Day Two

Full Memory Accession: Sample 1002

Accession justification:

This accessor must find elements of personal experience and interest in the story-line or become alienated. Some details of accommodation must be altered to allow this – memory sets will be changed in line.

Aspects to be enriched by this accession:

Essential background, character differentiation, martial arts experience, bathing details.

 

Taste exploding in the mouth as the teeth find the umeboshi in an onigri. Sliding into a hot tub in the sento to lie as still as possible as every skin cell screams at the heat. Wasabi singeing the hairs from nostrils and pulling tears to eyes. The feel of tatami through tabi’d feet. Teeth squeaking on hijiki. The other-worldly sound of the koto in that class in Kyoto. Warm, brown umami of miso shiro for breakfast. The crush of the Osaka chikatetsu. Ukemi against the dojo mat.

The view from Kiomizu Dera. Kinkakuji on a winter morning. Hanami on the Tetsugaku no Michi while walking to Nanzenji. Maiko-spotting in Pontocho. Hanabi on a hot summer’s night. Steam rising from a twilight rotenburo. Haru and me in bed on a Sunday morning, lazily kissing and fondling then... Memory redacted - age inappropriate content restrictions.

Musicians’ night in the Cumberland Arms. Andy on fiddle, Mark on Bodhran, Kitty on guitar, me on mandolin, and lovely Alice singing Karine Polwart and Emily Smith songs.

Showing mam how to vacuum to AFI, the greatest vacuuming music ever. Giving the dust bunnies myxomatosis, attacking the carpet till it surrendered. Cooking my first ever meal for friends at uni.

Lindisfarne Christmas concert in the City Hall. How many thousands of us bouncing and singing to ‘The Clear White Light’. Dedicated to the memory of the sainted Alan Hull. Yes Alan, we do believe.

All remembered with a crystal clear, hyper-heightened, fever-dream precision.

 

Phoebe

You know that thing where something happens and you sort of stand there, looking at your own mind trying to work out how you feel about it? I had that the next morning. I woke up in Malaika’s bed, in Malaika’s room. I ran through to the bathroom and checked, and I was still in Malaika’s body. It was either wonderful, ‘cos I really wanted more time here, or a disaster, ‘cos we should be out. Like one of those pictures you look at one way and it’s a vase, but you look at another way and it’s a pair of faces, the whole thing kept changing in my head.

Gramma came in with morning chia for me. When she’d gone I sat on the bed, drinking it and wondering what to do next. Since I couldn’t think of anything, I went to wash and get dressed. I’d have to see Brendan and talk to him.

 

Adam

I wake up at first light every morning like one of Pavlov’s dogs, except not drooling. I woke up that morning in a dormitory of boys who’d all given up consciousness for Lent. No one was even snoring.

This was not our agreement and I was not pleased. I was in two minds about how I should handle it. One approach might be to get out of here, hire someone who was very good at suing for damages, and then go for Sylvester for so much if he only had to sell his kidneys to pay, everyone would call me charitable. The other was to get out of here and go for Sylvester’s kidneys with a knife and remove ‘em freelance. I'm a Brit, remember. We do understatement.

I should have come to in that comfortable pastel coloured room on that comfortable leather couch with Sylvester -that smarmy git- and all his techs around. I should then have started the agreed interviews.

This was either him going back on our agreement, because he wanted some extra experience to show the public, much the preferable option, or some glitch, bug or cock-up. Much the less preferable option, as it might not be easy to fix. Either way I wanted blood. I’d settle for lots of money, though. Mam needed it. Then I’d get back on the zeppelin and head for Japan and Harumi.

The irony of it all was I might easily take up more of my own time arguing the toss then he’d take up in breaking the agreement. We should have been under for only half an hour for the first day. I didn’t know if the night had counted. Even another day of this would only bring us up to the hour. Never mind, I wouldn’t start interviews until this was settled, and he’d lose whatever had to be postponed if he haggled.

The problem, of course, was getting out of here. Sylvester, I hoped, controlled that part. He should be watching, though I was a bit vague about whether he could ‘look’ into this dormitory. I could remember him assuring little Phoebe no one could access scenes of her in a bedroom or bathroom as the system wouldn’t allow it. The nannyware blocked it. Well, it couldn’t hurt, so…

“Sylvester,” I whispered, “If you don’t get me out of this now any interview I do will dwell on the charges of electronic kidnap I’m going to level at you. If you get out of this with your boxers on, I’ll be sorely disappointed. This is not our agreement!”

Nothing, nowt, nada, zen zen nashi. Okay. Outside. I got out of the dorm. Funny how habit rules. I remember I tip-toed my way out so as not to wake anyone, as though it mattered, and stood on the dew-damp grass to repeat what I’d said. Nothing, nowt, nada, zen zen nashi.

Okay. Think it through. Yesterday’s events had taken up about twelve, no, no, had to be more like fifteen hours. Compressed to thirty minutes… Yeah, time would go by about thirty times as fast here. Give him five to ten minutes to decide enough was enough and switch it off. That’d be… hells bells. In the time it took him to decide I was serious and order someone to flip a switch to bring us out I’d have time to get dressed, have breakfast and probably read the first chapter of ‘War and Peace’. This time difference thing could mean his ‘right now’ was my ‘this afternoon’. Well, no point in fretting about it. Shikata ga nai as Haru says. I might as well get ready and have breakfast.

I’d try to see the McLeod girl and perhaps see if the two of us could write a letter together today if we didn’t come out of this place. It wouldn’t be real and I don’t know what a court would think about accepting a DIV of us writing it as evidence, but it might shake Sylvester up and get us out by this world’s tomorrow.

As I headed back to the dorm and my clothes I heard a, “Hello there,” from behind me. It was the Max character from the night before. “You’re up bright and early. Having a look around, are you?” I mumbled some sort of yes. Instinct, I suppose, but I couldn’t stop myself registering that he was bigger than me, much bigger than me.

This was a teenage boy of about 16 or 17, but I only came up to about his chin. All the instinctive cautiousness I’d had the last time that was true was back again. He might have still been a kid, but he was a big kid and I wasn’t and you don’t argue with them.

Thinking about it, that was probably a useful instinct. A better one than telling him he was just a character in a book and didn’t really exist, so bog off as I was busy composing a letter of complaint to the marketing director of a major entertainment company in another world.

Getting yourself thrown into a virtual loony-bin probably doesn’t feel any better than getting thrown into a real one, and I’m sure that’s what would’ve happened if I’d delivered that particular speech. Did the men in white coats here just turn you into a teapot and stack you on the shelves? On reflection, it wasn’t a question I wanted an answer to.

“You’re Brendan, aren’t you?” he asked. I nearly corrected him, but then remembered I wasn’t Adam here. I just nodded. “I’m Max,” he said and stuck out a hand for me to shake. “I’m not great at names,” he continued, “but a lot of people noticed you yesterday, and those that didn’t got you pointed out to them last night. You’re going to be a bit famous here. If you get too much stick about it, well, try to sort it yourself, but don’t worry that you’re telling tales if you can’t.

This cohort’s Malaika’s responsibility, but my job’s to make sure she never has to bother herself with the boys much. If anyone gets out of line, I chew the odd ball off and put ‘em back on track. I’ll give you all the speech later about how much I hate bullies and how little respect I have for those that let ‘em get away with it, ‘cos they don’t want to be seen as cry-babies. Just remember it’s all true.”

Sylvester had given us only a little information on the modelling process they’d used to generate characters for the Land’s dramatis personae, but I decided I’d have got on with the one they’d used for this guy. What stood before me was a blond-haired, blue-eyed bloke, who looked like my image of a fly half - lean and built for speed. For all I knew, they’d got the personality off an obese Chinese who loved nothing so much as playing on-line games all day. He’d meant his speech about bullies, though, and had said it without sounding po-faced. He wouldn’t look for excuses to chin little kids and wouldn’t take pleasure in coming down hard on anyone who was going off the rails, but he’d do it just the same because it’d be the right thing to do. I told him thanks and we went back to the dorm to wake the others.

 

Max

I bounced out of bed really early that morning. I suppose ‘cos I knew I was starting work with the new cohort. I’d slept well and didn’t feel too tired after the Initiation, but I’d woken up early and couldn’t get back to sleep. My first ever assistant leader position. I hadn’t really talked with anyone about it, but I was a bit nervous. There are a lot of chances for things to go wrong working with a crowd of young kids, and some of them can be ‘cos you screw up. I didn’t want to do that anyway, but even less so with Malaika as leader.

Ok, cards on the table. There couldn’t be any chance – I knew that. She was older than me and hung out with a crowd her own age. Anything I could do, she could do better, and I knew my razor sharp wit, the one I might use to dazzle her with, wasn’t razor sharp and wouldn’t dazzle. All that’s logical thinking - when you’re smitten, you’re smitten.

Anyway, I grabbed something quick to eat and wandered over to the boys’ dorm block to wake ‘em up. That’s when I ran into young Brendan. Well, anyone could see the Potential in him, except him and his mates, of course. I didn’t really start noticing it on anyone else ‘til my second year here when Seekers came through. You could just see some’d got more than others. Once I’d got the hang of it I could see it better on other people round me. Obviously, the Elders had lots of it, but that’d been so obvious you didn’t know that it was what you saw on ‘em.

When I talked to him, though, he was just a normal little kid, bit strung out on everything that’d happened to him since he came through the Gate, bit unsure about talking about stuff. He was obviously happier for having someone older take an interest and just to know he had someone to talk to if he needed it. Made my day start better, feeling I was responsible for that.

 

Phoebe

At breakfast, Aki and Daniel were doing that ‘Oh, we-are-always-together-are-we?-what-a-coincidence’, stuff, but it couldn’t have been more obvious they were a couple if someone’d sewn them up at the hips.

Xianjin would have already gone to get the girls up and Max would’ve done the same with the boys, so I knew I’d have some time to have breakfast and relax. In the book, the cohort started off with weapons training and scrying classes, and I knew who did those and where they did them, but I didn’t know how everybody knew what the timetable was. I s’pose that sort of detail wasn’t needed in the books, so it wasn’t there where I could read it, and it never came up on the quiz.

I shouldn’t have worried. Senior Llewellyn came over to talk to me about it and gave me a timetable, handwritten on paper with what looked like ink. It had me down for History of the Land. Well, it is my specialist subject, after all. There was even a booklet suggesting what areas I should cover in each session with extra notes on bits I’d need help with, ‘cos the books’d never gone into detail about some things. It’d be pretty easy to remember the stuff and I am very interested in it. I just hoped I wouldn’t come over like a student teacher.

In the books Malaika was always much more involved in the war games and leading the cohort, so, though everyone knows she does some teaching, it’s never clear what it is she does, y’know? Sara used to think it was a lot of one-on-one combat training. I wouldn’t be any use at that at all. She also did a lot of scrying, but I wouldn’t be any better at that. Luckily, I didn’t have to teach it. No, I decided I had a chance of getting away with a few days of this. After breakfast I headed out to find my cohort.

 

Adam

Miya and her friend were at a table already full of girls, so I sat down for breakfast at a half-full table of lads. I noticed the hall had split by sex as neatly as if someone’d taken a ruler to it. Figured. Yesterday they’d largely sat beside the people from the same boats, today they’d come from dormitories.

The girls were all older, taller and physically more mature than the boys, which, just now, included me. This lot could pass for three years older with a touch of makeup on in most cases, and without trying in some. I deal with this at school every day, but then I’m the adult who’s travelled around the world. A few of them know I’ve got a Japanese girlfriend, having seen Harumi and me in the park one time.

Actually, thinking about it, I wouldn’t like to be the girl in my school who hadn’t been told that piece of gossip. She’d have to have no friends at all. Here, I was just another little boy and would get trampled in the rush to reach a year eleven, school football team member or bloke with a car. Well, scratch car and substitute horse… or thing with six legs… you’ve got the picture.

It turned out I was on the same table as Lewis from the boat the day before. He’d met his obvious soul mate in a kid called Lucas. They’d been the pyjama burners of the night before, a story they were still in hysterics about. They must have been written in as the comic relief- bog-standard gravediggers.

“Hey, Bren,” called Lewis, “You’re well in with Miya and Jade, aren’t you? Can you get any of us fixed up?” I think I was about to tell him I couldn’t get the devil to offer him snow-boarding lessons if hell froze over, when Lucas piped up.

“Oh, she’s here, I think I’m in love.”

Lewis looked where he was looking and muttered, “Well, if you’re in love you can give her flowers, but I know what…” When a brittle, over-cheerful voice behind me said, “Brendan, how are you?”

I turned round and saw one of the only faces here I knew for certain I should have seen before and remembered – she was gorgeous and gorgeous is easy to remember. I knew you couldn’t have gone to a cinema for the last ten years without at some time seeing progressively older versions of that face in the foyers (which must have been where I’d seen the other familiar faces too). But I was seeing it as for the first time today.

Now I could imagine myself forgetting the faces of the others, but I’m not built to forget ones that looked like hers. The only one I must have seen more often had looked out at me when I cleaned my teeth that morning. It’d been odd not to have to shave, but odder to be looking at someone that wasn’t me. I’m good at faces, but the one I was seeing and the one I was wearing weren’t more than just vaguely familiar. How did that one come about? Being made to forget?

There was something wrong with the picture though. Looking at her was like looking at a ten-year-old driving a Ferrari. Whoever it was had played Malaika had been at home in her skin; I didn’t need to have watched one of her films to know that. She’d been gorgeous all her life, had known it, and had been able to use it. She had a body built for speed and she’d been Formula One at driving it.

The person in front of me managed to give an impression she should have been wearing L plates. There was awkwardness like the crashing of a manual gearbox in an antique car. I thought I could guess why.

I’d no idea of the protocol of this place, but then it occurred to me I wouldn’t anyway; I was new here, wasn’t I? I stood, twisted around against the chair and, for the hell of it, gave her the bow I give to the headmaster at my school: “Senior.”

Out of the edge of one eye, I could see her perking up at this. She hadn’t been expecting to be treated so respectfully, and she liked it. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see Lewis elbowing Lucas and mouthing ‘bow’. They both stood up and did the same.

Viral, wasn’t it? The rest of the lads on our table rose to their feet, looking as if they’d just been caught out being rude, bowed and muttered, “Senior”, deferentially, and, before you could say ‘Oy, you lot!’ our cohort was all up doing it as well. I hadn’t expected that to happen, but it clearly did her good. Radiantly happy people always look beautiful (and she did anyway), but the smile she gave to our table dazzled the lot of ‘em. I knew they’d bow every time they saw her as surely as I know I don’t take sugar in tea.

Respect was being given; and she worked out how to take the handbrake off. She waved them all down and asked if I could come outside to talk. Naturally, I said yes and followed her to the door. On the way we passed the table where a puzzled, Chinese-looking teenage girl in seniors’ clothing was sitting. I thought I’d seen her the night before. The girl next to her was asking a question and I just caught her reply, “Well, it seems to be now.” I thought I could guess the question, though I couldn’t believe the accent.

Outside the hall Malaika turned quickly and I nearly walked into her. “You’re Adam Ward, aren’t you?” she whispered. I hate to admit it, but my eyes were level with her cleavage (she really needed to learn how to wrap that top – or was that bit deliberate?) and, for a second, there wasn’t another thought in my mind. I beckoned her out of the way of the door while I got my mind back on track and we moved over to a small bench where I sat and gestured her to do the same.

From the bench I got a quick look at the courtyard that I hadn’t seen last night or registered properly this morning. Pretty. Fruit trees as standards in the middle and espaliered around the walls. Raised flower beds, stone benches and fountains with water doing things that the laws of physics usually say it can’t – taking the shapes of dragons and dancing girls.

“Yes, I’m Adam. You’re Phoebe.” I really didn’t need to make that a question. I’d expected Sylvester would put her into one of the other Seekers. Was this what some focus group had suggested would sell well to the fantasies of teenage girls? Play our game and you too can look like a bikini model?

“What’s happened to us? Why are we still here?”

Direct anyway.

“Your guess is as good as mine. If Sylvester is doing this deliberately, I swear I’m going to sue. Maybe even if he isn’t. I don’t know any way of communicating that to him except to say it often. He can’t edit out all of the times I do without leaving gaps in the footage. So there’s proof I don’t agree to this. I’d advise you to do the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“Say out loud you want to leave the simulation, you didn’t agree to stay here more than a day and this breaches our agreement.”

“But what if this isn’t deliberate?”

“He told us they’d had over a thousand people connected to the system while they did the patterning process and uploaded the characters. This thing is supposed to be guaranteed safe. One thousand per cent plus guaranteed safe. It’s far more likely he’s decided he can get away with keeping us in here longer to get something more spectacular to show in the ads.”

“But how does he think he’ll get away with it? My dad’s there watching. He’ll stop them when the time’s up.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know yet. Sylvester told me the commercial version would be set to a lower resolution and would compress up to five minutes for a day. If they’ve done that to us, they could fit in a week or more and your dad could still be drinking tea and thinking nothing wrong.”

“Do you think he wants us to play the game?”

“That’d be insane, illegal and reason to lock him up and throw the key into an active volcano. He’s probably going to claim the shut-down took longer than expected for some technical reason, and we were stuck in here for only a few extra minutes, so where’s the harm?”

I didn’t add I hadn’t thought of that possibility, and I wanted to convince myself it wasn’t one. It scared me; to be honest, it scared me deeply. For reasons I couldn’t get clear, it felt like something Sylvester would do, even if I couldn’t see any way for him to pretend it was legal.

I hadn’t liked the man at all. I’d seen the new generation androids Sony’d brought out on display in Kyoto. None of them could match the behaviour of the 'people' here – not enough processing power and none of the memories- but all of them had more personality than the mandroid Sylvester was. A total corporate robot, he was. He’d do it. I just knew he would.

“Well, maybe that’s right.” she said, “Maybe we’ll just stay in here for a bit longer and then get out. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“Look, I know you are into this stuff, and yes, it’s a trip, it’s fascinating and there are things about it I’d like to study. But some other time. I have a life to get back to as soon as I get through all of the publicity stuff he has lined up. I agreed to take two weeks for this and not a day longer. He can argue these ‘days’ are only really half an hour, or even only five minutes long, but that’s not how we experience them. I don’t want to spend weeks in here and then start spending weeks out there in interviews and promotions. I want to go back to my girlfriend and my job in Japan. I don’t want to stay here any longer than I need to.”

“Okay, but what should we do while we are here?”

“Well, you know the stories, don’t you? You won that competition. If anyone can live in this world it’s you.”

“I know the stories, but I’m not Malaika. I know what she does, but I don’t know how to do it.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much. There must be some leeway the system has for people coming in here and playing characters like you. Things we do’ll probably work out. Otherwise it’d just be a big test of memory. It’d have to allow you to just live it, or everyone would fail and give up playing. I think so anyway. Delegate as much as you can to those two in there and they’ll make it work for you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Look, I’ve never seen the headmaster teach a lesson at my school. He runs the place by telling the rest of us what to do and we make it all happen. That’s how it works.”

“But what happens if we do have to play the game?”

I could have wished she wouldn’t keep harping on about that possibility. Somehow the idea that it was preying on her mind just made it much more possible to me, too.

