Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

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 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 they 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.