WE STAND AT THE GATE
A Short Story by James D. Pratt
Copyright 2012 James D. Pratt
Cover image © HeroMachine.com
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Heinrich hated sentry duty. A grizzled veteran at forty, he damn well should have merited exemption from such menial tasks. That’s what new recruits are for, and there were always plenty of new recruits. The mortality rate was high out on the edge of the southern frontier, but such was a soldier’s life. Dying from unnatural causes was part of the job and where the Damned Company was concerned, there was plenty of unnatural to go around. The Blight wasn’t going to guard itself, after all.
Granted, it was a small consolation that he was sharing guard duty with Eobard Critchler. The younger man was fairly tolerable as far as fresh recruits went. Most of the new guys grew up rough and tumble and arrived with scars on their faces and chips on their shoulders. With no prospects back in civilization (unless you counted death by knife or noose a prospect) they came south, lured by the promise of a generous pension for a mere ten years of service spent in shouting distance of the most dangerous place in the world. Heinrich didn’t just know their collective story, he’d lived it.
As for the Damned Company, the outfit’s nickname wasn’t just a colloquialism. Their job was to stand at the threshold of damnation and with nothing more than swords and spears protect the border against whatever might emerge from the otherworldly wasteland known in legend as the Blight. Heinrich was the last of the fellows he’d joined up with an eternity ago to still be counted among the living. He had less than a year to go till retirement, but figured it might as well have been a thousand.
Heinrich suspected and most men agreed that the only reason a member of the Damned Company could retire after ten short years with full benefits was because nobody made it that long. Not that he could remember, anyway. Heinrich had seen all sorts of weird things emerge from the Blight (sometimes materializing from thin air), scoop up grown men like a raptor pouncing on a rodent, and escape lickety-split. He’d seen seasoned soldiers silt their own throats after going mad from living in such close proximity to the unnatural. But mostly, he’d known more than a few men who simply vanished and were never seen again. Whether they deserted under the cover of night or were taken by the Blight in some unknown way Heinrich could only speculate.
Heinrich watched Critchler out of the corner of his eye. Most of the men, even the veterans, hated being outdoors after dark. The Blight was bad enough in the daytime, but when night fell strange lights could sometimes be seen in the sky, and strange shapes sometimes darted, crawled, or oozed across the no-man’s land between the edge of camp and the towering guardian pillars which marked where the sane world ended and the Blight began. Sometimes those shapes were so bizarre the mere sight of them could drive a man mad. A fair number of the men were even willing to trade a month’s pay to avoid sentry duty. Not Critchler though. He was one cool customer.
Critchler didn’t strike Heinrich as a criminal (and it took one to know one) or a hard-case which made his enlistment in the Damned Company all the more perplexing. The soft-spoken young man was well-rounded for someone his age, implying education, and was slow to anger, implying his childhood hadn’t been a near constant struggle to survive. Heinrich was curious about him but not so curious as to raise the subject of Critchler’s background. He minded his own business and preferred that others do the same. Critchler seemed to subscribe to that same philosophy which suited Heinrich just fine, and perhaps that was why Critchler’s question caught him off guard.
“What do you suppose is on the other side?” Critchler asked him as they stood guard at the edge of camp that night. In the distance stood one of the massive, rune-carved pillars which marked the outermost boundaries of the nightmare landscape beyond. The elf-runes glowed green and fierce as they for thousands of years, their arcane power preventing the spread of whatever unimaginable force had created the Blight.
“The other side of what?” Heinrich asked.
“The hole.”
Heinrich raised an eyebrow. “What hole? Did somebody dig a hole?”
Critchler smiled and shook his head. “Out there in the middle of the Blight is a hole. Or maybe crack would be a better word. Yes, that’s what it is. It’s a literal crack in the sky, letting the essence of some other reality leak into our world. I guess you could say it’s the heart of the Blight.”
Heinrich looked sideways at Critchler. “What the gob are you talking about?”
Critchler shrugged. “It’s not a given. It’s just something I heard at the Magicians College.”
Heinrich snorted. “And what were you doing at the Magicians College?”
“I used to go there.”
Even Heinrich knew the Magicians College wasn’t the most prestigious of the royal colleges (the College of Engineering held that distinction) but it was definitely the most expensive. Magical research wasn’t cheap and the faculty was quite willing to grant honorary degrees not worth the vellum on which they were written in exchange for generous donations. “Yeah, and I’m the bloody queen.”
“Your majesty,” Critchler said with a slight bow.
Heinrich studied the younger man’s mild expression. “You serious?”
Critchler nodded.
“You come from money?” Heinrich asked, more surprised at himself than at Critchler’s revelation. It was the first time he had asked someone a personal question in almost a decade.
Critchler shook his head. “No, my parents were sharecroppers. After they died during the last zombie plague, my great uncle Tobin took me in. He wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination either, but he was a retired professor of alchemy with his own laboratory and everything. He taught me to read, instructed me in mathematics and the natural sciences, and when I showed an aptitude for basic spellcraft used some connections to get me into the Magicians College.”
“Huh. Okay, so do a trick. Make that rock float or disappear or something.” Heinrich’s eyes widened. “No, wait. I’ve got it. Turn it into gold.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Critchler said. “It’s not like in the stories where the wizard just says some silly words and waves a stick. Even the simple stuff takes preparation. And even if I could turn that rock into gold, after awhile it would just turn back into a rock.”
“Why’s that?” Heinrich asked, frowning.
“Have you ever tried telling a rock not to be a rock?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Heinrich admitted. He tried to bite back the next question but curiosity got the better of him. “Okay, so how do you go from the Magicians College to guarding the southern border from mutant rabbits? You kill somebody with a curse or something?”
“I quit school to come here and enlist,” Critchler said casually.
“You quit… You get a free ride to one of the Royal Colleges then quit just so you 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,