The Steward and the Sorcerer by James Peart (small books to read .TXT) 📗

straight line from the centre point of the square, stopping to look at the natural markings- but what was natural about this place?- on the other columns.  Each set of runes he observed was an exact copy of those he saw on the first pillar; as far as he could tell they were all like that.  He walked for several minutes then stopped.  Looking back, he could no longer see the pillars he had marked.  The temple had not changed, the columns of light it housed stretching for as far as he could see.

It would have to be here.  He took out the marker and stained each of the four columns that immediately surrounded him, drawing an arrow on one that pointed back in the direction he had come.  Pocketing the marker, he stood before the nearest column and considered what he was looking at.  The pillars filled with light were doorways to other worlds, he felt sure.  There must be thousands, perhaps an infinite number of them.  He thought he would not need to summon the black fire to pass through them, although how exactly he would cross over into one of these worlds he was not sure.  Perhaps it was simply a matter of walking into the light.

This temple must be an interim place, he reasoned, a world between worlds.

There was another thing.  He felt a pressure around him.  It had been gentle at first, barely noticeable, but had now grown strong enough to announce itself.  It felt very much like a brand of sorcery, though at the same time different from what he would term ‘sorcery.’  He remembered the Brightsphere telling him he would encounter other kinds of magic.  Did it mean here?  It seemed repelled by his own magic, so whatever inducement was carried in its force did not work its full effect on him.  It whispered to him to forsake his duty, lulling him into a peaceful state of mind where memory or purpose did not matter.  Whether it was malign or simply benevolent he did not know, but he understood that he could not stay here for very much longer or he would be carried away by its soft urge.

Summoning the blue fire, he directed it at the pillar that was nearest to him, its bright contrails flaring at his fingertips, the seeking flame pouring into the column of light until it was lost from view.  He waited some moments, anticipating a disruption in the flow of magic he had issued, some tell-tale sign that all was not right, but none came.  Perhaps the place that stood the other side of this portal was harmless, or it could be his magic was unable to read it.  Whatever the case, he knew he must make a decision.

He drew what remained of his sense of purpose tight around him and walked into the column of light.

6.

Whilst Daaynan was wrestling with his decision to leave the space between worlds, on another world, in another age and time, the Earl of Ainsworth, Christopher Went, waded through a lagoon provided by a low sandbank on a foreign shore.  Small wavelets lapped occasionally at his ankles, crashing softly against the arches of his feet and, at times, his lower legs, his trousers having been rolled up to the knees.  He waded slowly further away from the shoreline, his head bowed in silent contemplation, his movement elegant, carrying a sort of agile grace, bent as he was in a private reverie that looked to the close observer a helpless meditation.

He was being watched from the interior of a beach house not sixty feet away.  Two people, one of them a member of his own family, were discussing him with an examining scrutiny that he would have accepted with feeble uncaring.

“He doesn’t drink out of a sense of enjoyment anymore,” Simon, his friend, said.

“How is it between you two?” Christopher’s mother asked Simon.  “I mean, we hear stories of what you both get up to at Cambridge, but I put it down to recklessness of youth, that sort of thing.”

Simon looked uncomfortable, Isobel noted, and he’d flinched from her question.  “If that’s all it is,” she pressed, “then Lord knows I’m happy to endorse it.  What I’m worried about is the other thing.  His drinking, I fear, is only a symptom of a greater disease.  I believe that’s le mot juste; he’s simply not at ease with himself.”

A tiny frown line appeared on Simon’s brow.  Why was she trying to be so damn relevant?  He’d seen this trait in other members of Christopher’s family.  His friend had a problem with drink and they, in their attempt to seek its cause with such precision, fearing the worst, namely that he was drinking to try to escape them in some way, did not understand the true reason.  He understood it, or at least thought he did.  Christopher and he had been great friends since going to Eton together.  During their first year at University they had remained close, yet forces- a wider social development for Christopher, the lure of academic life for him- drew them apart.  When they encountered each other again, soberly, under the harsh light of day during Michaelmas term in their second year, they did so as young men, not boys, and truths which had been running beneath the surface in the shallows of their adolescence, churned under the roil of deeper waters and became exposed.  Christopher needed people around him, a dependence that at Eton had made him seem interesting and, given his gift for conversation and the natural quirk of his personality, exotic.  His dependence grew as he matured, however, and as Simon and others in Christopher’s entourage gained a measure of understanding of themselves and began to cultivate interests elsewhere, he began to fear the world outside.  He drank more, not to deepen a bond with his fellow man and align himself with these interests but to escape back into a realm where his boyhood dreams