Lessek's Key

by Rob Scott; Jay Gordon

An explosion knocked the others off their feet and tumbled Mark from his knees into a foetal position, looking so vulnerable that Steven reared back and struck the wall once again. When the smoke and dust finally cleared, a hole big enough to accommodate the small party comfortably had been opened in the blocks between the corridor and an apparently abandoned chamber beyond. Running down through the masonry was a makeshift tube – broken now beyond repair – that Steven guessed was connected somehow to the palace’s central aqueduct. The fountains weren’t magic; it was a simple system of pressure and abundant supply that kept the water flowing at Sandcliff. Jabbing the hickory staff into the cracked ends of the ceramic pipe, he released a devastating blast of destructive energy that tore through the palace.

  Hoping he had done enough to frighten the almor away, or at least stun it, Steven kneeled down beside Mark. ‘Are you all right?’

  Mark choked. ‘I hate it here, Steven; I really do. Clouds of living acid, water demons – how are we supposed to fight?’

  Steven had no answer. He stared at the shattered fountain lying on the stone floor beside the leathery sack that had been Rodler Varn of Capehill.

  ‘That was supposed to be me,’ Mark went on through his tears. ‘He wanted me to drink first. That was supposed to be me. I insisted he go first. Can you fucking stand that?’

  Steven was already on his feet. Stepping over the body, he reached out with two fingers and wiped them gently around the spout that had carried water through the tiny sculpture and into the marble bowl. Rubbing his fingers together, he said, ‘Sonofabitch. Look at that.’

  Gilmour was by his side, still shaking, and thrilled and frightened at the crushing blast he had called up to tear the fountain from the wall; he suspected it was his magic that caused the almor to scurry back into the dark recesses of the Sandcliff cistern. ‘What is it, Steven?’ he asked.

  ‘You said there was an aqueduct. Where?’ He was so intense now, and Gilmour could feel the power of the hickory staff surrounding him, charging the stale air of the old hallway.

  ‘It comes in through the east wall, below the main hall, turns a wheel downstairs and dumps into various lines that feed the fountains throughout the keep.’ He stepped away a little, nervous that the staff might touch him and inadvertently stop his heart, or blow a hole in his chest – he was still smarting from the firebolts Steven had used to shock him back to consciousness.

  ‘Garec, take Mark downstairs. Get to the lowest level you can reach without getting wet, or being near any water supply – I mean it. I don’t want you in sight of any water at all.’

  Garec helped Mark to his feet and as they made their way down the corridor, Steven called after them, ‘Keep your heads down, and wait for us to come get you.’

  ‘Right,’ Garec said, ‘I understand. It’s going to be bad.’

  Gilmour asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘The clouds are eating this place stone by stone, and they won’t stop until they have consumed us, right down to socks and boots. There is a demon in the water supply. I’m not going to have any of it, Gilmour. I think I know how to deal with both of them at once, but I need to know if we can get to a place on the aqueduct - without those clouds detecting us – where I might climb up and access the water supply.’

  ‘Water won’t do anything to those clouds, Steven,’ Gilmour warned.

  ‘Don’t worry about that: can we get there without those clouds noticing?’

  Gilmour’s face was layered in wrinkles as he concentrated. Finally he said, ‘Yes, I think we can.’ Then almost boyishly, he added, ‘Gods rut it, but Steven, I can get you there. Let’s go.’ He led the way towards the centre of the keep.

  Steven ran through the forest and up the sharp incline beside Sandcliff Palace. He kept his head low, hoping the clouds gnawing the north wing of the Larion keep down to its bones would ignore Gilmour and him as they moved towards the top of the aqueduct. The woods were thick enough to mask their movements, but they did little to diffuse the hissing as the acid melted the ancient stone.

  Arriving at the aqueduct, Steven and Gilmour huddled amongst the trees that grew along the base of the stone waterway. The Larion aqueduct was enormous, a marvel of engineering and architecture, the gigantic mortared stone archways supporting a veritable river; they climbed the hillside to the top of the mountain. Steven had no doubt that Larion Senators had spent time in Italy during the Renaissance.