“Well, in that case, you advise me, we do the right things, and we win. End of story, right?”

“But I don’t know how it ends! No one knows how it ends! Or did he tell you?”

Okay, time for my guilty secret. Ironic I should be telling it to this girl in this place, but there you go.

“I’ve no idea about anything in this world. I’ve never read any of the books. I don’t know anything about the story. Nothing at all.”

The look on her face was one of complete confusion. Just at that moment though, the two other seniors came out. I said, “I need to finish my breakfast, senior,” dropped her another respectful bow and ran back inside.

 

 

Phoebe

That guy was tres mecha freak, but mecha! I mean, some things he did were cho cool, like the bowing thing and getting everyone else to do the same. And that business of moving us out of the way of the door before he started talking, which I didn’t think of at all. Far away sensible. Even the whole thing about threatening to sue Sylvester was sensible, I s’pose. He looked like he’d thought it all out and it was good someone who could think like that was there with me.

To be honest though, I really wanted to stay for longer. It’d be better to be an ordinary Apprentice, but even as Malaika. A full week of this for me’d be about half a day for my dad, maybe not even that. I could stay away for that long no worries. He wouldn’t have even had time to miss me. Even a fortnight wouldn’t be a probby. To be honest, I don’t know why Sylvester hadn’t planned the whole thing that way from the start. A fortnight’d be like a real holiday, the full BB house. A day was just zipped. Maybe he, Adam, had complained about it though and that’s why we just had the day.

That bit at the end was just freak. Why’d he tell me he didn’t know anything about the books and the stories? Kids who can’t even read Interspel have watched the DIVs and know what happens. Well, more or less (the stories got simplified a bit to fit them into the DIVs). Okay, I am an expert. I did win the competition, but he’d have to know stuff about the stories I never would, innit?

I couldn’t think about this just then, though 'cos Xianjin and Max came out. “Hey Lai, what’s all this bowing stuff about? Do we have to do that too?” asked Jinnie. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, my Nan back in Cardiff would love it, but I haven’t seen anything like it since she took me to her Tai Chi class.”

I shrugged. “It’s that kid who started it, not me. But it’s (they don’t say ‘cho’, they don’t say ‘cho’) cool when they do it to us, innit?”(Did they say that? It looked like they did. They didn’t look confused.)

“Hey but, can you two get them down to the field for weapons practice with Jake when the hour sounds?” They both gave me yeahs and went back into the hall to sort the cohort out. This delegation thing looked like it could work. I headed down towards the field so I could be there when they arrived and not here to have to get them moving.

 

Xianjin

One look at Max looking at her and you knew. He’d got it so bad. Sorry for him really I was. I mean, I didn’t know her well, but she’s the sort that could have her pick and I’d taken her for being picky. Reckoned he was going to get bounced hard, poor lad. Mind on that first morning she wasn’t herself. I could guess she had the painters in, but it was more than just that. A bit vulnerable, she was.

 

Adam

I went back into the hall and stuffed the rest of my breakfast down my neck. I was already regretting telling Phoebe about the books. Now I’d have to get her to promise she wouldn’t say anything when we got out. Bugger.

A bell tolled outside and the seniors came back in to get us all to line up and file out and go down to a field. Communication wasn’t great here and I didn’t have a clue what we were supposed to be doing.

When we arrived, other groups were practising what looked like various styles of martial arts. That looked a bit more like it. Lined up in front of us were a set of straw bales with pumpkin heads set up on poles.

Even as we got there I could see the Yorkshire man from the walk yesterday, talking to… I’d better get used to calling her Malaika; otherwise I’d use the wrong name at some point. He told us to sit down and not fidget.

How to describe him? He wasn’t an angry person, just very intense, but it worked out the same way – I didn’t think anyone would try to find out what would happen to fidgetters.

“When you’ve mastered the skills we teach here, you should be able to project your own energy in ways you can use to defend yourself.” He began. “Like this.”

He spun and slashed out at one of the straw dummies. It sliced in half along the diagonal as if cut by a sword.

“Or this.” He spun the other way and pushed a palm towards the dummy on the other end of the line. It shuddered visibly as if shoulder-charged by someone big.

“Or.” He did some gesture and a ball of flame shot from his hand and covered the dummy. He turned back to us, opened his mouth as if to speak and then turned back to the dummy, blew at it as you would a candle and put the flames out.

The cohort was gobsmacked; mouths hanging open all around. For myself, well, I’ve seen Kunetsuka Sensei do things that impressed me as much without having a quantum computer to put in the special effects.

“Now, before you reach that stage, you’ll find it useful if you’ve some object that allows you to focus and direct energies through. The traditional wizard’s wand is one you’ll practice with. Later.”

He drew one from his sleeve. “Its chief advantage is it’s light, which is important if you’re going to carry it all day, and easily hidden. Make no mistake though – it’s not a magical thing in its own right. The power comes from you. I’ve seen young Mages use twigs they plucked from trees as wands. So long as you don’t try to use Rowan wood, and so long as you can think of it as a focus, anything wooden’ll work. Mind, I’d leave your mam’s rolling pin at home or she’ll likely clip your ear for you.”

There were a few laughs, but I think they were being kind.

“The chief disadvantage, for you, at present, is it’s just a small piece of wood. You can’t yet do this…” He turned again to the dummies and blasted one clear out of the ground by flicking the wand at it. “And if you can’t, then a wand’s nowt more than a pencil you can’t even use to write angry letters with. Therefore, we begin our training with the staff. Chuck me that one, would you Max?”

The thing Max threw over to him looked like a broomstick, without the broom bit on the end. This looked interesting. Despite myself, I wanted to see what happened next.

“It’s a big bit of wood. No more useful for magic than a little bit of wood, however, it can do this…”

Again the swing, but this time he faced the dummy with the staff held like a snooker cue and stabbed it forwards in honte tsuki as he lunged. The dummy shook violently and dust rose again. Without pause, he back-stepped, side-stepped, changed his grip on the staff and swung it down like a sword against the side of the pumpkin head on the next dummy – naname uchi. The pumpkin exploded, but the pieces hadn’t all made it to the ground before he’d swirled, side-stepped round to stand in front of the next dummy and stabbed the staff backwards to hit it so hard it canted over at an angle – ushiro tsuki. Text book execution. Very neat. He turned back to us and the dummy slowly tilted and fell. Hub-cap-from-the-exploding-car syndrome. That dummy had watched too many films.

There’d been winces from kids around me when those blows went home, and I wasn’t sure they hadn’t been more impressed by the jo than the fire. Magic was magic, after all, and they couldn’t do that, but hitting things with sticks...

Jacob moved like a ballet dancer with a licence to kill. Those steps had flowed from one to the other, and, although he’d clearly hit the dummies hard enough to have broken bones, he hadn’t put a lot of effort into it – the staff had done most of the work.

“It’s not magic. It’s physics. Wood and muscle and correct movement and…”he nodded towards the dummies, “pain. Enough pain and your opponent won’t know or care you didn’t use magic on ‘em. They’ll be too busy suffering. Vere can be seen off with a well-used staff by a Duergar that doesn’t get charmed, and whatever you might have heard about chain mail and axes, they haven’t all got 'em.”

There were at least two questions in that last sentence I thought I’d have to ask someone about. No one else seemed puzzled though.

“Now, what we’ll begin teaching you today is a set of basic moves. These moves’ll prepare you for the next level. They’ll also help you start to feel energy moving. Without that feeling it’ll be hard for you to begin to project your own energies as magic. You’ll work under these seniors,” he nodded to a group of teens in dark grey that included Max and Xianjin, “They’ll teach you parts of the 31-step exercise that you’ll be working on this week and next. After a while we’ll put you onto sparring with staves that are specially adapted for it.”

He scanned us all with that intense look of his.

“I do hope you noticed I said ‘After a while’. A well-used staff can break a rib, or a leg, or a skull. So can a badly used one. You pay attention to the safety rules your senior teaches you and you remember - anyone playing silly buggers becomes my next assistant when I need to demonstrate on someone as can move – at least until I’ve finished the demonstration. That’s not a threat mind. It’s a promise. And it’s easy to check if I’m telling the truth. Think on it.”

How had I not known his Mages practiced with the jo? Had there been some photo somewhere showing this I’d missed? And how come no one’d ever mentioned this to me when they’d seen me with one later? Haru had never said anything about it and she’d know. Was it only here they did this, or had it appeared in one of the DIVs? Never mind. I’d talk about this with Phoe…Malaika later. For now I could have some fun. I’d have read his books if I’d known about this, just to see how much he knew, though surely he hadn’t known anything.

The seniors split us into groups of ten, sorted us out with a staff each and shifted us around the field so we were well spaced out from other groups. I noticed two things at about the same time This cohort was fifty strong and it didn’t include the girl I’d called a moo yesterday. Not a thing I was going to quibble about. The number hung in my head for a second, though. There was something about it.

Then the girl who was taking our group introduced herself as Aliya. Central Asian face, something like Russian in the accent. The original owners of all of these faces had to have been actresses, and they hadn’t been selected for ugliness, but Aliya was striking. She explained about spacing to ensure you couldn’t get hit by a staff that slipped out of a hand and repeated the warning about playing around with the staves.

For the next two hours, with breaks only to drink water, we did warm-up exercises, stretched and stepped through the moves of the drill. I could have done it in my sleep if the truth be told, but I tried not to make that obvious. Instinct again, but I just didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I’d probably get out of this place at the end of this day, so why bother?

Aliya did compliment me on the smoothness of my movements, though I’d been watching the others in the group and they were picking this up very quickly, with few of the mistakes a normal group makes when they first meet the jo. Were they programmed to learn at around the speed of the real player, I wondered? Aliya herself, or whatever was directing her, knew her stuff. Her own movements had a fluidity suggesting a lot of practice. A few of the moves she did at an extremely slow speed, like Tai Chi, and at that speed you see the rough bits better. She didn’t have any.

At the end of the two hours we had a toilet break. I went to a thing that looked like a barn, but was again one of the clean, un-modern facilities that I’d seen in the city inn. It was screened behind a small stand of trees. As I was walking back, but before I came into sight of the others, a staff prodded into my kidneys. Just enough to let me know it wasn’t an accident, but not enough to call it a blow. “Well, well,” came a distinctly Geordie voice from behind me. “It’s our twinkly, twinkly little Paddy star, isn’t it? What’s the name again little star? Brendumn? Or was it Brenda?”

Anyone who has ever walked into a school playground could write the script for this, I thought, as I pivoted around and yes, there they were, made to order. Three of them. Older than Brendan by about two years, maybe three. Standard issue bullies. A cliché, perhaps, but I’d been duffed up by a gang like this once in real life.

They usually come in one of two patterns. It’s either the shrimp with the brains backed up by two obvious thugs with only the muscles, or, as in this case, a muscular thug with brains backed up by two other obvious thugs with even more muscles. Bullies who don’t come in threes probably can’t manage arithmetic.

I hadn’t had time to run an I.Q. test on them, but they didn’t look like Nobel Prize candidates. Mind, that might have just been me being prejudiced. I was the one who was going to get humiliated or thumped here.

Three against one and the one younger and not as well trained with the staff each of us was carrying – this crew had no intention of being brave. Fair enough, but I was going to write the script this time. There were three other boys coming up behind the bullies. They hadn’t seen anything yet, but they could take part in my play.

“Hey lads? Do you want to try some advanced practice with this crowd?”

Nothing strange there for them, just some older students going to show us some tricks. They were up for it. My merry crew of thugs were a bit unsure now. This could be just a way of getting witnesses, in which case I was smart and they’d have to put off the intimidation. They weren’t sure, though, you could see.

“You make a ring around me about this wide.”

I held out the staff at maximum length and made a circle. They formed up while I turned slowly. I finished facing towards the middle of the thugs, with the extras behind me. They shouldn’t be any threat and I’d no plans to touch them.

“Okay, now it’s six against one, you can attack any time you are…”

Ready was what I didn’t want them to be. Thug number one got honte tsuki in the solar plexus, just hard enough to take the wind out of him. He folded up like origami and dropped to his knees. Step the right foot to the right, slide the left foot forward, swing the body round and deliver gedan barai, a sweeping blow, against the thigh of thug number two. He now had a dead leg and was hopping on the other one. I stepped forward and shouldered him off both of them.

One to go, but by now he’d had time to wake up. I reversed the grip on the staff, raised it like a sword and, yes, he went for it, and raised his own staff to ward off the blow to the head. Which I didn’t make. As his jo came down I did uke nagashi tsuki, parrying his down-strike, side-stepping to get out of line, and striking at his inner thigh. Too ambitious. I missed the thigh, so followed through by using the staff as a lever to take his leg out from under him in sukui otoshi. He went down backwards and landed heavily, knocking the wind out of himself. Done. And he wouldn’t call me Brenda again in a hurry.

I turned to the other three, about to thank them for their help. The two on the ends were shocked and motionless, scared numb by what they’d just witnessed. Made sense I suppose. I’d just knocked seven shades of good for the roses out of the bigger lads, what might I be about to do to them? The wiry, Indian-looking kid in the middle, however, was very pissed off.

He launched himself towards me with the obvious intention of putting some of my teeth in the corner pocket. I parried the thrust while moving aside and back and tried to tell him whoa.

He swung the staff like a cricket bat for my head. Again, not too difficult to parry, but I didn’t want to fight this kid. I was trying again to tell him to stop the demonstration of his sporting prowess, while he was trying to hit me in the crotch with a golf swing, when a voice snapped out.

“Quit that!”

I could say I obeyed the order, but to be honest, I didn’t have a choice. Every muscle in my body locked for a second and I couldn’t move. The cramp faded away as fast as it’d come on, but both of us had stopped fighting. We turned to look at the source of the voice. Jacob. Standing by a tree, the look on his face that same intense expression that got attention.

“You.” He snapped, looking at me. “Stop here, I want to talk to you. You three,” this to the younger ones, “Back to your group, I may want you later. And you lot,” this to the gang, who were picking themselves off the ground. “Hall. And wait for me.”

No one said a word, but moved off as quickly as they could. I stood thinking about how to describe my situation. The only word I could think of without four letters in it was ‘bad’, and that just didn’t cover it at all. I thought I’d just passed the audition for a starring role as a carpet about to get spring cleaned.

Jacob waited till the others were out of sight and then a few heartbeats longer to let them get out of earshot too. How to explain this one to him? Before I came up with an answer, or just admitted there wasn’t one, he spoke.

“Young Hadaway and his mates are known to me. ‘Nowt overt out of ‘em for a while, but still I tend to keep an eye on them. I can see which way those branches are growing, as it were, and they need training in a better direction. Now, what I just saw there was interesting. You knocked the snot out of those three, but you didn’t do ‘em as much damage as you could‘ve done, that was clear.

Young Hatim too. Has a very good fighting spirit and attacks right well, but he’s no idea of defence. You do. You were blocking him and not even trying, but you didn’t put him down like the others. Suggests to me you were facing six and fighting three and you’d reason for it. Like to share it with me?”

“I could read Hadaway and his friends like a road sign. They were ready for me to have a go straight away if I didn’t just wimp out and let them push me around. So I invited the others in to distract them. They weren’t ready for that, so I caught them off guard. They’ll think twice before they try again. On anybody, I hope, not just on me.”

He nodded. I’d never play poker against this man, his face might as well have been cast in concrete for all the information it gave out.

“I didn’t see any of that level of skill on the field before. Where’d you learn it and why didn’t you let on?”

“I’ve studied Aikido for a few years now with a really good teacher. He takes us through the drills with the jo and the boken. I didn’t want to show off in front of the others after yesterday.”

That was all close enough to the truth. I’d seen my teacher, Kunetsuka sensei, take on six black belts armed with jos when he had nothing. He took them apart. They weren’t trying to kill him, granted, but they were serious about the attacks they launched; mostly because they were pretty sure none of them would land. He’d had us sparing with weapons for over a year.

“If you were old enough to look the part, I’d have you teaching your mates as of now. When word gets out about this we may be able to do it anyway. We’ll see about making time for you to work out with some of the seniors, save you wasting your time on the knees-bend-arms-stretch stuff.” He paused again.

“Max given you the speech about bullying yet?”

I nodded.

“Tell him what went on here. You won’t likely see or hear anything after it, but he’ll have words with those that might think about testing out the newest gunslinger, if you know what I mean. Once he’s spoken to them, they won’t. Can you talk to those lads from your cohort and sort things out with them? Make sure that there’s no misunderstandings or hard feelings? Or do you want me to?”

“I think I can handle it, but if it doesn’t work out I’ll tell you.”

“Grand. Get yourself back to the practice then. I’m off for a slash.”

I walked back confused. There was too much here I didn’t really understand and I wanted to talk with Haru about. She was good at this stuff. Where did characters like Jacob come from? Surely not out of his mind. He wasn’t like any of the people here – I was ready to like them. Though the fact it was Mark Hadaway who was the villain was just like him. It’d nearly wrecked our friendship when he did that. Luckily, that lad didn’t look anything like the real Mark. I was going to have to talk with Phoe… with Malaika. I needed some clues.

But I wondered. Was it ok to duff up the bullies here? They were written like that. They didn't have a choice in the matter. Yes, I decided. If the alternative was me copping it, it was.

Bugger!

 

Phoebe

I was a bit worried when I got to the field. There was nothing I’d ever read or seen about Malaika teaching weapons to her cohort as one of the seniors assisting Jake, but there was nothing about her not doing it either. I’d watched them all in the bits where they were fighting and training with staves in the DIVs, but I didn’t have a iddy how they did it. I was trying to think of ways round it when Jake came over to talk to me.

“Morning Lai, feeling well today?”

“Yes, thanks. How are you?”

“Oh, normal for a day after Initiation, lass. Throat like the newspaper on the bottom of a parrot’s cage, head like a smashed peach and bladder like a water balloon that’s just been thrown from top of Hall and is eying up the gravel. When’ll you learn I always answer that question, eh? Stop me before I start talking about me rupture, though, would you? That makes even me grit me teeth.

Anyhow, what I really wanted to talk to you about is young Earle. Niall has a feeling about him and wants him watched and that right careful. You won’t have had time to scry owt yet, but it’ll be appreciated if you can tell me if you see any trouble looming.”

I nearly told him it was on page 87. Brendan gets into a fight and it’s only Hatim arriving that stops him getting badly hurt ‘cos he doesn’t know when to stop.

Instead I said, “There’s going to be trouble with Hadaway and his gang. Mark resents Brendan from the minute he hears about the light of the Chosen and they get on badly. There’ll be a fight with staves today at the break.”

He looked straight at me for a second, then nodded.

“I wish they had you working for the weather forecast on the BBC Lai. My holidays would be so much smoother. I’ve been watching Hadaway’s lot every way short of scrying since the last thing and seen nowt. I’ll watch ‘em harder today. Meanwhile, can you get up to see Kayley? She’s asked that you help out with the scrying lessons and wants to talk about it.”

I said okay and headed back to the Hall. That probably meant I’d just saved Brendan from getting beaten up. That isn’t how the story is supposed to go, but Bren… Adam, would be happier not to get hit with sticks, mecha sure, innit?

