‘Thank you, Captain,’ Jacrys said. ‘I hope I haven’t frightened you, or made you feel uneasy. That wasn’t my intention.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Perhaps we can talk again later?’
‘You just get busy healing.’
‘I think I already have,’ Jacrys whispered.
WRECKAGE
Steven watched Kellin’s horse reach the riverbank. She was shivering, blue with cold, and caught in the numbing throes of a panic attack, but she sat tall in the saddle, seemingly immune. Her soaking cloak dripped river-water, leaving a trail through the patchy snow. Her wet hair was matted against her head.
Garec followed a few paces behind Kellin, still in deep water. He had slipped off the saddle and was furiously trying to regain his seat, using his reins to tug and clawed his way astride the nervous horse. He’d managed to regain the saddle, however ungainly, when the shivering duo clambered onto dry land.
Steven clung to his own reins, his knuckles white with the effort, and tried hard not to look upriver. Unimaginable devastation was coming, but watching that wall of water and debris roll down on them would only distract him from his goal: reaching the riverbank.
But the need to know was unbearable, and Steven glanced west. There it was, a roiling, tumbling mountain of water, littered with corpses, rigging, bits of boats of all sorts, and pieces of houses, farms, barns, stables, whatever it had managed to scoop up on its way across Falkan. There was a deafening roar, like a perpetual thunderclap. Steven gripped the saddle-horn – the reins were no longer up to the challenge – and regretted ever looking back.
I’ll never make it. None of us will.
He felt the magic around him, warming the water to a comfortable bathtub temperature as it had in Meyers’ Vale. He tried to project some of that energy into the swirling current around Gilmour’s horse, but he couldn’t tell if it was effective; he was too distracted by the incoming tide and the thunder. Whilst he wouldn’t die of hypothermia, Steven didn’t have much hope that his power would be able to stave off the wave.
He leaned over and urged his horse, ‘Just a couple more feet, sweetie. C’mon, you can make it; swim, girl, swim!’
When the flood finally reached him, it didn’t strike with the force he’d been expecting. It didn’t shatter his bones, or break over him like an ocean wave, like one of those waves out at that beach Mark’s always talking about, Jones Beach. Instead, Steven felt himself lifted, gently at first, and carried on a burgeoning swell. It felt strangely like a roller-coaster ascent, slow and steady to start with, then careening downhill, unchecked. First he could see the top of the riverbank, then the tops of the trees in the distance, the naked branches stark against the slate grey of winter. He was still on his horse, still facing north and still swimming along in the warm-as-a-bath current, when he saw the wave swallow Garec and Kellin and their horses, all disappearing without even a splash. The world pitched perilously as he heard Gilmour shout something, then everything was brown, turbid, cold, and tumbling wildly, both in his mind and in reality.
Steven held his breath, summoned the magic and let it burst forth, a flailing explosion of self-preservation, but he had no idea if it helped at all, because he kept rolling, lost somewhere beneath the surface.
He tried to swim, but it was pointless. The wave was carrying him at better than forty miles an hour. He felt his horse slip from between his legs and go spinning off. For a few moments he gave up and let himself be carried. The muddy water reminded him strangely of the riverscapes of his life in Colorado; it was always the same, no matter which river, no matter what time of year: light brown, almost beige near the surface, giving way to murky brown, then black in the depths, and whether he was swimming, leaping from a rope swing or tumbling from a raft in whitewater, the underside of all rivers was the same, and this one, however huge and deadly, was no different.
Then he was hit—
A log, or maybe a heavy beam struck his leg just below the knee. He was sure it was broken, a compound fracture, skin and muscles shredded, the knee hyper-extended … he screamed, but he kept tumbling east towards Wellham Ridge.
Tibia and fibula again, he thought. I can’t believe I broke those fuckers again.
