The Pilgrims: Book One (The Pendulum Trilogy) Read online

The Arch Mage wonders how a more gentle, timid man would have fared in Vous’s place at this stage of the Project. And he begins to wish he had such a man on the throne now.

  In the far distance, he sees the spiralling, winding thread of disturbed magic going skywards like a wavy line drawn in pencil across the white sky, indicating a powerful spell has been cast that way. A war mage, most likely; he does not concern himself with it. More troubling to him is the speck flying towards the clouds, then gone. It is an Invia, surely off to visit the dragonyouth in their sky prisons. They are pieces on the board he doesn’t know well.

  Other Invia have lingered in the air behind the castle for some days now. What interests them here? A possibility disturbs his thoughts and demands to be examined, however unlikely: when people come through into Levaal from Otherworld, the entry point is behind the castle.

  The thought is new, and troubling, and connects immediately with another: one of the Strategists claims that Vous was in that valley himself some days ago, walking with his head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. That Vous has left the upper floors at all, much less the castle, is very strange. And the Arch Mage has felt himself the pull from those strange rippling effects, like blind groping tentacles reaching for that spot, for the entry point …

  Otherworld. People from that mysterious place are not wanted on the Arch Mage’s board, where already there are too many free and mighty pieces beyond his hand. From the Hall of Windows he has glimpsed their world and what he has seen disturbs him. They command no traditional magic, it appears, but much machinery that looks magical. He has seen weaponry that left him sleepless for days with fear and desire. He has seen pillars of flame beneath enormous clouds shaped like mushrooms, and wondered if he were dreaming.

  To open the gap between worlds is high, high magic; a human would not survive even a failed attempt at it. But Vous is not human any more. The Arch Mage pictures him lurking near the entry point in that high green valley. It is likely that Vous doesn’t even have a reason for being there; he is under the influence of much more than his scattered human brain. The Arch Mage thinks: Not a user of magic, a force of magic, and his worry grows.

  In chess, you cannot take your own pieces off the board, only invite your opponent to do so. His opponents — the Free Cities — have not wits or will left among them to take Vous away, and leave room for a new, more suitable replacement. The Arch Mage himself dares not try it. The only way it can be done is by Vous’s own choosing.

  The sky’s lightstones begin to fade. The Arch Mage thinks long into the night, but just two things keep seizing his thoughts. He summons a war mage, sends it to guard the high valley behind the castle and orders it to kill everything that comes through, for the entry point is one thing his thoughts linger on. The other, about which he has less certainty, is the word ‘shadow’.

  4

  The working day ahead loomed like one of three big unwelcome hills between Eric Albright and the weekend. The saving grace of the modern age was that it was socially acceptable to spend that weekend playing computer games in your underwear, inhaling pizza, with or without a sixpack open on the desk beside you, at age twenty-five and beyond. The extended adolescence, some called it. He called it therapy.

  For now Eric played grown-up and dressed in business shirt, slacks, tie and polished black shoes. Following the career path of Clark Kent, he was a journalist for NSx, a ‘cool’ newspaper geared to twenty- to thirty-year-olds, distributed free throughout the city (and slowly going broke). That Eric had held his job so long was a mystery just recently and unpleasantly solved. He’d become aware that he was a sort of cult attraction for the paper’s readers, as his fifty-word entries for lost dogs or the odd sports report and restaurant review (when a real food critic couldn’t be found) were always far too emotional and involved. Fan mail had been sent to the editor, something they’d tried to keep hidden from him. It was both novel and deeply worrying: in the trade he’d staked his dreams on, writing, it was his inability, not his ability, that had kept him employed while heads rolled all around him.

  It had not been deliberate: the people calling to report lost dogs had actually made him sad. He cringed with embarrassment, thinking back to what they’d published in his name: Our dear friend Rexie, part Scottish Terrier, part cattle dog. Last seen Brickworks Ave. We’re lost without your simple little joys. Furious wagging tail to welcome us home. Even the bad: barking, holes in the yard. Don’t be afraid. You will chase your ball again. Help us! Rexie, come back.