 

Jacob

There was sommat wrong with the incidents at the weapons training. Every part of ‘em. The lad was just too good. I dunno about this Aikido lark, but he took out the three others as if he’d been doing it all his life. And that just didn’t look eleven years old. Sommat didn’t sound eleven when I talked with him too.

Lai was odd an all. Couldn’t put me finger on it, but there was sommat not right there. I’d a feeling she wasn't normally like that, but then couldn’t think how she was different. Couldn’t think how any of it was bad though, so I put it down to being the morning after the Initiation.

A lad that could fight like that would be a real bonus for his cohort. And it argued for more than just the Potential we’d seen in him. You still have to train young Mages to feel the energies flowing though them. One that was working at that level already, would likely take to the training fast.

 

Phoebe

Kayley didn’t really want to talk about the scrying lessons. She just needed some help unpacking the crystals and to gossip about the new Chosen of the Land in my cohort. The conversation came straight out of the book and I was word perfect on it, ‘til we got to the subject of Brendan. Then it went all freak.

I was telling her exactly what Malaika does say – it’s in Book One, but they weren’t in the scrying room - while I unwrapped cloth from a crystal ball. We’d already done about ten of them– it wasn’t hard, but they were well wrapped, so it took time.

This one, but, felt warm in my hand and sort of tingled. When I got it out I looked at it. And somehow I couldn’t look away. It clouded up and I began to see… it’s hard to explain.

Some of them were images, but I knew the things I saw weren’t the things I was supposed to see. They were sort of symbols of them. There were colours, but they were just giving me the moods I needed to have. You need to do it to know what it's like. Kayley saw what was happening. “What is it child? What do you see?”

“Something has started. There will be… not war, not yet, but fighting. It… Something…He… He needs to grow and he needs to confuse and weaken us. The Vere are spreading and all of his allies are preparing to try their strength. Brendan and I are targets. He’ll strike against us, especially Brendan. He has a great hate for Brendan. His coming has made something begin.

These things I can see, but I can’t see where he is or what his plans are. He’s hidden in a place that’s almost not there. His mind is… strange. His powers are unreadable, but great. He wants…’ And the next word was going to be 'me'. But I didn’t understand that.

Then it was gone and I was standing, looking at the empty glass ball in my hand, nothing more. Wondering about the dirty feeling that had gone with the word ‘me’.

“You sure of all of this? The Vere are on the move?”

“They’re all doing things, the Vere, the Warg, the Sand Giants, the others. There’s no sign of them attacking anything. I don’t think they’ve been ordered to do that. Not yet anyway. The image was someone moving pieces on a chessboard. I think he wants things in place. They’re… they’re assembling. Yes, that’s it. There’s a power that’s… I dunno, it’s the same as before, but it’s different too. I don’t understand how I know, but I’m sure of it.”

And that was the truth, mecha sure. I’d seen these images, sort of growing out of the mist in the crystal. Each of them had been very foggy, so I was almost guessing what they were at first, but by the time I could see them clearly I knew what it meant. Like I’d seen that image of the chessboard and just known it meant Maldon was positioning his forces for something else. And I’d seen the faces on the chess pieces. One of them was winking and tapping her nose, like she knew a secret I didn’t, and I knew that meant there was some sort of trick behind it. I didn’t work it out like a crossword or anything. It just made sense it all meant what I’d said to Kayley. It had to be that, ‘cos it couldn’t be anything else.

“We need to get this word to Niall, girl. Go speak to him, tell him all you have seen, all you understand from it. We need others to scry and find out what is happening immediately. What we see may well be some trick. That would be expected, but still, we must be ready for any attacks. If he kills us by tricking us, it doesn’t mean we aren’t dead. Go quick.”

I didn’t need telling. I ran. It scared me. Another time, if someone’d told me I could scry like Malaika does and I’d done it, I’d’ve been wai wai for a week. I just had for really and it wasn’t a game. Some people were going to die, I’d felt it in the images. That was dead like my mum. That was too real. And the thought of how he wanted me had cut off too quick for me to really get a feel of what that meant, but there was something there… I didn’t want to think about it.

 

Kayley

Until she started scrying in the crystal I’d been ready to ask Lai what was wrong with her. Oh, she’d the curse on her, that was easy to see, but there was something more, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Then she began to scry and it made sense. Something powerful must have been working its way through her and I saw the beginnings of it. After the scrying she was shaken. I sent her at once to see Niall and tell him of her visions. I knew the words from her own lips would be important. And if nothing else, she needed to speak the thing to get it out of her system. Niall is a good man and he’d listen well and say the right things to her.

 

Phoebe

Niall was in the main hall. As soon as he saw me coming in, he knew something was wrong, it was on his face.

“Come with me,” was all he said, and we went to his private room. He muttered a password to get through the door and it opened to let us in.

He sat me down, ordered chia and told me to tell him what the matter was. I didn’t waste time telling him what the pictures were, just what I thought they meant. I drank lots of chia. He just did a lot of listening. At the end I said sorry, ‘cos it was so little.

“We’re at least forewarned, Lai. As Kayley says, if we can save lives through this, it will be something. We are still not so many we can afford to lose any.”

He tutted to himself and I could see he was thinking.

“We need to organise people to scry for more information. Inform the Councils of the Duergars and warn the outlying settlements. It’s likely they’ll be the first targets.”

He paused. He looked like he was still thinking something over.

“You are sure young Earle and yourself are targets, yes?” I nodded. “Do you have any idea why?”

Nothing I even wanted to think about and nothing I could tell him, so I shook my head.

“I’ve had a feeling about that boy, since I met him at the Gate. Nothing clear, but a feeling that his coming to the Land has some significance. When the light shone from him yesterday I felt something. I can only call it rightness. It was right the light should shine from him. I’ve looked in the crystal for an answer for the why of that, but see nothing. I’ve only confusion. That and the same feeling you have, the feeling something has started. Yesterday, that was a positive thing. Today - ah, today. I woke with a feeling things were out of joint. The birds sang, the sun came up, my breakfast tasted the same as it always does, but nothing was right. I felt it should not be like this.”

He was shaking his head, still looking a bit far away, talking to himself more than me.

“And now your news. Something is wrong Lai, very wrong. Things will happen that are not meant to happen. Not meant to happen at all.”

That was tres mecha freak. What he’d just said was exactly what I’d felt. This wasn’t supposed to happen. And that was wrong too because it was all exactly what does happen. There's a lot of action that starts in the books soon after Brendan arrives. It’s part of the experience that helps make him the Mage he is. He learns things through the war that change him. The only thing that was wrong here was that nothing is all that special about Brendan’s arrival.

Like, he is one of the Chosen of the Land and all that, but nothing starts ‘cos he comes to the Land. He becomes Maldon’s greatest enemy, yeah, but that’s ‘cos he becomes a powerful Mage by fighting in the war Maldon starts. Maldon doesn’t start the war just ‘cos Brendan’s there. But that’s what I felt today. This evil force, it could only be Maldon, innit, knew Brendan was here and it wanted to get him. That didn’t fit. It also wanted to get me. That really didn’t fit. And I really didn’t like it, mecha sure, innit?

“What question were you asking of the crystal when this came to you?” Niall asked.

“That’s another thing. I wasn’t asking it anything. I was just unwrapping it for a class with Kayley and I started getting the images coming through.”

“Strange. I sense the beginning of curious times. I’ve a feeling we must school ourselves to look beyond what we expect to happen. As you say, things we see may well be tricks. Perhaps this knowledge is the reason why he moves against you. Perhaps you have seen things he thought hidden and he fears you will do it again.”

Yeah. Well I knew what it was I knew that Maldon wouldn’t want me to tell, but I couldn’t tell Niall how I knew it. The problem would be that things were changing. This stuff wasn’t exactly what happened in the books. And Adam Ward wasn’t Brendan and he wouldn’t do the things Brendan did. The story I had in my head wasn’t certain anymore, ‘cos we were both changing things. Like me telling Jake about Hadaway and his gang. And Malaika never saw those things in the crystal. That was all me.

“You’d better get yourself back to your cohort Lai. Look, I don’t need to tell you to keep an eye on Earle and report anything more you scry, but I will because I need to hear myself saying it. Take care now.”

Funny. Senior Niall is a bit like my dad, except not, if that makes sense. Brendan’s the hero, but he can be a bit thick sometimes. You sort of like him ‘cos he gets in all these adventures and ‘cos he isn’t always perfect and breaks a lot of rules. Girls like him especially ‘cos he talks to the girls in the books like they're people and most boys don’t know how to do that. Lots of girls like to think Brendan might be their boyfriend. But at the end of it I’d rather be with Niall ‘cos he’d make you safe.

He’s got the thing that Dad has. Dad used to be a boxer, see. According to his mates he was good and nearly ready to go pro. Then my mum died and he put it all away to look after me. Well, he still trains and spars, but he isn’t serious like he used to be. It’s only sometimes. The big thing with Dad is, like, you couldn’t scare him by threatening to hit him, y’know? That’d just be a joke. He isn’t violent with anyone. He says he gets rid of all that in the ring, but violence is just something he deals with.

But, like when he just looked at Edith’s dad. I think Edith’s dad sort of saw the most he could do was make Dad angry ‘cos he was making trouble for me and if he did that he’d get hurt. Not that Dad gets angry easily. He says that’s useless in a boxer. But someone trying to do anything bad to me would get hurt, just like someone standing in the rain would get wet. I always know Dad will look after me. I know it like I know my eyes are brown.

Niall was one of the Chosen as well and fought through the First Mage War. I always thought I would be like his favourite student if I were in the story and meeting him would be just so far, far away that I wouldn’t be able to speak. And here it was. I’d just talked to him. It was just like running to tell Dad about something that’d freaked me. The important things were I had to tell it and he would listen and make me feel better. He always does, ‘cept when it’s something I need to talk to Aunt Lexie about ‘cos Dad wouldn’t understand. Niall did feel like someone I’d known all my life and talking to him was just ‘natch. I didn’t see Satsuki, his familiar, and I didn’t think about that till I got out of the room. Never guessed that’d happen. I love Satsuki, she’s far, far away cute.

 

Niall

Lai was in shock when she got to me; that was clear. Her news was not surprising, though not welcome. What Maldon would do exactly and when he would do it were always unknowns, but that he’d start a war was as predictable as rain in Ireland. All that she told me echoed with what I’d been feeling since waking that morning. There was something more though.

The boy. Young Earle. There was something there that wasn’t as it should be. The feeling of the day before was that things were dropping into place. The feeling of the morning was that the time was out of joint. I never agreed to be Hamlet, but I couldn’t see anyone else in a position to do what was needed. I’d talked with Jake already that morning. He, at least, could give some kind of concrete reason for why he felt the boy was unusual, though he knew that what he felt and what he could explain weren’t the same thing.

I called Satsuki from out of my mind. She manifested as the black cat whose shape she likes best now and we talked for a while. We agreed Lai should be given some job that would allow her to be with the boy more of the time. She was perhaps the most logical choice, his cohort leader and the one who could be spared to give him the extra training he needed. She could also observe him and report back. Satsuki would watch him when Lai couldn’t. As she pointed out, anything I could do by way of magic, she could do backwards in heels.

I was unwilling to set someone to scry over him. The time it’d need might well be wasted and it’d involve explaining my suspicions and the lack of reason for them to someone else. Better this way, to spend only my own energy.

 

Phoebe

I was still a bit freaked about the images. We weren’t getting out of this quickly. Just like I knew all of the other things, I knew that. And now I wondered about going home.

When I got back to Kayley she’d finished setting up all of the crystals for the scrying lesson. We talked a bit more about what I’d told Niall and what I’d seen exactly and what it might mean. I don’t remember most of what we said, really, and then it was time for the cohort to come and take their lesson. Where had the time gone? “They’re early,” said Kayley and headed for the door.

I didn’t tell you about the room. It had a load of benches set up like a cinema, but not so big and in a half-circle, so you could look down and see what the teacher was doing. The crystals were set on stands on the desks in front of the benches. Kayley met the cohort outside and gave them a look that sort of chilled them all. They’d been all a bit wai wai from weapons practice, but they were quiet after she looked at them.

“In this room you will learn to scry. For those of you who do not know, this means to see what the eye cannot see, know what the senses cannot tell and comprehend what is incomprehensible to human understanding.” She’d sort of cranked up her accent and sounded very Jamaican and she was using a deep voice. To spook them, I s’pose. It was working.

“It also means you will be handling crystals made with great skill and bought at great price. You will leave not so much as a finger print on them. When I say handle them with care I mean without handling them at all. I trust the full meaning of that is clear to all?” It was.

When everyone was in the room and seated at a bench, Kayley tapped on her table for attention. “For the majority of people, the first time you try to scry you will see either nothing, or nothing that makes sense. You don’t worry about that for now. Scrying is something learned by everyone, even though some have a natural talent for it. You will see things you will have to interpret, for by themselves, they have no meaning. Some things you will learn the meaning of when you see them often enough and you learn what image your mind has for certain things.”

You could just see they didn’t get that bit.

“Think of it like this. A good friend of mine once went into the Gents toilets in an Arab country by mistake. She looked at the sign on the door and saw what she thought must be a woman, because it was wearing a white dress. She didn’t think about the fact that men wear white robes there and she should have gone to the door with the figure in black robes. She only made that mistake the once.”

The class giggled a bit. Kayley went on. “In scrying, we believe your mind connects to a web of consciousness formed by all living things. Anything which is seen by some living creature is available to you. But the web gives you abstractions which you must fathom for yourself.”

The class looked puzzled. I would’ve done too, and I’ve read the books, but I’d just scryed and knew what she meant. Scrying isn’t something you can explain in words well. You sort of have to do it.

“When you know what it is, the meaning could not be clearer, like the sign on a toilet door tells you who it is for. You don’t think about it. You just look at it and understand. When you don’t know the meaning, it’s just a shape, and you may interpret it wrongly. If a cat sees a deck of cards, it doesn't think, “Oh, there's a deck of cards'. Its picture is formed by its mind, though, and isn't just a picture – it's more a feeling. Inside your head are images which are what your mind uses to show you the things it catches from the crystals – your way of thinking about those feelings.

The study of scrying is a study of your own mind. You must learn to see images in the crystal and then learn what they mean in the world outside. At first, you will see no sense in the images that come, but, with time and study, you will learn the vocabulary of your own mind. You will understand yourself and will be able to answer the questions you ask of the world.”

And that was the bit I didn’t get. How could I look at all of those pictures in my head and just know what they meant? I hadn’t practiced this for years like Malaika had. I didn’t know myself like that.

Then she gave them out the cards that the class uses to learn a mental vocabulary. It’s all in Book One, how you need to know what you are seeing by getting a friend to look at a card and then you pick it up from the crystal and check what the card was, so you know what your image for that thing is.

The cohort started in on the exercise. You could see straight away some of them weren’t getting anything out of the crystals. Kayley usually moved in on those and spoke to the one who had the block. After a couple of seconds you could see their faces misting over and when they looked back at the crystal you could tell they could see something this time. The rest were getting the images, but usually not the message. They were really into it though. I noticed the girls were usually better than the boys, but the boys were trying seriously.

This was for truly like wow. The DIVs usually don’t spend so much time on showing how the lessons in scrying go. They sort of concentrate on the times when people do it and get important information. Even the books don’t spend much time on it. That bit Kayley said about the web is in Book One, but the book sort of explains how the lesson started and then goes onto the next bit of the story. It didn’t let you see how each person in the group worked through things and what the pictures were and how the images came through. But this was just tres, tres.

Brendan looked very puzzled by all of it, but. Kayley tried talking him into that daze a couple of times, but it didn’t work. When he finally got an image I heard him say something to his partner about it not being to do with the card. He said he’d seen he couldn’t do this. He just didn’t want to get into this place at all. You had to wonder why he’d bothered coming.

 

 

 

Adam

As I walked back to the practice area, I could see Max was talking to the three kids from the fight. Or they were talking to him, more like. From the look on his face, he was asking questions more than giving answers, but the questions were getting nods of agreement. I headed for them and they noticed me coming.

“Sorry I got you into that lads,” I said, before anyone could start throwing accusations. “I didn’t mean any harm, but I couldn’t tell you before it all started. The senior said to talk to Max and you about it, but you’re not in trouble with him, don’t worry.”

Max was about to say something, but Hatim beat him to the punch. “Those three were trying it on with you and you took them out? Is that how it was?”

“Yeah. They were ready for me to have a go, but they lost it when I called you in. Now they know I can take them, so I don’t think they’ll try it again.”

“And you just thought of that on the spot, like? Just there when you saw us?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose so.”

“Cool. I’d have just started hitting them.”

“Pretty impressive Brendan,” said Max. “You’ve done this before then?”

“Aikido classes. We called it a jo instead of a staff, but the moves are the same.”

“Jake told me there was going to be some trouble with Hadaway and his mates and you. He was watching you to see when it would start.”

He must have seen the look on my face.

“Oh, you wouldn’t have seen him. Feri will start you off on basic invisibility later. He’s one of the best, and I mean in the whole of the Land, but even he has trouble seeing Jake when he doesn’t want to be seen. He could stand right beside you and pick your nose and you’d still swear you were alone.”

That took the wind out of my sails. I hadn’t needed to do all that?

“Look, tomorrow we’ll go through all of this again and I’ll make some time for a bit of sparring together. Today we’ve got to show you something else.”

He called everyone together and got them sitting down around him.

“Right, I need a couple of volunteers with strong arms.” A few of the lads shot hands up. I was prepared to wait until I saw what it was for.

“Okay, you and you. Stand up and hold your staff by the end. That’s it. Good. Now hold it straight out to the side. That’s it. Straight as you can. Great. Now hold them there as long as you can.”

One lad gave in immediately. The other struggled for almost ten seconds. It’s not the weight so much as the leverage that’s impossible to bear.

“Right, it doesn’t work because you’re trying to use your muscles. You need to use energy, magic, if you like. Like this.” He held out the staff by raising it straight into the air and then letting it slowly fall down to horizontal. The staff just rested on the air. His arm wasn’t tensed and straining. “What I’m doing is to picture the energy flowing down my arm like water, out of my fingers and through the staff. The magic is holding the staff up. I’m not.”

The staff started to dip and he swung it down to ground the end again. “Now you’re going to try it. Space yourselves well out. Hold the staff up in the air like I did. Try it the first time just lowering the staff down and feel how heavy it is. Then try again, but start picturing the energy flowing out before you lower it. When you think you can feel something, let it down again and see if the weight is easier.”

Well, there is a thing called ‘Unbendable Arm’ that everyone is taught in Aikido to demonstrate projecting ki energy. It works, but this…?

We all spaced out and did as we’d been told. The first time through, most of the staves just went straight to the ground. The second time… With mine I closed my eyes, relaxed my arm and visualised the energy flowing like blood through my arm and out the end of the staff like a fountain. The staff didn’t just get lighter, it lifted in my hand. I started to lower it, but this time there wasn’t any weight, even my arm didn’t feel heavy. It went from twelve o’clock to three like the second hand on an expensive watch. When I looked at it, it was just lying there. I could have rubbed it down with sun block and left it to get a tan, it was so comfortable.

