Read Jake's Quest - Wizards V Online
Authors: John Booth
We met up again that evening in the Chancellor’s outer office. Esta was wearing her Estan clothes and had strapped up her lovely breasts. She had a bow strung across her chest and knives at her belt. The disguise didn’t look effective at all. I was surprised I had ever taken her for a boy.
Lana was in her amazon outfit and the sword strapped diagonally across her back completed her. Even when she wasn’t wearing it, it was as though it was still there and seeing it on her was the most natural thing in the world.
Jeram wore monk’s robes while I was in the jeans and tee shirt I’d been wearing that morning. Jenny had tried to get me to change them a few days ago, but I had pointed out that might give my ability to hop away.
Manda looked us over critically and then smiled at Esta. “You might be able to pass as a local if you wore longer trousers. Wizard Morrissey is probably wearing the most ubiquitous clothing, though Jeram will get by. The monk look is very common on all worlds. But you,” she stared hard at Lana, “You won’t get away with the sword, not in Bellweather in any case. Though there are still a few wild places in Newhome where you might be dressed appropriately. But swords are old fashioned over there. They have weapons called guns that shoot metal darts at you.”
“I am an expert shot with a gun,” Lana said coldly. In the months we had been sleeping together she had told me almost nothing about her home world, except that it preferred technology to magic.
“I am sure you are,” Manda responded equally coldly. Those two seemed to rub each other up the wrong way. “Follow me, and I will take you to the departure point.”
We used an elevator to descend many levels below ground. All I knew about this part of the university was that it was where they performed the dangerous research. It could be isolated from the rest of the university swiftly and I could feel tremendously powerful magic fields embedded in the walls designed to stop anything getting out.
After taking us through a maze of corridors we ended up at what looked like the door to a safe, one of those big room sized ones where governments store gold by the ton.
Manda held her open palm against the steel door and the door responded by making a sound like a choir singing. The door swung open and we walked into a room the size of a cathedral. Everywhere, on the walls and at many levels constructed up the walls were doors, thousands of them.
“This is the Transit Room. The university maintains chain bridges to many worlds we do not have formal relations with. The doors you see are hardened and there is no magic or technology known that can break them. I will take you to the door you need.”
Cast iron stairs and pierced ironwork floors connected the ground floor to higher levels. It looked a bit like the inside of a prison, a very harsh prison. Manda led us to the fourth level. Each door we passed had an engraved brass plate on it. Labelled with details of the world it connected too. I wondered if there was one connected to Earth.
She tapped a plate on a door. It read.
Bellweather Warehouse
44 Backend Street.
Storage District
Bellweather
GreenTrees
Newhome
Whydar
#AAX4326KL##62BW674###96453.9873.5623
“What does that reference mean?” Esta asked.
Manda smiled, “The Universe, the Galaxy, reference from Centre of the galaxy, taken as a spherical polar reference from the end of the longest spiral arm.”
“What if the galaxy doesn’t have a spiral arm?” I asked.
Manda frowned. “Don’t be stupid.”
I was sure I had seen some like that on an astronomy program, but maybe I was wrong.
Manda tapped at a panel in the door. “There is a lever on the other side of the door. If you pull it, this panel will turn red. The guardians walk the doors twice a day, so if you want to return you may have to wait several hours before the door is unlocked. On the other side is a chain bridge. Follow me.”
She pulled two massive bolts and swung the door open. It filled the walkway when opened, limiting access to the side we were on. She stepped into darkness.
Lana went next and conjured a light, revealing a set of long fur coats hanging on a rail. Lana forced two apart and slid between them.
“I wonder if they have a door to Narnia,” I said as I pulled the coats aside.
“What are you talking about,” Esta asked irritably.
“Home world cultural reference.”
“We have a city called Narnia,” Jeram said. “Does your world have a bridge to it?”
Now there was a question I couldn’t answer. I chose to ignore it.
The coats were indeed inside a wardrobe. I stepped out into a large musty smelling room, with small high windows. Wooden boxes were piled up randomly across the floor.
“This is the warehouse. It is on the outskirts of the city and I am told it takes at least an hour to walk to its center. They have local means of transport, but I know nothing about them.”
“What is in the boxes?” Lana asked.
