The Larion Senators

by Rob Scott; Jay Gordon

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,’ Mrs Winter whispered, peering at him over the top of her glasses. She wore them low on her nose, like a schoolmarm in an old daguerreotype. He had watched her attack the invaders. Steven didn’t believe she needed glasses at all.

  ‘Did you see what happened to Gilmour?’ Garec asked.

  Steven wrestled back another bout of tears and nodded. ‘He just sat there. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Overwhelmed maybe?’ Hannah suggested. ‘Did he give up? Maybe sacrificed himself to slow them down?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Steven said, uncomforted.

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that either,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘He was probably trying to break into their dreams, to slow them, or stop them entirely. He might even have been successful, or partially successful, anyway.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Hannah asked. ‘What are you even doing here? Who are you, anyway?’ She too was still in shock.

  Steven interrupted to say, ‘Her name is Alfrieda Winter. She owns the shop next to the bank in Idaho Springs, and I will bet you a year of your life to a bacon sandwich that her middle initial is “L”.’

  ‘You’ve never been stupid, Steven,’ Alfrieda Winter replied, ‘and I’ve known you a long time, haven’t I?’

  ‘Holy shit, it’s Lessek!’ Mark stood, spilling his tea over the curtain he was wrapped in. ‘It’s you; you’re Lessek, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am, Mark, and I’ve been watching you and Steven for most of your lives.’

  ‘Why? How?’ Hannah couldn’t cope with this; she looked from face to face, trying to understand.

  ‘I was forced to leave Eldarn a long time ago,’ Mrs Winter – Lessek – began. ‘I did a terrible thing, inadvertently, but a terrible thing nevertheless. I’ve been here ever since.’

  ‘That virus,’ Steven guessed.

  ‘The worst Twinmoon of my life,’ the old woman replied. ‘Thousands died in Eldarn. My team and I planned to come back, to find a cure, a herb, something to stop the devastation, but I was sick myself, and I wasn’t able to keep them from conspiring against me. I escaped to Rome, and then to the Holy Land, where I had friends and colleagues, but without my writings and the spell table, I was unable to control the Fold. Harbach, a power-hungry businessman, and Gaorg, my own brother, ran me out one night, ushering a whole new Era of politics and corruption into the fledgling Larion Senate. I spent thousands of Twinmoons here, decades and decades, watching, listening and hoping to find a way home, when, one day about a hundred and thirty-five years ago—’

  ‘Your own keystone came to you,’ Mark said.

  ‘It was as if a bomb detonated half a world away and I felt the aftershock. I was living in a corner of Africa at the time, a place from where I discovered I could communicate with the most powerful of the magicians from the Larion Senate.’

  ‘At Seer’s Peak,’ Steven said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But Larion Senators had been coming here for generations,’ Hannah said, her brow furrowed. ‘Why didn’t you go back with one of them?’

  ‘That was several Eras later, over an Age had passed, and I was settled here by that time, Hannah,’ Mrs Winter replied softly, obviously leaving something unsaid. ‘I made a point to help Larion sorcerers when I could, guiding them, leading them to powerful sources of energy, information, research and knowledge. I was an outstanding resource for the Larion Brotherhood, but—’

  ‘You never revealed yourself to them?’ Jennifer asked.

  ‘No.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I was more useful here, even to Nerak – especially to Nerak, I should say. He was an astonishing talent from very early on.’

  ‘And then your keystone arrived,’ Steven said.

  ‘And things began to unravel in Eldarn. I would have tried to go home then, but Larion journeys across the Fold came to an abrupt halt. Apart from Seer’s Peak, there was little opportunity for communication—’

  ‘Except for images,’ Steven said.

  ‘And dreams,’ Mark added. ‘My dreams, the dream of this very beach. How did you do it? My head hurts just thinking about it.’ Mark tallied points on his fingers. ‘I dream of Jones Beach and my dad. You plant the dream in my head, convincing me that I’m Eldarn’s heir. I am taken by the evil minion ruling Eldarn and we end up here, invading my home on this very beach. It doesn’t add up.’

  Actually,’ she peered over her glasses, ‘it adds up perfectly. Lessek’s key had been drawing members of your family to Colorado for generations.’