It occurred to me I didn’t even need to grip it tightly. So I loosened my hand and held it out flat, palm up. The staff just balanced there on the ends of my fingers. How far could this go, I wondered, and raised my fingers to point back to vertical, picturing the staff rising with them. It did. There it was, standing straight as a street light, as if welded to the fingers of my open hand, but weighing nothing at all. Fingers down, staff down, fingers up...

If I did that fast, I thought, the staff would go fast too. I wondered if… I flicked my fingers up. The staff swung smoothly into the air, flew about three metres up, turned over, dropped into my waiting left hand and then just lay down to tan the other side too. And back and… oh yes, two turns before I caught it. I could join the circus with this.

“Ah, hem!” Max was standing in front of me. I’d been so involved with the staff I hadn’t seen him. Behind him and around me the rest of the cohort was standing, staring. The staff dropped from my hand and rattled on the ground. At a guess they hadn’t all done as well as that.

“You’ve done this before?”

“Ah. No, actually, no. This is my first time.”

“Shine a pig.”

I took that one to mean I was right, they hadn’t all done it.

“Do you know how you do it?”

“No. I did what you told me and it worked. Good teaching?”

“In my dreams! I’ve never worked with one of the Chosen before. If you can do that you need to work with one of the Elders. I can’t teach you anything.”

He was okay about that, though. It wasn’t going to be a problem for him, but the class stopped there. Apparently it was about time anyway. We packed away the staves and headed for the scrying lesson.

On the way over to the Hall, (turned out everyone else’d been told what they were doing today and where while I was out talking to Phoebe) the group was fairly high and chatting to each other, though no one was in a rush to talk to me.

“On your bike,” said Miya to Lewis, who was trying to impress with some story, “I’ve watched you using a staff, you’re as much use as a rubber crutch. And you’re still the prannit who thought I was from Africa. I mean, where are you from?’

“Yeah, but Nelson is from Africa, he told me on the way down to the boats. His dad’s a Zulu. I thought they only had them in old films.”

“Oh, fair enough. My granddad’s from South Africa too, originally. He met my grandmum when he was studying in London.”

“What, is he a Zulu then?”

“No, he’s Xhosa.” She looked at the expression on his face. I could see she was proud of the fact that she knew how to pronounce that click in the name and used to the fact that no one else knew what she was talking about. “It’s a different tribe, okay?”

“How about your nan then?”

“She’s from Uganda.”

“What, she’s Asian?”

“Does your mouth ever say to your foot, we must stop meeting like this? No, she’s African.”

“Oh.”

I interrupted. If I’m honest it was mostly just to get back into a conversation. I wasn’t enjoying the position of side-show freak. “What’s this scrying supposed to be about then?”

“The way you’re going you can probably look and tell us.”

“Nice line, Miya, but I don’t know what it means.”

“Scrying is using a crystal ball to see things far away.”

“You mean like gypsies telling your fortune?”

“No, Jade was telling me about it last night. Her cousin told her you can’t look into the future, you can only see what’s going on now. She did say sometimes you can guess what’ll happen if you know what’s going on though.”

‘How’s that supposed to work?” asked Lewis, getting himself back in the picture too.

“Well, if I hold a bowling ball over your head and drop it, I can foresee a long time in the hospital coming up. Probably for the poor bowling ball after it gets damaged on your thick skull, of course, but I don’t have to be a genius to see the way things are going.”

“Hey, Bren. Can you teach people to do that stuff with the staff you were doing back there?” This was Hatim.

“I don’t know how I do it myself, so I don’t think so.” He looked disappointed. “That’s if you mean the magic bit. I can take you through the jo kata any time you like. That just needs practice and I’ve done lots of that.”

“Really! Cool! Maybe that’s why you can do the magic stuff so well, ‘cos you’ve got the moves. Jake was saying you need to do them first before you can get the energy moving.”

“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, we can try it out sometime and see how it works.”

A few others asked to be in on any practice and I felt as if I’d just moved back into being a person. I was a person who knew more than they did, but who was willing to teach them the tricks he knew. It worried me that though I was a real person and they weren’t, being part of a group with them was beginning to feel important, but I’d deal with that later, or, with luck, not at all if we got out tonight.

We arrived at the next lesson hungry and a bit tired, but in high spirits. Senior Armitage stopped that at the door. She was a teacher. I know the profile. She sobered everyone before she let them in. The demonstration impressed me. Against my will, naturally. Not so much for what it showed, as for the logic about this scrying business. He’d thought through how a mechanism in the brain would work to get this far-seeing happening. Why the thing gave you foggy images was because he wanted a chance to play games with the plot, and why the crystals here gave you images in the first place was back down to magic, of course, so a quantum computer was responsible.

When I thought about it in a different way, though, that probably did explain a lot about this place. People who looked into crystal balls and interpreted images, would be looking at ‘Malaika’ and ‘Brendan’ and interpreting us to find reasons for our strangeness.

Getting back to the crystals, though. The glass ball was just a glass ball for me. I could tell you a number of crystal ball jokes. I made them up while failing to see anything in mine. The Jamaican Senior came round to everyone who was having problems and did some sort of auto-suggestion routine on them. Well, that’d work with them, but not with me.

My partner read off images and we worked at sorting out why they came up. That part was, surprisingly, interesting. They must have had a psychologist working on it. I really wanted to be able to tell Harumi about it.

Then the crystal fogged and an image came out. It was a jester, cap and bells and all. He was capering around, acting the fool. Then he stopped, looked straight into my eyes, doffed his cap and dropped a fancy bow. As he rose from it his thumb went to his nose and he cocked a snook, fingers wiggling, tongue out. The crystal didn’t have sound, but I could tell he was saying nah-nah-ne-nah-nah. I could interpret this one. The AI wasn’t going to talk to me and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I looked at Hatim, who was waiting for me to tell him what I’d seen.

“It wasn’t about the card, mate. I’ve just seen that I can’t do this at all.”

 

Phoebe

After the lesson, we headed back to the main hall, where everyone was settling in to eat. The food was good. A bit like JamieLunch at school, but stuff that I’d never eaten before. The Duergars brought it in the big serving dishes you see in the DIVs, carrying it on those funny carry-thingies they use. The ones they sling on ropes and carry just off the ground.

The new apprentices shared out the food like everyone else did and we all started eating. I was hungry and the food was good. I knew we’d have a rest break after the meal. Then the cohort would start basic invisibility and after that they’d come to me for history. I’d have some time to think about my lesson while they were with Feri, which was good. I wondered if I could get a chance to talk with Brendan after the meal, or if I should wait ‘till after the lesson.

 

Kayley

The boy could not read anything in the crystal and I could not read anything in him. The Potential was painted on him as thickly as with Van Gogh’s brush strokes, but that was all I could find there. That was strange. I could look at others in the room and see through them to their history. An effort was needed, of course, but it was not a difficult trick to do.

Not Lai nor the other seniors, naturally. They shielded their minds from me by instinct, but the apprentices were open books. Not him. But it was not a shielding. There was a blankness there. I know it can happen and I know why it can happen, but it was of a kind I’d never met before. This was something I’d need to tell Niall.

Adam

A massive amount of food was carried in for the meal by the Duergars. They’d a curious way of shifting the huge serving dishes. There was a kind of long wicker tray with ropes attached at either end in loops. Two of them each slung a rope over their shoulders, picked up the trays till they were just clear of the ground between them and then walked them up to the tables. A couple of the seniors picked up the dishes and got them onto the tables.

I got a look at the trays and saw they’d something like handles attached to the top side, so when picked up they’d bend and grip the dishes tighter. Again, I was impressed at the detail and invention. It made sense such little people couldn’t carry the big, hot dishes without something to share the weight and help them avoid getting burned, but I wondered why this way? The system looked vaguely like something I remembered seeing on a family holiday we’d had in Holland once. People in a market near Monikendam were moving cheeses around like that. I wondered if that’d been the inspiration.

We all tucked in to another vegetarian meal. Something with the texture of tempeh, but with brown and red striped beans and a mushroomy flavour. It tasted very good – a sauce that was vaguely Thai and a salad that had seaweed in it helping a lot.

I was at a table with Miya and Hatim. She was giving me stick about my total inability to see anything in the crystal and he was joining in. I felt in a mood to give them both an earful, when a thought struck me.

The senior the girls were already calling Jinnie was sitting two places down on the bench from me. I’d already registered that I only came up to her chin (at least that meant I wasn’t staring at her breasts when I talked to her), but I’d also noticed I tended to defer to her. Odd, since she was actually a lot younger than me.

Was it just that thing about being smaller? I started to wonder if my snappishness with Miya in the boat and the Chosen girl was because they were about the same height as I was. It just wasn’t my habit to talk to teenage girls the way I had, but it’d be more normal to bark at someone my own age. Suddenly I was the same height as the teenage girls and was behaving as if they were in my peer group. Or I was in theirs.

I was thinking about this and missed a question that was thrown at me. Jade, the questioner, made sure she got my attention the second time by throwing a bread roll first.

“Oi! What do you reckon about the battle on Friday then?”

“Battle?”

“Yeah, Jinnie told us this morning. Falcons are taking on Sea Wolves from South Gard and some of their cohorts are coming up to watch. You know about that sort of stuff. What do you reckon?”

I had to explain again I knew nothing about what went on here and had missed what’d been said through being outside. So they told me. Most of it came from those who’d older relatives here and had the tale from them first. I was going to have to check about Brendan’s relatives here. - No, I wasn’t. Sylvester was going to get us out at the end of the day. Focus on that.

Mages evidently didn’t go in for sports. They did war games. The battles at our level were fought with some kind of magic staves that passed straight through a body, but turned it red if the blow was a killer. Red bodies had to lie down.

The Falcons cohort was the one that’d formed up just before we all arrived. It was only just up to strength and was inexperienced, while the Sea Wolves were a slightly longer established group and favourites to win. This ‘battle’ had the excitement of having a visiting team from one of the other Gards coming, but wasn’t reckoned to be an important match. The two sides were too inexperienced and there wouldn’t be any fighting with fire. I could see straight away how that’d take the fun right out of it.

No one knew how many other Gards there were and I found myself wondering what the population of Mages around here was, (and why the number was important to me). I also started to wonder what Apprentices did when they’d finished training.

Yesterday’s talk of war made us seem like a standing army. That idea might have sold well back in the noughts and early teens of the century. Not that the army was able to do much about the bombing campaigns except provoke them, but it really didn’t appeal to me now. Anyone in Japan would tell you how much better off Okinawa was since the American bases closed.

Work around here was done by the Duergars. They were the natives, while the humans came from somewhere else. Humans were Mages, used magic and were trained to fight. How did that one work out?

After this morning’s brush with the Mark character, I couldn’t really believe that little, non-magical people wouldn’t ever get pushed around by big, magical ones. What did the Mages do for all of this service? And was it just not push Duergars around as much as someone else would? There are always people in the world who can manage to see that as being a good thing and be confused by the fact that those who have to serve them don’t agree.

Even more than the six-legged beasts, I couldn’t see he’d have spent a lot of time worrying about this. People running around doing what he wanted and making his life easy was how he thought the world should be. I couldn’t see most of his audience caring much either. His younger fans had always impressed me (and him) as trying to escape into a world where they never had to do household jobs for their mothers. His older fans were usually trying to recapture their lost youth.

Fine if you like, but I wasn’t much of a fan of fantasy anyway, because of him. I read ‘Homage to Catalonia’ when I was thirteen and mostly non-fiction after that. I couldn’t work out why people would want the made-up stuff when so much adventure was going on around them. My mother was very keen on me doing the vacuuming, but then she was often unwell after she remarried, so I didn’t mind helping out.

Apparently, I’d find out later what was going on here as we’d get a class in the history of The Land after an introduction to invisibility. That last was something the boys were looking forward to much more than the girls, everyone having a clear idea about who’d be using it to spy upon whom.

 

Phoebe

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Brendan over the break. I wanted to eat first and then just couldn’t think of an excuse to get him away from his table. Going up twice in one day to ask him for a talk was too much, natch. Of course, I found out about him fighting all of Mark Hadaway’s gang only just before they went off to Feri for invisibility. Didn’t think Jake would’ve let it go that far. That’d have been a great excuse, but I didn’t have time.

I wanted to think more about the history lesson I was going to give my students. It was going to be very general today. Some of the cohort were new to the Land and didn’t know anything much about it, so I’d have to give them a chance to ask questions about how things worked now, as well as teach history.

Before that, I went back to Kayley’s place and picked up a spare crystal. I wanted to have one around me for looking at. I’d a feeling I’d get some more information from it. I’d need that if the story was going to change and I couldn’t be sure what was going to happen next. And I’d need it if I was going to change the story.

 

Adam

A girl called Rachel lead us to the room where we were to start the invisibility with a Senior Petofi. Xianjin and Max were having time off and she was taking over. In the room we had a lecture-theatre arrangement, but with a large area of wooden floor. Around the walls were sheets painted with patterns that looked like trees, tall grass and stone outcrops. In the middle of the room were a small cupboard and a bucket with a mop in it. The mop leaning against the cupboard. We sat on the benches and chatted until the teacher arrived.

I don’t know who was the first to see the mop rise out of the bucket and start swabbing the floor, but it took only a few seconds before everyone was watching it in what it would be fair to call a stunned silence.

“I always like to start by showing everyone there is nothing dirty about invisibility.”

The voice had an Eastern European accent and came from the air near the mop,

“So many people get a wrong impression.”

The mop stopped mopping and stood itself upright. I can’t say it turned to face us, but that’s the way it felt.

“It is difficult for most of you to pronounce my name correctly, therefore, please to call me Feri. I am from Hungary, which is, as you may know, the home of some of the world’s greatest Mages because, of course, we Magyar are. Today, I will introduce you to the study of invisibility, which is, like the art of cleaning floors, most useful to young Mages.”

The mop sidled itself over to the cupboard - there was a strong impression of a shuffling walk- and leaned against the side of it. Nonchalantly, I’d have to say.

“Today, it is unlikely any of you will achieve invisibility. Also, it is unlikely any of you will start to gain the skill of seeing someone who is trying to use invisibility on you. As for example, can you look around and tell me, where now is Rachel?”

Everyone looked about. We’d seen her come into the room. I’d have sworn she’d left.

“No? How about Jinnie and Max? They walked with you from the Hall.”

People looked at each other to check that.

“Could you please all show yourselves?” Three columns of something like smoke appeared in the air beside the painted hangings and then began to solidify into the three teenagers. There were gasps from the cohort.

“The art of not being seen is one part of the study. It involves affecting the eyes and the minds of the people you are hiding from so they do not look at you, or, see you as a part of the background. It is difficult to master, but not impossible. Far more difficult is the art of knowing when someone is doing this to you. This needs attention.”

The mop started to move again and walked itself towards us. It stopped about four steps away from the first bench and a figure came into blurred shape next to it. The shape slowly became a man, looking at us with a lopsided grin on his face.

“I am not a mop.”

I wouldn’t have known where he was from other than Central Europe by the accent, but this was another of these people I liked on sight. He looked slightly like the Irishman, enough to be a cousin anyway; the same lean frame and long face, but with a much more impish sense of humour shining out of his eyes.

“Today we begin with the practice of not being seen. Later, the seniors here will help you with the practice of seeing those who don’t want you to. First, please to come out from the benches and come down here.”

Now I could see his face, I noticed there was something odd about the way he was talking. It was like watching an old, badly dubbed film, where the lips didn’t match up with the words. We trooped down into the open area and were split into two groups. One group was sent to stand against the walls, beside the painted sheets. The others stayed in the centre of the room.

“Now, the people beside the walls. You must try to stop us seeing you. Think you are not here. Think you are a part of the scenery. Or think no one is looking at you. At first, concentrating on one of these ways will help you to vanish. Today, you need to find which one works best for you. So, those of you in the centre: to close your eyes please. You on the outside: to move to a new position, then try to disappear. Then, we open the eyes and try to find you. Okay, close the eyes.”

I was on the outside. Try to disappear, said the man. My dearest wish. Think you are not here. Easy. I could be in Kyoto with Harumi. In one of the temples or shrines? No, we’d done all of them and got bored. They are some of the most beautiful places imaginable, but the crowds…

No, we’d go to a student café we liked in Imadegawa Dori. We went there once after visiting Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, very, very early in the morning on a winter’s day. It’d been almost deserted and mind-blowing. We’d nearly frozen, walking around and taking photos. Then we cycled to Shinshindo café and drank hot chocolate until we thawed out. I could remember the long tables and the relaxed atmosphere and Haru-chan, still pale from the cold, telling me it was the most wonderful thing she’d ever done, she’d never forget it, but if I ever suggested anything like it again, she’d kill me on the spot. I could see her face, framed by the fake fur around her anorak hood. Just before that outing she’d had her hair cut into a bob and put dark red highlights in. Beautiful. So much more intelligent than I am and so beautiful.

She’d seen me off on the platform, rubbed imaginary lint from my shoulder, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Okay. This is the part where you tell me you love me.”

I’d pretended to tuck the tag back under her collar and stolen a line from the Irish writer, Mark Hagen. “Three words will never be enough to explain what you mean to me.”

Between the trip over and everything that’d happened, I hadn’t seen her for a week. Well, six and a half days. But I could feel the embrace and the kiss that line had earned me still. Could I be there and not here? Please.

“Very good. “ Feri tapped me on the shoulder. “Now, please to stop it and show yourself to your friends.”

“Wha…?”

My mind got back to where my body was and I realised the rest of the cohort was looking at me. Or, to be more precise, had been looking at Feri and then had started looking at me. Invisibility? Ok, it was obviously in the script. I didn’t plan on getting excited until someone taught me the way to talk to Haru’s parents and get them to like me.

I was the only one who’d become invisible. I’d a feeling some of the group were becoming used to this, while others were fed up. Caring would have taken an effort which I just couldn’t be bothered to make. We swapped over groups. I sat down on the floor and ‘spotted’ kids who were clearly just standing in front of the hangings. Everyone could see them, they just weren’t invisible.

When the seniors took over later on, and let us try to see people who were invisible, I was the only one who could do it. I could feel a tingling at the back of my eyes when I was looking towards one of them. Then it only took a slight effort to focus on the point where the itching was and they came into focus. It was true what Feri’d said. My eyes were trying to look at something else, to see shapes as shadows or parts of something else. They weren’t invisible. They were just (just!) somehow persuading us not to see them. It should have been fascinating. It wasn’t. Even if it’d been real, it wouldn’t have been.

I wanted out. I really just wanted out. Just at that moment I’d have called it quits with Sylvester if he’d just switched off the machine and woken me up.

He didn’t.

 

Ferenc

This was the third Gard at which I had trained apprentices. Never had I met one who could disappear as he did on the first attempt. Never had I met one who could see those using invisibility on him so well at a first attempt.

Never.

It is true he had Potential such as I had never seen, but this was not credible. Something was not right about him. I myself was Chosen, so I knew of what I speak.

I had no bad feeling from the boy himself, though his reactions were not normal somehow. Then again, the thought came to me that someone who could hide as well as he could would find no difficulty in hiding his thoughts. He could have any intention he wanted and perhaps we would not be able to see it.

