‘Those are always effective.’ Garec drank.
‘But the way I use it is more to say that Nerak is a great pile of cat-shit.’
‘All right, thanks.’ Garec grimaced. ‘You know, there really is nothing worse than cat-shit.’
Mark laughed. ‘How did we get here?’
‘We’re here to save Eldarn and send you back to Colorado. Have you forgotten?’
‘Oh, yes, right, save Eldarn. Of course, I had better write that down. I’ll see if Steven has any ash left. I’ll scrawl it here on my water goblet so I don’t forget.’ He refilled his cup.
Garec reached back for a piece of chair, tossed it on the flames and said, ‘But first we have to figure out how Eldarn itself might ward the Larion spell table.’
‘And then we have to get through Eldarn’s greatest gatekeepers.’
‘Most ruthless gatekeepers,’ Garec corrected.
‘Sorry, most ruthless gatekeepers,’ Mark said.
‘I wonder what aven it is.’
Mark looked surprised. ‘Does it matter?’
‘We’re sitting here drinking water. Whose idea was that?’
‘You think it’s late enough for wine?’
‘We’d have to go back down into the cellar. I don’t like it, but I’ll risk it.’
‘Yeah, I’d hate to get caught down there. Too dark, too many damp places. That miserable almor could be down there anywhere waiting for us. Maybe we’ll stick with water for a while and send Steven down there when he takes a break. At least he’ll have the staff with him.’
‘Right,’ Garec said. ‘We wouldn’t want to get trapped down there.’
Mark had leaned over the water bucket when he heard Garec’s goblet clatter to the floor. The Ronan was already running towards the stairwell at the far end of the great hall. ‘Hey,’ Mark shouted, his echo coming back at him from fifteen stone hallways at once, ‘where are you going?’
‘Sunonabitch!’ Garec called without looking back.
Garec burst into Steven’s chamber without knocking and was surprised to find Gilmour there, considering the crooked ash letters Steven had scrawled on the grey stone wall. ‘I know where this is,’ he panted, heaving in great swallows of air. Gilmour and Steven offered him twin blank stares as he waved a hand at the writing and gasped out again, ‘I know where this is. The spell table, I know where we can find it.’
‘Sit down, boy, relax.’ Gilmour was obviously unconvinced. ‘Get your breath back and tell us how – or rather, where.’ He looked at Mark questioningly as he too ran into the room, but Mark just shrugged and raised his eyebrows.
‘I just figured it out downstairs with Mark. We were—’ He stopped and laughed nervously; he didn’t want to be wrong after bursting into the room like a bad actor in a second-rate melodrama. ‘Well, we were downstairs, drinking water we collected yesterday from the cistern – it isn’t bad, but it tastes like lake water, all full of minerals and fishy things. And we were talking about going downstairs to get some wine, which is a good deal more pleasant, anyway, we decided to wait and send Steven down there, because to tell the truth the almor scares the dog piss out of both of us, and neither of us wanted to go down to fill the flagons.’
‘Gosh, thanks Garec,’ Steven said dryly.
‘Well, at least you’d have the staff with you,’ Garec explained.
‘Oh sure. Talk about hoping someone else will pick up the bar tab.’ Steven grinned. ‘Here at Sandcliff Wine and Ale, drinking really is hazardous to your health.’
Gilmour, clearly not amused, interrupted again. ‘I hate to be such a killjoy, but get to the point, please, Garec. Where is the spell table?’
‘It’s buried beneath a pile of rocks on the bottom of a river flowing out of the Blackstones into southern Falkan.’ Garec found himself squirming under the scrutiny of a Larion Senate leader, not the kindly gaze of his mentor and longtime friend. ‘I wondered if that might be the place where Eldarn itself would ward the table, but when I heard Mark clarify the part about the gatekeepers, Eldarn’s most ruthless gatekeepers, I knew that had to be it.’
Steven turned back to the text he had scrawled on the wall; he had been staring at it for days, vainly hoping some cartoon light bulb would pop on above his head, or the hickory staff would reveal the truth. Now he nodded. ‘That day on the river, yes. Gilmour, you were— well, dead at the time. We were coming downriver on our raft.’
