Rob Scott - Lessek_s Key

‘Well, at least you’d have the staff with you,’ Garec explained.

‘Oh sure. Talk about hoping someone else will pick up the bar tab.’ Steven grinned. ‘Here at Sandcliff Wine and Ale, drinking really is hazardous to your health.’

Gilmour, clearly not amused, interrupted again. ‘I hate to be such a killjoy, but get to the point, please, Garec. Where is the spell table?’

‘It’s buried beneath a pile of rocks on the bottom of a river flowing out of the Blackstones into southern Falkan.’ Garec found himself squirming under the scrutiny of a Larion Senate leader, not the kindly gaze of his mentor and longtime friend. ‘I wondered if that might be the place where Eldarn itself would ward the table, but when I heard Mark clarify the part about the gatekeepers, Eldarn’s most ruthless gatekeepers, I knew that had to be it.’

Steven turned back to the text he had scrawled on the wall; he had been staring at it for days, vainly hoping some cartoon light bulb would pop on above his head, or the hickory staff would reveal the truth. Now he nodded. ‘That day on the river, yes. Gilmour, you werewell, dead at the time. We were coming downriver on our raft.’

‘The Capina Fair,’ Mark said, as if the name were an important piece of the puzzle.

‘I went swimming, and managed to get myself trapped at the bottom of the river – something grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Garec came down to help, and soon he was stuck along with me. We used the staff to breathe, sort of, but that’s all it did – we barely got away with our lives.’

Gilmour looked at them. ‘How did you finally break free?’

Steven was quick to answer. ‘I remember this, because it was so odd. I’d been using the staff, blasting away at the river bottom, drilling it with everything I could muster, but it didn’t budge.’

‘Instead, it began to drag us towards this underwater rock formation, Steven by the ankle and me by my wrists,’ Garec said. ‘I thought we were dead. And then it just let go.’

‘Actually,’ Steven interjected, ‘it didn’t – and I’m not certain I’m right on this, but I’ll say it anyway: I believe it had something to do with what I was thinking.’

Gilmour cocked an eyebrow. ‘Go on.’

‘At first I was pounding away, all my frustration and fear blasting into the riverbed, and it was pointless, then I forced myself to relax. We were breathing all right, and I knew that even in the cold, we had a few seconds before we started to lose our senses.’ He looked at Garec, checking he wasn’t leaving out any details. Garec gestured for him to continue.

‘It was then that I thought about our goal, to reach the spell table and to defeat Nerak. I focused on it, concentrating all my will on our quest-’

‘And the staff responded,’ Gilmour said.

‘No,’ Steven shook his head. ‘I never landed another blow with the staff. The riverbed just let us go. Maybe it was a coincidence, but if it wasn’t, then something down there essentially read my thoughts and changed its mind about killing us.’

‘Or it was your own power,’ Mark said. ‘Maybe your own magic was stronger than the staff’s that day.’

Steven didn’t answer; he was still uncomfortable when Mark insisted that he was more than just a conduit for the hickory staff, even though Mark had a legitimate argument.

Gilmour asked, ‘What else do you remember?’

He closed his eyes, trying to recall as much as he could. ‘It was so cold. I do remember those rocks.’

‘It was like a cave,’ Garec agreed, ‘an underground cave, and the sand was pulling us towards the opening. Rutting terrifying is what it was, and I was going in head-first.’

‘It was more than that,’ Steven said, pointing a finger at Garec. ‘He’s right, but it was more than that: it was like a sculpture, a perfectly random, natural, flawed, beautiful sculpture – nothing you’d see in a Florence gallery, but perfectly awkward and clumsily done, as if a passionate idiot had built it out of rocks and sticks-’ He paused, certain he was going to sound foolish. ‘It was like an altar. I even kneeled down in front of it, twice. The second time was when it decided to grab me.’

Garec echoed the text scribbled on the wall. ‘Eldarn itself wards the spell table.’

‘Nerak took it from here and buried it there.’ Steven had not yet said as much, but he agreed with Garec.

‘Why not take it to Welstar Palace?’ Mark asked, ‘wouldn’t it be safer there?’

‘It’s too obvious a hiding place,’ Garec answered. ‘If anyone were ever to figure out how to get into Welstar Palace – a challenge, I admit – the spell table would be there. Burying it beneath an Era’s worth of rock, sand and mountain runoff – who would know where to start looking, never mind how to get it out of there? It’s the perfect hiding place: nowhere.’

Mark nodded reluctantly. It made sense, but there were still holes in the argument. ‘So why did it let you go?’ he asked. ‘If it wasn’t your magic, and if Eldarn itself wards the spell table, why did the riverbed let you go when it read your quest?’

‘No idea,’ Steven said, ‘maybe Nerak has cast some kind of spell that keeps the table under close watch – and maybe the river freed us because Eldarn itself wards the spell table, against its will. I want to believe that Eldarn itself wants us to be successful.’

‘That’s awfully presumptuous of us,’ Mark said. ‘And what of the ruthless gatekeepers? Is that the rocks and the dirt as well?’

Garec said, ‘No, the ruthless gatekeepers are those sunonabitch bone-collectors we met in that cavern.’

‘But that was days later – we were much further down the river. That can’t be what he means.’

‘But think about that cavern,’ Garec said. ‘There were hundreds of thousands of bones stacked up against that wall; where do you suppose they came from? There’s no way that many people just wandered into that cavern: those creatures come out and hunt.’

Remembering the huge eyes he hacked out with his battle-axe, Mark said, ‘They must be nocturnal – but some of those bones were ancient. They disintegrated when we touched them. Those things have been gathering bones down there for ages and ages. The spell table has only been gone for a few generations.’

‘So what?’ Steven said. ‘So they gathered bones for ten thousand generations; that doesn’t stop Nerak enslaving them as his gatekeepers nine hundred and eighty Twinmoons ago.’

Mark conceded the point and threw up his hands. ‘Hey, it beats sitting around here waiting for whomever or whatever is next on Nerak’s list to show up and kill us. What do you say, Gilmour?’

‘Can we find it again?’

‘I know right where it is,’ Steven assured. ‘There’s a mountain above the river with a stand of pines growing right out of the rock, sticking out all over, almost marking every point on the compass. I’ve never seen anything like it before. We can’t miss it.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely. I stared at it for what felt like hours while I was lying there thinking the staff’s magic had run out.’

Gilmour was silent, pacing back and forth across the chamber. He looked too thin, too tired and too old for the challenges that lay ahead. He ran a hand over forehead.

Everyone knew he was wishing he had been with them on the river. How much easier this would be if he had not been such a fool as to go to sleep. How many times in the past five hundred Twinmoons had he done that: fifteen? Twenty, maybe? But thinking he should build up some energy for their trip over the pass the following day, he had rolled himself up in his blankets for an aven or two – and why not? Kantu slept all the time – drunk too, mostly – and no one chided him for it. But the first time Gilmour slept in uncounted Twinmoons, an assassin had come into their camp and driven a knife into his chest, a quick, clean killing. He hadn’t seen the man, though he had known someone was following them. He, one of the most powerful sorcerers in Eldarn, had been tricked by a carnival magician’s cloaking spell, and it had cost him dearly.