by Rob Scott
More time passed, and the voices, Pace and the other, the lilting one, returned.
‘Is he coherent?’
‘When he wakes, he tries to talk. He seems concerned that the girl got away.’
‘Carderic, right?’
‘Yes, sir. Brexan Carderic, a deserter. She had been posted along the Forbidden Forest outside Estrad. She disappeared the morning Jacrys ordered the siege on Riverend Palace.’
‘Must have known they were hiding something there.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And she was with this partisan, what’s his name again?’
‘Sallax Farro, sir, Sallax of Estrad, one of their leaders.’
‘But he was killed?’
Yes, sir. The girl escaped. She stripped half naked and pretended to be a whore. She walked right out of the barracks.’
Did you now? Good show, Brexan, good show, indeed. You’ve become an adequate spy after all. Jacrys surveyed the room through one slitted eye. The chamber was blurry and indistinct. He could see the two men, little more than smears of black and gold: Colonel Pace and Captain Someone, the one from the searches. Good news about Sallax, though. That rutting horsecock needed to die. Jacrys let the knowledge seep through the paralysis and fatigue holding him hostage. It felt good to know the traitorous partisan was gone. As for you, Brexan Carderic, if I see you again, my succulent little morsel, I’ll gut you and mount your insides on the wall of my dining room.
His eye fell shut; the hushed conversation, somewhere on the other side of the room, faded once again. Dreaming, Jacrys felt the bedding wrap him in a gentle embrace, a comforting, woman’s touch, perhaps even Brexan’s. She was a beautiful girl. And if I don’t see you again, my dear, well, then goodbye.
‘Oh, and Thadrake?’
‘Yes, sir?’
Somewhere out beyond the coverlet’s billowy embrace, Jacrys heard them pushing their way into his dreams. That’s his name, Captain Thadrake.
‘What news do you have on the murders?’
‘We believe it was Sallax all along, sir… killed a Seron with a knife, did it one-handed… same description as the assailant who had been haunting the waterfront…’ Thadrake’s voice tumbled back over itself in layers of sound, until, unable to decipher any more, Jacrys let go. Twenty-five days, that’s a long time. I’ve been here a long time. Jacrys heard footsteps; that would be Colonel Pace leaving the chamber. Thadrake remained behind, but the Malakasian spy didn’t care. It’s time, he thought before spiralling back into oblivion. It’s time to go home.
‘I still don’t understand.’ Kellin Mora stood near the water’s edge. Her cloak covered underclothes, tunic and overtunic, making her look like a wrinkled beige bag topped off with a thin-faced blonde-haired head.
Steven Taylor, wiry, pale and tired-looking, waded calf-deep in the river, his boots and socks in a heap beside the fallen pine he’d been sitting on.
Kellin was still wary of the power she had witnessed Steven wielding against the Malakasian girl, Bellan – or Nerak, or Prince Malagon, or whoever that had been – and she felt a pang of distrust for the foreigner. She wished she was back in Traver’s Notch, with Gita Kamrec and the rest of the Falkan Resistance. Covert strikes, guerrilla attacks, hoarding silver and weapons: she understood these things. Battling wraiths, bone-collecting river monsters and possessed Larion sorcerers was unfamiliar and frightening, and she remained hesitant to trust this man completely, despite Brand Krug’s apparent complacency with their current assignment. Only her loyalty to Gita and Falkan kept her from sneaking back home.
‘Which part don’t you understand?’ Garec Haile, the good-looking bowman from Estrad, joined her near the river. He liked Kellin and welcomed her company.
‘Most of it, I suppose,’ Kellin said. ‘If that little girl was Prince Malagon-’
‘It wasn’t,’ Garec interrupted. ‘It was Bellan, Malagon’s daughter. Prince Malagon’s body was dropped in-’
‘South Carolina,’ Steven interjected without looking back. He gazed across the river, choosing landmarks on the opposite shoreline and lining them up with a rocky cliff above and behind them. The cliff face was dotted with pine trees clinging to the craggy granite. ‘Probably in Charleston Harbour, near Folly Beach. I know that doesn’t mean much to you, Kellin, but rest assured, it’s a long night’s travel from here.’
‘Wherever here is,’ Garec mumbled.