His lungs burned, and he grasped his magic and filled them. Thank Christ for that spell. He wouldn’t drown, not yet, anyway. Something hit him in the small of his back, not a bone-breaker this time, but a puncture by something thin and sharp. He cried out, swallowed a mouthful of muddy water and reached back to feel for the injury, but he couldn’t find it. Instead he clamped his mouth shut, biting his tongue when something hit him in the back of his head. That was a rock. His shoulder scraped against something rough, the ground perhaps; then he was following his feet, upside down but moving fast towards the surface and the lighter-coloured water. A foot broke free of the river; he could feel it jutting into the air, as dissociated from himself as the spinning bits of flotsam and jetsam pelting him from all sides.
Steven twisted onto his stomach, lifted his head and managed a real breath, then another. He managed to avoid being crushed by a skeleton of logs still lashed together, maybe the frame for a thatched roof, ripped from the top of a Falkan farmhouse.
Then he was beneath the surface again, tumbling backwards and waiting for the impact that would knock him senseless. Part of him continued to kick and thrash, fighting a madman’s battle, while the rest of him floated, fluid and graceful, watching the devastation unfold and witnessing the carnage in its wake. He didn’t know if the magic was somehow granting him a welcome feeling of distance from the nightmarish cyclone in the centre of the wave but he did summon enough clarity to regret that he had come so close to finding Hannah, only to die at his best friend’s hand.
He stretched out, arching his back and trying to knife through the water like a human surfboard. It was surprisingly effective, and in that moment’s grace, he folded his hands over his face, covering his head while waiting for the lights to shut off.
They didn’t. The tea colour of the surface water – bright enough to give him hope that he might kick hard with his good leg and get free – began to dim. He wasn’t sinking; the surfboard strategy was keeping him afloat, but it was growing dimmer … something was coming down on him. Steven didn’t know whether it was the crest of the wave, finally breaking, or part of the sailing vessel he had seen somersaulting along the watery ridge moments before, but it was large enough to cast a shadow over everything around him. If it was the ship, he would be broken, but if it was the wave itself, he would be dragged along the riverbed and his skin peeled away in an Eldarni version of what Mark liked to call macadam rash.
Gambling that the ship might not crush him to pieces in deeper water, Steven tried to bend his body into a makeshift rudder, to catch the current and force himself towards the bottom, and perhaps to safety. It didn’t work. The current was too unpredictable for him to do anything more than ride it out. He continued to slam into branches and rocks, felt stones and dirt pelt him in a hundred places at once: his face, hands, neck and back, as he waited for five tons of Falkan schooner to come slamming down on him from above.
He rolled into a ball, tucked his head down, filled his lungs and waited, wondering in a desultory manner if Garec and Kellin had survived, and if he would ever find Gilmour again.
It was some time later when he awakened.
What’s broken?
The world came into focus, as light and colour emerged from behind the curtain of hazy grey and blurry black. Eldarn repositioned itself around, under, above and beside Steven Taylor. He was lying in a shallow puddle of mud and cold river water. Fearing to exacerbate his injuries, he didn’t move.
Tibia and fibula, broken; they must be. Head hurts. What’s the head, anyway? Cranium. That’s it, your pointy little head, dummy. That feels broken, too, maybe a hairline crack. Shoulder’s badly scraped … a pound of flesh? Take two; they’re small… but intact, and my back’s all right.
; He snaked a hand down his thigh. I can’t have broken this leg twice in four months; I just can’t. He pulled his hand back. Later. Check it later.
Now, what hurts?
That one was easy: everything.
Take your time; let’s see what you remember. What hurts? Ulna, radius, coccyx … that’s your arse, for everyone in the cheap seats, thank you very much … both clavicles, ribs on the left, ribs on the right, and the knee bone, the patella, feels like it is connected to the shoulder bone, which feels like it’s still connected to the grille of a passing garbage truck. That’s it. That’s all I know, good for probably a D+ on your average biology exam.
Lying still, he tried to focus on anything but the fact that he might have rebroken his leg. Without lifting his head, he endeavoured to take in as much of Eldarn as he could from his current vantage point beside what remained of the Medera River.
He could see a rock, as big a small truck, resting on the razed, muddy ground as if it had been deposited there by a fast-moving glacier. There were countless uprooted trees, lying in myriad ungainly positions throughout the clearing as if they’d been tossed about. If this was a clearing. It was probably a forest until five minutes ago.
