marker stone he had made, Lucy went to start opening a portal back to the Guild, but Peter was already there. ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to be quicker than that,’ he said. They stepped through.
Lucy had been right: things really were in pieces at the Guild. Almost as soon as Peter had closed the portal behind them both, Eddie was upon them, trying to push Lucy out of the way to get to Peter. Peter stepped to one side to give himself and Eddie a clear shot, and paralysed Eddie’s hands.