The Larion Senators e-3

by Rob Scott

  He went on, ‘What I meant was why – if you and Kantu were the only real threats to him and his work – why didn’t Nerak arrange for your death and then take over the Senate at his leisure?’

  Gilmour drew a breath as if to respond, then he paused and, as if thinking to himself, said, ‘Honestly? I don’t know. But your question has some merit; why wouldn’t he have tried to kill me? I was his equal; he couldn’t do anything radical, new, dangerous or different without consulting me. Perhaps he did try. I don’t know.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Steven said. All right. How’s that?’

  Gilmour tested the leg. ‘Much better, thanks.’

  ‘Don’t mention it, just leave your insurance card with my receptionist on your way out, and don’t take more than one lollipop.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Gilmour stretched, and started across the mud.

  Steven brushed as much of the filth from his clothes as he could and joined him. After a few paces in shared silence, he asked, ‘So where is Lessek now?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Is that why we only get to see him in dreams and memories?’

  ‘And on Seer’s Peak,’ Gilmour added.

  ‘How’d he die?’

  Again Gilmour paused. ‘I don’t know. It’s my understanding that in the earliest Twinmoons of the Larion Senate, there were not as many regulations and policies governing the transport of foreign objects and substances back and forth through the far portals.’

  ‘Ah, drug-runners, even way back then. The Coast Guard must have had a hell of a time tracking them down.’

  ‘Not drugs so much as trinkets, innovations, a few get-rich schemes.’

  ‘What’s that have to do with Lessek?’

  ‘Well, this is all legend, mind you, but we have been led to believe that a Senator, perhaps Lessek himself, came back through the portal with something deadly.’

  Steven slowed, his boots sinking to the heels in silt. ‘What was it? A weapon? Poison? Explosives?’

  ‘A virus.’

  ‘No shit,’ Steven frowned. ‘An unfamiliar viral infection with nothing in your immune system to battle it, I bet you lost thousands.’

  ‘And Lessek was killed.’

  ‘He died in disgrace? After all that he did for Eldarn?’ He looked at Gilmour, who shrugged. ‘But since then history has recalled his greatness and elevated him back to an appropriate position in Eldarni memory?’

  ‘It has,’ Gilmour agreed, ‘but what good is that to Lessek now?’

  ‘Just press down on it, rutting whores!’ Kellin said. ‘I’ll stitch it up, but we have to stop the bleeding.’

  ‘It’s not stopping, Kellin.’ Garec tried not to sound nervous. With his chin pressed against his chest and both hands pushing down on a broad flap of scalp that had been peeled back over part of his skull, it was difficult to do. ‘It’s been bleeding like this since I landed here.’

  ‘Just keep pressure on it; I need a moment to get some clean thread. If we use dirty thread, it’ll get infected, and we’ll just have to rip it out and start again.’

  ‘Fine, that’s fine with me.’ He took a deep breath. He could feel the blood running over his head, behind his ears, down the back of his neck, along his cheeks and even across his forehead into his eyes, and he could smell it too. ‘Demonshit, Kellin, just stitch it up with anything you’ve got. We’ll let it clot and then do it with clean thread tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ll be all right.’

  ‘I’m going to bleed to death!’

  ‘You’ll be all right.’ Her hands shook as she rifled through her pack. Her horse was dead, his head crushed against a tree on the riverbank, but her saddlebags and pack were still lashed to the corpse. Her ribs flared with pain and one collarbone throbbed as she searched for a clean needle and a length of sturdy thread, preferably a piece that hadn’t been stained brown with filthy river water so she could stitch up Garec’s scalp – it’s going to be a lot of stitches, great rutting Pragans! – and then see to her own injuries. From the way one arm was dangling numb and useless at her side, she feared she had broken her collarbone. As soon as her adrenalin waned it would start hurting; she knew that much. And the pain in her ribs could only mean that she had cracked at least one, if not more.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ she called and hustled back. ‘Now, I need you to let go for a moment. I’ve got to lift it up and make sure everything is cleaned out of there. If there’s any dirt left, it’ll get infected and you’ll be dead before we can get you to a healer. Do you understand?’

  Garec whimpered a little. Now he was frightened.

