Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (32 page)

‘Stop here.’ Atlosreg’s voice brought Peter’s thoughts back to what was happening round him. The group which Atlosreg and himself had apparently joined was one of the groups which tended to the livestock: there were more of the bovine-looking animals they had eaten during the previous night’s meal, maybe two hundred, in a huge number of pens around the size of school playgrounds. They grazed on the sparse grassy plants which issued from the dry soil, and seemed to be fairly contented.

‘What are those?’ Peter said quietly.

‘We call them “wakka,”’ was the response. ‘They are similar to cows in your world.’

They were like cows, and it seemed plausible that they could be descended from some earlier, pre-domesticated species, and then evolved to cope with these shitty conditions. They tasted better than cows, at any rate.

‘What are we supposed to do here, then?’

Atlosreg looked around and watched everyone else. ‘I do not know. Last time I came out with the village, I was so young that I mostly just watched. And it was so long ago that I cannot remember what I watched them do.’

Peter watched the others at work as well. He didn’t want to be standing around here all day, looking lazy and feeling like a spare part. Everyone must have their job to do, their part to play, so it stood to reason that if Peter started looking for things to do, things would eventually present themselves to be done. Some people were checking the wakka for any injuries which might have occurred overnight, others tended to the young to ensure they were still healthy, and still others carried large, rough sacks of grain to great troughs in the ground, into which they emptied them.

Most of that day passed by with Peter, and to a similar extent Atlosreg, wondering what to do. Very little presented itself for them to do, and the others had such an efficient system in place that giving the two newcomers things to do would have cost more effort than it saved. At the end of the working day, however, they did allow Peter and Atlosreg to carry the carcasses of the animals which had been slaughtered for the evening meal back to the village.

The following day, they opted instead to go along with the groups which gathered fruit, the idea being that what needed doing would be more obvious: look for a ripe fruit, pick it, drop it in a basket, look for another. By the end of that day, Peter’s arms hurt from stretching and from the weight of the basket he had been carrying all day, and getting into bed at the end of the day was something which, for the first time in quite some while, he felt like he had really earned.

The work was fun, though, and he relished doing it alongside these simple, yet friendly people. On the third day, Peter and Atlosreg were sticking close to one another as they looked for and picked the ripe fruits, and Peter asked what was really happening with these people.

‘Oh, most of them are good people,’ Atlosreg said. ‘They like to work hard and then relax, just like they normally do in your own world. They are no different, really.’

‘I didn’t think they would be,’ said Peter thoughtfully. ‘At the end of the day, they’re just people, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,
we
are,’ Atlosreg corrected. ‘But I do not feel a lot like one of them now. It has been too long. My parents are long dead, fifty years ago, and my brother was killed twenty years ago. And all this time I have been in your world, getting old and hating myself for what I failed to do.’

Atlosreg had had a brother. It hadn’t ever occurred to Peter that he might have had a brother, but of course there was very little about Atlosreg that Peter
did
know. He wished now that he had offered to talk more. Then again, Atlosreg only seemed to have become willing to talk much at all since the two of them had arrived at Werosain. Maybe it was being home – or, more to the point, being an
outsider
at his own home – which had made him open up slightly.

‘Do they even know how…
spent
Werosain is?’

‘Most of them never even think about it,’ said Atlosreg, reaching up to pick a fruit. ‘The ones who do know think it to be none of their business. They have their own lives to live, and time spent thinking about other worlds is time that could be better spent going about those lives.’

‘They don’t have any opinion on the Fraud, then?’

‘Yes.’ The stalk attached to the fruit Atlosreg was gripping yielded, snapping back, and he dropped the fruit into his basket. ‘They think he is a god. They know no better, and they have no wish to.’

‘There are a few in the Army who know everything we know about him, and of those there are people who agree with you and me – that he should be killed and the people of this world given a chance at living on a world that is worthy of them – and there are people who think he was in the right, and your world’s people should be killed. Partly for revenge for the wrong that the Fraud think was done to him, and partly to make way for the people of Werosain to live there.’

Peter sighed. There was a fruit just out of his reach, and it looked perfect. He drew his wand and used a small spell to attract the fruit into his hand. ‘There must be a way to save these people…’

Atlosreg smiled pityingly, the lines on his face accenting the expression to an excruciating degree.

There wasn’t anything more to be said. As much as Peter wanted to save these people, this world needed to end. However, as much as this world needed to end, Peter wanted to save them. They were worth saving. There had to be a way.

The two of them stayed there for four more days, somehow having wordlessly decided between themselves that they should stay for one week. They would leave the village in the early evening before they ate, and attempt to infiltrate the Militia’s boundary and get back through the door, returning to Earth.

On the day they were going to be leaving, they had been picking fruit with the others, as they had been doing now for most of the week. Peter had been enjoying the simplicity of the days, though he very much missed the presence of coffee, as there was on Earth. There was water, and the fruits they picked, and things that resembled nuts, but nothing resembling coffee, and nothing else containing anything that resembled caffeine. As such, a daily headache visited Peter for around half an hour each morning.

One thing there was, however, which he hadn’t noticed until now, was a strangely familiar- and hardy-looking herb, which grew here and there, scattered around the plains. It seemed impossible that this wasn’t used for one thing or another, though Peter hardly imagined it was likely to be used in Werosain for all the same things as on Earth. As they were walking back toward the village on the last day, he snapped a leaf from it and sniffed it, and then – feeling daring – chewed it. It was definitely what it looked like.

They all arrived back at the village, and once everyone had been relieved of their respective burden, Peter and Atlosreg waited for the appropriate moment to announce that they were leaving.

