The Larion Senators

by Rob Scott; Jay Gordon

  ‘I had to assume the worst,’ Mrs Winter explained calmly. ‘You hadn’t returned, so protecting the key meant allowing the portal to close. I am afraid, boys, that the keystone and the Eldarni family lines are more important even than the two of you.’

  ‘But aren’t we the Eldarni family lines?’ Mark said. ‘Isn’t he the incarnation of the Larion Senate? Am I not some errant Ronan prince?’

  ‘You are,’ she said, ‘but the line doesn’t end with you two. You were, sadly, more expendable than my keystone.’

  ‘Your sister.’ Steven pointed at Mark.

  ‘Your sister,’ Mark said.

  ‘Like I said, you’re catching on, boys. Losing you two was tragic; oh, I worried about you for weeks, but I couldn’t leave the portal open for ever. When the trucks came and hauled the debris up the canyon, I was actually glad: it meant I didn’t have to find another relatively permanent storage place for it. And knowing I couldn’t get it back into the safe, I let it go up the mountain.’

  ‘How did you get here?’ Jennifer had been trying to stay abreast of the conversation. ‘We didn’t know until yesterday that we had to be here at the beach. How is it that you’re here, all the way from Colorado, so quickly?’

  ‘I was following you,’ Mrs Winter replied. She considered another go at the peaches, then decided against it. ‘When Nerak arrived and nearly destroyed Idaho Springs, I delayed him long enough for Steven to sneak away towards Denver. It wasn’t much, a few fire trucks, a handful of police officers in the street, just enough to allow Steven to disappear.’

  ‘Why didn’t you kill him?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘I’m not strong enough for that, my dear,’ Mrs Winter said, ‘not here. It’s been a long time. I have been able to develop an interesting perspective on Eldarn and the goings-on there, but that’s taken me centuries to do. To kill Nerak, I would have had to open the Fold and I couldn’t do that without the spell table. When Steven fled with the keystone, I was more nervous than I’ve been in hundreds of years. I had to assume that with Nerak pursuing him, Steven was working with Fantus and Kantu. However, I couldn’t be absolutely certain, not until David Johnson died.’

  ‘Who’s David Johnson?’ Garec asked of anyone who might know.

  ‘A— Well, he would have been a friend of mine,’ Jennifer said, ‘from Silverthorn. Nerak killed him, and a woman who worked at his store, right in front of me. It was horrible, terrifying— but how did you know?’

  ‘I read about it in the paper,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘I knew Nerak was there and I knew that you had the portal. Steven had given it to you, and when you didn’t turn it over to Nerak, I knew you and Steven were working on the right side of the fence.’ To Steven, she said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say anything to you that morning in Idaho Springs, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what had happened since you had left. You could have been rushing home to retrieve the key for Nerak.’

  ‘But you didn’t try to stop me when I went to the landfill.’ Steven was nonplussed.

  ‘Of course not.’ Mrs Winter sighed, a little frustrated at trying to explain herself. ‘By that time, Nerak was in the bank killing people and leaving dead bodies all over town, the odious motherfucker.’ She paused. ‘Poor Myrna; she was just a kid. I couldn’t get to the landfill before you, so I had to trust that you were working with Fantus or Kantu. That was one of the more nerve-wracking days of my long, long life.’

  ‘And you couldn’t save Myrna?’ Mark asked sadly.

  Mrs Winter shook her head. Nerak would have torn me to pieces. I’m surprised he didn’t sense my presence in town when he arrived. He probably thought it was the keystone, or maybe the portal.’

  ‘But you’re Lessek,’ Garec said. ‘We were told stories about you from the time we were kids. It was the stuff of great legends. You were the Larion Senate founder, the most powerful sorcerer of all time. You didn’t have enough strength to save those people?’

  ‘I had the ash dream,’ Mrs Winter said simply. ‘It was the primary building block for most of the common-phrase spells I researched and wrote during my Twinmoons at Sandcliff. It was my strength as a researcher and a teacher, the means for me to send messages to Kantu or Fantus, to lead Regona Carvic away from Riverend Palace the night Nerak killed Danmark and Danae. She ended up in Vienna, if memory serves.’

  Mark perked up. ‘Vienna?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Sorry, go on.’ He ran a hand through Milla’s curls.

