Jake's Quest - Wizards V (15 page)

26.
              
Field Trips

The house was impressive. It perched, somewhat precariously, on the side of a mountain beside a rushing waterfall. I had used a small chain bridge to get to it and was lucky one existed because this house was hundreds of miles from the nearest dwelling.

I was on Firor, the garden planet of the Balmack Accord. Sparsely populated and highly exclusive, there were less than a million people in total here. Given my current inability to hop, the only reason I could visit it was because of the chain bridge that linked the capitol to this particular house. That spoke of wealth and influence. Chain Bridges were relatively inexpensive to construct, but tying up a plot of land in the center of a city didn’t come cheap.

There wasn’t a visible door. The path led me to an eight foot wide wood roundel cut from a single slice of an ancient tree. The house jutted out over the top of me, twenty feet above my head. When I stepped onto the roundel a female voice spoke from out of nowhere.

“Please state your name and purpose of your visit.”

“Jake Morrissey of Haldor University, seeking to speak with Roge Saldor.”

There was no response for nearly a minute and then the wood platform rose into the air more smoothly than an elevator. As I approached the bottom of the building a circle of concrete dissolved and the platform rose through it to come to rest in a large reception room. I was impressed.

A man in his forties came to greet me and we shook hands.

“I’m always happy to help a university researcher. Are you here about my Home Across the Accord project?”

He didn’t look like the photograph of Dafydd Williams and he didn’t have a Welsh accent, but a wizard can change his look and his accent with little effort.

“Didn’t you build a house in Cardiff?” I asked innocently. The notes in his university file said Roge had specialized in house design in his final year.

He looked puzzled. “Where is Cardiff?”

“Tell me about your project,” I said quickly, before he got suspicious.

His face lit up and he led me to a room where the ghostly outlines of large chairs were scattered across the floor.

“Pick any chair you want like this,” he touched the image of a chair with his finger, “And then put it where it feels comfortable.” He gestured and the chair materialized in the place he pointed at.

I picked a bigger chair and gestured so it would be facing the one he’d created. This was cool and would save me making a lot of replacement furniture, if I installed something similar in Fluffy’s cave.

When I sat down, all the other images vanished. I tried to work out the magic involved, but my magical sight was blocked.

“You have to buy the method from me,” Roge said smiling. “But my prices are very reasonable.”

He blathered on about the new concept he’d had for a house located in room sized buildings across the Balmack Accord. Rooms would be linked using chain bridge magic. While interesting, this was all rather pointless as I had already decided he wasn’t Dafydd and the trip out here was a waste of time.

“I must tell you I came for a different purpose, and while your house idea is great that’s not why I’m here.”

Roge looked a little annoyed, but then his face cleared.

“And your real reason for coming here?”

“I’m trying to find a man called Dafydd Williams. He would have had to be sponsored by an ally of the Balmack Accord as you were. He came to Balmack under an alias.”

Roge nodded. “This has something to do with the sabotage at the university trials doesn’t it? I recognize you now.”

I nodded. “We believe this man did that, along with a number of other bombings across the multiverse. He has killed a lot of innocent people.”

Roge scratched at his chin. “There must have been thousands of people sponsored into the university the year I started. It would be like hunting for a single word in a book when you didn’t know what page it was on.”

Tell me about it.

“Yes, a very large number of people are potential suspects.”

“Not many are sponsored by the Elves though. I only know of one other and he joined the university three years ago. A very standoffish fellow. I tried to contact him a few times, but he never replied to my messages.”

Three years ago was way outside the time frame I was interested in. That would be fifteen years after Dafydd had first disappeared.

I sighed. “Thank you for your time. I may come back and buy your chair magic. There’s a dragon’s cave I know that could certainly use that trick.”

“You know the Dragon Ambassador, don’t you?” Roge sounded eager and impressed.

I nodded.

“Then you can have it for free, if it’s for him.”

He leaned forward and touched my forehead and I then I knew how it was done.

“I’ll ask him if you can visit him when it’s done.”

We clasped hands together to seal the deal. It seemed that Roge had a thing for dragons, judging by the smile on his face.

There was a lot of noise in the lecture theatre as my fellow students stood around chatting. We were off on a field trip to visit a world destroyed by wizardry. I suspected this was part of the continuing propaganda against people like me. I knew most wizards were self-centered and prone to evil, but some of us were all right.

Someone poked me in the back and I turned to find Lana grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“You aren’t on this course,” I accused.

“All this year’s hedge wizards have to go on this trip, even me.”

Another poke in the back, this time a lot harder and it was no surprise to find Esta on the other side of me. If looks could kill, Lana would have been a smoldering pile of cinders. On her part, Lana smiled back innocently.

Okay, I have to admit it. Having Lana and Esta share my bed, very much separately, had one major drawback, but only if we were all in the same room together. My hints at a threesome had not improved the situation between them.

