Thresholder

“As you know, the connection of the firmament to the mortis mundi has been an area of intense speculation, and an enlarged mundi has been determined to be a defining feature of wizards,” said Romauld. The man stroked his long gray beard. “The enlargement of that gland may have something to do with your appearance here, if you are at all like a practitioner of the more conventional arts.”

“No,” said Perry. “I don’t know that. You never mentioned it.”

“Didn’t I?” asked Romauld, blinking slightly. “I’d have sworn that we covered it when speaking of wizards, when you expressed interest.”

“I have every single one of these talks recorded and transcribed,” said Perry, patting the helmet that was sitting on the small table beside him. When away from the armor, it could be used for recording or for an open channel to Marchand, though the battery was only good for an hour or so, and that was with every other function shut down. It was definitely not the intended use, because a smart person would just use their phone. Who didn’t take their phone everywhere? Perry had left his phone back in Richter’s world, but even if he hadn’t, it would have been long-dead. “March, search the transcripts for ‘mortis mundi’.”

“Searching, sir,” the helmet replied.

They waited a moment. Romauld stared at the helmet. “The abilities of your thinking armor still astound.”

“I have a record of that phrase in one of the books you scanned, sir,” replied March after a moment. “I’ve been unable to find it within the recorded conversations between you and Romauld.”

“My mistake then, I suppose,” said Romauld, shaking his head. “The mortis mundi is believed to be the seat of power for our kind.”

“Right,” said Perry, pinching the bridge of his nose. “But it could go both ways, couldn’t it?”

“Beg pardon?” asked Romauld.

“If there’s a gland within the brain that’s enlarged for wizards, or only present for wizards, or something, then it could be that it’s necessary for the wizards to perform their magic, or it could be that it’s a side effect of wizardry.”

“A ‘side’ effect,” said Romauld. “A curious turn of phrase I’m not familiar with.”

Speaking with Romauld was sometimes an exercise in frustration. He was old, which was probably part of it, but had a tendency to be lost in his own thoughts, and to bring up unrelated concepts as asides, or wander in seas of unfamiliar terminology. Those asides could sometimes eat an hour of time, sometimes an entire day, and Romauld was, frankly, a terrible teacher with a poor understanding of what was vital to learning any particular subject.

Perry tried to cut the man some slack. It wasn’t like he was a professor who was teaching the same course for the tenth year in a row. There were no standard textbooks to hand over to someone like Perry, because there were no people like Perry. Getting to that understanding of each other had taken two days, since there were quibbles and exceptions, and Romauld seemed convinced that Perry had come from the firmament, and unpacking what ‘firmament’ meant had taken quite a while.

“The enemy is thirty miles away,” said Perry. “I appreciate you trying to answer questions, but there’s a front very close, an hour away if I use the sword, and I could be fighting alongside your men.”

“You have been fighting,” said Romauld. “Even the strongest warrior cannot sustain a battle forever. If your mind is not in matters of magic, we can end our ruminations for the day.”

Perry was sore, it was true, even after the ministrations of the healers, but he had seen the men dying out at the front. They went into tents that sat beneath powerful barriers Romauld had created, and the barriers had failed more than once, leaving men scrambling into their armor and grabbing their weapons in the middle of the night. The fight wasn’t unending, but it ground on day after day. Perry only thought it was unfair that it ground on without him, especially given that with the armor, he was worth a hundred of the rank and file. He could single-handedly scythe through the enemy, most often causing their undisciplined forces to break, his effect on the battlefield enormous.

“No, I need to know more,” Perry said with a sigh. “When you say a ‘gland’, you mean a specific piece of biological material, yes?” He’d learned to ask these clarifying questions, because often Romauld was imprecise, or was using language that was off in important ways.

“There is not one body, but many,” said Romauld. This was the kind of indirect answer that made these conversations frustrating, but Romauld was the court wizard, close advisor and confidant to the king, and apparently the most learned person in the entire kingdom. Romauld’s library contained five hundred books, and was the largest collection of reading material anyone had ever seen.

Perry, by comparison, had more than seven hundred books in his apartment, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, taking up four tall bookshelves he’d bought at Target. Him being literate was surprising to them, and one of the things that marked him as especially chivalrous. He struggled, sometimes, to remember that these people were from their own culture, different both from his own, and from the historical context of Earth. After his second major engagement in the war, a siege he’d broken almost single-handedly, he had been offered the hand of the king’s youngest daughter … who was twelve. It had taken some time to shake his disgust.

“I’m asking whether the mortis mundi is a small pebble of flesh found within the brain, as you seem to be suggesting,” said Perry.