  The fan mail described him as ‘hilarious’ and ‘a trip’. How then were his novels going to fare? The printed pages were scattered across his bedroom floor where they’d been flung in despair. One was a murder mystery, with ghost story parts thrown in (the ghost did it). The others were about superheroes he’d invented. One was named Death Row, a former convict who’d escaped and seen the light, and now fought crime via magic powers resembling methods of execution: lethal injection, electric chair, hangman’s rope, so on. Perhaps it was all uproariously funny …

  He hesitated before locking the flat’s front door behind him, very tempted to call in sick. How was he supposed to submit articles knowing they were being read by people trying not to laugh until he’d left the room? Worse, how was he supposed to be funny on purpose, now he knew that was what they wanted?

  His polished shoes beat down on the old concrete regular as clockwork, tap tap tap, carrying him towards an air-conditioned room in a tall building in the city’s inner peaks. More pleasant-looking than handsome, he was slim with straight blond hair falling in a cropped wave, bright eyes and a soft mouth with a slight overbite. Seeing himself stride across the glass of store windows, he did not think a stranger’s eye would pick him out from the street’s background of normality; but if it did, its owner would be unable to imagine him as anything other than office worker. Nor, to his horror, could he. He wore not a suit, but himself, and suddenly knew he could never take it off. If he slipped into a phone booth, he’d leave it buck naked, to jeers and pointing fingers.

  He hadn’t realised how badly this business at the paper had affected him. The very concrete underfoot seemed to slip and shake. It was as if he’d caught a mirror’s reflection from an angle never seen before, and was now unable to look away.

  The street dipped and curved. At its end was a bridge, with a bike path underneath running through a wide shadowy tunnel, opened like a yawning mouth. The bridge overhead clattered with the ungodly sound of a train, howling its way across with another load of Erics and Ms Erics, young and old, towards their own air-conditioned rooms in tall buildings, where, like the Eric passing below them, they did this or that with paper, computers, calculators, pens, phones, headsets, coffee cups, and all the rest. He fancied he saw their faces in the passing windows, each one identical to his own.

  Beyond the bridge was a seedy old park you didn’t want to walk through at night, where slept a seedy old drunk Eric occasionally played chess with.

  Below the bridge the mostly brick wall was thick with colourful graffiti slapped on with deft skill, almost pleasing to the eye but not quite, thanks to the tangled black scrawl across it saying MINE in street code. In the part of the wall that seemed always to be in shadow, there was something Eric’s peripheries sometimes caught on, something he felt (without ever really reflecting on it) to be an odd addition to the paintwork. It was a small red door made of little wooden planks. Black spraypainted tags had made their way like cracks across the boards.

  What he hadn’t noticed until now was that the wood was real. The door was real. Not a painting, as he had always assumed; no, someone had built it into the wall, or stuck it on somehow. Why?

  The tap tap tap of his footsteps paused as he looked more closely. This red door — about the height of his shoulder and just a bit wider than him — had been so much part of the background that it was a bit of a jolt to see it right here before him now, despite its having been there all the while. It had been there the whole time,
he assumed …

  He reached out and flicked the wood with his fingernail, just to make sure his eyes had got it right. They had. It was … well, it was a door. It had a keyhole, and a small handle — more a copper groove for the fingers to fit under, to pull. An odd decoration for the wall, but surely nothing more; nothing on the other side but the old bricks of the train bridge, cool to the touch.

  Surely nothing more …

  So he kept walking, and could not later have said just what made him pause, turn and look back. But when he did, he sucked in a sharp breath and dropped his briefcase. It opened as it fell, spreading papers over his feet. His lunch orange rolled sideways along the ground into a puddle of filth. Just for a moment there’d been a glimpse of movement, a glimmer of light at the keyhole.

  He crouched before the door, then shrieked and fell back. Looking back through the keyhole for just a second was an eye. That glimmer of light? It had been like daylight, when the owner of the eye shifted away.

