Free We Stand at the Gate by James Pratt Page B

can join… Why the gob did you
do that?”
    Critchler stared out into the dark for a few
moments before replying. “Guess which instructors they go through
the fastest at the Magicians College,” he finally asked.
    “What’s that got to do with anything?”
    “Just guess.”
    Heinrich thought for a moment. “Diabolists?
They’re the demon-guys, right? I don’t know, necromancers,
maybe?”
    “Diviners. They go crazy after a while. You
wouldn’t think it but divination is the most dangerous form of
magic there is. When you start poking around in the outer gulfs
beyond space and time, there’s always the danger of something
poking back.”
    Heinrich grinned. “Oh, I get it now. You
figured out just how dangerous all that hocus pocus could be and
decided to get as far away from there as possible. Coming all this
way seems a bit like overkill to me but I can’t say I blame you.
When I was a lad I ran with an itinerant wizard for a while. That
crazy bastard showed me things that still haunt my dreams every now
and again.”
    “No,” Critchler said, shaking his head. “I
enjoyed what I was doing. I was even studying to be a diviner.
Uncle Tobin wanted me to be a thaumaturgist because that’s where
the money is, but after reading a book on planar cosmology, I
became fascinated with the idea of other worlds and realities.
Diviners can see into more than just the past and future. They can
pierce the dimensional membranes and-”
    “Focus, Critchler.”
    “Sorry. Okay, I had a divination professor
named Sturgis. He was from a town in the Drakenwald, just like you,
I believe. Like most diviners he ended up going crazy, but he also
managed to do something no one else had ever done before. He saw
into the Blight, all the way into the very heart of it. He even got
a glimpse of what was on the other side.”
    “The other side of the…what was it you said?
The crack?”
    “Yes. See, there are a lot of theories about
what the Blight really is. Some believe it was left in the wake of
a sorcerers’ battle or magical catastrophe, back in the time of the
serpent people of the Sunken Lands or maybe even before that.
Here’s my personal favorite. Do you know what a dimensional
membrane is? No? It’s like a wall, separating one dimension from
another. Now imagine that something one dimension over has been
banging on the wall since the beginning of time, trying to break
through into our universe.”
    Heinrich wasn’t known for his imagination,
but in his mind’s eye he saw a great scaly fist smashing into a
crumbling stone wall. “And the wall finally cracked?”
    “Right. And that’s where the essence of that
other dimension started leaking through, killing or mutating
everything it came in contact with and creating the Blight in the
process.”
    Heinrich spent a few moments letting that
sink in. “Is that what you believe?”
    Critchler shrugged. “It’s just the theory I
find most interesting. Nobody knows what really happened. Even the
elves claim they don’t know, and they were the ones that erected
the guardian pillars in the first place. If it wasn’t for them, the
Blight would have spread across half the world by now.”
    Heinrich snorted. “Yeah, well, elves say a
lot of things. For all we know, those pillars don’t do a damn
thing.”
    “Maybe. But you have to admit, the line of
demarcation is pretty abrupt. Just one step past any of those
pillars and it’s like you’ve walked into a nightmare.”
    Heinrich had to concede that point. The
imaginary cartographer’s line connecting one pillar to the next
represented an invisible boundary he wouldn’t cross for a year’s
pay. “Okay, okay. So what about the professor? The diviner
guy?”
    “One night he and some other professors were
sitting around, drinking and talking and the subject of the Blight
came up. So Professor Sturgis told them his theory which another
professor, a transmogrification specialist named Hengler, took
great pleasure in