Rob Scott - Lessek_s Key

‘Two days from now – but it will take two days to get down there.’

‘And when do we report for duty?’

‘Funny you should ask.’ Hoyt glanced at Churn. ‘We’re hired from dawn tomorrow – I gather we’ll have quite a few crates of vegetables to load.’

‘Grand,’ Alen said wryly. ‘At least it’ll keep us warm. Let’s go and find Hannah; we’ve plans to make.’

‘You think it’s safe?’ Garec stuffed the last of his belongings into a saddlebag.

‘Of course,’ Mark said. ‘Steven said it was, and I don’t have any reason not to believe him – anyway, didn’t you hear it screeching all night? It didn’t sound especially healthy to me.’

Garec shivered. ‘The sounds of it dying – those coarse coughs, like barks, were so unnerving I could hardly sleep. Just when I thought it was dead and was finally going to lie still, it started up again.’

‘Steven said he did something so that the almor couldn’t escape, then it was just a matter of following it up into the hills,’ Mark said. ‘Even with the staff to keep him warm, it can’t have been much fun hiking back with no coat or sweater.’

Garec looked at Steven, asleep beside the fire in the great hall. When he came in earlier that morning, wet, cold and worn out, he’d just assured them they would be safe going down to the stables to check on the horses, then he curled up in the tapestry they’d been using as a rug in front of the fire and promptly passed out. Now, with both sorcerers sleeping off the rigours of the night’s work, Mark and Garec were left to make preparations for the journey south.

They probably wouldn’t travel far before stopping first, most likely in the village at the bottom of the valley, where there was at least one decent inn. Garec, folding blankets as tightly as he could, started to imagine a wooden table piled high with winter delicacies – gansel stew, thick sauces, fresh bread – followed by a long night’s sleep in a comfortable bed – until Mark interrupted, shattering his fantasy.

‘Do you want to take the rest of this down there, or will you wait for me?’

‘I’ll wait,’ Garec replied. ‘Together we can make it in one trip.’ He stood and stretched, reaching for the buttressed stone ceiling until he felt his muscles loosen. He had lost weight since leaving Estrad; he shuddered to think what his mother would say when she saw him. He hadn’t been especially large before setting out from the orchard that grey morning; but he imagined he now looked like one of Malagon’s wraiths. Garec promised his absent parent he would spend an entire Moon eating if he ever saw the end of this business and returned home.

Both Garec and Mark were looking forward to leaving the Larion stronghold; they had spent much of the past twenty days or more idling the time away while Steven and Gilmour worked. Garec noticed Gilmour never opened Lessek’s spell book, and though Steven flipped through the pages from time to time, it wasn’t that often, so it appeared that whatever magic the two men hoped to employ in their ultimate battle with Nerak, it would only come from the hickory staff, the Windscroll and Lessek’s key.

With little else to do, Garec and Mark had explored the Larion library, investigated all the decent vintages in the wine cellar – careful not to step in or near anything that might be damp – and had spent many avens perfecting a game Mark called Larion Golf, something he developed to take his mind off Rodler’s death. He couldn’t help feeling guilty, thinking the almor had been waiting for him specifically, but eventually he realised the demon wasn’t actually choosy: it wanted them all dead.

After a sleepless night agonising over his treatment of the smuggler, Mark took himself in hand. He called Garec over and spread a large piece of parchment out on the floor beside the fireplace. The parchment was covered with crosses, arrows and circles, and near the top were the words Larion Golf, The Front Nine, Par 27. He read it out for Garec, who couldn’t decipher the loops and whorls of the foreign script.

‘This, my friend, is how you and I are going to practise archery without boring ourselves to death,’ Mark said proudly.

‘What do those words mean?’ He ran a finger across the top of the folio.

‘Shoot straight and win drinks.’

‘My kind of game, then,’ Garec laughed. He studied the parchment, recognising it now as a crudely drawn map of the palace, from cellar to towers. ‘How do we play?’

Mark set up a course of nine holes of archery golf. Each had a tee, a series of wooden targets to hit from a particular spot at a particular angle, and a difficult, near-impossible final shot, through masonry cracks, lattice windows or stone crevices.

He’d worked out a tally system too: they teed off together, took three shots per hole, and counted once for every time a bowstring snapped. If their arrow reached each of the interim targets, and then embedded into the final target without bouncing off, deflecting, or missing entirely, it was scored par for that hole. Every time one of the competitors had to draw and fire again – either at an interim target or at the final mark – he had to add one shot to his final tally.

At the end of nine holes, the winner got to wait by the fire while the loser went, alone, into the wine cellar to fetch whatever vintage the winner requested. It was up to the winner to decide whether or not to share the wine, but every time Garec won – and of course he won every time – he graciously split the wine. In Garec’s opinion, Mark had earned the drinks simply for creating Larion Golf. Garec had never known how much fun shooting an old palace full of arrows could be.

Now he picked up Mark’s quiver and checked the contents. There were few arrows left with decent tips and many had damaged fletching. ‘We have to get you some new shafts and tips,’ he said. ‘And I need to teach you how to repair these.’

‘No laughing, Wonder Boy,’ Mark smiled. ‘Just because you’ve spent your whole life practising doesn’t mean you get to laugh at the beginner when he narrowly loses in heated competition.’

‘You never finished the course within six shots – and just look at these arrows! It looks like you clipped every stone in the place.’

‘I said, no laughing.’ Mark took one of the arrows and examined it; he grimaced when he saw how badly the tip had eroded.

‘I am joking,’ Garec said. ‘Most great archers need fifty Twinmoons to learn what you’ve learned in one; you’re an outstanding shot.’

‘But I’m not you.’

‘No one is me, Mark.’ Garec’s voice dropped. ‘I have-’

A special gift.’

‘If that’s what you want to call it, fine.’

‘I still don’t know how you do it.’ Mark said, ‘and the more I learn, the more in awe I am. Like those shots through the lattice window: they’re impossible. I didn’t make one. You never missed.’

‘I’m not just an archer,’ Garec said. ‘I’ve moved beyond that. My bow is more like a part of me – and you’ll be that good some day.’ He was confident Mark would become one of Eldarn’s great archers. ‘You have a natural affinity for it.’

‘For killing? I would never have thought that about myself.’

‘I meant for archery,’ Garec corrected. ‘Killing is something altogether different.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You will.’

Mark diverted to a safer topic. ‘So what do I need to fix these up?’

Garec laughed. ‘How about a whole new quiver full of decent shafts? These are all a mess. You won’t get one straight shot out of the bunch. It was a great game, though.’

‘That it was,’ Mark said. ‘Can we get fletching and tips in the village down here?’