  ‘Those pictures,’ Steven said, ‘the ones in the hallway at your parents’ house …’

  ‘That trip,’ Mark agreed, ‘and my dad’s favourite photos.’

  The Larion founder laughed. ‘You’re catching on, boys. You remembered Jones Beach, a day in your childhood when you and your father enjoyed each other’s company. I used the ash dream to comfort you that night, but no, I never imagined that you would one day invade Earth from this beach.’

  ‘It was in my head,’ Mark said, swirling tea in his cup. ‘The evil that took me just found it in there.’

  ‘It and all your analyses and conclusions about yourself as Eldarn’s heir,’ Steven said.

  ‘My goal was only to comfort you, Mark, to comfort you and to send you a message about your father; that was all. With you in Eldarn so unexpectedly, I had to act quickly, or else risk having you travel through Rona unaware of who you truly were. You chose the memory: the day, the beach, the time, all of it, probably because you happened to arrive on the beach outside Estrad when you fell across the Fold.’

  ‘After we’d been drinking beer at Owen’s Pub,’ Mark added. ‘My dad used to drink all day when we were at the beach.’

  Hannah chuckled. ‘An important parallel.’

  Mark went to the windows. The sun was high overhead now, but a cold wind continued to sweep the beach, kicking up the sand along the boardwalk. ‘So I have a vision of my dad, because you used the ash dream, but I picked the beach memory, serendipitously, most likely because I was on a beach outside Estrad. So far so good?’

  ‘Keep at it,’ Steven urged.

  ‘You continued to send me dreams and memories of my dad and Jones Beach and when I was taken, I had spent so much time thinking about this place that the minion controlling the Malakasian military decided this would be the perfect place to invade.’

  ‘True, but there were other reasons as well,’ Steven said. ‘When Nerak was in Colorado, ostensibly tracking down Jennifer, we assume he took numerous people.’

  ‘Gaining knowledge of Earth,’ Hannah said. ‘Taking you, the minion had everything it had learned from Nerak, plus what it gained inside your mind: knowledge of Kennedy Airport, Manhattan, the millions of people here, so many things. If it had taken me instead, this invasion force might have emerged up near Alamosa Pass, or maybe out on the prairie east of Denver.’

  ‘So here we are,’ Garec said, ‘living your dream, Mark.’

  ‘How did you get into my head?’ Mark asked. ‘I never came near any of that bark, or the ashes, or any of those shipments. How did you do it?’

  ‘The same way as Milla,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘The ash dream was the cornerstone of so many things I had planned to do for the Larion Senate. What a teaching strategy: imagine giving an apprentice a view of themselves, devoid of all the polish and subtle adjustments we apply to convince ourselves that our experiences are more special or important than they truly are. Imagine the learning, the emotional discipline—’

  ‘And the knowledge,’ Steven interrupted.

  ‘Most importantly, the knowledge,’ the older woman agreed, ‘because our most powerful magic hinges on knowledge.’

  ‘And my dream of the Air Force Academy and the almor?’

  ‘Again, you started the ball rolling yourself,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘I just interjected a key element.’

  ‘My prince,’ Garec said.

  ‘That’s right.’ She turned to him. ‘It was importa
nt for you to know who you were, Mark, certainly before you arrived here this morning. Just as it was important for Fantus to recognise his role as that of a teacher, and Kantu to understand his role as surrogate parent to Milla. The only way we could have turned back the evil that tried to take over our worlds today was for each of us to understand ourselves at our most fundamental level, to understand that we each have an important calling in Eldarn’s future. Garec, the king’s protector and sovereign of Falkan—’

  Steven spat a mouthful of tea on the floor. ‘What the Hell—?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’ Garec shook his head.

  Mrs Winter ignored them. ‘Mark, the Ronan prince—’

  Steven wiped his mouth, then finished Lessek’s thought, ‘And Milla, the heir apparent to the Larion Senate, the prodigy.’

  ‘Not just Milla,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Certainly not.’ Mrs Winter smiled and finally removed her glasses.

  ‘What?’ Steven asked, ‘what am I missing?’

