The Larion Senators

by Rob Scott; Jay Gordon

  They’d been three or four drinks into the evening and Mark had wanted to believe that the magician had gone insane, lost his mind right then and there. ‘What could be more real?’ he’d said as they made their way back to the beer tent. ‘What could be more real than actually cutting it off?’

  ‘Not cutting it off,’ Steven had answered. ‘Who in the audience knows what it’s like to actually lose a hand? Probably no one, right?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if no one knows, then chopping off his hand can look, sound, smell and feel like whatever this guy wants it to. Who are we to argue?’

  Mark hadn’t been convinced. ‘If you’re right, then the beer guys ought to be cutting him in at the end of the night, because half the audience is lining up for a stabilising drink right now.’

  What does it mean to chop off a hand? Does anyone know? Did Nerak know? He looked down through the darkness. He felt for the hand he could see with his mind; he imagined it had been lost in a childhood accident, a car wreck, a disease, maybe a shark attack. He imagined getting dressed, shaving, brushing his teeth, reading a newspaper, typing at the computer, all with one hand. He tied his shoes, phoned his sister, ate a lobster, folded his Visa bill…

  When the riverbed released him, Steven kicked wildly against the walls of the cave and clawed his way back into the light. He broke free with a cry and swam a good distance away before realising that he was alone; Gilmour was still trapped inside.

  Shit! Oh shit! He turned in a turbid cloud of silt and swam back as fast as he could—

  The explosions knocked him backwards and he covered his ears as he tumbled downriver. These were different, no flash of a white-hot fireball but more traditional explosions, like the bombs that had levelled Dresden or blew up the bridge on the River Kwai. Steven felt like his head had caved in; he was sure his sinuses had filled with blood, which might even be spilling from his ears.

  Finally he was able to grab a submerged tree trunk to stop his downstream fall and, pulling and kicking as hard as he could, he started back against the current, watching for any sign of the old man, blood, torn cloth, or even body parts, through the almost impenetrable cloud of mud stirred up by Gilmour’s attempts to free himself.

  By the time he reached the moraine, the water had cleared again to its crystalline clarity. And Steven’s worst fears were realised: the cave at the base of the rock formation had collapsed.

  The storm blew in diagonally through the forests of southern Falkan, a howling, ceaseless roar that rolled and bounced off the slopes of the Blackstone Mountains. Lieutenant Blackford did a quick mental calculation and shook his head. It’s not enough. He entered the barracks and made for Captain Hershaw, who was sitting behind Lieutenant Kranst’s old desk, worrying over a goblet of tecan.

  ‘Six days?’ Hershaw asked.

  Blackford nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Could we be invaded from the south?’

  ‘Over the Blackstones, in the dead of winter? Sure, Lieutenant, that happens here all the time.’ Captain Hershaw frowned. ‘She’s lost her mind.’

  ‘I’ve got to go and tell her we won’t be ready.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Hershaw stood, looking alarmed. ‘She’ll kill you too.’

  ‘I have to,’ the lieutenant said. ‘We’ll lose men, unnecessarily, if we attempt this before spring.’

  Hershaw said, ‘Good luck, then.’

  ‘You want to come with me?’

  ‘Rutters, no!’ He grimaced. ‘I don’t think you should go anywhere near her, either. Wait for Pace; he’ll clear this up.’

  Lieutenant Blackford folded a sheaf of parchment under his arm and started up the stairs to Major Tavon’s private office. ‘Major?’ he called, approaching from the outer hall.

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant?’ Tavon smiled, but it was a glassy, distant look, devoid of any real emotion. Something about her had gone tragically awry in the past three days, and Blackford hoped her illness – that’s what it had to be, some kind of crippling mental illness – had not done any irretrievable damage; maybe an Orindale healer might be able to cure their battalion commander. He and Captain Hershaw had already dispatched a rider to the capital to bring Colonel Pace and a team of healers as quickly as possible. Three officers and two soldiers were already dead, their bodies reduced to ash, and Blackford trembled every time he was forced to enter this room – but he was the only one man enough to actually do it. Everyone else, including Hershaw and Denne, who ought to be reporting to her, were unwilling even to come up the stairs.