‘The Capina Fair,’ Mark said, as if the name were an important piece of the puzzle.
‘I went swimming, and managed to get myself trapped at the bottom of the river – something grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Garec came down to help, and soon he was stuck along with me. We used the staff to breathe, sort of, but that’s all it did – we barely got away with our lives.’
Gilmour looked at them. ‘How did you finally break free?’
Steven was quick to answer. ‘I remember this, because it was so odd. I’d been using the staff, blasting away at the river bottom, drilling it with everything I could muster, but it didn’t budge.’
‘Instead, it began to drag us towards this underwater rock formation, Steven by the ankle and me by my wrists,’ Garec said. ‘I thought we were dead. And then it just let go.’
‘Actually,’ Steven interjected, ‘it didn’t – and I’m not certain I’m right on this, but I’ll say it anyway: I believe it had something to do with what I was thinking.’
Gilmour cocked an eyebrow. ‘Go on.’
‘At first I was pounding away, all my frustration and fear blasting into the riverbed, and it was pointless, then I forced myself to relax. We were breathing all right, and I knew that even in the cold, we had a few seconds before we started to lose our senses.’ He looked at Garec, checking he wasn’t leaving out any details. Garec gestured for him to continue.
‘It was then that I thought about our goal, to reach the spell table and to defeat Nerak. I focused on it, concentrating all my will on our quest—’
‘And the staff responded,’ Gilmour said.
‘No,’ Steven shook his head. ‘I never landed another blow with the staff. The riverbed just let us go. Maybe it was a coincidence, but if it wasn’t, then something down there essentially read my thoughts and changed its mind about killing us.’
‘Or it was your own power,’ Mark said. ‘Maybe your own magic was stronger than the staff’s that day.’
Steven didn’t answer; he was still uncomfortable when Mark insisted that he was more than just a conduit for the hickory staff, even though Mark had a legitimate argument.
Gilmour asked, ‘What else do you remember?’
He closed his eyes, trying to recall as much as he could. ‘It was so cold. I do remember those rocks.’
‘It was like a cave,’ Garec agreed, ‘an underground cave, and the sand was pulling us towards the opening. Rutting terrifying is what it was, and I was going in head-first.’
‘It was more than that,’ Steven said, pointing a finger at Garec. ‘He’s right, but it was more than that: it was like a sculpture, a perfectly random, natural, flawed, beautiful sculpture – nothing you’d see in a Florence gallery, but perfectly awkward and clumsily done, as if a passionate idiot had built it out of rocks and sticks—’ He paused, certain he was going to sound foolish. ‘It was like an altar. I even kneeled down in front of it, twice. The second time was when it decided to grab me.’
Garec echoed the text scribbled on the wall. ‘Eldarn itself wards the spell table.’
‘Nerak took it from here and buried it there.’ Steven had not yet said as much, but he agreed with Garec.
‘Why not take it to Welstar Palace?’ Mark asked, ‘wouldn’t it be safer there?’
‘It’s too obvious a hiding place,’ Garec answered. ‘If anyone were ever to figure out how to get into Welstar Palace – a challenge, I admit – the spell table would be there. Burying it beneath an Era’s worth of rock, sand and mountain runoff – who would know where to start looking, never mind how to get
it out of there? It’s the perfect hiding place: nowhere.’
Mark nodded reluctantly. It made sense, but there were still holes in the argument. ‘So why did it let you go?’ he asked. ‘If it wasn’t your magic, and if Eldarn itself wards the spell table, why did the riverbed let you go when it read your quest?’
‘No idea,’ Steven said, ‘maybe Nerak has cast some kind of spell that keeps the table under close watch – and maybe the river freed us because Eldarn itself wards the spell table, against its will. I want to believe that Eldarn itself wants us to be successful.’
‘That’s awfully presumptuous of us,’ Mark said. ‘And what of the ruthless gatekeepers? Is that the rocks and the dirt as well?’
Garec said, ‘No, the ruthless gatekeepers are those sunonabitch bone-collectors we met in that cavern.’
‘But that was days later – we were much further down the river. That can’t be what he means.’