  Kellin took both Garec’s hands in her own, squeezed them tightly and guided them gently into his lap. ‘It’ll just take a moment, then we’ll get to stitching it up.’

  ‘Grand,’ Garec said. ‘It’s just that… it’s just a lot of blood, Kellin.’

  ‘It’s not that much,’ she lied; he looked as though someone had emptied a bucket of blood over his head, and the wound was still bleeding. She took a calming breath and wiped his forehead with the cleanest cloth she’d been able to find. ‘I don’t want you to worry; you’ll be in one piece again in no time.’

  A hoarse cough followed by a prolonged wet wheeze reached them from somewhere in the underbrush. The sound was unmistakable: a death rattle.

  ‘What was that?’ Kellin asked.

  ‘I’m guessing that was my horse,’ Garec said sadly. ‘She took a branch in the chest; I guess it went into her lungs. It was just a matter of time.’

  ‘Great grettan shit,’ Kellin muttered.

  ‘No matter,’ Garec said, his voice wavering. ‘If I pass out – I’m about to; I can feel it coming – I want you to bind my head, tie it up tight, then go find a horse. With all this devastation, there’ll be plenty of them running about – I’d think a lot of the farms around here will have been destroyed, buildings damaged, topsoil stripped… find a horse, Kellin, and get us to Orindale. Are you hurt?’

  ‘Shut it, Garec,’ she ordered. ‘I know what I’m doing, but I need you to shut yourself up right quick; I’m trying to work.’

  ‘Find a horse, Kellin,’ Garec’s voice was weaker now, a whisper. ‘Bring my bow and quivers and Steven’s silver…’ His head slumped forward; his hands slipped from his lap into the mud.

  Kellin was horribly nervous, working alone and against time. She tried to relax and focus on her work, muttering to herself, ‘There’s no need to rush, no need to hurry. He’s fine; he’s sleeping, that’s all. It’s better this way, he won’t be complaining and squirming around. Just clean the wound and sew it up. You have to find a horse and then clean water, but first things first – how does it go? Well begun and… some rutting thing.’ She peeled back Garec’s scalp to expose the layer of bloody muscle beneath.

  The bleeding was astonishing, even for a head wound, but when she’d finished cleaning it, she couldn’t find see any evidence that the skull had been cracked. She’d never seen anything like this before, and had nothing with which to compare it. Were any major blood vessels severed? Were there any there? Yes, at least one, across the top of the head – but would the bleeding be even worse if an important vein or artery had been cut? Would it close up on its own, or should she try to cauterise it somehow, maybe in some sort of makeshift branding ceremony? But she didn’t even know where it was, never mind how to cauterise it. She supposed she could heat up an iron and singe the spots that were bleeding the worst, but she had no dry tinder, nothing to burn and no iron to hand for the task.

  She sighed. ‘Forget it,’ she told herself, ‘just stitch him up and run like mad for Orindale. Keep him full of water and, hopefully, he’ll sleep the whole way.’

  She rinsed the wound several times with the cleanest water she had been able to find, then, trying to keep the flap of skin in place by leaning on it with her numb arm, she stitched the wound closed as quickly and carefully as she could. Garec twitched and groaned each time she pushed the needle through his flesh, but she closed her ears t
o his cries and concentrated on making her stitches as small and neat as possible, thanking the gods of the Northern Forest it was the other arm that was damaged.

  Several stitches along, Kellin realised that she was closing the half-moon tear crookedly. ‘Mother of a whore-!’ she growled, and thought about pulling out of the thread and beginning again. Garec moved restlessly. ‘No, toss it all,’ she decided, ‘I’ll just squish a bit of it up there in a small wrinkle. He’ll never notice.’ And pulling a tiny pinch of skin into a small fold, she aligned the rest of the injury perfectly and finished the job with deft alacrity, despite shaking hands.

  A quarter-aven later, Kellin had managed to get Garec to drink nearly half a water-skin. It wasn’t the cleanest of water, and she was pretty sure he’d suffer for it later, but right now it was more important to get as much water into Garec’s body as possible. She prayed to the gods of the Northern Forest that she wasn’t killing him – dehydration and disease had accounted for more casualties than any war ever could.

