The Sinners of Erspia

FIVE A Map of Moods

The railway line wound through the broken landscape, curling round hills, clinging to escarpments and diving into valleys. The train of little box-shaped carriages climbed a steep incline by means of cogwheel and ratchet, then went rattling down the other side, swaying alarmingly on the narrow-gauge track.

To the relief of the passengers it adopted a more moderate speed on coming to a levelled embankment, its burnished engine puffing and chuffing. Munching a meagre meal of crispbread spread with fish-flavoured soft cheese, Adeptus Magus Harmasch and his apprentice Peadul stared glumly out of the window.

“Eh, Peadul, what a place,” Harmasch sighed. There was nothing to be seen but an oppressive grey sky, rocky crags and boggy ground pelted with cold, penetrating rain.

Thus was it ever in the country of Brodonia. The rain never stopped. The sun never shone. And the people were forever miserable.

Magic did not work here, either.

“I feel so unhappy I could kill myself,” apprentice Peadul complained. “Why do the Brodonians continue living? Or at least why don’t they move elsewhere?”

Despite his gloom Harmasch chuckled. “The people here like their misery,” he explained. “It is their mental climate, and if they travel abroad they always want to return to it, just as we want to return to the merriment of Cherie, our own country. Still, it is good to travel and experience foreign emotions.”

“Well, I still feel like killing myself.”

“To be honest, I also will be glad when we reach the border.”

The train continued to trundle on its way, swaying through fog and rain. Occasionally it stopped at some wretched halt around which clustered a few decrepit hovels, where pale faces streaming with rain peered in through the windows, as if the train’s arrival was the only bright spot in their owners’ wretched existence.

After what seemed like an interminable time the engine again ground to a standstill, hissing steam. They had reached the frontier. Before allowing the train to proceed, dour-faced border guards visited each carriage in turn, taking names and searching luggage.

Such was the routine. Anyone who entered Brodonia was recorded, anyone who left Brodonia was recorded, in case he had stolen something, or had committed some other crime, or was attempting to rescue a Brodonian from the country’s weather.

At length the train chuffed slowly forward. For those on board it was like passing through a curtain. No transition could have been more sudden. The passengers entered bright sunshine and saw green meadows sprinkled with flowers, while the chill faded away behind them.

Looking back, the frontier could be seen as a wall of rain wavering its way from horizon to horizon.

Harmasch chuckled as his mind emptied itself of despondency. Peadul, too, grinned with relief.

At first Harmasch’s native chortling gaiety reasserted itself and he regaled Peadul with quips and jokes.

Soon, however, the mood endemic to Pastorale, the country they had now entered, laid itself on him.

This was a mood of tranquil delight in nature. The magician and his apprentice gazed delightedly at sunny meadows and neat green woods reeling past. What a change from miserable Brodonia!

Admittedly Brodonia was not the worst. Their journey had taken them through Feroce, a fiery land of roaring volcanoes and crashing lightning where the ruling emotion was one of angry exasperation. It had caused not a few of the train’s passengers to come to blows.

The transit of Pastorale lasted less than an hour. Briefly they crossed a corner of Wymptia, a land of fatuous silliness where pink snow fell without pause even though the climate was warm and balmy.

The whimsical Wymptia mood passed the instant they crossed the frontier into Neutralia.

Neutralia: a small country, hardly more than a region, with no emotional climate of any kind. This was an eerie experience to come upon so abruptly, possibly one which only a trainee in magic could withstand.

The train pulled into Klyston, Neutralia’s single town, and ground to a halt at the central station.

Harmasch cleared his mind of distractions and aimed a thought at his apprentice.

Well, here we are, Peadul. Keep your wits about you.

Yes, master, Peadul thought back.

“Good, Peadul!” Harmasch congratulated out loud. “The atmosphere is marvellously clear here, is it not?”

And indeed it was. Magicians from all over Erspia were stepping down from the box carriages and on to the broad platform, making for a spacious plaza lying next to the station. All around them stood the white stone buildings of Klyston. The air was clear and bright, but somehow empty of quality, as though all mood colour had been extracted from it.

