Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (29 page)

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.

Yep, that should definitely be easy. As far as he knew, wire like that wasn’t even made, so he would probably have to try and find old pieces of pure gold, melt them down, and extrude the wire himself. And pure gold was hard to find, which meant that realistically, he would have to find gold and then separate it from its impurities – either by smelting or some kind of electrolysis – in order to obtain the pure metal. Such a pity alchemy had turned out to be a dead end.

‘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.

‘I don’t know if you’ve had this before,’ he said, handing one of the paper bags to Atlosreg, ‘but I find they’re good working food.’

Atlosreg looked inside the bag and took a bite. He seemed to like it. The two of them ate silently for ten minutes, and then Peter announced that he was going out again, this time to try and find the gold he would need to make the wire.

‘I’ve got the means to… acquire money, in a way that won’t cause trouble for anyone,’ he told Atlosreg, ‘but I don’t have any clue where I’m going to find it all. So it might be evening before I get back, and I might not have anything worth having, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘There are tools inside, if you want to start working on the wood.’

‘I know. I will start while you are out.’

‘Good man.’

And he left. Within the hour he was wandering around some random town, with five hundred pounds in his pocket. He walked into pawnbrokers and jewellers, and occasionally bought some small golden article from them. By evening, he was tired and his feet ached, but he had successfully acquired two large gold chains and a small, tatty-looking ring. He had no money left, but that wasn’t a problem: he should have enough metal here for what he needed it for.

He went back to Knifestone, for the second time that day. Outside, leaning on the westward wall of the Hovel, was a completed doorframe, with the oak comprising the outermost, bulkier part of the frame, and the apple wood forming a sort of inlaid inner frame.

Stepping through the door back inside, he shouted ‘honey, I’m home!’

Atlosreg was sitting in one of the armchairs with his eyes closed. ‘Never call me that again.’

Peter laughed. ‘I’ve got the gold,’ he said, and dropped the small bags from his pocket onto the table.

It was too late in the day to start thinking about making sure the gold was pure or extruding it into the thickness of wire that would be necessary, but Peter was still too excited to sleep. He felt childish admitting it, even to himself, but it was true. When he went to bed, he spent what felt like several years alternately staring at the ceiling and turning round in his bed. When the first flicker of dawn began to show on the horizon, he decided to give it up as a bad job.

‘Fuck it,’ he said aloud, resentfully. ‘Might as well get about business.’

He drifted over to the crude washroom he had built, and had a wash. By the time he had done that and got dressed, the Sun was visible, having just broken contact with the horizon, beginning its course through the sky for yet another day. He looked at the bags of jewellery on the table, and wondered how he was going to go about purifying them. Had he the equipment around, like there was at the Guild, he would have melted them in a crucible and then siphoned the gold out through a some variant of his water purifying straw he had made when he had been on trial.

Actually, when he thought about it, he could still do that: there wasn’t any reason why he couldn’t return to the Guild to do things like that; after all he was still one of them. The only reason, of course, why he wasn’t residing there at the moment was that he had Atlosreg to look after, and his researches to conduct. But he could still go to the Guild’s and use the equipment – which was, after all, there to be used.

So, that was that decided. He would go to the Guild to purify the gold. With a bit of luck, nobody would ask what he was doing. This, however, didn’t solve the problem of how he would extrude it into wire – unless he cast it into a rod and then tried to extrude it purely by magic. But that was something he could think about once he had actually ensured the purity of the metal.