Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (21 page)

Sitting down at the table in the secret library a short while later, Peter thought to himself: magic itself was a whole other world to what pathetes knew. So was the island, where everyone from the Guild had had their trials. And then there was Werosain. It was like something Plato had once written, about many worlds in many layers. Like an onion.

The rest of the day was as fruitless as it had been the previous day, and the day before. He went and ate his lunch – and in so doing noticed that nobody was behaving as though they had sent a youngster away to a possible hell for a year – and then returned to the library. That was the only break he took.

It looked, right until the last moment, like he wasn’t going to find anything. But then:

…
person who turned up around 1935 in Oxford, making contact with a number of pathetes. Thankfully there was no incident, but he never sought to join with the Guild or instigate any form of military action.

Peter’s heart stopped. The book was dated only twenty years ago.

He read on, and in a few different books found more references to who was obviously the same person: a Werosaian soldier who, apparently, was called Atlosreg. This was interesting… very interesting. And there were more recent references to him as well, all of which made it seem that he was still alive. It was hard to believe; first that this had happened so recently, and second that Atlosreg would still be alive after so long.

It was getting late, and he knew that too. But he didn’t want to give up, now that he had found something that he could actually pursue; going to bed right now would feel a little like giving up. Conversely, however, he knew he wouldn’t be able to work at anything like his optimum if he was tired from staying up all night. His eyes hurt, and he already felt as though he had stayed up through the night. Reluctantly, he retired.

The next day yielded nothing, much to Peter’s infuriation: having left the book open on the table when he left for bed the previous night, he returned to the secret library after breakfast and reread the page he had left it open on, and then turned it. The text abruptly shifted to some scribbling about the drainage and irrigation of the Guild.

‘Of course,’ he said to the book in disgust. ‘You’re taking the piss out of me.’

He shelved it and looked at the cover of the next book on the shelf. The title was in Runes, and right now he didn’t have the patience to try and tackle Runes. Instead, he sat for a moment and then decided that he should talk to Eddie, see if he knew anything.

It didn’t feel fair that he had to get up so soon after sitting down. Though, he supposed, that was life. He left the library again and briskly walked to Eddie’s office.

Eddie took a moment to let Peter in, and when he did he seemed a little short-tempered – Lucy, he guessed, had left him worried. As she had everyone, even though nobody was outwardly showing it.

‘Peter, that was nearly eighty years ago,’ explained Eddie, once Peter had told him about finding the brief description of Atlosreg. ‘What makes you think that he’ll even be alive now?’

‘Nothing,’ said Peter patiently. ‘Nothing at all. I just want to see if he is.’

Eddie huffed, an exasperated sound which somehow reverberated off the walls of the office back to them.

‘Don’t you think I have enough to think about right now?’

‘I’m not trying to add to your burden.’

‘Pull the other one, Peter.’ He closed his eyes, screwing them up as if in pain. ‘You’re asking if an enemy agent –‘

‘
Defected
enemy agent,’ Peter interrupted.

‘You don’t know that he defected. He might have got injured and not been able to return home. He might have decided to stay long-term to try and find out more about our world from within.’

‘He could have joined the Guild to do that.’

Eddie shook his head. ‘No, he couldn’t. Our induction for former Werosaians is different to how it is for natives of our own world. Part of it involves removing the knowledge of certain magical skills from their minds, so that they can’t contact Werosain or return there, and they don’t have to undergo the island trial.’

‘Maybe he wanted to live as a civilian?’

‘Bollocks, Peter.’

‘Why else would he come to live in this world and not join the Guild?’

Eddie’s hand struck the table, making Peter jump. ‘Fine!’ He shouted. He stood up and located a small file from a collection of similar files on a shelf behind his chair. He slapped it down onto the table, red of face and scalp. He sat and opened it, and read.

‘Atlosreg of Werosain. Recorded to have been first seen in our world, separated from other Werosaian forces on the twenty-second of October, 1935, in Oxford. Arrest by the Guild commuted because no particular threat noted. However, pathete authorities believe him to be mentally deficient.’

There was obviously more on that page, but Eddie flicked to the end of the file.

‘Surveillance continued. Apparently healthy, though mental deterioration is definite. Now in care with suspect dementia.’ He closed the file. ‘That was last year,’ Eddie said. ‘I can’t see what more you might want to know.’

Peter felt his eyebrows raise so high that he was wondering if they might still even be attached to his face. He took a moment to compose himself and said, ‘I want to talk to him.’

‘Out of the question,’ said Eddie, sternly. ‘He isn’t posing a threat
at the moment
, but that might only be because we’ve maintained a strict rule of no contact since he arrived. Yes, we have used magic to… tweak things a little, so that he would be able to, for instance, live in a care home, in relative comfort. But we haven’t ever actually made contact – and nor do we want to.

‘To do so might be incredibly dangerous for everyone.’

Peter laughed. ‘Come on, he must be a hundred years old by now. What danger could he pose that I couldn’t contain, if I needed to?’

‘Eighty years to be cast aside as a madman is a hell of a long time. More time than a lot of people get altogether. You are
crackers
if you think he’s going to be sane at all now, even if you think he might have been to begin with.’

Peter set his jaw. This was going rather less well than he had intended or hoped.

‘What if,’ he said eventually, taking care not to sound insubordinate, ‘it was important to my work?’

Eddie raised an eyebrow.