  ‘We don’t have enough supplies – horses, food, blankets or wagons – to make a six-day forced march.’ He froze, waiting for the major’s wrath to explode. Sweat trickled under his collar.

  ‘Get more.’ Tavon perused a map she had spread across her desk.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Blackford turned to leave, then said, ‘Uh, Major?’

  Tavon looked up. ‘What is it, Lieutenant?’

  ‘I’m not certain where we’ll find supplies enough for the entire battalion for that length of time.’

  ‘Then we will make the journey in fewer days. We’ll run the men day and night.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, but—’

  ‘Lieutenant,’ Tavon cut him off. ‘I am not stupid.’

  ‘No, ma’am. Of course not, ma’am.’ Blackford kept his eyes on his boots.

  ‘I know that you have been keeping this battalion running smoothly and well-supplied for the past thirty-five Twinmoons.’

  Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.’ His hands shook, and he clasped them together behind his back.

  ‘So I am not going to kill you, Lieutenant,’ Major Tavon clarified, as if it had been obvious all along. ‘Naked and drunk you’re still worth more to me than any dozen of these rutters.’

  Lieutenant Blackford had no idea what a dozen might be; he promised himself he would ask Hershaw when he escaped the office. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he muttered. He could think of nothing else to say.

  ‘So I want you to figure this out, Lieutenant. You have until the dinner aven tonight. We’ll march south after everyone has eaten.’ Tavon returned to her map.

  ‘That’s just it, ma’am,’ Blackford said. ‘There isn’t enough food. We have daily shipments from Orindale, but we have never had the entire battalion stationed in Wellham Ridge at the same time, so we haven’t ever stockpiled that much food, that many blankets, tent shelters, boots, uniforms, any of it.’

  Major Tavon glared at him. ‘Mark me, Lieutenant Blackford. I don’t give a pinch of pigeon shit if half the men expire from hunger, cold or even herpes between here and Meyers’ Vale. It is your job to locate supplies and resources for this battalion. You have done an admirable job of it in the past, and that is why you are still standing here breathing. Take what you require from Wellham Ridge itself. Break into civilian homes, requisition their blankets, food, carts, horses, even trainers, if that’s what you need, but have this battalion ready to move by the dinner aven!’

  Blackford trembled as he saluted and agreed, ‘Yes, ma’am. We’ll be ready.’ He backed towards the door, then turned smartly on his heel and hurried out. On the landing, he paused to look out the window. The storm was gaining strength.

  THE MORAINE

  The magic hadn’t left him; it was there waiting for him when Steven called it back to his fingertips. He stood on the riverbed, ignoring the possibility that he might once again become ensnared by the subterranean spell; somehow he knew that it wouldn’t reach out for him now; the moraine had caved in on itself and so there was no need for the web to gather up passers-by. The spell table and Gilmour were all but lost.

  Steven was warm and he was still breathing, despite having been submerged for over half an hour. Get the spells going and they will go on for ever, like the Twinmoons, or the fountains at Sandcliff. Nerak had certainly put these spells in motion, and they had gone on for Twinmoons – but he and Gilmour had beaten one of them. He didn’t know if the
y had succeeded in unravelling the magic, but nothing was reaching out to drag him into the moraine, so he was content to believe that it could be done: the magic could be turned, diverted like a stream, or even dismantled.

  He was seething now, but he waited just long enough for his anger to take a more definite shape. Once he could envisage his rage focused to a point, he ascended the mound of rocks, boulders and fallen trees. With the magic rumbling beneath his skin, he began to dig.

  It might have taken nature a hundred thousand Twinmoons to gather such a heap, or maybe Nerak piled them there over the course of a few days, but Steven needed only a minute or two to cast half of them across the riverbed, finding unexpected reserves of energy and strength. As angry as he was at Nerak – and the riverbed – he hardly noticed that he was chucking eight- and nine-hundred-pound boulders downstream as easily as pebbles. Those too heavy to move, rocks as large as a car, he shattered into manageable sections. He dug, pulled, heaved, tossed and dragged the moraine into pieces until the once-majestic, beautifully flawed piece of sculpture had all but vanished.

