Pilgrimage (22 page)

Roland walked at a slow pace, holding his bottle tight and burning away any thought of regret with scotch. This was how life was meant to be, anyway. Everybody is born alone and dies alone. People always try to ease the pain by convincing themselves that they should be with people. People were optional and, in his experience, they only ever complicated things. There was no cure for loneliness. It was the default state of mankind. He didn't need people to complicate his life. He could do that fine on his own.

He had everything he needed right there with him.

Roland kept walking along the dirt road until he got back to the highway. He marked the milestone with a drink and kept walking. His foot came down on a rock. It rolled underneath him, throwing him off balance. He fell face forwards. The scotch bottle slipped from his hands, out onto the road.

And shattered.

Roland lay still on his stomach, staring at the broken glass scattered over the asphalt. He watched it, unmoving as the minutes ticked by. Then he remembered he was lying in the middle of a road. He pushed up onto his hands and knees and crawled over to the side of the road and let himself fall into the long, wild grass. The sky was dark; a full moon was shining dimly through thick clouds. He closed his eyes. He could always go back to the Highland in the morning. For now he just wanted to sleep.

Chapter 14

The hum of the engine was soothing. Caia slid her jaw from side to side. It felt stiff and slightly unaligned. Changing shape had let her put her nose back where it belonged and tidied up the bruises she would otherwise have left over from the first encounter with Pentdragon. But sometimes the transformation left her a little lopsided or unaligned. She took a quick glance in the rear view mirror. It wasn't too bad – nothing anybody else would notice. She put her focus back on the road, lit up in front of them by their headlights but otherwise pitch black in the distance.

“Do you think he'll be all right?” Griffith asked. His unruly hair was flapping over his face in the wind. It was cold but Caia liked it cold.

“Roland is strong. He'll manage himself.”

“I don't think he will. I don't think he ever manages himself. He just does what he wants and doesn't think it through.”

“Some people do foolish things. Things like standing in front of loaded guns.”

“That's different.”

“Is it?”

Griffith stayed silent.

“Do you want to go back for him?”

“No.” He said. Caia didn't believe him but she didn't interrupt him. “This is what he wants. I can't save him now. He made it clear he doesn't want to keep going with us and he doesn't want our help.”

“Help with what?”

“Anything.” Griffith sighed. “When I first met him he really helped me out. If Roland hadn't been there I probably would have been killed. I thought I owed him for that and wondered what I could do to make it up to him. Then I saw what his life was like and I asked him to come with me. I guess I thought if I had time, I could heal him. He's wounded, Caia. Not physically but spiritually. Or mentally, emotionally or
something
. He's the kind of person who gets cut and lets it bleed because he's too proud to ask for a bandage. He'd rather bleed to death than ask somebody for help or even admit to somebody that he's hurt. The saddest part is, I think most of his wounds are self-inflicted.”

“Some people are fated to suffer. You can't help somebody who won't accept it.”

“I know. That's why he stayed behind and that's why there's no point going back. Maybe I should never have tried.”

“Whatever happened is what was fated to happen. The same goes for what happens now. The universe is out of our hands and there's no point regretting or questioning our decisions.”

They passed a sign that lit up in their headlights. The sign told them they were approaching Inverell. Not long after the sign, the highway turned a corner and the Inverell street lights appeared in the distance.

“The man with the white hair. Is it true you don't know who he was?” Caia asked.

“No.” He didn't look like he wanted to talk about it. That wasn't good enough for Caia.

“If he's going to be coming after us – if he's working with Pentdragon and he wants us dead – then I need to know who he is and what he's capable of.”

“All right. You're right, you should know. Damn it, I should have told Roland, too.”

“Focus, Griffith. This is important here and now.”

“Right. Sorry. His name is Lloyd Crane and he was my brother; not my real brother, but my brother the way Juan was yours.”

“I understand.”

“Master Edan, our master, wasn't a great sorcerer but he was a great teacher. He wasn't any more powerful than anybody else but he just knew how to teach us and make sure we reached our full potential. I always wanted to know how to use magic to help people. Ever since I was young I wanted to be a doctor but I just couldn't handle the schooling. But our master taught me so much, even how to turn time backwards for myself. I've looked practically the same for years, now.”

“How long?”

“I'm biologically three or four years younger than I should be. It's not a perfect spell and I won't live forever but I'm younger and healthier than I ever would be without it. In fact, without it, I'd be dead. It was one of the first spells our master taught us. He said we could spend as long learning from him as we wanted and with that spell. Time was on our side.”

“What about Lloyd?”

“He came later. At first he was just like me. He hardly knew anything about magic and he'd discovered it all by accident when he met a sorcerer. Our master taught a lot of people like us – people who would almost never get taught by other sorcerers because we were too old. Most sorcerers want apprentices when they're still children.”

“I know that,” Caia interrupted. “Get to the point, Griffith.”

“Of course you do. Sorry. I'm so used to telling this sort of stuff to Roland.”

Griffith kept going, talking in a kind of trance. He wasn't telling the story to Caia, he was just remembering it and speaking it out loud. Remembering how things used to be was bitter sweet. They were good times and he missed them. He could spend hours reminiscing, riding waves of joy and sorrow that came with thinking about the past.

“I was happy when Lloyd joined us because I had somebody to practise with. Lloyd was happy, too. Who wouldn't be happy when they get to learn to be a sorcerer? For two guys with otherwise boring lives and no promise of an exciting or fulfilling future, our master was the best thing that had ever happened to us. We shared a room in our master's house like students in a dorm room. We had it divided right down the middle. It had this strange mirror feel when you looked at it.” Griffith closed his eyes and he could see, in his mind, the bedroom he shared with Lloyd as if it was right there in front of him. He couldn't help but smile. Then smiling gave way to tears welling in his eyes.