  He whistled quietly as he looked up the bone-grey wall to where a stream of water ran into the cisterns beneath Sandcliff’s east wing. ‘Sheez, Gilmour,’ Steven shook his head. ‘You didn’t mention it was quite this big.’

  ‘What can I say? We had a lot of fountains. We had hundreds of students studying at the university,’ Gilmour replied. ‘Now will you tell me what you plan to do?’

  ‘Well, I will tell you that I don’t plan to get killed,’ Steven said, ‘just in case you were wondering.’

  ‘It had crossed my mind …’

  Peeking beneath one of the stone arches, Steven could see that the clouds continued to work their insidious magic, dissolving what was left of the tower to rubble. Soon they would break through the walls of the main building, and from there it was just a short step to Mark and Garec’s hiding place.

  Tucking the hickory staff into his belt, Steven climbed the aqueduct and carefully ran along the narrow edge – keeping his feet dry for as long as possible was critical; he didn’t want to alert the almor until the last possible moment.

  He moved quickly back down the slope to where the aqueduct spilled through a tiny breach in the palace wall and into the great cistern. Once he found a suitable spot he stepped into the ankle-deep stream of rushing water and bent low to examine the joints between two of the sections of funnel-shaped ceramic tubing the water ran in. He found an old carpentry nail holding them together and scraped a fingernail across the metallic head, then rubbed his fingertip against the fleshy part of his thumb. ‘Good enough,’ he said to himself, then turned towards the acid clouds and began to shout.

  ‘Hey! Hey you, over there, you— whatever you are, cloud things! I’m over here! Come on over and get me!’ Steven shouted, trying to taunt the clouds into attacking him; he had never realised how difficult it was to insult a cloud. Still screaming into the sky, he felt the hickory staff warm into a rage once again. This had to work. He just needed one more thing to fall into place.

  Steven stood in the water, taking a gamble that the magic had driven the almor far enough out of the palace that the creature wouldn’t come up behind him from somewhere in the cistern. It had been a powerful blast – and he knew the staff had enough strength to kill an almor; he had done it before. It had most likely been driven up into the mountains, where it would wait for another opportunity to ambush them, but Steven wasn’t willing to sit around and be hunted by a demon every time he took a drink of water. He stomped his feet in the aqueduct stream, egging the almor on, while he continued to berate the far-off acid clouds.

  Then the twin clouds broke away from the north tower and, independent of the prevailing winds, moved over to where Steven waited, the staff a red glow of vengeance in his fists. ‘Come on, come on you bastards,’ Steven said, uncertain if the clouds could hear him. They had detected him there, and that was enough. Now he needed the almor. He looked for Gilmour below in the trees, but the old man was nowhere to be found, probably hiding in the shadows.

  He stomped his feet again, splashing as much as possible without tumbling over the side and plummeting to a broken neck on the frozen ground below. ‘Come on, where are you?’ he shouted. ‘Come and get me, you bastard, I’m right here – I’m standing in the water, for Christ’s sake. What more do you need, a goddamned invitation?’

  Looking back to the clouds, he realised it was too late: they would be on him before he had a chance to draw the almor in for the kill. ‘Motherless dry-humping bastards,’ he cursed; this was bad luck: the almor could hit him at any time, probably while he was busy ba
ttling the clouds.

  ‘Shit and double red shit,’ he said, ‘burned to death with acid while being sucked dry by a waterlogged demon. This was a great idea, Steven. No, really, one of your absolute best!’

  He waited, furious; the acid clouds were coming, with or without the almor, and he was about to fight. He took a deep breath, murmured insults at the acid monsters, and braced for their assault – until Gilmour’s shouting and splashing distracted him from his immediate doom. The old man was dancing and jumping about barefoot in the water near the top of the aqueduct and even from this distance, he could hear the song Gilmour was singing, an off-key, off-colour ode to a sexually active young man with a wooden leg, surely one of the most hilarious pieces of folk poetry he had ever heard. But now was most definitely not the time; he was quite sure that Gilmour had gone stark raving mad.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Steven shouted, looking back and forth between the dancing sorcerer and the clouds. ‘You’re going to get yourself killed. Take cover. Get out of here now!’