  ‘In your pocket,’ Hannah said. ‘You were willing to believe that Mark was drawn to Idaho Springs by the power of Lessek’s key, but you never bothered to wonder about yourself.’ She took a seat beside her mother; they huddled together under a blanket. ‘After hearing of your exploits from Brexan and Gilmour, I put two and two together.’

  ‘Two and two?’ Steven said. ‘Where’d the other two come from?’

  ‘From Alen.’

  ‘Alen?’ Steven unfolded the sheets of paper Hannah had given him that morning. They were printed out from an Internet café, somewhere in western Massachusetts. Across the bottom of each page was a common footer: a web domain. ‘What is this?’ Steven said, turning the first page over several times, trying to make sense of an ornate grid filled with unfamiliar names.

  ‘It’s from a genealogical website, a database,’ Jennifer said. ‘Look at it closely. What do you see?’

  ‘It looks like a printout of a family line, originating somewhere in northern England a couple of centuries ago.’

  ‘Look at the generations spanning the middle page there.’ Hannah pointed at the second sheaf. ‘The stuff between 1846 and 1881 …’

  ‘There’s a family, Wakefield, from Bradford who married into the Kirtland family from Durham. They had four children, three boys and one girl, who in turn went on to have, two, three, five, holy shit, eleven grandchildren. It was a rutting brood – but so what?’

  ‘So look again,’ Hannah said, winking at Mark and adding, ‘He’s as thick as a bag of broken bricks sometimes.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Mark groaned.

  ‘Um, all right,’ Steven reread the page. ‘Whatshername from Bradford marries Kirtland from Durham and they have four, oh, wait, no, five! They have five kids and the last one – that’s the one I missed. Hold on.’ Mark reached for the pages and Steven relinquished all but the one charting the family line through the mid-1800s. ‘She doesn’t belong here. Who is she?’ He looked pointedly at Hannah. ‘The woman who married Thomas Robert Taylor of London in 1892 and moved to America, New Jersey and then to Ohio, before dying at the age of 87 in Denver, Colorado. Who was that woman? My great-grandmother, Margaret Rena Kirtland Taylor?’

  ‘Yes, she was your great-grandmother,’ Hannah explained. ‘Her name was Reia, not Rena. She was the daughter of Alen Jasper and Pikan Tettarak, the offspring of two Larion sorcerers, and the direct source of your power.’

  ‘Holy shit!’ Mark yelled, ripping the key page from his friend’s hand.

  Steven didn’t seem to notice; instead he stared at Hannah, blinking, looking dumbfounded. ‘It— No, I can’t … It came from the staff; it had to!’

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ Garec said. ‘Mark and I have been trying to tell you since the fjord, since Traver’s Notch. The magic didn’t come from the staff; the staff just brought it to life. It was there all along. I knew it the night we spent in the cavern beneath the river.’

  ‘Cold beer and oil changes for $26.99,’ Mark said. ‘We were seeing across the Fold.’

  ‘Just like you did today.’ Mrs Winter took his hand. ‘Milla is not the only heir to the Larion Brotherhood, Steven, you are as well. You will both bring leadership and knowledge to the Larion Senate: Milla is a prodigious talent, certainly, but you are the Senate’s legacy.’

  ‘Old magic,’ Steven said, ‘that’s what Gilmour called these abilities, nonverbal spells and such.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’ Mrs Winter smiled.

  ‘Did he know?’

  ‘The clock.’

  ‘Sonofabitch.’ Steven didn’t fight the tears this time. Slipping to his knees, he cried out, ‘And I buried him. I buried him inside the Fold. I—’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ said Mrs Winter, ‘he was inside their minds, inside their dreams when it happened. Fantus knew what he was doing.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘There’s your proof.’ She pointed at Garec.

  ‘Me?’ Garec looked around at the others. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You didn’t die this morning. Why is that?’

  Garec rubbed stiffness from his arm. ‘They were killing me. I figured it was over; I was heading for the Northern Forest, or whatever might pass for the Northern Forest around here, but I had to try and reach Milla. I don’t know why they stopped; they just left me alone.’ His face was a roadmap of cuts and bruises. He thought of Kellin, sailing somewhere along the Northern Archipelago, and wanted badly, right at that moment, to go home.

  ‘The ash dream,’ Steven whispered, pulling himself together. ‘So he did get in.’