  Now the keyhole was as it had been before: dark, nothing but brick behind it. He scrambled back to his briefcase, hands shaking a little as he put it back together. The orange he left in the gutter. And, though shaken, he kept walking, and the day panned out just as he’d dreaded it would, till it was time to go home, and things — for good or ill — began to change.

  *

  ‘Here’s young Eric Albright, late home from work.’ Whoever spoke was lost in the shadows under the train bridge. The cleaners’ vacuums had woken Eric at his desk around nine. The voice was of course familiar.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Stuart Casey,’ said Eric.

  Casey, or Case, moved into that wedge of the path revealed by the street light. He might as well have stepped out of a costume shop having just dressed in its most convincingly generic-old-drunken-man garb: battered hat, fingerless gloves, ragged shirt and mismatched jacket and trousers sitting loosely. Case’s unsteady footsteps sprayed little stones across the concrete path, indicating he’d put away at least one bottle since noon.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ said Eric. Case laughed uproariously, and Eric joined in. They both knew he looked like shit.

  ‘How’re you looking, then?’ said Case. ‘Eh? Saw you this morning, checking out my wall. You dropped your briefcase all over the place. Something scared you pretty good, eh? What was it, a ghost? Maybe a naked woman with wings?’

  ‘Naked woman with wings!’ said Eric, pretending not to be unnerved by the mention of ghosts. ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘I seen one myself. No lie. She flew right through from under here, night before last. Pretty as a diamond, she was. Glittered like one too. I’d put a few away, but I saw her all right.’ Eric was surprised by how straight-faced and earnest Case sounded. The old man sighed a long breath reeking of cask wine. ‘How bout a game?’ he said.

  The cheap plastic chess board was already set up not far from the door. Eric had played him on maybe a dozen occasions, often when Case was too drunk to stand up, and had never once beaten the old guy. He had twice forced a draw, but that was all. ‘Nah, not tonight.’

  ‘Why not? Still scared of the wall? The door?’

  Eric didn’t like the glint in Case’s eye. ‘What about the door?’ he said.

  ‘You tell me,’ said Case. ‘What about it? What’d you see?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Why don’t you want to tell?’

  This would go on for some time, Eric realised. He shrugged and kept on along the path.

  ‘You think I’m joking about that woman, don’t you?’ Case called after him. ‘Does this look like I’m joking?’ He dug around in his pants and held up a black pistol.

  ‘What the hell are you doing with that?’ said Eric. ‘Where’d you get it?’

  ‘Never you mind where I got it. I’m here keeping watch. That door — something’s going on, and you know it. You saw something. Well, so did I. I heard something too. It’s making noises down here at night. Has done for a week or two.’

  ‘Noises? Like what?’

  ‘You tell me, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Eric. ‘An eye. OK? I thought I saw an eye at the keyhole.’

  Case made a strangled noise. He staggered forwards and grabbed Eric’s sleeve. ‘You wait here with me tonight. OK? We’ll stand guard, you and me. Something’s gonna happen, I can feel it. It’s your chance to see something no one else ever has, you bet. We’ll keep watch. OK?’

  This was possibly a very elaborate scheme via which a lonely old man hoped to garner a little companionship. It was so ambitious Eric almost felt duty-bound to oblige him, at least for half an hour or so. He sighed and crouched with his back to the graffiti-clad wall. ‘Fine, let’s play.’

  And just as they finished their third game, and Eric began to say his goodbyes, white light bloomed into the tunnel of the train bridge, beaming through the keyhole of the door.

  5

  They ran, abandoning game and briefcase, out of the tunnel towards the park and dropped onto the footpath’s smooth concrete. It was cold on their legs and arms. ‘What’s the plan?’ Eric said.

  ‘Just listen,’ Case whispered. A sound came from the tunnel: rick rick rick, like long fingernails being drawn across old wood. It abruptly stopped, and the light dimmed to nothing. A cold breeze swept over them from the park, stirring up some litter on the nearby road. Case quietly laughed. ‘Lots of secrets in the world, eh? Just when you thought you had the place figured out. Damn, but it’s quiet around here too, isn’t it? This little spot manages to shoo people away when it wants to act up. But you and me are here, aren’t we? Why us, eh? What do we matter?’