Perfect for the testing of magical ability.

After a shouted warning to any who had yet to embark or disembark, the train chuffed out of the station to continue its endless circling of the world.

The examinations were already in progress, some candidates having arrived by horseback or on foot.

The place was familiar to Harmasch. He had been tested five times here, in order to reach his present grade of Magus Adeptus. He made his way with Peadul among the tables that had been laid out, and presented himself at the registration desk, displaying his certificate of wizardry with its five degrees.

“My apprentice here, Peadul Hobsot, applies for marking in the first degree.”

Wearing a green shift, the registrar examined the certificate carefully. He scanned the plaza. “Place number seven is vacant. And please, Magus Adeptus, do not forget your cap.”

“Of course,” muttered Harmasch. He dipped into his bag and brought out his conical headdress with its five gold-coloured pentacles. He set it on his head.

Coloured balls were dancing in the air over the examination tables as they walked to table number seven.

The examiner was a slim, middle-aged man who himself wore the cap of a Magus Adeptus. He smiled indulgently as Peadul settled himself nervously in the candidate’s chair.

“This shouldn’t take too long, young man.”

Harmasch took the observer’s chair a short distance away. In times past magicians had been known to cheat in favour of their apprentices, ‘nudging’ the results by using their own faculties. Any examiner worth his salt would soon detect such chicanery these days, but by convention a patron did not sit at the table.

“Now then,” said the examiner affably, “I want you to recite the words I am thinking.”

He closed his eyes, and Peadul did likewise. After a moment Peadul began to speak.

“The science of magic is the art of discipline of the mind. If the mind is not disciplined, magic cannot be performed. The magician learns to sustain a single thought for as much as an hour or more. He learns to extend his thoughts and mental images to the external world and to achieve effects through them.”

Peadul paused, then spoke again in a different tone.

“Say, this is rather interesting.”

The examiner opened his eyes and frowned. “Hmm. You seem to have picked up a stray thought from somewhere.” He glanced in slightly reproachful fashion at Harmasch. This was a mark against Peadul: being unable to distinguish between one person’s thought and another’s.

“Let us move to the second test.”

The examiner tipped a boxful of coloured balls into a curved hollow in the middle of the table. “Now. Let me see you perform the motions known as Petals Dance in the Wind.”

Peadul smiled. He had practised long on Petals Dance in the Wind. He fixed his eyes on the pile of balls, readied his mind, and reached out with his telekinetic faculty. The balls rose in the air and began gyrating in a complicated pattern, mauve following mauve, russet following russet, cobalt blue following cobalt blue, in winding streams. Intense effort of will was called for, each stream being moved independently but harmonising with the others. Smoothness of movement was required. The examiner would note any jerkiness or sudden drops indicating that the apprentice’s telekinetic grasp had wavered.

Unfortunately just such dislocation occurred now. Kinks appeared in the gyrating streams. There was confusion in the dancing balls. Colours became mingled. With a gasp Peadul relinquished his power and let the balls cascade back into the recess.

He turned, not to the examiner, but to Harmasch. “Someone is interfering with my control!”

The two older men looked first at one another, then all around them. A little further off, standing between the tables, was a man who glanced furtively aside, as if trying to make himself invisible.

The person was of such odd appearance that it was surprising he had not been noticed before. He wore neither the conical cap of a magician nor the more common-place turban, but was bare-headed. His clothing was drab and without style: a single close-fitting blue overgarment, making it impossible to guess the mood of his native country. His features were unusual, too: sharp, with an angular nose and peculiar eyes.

To a Magus Adeptus the source of the sabotage was quickly evident. Harmasch and the examiner pointed, crying out together.

“Seize him!”

As the projector station flew over the landscape of Erspia-4, Laedo had seen spread below him what seemed to be a huge patchwork quilt. Slowly he realized that it was more like a map showing each country or political entity in a different colour. The colours resulted from the apparent fact that each country possessed its own unique weather, which ended sharply at clearly delineated borders. Sunny, stormy, tranquil, cloudy, fog-covered, and so on. The projector station came lower, and Laedo began to experience mood changes as he passed from one region to another. Delight, gloom, happiness, misery, fury, resignation, all flitted through his mind like wisps of cloud passing across the face of the sun. The transition from one emotion to another was as sudden and obvious as the edge of a moving shadow.