  Garec half-awakened, enough to repeat his orders to find a horse and get them both to Orindale.

  Kellin promised she would, but they needed rest first. She wrapped him in their cloaks, though they were still soaking wet, and tried to drag him up the bank, but it was no use; her ribs and collarbone protested too much. The pain was overwhelming, and Kellin fell in the muck, weeping quietly, shivering and wishing that Steven and Gilmour would find them somehow. As wary as she had been of the two sorcerers and their fantastic abilities, she longed for one of Steven’s campfires right now.

  But they were alone and injured. They’d have to do this themselves. ‘We’re farmers,’ she rehearsed, ‘farmers from outside the city. We were hurt badly when the wave came through. Can you help us, please?’

  She found a spare tunic in her pack and with her good hand clumsily tied a loop in the end of each sleeve. She pulled the sleeves around herself from behind, then tucked a short stick through the loops and twisted it, tighter and tighter, until she cried out, screaming from the pain in her shoulder.

  ‘We’re farmers!’ she shouted, cranking the stick another half turn and pulling the tunic splint close around her injured arm and ribs. ‘We’re farmers from outside the city. We were hurt when the wave came through, hurt badly. Can you help us, please?’ She tucked one end of the stick into her leggings. Her shoulder was immobile and her ribs braced; it wasn’t perfect, but it would do for now.

  Kellin rested her forehead in the mud. The cold felt good on her face. ‘Just a moment’s rest,’ she said. ‘I need a moment; then I’ll find a horse. I promise.’

  It was nearly dark when she woke; at least an aven had passed. Shivering and confused, she sat up with a start. Garec was sleeping, but he looked as if he had been cast deep beneath the shadow of death. She wondered if he had already started the lonely journey to the Northern Forest.

  In between the mud and dried blood Garec’s skin was pasty-white. He was shivering as well, and an inhuman humming sound came from the back of his throat: death’s drone. Kellin shook him, slapped him hard, then shouted his name, trying to call him back from the forest path.

  Garec murmured, opened his eyes briefly and then slumped back into unconsciousness. He wouldn’t live through the aven, not like this, wet and unsheltered.

  ‘I’ve got to make a fire,’ Kellin said out loud. ‘I need flint and tinder, and something dry.’ She looked around. Everything was wet. ‘North, away from the river, it’ll be dry there.’ She ground her teeth together until her jaw hurt. ‘Stay awake, you bastard,’ she murmured as she staggered into the brush. ‘Stay awake. Make a fire.’

  Garec had a flint in his pack. She had heard his horse – I hope it was his horse – die in the bushes off to her left. If she could get the flint, and find some dry wood outside the waves’ wreckage area, she might be able to light a small fire and warm herself for a few stolen moments, and then she’d come back for Garec. ‘But he’ll have to wake up,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll have to help me; I’ll never be able to drag him that far. But first things first…’

  She found the horse, and Garec had been right: it had a splintered branch protruding from its chest. The flint was in the saddlebag, but it was another twenty-five paces before Kellin reached a dry area of the forest. If she was glad for anything, Kellin thought, it was that the flood had thrown them north. They hadn’t been inside that roiling nightmare very long; had it cast them south, or carried them further east, they would both be dead already.

  Igniting the fire took longer than she had planned, but she finally captured a small spark in the handful of dry tinder she had scraped together, then generously heaped winter brush on the determined little flame. ‘Who cares?’ she said, ‘I’d be happy to have the whole rutting forest on fire. You need to find us, Steven? Well, that’ll be easy; just look for the big orange glow in the sky.’ Kellin laughed for the first time all day, then winced. ‘All right, no laughing,’ she told herself firmly, a smile still on her face.

  With a hearty blaze crackling, Kellin added several logs. She knew it would take time to drag Garec – if he’s still alive – through the forest, so she was trying to ensure there’d be at least some smouldering coals when she returned. She stood close to the flames, feeling the heat on her face and watching tendrils of steam rise from her clothing. She captured the feeling and secured it inside her mind: a warm place, a summer place, where no one ever found themselves washed two hundred paces through the woods by a rogue wave as big as a small mountain. Then she went back for Garec.

