Jake's Quest - Wizards V (9 page)

14.
              
A Few Goodbyes

My phone rang and I was surprised to see it was Dad calling.

“Hi Dad, what can I do for you?”

“We need to talk, son.”

I mouthed goodbye to Bronwyn and hopped.

“So let’s talk.”

Dad put down his phone and ambled over to his favorite chair. He absently tapped at the bowl of his pipe even though there hadn’t been tobacco in it for years.

“What did Bronwyn do to the twins?”

“I don’t know. She only had them alone for a few seconds and she swore there were no bruises.”

Dad nodded, “Your Mam looked and there aren’t. But she can’t go threatening them like that. We’ll have social services down on us and that might stop the adoption.”

I wondered if that might be a good thing. Dad seemed to read my mind.

“We want them, Jake. We had you young and having them gives us something to do. And Colleen named us in her will.”

“I think Bronwyn has improved their behavior.”

Dad chuckled. “There is that, but she hasn’t messed with their minds has she?”

“I’m pretty sure she hates mind control every bit as much as I do.”

Dad fumbled with his pipe in a way that suggested there was something else he wanted to say. I offered to make a pot of tea and when I came back with it he braced himself before he spoke.

“The twins need to know who you really are. And they need to know about Salice. We have to trust them to keep the secret.”

“Not now, when they’re older.”

“Jake, every time you appear here you could give yourself away. Best they know the truth before they imagine something worse.”

“Is there anything worse?” I grinned as Dad shook his head.

“Will you tell them?”

“We should wait until after the inquest. They may well be called as witnesses.” That was prevarication. The government didn’t want an inquest on the bombing and the start date kept being put back. My theory was my kids would be grown before it happened.

“Soon Jake. You have to tell them soon.” Dad wore his determined face and I knew argument was useless. He’d made up his mind before he called me.

“Okay, when I get back from Balmack.”

After all, there was a possibility I might never get back and that would solve the problem for both of us.

Dad didn’t look happy, but he knew it was the best deal he was going to get. I hopped away before he could think of a reason to make it sooner.

I arrived outside Betty’s office to the sound of women screaming at each other. My first thought was to hop home. But I needed to see Betty before I went to Balmack, if only because she had a way of telling me things I needed to know. I also didn’t want to leave it too long since I’d made her pregnant. Better to get any shouting out of the way as soon as possible.

So reasoning, I opened the door and found Betty and an older woman who looked remarkably like her turn to face me.

The woman looked at her watch. “It’s your four o’clock screw.”

“Get out. I never want to see you again.” Betty was trembling as was her voice.

The woman shrugged and picked up her handbag. I stepped aside to give her a clear path to the door. However, when she reached me she thrust her face into mine.

“So this is the great Wizard Morrissey. The man with brains in his balls, having none at all in his head.”

I gave her an elegant bow. All that time in the King’s court at Salice had taught me a few moves. “Any friend of Betty’s is a friend of mine.”

She laughed; a surprisingly warm laugh.

“I might learn to like you. You made my daughter pregnant and I’ve been waiting so long for that.”

“Get out!”

The ex-Mrs. Hardy put her hand across her mouth in a mock attempt to prevent her daughter hearing her words. “I needed to leave to make that possible. She had to grow up a slut.”

“I inherited that from you,” Betty screamed. She picked up a hammer from her desk and threw it at her mother.

I stopped it in mid-air and let it hang there.

“Useful for other things than sex as well,” Mrs. Hardy mused before sweeping elegantly from the room.

Betty advanced on me, plucking the hammer from the air on the way. I prepared a shield, just in case.

“I’m surprised you have the nerve to show your face around here after what you did.”

I backed away and collided with the door.

“I ought to…” Whatever she ought to do she decided to throw the hammer behind her where it slid across the floor until it collided with and smashed a large middle-eastern looking pot. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”

I repaired the pot and whisked the hammer to the other side of the room, casually covering it with a newspaper.

Betty laughed. “You
are
useful for more than sex. She was right about that.”

“Your mother?”

“Tina Wells, don’t you ever call her that again.”

“What did she want?” A little voice in my head was saying ‘don’t mention the baby’ and I was doing my best to follow its advice.