  When the silty bed beneath the moraine came into view, Steven paused long enough to locate the stone that had fallen over the swirling membranous spell. Gilmour would be down there, beneath that rock, if not already inside the putrid gullet. He shifted the stone, then hesitated as a pang of doubt hit him. It was the same fear that had trapped him on his porch as he sat all night long trying to summon the courage to follow Mark into Eldarn. Reaching into the mud now might mean losing his arm, losing his mind, maybe – who knew what lurked beneath?

  The river snare, Nerak’s watchdog, was enormously powerful. Anyone bold and confident enough to breach the moraine’s defences would most likely have the magical power to retrieve the spell table, so Nerak struck at the one common denominator all future sorcerers would share: they would all – including Steven Taylor – be susceptible to losing confidence.

  Steven knelt as close to the spell’s centre as he dared and cast his thoughts down inside that cauldron of hopelessness and death to search for Gilmour. Do it! he told himself. You’ll never save him just kneeling here – dive in! He looked around the riverbed, hoping some alternative might present itself, and finally, when nothing did, he channelled the magic into his fingers and hands and dived headfirst into the centre of the swirling spell.

  His fingertips entered the mud first, piercing the grim membrane and sending an icy shock through his body, a feeling of abject despair, suffering, ultimate loss. Now elbow-deep, Steven felt himself gripped by a paralysis that left his spine frozen and his legs twitching helplessly with involuntary spasms. Unable to pull back, he felt hope draining through his fingers, pooling beneath him and washing away in the current. This is it, he thought. We underestimated him …

  When his hands hit bedrock, Steven felt the bones in two fingers snap and his left ring finger folded in against his palm in a grave dislocation. The pain was astonishing, but his efforts to withdraw his arms from the riverbed were futile. He was trapped up to his elbows, and he could get no sense of what had happened to Gilmour, or how he might extricate the spell table from its prison. Fighting to mute the waves of panic washing over him, Steven closed his eyes. He forced himself to ignore the pain in his hands, to forget everything except bringing back that mystical energy to save his life.

  It was several seconds before Steven wondered how Gilmour could have disappeared inside the malevolent circle while he was trapped outside. Somewhere in some momentarily out-of-reach place in his mind, Steven knew there was no bedrock eight inches beneath the mud, yet cogent thought eluded him as his will weakened. He scratched with an intact fingertip at the granite floor. It’s rock, he thought. How in hell did Gilmour disappear into rock?

  As his vision faded, he wondered vaguely if the spells keeping him alive beneath the water would continue after he passed out.

  That’s when the bedrock pushed back.

  The upwards movement, gentle at first, pressed on Steven’s shattered finger and a bolt of pain brought him enough to his senses that he was able to shake his head to clear his vision. He pressed his hands flat against the shifting granite floor and mud slipped away from his forearms, tumbling in tiny avalanches that caught the current and spiralled away towards Orindale.

  Something was pushing him free.

  A faint wellspring of hope arose and Steven’s own magic responded, slithering back into his hands, healing his bones and searching for some means of escape. Something familiar brushed his fingertips and disappeared. Steven remembered a game he played as a kid: you reached inside a bag and used touch to identify various objects. Bring it back, he thought, I was good at that game – I always figured out the balled-up masking tape, the peeled grape …

  He was wrist-deep now, almost free. He cast tendrils of power into the riverbed, past the weakening membrane and into the bedrock beneath his hands. There it is, he thought. But the sensation was gone again … What is this? His right hand came free, then his left, and he pushed himself up and away from the river bottom, watching as the mud began to shift.