‘But think about that cavern,’ Garec said. ‘There were hundreds of thousands of bones stacked up against that wall; where do you suppose they came from? There’s no way that many people just wandered into that cavern: those creatures come out and hunt.’
Remembering the huge eyes he hacked out with his battle-axe, Mark said, ‘They must be nocturnal – but some of those bones were ancient. They disintegrated when we touched them. Those things have been gathering bones down there for ages and ages. The spell table has only been gone for a few generations.’
‘So what?’ Steven said. ‘So they gathered bones for ten thousand generations; that doesn’t stop Nerak enslaving them as his gatekeepers nine hundred and eighty Twinmoons ago.’
Mark conceded the point and threw up his hands. ‘Hey, it beats sitting around here waiting for whomever or whatever is next on Nerak’s list to show up and kill us. What do you say, Gilmour?’
‘Can we find it again?’
‘I know right where it is,’ Steven assured. ‘There’s a mountain above the river with a stand of pines growing right out of the rock, sticking out all over, almost marking every point on the compass. I’ve never seen anything like it before. We can’t miss it.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely. I stared at it for what felt like hours while I was lying there thinking the staff’s magic had run out.’
Gilmour was silent, pacing back and forth across the chamber. He looked too thin, too tired and too old for the challenges that lay ahead. He ran a hand over forehead.
Everyone knew he was wishing he had been with them on the river. How much easier this would be if he had not been such a fool as to go to sleep. How many times in the past five hundred Twinmoons had he done that: fifteen? Twenty, maybe? But thinking he should build up some energy for their trip over the pass the following day, he had rolled himself up in his blankets for an aven or two – and why not? Kantu slept all the time – drunk too, mostly – and no one chided him for it. But the first time Gilmour slept in uncounted Twinmoons, an assassin had come into their camp and driven a knife into his chest, a quick, clean killing. He hadn’t seen the man, though he had known someone was following them. He, one of the most powerful sorcerers in Eldarn, had been tricked by a carnival magician’s cloaking spell, and it had cost him dearly.
Now Gilmour wrestled with the uncertainty of leaving again: would his magic wane when he stepped outside his home? Mark was right: there was no point in remaining at Sandcliff, and there was nothing in the third Windscroll other than a protection spell that he thought Pikan had planned to use to protect herself and her team from Nerak when he came through the doorway. Even then, Gilmour had failed, for he hadn’t found the scroll in time and Pikan had not been given an opportunity to use it.
‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Let’s go.’
‘What? When? Now?’ Steven hadn’t expected to leave so suddenly. ‘Don’t you have more work to do with the Windscroll? You’ve been poring over it, and working so many spells in the back hall; are you ready? Do you need more time? Gilmour, as long as we have the key, we control the pace of this horrible cat-and-mouse game.’
‘No, Steven, I’m ready,’ Gilmour said, straightening his shoulders. ‘The Windscroll is an engaging riddle, and I think I’m onto something, but I can keep that research going as we travel south.’ The lie tripped easily off his tongue. He looked at each of them in turn. ‘You’ve all convinced me. Let’s go.’
Nerak’s weakness lies elsewhere – he heard Lessek’s voice echo in his memory and worried for a moment that the others heard it too; it was followed by Pikan saying, I need the third Windscroll. It’s in the library near the top shelf behind Lessek’s desk. Why had she wanted that scroll? Did she know – wherever she was – how hard he had worked and how far he had come to get it?
Nerak’s weakness lies elsewhere.
‘Where, gods rut it?’ Gilmour barked aloud.
‘Where what?’ Steven asked.
‘Nothing, sorry!’ Gilmour found he had begun to sweat and dragged a sleeve over his brow in an effort to hide his discomfort. The pieces had fallen into place. Nerak’s weakness. Pikan had known what to do; Gilmour had lived with that assumption since those terrifying few moments cowering in the corner of the spell chamber, gripping the pommel of that absurd broadsword.
If Nerak’s weakness lies elsewhere, and it doesn’t lie in the third Windscroll, then where in all the wide world does it lie?
Fantus, are you there?