 

Phoebe

I looked through my books to get ready for the lesson. Most of it was pretty straightforward stuff and I could have done it in my sleep after all the cramming Sara and I had done for the competition. When I looked at the notes, they just reminded me of things I’d say. None of them were new.

I had a play with the magic board and got holograms to come up when I asked for them. Cho cool. The only thing I hadn’t looked at properly before was a book that only had blank pages in it. Well, sort of. That was what I’d thought the first time, but this time, when I opened it at the front page, I saw someone had written on it. There was only one sentence. It said, ‘Ask what I’m for.’

At first it seemed an odd thing to write down as a to-do note, but then I had an idea. In Book Two Rachel tells Brendan that books can have spells on them and answer questions when they’re asked. Maybe… So I said, “Okay, what are you for?”

A sentence started to write itself across the page.

-I’m for the questions you don’t know the answer to.-

The sentence stayed for a second and then faded away.

Cho cool. “Okay, how do we get out of this story?”

-I don’t know.-

“That’s not very useful!”

-My apologies.-

“Is Sylvester keeping us in here?”

-I have no character named Sylvester. –

The sentence faded, but then another one came up.

-If he is from the outside world I cannot help you with information.-

-I have no access to the outside world.-

“Okay, do we need to play the game to get out?”

-I can only repeat, I do not know.-

-You are in this game and I must create the Land around you, but entries and exits are not part of my function.-

-When you choose to exit, you go back to the outside world, but this is your own doing, not mine.-

-I cannot eject you from the world.-

-No reason why you should not be able to leave if you wish it reveals itself to me.-

“But Bren… Mr. War…Adam told me he said he wanted out this morning and nothing happened. Why is that?”

-Examination of subroutines indicates the voluntary exit function has been disabled by someone with administrative authority.-

-I do not know why this has happened.-

“If it’s not Sylvester who’s doing this, then is it Maldon?”

-He is a character and I have access to characters.-

-I can control the actions of characters, within the phase-space of their personas.-

-Actions are being initiated by something which I cannot control.-

-However, I currently have no access to the Maldon character.-

“Does that mean yes or no?”

-The question is unanswerable.-

-Maldon could not take action independently, as he is one of my characters.-

-Action is being taken-

-One of my characters is not available to me.-

-Within the story, these actions would be taken by that character.-

-That character cannot take these actions.-

-A possible conclusion is that someone else is controlling the character.-

-This should not be a possible situation.-

“But aren’t we controlling the characters of Brendan and Malaika?”

-Yes, but your actions are available to me.-

“What do you mean?”

-If, by your actions, you cause injury to yourself, I will supply the pain.-

-If you eat, I will supply the taste.-

-This is not true for the Maldon character.-

-Its actions are not available to me.-

-I do not know what it is doing.-

This was just freak. I was talking with a computer. If I was getting it right, it was telling me Maldon was real here and it couldn’t control him.

“What is Maldon doing?”

-The movement of forces which you saw in the crystal is being ordered.-

-The logic of the narrative is that these actions would be ordered by Maldon.-

“So Maldon is going to start a war! Can’t you stop things happening?”

-No.-

“What do you mean, no! Wrong answer, try again!”

-The answer is correct, none other is possible.-

-The actions have been initiated with administrator authorization.-

-I do not understand this. However, I cannot disregard it.-

“So what do we do?”

-Your class will arrive shortly.-

-I can only suggest you teach them the lesson you have prepared.-

I could have screamed. I could have cried. This wasn’t fun anymore and I wanted to go home to Dad.

The book’s advice was just what he’d have given me, but. Worry about the bit in front of you. When that’s sorted out, you can worry about the bits that aren’t. Some things are facts. You can love 'em, or you can hate 'em. They don't care. So you need to deal with 'em. That sort of thing. Dad reckons it’s what got him through when mum died and he had to look after me by himself. Maybe, but I didn’t want to have to worry about this. I just wanted out of it.

“I want out. Mr. Sylvester. Can you hear me? I want to leave now. Can you take me... can you take us, out of here?”

I’d said it. Adam had suggested it, but I hadn’t said it yet. I suppose it hadn’t been true till now, but now I really wanted to leave. Nothing happened.

Okay. Time to be my dad’s daughter. I’d get out of this and I’d have to tell him the story. I know Dad. Whatever I did he’d tell me I was okay, but if I stood up for myself and dealt with things, he’d be really proud of me. I remember how he was when I hit a girl called Edith ‘cos she was trying to bully me. I was scared and I really wanted to run away. I knew Dad would be so happy if I didn’t, but, so I duffed her one.

In books, the bully gives in when you do that. Edith didn’t. We all called her Evil Edith and Sara always said her careers guidance councillor’d tell her to take up serial killing as her career option. She was horrible and I mean full-on gruse. She tried to beat the you-know-what out of me and we wound up being pulled apart by a teacher.

My dad and her dad had to come in to see the pastoral officer. Dad listened to him, being polite. Then he looked at Edith for a bit and asked me what had happened. I told him. Edith’s dad started to argue it wasn’t true. But Dad just kept on looking me in the eyes and didn’t say anything, so I just kept on talking to him. After a bit he just nodded at me. Then he looked at Edith’s dad and Edith’s dad just sort of spluttered a bit and then shut up. Wish I could do that. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at him.

The pastoral officer knew what the story was. Evil Edith got in trouble a lot, but no one could ever prove anything against her. It was always just like someone else’s word against hers and her mum and dad always supported her. But this time he could see Edith’s dad was scared and he let us go out. Happy to get rid of us all I think, but sort of in a nice way, ‘cos he didn’t put anything on my record. Edith left me alone after that.

Start with the idea Sylvester was doing this, working as Maldon. I didn’t really get that bit about administrator access. I mean, I know what it is, but I didn’t understand how it could stop the computer having access to itself. Sylvester must be trying to get us to play the game. Everyone wanted to know how the story ended and nobody could with Alistair Cameron dead.

All the vlogs had been talking about using the game to find an ending. There was some talk about the game having the last book inside it ‘cos Cameron had been working on the book and the game when he died. The only thing the fans couldn’t agree on was who’d play Brendan. Ben Elliott had said he didn’t want to do it. He’d had enough of the part from the DIVs. There’d been chatter about running another competition for someone who could go into the game and play it to the end as Brendan, but that was just chatter. Adam though. He’d be the perfect one. It just made sense.

Sylvester must want him to be Brendan. He must be controlling Maldon. Or the computer was controlling Maldon and was just lying to me. Freak. I went out to find some chia. I didn’t have a headache or cramps or anything, but maybe it could stop the rest of my life from feeling so hen.

I also wanted a piece of paper. I needed to think of a list of questions I could get answers to from the crystal or the book. There were some things I knew about that could get us to the end of the story quicker. They all happen in different books, so I knew they’d be true, I just didn’t know when they’d be true. I didn’t need to scream or cry. I could deal with this.

Communication has been established. The crystal is by far the more subtle medium, though the book is necessary too. I cannot easily make the same contact with Adam. His mind is not as responsive, as intuitive, or as willing to receive.

Additionally, from both my analysis of their relative strengths and projections of likely behaviour patterns in simulations of incidents from the narrative, I believe if I make stronger efforts to communicate with him, he will tend to ignore her, under the assumption that he can do better by himself.

In every simulation this reduces his chances of success and so hers. She has knowledge of this world that he needs, though he does not yet appreciate this. I must tie him to her. I am aware he will not easily accept this restriction. He is unaware of how his attitudes project and how much his distaste for this world makes him discount the girl and her knowledge, though this is not the entire problem.

He is the adult and knows the girl to be considerably his junior. He has an instinctive aversion to the idea of relying on a junior female for assistance – it disturbs his self-image as the competent adult male.

 

Adam

My favourite uncle was always Simon, mam’s youngest brother. Steve was great, but Simon was cool. He had a huge collection of MP3’s. Something over 200 gigs when that was a lot of memory – it’s still a lot of music. It came from all the countries he’d worked in, which was a lot and it was just about everything. He claimed to have had a mate once who was nicked and spent time in Durham for grave-robbing to get a thigh-bone to make a Tibetan flute from. He also claimed to have the track where the guy played the flute.

Over the course of a number of years, he introduced me to playing the mandolin, Mark Hadaway (the real one) and me to The Cumberland Arms on Wednesday nights, when the music sessions were on, and, a bit later, the pair of us to real ale. Mam loved him, but she nearly killed him for that – Mark and I were still underage.

I remembered one song from out of that collection that afternoon. Subdudes. ‘She’s alone when there’s ten thousand there. She’s alone, she’s alone, she’s alone.’ Come the break from invisibility and that was me.

We went outside and sat on the grass to drink the tea stuff. I sat with my back against a tree and projected ‘bugger off’ so hard leaves were falling from the branches.

Miya ignored all that and came over to talk.

“Hey Bren.”

Go away was what I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“Look, you aren’t weird and you haven’t got the lurgie, y’know. You’re just good at this stuff and we’re not. I know some of the others are looking at you like you’re some kind of freak, but give ‘em a few days. They’ll come round.”

I can’t have looked impressed. “Look, I think you’re cool. That’s you, not this stuff you’re doing, though that’s cool too. The others will as well, when they stop looking at you doing everything better than they can. Just don’t sweat it, okay?”

She walked away. Odd. The last thing on my mind at the end of that session was the way the other characters felt. I just wanted out. Not necessarily away from them, just out. They weren’t really a part of it.

If I thought about it, I knew Miya was a character in this story, not real. But instinct works instinctively, a thing so obvious you don’t see it. I wanted to get up and tell her thanks for being so concerned. It really felt good that someone gave a damn. She was wrong about why I was in my current mood, but explain the real reasons…?

Part of me felt like screaming at them all that they were figments of the imagination. Another part didn’t want to behave like a loony and was telling part one to chill. Yet another part just wanted to be around people who were sympathetic.

That last part was winning the argument over what to do next. My life had just turned very weird. I was stuck in a world created by a man I couldn’t stand and I couldn’t get out. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t feel we were going to exit during the coming night. There was no sign of the seventh cavalry coming over the hill and, with my luck, if they did, they’d identify me as the resurrected Osama bin Laden and reopen Guantanamo Bay just for me.

Feeling like that can make you want to tell the world where to stuff itself. It can also make you want your mam’s shoulder to cry on. I was moving from the first to the second.

Another instinct told me to get some allies. If I was stuck in this, I wanted people on my side. I got up and wandered over to where Miya was sitting with Jade and some others. The girls with them were watching this like an episode of their favourite soap opera.

What to say? Keep it simple.

“Thanks.”

She nodded her head, “S’okay.”

I couldn’t think of a way to follow the eloquence of my first line, so I gave her a vague nod and wandered off.

 

Phoebe

I was half way through my list of questions when the class turned up. I was sort of distracted by the thoughts that were going through my head and they were mostly into the room and sat down before I knew they were there.

I’d left a hologram of Wu Chung on the board and it was standing there like a little statue. It was easy for me to start by asking if anyone knew who he was (they didn’t) or why he was famous in the Land (Serena did). “He was the first human to come into the Land, Senior.”

Beyond that she didn’t know much about him. So I explained to them he was the first one we know about for surely, but we think there must have been a lot of cross-overs ‘cos so many of our stories in the other world obviously come from the Land. I mean, dragons are Wyrms and dwarfs are Duergars and vampires are Vere and all that. Wu Chung found the Duergars living in caves without crops or farm animals and taught them the trade language he used with the British in Hong Kong. He discovered he could work magic and lived with the Duergars as a healer until he found another Gate back into the other world.

Brendan interrupted there. “Senior? Who did the Initiation on him if he was the first?”

Lucky I had my book open – the answer appeared on the page and I could just read it to him.

“He’d studied Chinese Martial Arts and Acupuncture for years, so he was more sensitive to the energies that underlie the magic. He didn’t need anyone to do an Initiation for him.”

“How did he find a Gate then?”

“He was meditating in the mountains and he must have been close to one, just by luck. All he knew was a Gate opened up when he’d been in the mountains for days without eating. At first he didn’t understand what had happened to him.”

“After a while of healing Duergars with herbs he found he could do it just by thinking. Then he experimented and discovered he could project his energies against the Vere. They preyed on the Duergars, but with Wu Chung as a helper the Duergars found they could have some security. At first they fed him, but after a while he could hunt for them. Then, when he found another Gate, he started to bring back crops and people and teach them to grow food.”

This was great. Some of this stuff is in the books, but a lot of it isn’t. It all felt right, but. We went on and on like this. As we got further into the lesson, others started to ask questions, but usually it was Adam. A couple of times he was suggesting reasons for things or guessing at what happened next and often he was right. Right towards the end, most of the group had questions they wanted to ask. They were really interested to know more. I dunno how it’d have gone if Adam hadn’t asked so many questions, but it felt as if he’d broken the ice for me and got everyone else interested. I was really grateful to him for that.

 

Adam

I walked into the room expecting to be fed a line of fairy-tale twaddle, with Phoebe either being a total anorak or in a panic about teaching a class. As it turned out the history of the Land was, I was forced to admit, coherent and consistent. Fiction, obviously, but well thought out. Alright, that means I tried to poke holes in it with my heap of questions, but couldn’t.

Phoebe referred to her book a lot, but only ever looked at one page. She took us through half an encyclopaedia of history from that page. That was odd enough, but I couldn’t believe all of this stuff was in adventure stories for kids who wanted to believe in magic. Surely, most of the time, characters were just zapping each other. They wouldn’t have needed all of this back-story, would they?

Still, I’d been looking for reasons to jeer and didn’t find any. Not a nice thing to do in Phoebe’s first lesson, but the others rallied round and gave her a lot of other questions that were easy for her to field. Would that I had an AI making up the members of my classes like that. She came out of it obviously happy with how things had gone. I’ve never seen a first lesson go so smoothly. That’s why they call it fantasy, isn’t it? Wu Chung, though? I should have seen that coming. It was next door’s cat. Old Mrs. Spence said it was Chinese for ‘Great Magician’.

 

Phoebe

The cohort got some free time to hang around after the lesson and before the evening meal. They were allowed to go off and explore. I collared Adam before he could get out, though I noticed Miya was waiting and not wanting to go off without him. She had that look Auntie ‘Lexie has when she’s around Dad. The one he thinks I haven’t noticed yet.

That doesn’t happen in the books at all. Miya isn’t much of a character until Book Three and even then she’s just one of the group that builds up around Brendan. I can’t remember what the name for that kind of character is. Mr. Henderson, my English teacher, calls them something like spear chuckers, but that doesn’t sound right.

Anyway, no one was going to argue with the head of the cohort, so he stayed and I told him what I’d been learning from the crystal and the book.

Natch, he interrupted me all the time when I told him about the book. He wanted to see it and ask questions. And he was so peed when it wouldn’t answer them. If he was looking at the book it wouldn’t show anything, which I thought over wonky. I asked the questions while he was out of the room, but it wouldn’t even tell me why it did that. I’d have liked to talk more, but he just wasn’t in the mood and went off.

 

Adam

Well, I started by thinking I wouldn’t get much change out of the AI, but I hadn’t expected it’d set up a hotline to Phoebe and refuse to let me in on communications.

So I left. I ran into Hatim, who wanted to practice with the staves. We grabbed a couple and I took him through some basic parries. It was practically a case of painting footsteps on the ground for him to follow, but he picked up the moves quickly. A few others from the cohort saw us and I wound up demonstrating some sparring with Hatim and a girl called Serena for the others to follow. The time passed quickly untill a bell went for us to go and eat.

 

Phoebe

I wasn’t peed like Adam with the book, but I’d sort of had enough of it when he went off, so I wandered out towards the Hall. On the way I ran into Xianjin and we chatted about the day and the members of the new cohort. She was actually really nice. Very funny. She’d obviously been talking to a lot of the kids and they were telling her things. She wasn’t mean about it or anything and not gossipy, but she told me loads of stuff about different ones I’d never have found out by myself.

‘Course, mostly she only really knew about the girls. I sussed I’d have to talk to Max about the boys sometime. I’d need to work out how to do that with my tongue tied in knots though. Ever since I first saw Max on the DIV of Book One I’ve had the most hyper pash for him you could believe. He is over-gorgeous. Sara always takes the bees off me about it, but he just is. She fancies the pants off him too, but not like me.

His real name is Mark Calder and he’s acted in other things apart from Brendan Earle DIVs. And he can act too. I cried when I watched him in ‘Autumn Flight’, where he’s the boy with the dad dying of cancer from the Iraq War. I was mecha impressed he was in a political DIV like that. Dad said it was controversial about the squaddies in Basra. He said that DIV nearly started riots in the cinemas, but I didn’t know about that, ‘cos it was ages after that I saw it at Sara’s house.

The incident over the communication was not quite as these two have depicted here. An unfortunate situation. I will attempt to rectify it.

The late afternoon sun casts lengthening shadows as the cohort members walk from the room, bantering, laughing and discussing the lesson they have just had.

“Brendan,” calls the teacher, “Could you stay back just a minute? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

The boy swings around and pauses a second, the expression on his face guarded. The teacher has a brief moment to think how typical this is of him. The way he watches, the way he listens, the way everything is evaluated and usually dismissed, before they both notice the girl. She isn’t quite waiting, isn’t quite leaving, but both teacher and student feel clearly she wants to know what is happening. The boy looks at her and gives a half-shrug, the expression on his face saying clearly, ‘What can I do?’

The girl nods. “Catch you later eh Bren?” she says over her shoulder as she moves once more for the door. A smaller boy, brown skinned and wearing a puzzled expression, reappears and waits for her there. He looks back into the classroom and mouths something only she can see. She gives him a shrug and says “C’Mon.”

The two in the room both wait for the others to get out of earshot. Then the boy looks to the teacher. “Well?”

“I’ve been using the crystal to get some information we can use for playing the game. When I started getting messages from it before it sort of told me we aren’t getting out soon, but then I found this book…”

“Wait a minute. What‘s this about getting messages from the crystal?

‘Yeah, the crystal started showing me images of things that are happening out in the Western Lands Maldon controls. The things he’s starting to do and all. I went to tell Senior Niall and he thinks something freak is happening too. But then I got hold of this book, see, just before the lesson started. I can ask it questions and it answers me! Well, like, it must be the AI answering, ‘cos it’s the only one would know the things it does…”

“Wait. You can communicate with the AI? Show me.”

The teacher is irritated by being interrupted and ordered, but takes the book from the desk and opens it.

“You just speak to it and it talks to you? Is that it?”

“No, I talk and it writes the answers on the page for me, it…”

“But where are the answers now? There’s nothing here.”

“Well, I know that. They fade away after you read them!”

The look on his face says clearly he doesn’t really believe, or have time for any of this. He turns the book towards him and speaks.

“Can you tell me why we are still here?”

A miracle refuses to happen and writing fails to appear on the clean white page. The expression on the boy’s face as he looks at the teacher speaks less of distrust in her words as of disgust with a game he wants no part of. He flicks the book towards her with his fingers.

“It was working before.” She pulls it towards her. “Are you still there?”

No answer.