  She did. ‘The ash dream was the way I made suggestions to Mark about his family, how I charted the evolution of your partisan struggle in Eldarn, even the way I encouraged those fire-fighters to block the on ramp to I-70 when Nerak was chasing Steven towards Denver. But that’s it. Oh, I can still dole out a significant blast; I was pleased with my efforts on the beach this morning, but my strength as a sorcerer, a magician capable of levelling a mountain, or whatever legends you might have heard about me in your youth, Garec, was founded on the spell table. I didn’t have the spell table, hadn’t seen it in nearly a hundred generations, so no, I didn’t have the power to subdue Nerak.’

  ‘So the ash dream, this key element in your abilities, is just the power of suggestion?’ Garec craned his neck, looking for more tea, but found the pot empty.

  ‘Oh no, the ash dream is the power of knowledge, the one common denominator in any spell. The more one can understand and manipulate perceptions around a body of knowledge, the more flexible and effective his or her spells can grow. If I could have brought one thing with me from Eldarn, well, all right, two, technically, I would have brought my keystone and that book.’ Mrs Winter gestured towards the leatherbound tome, wrinkled from so many dunkings in the past three Twinmoons.

  ‘And you followed me, followed the portal, instead of going back with the keystone,’ Jennifer added. ‘That’s why you were already here this morning.’

  ‘I did,’ Mrs Winter shrugged. ‘I followed you, because—’

  ‘Because you can’t go back,’ Steven guessed, ‘can you?’

  ‘No, Steven, I can’t. My … my so-called friends and colleagues arranged that in the wake of my disappearance, sometime around the beginning of the second Age, almost five Eras ago.’ She removed her glasses again and ran bony fingers over the lines etched in her face.

  A heavy silence fell over the sunlit dining room. Two joggers, bundled up against the cold, passed by on the hard-packed sand near the waterline; neither noticed that the restaurant doors had been forced open. Beyond them, the North Atlantic, glittering gold in the sun, rolled with the tide, unconcerned that it had swallowed an army less than an hour earlier.

  Garec, intrigued by the bright colours of the jackets and footwear, watched the joggers disappear into the distance. The world around him slowed, even time seemed to grow weary, trudging along to a soft dirge. They were done. They had won. He ought to feel better about it, but now all he wanted was to go home, to find Kellin and to sleep for a Twinmoon. He hadn’t felt safe for much of his life, not until this moment. He honestly hadn’t expected it, and now he was afraid even to consider what might lie ahead. How would he handle the realisation of everything he and his friends had ever worked to accomplish? The notion of success, hard-fought and harder-won, unnerved him. Garec decided he would go home and he would sleep. Then he would lock his bow and quivers away and ride for the Blackstones and Renna. The thought of his fiery little mare comforted him and he turned from the windows to ask, ‘What do we do now?’

  At first, no one answered. The challenges they had met stood taller than those that now lay before them. Saving Eldarn – saving Earth – had seemed so unlikely a battle to win: none of them had ever thought they would live this long. Now, faced with the task of rebuilding Eldarn, of starting over again a thousand Twinmoons later, the breadth of the work ahead was staggering.

  Mark, the history teacher, started on their list. ‘Education, public health, decent food supplies, shelter, clean water, working farms, shipping, roads, industry,
a reliable judiciary, a set of reasonable laws – formative, not summative, not now, no way – and a representative government, right from the start. It might seem like it would be easier to start off with a monarchy and then switch over after a while, but that’s not the way to rebuild. They have to own it; there have to be some common values, simple – and I do mean dirt-simple – things the people of Eldarn can agree upon; we’re talking about a people with basic literacy, not the crew who spent the past fifty Twinmoons under Gilmour’s tutelage, but the rest of the population. That’s where you start a true grass-roots effort. Holy shit, it’ll take lifetimes to get that place put back together. I don’t… I can’t even get it all straight in my head. It’s too big a problem to even conceptualise without getting dizzy.’

  ‘Was there any beer in that fridge?’ Steven whispered to Hannah. ‘He works better after a beer or two.’

  ‘I’m sure the school board would be interested to know that little factoid, and no, there isn’t any beer back there. You’re home now; you can’t be drinking beer at ten o’clock in the morning.’ She slugged him playfully in the arm.

