Beyond The Gate Page 3
Vega sat on a log high above the swampland, legs crossed, face looking down at the water below. He wore dark clothes that he had stitched himself and a flawless jade hooded cloak that matched the color of his eyes. A frog jumped after a fly, making a splash somewhere in his periphery. He thought about leaving his abode.
Behind him, on a short hill in the swampy lowlands, sat the only home he had ever known. His father had built the cabin from logs he had fallen with his own hands. He made a winding pathway up the hill out of sharpened logs that acted as a retaining wall, so that any visitor would have to walk the switchback maze in order to reach his family.
And Vega missed his family; he had been alone for six months. His father had become ill twice that long ago, and he deteriorated rapidly. It was a strange illness, for he and his mother had no transferred effects. Seeming to know his fate, his father made a point to tell him many things.
“The reason I caught this illness is because I am not from this place. You know this, I speak your mothers tongue poorly, and you know each of ours because of it. I may not last much longer, and even though you are still young, you must be prepared to take care of your self.”
“But I will always have mother…” Vega cried, faced with his father’s death. He sat at the edge of his bed and looked down on the pale man. Vega’s heart was broken seeing his father like this. He had always been so large and solid, faster and quieter than any man he had seen, even though he could probably count them on one hand. He did not think he could feel any worse, but his father proved him wrong.
“You are not going to be able to depend on her, son. She is a good woman and gave you life, but she is weak. I saved her from herself, from her vile life back in the City. Without me, without the influence I held over her, causing her to walk away from her previous existence... I cannot say for certain that she will not return to it.”
And that was the case. They burned his father and his mother was silent for days. She came to him on the third night and told him there was nothing left for her there. She was going back to the City, and that he could come. They could find a room and he could work, or find an apprenticeship. Her words were said, but Vega knew better. His father had pulled her from the grime. She had made terrible decisions with her life just to keep herself warm at night and food in her belly. Most of the time she worked just to pay for another bottle of sharp liquid, like everyone else in the City. The people there worked long hours at monotonous tasks, just to forget their toils by drinking them away. His father had told him about City life.
He had never been to the great city, but he had seen it once. His father took him to a hill that provided his first view. It was sunset. The orange light of the setting star was blotted out in a quarter of the sky by the dark aura of the stinking city. Smoke stacks shot clouds of burnt fuels high into the firmament, mingling with the common persons own waste smoke. The City was huge and sprawling, a lump of cancer growing around the river that flowed through the human conurbation. That was the place his mother came from. It was the only city known to man, there were few small settlements outside the industrial monster, mining towns and plantations, but for the most part the City was where humans lives. His father told him all about the place that day, about the greed, corruption, poverty and filth. He made it clear that the City was no place Vega would ever want to go. His mother never spoke of it, but now she was gone.
The swamp was his home. Or it had been, until recently. He did feel content with the vibrant green and browns in the place of his birth, but now it felt empty. There was an indescribable itch in the depths of his chest, but he could not put a finger on what it meant. Before his father’s friend had arrived, he thought about leaving. Maybe he should go into the City and see the accomplishments of man for himself. He could go and stay apart from that life without being corrupted, like a person on a tour. Maybe find a woman of his own, like his father had…
Or he could strike off to the unknown regions. He knew enough magic from his mother to be able to survive on his own. And the roomers of warm islands far to the south...
But the recent arrival had changed all those plans. Now he sat in his special place, humming a tune his mother would sing to him to make him go to sleep, contemplating yesterdays offer.
Vega was out collecting turtles from his traps when the man appeared. He looked young, possibly only ten years older than himself, and spoke to him in his fathers tongue. “Can you understand me?” he said, shocking Vega with the speech. His father had told him that they two were probably the only ones in this land who could speak that way.
Vega had felt unable to move when the stranger approached and switched words. “I can also talk in this manner if it would be easier for you.”
“No, this way would be fine. It has always tasted better in my mouth anyway,” Vega answered.
“That is because you are half Tarkin and our speech is in your blood.”
The man walked closer and Vega saw his eyes. They were purple, but the shade was so similar to the Jade green he and his father shared, nothing at all close to the hazel his mother had. “Your father and I were very close once. He was one of the best friends I have ever had. I was told that he is dead.”
Vega had shown him the long extinguished funeral pyre and they stood in silence. His father's friend reached in and drew out a charred long bone, wrapping it in a cloth before placing it in a pack he had been carrying. It was obvious to Vega that this man had come from the City. He wore their clothes and a long dark coat beneath the pack.
“I’m sorry I missed him. I didn’t even know he was here for some time. I heard a tale in the City about an occurrence sixteen years ago that made me realize he had made it off our world as well.”
Vega didn’t know what to say. He had so much confusion inside his mind and wanted to ask so many questions, but only the simplest came to his lips first. “How did you know where we were?”
“I found your mother. She told me what happened.”
Vega blinked back tears at the mention of his mother. He had felt little when she had left, still numb from loosing his father, but now the emotion crept up on him. They stood a little longer before they went to the house. Vega cooked turtle stew over the fire and there was little conversation.