Nerak, you bastard. Where are you? Why don’t you just come and settle this together, face to face, here at home, where we belong?
Fantus, it’s Kantu. Is it you, Fantus?
Gilmour felt dizzy: the voices inside his head had taken on a mind of their own. First Nerak, then Pikan, and now Kantu – what was happening to him? Sweat poured off his forehead and stung his eyes. He mopped repeatedly at his brow and shut his eyes hard, trying to keep the salty sweat from blinding him.
Fantus! It’s me, Kantu. Can you hear me?
He answered, What could you possibly want? To ride along with the others as I lose my mind? And what brings you out at this time of day? I figured you’d be—
Fantus. Shut up and listen!
He was really there. It wasn’t his imagination …
Gilmour tried to relax and to open his mind – as scrambled as it had become in the past half-aven – and allow his old friend to speak with him. Sorry. I’m sorry, Kantu. Give me a moment. I must attend to one thing and then I’ll lie down.
Please hurry. I am in a safe place, but this will tire us both immensely.
Gilmour opened his eyes to find his young companions standing frozen in place, each staring at him with wild-eyed incomprehension. He realised he was gasping for breath, sweating and talking with the demons in his head.
He sent them away, reassuring them he was all right, but pushing them firmly out of the room. ‘I need to be by myself,’ he said, forcing a smile. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll come and find you tomorrow.’
Steven was the first to protest. ‘Gilmour, we don’t think—’
‘Nonsense,’ he cut them off. ‘I’m fine. I have a few things to work out in my mind before we go, and I am going to need quiet for that. I beg you not to worry. I’ll join you all for the midday meal: whatever perishables we have left. Pack for travel, because we need to investigate this river of yours before we do anything else.’
The others eyed him suspiciously, but no one offered another argument. Steven, following Garec and Mark out, asked once more, ‘You sure you’re all right?’
‘Just fine, really,’ he replied. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, midday.’
‘Good night, Gilmour.’
‘Sorry to be so abrupt, but I’ve just figured out a few things that need to happen before we go. I want to take care of them tonight.’
Steven nodded and pulled the door closed as he left.
In the hall, Mark said, ‘What’s with him?’
‘He’s losing his mind,’ Garec said. ‘Did you see him? I thought he w
as going to fall down.’
‘If he’s not right tomorrow, we’ll insist on staying here for a few more days,’ Steven said.
‘We don’t have food for a few more days – we’re pretty much out of everything, and even drinking the water is dangerous.’ Mark had run out of ideas, so he clung to the notion that they needed to get to the river right away. Of course, there was the problem of the almor waiting for them outside, not to mention an entire army …
Steven read his mind. ‘If he’s in there getting things sorted, then we have to do our part out here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, if he’s working out the details of the Windscroll, whatever he needs to crush Nerak with the spell table, then we need to make certain we’re ready to travel.’
Garec was confused. ‘What? Pack?’
‘Yes,’ Steven said. ‘You two get us packed.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Mark looked sceptically at his roommate.
‘I’m going outside,’ Steven said.
‘Oh, that’s just—’
‘Don’t try to stop me. You know as well as I do that it has to happen. If it doesn’t, then we’re just stuck here staring at the walls and drinking vinegar until Nerak sends something in here to kill us.’ He shouldered the staff. ‘I have to do it.’
Kantu! Gilmour called into the darkness gathering in his mind’s eye.
Fantus! Are you losing your mind, my old friend? Kantu’s voice came to him across the void. Communicating this way was horribly difficult; it required a masterful use of energy to completely empty one’s mind of thoughts or images that might distract one of them and in turn break the connection between them.
For the moment, yes, I think I am. But how are you? Are you in Middle Fork?
I am well, but I am not in Middle Fork. I hoped I would find you at Sandcliff. I felt the gate open during the last Twinmoon and knew it was either you or him. I have not had an opportunity to try and reach you since then. We have been travelling a great deal. In a secluded corner room on the second floor of a surprisingly comfortable inn, Alen Jasper of Middle Fork lay on a straw mattress, apparently fast asleep. Downstairs, his friends were enjoying a fine dinner, with an extra flagon of wine with his compliments.
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