  Mark ignored them. ‘And the Larion Senate, the independent states of Gorsk, Praga, Rona and Falkan, even Malakasia. There’ll be civil wars, border disputes. The shipping industry will probably come near to collapse before it rights itself again. People will starve. There’s no army to speak of, no one to police the populace. Jesus, it’s going to be a mess.’

  ‘What about Gita?’ Steven said. ‘She can probably help.’

  ‘Yes, her, certainly, we’ll need to find her,’ Mark said. ‘Man, this’ll take weeks.’

  ‘Weeks,’ Hannah said, ‘that’s not so bad. They can hold together for a few weeks.’

  ‘I mean weeks just to get it all written down, just to get the problems outlined and the resources listed. That’ll take weeks. We’ll all be old people with see-through skin and brittle bones before Eldarn gets to the stage where people are living healthy, productive, free lives.’

  ‘Oh,’ Hannah said. ‘Sorry, I misunderstood.’

  ‘Mark—’ Steven sat next to Mrs Winter, ‘Mark, is this truly what you want to do? Are you suggesting that you’re ready to go back, to take up the mantle of some leadership position you never asked for?’

  ‘Look at me, Steven. My own family aren’t going to recognise me. And what about you? Do you think there’s a place in this world for a sorcerer? You’ll be grossly misunderstood, or exploited; you’ll either be dead or locked up inside a year: prison, maybe, or some psych hospital.’

  ‘You’ve been through a great deal, Mark,’ Garec said. ‘Perhaps you ought to take some time before you commit countless Twinmoons of your life to Eldarni cultural reconstruction.’

  ‘It has to start somewhere,’ Mark murmured, not to anyone in particular.

  Steven said, ‘But we’ve only been home for a couple of hours. We came a long way to get here; can’t we just enjoy this for a while? You can take a break: a month or six or whatever, get used to your new … self.’ Steven avoided looking at Mrs Winter. He hadn’t expected to feel selfish, but he couldn’t deny the sensation suffusing through him at the moment. His desire to protect Mark was equalled by his need for a few days’ of normalcy, some fried food and maybe a real mattress. He knew he would be returning to Eldarn if the opportunity arose, but bringing Mark along hadn’t crossed his mind, not since he’d been taken in Meyers’ Vale. Trying hard not to sound condescending, Steven added, ‘This is supposed to be where you ride into the sunset, cousin. I hadn’t thought about what we would do after today, but I promise it didn’t involve dragging you, or Hannah, back to Eldarn. That’s one mistake I prefer to make just once in a lifetime.’

  ‘It isn’t your choice to make,’ Hannah said quietly.

  ‘Hannah!’ Jennifer jumped up, looking startled and indignant.

  ‘Sorry, Mom, but if they’re going back, I’m going with them.’

  Hannah’s mother glared at Steven; she would always blame him.

  Garec interrupted, asking Mrs Winter how the Larion Senate could possibly rebuild without the spell table.

  ‘That’s a great question, Garec.’ The others postponed their disagreement to listen in. ‘You see, we don’t need the spell table to reconvene the Larion Brotherhood. All we need is Steven, Milla and that book.’ Again, she gestured to the leatherbound volume Gilmour had carried across half of Eldarn. ‘I was able, in my youth, to capture the essence of magical powers from different places, and all of it I channelled into the spell table. However, while doing so, I studied the magic of Eldarn, the lifeblood of our world, the energies and forces that ran through the very ground beneath our feet.’

  ‘Weren’t they in the spell table, too?’ Garec asked. ‘Would they have been lost when Steven broke it all to bits this morning?’

  ‘Steven?’ Mrs Winter raised her eyebrows. ‘Would you do the honours, please?’ She tossed the empty peach can towards the high dining room ceiling. Steven reached with one hand, captured the can in mid-flight and guided it gently back to the tabletop. There, the can crumpled itself into a compact silver ball and floated in a high arc, across the room, to land in a corner trashcan.

  ‘Nice shot, buddy,’ Mark said.

  ‘It was,’ Steven said, ‘but that wasn’t me.’

  Mark held a hand out to Milla, who, uncertain what to do, simply stared at it.

  ‘It’s called a high-five, sweetie,’ Mark whispered. ‘Just give it a good whack.’

