Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I (40 page)

When he reached the tomb, the resident field of preternatural force was weaker than it was on Earth; it was an echo or a shadow, without enough force of its own to be of any great threat to him or protection to itself.

His heart was drumming so hard he could feel the arteries in his neck pulsing, and his head throbbing. He even felt it in the bridge of his nose. But there was no going back – and there hadn’t been since leaving Knifestone.

Slowly, concentrating hard, he retrieved the flute from his deerskin satchel, and began to play. The force guarding the tomb gave way with very little effort, the stone door crumbled into non-existence and exposed what lay beyond. He replaced his flute in the satchel, and peered through the black hole of a gap where the stone door had been.

Inside the tomb itself, there was a dark red flame and a blackened skeleton, exactly as there had been in the tomb under the Guild. With no Atlosreg here to prevent him, and no other alternatives presenting themselves to him, he stepped inside.

Immediately, he found himself stricken with a nauseating sensation of being in two places at once, being torn into halves along the seams of his very soul. He fell to one knee, placing his fingertips on the ground to steady himself. He knew he had been right in assuming Rechsdhoubnom would be here; there was a strong presence in the tomb, manifest in the form of a feeling of a mounting level of energy. The feeling grew and grew, bringing with it the echoes of a woman screaming, a young man laughing.

But the echoes were getting louder, as though they were on a tape being played in reverse. The woman’s screaming grew less urgent, and the man whose voice was laughing grew younger and younger, becoming that of a child, and then a baby. When the baby’s voice faded into a foetal silence, the woman’s screaming segued into laughing, which was joined after a few moments by that of another man, similar yet different. More mature.

The voices slowly turned from laughter to sounds indicating something more pleasurable, and when they finally reached their crescendo, they fell into a resounding silence. The mounting energy was gone. Whatever it was that was happening had now happened.

It took a second for Peter to realize what it was, but then he looked up and saw. The woman’s skeleton had broken apart at the hip, the pelvis lying shattered. Behind her stood a man, twice as tall as Peter, clad entirely in pitch black leather armour.

It was Rechsdhoubnom, here in the place where he had profaned the very nature of creation.

Peter’s confidence in his protection faltered for a moment, but then he remembered the small old cygnet ring he was wearing. He kept it at the ready, on the little finger of his right hand.

‘I am here,’ he said, firmly meeting Rechsdhoubnom’s eyes.

He didn’t wait for a response. He drew his wand in a single, fluid motion, and cast an explosively powerful spell, directly upward.

There was a deafening, head-splitting CRACK-ing sound as the tomb was blown apart, and the earth above with it. For a full minute, Peter’s vision consisted entirely of decreasingly dark brown static, reminding him of a noisy signal on an old television.

When the dust began to settle, Peter saw it had worked: he had blown the entire cavern apart, exposing the bottom of the tomb to the deathly light of the Werosaian sun. He looked at Rechsdhoubnom defiantly, and noticed that none of the dust had fallen on him. He looked over himself and saw that not much had fallen on him either.

Rechsdhoubnom began trying to invade Peter’s mind again, throwing disturbing images into it. Peter, however, activated the out-phasing spell he had prepared, before the images could fully form in his head. He laughed and performed a moment’s cocky dance at Rechsdhoubnom. However, he didn’t have time to dance for more than a second or two, because Rechsdhoubnom had hefted a great lump of rubble in his massive hands and thrown it at Peter. The out-phasing spell couldn’t protect him from physical attacks; it only phased him out of reality by a small enough margin to prevent magic from outside the field from getting any traction on him. He rolled out of the way and put Atlosreg’s flying spell on himself, rocketing out of the tomb, up to the remains of the valley above.