However, the moment didn’t come. Just as Peter was drawing breath to call to Atlosreg, there was a deafening crash of thunder.

Everything fell silent, though Peter couldn’t tell whether that was the thunder ringing in his ears or everything having simply fallen silent. But that made no sense. Things don’t simply fall silent, other than people, which they had: nobody was talking or moving, and Peter had a distinct feeling that nobody was even breathing.

He looked over at Atlosreg with his mouth still open, having momentarily forgotten to close it when he had been cut off from speaking. Atlosreg looked calm and under control, which was worrying: Atlosreg usually only looked calm and under control when he was having to
remain that way
.

Slowly, he turned round. From the corner of his peripheral vision crept a vast shadow, which at first he thought was an eclipse. But, of course, there was no moon, which meant there must have been something massive casting it.

There was. As he turned, he instinctively reached into his satchel for his wand, and then he noticed that the shadow was being cast by something human. No – something which
looked
human, though it couldn’t be. It looked tall, at least seven and a half feet, and exuded an almost animal atmosphere. At last, he reached the end of the shadow, coming to what was casting it.

It was a man, six feet away. Every inch on him except his eyes was covered with plates of thick, black hide. The hide was covered in scratches. They could have been symbols or some primitive writing: probably spellwork.

At last, Peter’s mind ceased fumbling at loose threads of thought and caught something that gave him some traction. In his moment of realization, he went dizzy and nearly fell down. His heart began to drum the timeless theme of imminent death, and a sudden constricting pain in his gut almost caused him to double over.

It was Rechsdhoubnom. And he was looking straight at Peter.

Peter’s mind cast around for something eloquent to say, but the best thing it could at such short notice was a weak, protracted ‘fuuuuuck,’ which he uttered almost absent-mindedly as their eyes met.

He really did look every bit like a god. His leather plate armour seemed to suck light from the surrounding area, making it appear as though, finally, the sun was going to set. But the sun was directly in front of Peter now, behind Rechsdhoubnom, and it didn’t appear to be going anywhere.

Movement was happening now, which Peter could sense. He had a feeling that everybody who wasn’t frozen in fear and rooted to their spot was creeping away to their houses, abandoning their communal meal, at least for now. Someone stepped up to Peter’s side, their sudden presence making him jump, but then to Peter’s relief it turned out to just be Atlosreg.

‘Peter,’ he whispered. ‘We really should run.’

‘Yes.’ It sounded like the thunder itself was speaking. It came as a passive shock to Peter that Rechsdhoubnom would speak English, but he supposed there wouldn’t be any reason why he shouldn’t be able to. ‘You really should. People from Earth are not welcome here. Not when they exiled me in the first place. They have no place here.’

What. Surely he should be about to kill them, not encouraging them to run away. Peter wasn’t, however, about to start jeopardising any chances of escape by challenging what Rechsdhoubnom had just said.

But then he realized he was paralyzed, and he couldn’t tell if it was through spellwork or simply fear. His perception of reality seemed to be going slightly dim. He carefully and purposefully opened his mouth to speak again. ‘Uuuuuuuh…’

Then the gradual dimming of his senses suddenly sped up, and all was static. It was as though he was being electrocuted; all physical sensation had been forcibly replaced with a dull tingling sensation, all he could hear was white noise, and all he could see was vague, distant, multi-coloured geometric shapes.

His hearing was the first thing to start recovering. The white noise slowly faded away, to be replaced with something which could only be loosely identified as sounding like a jazz band tuning up. The swirling shapes resolved into the shapes of the surrounding plains and hills – or at least appeared to, from his memory of them. But they were in the wrong place, the sky seemed to be too high and the hills to either side of the village were at the wrong angle. He must be on the ground, but he couldn’t feel it.

But then sensation did seem to be slowly returning to him, beginning with the startling realization that he was mid-way through an orgasm. In and of itself it initially felt amazing, and he could hear his own half-ecstatic scream echoing off the hills in the distance. But then, as he remembered exactly what was happening around him and to him, he felt intensely humiliated and violated, infinitely more so than when his mind had been commandeered at that warehouse near Blackpool.

Every spasm made him want to vomit as he attempted to fight it, and then when it subsided he did, realizing as he did that he was sprawled on the ground, with the left side of his face pressed into the cold, dry earth. Vomit trickled half-heartedly out of his mouth and onto his cheek, and he realized that his bowels had just opened as well.

Rechsdhoubnom was laughing.

Peter wanted to die.

But he didn’t. Instead, his senses returned to him fully. He lay there with his eyes closed, trying to close his mind at the same time as trying to decide whether the seizure had been induced by fear, or by spellwork. He eventually decided that he didn’t want to know. He stood up, still feeling weak, and tried to ignore the disgusting sensations being caused by what had just been deposited in his underwear. Atlosreg was looking at him, concerned, but Peter was too ashamed to meet his eyes.

‘Come on,’ he hissed, and gripped Peter’s arm, tugging.

‘Yes.’ Peter could not move.

Atlosreg began to haul Peter upright, and Peter could still hear Rechsdhoubnom laughing slightly. But then, with another tremendous thunderclap, the laughing – and its source – was gone.

Peter swayed on the spot and vomited again.

‘Are you alright to move?’ The firmness in Atlosreg’s voice was, far from being as disconcerting as it usually would have been, something which Peter was relieved to latch onto.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ He started piling spells over both of them: protection and invisibility, speed, stamina, and finally the ability to fly. Even in his humiliated and confused state, Peter was astounded at the last one, and even after they both took off and he started to see the dead, wasted countryside scrolling underneath him, he could barely believe a spell like that could be possible.