The smell of decay found him, tickling the back of his throat. He didn’t want to vomit; he breathed heavily through his mouth for a few seconds, until he was more accustomed to the aroma of upside-down river. It was like autumn, the smell of death and decomposition, but autumn had a way of being delicate about it, of mixing its scents with more pleasant aromas: mulled wine, ripe fruit, mown hay, and wood smoke. This was just the opposite: the hegemonic smell of shit and rotting earth.
Mud and silt coated everything, as if the world had been hastily slathered in a quick coat of something muck-brown, foetid. It was cold now, despite the lingering effects of his warming spell, and he knew he would either need to concentrate enough to recast the magic, or get to his feet and find someplace to dry out.
He could hear the river trickling by somewhere behind him. He guessed he was facing north, lying perhaps two hundred feet from the riverbank. The sustained thunder had passed, even its echoes, and Steven closed his eyes and listened for a moment to the rhythmic babble as the Medera rediscovered its former self and wound its more familiar route towards Orindale. There was no sign of Garec, Kellin or Gilmour, no sign of any of the horses, and no sound of anyone shouting for help … just the river, and the same light breeze he had felt that morning.
Steven closed his eyes. Despite the cold, he might have slept for a few minutes, until the slurp, drag and slurp sounds of something large and broken being dragged through the mud finally roused him. He rolled, with surprising ease, onto his back and lifted his head. It took a moment for everything to make sense; the land looked like it had been bombed. Then, across the mudscape, he saw the grettan, a big female – not nearly as large as the creature that had attacked him in the Blackstones, but a muscular and dangerous animal, nevertheless. She had sustained a serious injury to her back during the floodtide and was dragging her hind legs, grunting as if in pain. The creature’s fur was matted, covered with mud. She bared her teeth with each step, but it was more a show of pain than any real hostility.
‘You planning to eat me?’ Steven pushed himself up. ‘Huh? Eat me and then rest somewhere while you heal?’
The grettan growled something threatening; she hadn’t expected Steven to be alive, never mind capable of mounting a defence.
‘I have bad news for you, sister,’ Steven said. ‘You’re screwed. That’s not going to get better; you’ve got maybe a day or two left, and I wouldn’t recommend any dancing in your condition. So what happened, Dorothy? Someone drop a house on you? I think they dropped a ship on me.’ Steven focused his thoughts inward and brought the magic forth in a tightly woven spell. He thought about just stinging her, driving her off somewhere to die on her own, but that would take time. If there were healthy grettans about, the end for her would be ugly. Instead, he decided to finish her here. ‘Sorry about this, my dear, but it’s for the best.’
He lashed out at a spot between the grettan’s forelegs. The spell slammed into the creature, ripping her apart in a hailstorm of bloody fur and sinew. Steven watched as the animal’s tongue lolled from what was left of its mouth, poking its pink tip into the mud.
‘Nicely done.’
Gilmour. Sonofabitch.
‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling up to a bit of magic. You must be relatively whole, and if you’re not entirely ready for the winter chain-ball tournaments, you’re at least strong enough to sit up and work a spell or two. That’s a relief.’ He pointed towards the grettan’s remains. ‘She was planning on an early lunch, wasn’t she?’
Dragging a leg himself, a bloody piece of cloth over one eye, Gilmour, masquerading for the moment as a Malakasian soldier, made his way across the mud.
‘You’ve got nine lives, old man.’
‘Pissing demons, I’ve got more than nine, Steven. I must’ve used nine up since I met you.’
‘I’ll try to take that as a compliment.’
‘Are you broken and battered?’
‘Am I?’ Steven shrugged. ‘The verdict isn’t in on that yet, but so far, I think I need a new head, new leg, new arse, a new set of tyres and a couple of gallons of paint.’
‘Oh, good. Is that all? I was worried.’ He sat with a sustained groan. ‘Actually, I think there’s a place just up the road where we can get all those things.’
Steven suppressed a chuckle. ‘Don’t make me laugh; my ribs hurt.’
‘Sorry.’