‘Have a little faith.’ Steven turned and smiled at them. ‘This is it. Don’t you remember that hill? It looks like my grandfather’s nose. That’s a hard mountain to forget.’
‘That’s quite a grandfather you have,’ Kellin said.
‘Yeah, well, he wasn’t much of an underwear model, but he could drink his own weight in Milwaukee beer and he could read cigarette ashes in my grandmother’s ashtray. That has to count for something.’ Steven turned back to the river.
‘I thought it was tea leaves,’ Gilmour said.
‘It should be, but old Grandpop never liked tea, and my grandmother smoked enough to kill the neighbour’s dog. So it gave us all something to do between dinner and dessert.’
Kellin raised an eyebrow at Garec, who shrugged. She returned to the previous conversation. ‘So, Prince Malagon’s body lies abandoned in your world?’
‘Right,’ Garec answered for his friend. ‘Nerak, the Larion Senator who had been controlling Prince Malagon, had not been to Steven’s world in a thousand Twinmoons. So when he arrived, he dropped Malagon’s body and probably took the first person he found.’
‘Why?’
‘A head full of updated knowledge,’ Garec said.
‘He can read your thoughts?’
‘Only from the inside, Kellin.’
‘So Malagon was inside his own daughter?’
‘Nope,’ Steven said, ‘that was Nerak.’
‘Oh, yes, right. Sorry,’ she said, ‘I get them confused.’
‘It’s easy to do.’
‘So, Nerak returned here to Eldarn and took Bellan’s body?’
‘Right again.’ Steven wandered through the water, which crept above his bare knees to dampen his rolled-up leggings. ‘Ah, crap. Now I have to dry these again.’
‘You’ll never get the wrinkles out,’ Garec teased.
‘Wait,’ Kellin interrupted, ‘don’t change the subject again! How did he get back here, without a portal and without a body?’
Steven hunched noticeably, as if the wind was blowing cold in his face. ‘He could have used anyone to make the trip back here, Kellin. And as for how he returned, I’m worried that he might have killed a friend of mine, a woman whose daughter I-’
‘He didn’t.’ Gilmour cut him off. ‘Nerak returned here because I opened the way for him.’
‘How?’ Brand was cooking venison steaks on a flat rock beside the campfire. ‘How did you manage it without a portal?’
‘I made a mistake.’ Gilmour glanced towards his pack and the collection of Lessek’s spells wrapped inside. ‘I opened a book I had no business reading. It let Nerak pinpoint my location and make the journey home; I’m sure of it. Hannah’s mother probably never encountered him at all.’
‘Let’s hope,’ Steven said.
‘But didn’t you kill him, Steven?’ Kellin asked. ‘I saw you pick up that girl and throw her inside that boulder. She vanished; didn’t she? Is she… or he… dead now?’
‘It wasn’t exactly into the boulder, Kellin,’ Steven explained. ‘It was through a rip, an opening that you weren’t able to see. I threw her… him, if you prefer… inside, and he doesn’t have the power to get back out.’
‘So Nerak is dead,’ Kellin said.
‘Essentially.’ Steven sighted along his finger between a clump of trees and the tip of his grandfather’s nose.
‘Then why are we still here? We’ve been riding these past few days as if someone is chasing us. Mark’s gone; we didn’t even look for him, and we’ve been hurrying through the forest trying to find this cliff, hill, stone t
able, whatever it is, and I don’t understand why.’ Kellin avoided looking at Brand. She was a Resistance fighter; she’d fought Prince Malagon’s soldiers and shown her allegiance. Hearing her voice rising as she pleaded for understanding was embarrassing; she cleared her throat nosily to cover her anxiety.
Steven’s smile faded. ‘We’re still here, Kellin, because we were guilty of exactly the same offence that allowed me to dispose of Nerak for ever. We focused on the wrong thing; we believed something that wasn’t true, just like Nerak.’
The others, including Gilmour, were listening intently. The battle in the glen had been four days ago, and no one had yet endeavoured to explain what had happened, or why.
‘What did you- What did we have wrong?’ Kellin asked.