“Jake, they are letting anyone into our lectures now,” Esta said sweetly.

“Play nice, girls.”

“Does he make you dress up as a boy and take you from behind?” Lana asked equally sweetly.

I admitted defeat and slipped away from them before either of them demanded I should pick a side.

Professor Delor was a small plump woman of indeterminate age with a demeanor that reminded me of a terrier. She regarded the title
wizard
as a term of abuse and was always careful to call me Wizard Morrissey whenever she addressed me.

“
Wizard
Morrissey, how nice to see you here early for once, but I suppose a field trip is more fun than a mere lecture.”

“I hang on your every word, Professor.”

“Would that we could hang…” The Professor stopped and I looked down at her with an innocent look of enquiry on my face.

“And don’t look at me like a lovesick puppy. Most
wizards
who join the university have the decency to wait until they are middle aged. Now we have three children on my course.”

There was nothing to say to that so I stayed quiet until I thought of a question,

“What do I have to do?” There had been no instructions beyond gather in the room.

Professor Delor looked exasperated.

“Go and hold somebody’s hand. Preferably someone who knows the way. They are the ones with the green armbands,
Wizard
Morrissey.”

I found a student with a green armband, someone I’d never seen before. We held hands after I offered mine and a few moments later we hopped off the planet.

We were in the ruins of an open air amphitheater. It was impressive even in decay. The circular stage was two hundred feet across and the seating area around us rose three or four hundred feet into the air. Creatures that may have been rabbits ran for cover as students arrived in small groups hanging on to someone with a green armband.

Professor Delor arrived last and walked up the first few flights of steps to a place where we could see her.

“This is the world of Tandor. It used to be a thriving and peaceful place, populated by artists and artisans. There is only one continent on this planet surrounded by a vast sea and that continent used to have four distinct races, roughly split like points of a compass to the north, south, east and west.”

“Then four
wizards
arrived, initially friends with each other, we believe, and they took control of a race each. They instituted programs of slavery, pandering to their physical desires and greed. This was one of the capital cities, and when you wander around you will see murals depicting debauchery and torture beyond belief.”

“Over time, the
wizards
fell out and began a program of wars, perhaps because their senses had become dulled from overuse and they wanted greater excitement. The causes of the wars are lost to us, but we do know they placed a compulsion on their people. A compulsion to seek out and kill members of the other races. Some were turned into living bombs, their flesh detonating when they reached their targets.”

This was exactly how Auntie May had been used against me. I wondered if cousin Dafydd had been on a similar field trip and got the idea from visiting this place.

The Professor had been droning on while I mused and I tuned back in to what she was saying.

“Once the four
wizards
were dead there was no one left to remove the compulsion from the few surviving humans. Over the next ten years the races slowly and methodically exterminated each other. Finally, the only people left were the children born after the
wizards
had died. Not infected by the compulsion, but without adults to guide them the population dropped below a critical mass and humanity on Tandor became extinct.”

I ventured to raise a hand.

“How long ago was this?”

“Thank you for that question,
Wizard
Morrissey. We don’t know exactly, but from estimates using tree rings we believe it was somewhere between twelve hundred and fourteen hundred years ago.”

“How do you know the wizards were killed?” This from a girl called Paulan.

“Despite being under compulsion, or perhaps because of it, we have extensive written accounts of what happened written by the doomed people themselves.”

That was a sobering thought. One of the easiest things for a wizard was to compel a human. To kill anyone that way was obscene; there wasn’t a word vile enough to describe committing genocide like that.

“I hope you’re not thinking of me with that face,” Lana said. She took my hand and led me out of the theatre and onto the street. “We are supposed to look round and write essays on anything interesting we find. The part of the city around the amphitheater has never been explored.”

This place made me uncomfortable. It was like all the ghosts of the world were watching us.

“Sounds like a terrible idea. This place feels like a cemetery. We should leave it alone.”

We walked out onto a wide avenue. Ancient trees lined it and younger trees had ripped up stone to sprout between them.

“There might be a bed around here we can use.” Lana’s eyes glittered with excitement. “Haven’t you ever wanted to do it in a cemetery?”

A stir in my loins suggested I might. There was no one else on the avenue. The other students must have gone in different directions.

“If you catch me, you can have me.”

Lana ran into the trees and disappeared behind one of the larger ones.

Well if it was a challenge, I was up for it. I ran after her, extending my magical senses to track her. Behind the trees were majestic buildings, the sort of thing someone might build if they had unlimited slave labor. They looked in remarkably good condition, only the glass in the windows was broken. Lana’s magical trace went through some big doors into the massive building in front of me and I set off in pursuit.

The interior of the building was a dark maze. A click of my fingers brought light to the rooms as I chased Lana. Many rooms were intricately decorated with scenes of sexual depravity. Perhaps this had been a brothel?