‘How about you?’
‘Cuts, scrapes, abrasions in embarrassing places and some damage to my hip, but I’m betting you can fix that.’
‘I’ll need a box of Band-Aids and a couple of quarts of hydrogen peroxide. Any broken bones?’
‘A dislocated finger, but I took care of that before I came to find you.’ Gilmour held up the swollen knuckle. ‘Let me see your leg.’
Steven indicated his calf, the same leg that had been nearly bitten off in the Blackstones, the same leg that had tripped him up in the landfill outside Idaho Springs, where Lessek’s key had been buried. ‘It’s numb. The cold helps.’ He ran his hands along either side of his knee and down. ‘Actually, it doesn’t feel …’ He stopped, then tried to bend it. It complied, with only a twinge of muscle cramp. ‘Holy shit!’ he cried, looking enormously surprised.
Gilmour smiled. ‘You used the magic?’
‘No, not here, not since I woke up here – oh, I did! It was right as the wave was swallowing me up; I just let fly with whatever I had inside me. I called it up and it blasted out into the water. I didn’t think it did—’
Gilmour finished his thought. ‘It did. That’s good. It kept you relatively safe.’
‘I don’t feel relatively safe.’ He rubbed one of several lumps that had welled up on the back of his head.
‘Imagine where you would be right now without it,’ Gilmour said.
‘You’re right,’ Steven agreed, ‘my leg would have been broken, at the very least, and I suppose I would have ended up drowning … oh, shit, what about Garec and Kellin?’
‘I haven’t seen them,’ Gilmour said quietly.
Ignoring his aches and pains, Steven pulled himself to his feet, then helped Gilmour. ‘We need to look for them; they could be lying anywhere, injured badly, dying—’
‘We’ll look for a day or two,’ Gilmour sighed, ‘but then we’ll have to move on. We can’t forget where we’re going, or why.’
Steven grudgingly agreed. ‘We keep to our schedule: twelve days from now, we need to be on the Ravenian Sea, off the mouth of that fjord. I watched them get swept up by the wave, but they were much further north than I was; they might have tumbled around for a bit and come out just fine.’
Gilmour didn’t seem hopeful. ‘We’ll attempt a crossing in Mark’s skiff if they’ll don’t manage to meet us with a vessel.’
‘But that will mean u
sing—’
‘I know.’
‘But he’ll sense us coming—’
‘I know.’ Gilmour frowned. ‘There’s nothing else we can do.’
‘Shit.’ Steven opened his tunic and checked his shoulder. It was deeply scraped and bloody, but once clean, it would heal over.
‘You saw the remains of that schooner riding the wave before it crashed over us?’ Gilmour asked. ‘It was too big for this river, certainly this far east.’
Steven paled. ‘You mean it came all the way from Orindale? But that would mean that Mark …’
‘Right again,’ Gilmour said. ‘Even if Garec and Kellin reach the city, they may not find much in the way of seagoing transportation available.’
Steven wiped his eyes and swept the wet hair off his forehead. ‘So it may be just you and me. Where’s the spell book and the portal?’
‘I hope they’re still tied to my saddle. I caught a whiff of them from over there.’ He pointed, then added, ‘I don’t think it’s very far. I was on my way when I stumbled on you and your ladyfriend.’
‘All right,’ Steven said, ‘let’s go.’
‘First,’ Gilmour said, grabbing hold of him, ‘I need you to think about fixing my hip.’
‘I don’t know anything about hips, Gilmour.’
‘Sure you do,’ he replied, ‘you fixed Garec’s lung, didn’t you? You kept your own bones from breaking.’
Steven was confused. ‘But they were moments of— well, heightened emotion, really. I just took what I knew about physiology and infused it with—’
‘Exactly,’ Gilmour said. ‘Where do you think new spells come from? Why do you think we spent all that time in your world? Collected all those books? Sponsored research and medical teams from Sandcliff for all those Twinmoons?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Think about the magic you’ve done, the crafty spells, not the bombastic stuff.’
‘Yes, I remember, “Explosions aren’t magic”.’
The Larion Senators Page 24