  ‘Um; you know, to me, it’s kind of still just a train bridge. And that light — there has to be an explanation.’

  Case laughed again. ‘Bet there is. And you think there’s an explanation for that woman too?’

  ‘With the wings, Case?’

  ‘You think I’m joking about her.’ Case sounded affronted.

  ‘No, man. I think you were whacked out of your head on some pretty good stuff.’

  ‘Pfft. Wait and see. You might just — wait. Look, it’s starting up again!’

  A line of light threaded along the door’s bottom edge, moving slowly up the left side first, then the right. Another point began to glow from the keyhole, beaming out like a searchlight. ‘Quick, you get up the other end of the tunnel. And take this.’ Case handed him the gun.

  ‘Why am I taking this?’ Eric said.

  ‘Cos I’m too drunk to shoot straight.’

  Shoot at what? Eric thought. Martians? But he took the gun and sprinted through the tunnel past the glowing door. Then he tripped over the chess board and briefcase and went down, pieces scattering across the path. His mobile phone and gun both clattered to the ground. He scrambled to get them, but then a human voice called out from behind the door. Empty-handed, he charged through to the far end of the tunnel and crouched there, panting. Smooth moves, man, he thought. Cool under pressure. Resourceful too. Batman you ain’t.

  For a time the tunnel’s light dimmed till it had almost faded completely, when there was a loud bang. With a jolt and rattle of wooden boards, the door slammed open. Light flooded the tunnel like day pouring in. A gusty wind sprayed dust and pebbles across the ground, knocking chess pieces from the path and rolling them on the dirt.

  He felt strangely, eerily calm as a shape appeared in the doorway. A face, a human face, he thought. It was a man of middle age, ugly and scarred, with coarse curly hair. Behind him there was a sky, dim, white instead of blue, with thin grey cloud crawling across it. The invader seemed to be climbing up as though from a stepladder below the door’s other side. With a grunt, he was through, standing a little bow-legged, looking left and right up the tunnel, hands at his sides as though to draw a weapon, and indeed long knives were in sheaths on his belt. In the distance was a huge shape, sparkling bright as a gem. A tower? Some kind of building …

  But Eric had o
nly a glimpse before another shape in the doorway obscured the sight. The man who had climbed through reached down and helped up a young woman wearing a grey cloak with a hood obscuring her face. Slung around her back was a longbow on one side, a quiver on the other. A long curved dagger was displayed, hanging from her belt. A third face appeared in the door. The other two helped up a man whose black leather covered his whole body to the neck. His red hair was piled up in a bizarre pointed cone. He was much taller than the others. He peered around the tunnel and laughed, perhaps in nervous excitement, high-pitched and penetrating. ‘Hello, Otherworld!’ he cried.

  A fourth figure was at the door: a bald head, huge face, bulging white eyes. He peered around, looking startled, and tried to lunge forwards through the entrance, but the door frame was too narrow. An enormous meaty forearm, glistening with sweat, flopped through the door, the fat hand grasping for purchase. There was no way the huge man would fit; he was too big, even, to be a man. His efforts sent the redhead into gales of squealing laughter.

  The first to come through shouted, ‘Get back,’ but the huge man in the doorway kept trying to squeeze in, eyes pleading with the others. The redhead laughed hysterically, raised a boot, and with it gently pushed the massive face back down. He slammed the door shut and peered around the tunnel with a grin. Light from the door’s outline dimmed till it only just illuminated the invaders with flickering white. The noise of wind died down to a quiet that was startling, leaving the sound of the invaders’ feet shuffling and scuffing on the concrete.

  The redhead’s insane laughter continued in more muted bursts. ‘Now let’s get busy,’ he said.

  The woman spotted the briefcase. She crouched before it, her long curved knife in hand, and poked it.

  ‘What’s that?’ the redhead demanded, coming over.

  ‘An object,’ she replied. ‘Though that is just a guess.’

  The first man — who kept glancing up the tunnel towards Case’s outline — grabbed the briefcase and shook it, listening.