‘Nerak believed he was powerful, much more powerful than he turned out to be. He actually used a spell to convince himself that he was the greatest Larion sorcerer that Eldarn had ever known. He removed the part of himself that understood who he really was, almost physically tore it out of his mind, and he hid that knowledge in a friend’s walking stick, an old length of whittled hickory, that I found – that found me – on the other side of these mountains. The evil that Nerak released from the Fold took him, and it believed what it found inside Nerak’s head, because it didn’t have any reason not to. What Nerak believed about himself was the truth to him, as real to him as – as this river is to us.’
‘So he lied to this evil creature?’
‘It was the evil’s mistake to take Nerak’s beliefs as truth.’
‘Where is our mistake then?’ Kellin hadn’t yet made any connection.
‘We did the same thing Nerak did,’ Steven said. ‘We focused on the wrong things.’ He looked over at Gilmour. ‘We spent two Twinmoons worrying about Nerak, when Nerak wasn’t the one threatening Eldarn. We should have been worrying about the evil that had possessed him – it had possessed Prince Marek and the Whitward family all those Twinmoons ago. When I cast Nerak into the Fold, I permitted that evil to break its connection with a tired Larion Senator and to establish a link with-’ He paused.
‘With Mark Jenkins,’ Kellin whispered.
‘We focused on the wrong things,’ Steven muttered. ‘We believed Nerak was at the root of Eldarn’s peril. We forgot that in all the time Nerak worked at Sandcliff Palace, researching, learning, teaching, Eldarn was never at risk. It wasn’t until the evil slipped free from the spell table that Eldarn’s future was put in jeopardy.’
‘Then how can you just-?’
‘Just what, Kellin?’ Steven wheeled on her, sending concentric ripples out across the smooth surface of the water. ‘How can I eat, sleep, make jokes with you and Garec, stand here like a goddamned fool looking for an ancient relic we aren’t even certain will work even if we manage to get it out of the water? How can I do all those things?’
Kellin wanted to back down, to apologise, but the soldier in her took over. Now she did look over at Brand briefly, before saying, ‘Yes, Steven. How can you do all those things when the real root of your problems, Eldarn’s problems, is wandering around back there in the body of your roommate?’
Steven hesitated; Kellin hoped it was because some part of the foreign sorcerer was impressed with how she had stood her ground.
Finally, he said, ‘We hurried up here, because Mark is coming, probably with whatever forces he is able to organise at Wellham Ridge. That may not be too many, and I’m sure Gilmour and I can take care of them, but I would rather not engage them at all, because I don’t want to risk losing the spell table – which might just save us -and I don’t want to risk a confrontation with Mark, because I might inadvertently kill him.’
‘Mark’s dead,’ Kellin said, ‘isn’t he?’
Steven shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘When Nerak took possession of people, both here and in my world, he killed them. He forcibly entered their bodies, took their minds, memories, thoughts and knowledge, and then allowed them to die. He did it to Gabriel O’Reilly; he did it to Myrna Kessler, and he did it to countless others. But when the evil that took Nerak came to Eldarn, it kept him alive. Granted, it abandoned his body, because moving about as a spirit let him take others, hundreds of others, that night and over the Twinmoons, but they worked as a team. Nerak was alive all that time.’
‘How do you know that?’ Gilmour wanted to believe there was still hope for Mark, but he too was sceptical.
‘Because he was there in the glen,’ Steven said. ‘He wasn’t propped up by anything; there was no evil puppet master pulling his strings. That was Nerak. Bellan was dead and long gone. Hell, we might have battled her sorry soul right there amongst those bone-collectors, but Nerak was alive and well when I tossed him into Neverland.’
‘So Mark is alive.’ Garec started up the shoreline. A steely grey day was reluctantly giving way to darkness.
‘I’d bet on it,’ Steven said. ‘That night at Sandcliff, the evil force that consumed Nerak had just burst free from the spell table. It took Nerak and learned that it had hit the jackpot. Ka-blam! First shot, and it wins big: Eldarn’s greatest magical mind. But what of all the others, all the Larion Senators living and working in the palace? Why not join with Nerak and grab a few others, fifty, two hundred, who cares?’ Gilmour was looking sick, so Steven backed off somewhat. ‘The being, the essence of things evil, whatever it is that took Mark didn’t have anyone else to take. We’re all still here, still alive. There were just a few farms between Meyers’ Vale and Wellham Ridge. Does he need a plough-hand? No. He needs Mark. Mark knows us; he knows me. He knows our plans; he knows where we’ve been and where we hope to go, Gita, Capehill, the lot. Granted, the creature can get all that and still kill him, but I’m betting he’s alive.’
