The Steward and the Sorcerer by James Peart (books suggested by elon musk .TXT) 📕

the Englishman finally made up his mind, Daaynan reflected with sour amusement, he acted quickly.  There had been no further arguments or misgivings, he simply decided to leave right then.  There were things Daaynan wanted to do first, for example prove to this young man that the world they were in operated not on one’s imagination but memory.  It could have been accomplished by a simple trick yet Simon would have none of it.  He had decided to trust Daaynan and in so doing put all other considerations aside.  He began to talk to the Druid, about his life in England, his schooling, and his training as what he termed an ‘academic,’ which was really, he supposed, an erudite.  Much of his schooling revolved around his friendship with Christopher.

He wasn’t the sort to be easily controlled.  He belonged to the type that weighed matters up in his own time and at his own pace and came to a decision that had been carefully worked out.  Back in the Englishman’s country (he had called it Italy and said he had been there on ‘holiday’) when he had thrown himself in the path of the Druid’s green fire, he had been acting against his better nature and more out of love for his friend than anything else.  His desire to leave Christopher behind in the tavern sprang from the same love: he did not want to see him hurt.  There was clearly a bond between them, though Daaynan suspected it rested more on Simon’s side than it did his friend’s.  They had been schooling friends, he had told him, and, at the age of twenty had swapped one school for another, known as a Universe City, although quite what they had learned there that they couldn’t have in twelve years elsewhere was a mystery to him.  There, it seemed, they had grown apart, furthering individual interests.  This had upset Simon more than he let on.  He was embarrassed by his friend’s drinking and the sort of people he had begun to company, yet this overlaid a deeper sorrow for his friend’s passing.  And it was a death.  He was right to have thought it such.  Christopher’s physical death, should it come soon- and Daaynan suspected he had every right to think it would- might have a devastating impact on Simon.  He reflected on the nature of his love for his friend.  It gave him strength of a kind.  Certainly, the Englishman would not have been so confrontational toward the Druid had it not existed.  It was, however, he thought, unhealthy, much of it drawn from the sense of responsibility he felt toward Christopher.  As far as he could tell this sense of duty was one-sided.  There was a lot of guilt there too, a self-conscious remorse at what had befallen the other.  Christopher did nothing to assuage this guilt, as far as he could tell.  On the contrary, he used it to feed his addiction, to further entrap himself in the prison he had made for himself with drink, and he did so blamelessly in the knowledge that Simon was somehow at fault for his disease.  Daaynan had known people like this in Bottom Dell.  Had not his own cousin used his neglect as a means of distracting him from the real purpose of his visit to Fein Mor?  He had nearly killed him.  What would Christopher do to Simon, given time?

Brushing all other deliberations aside, what was clear was that Simon needed Christopher and that taking one would mean taking the other.  He was not in the business of protecting the self-deluded so he must return them both to this England, or Italy, or wherever it was they needed to go.  As soon as he had studied the living ‘map’ of the steward’s citadel and discovered where it was Longfellow spent most of his time unguarded he would try to return the pair back to their time and place.

Simon was talking now.  When he glanced over at the younger man he discovered he was walking in lockstep alongside him, a curious expression drafted on his features.  Christopher was somewhere off to his right.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“You may.”

“You used a green fire to remove us from Ita...from our world.  From what you said of your powers you can summon magic to do different things.  Does each of these things necessitate the use of fire with a different colour suited for each purpose?”

“It does.”

“Would you care to elaborate?”

“The green flame I used to draw both you and your friend into the temple belongs to a type of magic which draws matter and energy into a world of origin from another world.  In the Northern Earth I can use it to draw same from any world into what I know of as the real world.”

“I see.”  He was silent for a beat.  “But why didn’t you simply ‘draw’ us from the Northern Earth to begin with?  Would have been a lot easier.”

“To begin with, I wasn’t aware of your existence.  Also...”

“And once you entered Italy didn’t that become the world of origin?”

“As I understand it the ‘world of origin’ is not dependent on where the magic user is located, but where he hails from.”

“But you come from the Northern Earth.  How can you explain that?”

Daaynan’s expression seemed to darken within the folds of shadow cast by his hood.  “I can explain it this way: the temple holds all worlds.  It is a point of origin from every world, so that the Northern Earth comes from there every bit as much as Italy or England.”

“Yes, but how does it distinguish?  You drew us into the origin, which was the temple.  But Italy was equally the origin, as it is part of the temple.  By drawing us from Italy, we could simply have ended up in Italy.”

“The temple dwarfs any one world!  If you are there and leave it and employ the green fire, you draw any matter back into it.  Equally, if I