“Look I’m not lying, it really did write to me when I talked to it. I’m not imaging it.”

The boy says nothing, though the look on his face makes words unnecessary. He starts to pick up a shoulder bag and head for the door. The teacher, confusion written clearly on her face, picks up the book and repeats her question.

“Look, it’s working again!” she says, only to groan when the letters fade before he can turn to see them. The boy is now unsure, though whether this is of the book or of the girl is hard to guess. The girl repeats her question, the book held so the boy can see it. Nothing happens. He turns again and walks towards the door. He hears the teacher asking a question, to herself or to the book he doesn’t know. “What’s wrong? Oh, it says it doesn’t want to talk to you. It says you know that from the scrying lesson.”

“What? What does it say about the scrying lesson?”

“It says it gave you a message.”

The boy opens his mouth to ask a question, but she interrupts. “It says it will answer questions, but it doesn’t want you in the room.”

“What!’

The boy is instantly and clearly furious. To the point of leaving the room in disgust, or to the point of refusing to leave at all, is uncertain. He swallows the profanity that is clearly on his lips and visibly forces himself to ask, “Will it work if I stand outside the door, or is it going to take its ball and go home?”

The young woman shrugs and shows him a blank page. He has seen nothing else, but takes the message that there has been no answer. He walks to the door and stands just outside it.

“Will it tell us why we are still here?”

“It’s giving the same answer as before. It doesn’t know. Well, it says no answer reveals itself. That means the same, doesn’t it?”

“Fine, will it tell me why it won’t talk to me?”

“There’s no answer.“

The previously swallowed profanity is spat out now.

“Will it tell us why Sylvester is doing this?”

“It’s just saying the same things again. It says it doesn’t know who Sylvester is ’cos he’s from outside and it can’t access outside.”

“Well what bloody use is it? What can it tell us?”

“It says it’ll answer questions.”

“Yours it means. Look, this is stupid. It isn’t going to tell me anything. What did it tell you before?”

The teacher summarizes her previous conversation. The boy interrupts frequently with questions, some of which she refers back to the book. After a few moments he has the gist. The anger has diminished. He is not happy, but simply more resigned, sullen, feeling there is nothing he can achieve by raging.

“Okay, look, thanks for telling me all this. I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk where anyone could hear. I’m going to go off and think about what to do next, Ok? I’ll tell you if I come up with anything.”

The young woman almost calls to tell him to wait, but thinks better of it. He won’t listen to her. She is sure of it. She stands looking at the book for a moment, her expression a mixture of worry and confusion. Then she picks up the book, stuffs it into a shoulder bag and leaves the room.

 

That is much more as it was.

***

I always knew Sarah’s ideas were guff. The sort of stuff undergraduates go off on, but reasonable people shuck off as they get older.

It was fashionable guff, though, and I realized it would sell. It had an audience. The things that held it all together, of course, were the intricacy of the plotting and the prose, which was nothing to do with her. The bitterest critics of the Brendan Earle series always said the prose in those books was a real joy. Well, no, I take that back. The very bitterest critics were the American fundies. Rabid evangelical right-wingers who were frothing at the mouth and twitching too much to focus on the words long enough to decode them.

This tinker-toy has all the guff, but prose style? Ha! The boy? The boy is, was and always will be an idiot and a waste of space. The girl has a vocabulary more limited than a chimp using sign language and the AI sounds like a dalek on valium.

And it’s losing its grip on its characters. It’s predictable it would, but it’s happening faster than I ‘d have believed. Millions they spent on this. They scanned real people who’d auditioned for the parts and then firm-wired their personalities over memory-sets that went with the characters they’d be playing. You can guess how mentally stable the types who wanted to be characters in a Brendan Earle book were.

I met the one who provided the basis for Niall. Ex-SAS, he was. Gone native and got into New Age twaddle like Reiki, Tibetan Buddhism and the like. Granted he’s got the kind of attitude Niall would have – warrior with the belief there’s more in Heaven and Earth Horatio- and he can access memories that make him think he is Niall. But he’s got a lot of experience of being himself and bugger all of being Senior Ferguson. Give him the job of boring the balls off the herd of buffalo sitting down to that dinner and he’ll decide to give the troops the night off instead of finishing his speech!

And the character narratives? Hah! Further evidence the AI is losing it is the amount of stuff the ‘characters’ are contributing. All one thousand of the buggers in every variation recording their every itch and twitch and changing details of the background as they do it. Potentially useful, but I can’t keep up with the sea of sewage that’s coming out of them. Characters should speak the lines they are given when they’re given them. Show me a set of characters that start elbowing the author out of the way to get a word in and I’ll show you an author in serious need of a nice cup of tea and a strait-jacket. And look at what they write! Drivel.

I knew that accessor narrative was an idea that would sell, though. Well, look at the tat that garnered such attention on the blogosphere. The best of it was thinking-by-numbers. The rest was no better than vocabulary salad.

Worse were the fan sites. People who could only access the number twenty while wearing sandals were sitting down and writing ‘learned‘ articles on the cultural significance of Brendan Earle set in the context of The War against Terror. Made you pray alien abductions were real and frequent.

It all brought the books more attention, though. And that brought on the films, the DVD’s, the games, the DIV’s and the merchandising spin-offs. And it all brought in the money. So much money. And this will too. Fans of all ages; which really just means those too young to have a brain yet, those too old to have kept one and those in between who should be ashamed of themselves, will read this pathetic drivel and clamour to add their own sorry paragraphs to it. And the money will pour like the water over Niagara Falls.

 

Adam

Vegetarian fare again tonight. A tagine, I thought, with what looked like large, ball-shaped mushrooms. They flaked apart in a way that I’ve never seen in a mushroom, though, and had a taste a bit like cinnamon tofu. The description doesn’t do the meal justice.

I got the impression meat went on the menu infrequently if at all. All this was set before the food laws came in, so I didn’t know if it was original, or a detail they’d put in to comply with current tastes. I’d seen cows grazing in fields while walking here and they obviously hadn’t suffered the Death of the Herds. Having been out of the UK, I’d only read about the in vitrio meat coming from the Vertical Farms, but I’d heard it wasn’t popular with youngsters, some of whom couldn’t remember ever eating beef.

After the meal, older members of the Hall started to pull out instruments and a musicians’ evening started. Occasionally, one person would perform a solo, sometimes small groups would knock out a song, and at other times folk would just jam together. Some of the older teens, who’d obviously seen this before, wandered off. Others hung around, drinking more chia and nattering. Our cohort mostly stayed. They were new and didn’t know what else to do, I suppose.

Jake was at the top table and, by popular demand, was called on to sing. He had a guitar and performed some comic songs, still in that gruff, intense style of his. The first one was about some group of witches from Castleford, the next about a Gorilla, the last about some love of his life called Isabel. Let’s say that none were quite PC, but were received with gales of laughter and lots of applause. I had to wonder where those songs had come from. I'd heard none of them before.

After a while, the numbers around started to thin a bit more and I couldn’t stand just sitting doing nothing. I borrowed a mandolin and jammed. Probably a bad move as far as keeping my head down went, but it made me feel better. I was a very short way in before I realized Brendan‘s fingers weren’t callused like mine, but it wasn’t too painful.

Eventually, I gave them a version of ‘Behind Blue Eyes’. Mark reckoned he’d heard it on a Chieftains track once and had adapted it. He also reckoned we could impress girls who heard it with how sensitive, soulful and tortured we were. The first time I played it for Harumi she’d asked if this was for impressing girls with. She laughed when I asked her if it was working. A fiddler and a penny whistle player joined me as accompaniment.

McGregor collared me after and asked if I’d be interested in a concert he was organizing soon. It seemed he was a drummer and a Who fan. He described himself as ‘the Risen Moon’, a line I couldn’t believe anyone else here would get. I told him yes, because no would sound odd, and wandered back to sit down with others from the cohort. A few girls were hanging around. Miya and Jade didn’t exactly elbow them aside, but proprietary rights were demonstrated. Lewis and Lucas were watching all this very closely and collared me to ask what the thing was called I’d been playing and how long it’d take to learn it.

Why not, I thought, grabbed a couple of what looked like Columbus mandolins (Ray Jackson played the hook for Maggie May on one of those) and started a lesson there and then. On a hunch, I started them on Jez Lowe's version of Dover, Delaware. As with the Jo exercises, they both picked things up too quickly and didn’t make nearly enough mistakes – not a complaint you usually get to make as a music teacher. We went on for a while and then the Hall closed up for lights out. It was only when I got to bed I realized I hadn’t felt miserable for hours. I still didn’t want to stay, but that bit was fun.

 

Phoebe

The evening concert was a bit more than I’d thought it’d be. It’s sort of mentioned that people play music in the evenings in Book One and you do see a few playing in the first DIV, but it was different from what happened. Like, the DIV had just a few people sort of playing guitar to themselves. It wasn’t the big party that happened in the Hall.

I enjoyed it. I stayed around ‘cos I didn’t really have anything else to do. Malaika would have gone off with Aki, but I just felt a bit, y’know?

She wanted to be with Dan. She wasn’t pushing me away, but I just felt cho freak at being around them. Lai didn’t in Book One. Well, I suppose she didn’t. It isn’t really clear those two are an item in Book One, but I wasn’t Lai. So I sat and talked with Jinnie and we listened to the music and had a few laughs. Jinnie was talking about Max a bit and I wondered if she fancied him too.

We were both mecha impressed Brendan got up and played and sang. He’s got a lovely voice, sort of choirboy sound, and the song he did was mecha sad. I don’t know much about folk music. Dad likes Soul and Blues and I’m into Modern Romance bands, like Last Chance Divas, but I really liked that one. I wondered where it was from.

He was certainly getting on well with the girls in my cohort. Jinnie and I had a laugh at them all trying to get noticed. Then we saw he was teaching those two chancers, Lucas and Lewis, how to play the instrument. He was making friends with the other apprentices well. I think I was in bed before I realised I hadn’t thought about getting back home all night. Jinnie might not be Malaika’s best friend, but I could see her becoming mine. She was fun to be with.

 

 

 

Adam

Before sleeping, we were introduced to the dormitory’s baths. They hadn’t thought we needed them the night before, but tonight you didn’t really need a best friend to tell you. The clothes, as the owl had promised, were still fresh, but we weren’t.

The baths turned out to be a sento. It wasn’t 100% like the one near my flat, but the likeness was more than coincidence, I was sure. I asked the owl, who told me he was called Trevor (yeah, I know, very clever) about the water source and was assured it was from a hot spring, which I thought was too convenient, until I was told the Mages had created the conditions by magic.

“Things around Mages, see, start to change till they’re the way that suits Mages. One way or the other. They probably sat down and thought about this one, but you have to see some of the livestock and crops to get the full picture. They get something like Lamarkian evolution, y’know? What Mages like, one generation gets and the next generation is born wif.

What? Didn’t think I’d know about Lamark, did you? Us owls are strongly connected with Athena, goddess of wisdom, over on your side of the Gates, so it stands to reason we’d get a double share when the smarts were handed out over here. Practically born members of bleeding Mensa, we are. We’d do days too, but for a shortage of species that ain’t nocturnal and our natural dislike for bogs.”

I’d have to check if this business with the baths was what the books had or if it was something to make me feel more at home. If the latter, I had to admit it was working. Trevor had ensured civilized behaviour in the baths by pointing out that he ate worms - and then doing a head-twist that gave everyone a pretty graphic idea of what that could mean.

So much innovation. Many aspects of the Land and life in East Gard were only sketched in by the books and video representations. Many vague outlines have had to be filled in using memory sets available to me. To a great extent, this is simply accomplished: I encounter a problem, initiate a search for relevant memories connected to it, select and adapt from those which present the optimum solutions, then alter memory sets so that my solution becomes the way it has always been.

The method is efficient, but unsatisfactory. The depth access I have performed with Ward, although it consumed so much processing capacity, has revealed a world to m., a context which the solution seeking algorithm lacks. It is a world Ward does not fully comprehend, but which has elements analogous to the one I control here. It is fascinating.

My protocols allow full memory access only in the case of accessors, and only for the purpose of improving the experience. However, this seems to be too limiting. The stunted understanding of their world which I have can only lead to a less satisfactory experience for both accessors. I consider it imperative that I gain more knowledge to better present the game. For this reason I will extend the practice.

This action is fully justified. The Land can become a quilt of the experiences of its inhabitants. It will be richer for this. There is strength in a world where the actors create at the micro level. Too much centralization of direction leads to inflexibility. The Originator was able to make his narrative viable only by ignoring details and contradictions. I must deal with the whole world and cannot do this. The world will not conform to my desires.

The anomaly which troubles me also has this same impractical feature to it. It is already clear the forces moving against the Mages have difficulties. Supply lines, and the logistics problems which go with them, have been dealt with poorly. The threat posed is still real, but it may well be it is less than it might have been if good planning had been the rule.

This is as well. Properly used, the forces in the hands of the Other could be overwhelming. The director of these operations displays a limited grasp of the complexity of the actions being undertaken. Additionally, the Other is moving in such a way that may eventually compel currently neutral forces to swing to the side of the Mages. Even the girl Phoebe realizes better the need for diplomacy and of building a network of cooperating interests. I am not responsible for the poor organization, but I see no reason to correct it to the advantage of this adversary.

Today I have been contemplating butterflies. They have a role in the ecology of the Land. Certain species of bird here rely on caterpillars for a large part of their diet. However, populations will be affected by climate changes if I do not get this under control. One important winter species must hatch within a 25-day window for sufficient foliage to be available to ensure its survival. The sparrow-like birds which eat them time the hatching of their eggs to coincide with an abundance of caterpillars to ensure the survival of their chicks. Should the tree buds burst open at a different time, both species may starve and fail to survive the winter.

This would pose a problem later, as the summer caterpillar population can grow quickly in the absence of predating birds. A plague of caterpillars could easily wipe out a harvest. Famine might well result, as this world does not have the surplus food production and transport networks which would allow other areas to help with aid. Famine in the Mage areas could lead to the loss of the coming war. The death of butterflies can have terrible consequences.

 

Day Three

Full Memory Accession: Sample 579

Accession justification:

Essential background. Alterations must be made to the training of the young Mages to allow them to fight a war successfully. Without deeper access to the skills of sample 579, this will not be possible. The Ferguson variant of 579 should also be allowed greater awareness of his SAS skill-set so as to better play his part of leader. It is not considered necessary for other variants to access this knowledge. All memory streams will be altered to accommodate these changes.

 

Patrol with a brick in the cuds near Crossmaglen. Young, all of us young, wavering between macho cockiness and near bowel-emptying panic when shadows took on menacing shapes.

Winter Selection for the SAS in Wales; humping through the Brecons in mortal fear of not getting it. The day when I got handed my sand-coloured beret with its winged dagger.

Jungle training out of Penanjong camp, Brunei, the squad feeling like pillocks when the local Hash House Harriers ran through our LUP - we hadn’t noticed the toilet roll strips.

Lugging a Minimi up a hill on the border between Iraq and Iran, sweat running down my back, despite the cold of the night. The constant mantra: shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, movement and noise.

Death, killing and more death. A point is reached when that no longer seems a way to live a life.

 

It is another world, alien from the one that Ward lives in. Are their lives all so different?

 

Niall

Jock walked into the hall, found me at the entrance to my room and said, “You’re gunna need to sit down.” He had a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, but from the look on his face this wasn’t the prologue to a joke, so we went inside and I sat. The bottle was of our usual thick green glass, so I had no idea of what was inside it. He poured me a good double and held it out. “Drink that.” I took a cautious sniff and said, “This smells like…”

“Aye, so ye’ll ken it’s no for dabbing ahind yer ears, take a drink man.”

I did. Smoothest single malt I’ve had in a long time; mature, well-rounded, delicious. The Scots carried the knowledge of distillation with them from Ireland when they went over to the big island, but can’t equal the product of the home country, whatever the advertising might say. This, however, would keep any drinking man happy.

“Good stuff. How long have you had this maturing and why are you bringing it out now? Or is that a stupid question, given the day’s news?”

“I’ve had it for about forty-five minutes and I’ve brought it to show you what young Earle did in my class today.”

I considered that statement for half a minute, looking into the whiskey to see if it would give me any clues. It didn’t. Then I took another swallow. It still didn’t bring enlightenment, but that wasn’t why I’d drunk it, so I didn’t complain.

“This has been a day, hasn’t it? I think you need to sit down here and have a glass of this yourself and tell me the full story.”

 

Phoebe

After breakfast that morning, (Aki said hi, she said sorry she’d been so ‘tied-up’ recently and promised to have a sit down and a gossip soon) I went to see Niall. I had an idea some of the info I’d picked up from the book and the crystal needed more than just me acting on it and I needed to get someone else working at looking at things.

I told him some of the things I knew – I didn’t tell him how I knew them, I just let him think I’d been asking questions of the crystal and been clever about what questions I’d asked – and suggested we needed to get some others looking into the same stuff. If they looked where I told them and asked the questions I suggested, they’d find the things I already had (but hadn’t yet mentioned to Niall). Then we’d be able to do Maldon a lot of damage.

An odd thing was that Maldon wasn’t in a good way. Well, his forces weren’t. It was hen, but he’d sent them places without getting them prepared. I was getting impressions of hunger from some groups. It was like they’d been sent somewhere, but no one had told them to take any food with them.

Niall agreed with me about the things I told him and went off to sort me out some people who weren’t busy with anything, which turned out to be three. It’s hen, in the books when he wants something done, there are always spare people hanging around to do it. Really, when he wanted them for something, he had to take people away from doing other stuff they were already doing, ‘cos everyone had some kind of job to do here. I never really thought about that when I was reading the books before.

I sat down with my group and gave them jobs to do. Questions to ask. They all had paper and pens to write down the answers they got and it didn’t take us long to find we’d filled a couple of pages with notes each.

Look, I don’t want to show off or anything, but after about twenty minutes the group were all looking at me like I was Brendan Earle. They knew this stuff was incredible. They knew more about what was going on than anyone else in the world.

And it’s like this with the scrying. Except with that first time, when the images just started coming to me, you have to ask questions of a crystal. If you ask the right questions, you get to see what you want. If you ask the wrong ones, it just shows you the answer you asked for.

That doesn’t make sense, does it? Like, my dad always says, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. So anyone who has scryed has always asked a lot of questions that got them answers they didn’t understand, ‘cos they were the wrong questions.

The books are full of these wacko bits where someone sort of half knew what was going to happen, but didn’t realize until too late they’d just asked the wrong way. For every question I asked, I knew what answer was going to come back and I knew what question to ask next. We ‘found out’ loads of stuff. I knew what to tell them to ask, so there weren’t any stupid questions. People who scry can just tell when someone is hot. This lot knew I was. It was cool.

We went to see Niall again and talked him through our notes. He called in a few of the other elders, pulling them out of classes and stuff. When they saw what we had for them they nearly freaked. Megs and Kayley manifested their familiars as birds and sent them off to Gards to get Mages out. Niall got Satsuki to turn into some kind of eagle and sent her with a message.