Betty took a deep breath and I braced myself. Then she let it out again in a long sigh.

“She wants us to be friends. Told me a load of nonsense about how she had to leave so I could become who I am now.”

“Pregnant?” I could have bitten my tongue off.

Betty smiled sweetly at me and then brought her knee up unexpectedly, catching me completely off guard. I doubled over in agony, unable to concentrate enough to heal myself.

“I am very pleased to be pregnant,” Betty paused for a long second, “And the next time you do anything like that to me without asking I will cut your balls off. Are we clear?”

I nodded; the pain was receding enough for me to think. In another few seconds I would be able to use magic again. She noticed my agony and laughed.

“Well get healing. I have use for those parts of your body and expect an expert performance.”

I was able to lift my head to look at her a few seconds later and found she had positioned herself on her desk, legs spread and not a pair of knickers in sight.

“Come on, I’m waiting here.”

A man has to do what a man has to do.

A desk is okay for some things, but for cuddling afterwards a swivel chair is much better, though Betty was a bit on the heavy side. I wondered vaguely how much heavier she’d get in the next few months.

“You will need to be careful, Jake. Don’t let your guard down for an instant.”

She ran her fingers over my face as if she was using them to memorize the shape.

“I figured as much.”

“I mean it. The worst danger will come when you think you are safe.”

A thought occurred to me.

“Have I changed the future? Now, you’re well, you know.”

Betty laughed again. “You are always changing the future and mine has got much happier. Just don’t ever do it to me again.”

“I promise.” I kissed her, hoping she wouldn’t notice that I’d crossed one set of fingers. I knew my limitations.

15.
              
Harlan

The Bat Cave was still empty when I hopped into it on Friday morning. I had done the rounds saying goodbye to friends and family. Jenny assured me that Fluffy was well and was feeling self-satisfied in the extreme. He knew I was leaving this morning and yet he wasn’t here. I felt let down.

Putting down the rucksack with my important worldly possessions, to wit, five tee shirts, a spare pair of jeans, and some comfortable slippers, I surveyed the cave and tried to conquer a sudden attack of first night nerves.

I was about to go to Balmack to seek a place in Haldor University using a competition designed for hedge wizards from unaffiliated worlds. But my real motive was to find my cousin, Dafydd Williams, who was my only suspect for being the Bomber.

All I had to do was win the competition, overcome the Balmack dislike of me, and find a man I had last met when I was four. When I put it like that it seemed so simple. I could be back by lunchtime if I cut a few corners.

I picked up the rucksack and took a deep breath.

“Wish me luck, Fluffy.”

I hopped for Valhalla.

The chamber was empty except for Meldar Lind.

“No leaving committee to make absolutely sure I go?”

Lind gave me a brittle smile. “You may need that sense of humor later. Take my hand.”

“You’re taking me to Balmack?”

“No, I am taking you to the Balmack Consulate. Take my hand.”

I had seen a handful of rooms in Valhalla and it was a whole planet with another dozen or so allied worlds making up their empire, but it had never occurred to me that there might be consulates and ambassadors for other worlds.

We hopped to just outside an imposing looking building. Meldar dragged me forward to an even more imposing door. She stepped forward to reach for the knocker, but the door opened inwards before she could touch it and a young man in a disheveled light blue robe stepped out.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said, speaking in Balmack. “Thank you for your university application.” He held out a hand to me and when I took it he gave it a loose feel and let go.

Meldar looked as if she was going to say something, but the man shooed her away. “Thank you for bringing the applicant, err Councilwoman. I can take it from here.”

She shrugged and hopped.

“Tsk. So rude, these Valhallans. I can see why we don’t have a permanent ambassador. Come in Wizard Morrissey. You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? On some worlds Wizard is a term of abuse. Graduates in the Balmack Accord use Mage, much more classy and with none of the negative connotations.”

I nodded my head as getting a word in edgeways seemed unlikely if not impossible. He stepped back into the building and I followed.

Despite the imposing façade, the inside of the building turned out to be hollow, just one vast empty space, though the floor we walked on was polished marble. The young man’s voice echoed in the vast chamber as he walked towards the far wall.