  But Gilmour danced and sang; jumping about, he was a dripping mess of wet wool and matted hair – until the Larion Senator turned suddenly and gestured over his shoulder.

  The almor was coming.

  ‘Get down, Gilmour, jump for it,’ Steven cried, but the last few words were lost. The clouds were just overhead.

  Gilmour screamed again and Steven risked watching as the old man took a few tottering steps towards him, then dived headlong into the smooth ceramic channel. Steven was surprised by Gilmour’s over-the-edge antics, until he realised that Gilmour’s cry had been one of excitement, not fear or panic, as he came onwards, head-first and bellowing the third verse defiantly. Out of nowhere, Steven recalled a water-park near Denver where periodically a drunk forty-year-old would leap headfirst down the tallest slide and end up airlifted to the nearest hospital. He wondered what might happen when a three-hundred-year-old man tried his hand at such a game.

  As he came closer, Gilmour’s song changed from the rhythmic thump of a drinking tune; now he was shouting, ‘Behind me, Steven, look behind me!’

  Finally he realised what the crazy sorcerer had been doing as an ivory blur pursued him down the aqueduct, rapidly closing the distance between them. Timing would be everything if this were to work. Steven stepped out of the stream and stood astride the chute on tiptoes, hoping he’d left enough space for Gilmour to pass between his legs. His eyes moved from the almor to the acid clouds: the demon was coming fast, almost too fast now, down the chute, nothing more than a hillock of fast-moving current. Above, the clouds were massing, one spinning tumult of acid death.

  Steven found himself remembering a science class on weather: were these stratocumulus, cumulonimbus, stratonymphopolyphonic – whatever? They were weaving themselves together to rain their deadly fluid down on this young fool – and, in a stroke of great luck, poison the water in the palace at the same time.

  The almor was close now and Steven watched as one shapeless arm broke the surface and stretched towards Gilmour’s feet. In another few seconds it would have him. ‘Hurry, Gilmour, come on,’ Steven urged under his breath, and called forth the magic of the hickory staff, right at his fingertips—

  The acid cloud dropped, a terrifying storm of pestilence and burning death. It was little more than twenty feet above his head when Steven glimpsed the old man passing beneath him and with a primitive cry, he slammed the hickory staff down into the water between Gilmour and the almor. His magic responded instantaneously, blowing the stream up and out into the acid storm above, carrying the almor aloft as well. Its cry was deafening, reverberating waves of punishing sound.

  Steven intensified the magic, calling forth all the water from the aqueduct, throwing great waves of icy snowmelt overhead.

  He caught every drop of water and cast it skywards, and when the half-moon channel was empty, the hickory staff pulled forth reserves of water from the mountains, deep caverns of inky-black water, summoned into the skies above Sandcliff Palace. Wave after wave drenched the acid cloud, and when the deadly nimbus realised what was happening, it tried to flee.

  Steven screamed, nothing intelligible, just a release of pent-up anger, frustration and fear. He understood Gilmour’s lunatic behaviour now as he continued to pour thousands and thousands of gallons of water into the cloud. His senses sharpened by the magic, he caught sight of the almor, acid-scarred and full of hatred, below him, sliding towards a rapidly diminishing puddle.

  ‘Not so fast,’ Steven cried from his place atop the makeshift river, ‘back you go to the hell that spawned you!’ He used the magic to toss the opaque demon back into the acid cloud. Again the almor screamed, but Steven kept his feet and continued his barrage.

  All of a sudden it was over. The cloud, saturated, fell across the hillside in a rainy death, killing some of the trees and shrubs, but mostly absorbed by the cold dirt above the palace. The north tower looked as though it had melted away. Steven hoped the Windscroll would give them the answers they needed, because anything left in those tower rooms, Harren’s remains included, had dissolved to nothingness.

  Steven searched the hillside, through the wispy clouds of foul-smelling mist, for the almor. He was certain it had survived – an acid bath wasn’t enough to kill it, but it would have annoyed the demon, and hopefully made clear that Steven and the hickory staff were a formidable enemy. It was just a matter of time before the two of them battled again.