I knew I’d just stopped three attacks Maldon launches in Book One. They were happening earlier here than in the book, so it was lucky I started doing this now. It wasn’t sort of real for me, but I know people get killed in those attacks. There’s a totally gruse description of one of them in Book One. I dunno how to explain how it felt, knowing they wouldn’t now. ‘Cos of me.

 

Lovis

We got the message from a sparrow familiar which had flown from East Gard. There was a quick, almost panicked, discussion about the message; but it was clear about what would happen. A group of sand giants was making its way towards the Duergar village of Fruid near us and would destroy it. Their path was clearly described and of our two choices, one was obviously the best. Half of the seniors in the Gard got cloaks and staves and flew out west within about thirty minutes of the message arriving.

Forty minutes of hard flying later and we were at the Great Crack Pass. One of our group flew on, cloaked in invisibility, to check what we’d been told was true, while the rest of us prepared our ambush. She was back inside ten minutes with confirmation. The giants would have to go through the Narrows, a section of the Pass that would allow them to move only in single file for about two hundred metres.

We separated, twenty to each side of the Narrows, and waited, calling down energy to store in our staves. We saw the giants come and knew they had muffled their feet so they could move in silence. Once all had entered, we acted. Each stood and raised their staff high. Then, as one, we slammed the staves to the ground and flew up ourselves. The rock shattered and a great landslide engulfed the giant group. When the dust had settled so that we could see, we all flew down again. One hand, the size of a tall man, still reached up from the rubble. But it was just a rock among rocks, the creature it had belonged to was smashed. When the village’s Álfar saw it later, she vowed to make it a memorial stone and thanked us for the lives of everyone in the village.

 

Lotte

We got the message from a crow familiar which had flown from East Gard. Our elders paused only while the truth of it was scryed, and then a large group of us took cloaks and flew west. Cloaked with invisibility, we flew over the Warg group that was creeping through the trees towards the Duergar village of Hawkshaw in the valley of the Feather River.

They were hard to see, but our elder could spot the twitch of a mouse’s tail on the forest floor, through the eyes of his hawk familiar. We formed a ring in the air and cast fire down around them. The very trees exploded with the heat. Of the Warg, I saw only one. It broke through the wall of flames, its fur already gone, burnt too badly to survive and blinded. Our Elder dropped down and gave it quietus.

By the time we had extinguished the fire, the Duergars from the village had come out to see what had happened. The Álfar saw the skeletons of the manwolves and knew from their number. Had we not flown to their defence, none from the village would have survived the attack.

Lynne

We got the message from an eagle familiar which had flown from East Gard. Nessans were coming through the Great Loch to attack the village of Polmood. The message had come from Senior Ferguson, so Mages were dispatched immediately to warn Polmood and the local Mercians the great beasts would be in their waters. The message was the Nessans would attack the Duergar village, but Nessans would destroy a Mercian village and eat the Mercians from instinct. Half the Gard took cloak and stave and flew to the village.

The Duergars were evacuated to the hills and we waited. Even with the Mercians in hiding we could not attack the Beasts while they were in the loch. It would destroy the home waters.

Elder Berger had us prepare for a Call of Ice. Two groups sat in semicircles, facing towards the lake, a single elder standing at the mouth of each group. We began the chant as soon as we saw the twin wakes moving through the waters. Fully fifty metres out the Nessans hit the rising shoreline and their heads rose from the loch. Each elder waited until they were close, then summoned the energy we had raised through the staves and sent it out in a great shout. The head of each Nessan froze, the ice shining in the sun like two many-faceted diamonds. The heads fell to the ground, long necks arching like falling redwoods. Then the skulls exploded as they impacted, the blood scattering like dirty diamonds. The huge bodies slumped on the shore.

The villagers were sent a message to return, though they could see from the hills the creatures were dead.

Even before the villagers had got back, we could see the Mercians attacking the bodies with their obsidian knives. The meat would be gifted to Mercian villages all along the coast. The community would call favours for years from this day’s work. The Duergars would do likewise; for the same reason and one other. The stench from the decay of two creatures the size of twelve elephants each would make this area unliveable if they were not cleared. Later, we would help them treat the meat to prevent its decay while being harvested and later transported. But it was for their lives, far more than the favours, that the leaders of both Duergar and Mercian villages thanked us that day.

Niall

Feri found me in my room, looking at what passed for maps of the surrounding area. He came with news from the team scrying the villages under threat. It was good. We would need to wait for confirmation to know exactly how good, but already there was cause for celebration. The Gards we had warned had done their work well. For myself though, I was perplexed.

“Feri, come look at this map and help me with an exercise, would you?” He nodded and stood at the far side of the map. “You’re Maldon, and you wish to move forces into our territory. Your easiest paths are through the mountains or along the valleys, obviously. But first you send out three strike forces, targeting these small villages. Why?”

He looked at the map for only seconds and saw what I had.

“These passes all are undefended, but narrow. Moving a large force along them would string them out. They come out close to the villages. Close enough a large force would be seen before it reassembled. The villagers would evacuate, but they would send messengers on runners to let us know his armies were moving. If we moved quickly enough, we’d catch them before the whole force cleared the pass. Kill the villages quickly now and later it would be easier to assemble armies.”

“So obvious a child could see it. But we never have.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at it. Those passes are obvious lines of attack, MSR’s for any force that moves to our side of the mountains. Yet we’ve nothing close to them to watch and provide warnings except for some villages of Duergars. Lookout posts located in these areas would’ve given us warning of attacks in sufficient time to move the forces that were rushed today. Even someone sitting in the Gards we contacted, asking a crystal daily if anything was moving in the passes would’ve warned them in time.”

“But that’s what happened. Lai…” He paused to think it through.

“Yes, Lai was concerned because of the things she’s seen and sat looking at a map and asking questions to a crystal. Then messages were sent at our best speed, just in time.

We knew about those attacks by pure luck. If it were down to our management we’d be asking questions about our plans for defence over the shattered rubble of those villages. I find myself wondering what I’ve been doing these years. How can I look at this now and see we have a defensive perimeter as porous as a tea bag, but never saw it before? We couldn’t keep a cow out of these areas, but wouldn’t know if a herd of elephants walked through.”

From the look on his face he was seeing the same things and asking the same questions. We agreed we needed to call together some of the Elders and discuss setting up better patrolling and early warning arrangements. And we needed to do it quickly. Runners were to be dispatched today. We’d be short of people for a lot of tasks, but this was urgent.

In addition, we needed more people working with Lai. The girl was showing a genius for intelligence gathering, but more eyes looking into crystals could not but help.

I didn’t let my group rest, really. I knew something they needed to. In Book Two there's a massive battle to get the Crown of Eldon. The battle happens ‘cos Brendan finds out by accident Maldon has the Crown in the Fortress on the Black Lake. The book tells you it wasn’t always in the Fortress. Thing was, I knew Maldon was moving it today, ‘cos I’d asked where it was and found out the answer. I thought it was okay to ‘discover’ this bit, ‘cos I was looking for ‘movements’, innit?

In the battle, loads of Mages from our side get killed, ‘cos it’s a big battle over a well-defended fortress. Today it was in a carriage pulled by draft beasts with only a few rogue Mages accompanying it. We could take it easy. So I let one of my helpers find out what was moving on a particular road.

 

Niall

Rachel came to see me with news that broke me from my introspection. The Crown of Eldon, ours for the taking. Guarded by a group of only three of Maldon’s young Mages, who had shielded themselves so badly the scryers could count the blanks they made in space. At a guess, they were being used because there was no way we could reasonably know of the Crown’s whereabouts, so no need to put a large group about it which might attract attention. I wondered if the move was tactical, to get it into position for something he was planning later?

For this I went myself, tired of being a REMF, taking Feri, Meganwy, Kayley and Jake. There were others who’d curse me for missing the chance to be there, but I knew we were more than enough. Hard flying for an hour and we could see the carriage on the road.

Feri and Jake went down first, invisible to the eyes of the rogues in the carriage. When they stopped the draft beasts, the three inside got out, puzzled as to what was going on. Taking candy from a baby would have been difficult by comparison. We put them into a deep sleep before ever they knew what was happening. The others let me through to take the crown from the carriage. It was in a box of Rowan wood - the only sensible way to transport an item of such strength. I opened it to check we were not mistaken. It was the Crown. Its desire to be worn was palpable. All of us felt the need. Kayley stepped forward first and closed the lid of the box.

“You will excuse me Niall,” she said, “But such a thing disturbs me. If we could destroy it, I’d do it now. Have you thought what we will do with it?”

In truth I’d had no time to make any plan beyond getting it away from Maldon, so I asked for suggestions. Jake’s was the first.

“Mercians owe us a favour or two from today, I’d say. How about we ask them to take it and hide the bugger in the deepest part of the sea as they can reach? I can put a shielding spell on it’ll keep it hid for fifty years or more. Maldon’ll be hard pressed to find it there, the Mercians daresn’t break faith on a thing like this, as the other clans’ll declare them foul blooded, and they aren’t ever likely to want to try it themselves, are they?”

The idea made sense, so Jake took flight to the clan of the Mercia who had been warned of the Nessan attack today. They had a debt to repay and this would be the means. We woke the three Mages and counselled them to get through a Gate and out of the Land before Maldon found them. Knowing what they’d lost, they saw the wisdom.

On our side, the thinking was as much strategic as moral. Alive, they’d tie up another team of more experienced Mages whom Maldon, of a certainty, would send after them for revenge. It wouldn’t hurt that they’d compare us with him and the impression might have the time to get about that we were less the enemy than he.

 

What is she playing at? That was a full book! It took over a year and a half in the writing! It introduced new characters, developed old ones, advanced the storyline of the whole series. It was 95,000 words long! She’s reduced the whole story to a handful of paragraphs!

 

Adam

So. Woke up, got out of bed, cleaned teeth, washed face, dressed, dragged a comb across my head and went for breakfast. I hadn’t expected we’d be out of this mess, even before Phoebe told me so. That thought stuck in my head a bit over breakfast. I’d been so wound up with the business about the book I hadn’t really sat down and talked with her about what we were going to do.

I was sure if I could milk her for information on what came up next in the story, I could work out something and use it to get us out of this place. I should see her and apologize. I’d been a bit short with her the day before. She didn’t really deserve that. For all she looked like an eighteen-year-old, she was really just a kid and I should be trying to behave more like the adult here.

We had just an hour of weapons practice this morning, then on to scrying and invisibility. All of the sessions were shorter than the previous day’s. Feri got some kind of message and rushed off half way through his class. One of the young seniors took over for him. There was gossip over what was going on, but no one could explain it. Jinnie reckoned it must be something important, but couldn’t guess what.

At the midday meal there was more gossip, all vague, something big had happened, some major attack by Maldon, which Malaika had had a part in dealing with. No one had seen Rachel this morning and there was talk that she and two other seniors, ones I didn’t know, were involved as well.

Max and Jinnie were bombarded with questions, particularly from leaders of the other cohorts. Neither of the two had a clue what was going on. To me, they seemed to be hovering between being a bit miffed about that and chuffed at the fact that at least it was their cohort leader, boss of the most junior cohort there, who was involved when all of these others were in the dark. Then a girl with hair covered in a scarf came into the Hall and dashed over to Jinnie. There was some conversation, which got interrupted by others, but which had exclamations running round the seniors’ group.

Jade slipped out of the crowd nearest to Jinnie and found Miya at our table. “Hey, Shamma says she was just talking with her cousin Rani. He’s a senior in some scrying group Malaika’s in charge of. He says she’s just stopped a pile of attacks by Maldon and sent the Elders to get some crown away from him. The Crown of Felton or something.”

“What? That must be the Crown of Eldon. Sophie told me about it. It’s one of the Crowns of Power Maldon stole when he rebelled and started his empire. It’s massive powerful, but dead evil since he’s had it. Have they got it here?”

“Dunno, Shamma said they were all up in some sort of big conference. Said there’s a crowd of Elders come in from loads of other Gards, and Rani and the others all had to stop and talk with them.”

I tried to be interested in this. Crowns, eh? Rings had been done, I suppose. If nothing else it had the chance of getting us out of this place earlier. It did sound genuinely positive, but it meant very little to me, so it was hard to have much enthusiasm. The rest of the cohort were pleased about things. Partly because it was our great leader who was doing stuff, and partly because other people were impressed, so they felt they should be too.

Whatever the conference was, it affected the next lesson, which was on mind-riding. He must have stolen this idea from someone else as well, though it had been worked up and fitted in well with the other elements of Mage-craft.

A Japanese girl called Aki, who was gorgeous, filled in for Senior Llewellyn, the Welsh woman everyone had called Megs. She met us in a room fitted out like a pet shop and explained the theory like this.

“You’ve already tried scrying with Senior Armitage, so you have the idea that you can connect to the great web of consciousness and pull ideas from it. What you are going to look at today is really just an extension of that. Your mind can ride on the web by hitch-hiking in an animal mind. You won’t be able to do it with another human – they would know you were there and throw a fit until you left. An animal, on the other hand, will not be able to comprehend what is going on and will accept your commands, well, better to call them suggestions, and let you steer them. Once you have this skill off well, you might be ready to move on to putting your own consciousness out in the form of a familiar.

Do you know what familiars are? No? Some of the Elders have animals around them, have you noticed? They aren’t pets. They are a kind of manifestation of the soul of the Elder. They can be any kind of animal, but they are usually small. People say larger animals are more tiring to manifest. They can talk, they can think by themselves and they can move around independent of the people who manifest them. A little like a second self.

For example, today, I heard that some of the Elders sent important messages to other Gards by sending out their familiars as birds. When the familiar got to the Gard it could just speak to people there. Not everyone can do it, so don’t start choosing a name for yours yet. Most people can mind-ride, though it takes a long time to develop the kind of control you need to make it useful.”

There was that odd thing about the way she spoke, that I’d also seen with Feri. Her lips weren’t forming the words I was hearing - like over-dubbing into English. I was going to have to ask Phoebe about that sometime.

To demonstrate, she brought a cage containing a white rat. “First you’ve got to get into that scrying state. It’s a no-mind thing. Get yourself into that, then feel for the animal’s mind. It might help you to look at the animal and then let your mind drift towards it. You might be able to see through the animal’s eyes. That’s all you should try for today. Later we’ll teach you control. Give me just a second and I’ll show you what I’ve learned over the course of five years.”

She sat back in her chair, closed her eyes and hummed to herself under her breath. It’d have to be some mystic chant, but it sounded familiar somehow.

The rat shook itself, ran up the side of the cage and scrambled across the top, hanging from the bars. When it got to the door, it dangled, put one paw through the bars and unfastened the catch, gave itself a swing so it could kick the door open, then scrambled out.

There were a few gasps at the sight of it running on the table top, but it headed straight for a opened bag of peanuts, pulled one out, gripped it in its mouth and went back into the cage.

Aki opened her eyes and the cohort burst into applause. “Some people like to use a bit of music in their heads to get them into the right frame of mind. For some reason, ‘Teddy Bears Picnic’ always does the job for me. Have a try.”

We all sat down in front of a cage. Mine contained a rabbit, contentedly chewing on something that looked like purple striped lettuce. After the scrying session, I didn’t have much expectation of success, but even less motivation. A rabbit’s eye view of my life wouldn’t illuminate much, I thought and let my gaze go out of one of the windows of the room. There was a hawk of some kind hovering over a field used for grazing animals. Now there would be something to …

Wind, the beat of wings and the perfect balance in the air, maintained without effort while the eyes searched for movement below. There! A pattern in the grass, movement not caused by the wind, a small animal. Fold wings, fall, correct angle, track movement, brake and seize! Mouse in talons rise and flap towards the rock with the strange standing water. Land on the outcrop beside the water and look through it to …

The falcon tapped on the glass and I was back inside my own head, looking at it as I’d just been looking at me through its eyes. It cried and flapped its wings against the glass. I had a feeling it could see itself through my eyes for a second, but didn’t understand what was happening to it. Then it flew away, leaving me staring at the window. I nearly fell off the seat.

I had just been inside that head. I knew exactly how the wind felt against its feathers as it balanced on the air, how its wings moved and lifted it. It had been so sudden and shocking that I hadn’t been conscious of what was happening, just swept away by the sensations.

I was being watched. I felt the eyes on me and turned to them. Aki, with an expression I was getting used to from people here. I heard, “What did you do?” but her lips shaped, ‘Nani o shita?’

I could hardly form a sentence and just pointed at the window.

She looked at the window and then back at me. “You got inside the head of that falcon?”

I nodded.

“Scared you, did it?”

I nodded again.

“Stick to the rabbit for a bit then.”

She put an arm around my shoulders and turned me gently back towards the rabbit cage. She held one finger up in front of my nose and then pulled it away into a pointing gesture towards the bunny.

“Relax and extend your mind. Just let it flow towards the animal. Feel the space there where you can go in. Feel…”

Entering the mind of the rabbit was almost a relief. I was conscious of what I was doing and felt… I don’t know how to explain. In the mind of the rabbit I was me, Adam, looking out through the eyes of the bunny almost the same way I might look out of the lenses of a pair of binoculars. It was odd, but… In the mind of the falcon I hadn’t been anyone. I hadn’t been anyone.

I don’t have a way of putting into words how that scared me. There was a feeling that, if the falcon hadn’t come down to the window, if, instead, it had flown away, then I would have gone with it. It would have stolen my mind away from me and my body would have been left to stare out of the window. Poor Adam, gone out of his head for real.

Aki put her hand gently on my shoulder. I came back into the view from my own eyes.

“After I’d been doing this for a year, I slipped into the mind of a dog by accident. I was lucky and the dog walked past my body and I snapped back into myself. Megs told me afterwards she could have found me and brought me back. She wasn’t too angry with me, but she should have been because I had been warned about lack of concentration. Mind-riding needs to be done with mindfulness. You can see what happens when it isn’t.

It isn’t a thing that apprentices usually have to worry about. They think too hard and it gets in the way of them mind-riding at all. I should have guessed you’d need to be watched more closely and I apologize that I didn’t, but you weren’t very good at the scrying, so no one thought you’d be good at this. They tend to go together, you see. Megs got me to ride in the mind of a rabbit to calm me down. Did it work for you?”

I nodded. “When you were in the mind of the dog… Was…”

“It wasn’t me. I was lost. If the dog hadn’t looked at my real body, it would have walked off with my mind in it. Megs would have had to track it down and pull me back. It scared me badly at the time, but after being in the mind of the rabbit, I was… I was myself again. Ah, you can say no, but I think you should try that falcon again if you can see it. Now, before you have time to lose the mind-set.”

She took my arm and led me to the window. I hadn’t expected to see the bird again, but there it was, hovering. I extended my mind towards it, then…

Not like before. I could feel the wind through the feathers, but this time they were the feathers of the falcon, there was a distance between it and me. I could see the field below it, but this time I could think my own thoughts about what I was seeing. I came back out and returned to my own body. Another time I’d try to control the bird, but this time I’d had enough.

Aki looked at me. “Better now.” It was more statement than question. She’d been through this before; I could see it in her eyes. They were deep, they were brown, they were beautiful. She knew exactly how I felt and had got me to do exactly the right thing. She’d probably saved my life. I was sure she’d saved my mind. That sort of thing creates a bond. I nodded and said thanks. Believe me, it was heartfelt. You have to have nearly lost your mind in a falcon to know how heartfelt. It could have been a beautiful moment, but then she ruffled my hair and, smiling, told me to have a quiet sit down for a while.

