Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

Kellin wasn’t convinced. ‘It may take me some time. Nothing in my life prepared me for what happened in that clearing.’

‘Me neither, Kellin.’

She sighed, then moved a pot of snowmelt onto the coals. ‘Tecan?’

‘Please,’ Steven said. ‘We haven’t had coffee since Sandcliff. That’s too bad; I bet I could convince Mark to break free if I could just brew up a pot. He’s an addict; I’d be catering to his one real weakness.’

Kellin ignored his attempt at a joke. ‘What will you do today?’

‘Swim down there, try to unravel the spell protecting that underwater moraine, move some rocks and boulders around and hopefully retrieve the spell table without killing myself in the process.’ He pulled a pouch of tecan leaves from his pack and tossed them over to her. ‘How about you? Any plans for the day?’

Kellin’s smile was genuine this time. Beneath the crusty exterior of a hardened partisan lurked an attractive young woman. ‘I understand there is a wonderful hot springs spa near here. I thought I’d go and enjoy a relaxing day in the sun.’

‘Ah, great. Well, bring me back a margarita, no salt.’ Steven wanted her to trust him, but if she didn’t, it would change nothing. He had his goals and couldn’t stop to worry about every Resistance fighter who found him frightening.

‘You think you’re ready for this today?’ She sprinkled several pinches of the dark leaves into the boiling water.

‘Oh, sure,’ Steven joked, ‘they’re always better with salt, but that stuff is so bad for you.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I hope I am.’ He pulled on his jacket and quietly zipped it up. ‘The difficult part will be unravelling the tendrils of Nerak’s spell. I haven’t done that before and I don’t really know how it works.’

‘Can’t you just create a stronger spell to cancel the existing one?’

‘I wish it were that easy, but I’m afraid I’d destroy the table or kill myself – all of us – in the process. From what little I understand about magic, the most powerful spells actually change what is real. They alter reality, and then allow time and space and Twinmoons to go on as if nothing had happened. The magic is still there, churning away, but the world keeps going on as if nothing’s different. Reality isn’t suspended momentarily – although there are spells that do that too. Instead, what is real is shifted, and then permitted to fill its own niche in who we are and where we are and what we’re doing.’ He broke a small stick and handed Kellin half. When she raised her eyebrows, he made a stirring motion with one finger.

‘Oh, right.’ She stirred the bubbling mixture, and said, ‘I won’t pretend I have any idea what you’re talking about. How will you know what to do when you get down there?’

Steven said, ‘I’ve been lucky so far.’

‘Lucky?’

‘The magic has shown me what to do.’ He mulled over this another moment, then added, ‘Actually, it has shown me what not to do, what’s not important. Figuring out what is important has been my job. So, yes, I’ve been lucky.’

‘And skilled,’ Gilmour rolled over and rubbed his hands above the flames. ‘Don’t let him fool you, Kellin. He’s been very deft at figuring out what needs to be done.’

‘I don’t know about this one, though,’ Steven said.

‘Because you’re distracted by the water and the cold and the possibility of drowning,’ Gilmour said.

‘Well,’ Steven chuckled, ‘it’s hard to get past those, my friend.’

‘Nonsense.’ The teacher in Gilmour took over. ‘Don’t think about it as an underwater moraine in an icy river.’

‘That’s easy for you to say.’ Steven smiled over at Kellin. ‘You’re not the one going down there, Gilmour.’

‘You must think of it as a pile of rocks on the shore, someplace warm and dry. Deal with the cold and the air first; then forget them. You said yourself: the most powerful spells change what’s real. Change the water temperature; change your lungs and then get busy working on the moraine. You need to unravel the spell inside the rocks and the riverbed; that’s what we’re doing here. The rest of it is extraneous detail.’ Gilmour handed Kellin his goblet and she filled it. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Think of it like the doorway to Prince Malagon’s cabin on the Prince Marek. Remember that spell?’

‘What I remember is that I couldn’t unravel a damned thing, so I blasted it to matchsticks with the hickory staff.’

Gilmour looked disappointed. ‘Right. So you did.’

Kellin said, ‘I still don’t understand what you mean by unravelling the magic. I thought you said once reality was changed, it was changed for ever.’

Gilmour said, ‘Yes, it does change. But as Steven also said, the magic is still there, still churning away – like a diverted stream, it’s a layer of refocused energy in our existential plane. As long as a wily sorcerer can get at it, he – or she – can change it again, change it back, even paint the goddamned thing yellow if he wants to.’

‘Yellow?’ Kellin said.

‘Insider joke,’ Steven said.

Gilmour went on, ‘So all Steven has to do is find that place where Nerak’s magic comes together, where all the scattered threads have been woven into something new. In this case it’s something dangerous. It’s probably somewhere near the base of the thing, especially if he cast a spell on the rocks and the riverbed simultaneously. Then, the rest of it becomes-’

‘Geometry,’ Steven finished his friend’s thought, ‘the mathematics of untying knots, imploding old buildings or folding paper into complex shapes. It’s all just one turn, one brick, one fold at a time.’

‘Exactly.’ Gilmour handed back his goblet for a refill. ‘So, Kellin, there you have it. That’s all our young friend here has to do today.’

Steven smirked. ‘Again, that’s easy for you to say. You’re not going down there.’

Gilmour frowned. ‘Of course I am. Don’t be silly; I wouldn’t miss this for anything.’

‘But the cold, and the water, and the rest of it,’ Steven said, ‘are you really up for all that, all those extraneous details?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Gilmour admitted, ‘but I’m certain that you are.’

It was one o’clock by Howard’s watch, some time after dawn in Eldarn, when Steven sat on the fallen pine to remove his boots and socks once again. The river rolled inexorably through Meyers’ Vale.

‘Ready?’ he said to Gilmour.

Gilmour had already stripped to the waist and was standing barefoot in the dusting of snow that had fallen overnight. He looked unfazed, as comfortable as if he were on a tropical beach. ‘I suppose I am,’ he said, turning his arms in great spiralling loops like an Olympic swimmer warming up. Gilmour’s body was an emaciated, bandylegged leather sack, ribs pressing out against the paper-thin skin of his chest. The fisherman Caddoc Weston, whose body Gilmour now wore, had spent many Twinmoons hauling nets on the Ravenian Sea, and that time had toughened the old man’s flesh into something near-impenetrable, otherwise Steven was sure that Gilmour would have frozen, cracked and collapsed into a pile of jagged pieces right there beside the river.

‘Don’t warm me up right away,’ Gilmour said. ‘I want to see if I can still handle a Winter Festival swim.’

Garec laughed. ‘And if you can’t?’

‘I guess you’ll have to gaff me and sell me at the fish market in Orindale.’

‘With all that meat on you?’ Garec said. ‘A half-bucket of eddy fish and a slimy eel are worth enough copper Mareks to buy a round of beers. For you we’d be lucky to get enough for a loaf of day-old bread.’

‘Trust me, I’ve got it where it counts, Garec,’ Gilmour crowed, puffing out his narrow chest.