  She was feeling better for a bit of heat and moved faster, determined to find reserves of strength to heave the Ronan bowman back to the campfire, but once outside its peripheral glow, she felt the chill creep back into her bones. Her clothes were still wet and her skin rose in dimpled gooseflesh. She started shivering, great quaking spasms. She couldn’t do this…

  When the mule brayed, Kellin pissed her leggings. She couldn’t see anything, and hadn’t heard it moving through the brush. She thanked the gods that the animal was not a squad of armed Malakasians; they would have had her gutted, sewn up and gutted again before she’d even realised they were there. If she hadn’t been so cold and in so much pain, it would have been hideously embarrassing – but there was no one to witness her discomposure, so she tried to recover herself and hurried to find the animal, lost but otherwise healthy, munching bits of brown vegetation poking through the patches of snow as it wandered in the general direction of home.

  ‘Well, aren’t you a surprise?’ Kellin said, hoping to sweet-talk the mule into carrying her and Garec to the nearest healer’s doorstep. ‘Would you like an apple?’ The mule didn’t answer; it didn’t appear to care one whit that Kellin was there at all. ‘No? How about a crate of apples?’ she said softly, approaching the animal. ‘Come on, we have a little job tonight, and then Kellin will get you all the dry grass and thistles you can eat, agreed?’

  The mule was wearing a rope bridle and had the remains of a pink ribbon tied into its mane: it was obviously a child’s pet.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked as she took hold of the bridle; the mule didn’t care, and when she tugged, surprisingly, the mule complied without complaint, plodding happily alongside her until they found Garec, looking worse, barely breathing, still wrapped in the damp cloaks.

  ‘Mule,’ Kellin said, patting the animal gently, ‘I need you to wait right here while I help Garec up. Will you do that?’

  Again, nothing.

  ‘Fine, I didn’t expect you to answer,’ she told it. ‘You’re not much of a conversationalist; I can respect that in a beast of burden, but I need you to understand that if you run off, I’m going to find you, kill you, eat you and then make a nice pair of winter pants out of your miserable hide. Understand?’

  The mule twitched an ear. Kellin knelt in the mud and pressed her cheek against Garec’s forehead. Panic struck hard: he was too cold.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no, please no,’ she cried, shakin
g again. She moved her hands back and forth between Garec’s hands, cold and stiff in his lap, and his ivory face, marked with a roadmap of dried blood. She put her cheek near his mouth, felt nothing and moved closer, pressed her skin against his lips, blue-black in the moonlight. Still nothing.

  Kellin blamed the cold: she was too cold to feel his breath. He was breathing; of course he was. She was simply too cold to feel it. She rocked back on her haunches, hoping something would come to her. She was too cold, too tired and too injured to lift him herself; as determined as she wanted to be, Garec was too heavy, a deadweight. ‘Think, think, think of something. Think,’ she chanted, rocking back and forth, ‘it’s too cold. I can’t believe it’s come to this…’

  The rope bridle.

  Kellin slashed through one end of the mule’s reins and hastily tugged the free end across Garec’s chest and beneath his armpits. He didn’t stir at all; there was no sign that he was still alive. Now Kellin longed to see a bit of blood seep from the wound on his head, just a few drops, that was all, just to confirm that his heart was still beating.

  With the rope knotted as tightly as she could with one functional hand, Kellin took hold of the bridle and tugged the mule towards the fire. After a moment, the animal followed docilely, dragging Garec through the hardening mud.

  At the campfire, Kellin threw her arms around the mule’s neck and buried her face in its musty fur. The beast nuzzled the crook of her arm and offered a derisive snort that said, ‘Touching, but how about my apples?’ She managed a faint grin and set about untying Garec, making sure to link the rope around a tree when she was done.

  She managed to untangle their wet cloaks and spread them over low-hanging branches, as near to the fire as she could get them without setting them alight. They started steaming almost immediately as she pushed Garec close to the fire.

  She spent a few moments gathering a big pile of logs, then returned and sat herself, cradling Garec’s head in her lap, willing the heat to restore him to her, whole and unharmed, save for the crooked needlework ringing his scalp.