“The beds were opposite each other, and the desks and bookshelves were opposite each other. But while I had books on medicine and some novels on my bookshelf, his was stacked almost to breaking point with big books by Alastair Crowley, Gerald Gardner and Anton LaVey.”

“Who?”

“They were occult writers who generally got everything about magic absolutely wrong. Lloyd had them before he met our master and he still occasionally read them.”

Griffith paused to collect his thoughts. “When you were apprenticed, Caia, were you ever asked to do things?”

“What sort of things?”

“Anything you wouldn't normally think of as being part of learning magic. Errands or jobs.”

“We called them hits. We all did them.”

“Hits?”

Caia grunted her confirmation.

“We met another apprentice who called them quests. But our master just called them jobs. Because I was the senior apprentice, I was given jobs first. That was when things started to change. Lloyd hated that he wasn't given jobs when I was. It's not like they were important jobs or hard jobs. They didn't even require much magic. Sometimes all I had to do was pick up a package from one sorcerer and then give it to another. The worst jobs involved helping a particular sorcerer with research – I was always having new spells being tested on me or given magic objects to try out. Sometimes it went wrong. My eyebrows never grew back properly.

“But I did all those things because I was told to. I did as the master told me and I figured they'd either get more important with time or I'd start to see the real reason for it.”

“Did you?”

“I guess it was to keep us humble. Maybe he wanted me to meet other sorcerers, too. One of them, his name was Geoffrey, became a good friend of mine. Our master was happy to keep our world secret but he believed it was still important to be a community. Or maybe he knew some of those sorcerers were crazy and dangerous and I'd have to heal myself afterwards. The truth is, I never asked.

“There were maybe a dozen sorcerers living near us. We had all just naturally congregated in the one neighbourhood. Eventually he started giving jobs to Lloyd, too. By then Lloyd resented waiting so long that he wasn't even happy to be trusted. I was so excited for Lloyd when he was on his first job. He didn't get back until late that night but I was waiting for him. From our bedroom I heard him come in and I listened to him make his way through the house. He went from the front door to the kitchen and spent a while there. Then he went to the bathroom and finally I heard him coming up the hall to the bedroom. In every room I heard something slam or crash and his footsteps up the hall were angry footsteps.

“When he came into the room he looked at me for a second like he didn't recognise me. I felt like maybe I wasn't who I thought I was or he wasn't who I thought he was and we stood there looking at each other. He asked what I was doing awake. I told him I was waiting for him. He just said he was going to bed, turned off the light and went to sleep. I stood there confused for a while longer and then I went to bed, too.

“I woke up the next morning because I could hear Lloyd and our master shouting. They were arguing over something but I couldn't make out what they were saying. By the time I got out of bed, Lloyd was gone. Our master told me that Lloyd had gone on another job. He said he didn't have any other jobs for me and then handed me an empty fruit bowl and a bag of apples.

“Turn them into oranges,” he told me. Then I was to tell him when I had made one that actually tasted like an orange. So I went into the backyard and started making and practising the spell. Lloyd came back in the late afternoon and didn't say a word to anybody. When Lloyd started getting jobs, everything was tense and uncomfortable all the time. It was almost unbearable.”

“It sounds like it begun when the master gave you the first jobs,” Caia commented.

“Yeah. That was when it started to go downhill.”

“Your fate was already decided. Everything played out in the only way it could. But why does he want to kill you?”

For a while, Griffith didn't answer. He stared out the window into the night, unable to see anything past the road. The town of Inverell came and went, vanishing into the night as they drove on. The name Inverell stuck out in his mind for some reason. There was something important about Inverell. Oh well, it couldn't have been that important. He'd remember if there was something special there. He continued. The words came out of Griffith's mouth slow and pathetic like clumps of squished, rotten fruit. Even the memories that should have been good were sour. But he owed Caia this story and he had to keep telling it.

“After the first couple of jobs he did, Lloyd finally told me what he was doing. His jobs weren't much different from what I had to do. They seemed less dangerous but just as menial. I tried to tell him mine were the same. He either didn't believe me or it didn't matter. Lloyd thought it was a waste of time that could be spent actually learning magic or using it for something worthwhile. I didn't ask him what he thought would be worthwhile. I didn't want to know. Lloyd was always a little cold, even to us. But sometimes he started talking and he'd make vague comments that nobody else understood. He was scary when he got like that.

“About a week after that conversation I came home from a job and found Lloyd reading one of my books. It was a book on disease – viruses, cancer, that sort of thing. He asked me if I minded. I didn't, of course. I had no idea why he wanted it, at the time. He smiled. I hadn't seen him smile in months. I thought that maybe something had happened and things were going to go back to normal or maybe he'd just gotten over it. Lloyd can be pretty childish. He gets upset over the smallest things and then has these mood swings where he doesn't care any more. For a while, after that, things were better. He did the jobs, he didn't complain and he was always talking to our master about something. If I wasn't so glad that things were peaceful again, I might have been jealous that he was getting so much attention.” Griffith chuckled and waited for Caia to say something. She yawned.

The darkness around them was thick and endless. Even inside the car, in the glow of the dashboard lights, Griffith could hardly see his hands in his lap. His eyes felt heavy. A green road sign came out of the darkness and then disappeared.

“What did that say?” Caia asked.