‘He might be able to tell me things about Werosain – military tactics, how their magic works, hell even their culture – that could help me work out how to better defend us against them.’

Eddie considered. ‘You really don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,’ he said.

‘Neither do you,’ said Peter in an attempt to be humorous.

‘Neither do I,’ Eddie repeated, deadpan. ‘And that’s why I’m being so cautious.’

Peter nodded. He could understand that, of course. A position of caution was obviously a very wise position to adopt, especially when one was acting as a military commander, as Eddie was.

That didn’t stop Peter from finding it infuriating, though. He wanted to find and meet Atlosreg, and to talk to him, see if there was anything he could find out from him.

‘Look,’ Eddie said. ‘Just have a bit of sense. The chance he might be able tell you anything like what you want to know is remote to non-existent.’

‘I know. But, however remote it is, it’s going to be there, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so, but it would take a lot of weeding to get what you want.’

Peter laughed, openly. ‘Remember what I’ve been doing here.’

Eddie looked impatient, but he conceded. ‘True.’

‘So can you please tell me where I can find him?’

‘You just want to talk to a real-life Werosaian, don’t you?’

Peter nodded. ‘Even talking might teach me something about these people. And if he’s old – and in a home – he’s not as likely to pose a threat.’

‘Don’t let age fool you in magicians.’ Eddie said it simply, and then handed the file over. ‘Just bear in mind that if you get in trouble, nobody’s coming to save you. It’s on your head.’

‘I can accept that.’ Peter picked the file up, which he assumed would contain all the details the Guild held on Atlosreg. ‘Thank you.’ He inclined his head in a half-bow, and then left.

Rather than returning to the secret library with the file, Peter went to his own room to read it. As he had expected, it was a full dossier on Atlosreg, including what they knew about his character, and where he had been while he had been in our world. What he had not expected, however, was how
little
detail there was. Mostly, the file consisted of a list of places and dates; which mental institution he had been moved to and when, and later which nursing home – including, at the bottom of the last page, his current place of residence, where he had now lived, without incident, for twelve years.

Excellent, thought Peter. To Oxford I go.

The place Peter was to be looking for Atlosreg was a little to the east of Oxford, but getting there was no more difficult than getting to the University itself: he found out from Eddie the following day how portals were to be set up, which in itself was an interesting bit of magical knowledge.

As it turned out, portals were just as obvious as Peter would have thought they would be: in many magical legends and stories, portals from one place to another were not so much a wormhole, as Peter and anyone else with more than the merest scientific knowledge would have guessed, but paths along a magical substrate or co-dimension. This wasn’t true, however; they were magically-sustained wormholes after all, anchored not to space or time but between solid landmarks. The home-end of the portal, the side which went out from – and back toward – the Guild, was always anchored to the entryway, and the outward-end of the portal was generally anchored to a permanent feature of the place to which the traveller was going: a lamp-post, a gatepost, a particularly long-lived tree.

He sat in the refectory with a bowl of porridge, poring over the file again. There was the address of the nursing home he was at, a broad physical description (
short, stocky, slightly dark-skinned, long black hair, sunken eyes
), and the name under which he had been placed in the home, which was Adam Richards. He amused himself for a moment at the idea of old Guild members trying to come up with an English-sounding name that sounded enough like his original Werosaian one
to be recognizable.

There wasn't much written there about any character traits he might or might not have. But then, he supposed, there wouldn’t be; if he had been in any kind of mad-house, it was more than likely that a lot of his personality could have been drugged or electrocuted out of him.

So, Peter thought, whatever there was to find out about Atlosreg, he would have to find out for himself. That should be fun.

This was a slightly uncountable notion for him, because on every occasion he had done field-work for or with the Guild, some sort of disaster had ensued. He was loath to do it, but in the end the whole point of this was that he knew he had to do a certain amount of legwork, leaving the safe confines of the Guild, from time to time.

So, there wasn’t anything for it now but to actually create the portal and depart. He returned the file to his room for the time being, and then went to the entryway and performed the spell to open the portal. To his slight surprise, it opened perfectly, first time. He stepped through.

He had tagged the outward side of the portal to a tree just around the corner from the home itself, so there wouldn’t be any possibility of anyone inside the building seeing him materialize from nowhere through the window.

As far as missions away from the Guild’s own base was concerned, he thought to himself, this could well be the most profoundly stupid thing he had ever done. Yes, he knew what he would need to do here, but he hadn’t done anything even remotely like it before. There were things here he needed to do which could break the Third Law (
the use of magic to alter another person’s state of mind
... but was it changing their state of mind?) and thus could get him very deep into water so hot that he would be soup before he knew it.

The home was already within sight where he arrived. He hadn’t seen it before, or seen pictures, but when he saw the large red-brick building, there were very few other things it could be.

Slowly strolling closer showed him to be right, when a handful of trees and untrimmed hedges scrolled aside to expose a sign which declared to Peter that it was, indeed, the place he was seeking.

At seeing the sign, he stopped and closed his eyes, bowing his head: anyone looking on might have thought he had stopped to say his prayers, though in reality he was simply calming his mind. This was going to take all the calm he could muster.

One.

Two.

Three.

He walked up boldly from the sign to the what looked like the front door, and knocked with his left hand, concealing his wand up his sleeve with his right.

It took a moment for the door to be opened, revealing a short, not-unattractive brunette of maybe twenty. She was wearing a light blue uniform typical of places like this, which momentarily reminded him of his lack of contact with women for... was it really six years?