“Clothes, tools, possibly money. Things collected by earlier students who have visited this world. You will have to open them to find out what is in them.”
“Do you know the local language?” Jeram asked.
“No,” Manda said curtly. “I checked and found that no one who knows any of their languages could be reached in the time available. You are on your own.”
“Why make it easy for us?” I asked sarcastically.
Manda snorted and returned to the wardrobe.
“Good luck,” she said and then was gone.
“The university is being
so
helpful,” Lana said.
“It is as though they will spare no effort to help up succeed,” Esta agreed.
“I have been in worse situations,” Jeram said helpfully.
“Suck it up,” I suggested to a row of baffled faces, but I think they got the message even if the phrase meant nothing in Balmack.
“Let us open a few boxes,” Lana suggested.
The boxes were a disappointment. Tin cans, newspapers and books we couldn’t read, mechanical toys, there were a lot of mechanical toys, and a wallet with a few crinkled notes of paper money.
“We could copy them?” Lana suggested.
I shook my head. “I have a better idea, but before I do that I need to sort out your bracelets. This is going to be a bit disorienting.”
Before anybody could object I grabbed Lana’s hand and laid the magic on my bracelet over hers. She staggered around and then vomited.
“You next,” I said to Esta and did the same trick to her with identical results.
Jeram was backing away and I saw fields of magic leaping from his hands.
“Now take your medicine like a good boy.”
I did the deed and hopped before Jeram’s attack could reach me.
I arrived in a dusty apartment in Los Angeles. A few moments later, the front of the safe in the wardrobe floated away revealing wads of paper cash and coinage from across the multiverse. I sent a magic sliver after currency that matched the ones in my hand. A three inch thick wedge of paper drifted out from the piles.
“Thank you Dafydd, you bastard.” I said to the room. The front of the safe rejoined the rest of it and I hopped back to the warehouse. Mission accomplished.
Six hands grabbed me and dragged me over to a couple of boxes as I materialized. Magic wove around me, holding me helpless. It would take me several seconds to break free. I was forced to bend over the boxes and no sooner had I been bent than the flat of a sword hit me on the backside. It hurt like hell and I lost my concentration.
“Hit him harder,” Esta urged, and I realized it was she and Jeram who held me.
“My pleasure,” Lana said and there was a swishing sound followed by excruciating pain.
Another four strokes followed before they let me go, their magic dissipating. I healed my body in seconds as soon as I could focus my magic. There was nothing more than a few bruises, though the memory of the pain remained.
“What was that for?”
“Something I think we have all desired to do for a long time,” Jeram said cheerfully. “I see you obtained some more money. Did you rob a bank?”
“The safe of Daffith Smith.”
“That is the second best thing to happen since we got here,” Esta said in neutral tones, though she couldn’t keep the smirk from her face.
Before I could think of a suitable response to my companions’ actions, Jeram spoke.
“I need to return home and tell my wife all that has happened. Do not go exploring until I return.”
He vanished.
Lana sighed. “I also need to go home. All the indications are that my weapons and clothing will be out of place here. I have some guns which might prove more useful and can be easily concealed.”
She vanished. I turned to Esta. “Don’t you want to go back home? Tell the husband what you’ve been up to?”
Esta’s face flushed. “You know I am not married. Women are slaves on my world, much as they are on yours. I ran away and ended up here with you. I might as well have stayed home.”
“Whoa, hold on a minute. You came to my room and offered sex.”
“You could have refused. I was obliged to make the offer, but you were not obliged to take it.” Esta took a swipe at a box filled with toys, and box and its contents flew across the room, the toys scattered when the box hit the floor.
“Women on my world are equal with men,” I said.
Her face showed outrage mixed with astonishment.
“You cheat on your wives; you even cheat on your mistress. Do they cheat on you?”
Well, Betty does, not that it’s cheating, exactly. But I knew what she meant.
“I feel guilty about it.” That sounded weak even to me and I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.
She stood in front of me and pushed me with both hands. “You feel guilty about it? And that makes it all right, does it? The sex and guilt balance out do they?”
Esta was getting to me. I pulled myself together and spoke unnaturally calmly.