He suspected that he was in the presence of a social experiment similar to the one he had encountered on Erspia-1, but far more complicated.

Still outside his control, the projector station settled itself in a canyon in a bare, rocky region.

No sooner had it landed than a desire to kill Histrina plopped full-blown into his consciousness. The impulse was sudden, vicious, and full of hatred.

He resisted the urge and walked out of the control room. He had not gone far when the murder mood vanished. Instead he was assailed by an almost overwhelming wish to commit suicide.

Moving experimentally from one part of the station to another, he was able to locate a borderline running through the structure. The station straddled a frontier. On one side was the impulse to murder, on the other, suicidal depression.

In both directions the area was bleak, rocky, lacking vegetation and without a population—though possibly it had possessed one once.

Laedo’s experiences on Erspia-1 gave him the strength of mind to handle these unwelcome emotions. He treated them as originating from outside himself. This was not the case with Histrina. She made the most determined effort to murder him yet, and when he lured her into a part of the station on the other side of the invisible border, she had tried with equal enthusiasm to end her own life. His solution had been to drag her to his cargo ship and lock her in the lead cabinet which was, in effect, an isolation chamber proof against thought-rays. That was where she was now, with a store of air, food and water.

Laedo could hardly begin to guess what sort of control system could select both weather and emotions for demarcated regions on the planetoid. No orbiting projector stations showed up. Presumably everything was deep inside the worldlet, alongside the gravity generator.

Taking the cargo ship aloft for a brief reconnoitre, he had seen a town a few miles away. The murder and suicide areas were small, no more than localities. Evidently the projector station had chosen the canyon for concealment. Setting the cargo ship back in place, he had set out on foot, even though it occurred to him that Histrina would be in a poor situation should anything untoward happen to him.

On entering Neutralia he was pleased to find himself in a region free of artificially imposed mood.

Wandering through Klyston, as he learned the town was called, he had come upon the grading examinations in magic.

Magic! It did not take him long to realize what this ‘magic’ consisted of. Klystar’s technology had a finesse beyond anything he could have imagined. By some extraordinary technique of fine-tuning, thought projection was used to achieve telepathy between individuals. In similar manner, fine-tuned inertial fields projected from within Erspia-4 were made to respond to the human will and achieve telekinesis.

Not that the ‘adepts’ understood any of this. Neither did Laedo grasp what use these somewhat limited

‘magical’ powers were put to, nor why they were so valued on the planetoid. He did realize, however, that he had been rash indeed to experiment with the faculties himself, by interfering with the testing of a young apprentice. As a result he was accused of being a ‘rogue wizard’, mentally strong enough to exercise magic, but lacking the proper training. Such individuals were associated with Swirl, the land of continuous whirlwinds, whose people were eccentric mavericks and were forbidden to travel outside their borders because of their disordered lives. If they did, they were treated as outlaws.

He sat in a windowless room of white stone. Facing him across the table were the Magistrate of the Magical Convocation, the examiner whose work he had interrupted, and the magician whose apprentice he had wronged.

“Come now, admit it,” said the magistrate testily. “You are a Swirlite who have unlawfully left your country. Tell the truth if you want mercy.”

“I am not from Swirl, nor from any country on your world,” Laedo answered ingenuously. He paused.

“What do you call this world, by the way?”

“Erspia, of course! What else would we call it?”

“Yes, of course… but why do you call it Erspia?”

This time Harmasch spoke, in his usual jovial voice. “That is the name given to it by the creator, Klystar, and that is all that can be said about it.”

“Klystar,” said Laedo softly. “Did Klystar also teach you magic?”

“Naturally. Klystar made both the world and mankind, and gave us everything we have.”

“And where is Klystar now?”

“Enough of this nonsense,” the Magistrate retorted. “We already know that a band of Swirlites has broken out and is rampaging abroad, creating consternation to decent folk. It is quite clear to me that you are a member of that band. Where are your companions?”