  Mrs Winter nodded.

  ‘And all this time, he doubted himself,’ Mark said.

  Steven took back Hannah’s printout. ‘So Alen Jasper, Kantu, was my great-great-grandfather?’

  ‘He was.’ Hannah crossed to hug him. ‘And Pikan Tettarak, the woman he loved more than anyone else in these past five generations, was your great-great-grandmother.’

  ‘Did Alen know?’ Steven asked. It felt good to have Hannah against him, feeling the warmth of her, the shape of her, there, still alive, still with him.

  ‘No,’ Hannah whispered. ‘I’m sorry. I just never thought that he would be gone and he was so preoccupied with caring for—’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Steven hid his face in the crook of her neck. ‘It’s all right.’ He flashed back to southern Falkan. We are the Larion Senators.

  ‘Mrs Winter?’ Mark ladled out another scoop of peaches. ‘When Steven and I fell across the Fold, the far portal was left open in our house, with your keystone there on the desk. I fell through on a Thursday night; Steven joined me on what would have been early Friday morning—’

  ‘I didn’t fall through until Friday evening,’ Hannah added.

  ‘So why did you just leave it there, opened like that? Why didn’t you come up to the house and close the portal? Why didn’t you take the keystone?’ Mark stood. Steven looked up at him; Redrick Shen was noticeably taller than Mark had been.

  ‘I was monitoring the portal,’ she replied. ‘I knew where the keystone was, but I didn’t know if you had accidentally fallen into the portal, or if you had been invited into Eldarn by Fantus or Kantu, perhaps even by Nerak. I didn’t close the portal, because if I had and you returned suddenly, you might have found yourself swimming home from the Aleutians.’

  ‘Oh shit, that’s right,’ Steven said.

  ‘And I didn’t want to take the keystone, because if Fantus or Kantu had brought you across the Fold, I wanted the key available to them.’

  ‘And if Nerak happened to come through for it, unannounced?’

  ‘I would have known,’ she said, donning her glasses again, as if out of habit. ‘I actually went to the bank that morning, ostensibly to cash a cheque. Myrna and Howard were working the window and neither of them seemed to know that you had taken anything from the safe. So I didn’t imagine there was any cause for concern. I didn’t expect anyone would be going into your house; everyone assumed you were cl
imbing Decatur Peak together. Howard breaking in that afternoon came as a complete surprise to me. I rushed over when I saw the flames, but I wasn’t permitted anywhere near the fire.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Mark interrupted, ‘Howard burned down our house?’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No,’ Steven said, ‘we had no idea. At first I thought it was Nerak, then I guessed maybe it was just a fluke, one of those things.’

  ‘It was Howard Griffin,’ she said. ‘He apparently left the stove on in your kitchen.’

  ‘I am going to beat the shit out of him,’ Mark muttered.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ Garec elbowed him in the ribs.

  ‘An abscess in my rectum,’ Mark said. ‘Howard is Steven’s boss.’

  ‘Disgusting, but I am proud to say that I know what all those words mean, in English. Fancy trick, this cross-Fold travel.’

  ‘Mrs—’ Steven started, then, ‘Sorry, Lessek, why didn’t you know if we had fallen through or if Gilmour had come over and invited us back?’

  ‘The portal wasn’t opened until late at night. I had been asleep, so I couldn’t determine if anyone had come through before Mark disappeared, and you were hanging around so long afterward, I thought perhaps you and he had coordinated something with Fantus or Kantu on the other side.’

  ‘I was a bit nervous before that first crossing,’ Steven admitted, blushing at the memory.

  ‘And when they came and hauled away the remains of your house, I tracked the portal and the key and I let them go.’

  ‘To the dump?’ Mark was incredulous. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not? It was a damned-near perfect hiding spot: outside of town, buried in the mountains. Who would’ve thought to go looking for them up there?’

  ‘But the portal was closed!’ Steven shouted. ‘I nearly drowned coming back, landing in the ocean off South Carolina, and then I had to race across the country with Nerak crawling up my backside the entire trip. I found the house razed to the ground, and then I had to dig around up there, through that mountain of ice and frozen diapers and rotting food and shit until I found the stone and the portal. Why?’