  Frustrated at being beaten by the riverbed a second time, Steven moved a little closer to the surface and watched, uncertain what to do next, as he saw what had been the genesis of Nerak’s spell break through the silt. It looked like a puddle of heavy oil spilled on the riverbed. It pulsed, shifting its shape slightly as it was forced upwards into the water, flapping like a fish tossed onto dry ground. Christ, what is that thing? he wondered. Having failed to free himself, Steven dared not venture any closer to the sentient-seeming membrane, now apparently struggling for its life. Instead, he waited, and saw the riverbed quaking more violently as it fought to expel something else, something bigger, in an agitated parody of birth.

  Suddenly Steven understood what had found his fingertips inside the membrane: Gilmour – it was his Larion magic that had felt familiar, a faint tickling that had held his hand for an instant while it pushed back against the oily, black gullet Nerak had left waiting as a trap so many Twinmoons before.

  Gilmour, Steven thought, where are you? Tell me what to do; I’m afraid of that thing, whatever it is. Gilmour!

  The microcosmic earthquake continued, and all the while the sifting mud and silt took on an ever more defined shape, almost crowning, like a baby’s head, as whatever it was pressed its way through the muck.

  Finally the current carried away a layer of mire from the subterranean womb and Steven dived for the bottom, careful to avoid the inky membrane.

  It was the table.

  He knelt beside it, convinced that Gilmour was somehow beneath the great stone tablet, pushing with all his Larion strength. Steven summoned his own magic, wrapped it about the table, felt it grip like a dockside loading net, and heaved. The sensation that greeted him was at once familiar and refreshing. It was Gilmour; Steven recognised his friend’s energy, the rippling waves of venerable power. Together, the two sorcerers hauled Lessek’s spell table from the mud and let it come gently to rest on the riverbed.

  Steven strained to find Gilmour through the muck and dark mud that washed away in waves as the river scoured the granite artefact clean.

  There he was, emerging from beneath the table, looking like a swamp creature from a Saturday morning movie.

  Gilmour Stow of Estrad scraped several inches of riverbed from his face, scrubbed another half pound from his hair, wiped his hand over his eyes and looked over at his young apprentice. He was beaming like a devilish child.

  Steven grinned back and gestured towards the surface.

  When Steven emerged into the wintry morning air, Gilmour was already shouting and hooting.

  ‘You pimply-faced old horsecock!’ He waved one fist at the sky, and screamed, ‘I beat you, I beat you, you bucket of rancid demonpiss! ‘

  ‘Gilmour?’ Steven was confused. ‘Beat who? Nerak? He’s not here, is he?’ Panic threatened to take him again, and Gilmour calmed down enough to assure Steven that they were alone in the river.<
br />
  ‘No, no, my boy. Of course not. Nerak is right where you left him, screaming a silent scream for ever as the Fold swallows him into nothingness.’

  ‘Then what are you talking about? Where were you? I thought for sure you were dead—’

  Gilmour patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. ‘I did, too, Steven, especially when you managed to free yourself but I was still stuck there.’

  Despite the chill, Steven felt his face flush. ‘Sorry about that; I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be. You probably saved my life.’ Gilmour grinned again. ‘Great gods of the Northern Forest, I could use a beer or six.’

  ‘I still don’t understand—’

  ‘Because you weren’t there.’ He did another little victory dance.

  ‘Under the riverbed?’ Steven was getting increasingly bemused.

  ‘At Sandcliff!’ Gilmour raised his hands in a gesture that said I’ll start over. ‘No, Steven, you weren’t at Sandcliff Palace fifteen hundred Twinmoons ago.’

  ‘That saved you?’

  ‘Sure did – and it would have saved you too. When you broke free and kicked clear of the cave, I thought I was done. I could sense that there was a nasty trap in the muck, but I didn’t know what kind of spell it was, but you were clear, so I decided to blast the grettanshit out of the place, maybe throw it off enough to break myself loose. Instead, the whole moraine caved in on me, and there was no place to go but inside.’

  ‘Inside that oily thing?’

  ‘Right. And I knew it was a vicious bastard, but I didn’t know what it would do to me, so all I could do was hope against hope that something would come to me when I got sucked inside.’