“My name is Aros,” he told Vega. “What are your plans? Will you continue to live alone?”
“I don’t know,” Vega said, staring at the bed his father died in. That had gotten him thinking.
“Think about it. I will have a proposition for you tomorrow, to consider in better light. We can talk then.”
Vega did not sleep that night. He was too tired to get up and do anything, so he just laid in sleeplessness until the sky began to lighten. Without a sound, he forced himself up, leaving the sleeping visitor on the hill. Now he sat, covered with his green cloak, absentmindedly thinking about the past rather than about the future.
Aros walked down from the house on a hill. He went toward the cloaked figure perched on a fallen tree overlooking the swamp. It was not quite a Tarkin mannerism, but it was close. Aros walked down the path beside the water toward Vega’s roost.
Vega watched Aros approach, wondering what it was that he would ask him, when he saw the slight change of the swamp water. Vega was about to call out a warning when the small crocodile exploded from the water, striking at the pedestrian. As if with negative magnetism, Aros launched himself up and away, sticking to one of the old wooden pylons that had been left by a previous attempt to build in the swampland.
Vega was amazed by the hand weapon Aros had used to attach himself to the pylon. Into the wood it stuck, holding Aros out of reach of the danger. With a natural motion, Vega raised a flattened palm to the ground and sent a thin bolt of electricity down to the waters edge. The collection of teeth recoiled back into its usual hunting ground. Aros gave him a nod, detached himself and continued to meet him.
“So, I see you share your mothers affinity for magic.”
“Yes,” the boy said, his hood pushed back now enough to plainly see his face. “Most people from the City are taught it in school if they are found to posses the talent for it. My mother remembered her lessons and taught me all she knew.”
“Yes, in the City you can earn a decent living casting magic in a factory. The creation of energy by using crystals is sought after. I read that over half the population has some level of command with simple magic. And there are a few that can do more…”
“My mother told me that that requires years of advanced schooling at the Institute. Not many get to go there and learn. Most of the skills of the ancient casters are no longer public knowledge. There are books, but…”
“I have read the books. But I am not of this world, and have no skills with magic,” Aros said. “Your mother, who I met, was very powerful indeed. But, she never reached her full potential. That is why I have come to see what you can do.”
Aros was half way up the fallen log now, standing facing Vega. A warrior and a magician, half related by distant blood. Vega took his hands from his cloak and cupped them to a bowl.
“I can make fire,” he said and a drop of flame illuminated his hands. With concentration, the fire grew larger and taller, rising like a column from his hands. Then it was gone.
“You saw my skill with lightning. I know some white and red magic as well. My mother had a worn copy of intermediate skills that she was given by a mentor in school. I have read it, but she never trained me to use any of it.”
“She should have. Most the magical workers I met in the City were only adept at casting pink magic to charge mined gemstones. Most couldn’t produce fire larger than a candles flame,” Aros said. There was a pause and Vega could sense what was coming.
“I h
ave to leave this place,” Aros began. “Something in it is not good for Tarkins. I don’t know if it’s the air from the City or unseen organisms, but I will have a similar fate to Akoda’s if I do not leave. I never planned on staying long enough for it to affect me anyway.
“I came across a very old book of magic while in the City. I was going to hire someone from the Institute to cast a spell from it for me, but then I found out about my friend. I had to come and meet the son of Akoda myself, even if it was too late to see him.”
“But you are so much younger than my father,” Vega interrupted. “He said he was over one hundred years old. You look like you are no more than thirty.”
“Time is a funny thing. What do you know about time travel?”
Vega was taken aback. “Nothing. Can great magicians really travel against the river of time?”
“Oh, yes. Maybe not magician from your world, but from others… It has been known to happen,” Aros said.
“Is that what you are going to ask me to do? I could never perform a spell like that…”
“No, No. Not against the river of time, that is a feat that I’m sure is beyond you. The spell is one of stone.” Aros took a pocket-sized book from his breast pocket and handed it over to Vega. “It will call forth a thick cloud that will cast me into stone. The stone will hold me suspended in time for half a millennia. It is a quick way to go downstream a distance.”
“This was used long ago to create gargoyles out of prisoners,” Vega read. “Then they would be displayed for all to see what happened to thieves and rapists.”
Vega looked up, “How do you know that you would revert in five hundred years?”
“Part of the incident with your father involved a man who was out of place in the City because he had come back to life in a different age. He said it was like a nights sleep for him.” Aros nodded his head as he said this and took a step closer to Vega.
“I have traveled through time, in various fashions. Why do you think your father and I, who grew up together, are such different ages? This is what I do, I am a traveler. Come with me Vega and let's leave this place. There is nothing left for you here. I could use a good magician with me. You can travel with me as long as you like. I have been to different worlds and different ages. There are things out there you would never believe! We might even reach the world where your father and I are from, one day.”
Vega glanced back at the book and then to the already familiar face of Aros. For a moment, all time was one. He knew the outcome of the decision he was being asked to make. It took no thought; Aros was right when he said there was nothing here for Vega.
“Where would you like to stand for five hundred years?”