Tak

The Conjuration - Part 2

     Thomas found Karog Gunlubber in the crew recreation room, part of the hastily erected complex of prefabricated wooden buildings near the village of the mundanes in the centre of the valley. It was an area from which wizards were usually excluded, but he'd gotten special dispensation to visit it.

     The mood in the rec room was sombre. The two other human deaths had both been soldiers and conversations were quiet and subdued as everyone remembered the friends and comrades who'd been taken from them. Karog was sitting at the bar, staring into a huge mug of ale whose frothy head had long since gone flat, and Thomas sat beside him. He sat there, saying nothing, until the trog's sagging, wrinkled head turned to look at him.

     "He were one o' the very few humans I ever met who really appreciated numbers," he said, his gravelly voice low and reflective. "He saw the beauty of them as I thought only a priest of Caratheodory could. I was beginning to think I might've made a convert of him."

     Thomas said nothing, could think of nothing to say. The barman placed a drink in front of him, then walked away without asking for payment. Thomas hardly noticed it.

     "The thing I remember best," continued Karog, "is how terrified he was the first time we went into space, and how that fear turned to joy and wonder once he actually experienced it. After that they could hardly keep him on the ground. He was going to be a member of the crew if he had to stow away in the laundry room! He admitted to me once that he'd progressed as far along the path of wizardry as he was ever going to. His career had reached its pinnacle and all that lay ahead was a gradual decline into retirement. That's why the Ship of Space was such a godsend to him. It gave him the only chance he was ever going to get to do something new and exciting. He would have made the same choices, even if he'd known, known..."

     The trog let himself down from his stool and hurried from the room before his self control broke. Trogs never show that kind of emotion in public. Not even before their closest friends.

     Thomas remained where he was, thinking back on his few, all too brief meetings with the other wizard. Then he became aware that a soldier was standing beside him. He looked up and saw a young, freckle face man in a spotless uniform hovering, shy and embarrassed, as if trying to summon the courage to speak.

     "Sir?" he ventured at last. "You're the wizard Gown?"

     "Yes," confirmed Thomas, wondering what this was about. Was he about to be asked to leave this sanctuary for non-wizards?

     "You're the one who rescued the wizard Fugh from the Southern Continent?"

     "I was one of them, yes."

     "But you did the hardest part, the most dangerous part. I'm Private Bacon. I'm one of the men who was on the ship with him. He saved us all when he ordered us to abandon ship so fast. Someone else might have hesitated, and we might all be dead, but he saw immediately how serious the situation was and he had the common sense to act at once, so he saved us. And you saved him, so in a way you could say that you saved us."

     Thomas smiled a nervous, self conscious kind of smile. "I wouldn't say that..." he muttered unhappily.

     "Well, anyway, the thing is, you're a wizard, like he was, so you must have known him fairly well."

     "Not as well as I'd have liked. Most of what I know I heard from other people."

     Private Bacon sat on the next stool and stared eagerly at him. "I'd like to know all you can tell me," he begged. "I want to know everything about him. Please."