  His rage sated and his need to avenge Rodler met, Steven felt the magic recede. Maybe Mark had been right: there were no hickory trees in the foothills where he had found the staff; that was anomalous enough, but it responded to Steven’s needs so perhaps there was something to Mark’s claims that he was a sorcerer, compelled to remain in Idaho Springs all those years by Lessek’s key. Steven inspected the familiar length of hickory for any damage and wished he had the answers.

  If Mark really was a king and he really was a sorcerer, they were doing a right hideous job of saving the world.

  ‘Steven?’ Gilmour’s voice came from the forest below. Are you all right, Steven?’

  ‘Am I all right?’ Steven shouted back. ‘I’m not the one who did a full-on Charlie Hustle all the way down this aqueduct. Where’s your head, Gilmour? That thing could have caught you and sucked you dry before I had any chance of warding it off. How did you know it wouldn’t catch you?’

  Gilmour’s face was bloody and one arm hung at his side, unmistakably broken, but he sounded fine, even enthusiastic. ‘I was right rutting surprised at how fast it came after me. I do love it when we take the fight to them, though, don’t you?’ Gilmour was enjoying himself, as if he had momentarily forgotten that the spell table was missing.

  ‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ Steven said. ‘It’s invariably the highlight of my day. I find few things as invigorating as going toe-to-toe with homicidal clouds and ancient demons. It’s like a double shot of espresso. How do I get down there?’

  ‘I came the easy way.’ He pointed towards the palace wall, ‘Bounced right off and fell into that bush over there. It was quick, but I don’t recommend it. I’m going to have to do some work on this old fisherman’s body, I’m afraid. I suggest you hike back up the chute and jump down.’

  ‘I think I’ll take option two,’ Steven said. Water began flowing down the chute from the hidden caverns and subterranean aquifers, chilling his feet even through his boots.

  Ignoring his injuries, Gilmour kept pace. ‘How did you know the water would drive off those clouds?’ he asked.

  ‘It wasn’t just water. That fountain was caked with limestone, deposited over the Twinmoons by that trickle. The water flowing into the palace is heavy with lime – you can scrape it off the nails holding these joints together.’

  ‘Limestone?’

  ‘Calcium carbonate, Gilmour, simple high school chemistry: in solution, limestone raises the ph of water.’ The old man still looked bemused. Steven clarified, ‘It makes water less acidic: the solution can be
used to neutralise acids. I didn’t know what the concentration was, or whether it was enough to stave off those clouds, so I used a lot.’

  ‘I’ll say!’ Gilmour grabbed a low-hanging tree branch with his good arm and pulled himself up the slope next to where Steven could jump down from the elevated waterway. ‘I wasn’t sure there would be any water left in the mountain after that little display.’

  Steven landed beside him and started mopping the blood from Gilmour’s face. ‘You’re a damned mess.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘It seems I’ve rediscovered a few vagrant skills here at the old homestead.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Steven said. ‘We’re going to need them to find that table.’

  Gilmour’s enthusiasm faded.

  ‘Sorry,’ Steven said, ‘I didn’t mean to remind you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ Gilmour forced a smile. ‘But I do love it when we take the fight to them!’

  From somewhere on the hillside, the almor screamed, a raging cry of anger and frustration. Its hunger wouldn’t wane until it had taken them all. Steven winced as the inhuman shriek resonated along his spine, chilling him through his already wet clothes.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ Gilmour said. ‘We’ll have to be careful drawing water while we’re here, and even more careful when we leave.’

  Steven fell in beside the old man and they carefully picked their way down to the palace gate.

  BOOK III

  The Wolfhound

  MALAKASIA

  ‘Thank you, Alen.’ Hoyt’s eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Where did you get these?’

  Alen gestured as if all of Eldarn were within his reach – yet Hoyt had never known the old man to be anywhere but Middle Fork. ‘Oh, here and there.’

  ‘But these are vintage – nothing like this has been printed in over nine hundred Twinmoons.’ Hoyt brushed the cover of the top volume in the stack of thirty or more: the most comprehensive collection of medical texts he had ever seen.