“Do you take my meaning when I say there are several bodies?” asked Romauld. He pressed a wrinkled finger against the table that sat between them. “This is fundamental.”

“You’re referring to the theory that there exists a body that lies partway in the firmament,” said Perry. “A … replacement body that exists in some kind of extradimensional space and is called upon by healing magic.”

Romauld frowned. “You will need to explain ‘extradimensional space’ to me again.”

This was how it went sometimes, and Perry had to spend the next five minutes going over what he meant, which was grounded in a poor understanding of physics and a slightly better understanding of fantasy fiction.

The term ‘firmament’ was a hurdle, one which Perry wished that they could dispense with, but it was too fundamental to Romauld’s thinking, too core to the way that Romauld’s books formulated the world. It was, to Perry’s understanding, simply ‘everything that is not the material world’, but it included such a diverse set of different ways in which something could be ‘not the material world’ that he had trouble understanding what unifying theme or set of assumptions led to them using a single word for it.

Where did people go when they died? The firmament. Where did the power and energy of a seasoned wizard come from? Why the firmament, of course. Things could be pulled from the firmament or pushed toward it, and it was the answer to not just matters of magic but simple questions of the common folk as well. When someone went missing, it was to the firmament, when someone misplaced something, the firmament was blamed — or blessed. Yet this wide-ranging thing was not just fundamental to magic, but fundamental to lots of things, and Perry simply did get it. They were pre-scientific, which was the real problem, and Romauld simply didn’t seem to see the problem with the fact that many of the things attributable to the firmament could be rationally explained by other things.

Romauld was very firm on certain issues, but much less so on others.

“What if it’s not true?” asked Perry. “What if there is no firmament?”

“Where would you propose that you came from?” asked Romauld.

“Another world,” said Perry. “Earth.” Only, he’d been to two Earths.

“And Earth is of the firmament,” nodded Romauld. “You understand.”

“I don’t see what good it does to say that Earth is of the firmament,” said Perry. “Do you have some way of, um, operationalizing this? Pretend that it’s a black box, just inputs and outputs, can we somehow list effects? Make a flowchart?”

“You’re speaking quickly, using unfamiliar words,” said Romauld with a frown.

“Yes, sorry,” said Perry. “There are, uh, ideas on my world that are helpful for dealing with other ideas.” He rubbed his forehead. “Maybe I should go to the books, see if they have anything worth saying on these subjects.”

“You think that books can express more clearly the things I’ve been saying?” asked Romauld.

“I think that I can do some reading, tear apart the concepts, then ask you about the things that I’m not understanding,” said Perry. “I want to know how to resurrect someone. I want to know how to throw up barriers like you do, protect people, how to deliver a killing blow at a distance.”

“Your armor already does that, does it not?” asked Romauld. “I was told you killed a dozen men from a hundred paces away, as though you were hiding a rank of archers inside you.”

“It’s different,” said Perry.

Romauld seemed to accept that, and Perry thought that was one of the ways in which they were different. Perry would have pressed the point, demanded to know why the gun only worked in specific circumstances, what its limits were. In truth, he’d been running low on bullets, and was loath to use them if he didn’t have to.

“Wizardry takes time,” said Romauld. “I started when I was young, not long after I had my first blood, and could cast nothing of substance until I was in my thirties. You will not gain an understanding in a fortnight, especially if you must spend your time in defense of this kingdom, sword in hand.”

“The manner of teaching isn’t what I’m used to,” said Perry. It was as diplomatic as he could put it. “In my world, we have instruction and management down to a science. I expect that once we have the groundwork laid, I’ll be able to go through it faster than … twenty years or so.” He didn’t know what ‘first blood’ was, but it was among the endless list of questions he had which felt both overwhelming and pointless.

“I do not dispute that you are needed as a knight and soldier, that it is your duty and a manner of no small honor,” said Romauld. “Nor do I dispute that you have a place here. You have a keen mind, exceptionally so, a command of concepts and a high literacy that mark you as special even among the best of our knights.”

“You think I’m stretched thin,” said Perry. He could feel the tiredness in his bones, but knew that he would have trouble sleeping anyhow.

“I think a man cannot be all things,” said Romauld. “The conclusion of the war might offer a better time for you to work on your studies.”

But Perry knew that he couldn’t do that. He’d been through two portals now, and expected a third. When it came, he would go, and he would hope that he’d taken everything from this world that he could. He had scans of all Romauld’s books, books on wizardry, healing, alchemy, and all manner of topics. He had the sword, an artifact gifted to him for his service in defense of the kingdom, in part because he’d kept breaking weapons while fighting. He was going to milk the world for what it could offer and then move on to the next, he knew that already.