‘And what better prize, if Mark truly is Eldarn’s king, Rona’s heir?’ Garec said. ‘First, evil takes Nerak and discovers the greatest sorcerer in the five lands. Then it takes Mark and discovers a long-lost monarch.’
‘Two for two,’ Steven said.
‘But is Mark truly Rona’s heir?’ Brand asked.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Garec said. ‘Mark believes it. It’s truth inside his head.’
‘Will evil make that mistake twice?’
‘Probably not,’ Steven shrugged, ‘but Mark is still a trophy catch. He knows everything about us.’
‘Rutting whores. I hadn’t thought of that.’ Brand stood, ignoring his steaks.
‘And you won’t fight him?’ Kellin pressed.
‘Not yet, no,’ Steven said, ‘not until I have a better idea how to separate him from the evil holding him captive.’
‘He’s taken Lessek’s key too,’ Garec reminded them.
‘True,’ Steven said, ‘but as long as we have the spell table, the key won’t do him any good.’
‘Why don’t we blast it to fish bait with one of your spells?’ Garec asked.
Steven cocked an eyebrow at Gilmour. ‘What do you say? We certainly don’t need it.’
Gilmour sat on his haunches beside the fire, carved a strip from one of the steaks and said, ‘That one’ll have to be mine, Brand. Sorry, I couldn’t wait. He finished his mouthful and added, ‘Actually, we may still need the table.’
‘Why?’ Garec said. ‘We needed it to fight Nerak. He’s dead or gone or something.’
‘We believed we needed it to battle Nerak, but we also needed it to seal the Fold.’ He popped another strip of meat into his mouth. ‘Rutting hot, Brand, hot!’ He fanned his mouth, then added, ‘Unless Steven thinks he can close the Fold without the Larion magic, of course.’
Kellin said, ‘Can you do that?’
Steven shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
Garec changed the subject. ‘It’s snowing up there.’ He pointed towards the Blackstone peaks in the distance. ‘We may get hit before morning; we should think about finding some decent shelter and gathering a more significant stack of firewood.’
‘I’ll get on it,
’ Kellin said, glad to have something to do. Before leaving she asked, ‘Steven, isn’t that water cold?’
He chuckled. ‘I suppose it is, but I’m warming it up a bit. It’s a little experiment I wanted to try before diving in tomorrow morning.’
‘Warming it up?’
‘It’s not much, just the water right here.’
‘Isn’t it moving?’
‘That’s the tricky part,’ Steven said. ‘At least it’s not moving too quickly; I wouldn’t want to try this in a stretch of rapids.’
Gilmour smiled like a proud parent. He said, ‘You’re sure this is the place?’
Steven nodded, ‘Yup. Old Grandpop’s nose was straight across from that clump of trees over there. I remember them because they were all aflame when we came through last time.’
‘On fire?’ Brand asked.
‘Red,’ Steven said, ‘they’re maples. They stood out like a bloody sore against all that green.’
‘Very well, then,’ Gilmour said. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll go in.’
A northerly breeze brushed the evergreen forest with a flurry of snow. A break in the cloud cover allowed the occasional beam of pale moonlight to reach Meyers’ Vale; with a storm blowing off the mountains, even that little light would soon vanish. Eldarn’s twin moons looked distant, almost insignificant. Though their light was faint tonight, it brightened the riverbank just enough for Steven to watch clouds of snow whirling their way north towards Wellham Ridge. Behind him, the others slept, chatted softly or stared into the fire.
The darkness beneath the trees lining the riverbank was depthless. Steven was glad they were in camp this evening; he would not have enjoyed travelling through the woods along the river. The tree trunks were cloned columns marked with the blackened vestiges of autumn sap, and the branches started high enough for him to wander about beneath the overhead confusion of prickly boughs. Something was there, lurking behind the willowy clouds of swirling snow, under the evergreen canopy.