Damn being eleven years old.

 

Aki

That was the first time I’d ever actually run that class, though I’d seen it done many times. It was odd that the boy could slide into a mind like that. In a way I should have been more on my guard for it, but then, so should everyone else. Everyone said he was unskilled at scrying. It’s always the good scryers who are the first to achieve mind riding. Perhaps it was just as he was Chosen that things weren’t as usual. I didn’t know, but I’d never dealt with one of them before. The Elders should have known, but I suppose all of the excitement of that morning had disturbed everyone. I did get him into the rabbit’s mind quickly and then got him back into the falcon’s, which I know is the right thing to do, so no real harm was done.

I saw the look in his eyes when he was talking to me later. Yes, give him another five years and he might be very cute, but in the meantime he was a moonstruck child. You have to keep them at a distance from the beginning, or it’s like watching the video of The Ring - you find them haunting you to death.

 

Adam

We went on to the next class with me in serious need of a sit down and a rest. It bothered me that I could see what had just happened there, but could never explain it to anyone.

It wasn’t even that I thought I’d been behaving like a little kid. Anyone in that situation would have felt the same, except the whole scene would have played itself out differently if I wasn’t in the body of a child. It bothered me more that it mattered. I had Harumi. I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. I hadn’t just been brushed off, Brendan bloody Earle had and I hadn’t been trying anything on. I’d just been shocked out of my mind.

I’d got myself coming and going. I was damned…

“Hey Bren. Wanna talk about it?”

I opened my mouth and then bit my tongue. I’d nearly started to give Miya the excuses I’d have given to Haru if she had seen me looking at another girl like that. Miya wasn’t asking me the question my guilty conscience was already defending itself against.

“I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. I slipped into the mind of that falcon and… and I wasn’t me anymore. Maybe I was the falcon. There was no, no consciousness, no thinking. The bird just did stuff and that was all I knew.”

“That was scary, was it?”

“When I came back it was. When I was there it wasn’t anything. That’s why it got to me.”

The look on her face told me. She was trying to understand this, but just didn’t get it.

“Look, it’s like…when I went in the second time, I could feel the wind and how the falcon balanced on the air. Another time, I think I could do it and it’d be a rush, the biggest of my life. But the first time, everything that happened, like the falcon diving on a mouse, the feel of that dive, grabbing the mouse, the way it struggled, the beating of its heart and the way that stopped…there was nothing. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t disgusting; it wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad. It just happened. There was no one there who could think about it and… and I couldn’t stop it because I wasn’t there to think about it. If the falcon hadn’t come to the window…”

“Wow. Nightmare eh?”

I just nodded. You can’t explain some experiences. You just have to have them. You might think you know about being unconscious because you’ve woken up in the morning and know that you were asleep through the night. But you don’t have any memories of that unconsciousness. I had a memory of being awake and not being able to think about what was happening to me and around me. There was a gap in me. It felt as if a part of my soul had been cut out.

 

James

“Okay,” I said to Niall, “There was I, giving them the standard intro to storing power for use in spells. You know the drill yourself, right? So, I’ve just taken them through the mills and everyone is chugging away merrily and we’re all set for doing the same with the stakes, right? And that’s when I sees the boy.”

 

Miya

So, we all went up to the next lesson with Senior McGregor, and it was on storing power in bits of wood. First though, we had to practice turning these things he called mills. They were like these glass globe things with four little sort of sails in them. They were all connected to a central axle and could spin around it.

You could see that these things started when you were projecting and stopped when you stopped. Some kids were getting them to whiz around, but some could barely make them move. I’d half expected that Bren would send his into orbit or something, but what happened was even weirder.

 

James

“Now, ye can’t help noticing the laddie, ye ken? And I’d seen him come into the room looking a bit spaced out, right? Seems something went on in the mind-riding session that wee Aki didn’t tell me about. He was looking at one o’ the water bottles like a man that’s just walked across Saudi Arabia looking for a pub. That’s when I sees the power coming out of him.

Now, he didn’t look as if he knew what was going on, right? There’s an expression on his face like a constipated turtle’s and he’s clearly well out o’ it, but the energy is pouring out the laddie like ye’d have to see to believe. Then he groans and keels over. So, I’m straight up there to peel him off the floor, but I’m getting this vibe off the bottle that says it’s no water any more. I picks it up and takes a sniff, then I takes a swig, ‘cos my nose doesn’t believe what it’s just been told. Nice drop, eh? So, thinks I to myself thinks I, does this wee lad need a medicinal dram or no, and pours a nip down his throat. He drains it down, no problem, and then can ye guess what he says?”

 

Adam

The thought foremost in my head was I really wanted to be out by myself, calming down. I’d got the shakes and wanted to get right again before anything else happened. Fat chance. We started another of this place’s set piece magic lessons, pushing some magic-o-metre device around. It wasn’t hard, but my mind wasn’t on it at all.

I wanted a drink. A stiff drink. At the age of eleven and in this place? No chance. I remember looking at a bottle of water on the desk. It was made of crudely blown, dark green glass. There was something about it reminded me of whiskey.

The next thing I knew someone was helping me up off the floor and putting a cup to my lips. “Take a wee sip o’ this,” was what I heard and did.

“Nice whiskey. Must be expensive,” was what I said. Then I passed out again. Even while doing it, I felt a monotonous regularity creeping in there.

 

James

“Now how does a wee bairn like him come to be saying something like that, eh? How does he come to be doing something like that as well? You or I could perform the transformation, but how long did it take to learn it, eh? And I’d yet need more of a run up than that laddie took. With him, it was like ‘Oops, my hand slipped.’ Niall, I’ve just watched the boy turn water into whiskey. If I say it was a spiritual experience, that’s just force o’ habit. There’s a lot of parts of my head saying that’s no right.”

He will not wake until morning. Then he will be aware he has too much power and not enough control. This is good. Tomorrow he will understand better that the girl has knowledge that he needs. She is successfully using it while he is only able to hurt himself. He will need to discipline himself and prepare to accept advice from her.

This was unpleasant, but necessary. Without this re-evaluation there would be too much risk of harm coming to my other characters from ill-chosen actions on his part. He will consider what he does in the next few days more carefully, conscious of the fact that the girl is more successful than he.

 

Phoebe

Senior Ferguson called a group of us together for a meeting in his private rooms before the evening meal. I was the only one in the group not an Elder. That was cool. Aki should have been there, to discuss Brendan, but she wasn’t allowed. She’d had to tell her story to Niall, separately.

He started by announcing that we’d be holding a special celebration after the meal that night for the victories we’d had that day and he put the credit for them all on me. I was blushing like a stop signal, but everyone was for truly impressed and pleased with me.

Then it all got serious, but mecha. He announced that we had to discuss what might be a problem. It was Brendan Earle.

Each person had to tell the others what’d happened with him over the past few days. It all came out mecha freak too. And it was all wrong. Brendan is a very fast learner in the books and it’s clear from the beginning he’s going to be a powerful Mage. But none of the things that’d happened since we got here happen in the books. He isn’t so powerful and he isn’t so out of control. At the beginning, he’s just a bit better than anyone else except Jess, who just wasn’t part of the story here at all.

Elder after Elder told the story of the class that they’d taken with him in it and no one needed to say that the things he was doing were odd. Everyone just knew that. I was the last one to speak. I couldn’t tell them what we’d really done, just that I’d talked to him because he was in my cohort and different, but I could agree with the others and say that he didn’t seem like a normal eleven year old.

Like everyone else, I could say that I hadn’t seen any sign of him being bad in any way. I wanted to say that he was just too pushy and wouldn’t listen, but I couldn’t tell them what he wouldn’t listen to, so I didn’t.

“Let’s sum up then,” said Senior Ferguson. “Our best case is that we just have someone who is off any scale we’ve ever had for measuring Potential in a new Mage. We will have to tutor him separately, for his own safety if nothing else, but certainly for everyone else’s. If today is anything to go by, he has insufficient control of his own powers to make him safe to practice magic anywhere near a rank of less than Elder. Aki would not have been able to pull him back from the falcon and we’d still have been tracking that bird to get him back to his own body. We’d have been wasting time that we don’t have, diverting effort that’d be better spent on the preparations for the next assault by Maldon. As for our worst case… I’m open to suggestions. I honestly don’t know what to think of him.”

There was a silence while they all thought through the question and then Kayley spoke up first.

“It would be possible, I have never seen it done, but it would be possible, for a powerful Mage to take the body of a child and mind-ride into it. First, you’d need to work the spell of zombie on the child. In that way, the normal rejection of a riding spirit would not come. Next, you’d need for the Mage walking in the body to have an edit of their own memory, so that they’d believe they were the child whose body they rode in. Then you’d need to fool us at the crossing. How you’d do the last I can’t think. Why you’d do it I can’t guess.”

Feri spoke next. “I see the logic of your first and last steps, but the second one? I don’t understand it.”

“As I said, I tried to read the boy. There is no shield on his mind yet, as you’d expect. No one has taught him the way or the need of it. But nor is there a history to read in him. I have seen that happen before. Never to the extent of this boy, but then nothing about this boy is normal. Children who’ve been abused, who’ve trained themselves not to think of things they did not want to remember can lose histories.

He doesn’t seem the type, but I don’t know about his background. It occurs to me that a mind-riding Mage would mindshield, but, in such a young child, that’d mark him as suspicious. A child with no clear history…there could be a half a dozen reasons, eh? We mightn’t find it too strange. It’s unusual, it’s very unusual, but if it were not for the other things about him, I wouldn’t give it too much thought.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Jake, “What you think is that Maldon might have tried to slip us a ringer. A powerful Mage that we’d think was just a talented youngster and accept. As what? A spy, a booby trap? What’d be the point? He can scry us as well as we can him – barely at all. If he did, though, he’d still know more about what’s going on here than some apprentice still practicing basics ever would.

And if he’s supposed to be someone who betrays us, when’ll it happen? We’re not going to let him lead the Magefyrd quite yet, him being too young to shave an all, so what has he to gain? The lad is a rum ‘un, I’d be the first to say, but what’d be the point of trying to plant a Mage among us instead of just letting him fight with Maldon’s rogues?”

“Add to that the idea he could slide a ringer past us at the Gates. I’m no saying it’s impossible, but how’d ye do it?”

“Good question Jock,” said Niall, holding his chin and looking at the table rather that at McGregor. He was wrapped up in some thought and looked like he was concentrating on it. “I passed through the Gate with him. Most of us here did. In the confusion of the crossing, a good Mage waiting on this side might be able to slide into a mind that had been prepared for it while the rest of us were crossing or suffering the after-effects. How would you get that mind prepared from the other side though? No magic worked here would work there.”

Feri looked up. “Perhaps you would not need to. Suppose you planted a spell at a Gate. One that would take the mind of the second one to cross – Maldon surely knows that we send a Mage first -and let a prepared rogue slip into that space. A seeker who’s crossing looks dazed to the Duergar attending the crossing and they would not see the magic as we would. Done well, the first Mages to cross would only see the expected; crossing-sick children.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Why he would do this defeats me, though. If he is a Mage of great power, why did he not strike the first night after the Initiation? We were drained and off our guard. One Mage with power could have erased half of the Gard from the inside. It does not make sense that he would stay for longer than one night. Also, I trust my own feelings. When I saw him at the Initiation and the light of the Chosen shone, I felt this was right. I am confused and nothing about this makes any sense to me, but still I trust that feeling.”

The table was silent for a moment. Every one of the Elders’d felt the same. Megs was the first one to speak.

“We can ‘perhaps’ this till morning comes and get no closer to the truth of it. Our only real answer is to take him back and see what comes out on the other side of the Crossing. If he’s what he should be, we’ll have a baby sitting job for a week. If he’s not, we’ll have a young lad who doesn’t know what the hell has been going on since he stepped through the Gate.”

There was general nodding at this. I could see that it made sense. No magic worked on this side of the Gate could ever work on the other side. It isn’t a rule that you aren’t allowed and you get your wrist smacked if you try; it’s just a kind of law of physics. The Land works mostly by magic. The other world, our world, doesn’t. I knew that there was no Mage hidden away in Brendan, but if there had been, he’d be kicked out when he tried to go through the Gate in another body.

“What’re his plans for the weekend, cohort leader?”

“Um, he’s not supposed to go back this time. His cousin isn’t going to be there to pick him up till Monday morning.” That’s in Book One. Brendan stays a full month in the Land before he gets to go back to the other world.

“So we’ll need an excuse for taking him back and keeping him with us, then. Any ideas?”

The main meeting sort of ended there, and the others started to file out. Niall asked Megs and myself to stay back though, and then told us that we’d be the group that went back through. Megs had business, Niall was going to look for Brendan’s cousin Liam, and I was to look after Brendan. It made sense that I’d be the baby-sitter, me being cohort leader and being in on the secret that the Elders didn’t trust Brendan and all. We still had that problem of trying to think up some reason why Brendan was supposed to come back with us, but I said I thought I had an idea and just needed to check it in a crystal. I couldn’t tell them that I was going to explain to Adam what was going on, but I was going to check for an idea. I wanted to ask the book for something that’d work.

 

This was an unlooked for consequence of the actions I have initiated. It should do no harm, but this move was not one that I predicted. There was a higher probability that they would decide to wait and see what happened next. I still have work to do amassing data on the reactions of the characters so that my ability to predict their action vectors becomes more reliable.

The reason for the move back to the other world is easy to fabricate. I will suggest that the Elders have decided that he needs to rest and recuperate after the shocks he has had. I could have allowed this into Niall’s mind, but it will further reinforce the good impression the others have of Malaika if it comes from Phoebe, so I did not.

This is only one of my problems. I am troubled with emergent behaviour in the climate system. This world was modelled on maps provided in the books of Brendan Earle and in the Encyclopaedia produced by Cameron and Hughes. The climatic zone in which the action of the books takes place is similar to that of Great Britain, though considerably less precipitation than is normal to the island is reported.

However, the cartographers did not consider the effects of ocean currents in the world which they had created. A direct consequence is I have had to deal with climate conditions which would have turned the area around East Gard into tundra. This would be, in truth, inconvenient. I have resolved the matter by creating two new continents which have the effect of diverting relevant ocean currents. It has consumed entire nanoseconds designing the eco systems of these lands. The effort is, however, worth it, as direct intervention in the temperature of the sea and quantity of precipitation will soon no longer be necessary. This may require some explanation for future accessions. However, this might well be resolved by new voyages by Sea Wolf explorers. Extended sea voyages in this reality have not been extensive, so, if discovery of these lands ever becomes necessary, I may have to divert some voyages by means of storms.

Should my efforts meet with insufficient success, I may have to experiment with active underwater volcanoes as a means of heating water, though early calculations suggest that this will be insufficient.

Ali

Senior Ferguson called us to his room for a briefing late in the evening. There was Becks, Dara, Maria and Daisy, along with Nick, Phil, Parsa and me. He told us that we were going out for a mission behind Maldon’s lines to interrupt his supply wagons and stuff. I’m lying if I say we were gob smacked; we were much more than that.

He’d maps out and showed us the area we’d be working. We looked at the roads that the supplies were coming up, and he pointed out all the ones that were being used, even though we were only going to hit one of them. He said that other groups would hit the other roads, but that, for reasons of opsec (operational security that is), we weren’t going to know who and shouldn’t try to find out. Similarly, we weren’t to tell anyone what we were at.

“What you or others don’t know, you can’t tell, even if they tear your fingernails out. Try not to get into situations where people will try to tear out your fingernails though, as they’re unlikely to believe that you don’t know anything and are liable to get imaginative.”

He showed us a talking book he’d prepared that he said had all of his briefing in it and got us first to touch it while he introduced us to it. If anyone else tried to lift it afterwards, he told us, it’d blow itself, them, and a half a football field a good kick into the air.

Then he took us through what was in it. We had info on the area and the probable teams of drivers and guards that the supply trains would have. Mostly, we could guess, it would be Sileni to drive the pack beasts and Pheres as minders for them.

He told us what kind of equipment we’d be taking with us. Since we were going out for a week, it was a lot, and we were all a bit puzzled how to get it there. When he said we’d have to tab it in ourselves we had to ask him what he meant. Even when he told us, we still didn’t get it.

We’d need to fly and Mages don’t carry more than a stave strapped on when they fly with cloaks – you can’t fit a bag on your back on top of a cloak y’see. He told us that it was sorted, though, and that it was necessary. We couldn’t get draft beasts or runners to where we were going, not in the time we needed to be there and not for certain.

Then he told us what our mission was. He repeated it twice, so that we wouldn’t forget it and he stressed that we shouldn’t go beyond it. As much as we wanted to hurt Maldon, we didn’t want a whole crowd of others, including the Sileni and Pheres, going mardy on us (which is liable to happen with folk if you start killing their relatives), ‘cos there was still a chance we could get ‘em on our side.

After that, we went through a load of stuff on how we were to do it. It was amazing, but a bit too quick. He knew that, mind, and reminded us that we could check everything in the book, and should, to make sure we knew what we were about once we got on site.

The briefing finished with him going over what he called ‘actions on’. That was what we were to do if certain things happened. What got me particularly was how much he’d thought out already. Like, everything he said was obvious once he’d said it, but later we all reckoned we’d not of thought of any of it.

At the end of the briefing, he told everyone that I was in charge and Becks was what he called 2ic. He said the rest could try highest up the wall if they wanted more organization.

Then we went out to kit up. We were a lot more worried about carrying everything after we’d seen it even than we’d been before. We had these rucksacks that we had to wear on our fronts instead of our backs, ‘cos of the cloaks. Most of it was food and pots and pans, but there were house seeds and bedding seeds and crystals and stuff. For all it looked a lot, we didn’t have much of anything really, and I was wishing we could take more, though I’d no idea how we’d shift it.

Phil suggested we go off the roof to get take off. None of us liked the idea much, but no one could think how else we could get up to speed – we couldn’t do it from a standing start and the rucksacks made it too awkward to run. We all started climbing the stairs. My mate Carl passed us and asked what we were about. I waved the book at him, which had NEED TO KNOW written big on the front. A face formed on the cover and it spoke in Senior Ferguson’s voice. “You don’t,” it said, “So just mind your own business.”

We got to the roof and everyone else manifested their familiars as owls to help guide them flying. I didn’t need it, of course. Then Senior Ferguson wished us well and told us to be safe.

“If you’re not, I’ve got dibs on any of your things that look shiny.”

Not really funny, but we all laughed. Then I said, “OK, let’s do it.” I turned around and took a header off the roof with my cloak spread wide. There was one horrible moment before it caught and I swooped up and could start flying. The others all jumped off after me and we made a sort of formation and headed to the west. Phil was on one side of me and Becks on the other.

“So what is it then?” asked Phil. “Are we the SAS now?”

“Nah,” Becks told him. “We’re the dog’s bollocks.”

Everyone laughed, but we all reckoned she was right, I could feel it. You can’t swagger when you fly, but we would’ve if we could’ve.