“If you knew Esmeralda, you would not talk about inequality, at least on her part. She is in charge of her own destiny and knows about the things I do.”
Esta looked at the floor. “And your other wife, Jenny?”
“Doesn’t want to know. Puts up with it. I don’t know.” And I didn’t. The guilt was always about Jenny. I loved her, but I didn’t seem capable of being faithful to her.
Esta sat on a box and continued to stare at the floor. “You don’t know anything about any of us. What made Lana who she is? Why I came to Balmack dressed as a man? What is Jeram here for? You know nothing at all.”
She had a point. I hadn’t even known Jeram was married until he mentioned his wife a few minutes ago. I hadn’t been much of a friend to any of them.
“So tell me.”
Esta checked to see I was actually interested. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to spend our time alone having sex?”
Difficult question, but I knew the right answer. “Tell me.”
There was a long silence. When Esta started to speak it was in a voice so quiet I could hardly hear her.
“On my world a woman is little more than breeding stock. Something to be traded by the head of the clan. We must be educated so we can impress our father or our husband’s guests with how clever we are. Our virginity is a prized commodity. Did you know how much you cost my father when you took it?”
She didn’t act like a virgin during that session. In fact she gave me the impression she was better educated in sex than I was. As if reading my thoughts, Esta continued.
“But sexual prowess in a wife is also highly prized, so we are taught in school all the ways to satisfy a man. We watch moving images of couples performing. Then we are trained to emulate them. To be the perfect whore. Did I learn my lessons well?”
I could only nod. She was right. I knew exactly nothing about her.
“You were more pleasurable than I expected. But then you tossed me aside for Lana, having first taken from me the only thing my society regards as valuable.”
There was only one answer to that and it was inadequate.
“I’m sorry.”
“It makes no difference now. You chose Lana over me and yet in all those weeks together have you learnt anything about her?”
“She feels naked without her sword.”
Esta laughed. It was a bitter sound.
“Lana was brought up in a rich and powerful family. Her father owns half a planet, cities, rivers, mountains, and farm land. Flying as fast as the fastest bird it would take you months to cross his lands at their shortest side. Hers is a technological society, ordered, regimented, controlled. People only talk to others of their own station. Magic is regarded in the same way my society sees prostitution.”
“How do you know all this about her?”
Esta laughed wearily. “I asked.”
“And what should I know about Jeram?” He would probably turn out to be Gandalf come to take the one ring to Mordor. Nothing was going to surprise me today.
“He loves his wife and has never been unfaithful to her.”
I felt the dig in that.
“There are tattoos all over his body. They provide him with additional magic, though he has never explained how or what they do. He came to the university because his wife is a more powerful mage than him and he wants to catch up with her. Not to rival her, but so she will think more of him. They are both academics and knowledge is everything to both of them.”
“What’s her name?” Maybe Esta wasn’t completely all knowing.
“Fane.”
Darn it.
“And this is why the lot of you used Lana’s sword on me? Because I didn’t ask you the right questions?”
Esta’s eyes went wide again, as though I’d missed the point.
“Not because you did not ask, but because you did not care. We are just things to be used on the way to your goal.”
I didn’t want to think about that and my mind slid away from the idea. Me, arrogant? As if? Best to change the subject.
“Did you wonder how I found a way to defeat the bracelets? It was when the Bomber attacked me at the Dragon Embassy. Fluffy, well his proper name is Retnor, was trapped in the rubble and trying to move it off him would have killed him. So I had to find a way to hop him free.”
Esta stared at me and I saw the streaks tears had made.
“Was he badly injured?”
“I’m a good healer, but I didn’t have enough power. I hopped him to the world where the dragons meet and one of the Dragon Elders and Issus of the Zelphi helped.”
“Who are the Zelphi?” Esta asked as Lana and Jeram reappeared.
“The Zelphi are a mythical race of Gods,” Jeram said. “Or more correctly, we have always believed them to be mythical.”
“A bit like Dragons, at least on my world,” Lana added. She had changed into clothing identical to my own, except the shirt was bigger across the chest. Much like the clothing she had been wearing at university. She had brought a small bag with her.
Thinking of Issus raised a question I’d been meaning to ask.
“Have any of you heard of the Great Destroyer?”
Three gasps suggested they had.