Rechsdhoubnom followed, darting through the air like a bird, and when they were both clear of the crater, he launched himself at Peter, flying so fast that the sonic boom he produced nearly knocked him out of the air. Peter deactivated the out-phasing spell and flew back toward Rechsdhoubnom, charging himself with static electricity from the air. As the two of them collided, he gave Rechsdhoubnom a huge shock, making the armour smoke. He followed it immediately with a freezing wind, which whipped them both higher and higher into the air. Rechsdhoubnom responded with a flaming plume of lava from his shaman’s drumstick, which froze upon the wind and fell, breaking apart into so many fragments of pumice as it spun to earth.

Peter dived at the ground, once again activating the out-phasing spell as Rechsdhoubnom began launching bolts of lightning at him. However, the lightning went straight through Peter and struck the ground, leaving huge patches of flaming woodland, and scorching the ground around.

The atmosphere was magnificent, Peter battling against a god. Even though they hadn’t been fighting for more than two minutes, it was clear that Rechsdhoubnom was becoming rather incensed at having been challenged so successfully as he had. He screamed at Peter: ‘you stand no chance!’

‘You are no god!’ Peter replied. ‘And you are
doomed
!’ With that he phased back into reality and barraged lightning of his own at him, along with fire and hailstone. Rechsdhoubnom’s armour, of course, was orders of magnitude stronger than Peter’s, but that wasn’t what Peter was doing: he was attempting to make Rechsdhoubnom lose control of himself and his magic, and forget about the magical power he was wielding.

Just then, a voice appeared in the back of Peter’s mind. It was Atlosreg, using a spell the two of them had developed for this exact purpose: it told him that they had successfully moved all the willing innocents from Werosain to Knifestone – some seven thousand – along with enough seeds and livestock for them to be able to recreate their farms in the cavern under Knifestone. Peter knew it wasn’t Rechsdhoubnom tricking him, because it had been arranged between the two of them that Atlosreg would say it in such a way as only they would be able to comprehend.

Peter took a surge of confidence and strength from this news, and began to attack the Werosaian countryside instead of Rechsdhoubnom. He flew in a vast circle around him, making the land beneath them explode, cratering the continent, cracking it, digging through the craters with new ones, until the crust of the planet broke.

Rechsdhoubnom screamed: his world was being mortally wounded by the mite of a young man who had barged in. He caused a chunk of stone the size of a small island to fly upward, straight at Peter, but Peter saw it coming and darted straight down, smashing into it with a combination of his own magical armour and great speed, shattering it into a cloud of gravel, which ballooned like a puff of smoke, and then started to fall back down into the fiery chasm beneath them, a hail of stone.

Peter threw the same explosive spell at Rechsdhoubnom, who caught it, whole, in his left hand, and flung it behind him at the sky, where it harmlessly careered away into the cold depths of space.

Again and again, Peter cast spell after spell at Rechsdhoubnom, hoping to make him lose his temper, but it wasn’t working. He was dodging Peter’s work, flashing up and down, left and right, circling him. Peter was becoming more and more alert, as though the spells he and Atlosreg had developed were having greater effects on him now he was engaged in genuine combat – which for all he knew, might have been Atlosreg’s intention; his gift, and contribution to this final effort.

One spell missed Rechsdhoubnom and flew straight at the sun, making a dark spot on it that grew into a storm, like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, only much, much larger. The storm raged hard, casting a night-like darkness over Werosain as Peter flew straight up, coursing as high in the thin atmosphere as he could to bombard the sun with more and more explosions. Each spell thrashed into the now-storming sun, until the whole disc was raging with pulsing, undulating spots and flashes of lightning.

Rechsdhoubnom screamed again, the sound of an overgrown child whose favourite toy had just been smashed on the ground. He cast spells up at Peter, but Peter phased out again and dived straight for him, iron-clad fists pointing forward like bullets. He had started from nearly half a mile in the air, and as he shot downward at an acute angle, he caught Rechsdhoubnom in his hands and gripped, arcing and increasing his angle, so as to hit the ground as hard as possible.

He was gripping the massive neck in both his hands, the giant form grappling with him and trying to swat him away with spells and physical swipes. Peter could tell he was beginning to lose hope; every action was becoming more desperate, and as they hit the ground Peter heard and felt a great bone somewhere in the ancient giant break, and a scream of agony issued from him, only to be drowned out by the earth, pressing into and past him.