“I know nothing of this country you call Swirl,” Laedo insisted. “I do not even come from your world. I come from another world far off in space.” He paused. “One that was not made by Klystar.”

The examiner snorted. “Only a Swirlite could talk such arrant rubbish. Honoured Magistrate, I am anxious to resume the important task of testing, unmolested by this undisciplined individual. Could you not conclude the hearing in a satisfactory manner?”

“I am sorry for the way I intruded into your procedures,” Laedo offered apologetically. “I can only say that I am ignorant of your customs and acted without considering the consequences. By the way, what is the penalty for such an offence?”

“It is death.”

The Magistrate shifted in his seat. “For a Swirlite, at any rate. And since you have just admitted your guilt, it only remains for me to condemn you, with the comment that it is most unseemly for the annual testing to have to suffer such indignities. Take him to the execution ground.”

“But wait a minute—”

Laedo had not expected this. He had even left his gun behind, assuming that the town he had seen in the distance would be peaceful. To bear weapons there might even be forbidden. But no one was prepared to listen to him. He was handcuffed, taken outside, bundled on to a horse-drawn cart, and this sent trundling over the flagstones.

The magician Harmasch, in his gold-starred, conical cap, clambered aboard as the cart began to move.

Laedo’s two guards glanced at him, but said nothing.

“Why do you say there are worlds not made by Klystar?” Harmasch asked. “That is a terrible blasphemy.”

“Because it is true.” Laedo told him “Though Klystar did, for a fact, make a number of worlds. Do you know how many?”

“There is only one,” Harnasch said reprovingly.

“No, there are more.”

A small crowd of people began to follow the cart as it passed through the streets of the town. Their faces were passive but curious.

“Why is this town called Klyston?” Laedo asked.

“In honour of Klystar. It means ‘Klystar’s town’.”

“Yes, of course,” Laedo muttered. Then: “Where is Klystar now? Is there any way to reach him?”

“Whenever you perform magic, Klystar is reaching out to you. Otherwise you would be powerless. That is why it is wrong to meddle with these powers without the proper training and ceremonies, as you Swirlites do.”

It was disappointing to meet with such superstition. Obviously the people of Erspia-4 had no real knowledge of Klystar.

Though there must have been some knowledge once. At least they knew his name.

And there was technical skill here. Laedo had seen a railway train coming through Klyston, pulled by a steam-powered locomotive. If things had not gone so badly wrong for him, perhaps he could have had his transductor made.

Or could he? A comical, almost ludicrous image came into his mind. Perhaps all machine parts were made by star-capped magicians in ‘mentufactories’, special places set aside by Klystar where thought-directed inertial fields could twist metal into pre-arranged shapes.

And why not? it seemed that nothing was too crazy for the Erspia worlds.

By now they were beyond Klyston and making for a bare moor. Laedo turned to the wizard.

“Listen to me. A few miles north of here is a large metal structure. A young woman is trapped in it. You must help her.”

Harmasch did not even hear him. “Change your Swirlite heart in these your last moments. May you find peace in Klystar’s bosom.”

He dropped from the cart and began walking back to the town.

The cart stopped. Laedo was taken by the arms and helped to the ground.

A numbness of will had come over him. How did he arrive in this situation? How could he have behaved so incautiously in a new and unknown culture? The geniality and apparent harmlessness of Klyston’s people had misled him, he told himself. He had been unable to imagine that they would put him to death for what was to him no more than a mischievous discourtesy.

Dire consequences were flowing from his failure. He was about to lose his life. Worse, he had incurred bad karma. He would never now be able to carry out his bound duty, which was to deliver his cargo of cavorite. And poor Histrina would die of thirst or suffocation, locked in the lead-lined cabinet.

The method of his execution was now revealed to him. A cord with a lead weight on each end was wrapped around his neck. The guards retreated, and as they did so the lead weights rose in the air.

A quartet of magicians surrounded him, keeping a distance of about twelve feet. They were concentrating, their eyes on the lead weights. The weights moved in diametrically opposite directions, tightening the cord, which bit into him.

He was being garrotted by ‘magic’!