“We have this one size fits all approach for consulates. All of them look the same from the outside, constructed by magic, naturally. Some of them have ballrooms and majestic staircases and hundreds of rooms for all manner of work. But we only built this one so we can complain when Valhallan wizards arrive on our dependent worlds and started causing trouble. They do like creating little pocket kingdoms, you know.”

“May I know your name? We haven’t been introduced.”

He stopped and then to my surprise, he blushed. “I do beg your pardon. What must you think of me? It’s just that this is the first time I’ve been off world on official duties and I’m a bit excited. In fact, it’s my first time outside the Accord when not on an expedition. I’m Harlan Ertlz, junior lecturer in the Creature Magic Faculty.” He held out his hand again and this time I got to shake it properly before he let go.

“What exactly does the Creature Magic Faculty study?” Okay, that was a bit of a stupid question, but I wanted to know.

“Err… Magical creatures? Not the hominid branches, like elves and fairies, but the exotic sentient ones like unicorns and dragons.”

“Have you met many?”

Harlan laughed. “Well one hears rumors of them, but if they exist at all they must be very rare. After all, how many people do you know that have seen a dragon, let alone got into a conversation with one?”

I thought about answering, ‘Just about all of them’ but decided that I didn’t want to antagonize the man.

“Don’t you have access to the Temple in hop space? Balmack sent a representative to the Conference Between the Worlds so you should have.”

Harlan looked wistful. “Only the most senior member of the government have access. You think I might find races of unicorns in the Temple? It’s restricted because some of those people are dangerous. Why only a couple of years ago our representative was killed by a monster from a hedge world. Murdered just like that while he was standing there minding his own business. There hasn’t been a murder in the Accord in living memory.”

This brought up another interesting question.

“What have you been told about me?”

Harlan looked embarrassed. It was a comfortable look on him, as though it had been etched there from much use.

“Hedge wizard Jake Morrissey. You applied for the undergraduate position we leave open for heathens, err disadvantaged branches of humanity. It’s a competition that attracts four or five entrants a year. The contest is great fun and everyone bets on it.”

“What happens to the losers?”

Harlan swapped embarrassment for confusion. “Why they return home, I suppose? Once they’ve been eliminated everyone loses interest in them. But we must get on.”

We walked to the far side of the building and Harlan opened a small door. There was a corridor beyond which was about six feet long. A guard stood to attention at the other end with his hand resting on the handle of what looked like an old fashioned paper cutter. A small silver chain, the sort a girl might hang a pendant from, passed under the blade of the cutter, ran across the floor and joined to a pin fastened into the floor on our side

On the magical plane, the corridor was surrounded by a vortex of magic. Forces flowed around it like a magnetic field around an electro magnet.

“Please lock the door behind you, sir,” the guard requested.

Harlan complied and started to walk to the other end of the corridor. I didn’t like the look of that field and stayed where I was.

“It’s just a chain bridge. You must have seen one before?”

I shook my head.

Harlan was nonplussed. “But everybody uses them. It joins two places together so people can travel from one world to another. I know the Valhallans use them to link their worlds. Everybody does. After all, how else would you move produce and people between worlds? Wizards can’t hop much more than they can carry.”

That answered a lot of questions I had never thought to ask. How else could the Diamond Worlds exist? They had to have some cheap and easy method to travel between their worlds. I felt like a moron.

“And the chain?”

“Maintains the bridge. Cut it and the link is severed. That is why we call them chain bridges.”

Well that was one way to make me seem stupid. I walked down the corridor.and didn’t feel the transfer, but I suddenly felt disoriented as if the corridor was spinning.

The guard had snapped some kind of bracelet round my wrist and the spinning got much worse.

Harlan held me to stop me falling and helped me out of the door at the far end. He then hopped us to a white room with a bunk, toilet and wash basin.

“The disorientation will soon pass. The bracelet prevents you from sensing where you are in the multiverse. You will not be able to hop further than you can see until it is removed. We do it to applicants to protect the Accord from invasion.”

I started to wretch and he helped me over to the toilet.

“We will talk later, when you have recovered.”

And then he was gone, leaving me to empty my stomach into the toilet. It took a long time.