They were drilling straight downward, through the cool crust of the planet, and when they reached the hot magma Peter let go and zipped straight back up, out, high into the air.

In the time it took Rechsdhoubnom to free himself from the molten rock which was engulfing him, Peter demolished everything of the landscape that he could see from where he was. He was running a remote rampage, smashing an entire world from the air, each spell having the explosive force of an atom bomb.

Rechsdhoubnom emerged, enraged, and threw himself up at Peter again, and Peter flew down to meet him, throwing spell after spell at him. Some hit, some missed, but none did any real damage. Peter laughed again and angled away at the last moment, dropping and changing his angle just above the ground, flying parallel to it, as fast as he could until he reached the sea.

He hovered over the sea and blew a spell with his flute, to transmute every loose piece of rock and earth he could see into the most dangerous thing he could think of to be combined with water. It was a chemical element, one which only existed as isolated atoms on earth. The francium, as the most highly reactive of the alkali metals, began to flare and melt as soon as it had been called into existence, but that was only the beginning of Peter’s intention for it. With some difficulty, Peter picked every scrap within reach up, and fired it at the water, whereupon the whole ocean boiled, almost volcanically throwing vast plumes of flame and steam hundreds of feet into the air.

Rechsdhoubnom roared again in anguish and fury, and flew again for Peter, arms outstretched, preparing to strangle and pommel, finally forsaking his magic.

Peter waited for him, and allowed himself to be plucked from the air. At the last moment, he phased out again and wrestled with the gigantic form of the pseudo-god, wrestled not for his freedom, but for the drumstick. It burned in his hand the moment he touched it, like a stove, but he gripped it hard with his hands, kicking at Rechsdhoubnom. He was this close, he simply
couldn’t
give up. There was no way in heaven or earth – or even Werosain – that he was going to give this up.

He shouted. ‘Give it up, Rexie, you have already lost. You can’t defend Werosain against me, and you can’t repair it, even if you kill me. You’ve fucked yourself!’

Rechsdhoubnom screamed, his voice cracking, and let go of the shaman’s drumstick. He gripped Peter’s chest and began applying pressure, trying to crack his chest and burst him open.

Peter, however, knew now that he had won. They were spinning past the ocean, occasionally getting themselves caught in the flames, until they landed, still wrestling, on the land on the other side.

They crash-landed into the shore, Peter only just having enough breath in him to taunt Rechsdhoubnom one more time as he felt his strength, at last, beginning to wane.

‘You lose, Rexie! I have your drumstick, I have your power, and you have nothing but a burning shell!’

He pointed the drumstick at the ground and fired the same earth-shattering spell at it as he had been using before. However, he hadn’t stopped to think about what effect it would have, casting a spell such as that with the instrument which had, twenty thousand years before, created this world.

The whole planet cracked open, and Rechsdhoubnom instinctively let go of Peter to gain a grip of the chunk of planet he was on. With the whole world breaking apart, gravity began to fail: each cluster of broken rocks drifted about and smashed into others, and the magma from within began to leak out. The world was a broken egg, with its innards spilling out and away.

Rechsdhoubnom was on a separate rock to Peter, who was recovering from the shock of what he had just done, and as the former god tried to jump across from his rock to Peter’s, Peter began to fly again. He only had a very limited time to get from here to where the door back to Knifestone was, before that fragment of the planet drifted too far away for him to be able to find it.

He was dodging from side to side, avoiding flying rocks from the exploding planet which had, until thirty seconds ago, been the world of Werosain, and other rocks which were being hurled at him by the enraged Rechsdhoubnom. The sun was beginning to go out now, its remaining energy spent in the storm Peter had caused, and pretty soon the only light there was to see by was that which was issuing slowly from the globs of magma as they floated from within the former planet’s shell into the once-red sky.