Choking, he fell to the ground, unable to raise his hands to stay the weights, which surged away from one another as if with a will of their own. There was a roaring in his ears. He felt his tongue being forced from his mouth.

Then suddenly, mercifully, the pressure eased. Magicians, guards and onlookers were fleeing with cries of alarm. He became aware of a chivvying call from the middle distance. “Halloo! Halloo! Halloo!”

He struggled to his knees, the strangling cord still uncomfortably tight about his neck. A troop of horsemen was rushing in at a gallop. They were a strange sight. Each rider held his steed’s reins in his left hand and twirled his right arm over his head in a flailing motion. Each whirling arm seemed to be the base of an air vortex which caught dust and debris thrown up by the horses’ hooves: a deliberately created dust devil. Furthermore the dozen or so vortices eventually joined up to form a minor whirlwind which accompanied the horesmen and trailed behind them.

These could only be ‘Swirlites’, practising their rogue magic upon the air, carrying a little piece of their whirlwind-ridden country with them as a flag or banner.

The whirlwind died as the riders reined in and jostled around Laedo. One dismounted and carefully unwrapped the ligature from around his neck. Then he drew a blade which was somewhere midway between a dagger and a broadsword, and with one deft slash severed the chain joining the handcuffs.

“Being nasty done to, oho? Not liking how you dingdong? Come swirl alongside.”

With one leap the Swirlite was astride his horse. Reaching down, he pulled Laedo up behind him.

The troop cantered off the way it had come.

Laedo now had time to examine his rescuers. They were clad in makeshift garments, rags, or simply grass skirts. They seemed full of energy, chattering continually in clipped, disjointed phrases and ejaculations—a patois or slang which Laedo suspected they made up as they went along.

Most societies had their rebels who defied convention. It seemed the mood-mapped world of Erspia-4

had catered even for that.

Laedo wasn’t much of a horseman, so he was glad when the Swirlites pulled up, dismounted and made camp. What followed was like an insane festival, a madcap round of capering, cavorting, yipping and hallooing, arms flailing over heads, air vortices bending this way and that, conjoining and separating.

The man whose horse he had shared, limbs bound about with bands, a brief cloth kilt hanging from his waist, his skin filmed with sweat from his exertions clapped an arm round Laedo and offered him a hunk of bread smeared with some foul-smelling cheese.

“You no straight, oho? No slave of Klystar’s moods, oho? Like us, be you. Carry own craziness, oho?

Bond with us to Swirl. Mad-happy.”

Politely Laedo bit into the bread. No wonder these Swirlites were feared and hated. They were heretics.

They rejected Klystar! Probably they failed to realize that their own mental outlook was not self-generated either. That, too, was dictated by Klystar’s mood generators. An idiosyncratic state of mind was better able to maintain itself when crossing into other countries, that was all. Klystar had given Swirl all the advantages of lunacy.

Did the Swirlites have their own social outcasts, who lacked the vitality for a life of ceaseless partying and erratic behaviour? Laedo would certainly have been one of those. He ate the bread, then lay himself down a short distance away to get some sleep.

When he awoke it was dark and the Swirlites had finally tired themselves out. They lay sleeping, tumbled over one another, one or two draped over their horses. Laedo stole away by starlight and headed out in the direction he gauged the projector station lay.

It was not hard to find it. He knew when he had crossed the Neutralian border. Hot thoughts of killing entered his mind. He was in murder country. He found the canyon, then climbed up to his cargo ship.

What a relief it would be if he were to kill Histrina! No more keeping an eye on her, no more remorse for all the harm and killing she had done. No more having to think of her eventual welfare. Sometimes being ethical just didn’t make any sense. He thought of what a pleasure it would be to choke the life out of her…

He forced the thoughts away and opened the cabinet. As he expected, she came at him with the strength of a madwoman, scratching, tearing and biting. Subduing her was difficult, but he did it by half-suffocating her. He dragged her into the projector station and tied her securely down to a couch, where she continued screeching her hatred once she recovered.

Wearily he spoke to the control board. “Take us to Klystar. Yet again.”

Sedately the station rose into the star-speckled sky.