Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

‘Most of my life, anyway.’ Gilmour leaned in through one of the windows, then backed out quickly, peeling invisible cobwebs off his face.

Steven wandered onto the road, knocking off an icicle as he passed. It slid across the mud. ‘This is another university, isn’t it? I get the same sort of feeling as the last one – although I’m pleased that there don’t seem to be any acid-clouds or starving almor here. That definitely gets this place an extra star in the Barron’s Guidebook to Eldarni Colleges.’

‘Good guess.’

Steven continued, ‘And judging by the general disrepair, I’d guess that this was one of the first schools our friend Prince Marek closed after meeting Nerak back in the day.’

Gilmour leaned against a post and blew a smoke ring. ‘Marek Whitward was a pleasant young man, one of the nicest of the Remonds, and it was quite tragic about him and Nerak – but don’t let me interrupt. Please, go on.’

‘If this university is like those back home, I’d wager that stone building over there with the collapsed roof is the library – but I don’t expect we’ll find any books in there today.’ He pointed to an even larger, sprawling structure, standing at the centre of what might once have been the university common.

‘Correct again, Steven,’ Gilmour said. ‘Any surviving manuscripts would have been taken to Welstar Palace, or destroyed, but we haven’t come here for books.’

‘All right, you have my attention. Why then have we come out of our way to visit a derelict, abandoned and obviously off-limits former institution of higher education?’

The old Larion Senator wearing the chubby soldier’s body smiled, the same boyish grin Steven had seen on both of Gilmour’s previous hosts. ‘I need to look for something, something that’s been missing in Eldarn for some time.’ He started towards a set of double wooden doors, one of which hung crookedly by a single hinge.

‘In there?’ Steven was sceptical.

‘Come on,’ Gilmour said, ‘or wait here. This doesn’t really concern you.’

‘Oh, really? You meeting some woman? Because if you are, I can wait in the car. Or give me a couple of bucks, and I’ll take in a movie down the street.’

‘Trust me.’ Gilmour ducked through the broken frame. The empty room was a hall of sorts, with several doors off it leading to unseen rear chambers and, Steven guessed, stairs to the upper floors. There was no furniture; it, along with most of the floorboards and panelling, had been stripped, probably stolen by intrepid builders from nearby farms. A thick layer of dust moved in the air, disturbed by their arrival.

‘Lovely place you’ve got here.’

‘Like it? I call it Minimalist Grime.’

‘If I run into any homicidal maniacs looking for a quiet summer hideaway I’ll send them to you.’

Gilmour reached the rear wall and tried one of the doors. ‘This one’s latched inside.’ He moved to the next; that was blocked as well. ‘Curse it all,’ he said, ‘I hate to do this.’

‘What? Force the door? Stop joking, Gilmour, just blast the thing off its hinges and let’s get going. Just try not to knock down the whole building.’

Gilmour stepped back and whispered a brief spell; the door collapsed into a pile of kindling. A tremendous cloud of choking dust arose, momentarily blinding them both.

Coughing, doubled over, Steven said, ‘Oh yes, great idea – that’s much better!’ He pushed past Gilmour into the darkness beyond the ruined doorway, saying, ‘Better let me go first – who knows what might be waiting for us now that we’ve rung the bell?’ Two steps in and he disappeared into the dark.

‘I’ll get some lights on,’ he said after a bit and reached above his head. A pleasant glow filled the chamber, a room larger than the entryway, with a high ceiling and a polished stone floor. ‘It’s a damned cavern,’ Stephen said. ‘This one room must take up most of the building.’

‘I thought you might find it interesting,’ Gilmour replied.

Without speaking, Steven waved his open hands towards the ceiling, still invisible in the shadows above, and with each gesture, a fireball, glowing with a warm, bright light, leaped from his palm and floated off to brighten another corner of the massive chamber. There were several bulky, irregularly shaped structures arranged in a desultory pattern on the floor. ‘What the hell?’ he whispered, brightening the orbs with a nod. ‘Gilmour, what is it?’

‘This? I’m not sure; it looks like a pile of wreckage, probably dumped in here when they closed the school. What I need used to be stored along that rear corridor. Wait just a moment; I’ll be right back.’ He crossed to an antechamber behind the debris and slipped quietly inside.

Gilmour closed the door, cast a small flame toward the ceiling, and examined the gloomy storage closet. As expected, it was empty. He sat on the dusty floor, lit his pipe, and waited.

Steven circled the mountain of trash.

He called toward the corridor. ‘Okay, well, then I’ll just wait in here. That’s fine. I don’t mind cold, damp, dusty, creepy, and dilapidated. It’s kind of like my first apartment, only bigger… Gilmour?’

The debris was actually a stack of variously sized cogged gears, the smallest no larger than a bicycle tyre, the largest a huge wood-and-metal wheel with a circumference of half the cavernous chamber. It looked like the gears had been dropped, one atop the other, in an upside-down pyramid, smallest at the bottom. A polished metal rod was attached to a single cog on each gear.

‘There’s no rust,’ Steven said to himself.

He knelt beside the largest wheel and ran a hand up the silvery metal spike. ‘This might have been something once, but it’s just a pile of rubbish now – this big one has got to weigh two tons, though. And those loose cables up there – what are they for? Hold on a minute, just a minute… they’d have to be attached by-’ He took another lap around the pile, muttering, ‘Eight… eight to thirty and thirty to sixty, but that can’t be right… one is to four, but then there’s a switch, but there’s no switch in here…’ He searched the walls, the ceiling and the pile of cogged wheels, looking for a missing piece that might bring his ruminations to a tidy conclusion.

Stephen lectured to the empty room. ‘It wouldn’t work on the walls, and the rods are vertical… they don’t interlink – the cogs are the wrong size – but they do turn in a pattern; so what’s the denominator for the ratio? One to four to eight to thirty to sixty toChrist in the jungle, that’s not right: one to four has to be a mistake, unless- unless it’s on the floor… Sonofabitch!’

In the closet, Gilmour laughed silently into his fist, relit his pipe and leaned against the doorframe, listening. He gave it half an aven, then brushed the dust from his cloak, pocketed the pipe and reentered the chamber.

The cogged wheels were suspended, seemingly of their own volition, above a series of coloured tiles cemented into the floor. A matching set of tiles was affixed to the ceiling, just a short distance above the largest gear, which wobbled and wavered dangerously as it hovered above them, parallel to the floor.

‘Good gods! ‘ Gilmour feigned surprise. ‘What have you been up to?’

Now stripped to the waist, his lean frame shiny with sweat, Steven jumped, his apparent reverie broken. ‘Shit, Gilmour, don’t do that!’

‘What is it?’

‘You don’t know?’ He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand.

‘I’m hanged if I have any idea.’

Steven gave a self-satisfied grin. ‘Do you know what day it is?’

‘Of course not.’

‘When was the last time that you knew – for certain – what day it was?’