  ‘All right,’ Milla cried and wound herself up for a resonant slap.

  ‘So you see, Garec,’ Mrs Winter went on, ‘the magic of Eldarn is alive and well. Granted, the spell table is lost, but with my writings and the purity of Steven and Milla’s skills, I have great hopes for the next generation of Eldarn’s Larion Senate.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Mark said, clearing the table, ‘let’s go.’

  ‘Go where?’ Jennifer said.

  ‘To my parents’ house,’ he replied. ‘They’re about half an hour from here. We can stay there as long as we need to get our bearings and then, if that portal still works, we can go back, round up the key players and get busy. I don’t envy us the task ahead, but screw it, we were able to come this far.’

  ‘You think your parents will recognise you?’ Jennifer asked. ‘If they’re anything like me, they’ve never given up hope, but seeing you like this, do you think they’ll call the police and have you dragged off the lawn?’

  ‘I’m trusting Steven and Milla to convince them,’ Mark said.

  ‘Very well,’ Steven said, wrapping an arm around Hannah’s waist. ‘If we don’t help them, who will?’

  EPILOGUE

  Crossroads

  LINDEN TREES

  Barrold Dayne adjusted his eye-patch and guided his horse along the line of partisans, resting now beside the thawing Falkan roadway. Spring was not yet in the air, but he could feel the frozen ground softening beneath his mount: it would be muddy going before they reached Orindale.

  He felt good for the first time since leaving Capehill.

  He spotted a lieutenant, a woman from Gorsk, giving curt orders to her platoon as they prepared a hasty meal by the roadside. Two soldiers, each laden with multiple leather skins, scrambled through a fallow field towards an irrigation pond a few hundred paces away, while others sifted through packs, cut strips of dried meat and sniffed dubiously at ageing blocks of cheese.

  Seeing Barrold, the lieutenant asked, ‘We going to be here long?’

  ‘Probably overnight,’ Barrold replied. ‘We’ll wait for the order from Gita, but I’m betting there’s no need to rush.’

  ‘What’s up there?’ She nodded toward the forward ranks. The Falkan Resistance had grown to nearly three thousand, not an army, but still one of the largest fighting forces mustered in the Eldarni Eastlands in generations.

  ‘Get your crew settled, then take a ride up to that crossroads. You’ll see.’ Barrold didn’t know if General Oaklen’s infantry still
held Rona or Orindale or southern Falkan; there had been no credible intelligence since Brand Krug’s arrival. But the way the locals described it, the Malakasian exodus had been as swift as it had been unexpected. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

  ‘Back a bit, still trying to convince that group of farmhands they’re needed here.’

  ‘We could use them.’

  ‘So could that farm; the bloody thing’s bigger than any ten patches of greenroot we’ve got growing up in Gorsk, I can tell you.’

  Barrold gave the woman a rare, tight-lipped smile, then urged his horse towards the tail-end of the partisan ranks.

  Gita Kamrec had dismounted and was looking up into the faces of eight or nine young farmhands, mostly school-age boys, from the look of them. A few had worn canvas packs hefted over their shoulders, ready to march, and at least two carried field tools, the closest they could come to weaponry, Barrold guessed.

  Gita, looking every bit this group’s grandmother, was entreating them to return to their homes. ‘—And I really appreciate your sense of duty, boy, I do, and I am going to use you – just in a different way. Boys, someone’s got to feed us, and that someone is you – all of you. You’re too important, all of you, to be running off to war with the spring Twinmoons only days away. Too important, and I don’t want to hear another word about it. You get yourselves home. You listen to your planting bosses and your farm foremen. Feeding the people of Capehill is your job, and gods rut us all, I’ll be back through this way, and I’ll want to see that you’re breaking your backs at it. Understand?’

  A few of them offered a muffled Yes, ma’am, clearly disappointed.

  Barrold smothered a laugh, then cleared his throat loudly to signal his presence.

  Gita climbed into the saddle and turned to the boys again. ‘I’m not joking, boys: we really do appreciate the offer, but you’re needed far more where you are. So thank you again.’ She watched the would-be soldiers shuffle dejectedly towards a large farmhouse at the far end of a field that looked big enough to feed a nation all by itself.