Rob Scott - Lessek_s Key

Whenever the fire died down, she summoned the barman. She was tired of being cold too.

As she took a long draught from her wine goblet, Brexan felt the warm, dizzy sensation of incipient drunkenness wash over her. Her vision blurred and tunnelled pleasantly as she stretched her feet out towards the fire, warming the soles of the seaman’s boots, padded with handfuls of sack-cloth to fit her small feet. The sailor had been paid three silver pieces for his last voyage: he had made the fortuitous – for Brexan – mistake of tucking the coins into his sea bag. With that much silver, Brexan would be able to live comfortably in Orindale for the next Twinmoon, with coin enough for a room and a new pair of boots from a real cobbler, not just some street vendor with lengths of tanned hide and a sewing needle.

Slowly, a plan began to emerge through the comfortable stupor: she would find lodgings; she needed to do that tonight, but there would be plenty of choice. Tomorrow, boots, her first pair since enlisting in the Malakasian Army… and a skirt, a heavy wool skirt, loomed wool, not the ratty homespun she had been wearing for the past Twinmoon. She would linger over the process, trying whatever caught her fancy, and then buying real women’s clothes, from a high-class city shop. If it took all day, that would be fine. She would shop and she would think of Versen and she would end the day here again, here beside this same fire.

And tomorrow evening, she would work out how to find Sallax, and the owner of the merchant schooner moored out in the harbour. Sallax she would talk to. The merchant – him, she would disembowel, then cut his heart out.

Brexan smiled to herself. She had a plan.

Steven pulled the cap down over his ears and wrapped his face and neck in the scarf. Bright sunshine and dry mountain air gave the illusion of unseasonable warmth, and to passersby the hat-and-scarf combination might look a bit excessive, but he had to ensure he was not recognised by anyone. The bus had dropped him off, the only passenger exiting in Idaho Springs, on the east side of town, and there was no way to avoid using main roads.

With nine blocks to go, he crossed a road to avoid a family dressed in matching ski-jackets, then, anticipating a straight shot home through the relatively quiet residential part of town, he nearly ran over Mrs Winter, the elderly woman who owned the pastry shop next to the bank.

‘Oh, geez. Sorry, Mrs W,’ Steven said before he could stop himself, grabbing the surprised older woman by the shoulders in a clumsy effort to keep her from falling to the snowy sidewalk.

Thankfully, Mrs Winter didn’t hear very well. ‘You should watch where you’re going young man,’ she scolded, but Steven was already hurrying away at a run. ‘Young man!’ Mrs Winter cried at his back, ‘young man, that was very rude of you!’

‘Sorry, Mrs W,’ Steven murmured to himself as he paused to catch his breath. He looked up the hillside to where Oh My Gawd Road ran, hundreds of feet above the floor of Virginia Canyon. It was named for the reaction of most travellers: Oh My Gawd Road was still dirt for much of its length, and there were no barriers along the circuitous route to the old mining town of Central City. He and Mark had cycled it once; Steven remembered fondly Mark groaning his displeasure at the gruelling climb to eleven thousand feet. ‘Just for the record,’ he’d rattled through shallow gulps of thin air, ‘I think this form of travel sucks. Next time, we’re taking the bus or a plane or a frigging space shuttle; I don’t care.’

Steven smiled at the irony: if only his roommate had known that day the various forms of travel he would be using in the coming months, he might have allowed himself to enjoy the bike trip. Who knew the pair would be travelling across the Fold, whatever that was, on horseback through the coastal forests of Rona to Seer’s Peak, on foot through the Blackstones, and then drifting through Meyers’ Vale on the Capina Fair?.

He grinned. One day he would drag Mark back up that canyon and into Central City to celebrate with a night at the tables, the city’s main attraction. As his thoughts drifted, he slowed to a distracted walk. Something was tickling at the back of his mind: something was wrong. Travel. What about travel? He turned and stared back up Virginia Street. Mrs Winter was gone, most likely sweeping the snow from the steps in front of her shop by now. Travel. He had travelled; he had come a great distance, though he had no idea how far he was from Eldarn now – a million miles? A few inches?

That wasn’t it, it wasn’t Eldarn. It was South Carolina: he had come from South Carolina and the trip, without real sleep and only a few stops for gas and food, had been as gruelling a journey as the bike ride through Virginia Canyon last July.

What was it? Steven unwrapped the scarf from around his face and drew his first unfiltered breath of Idaho Springs air.

The Larion far portal in his house was closed. Steven stopped dead. He had been so distracted by events at the airport, and hurrying so fast across the United States that he hadn’t thought about where he had arrived: the far portal had to be closed, otherwise he would have come from Eldarn straight to his living room. Someone – and much as he hated the idea, he had to accept it was someone after Hannah, as she was obviously there now – but someone had come into his house and closed the portal. Who would that have been? Her mother, Jennifer? But there had been a pile of unread newspapers on her front lawn; maybe Jennifer Sorenson was in Eldarn too?

But someone had been in 147 Tenth Street after Hannah, because someone had closed the portal, probably by folding up the tapestry. The police? Investigators would have been called, he guessed, maybe several days after the roommates’ disappearance: one of them might have inadvertently closed the portal. Even worse, what if they’d detected the tapestry’s power and taken it away, shipped it to Washington, DC, or to some research facility in Boulder?

He started to run again, breaking out into a cold sweat. Ignoring the chance he might be seen, he pulled the watch-cap from his head and ran a hand through his hair to free the matted strands.

And there it was: 147 Tenth Street – and what Steven saw was far worse than his most hopeless nightmares. The portal had not been taken by the Idaho Springs Police; it had not been checked into evidence and locked in a room in the town hall basement, or shipped to DC, or even sealed in a container and hidden far below ground level in a subterranean basement of a top secret radiation centre in Nevada.

This was worse. Standing on the icy sidewalk in front of 147 Tenth Street, Steven was struck dumb, completely devoid of any idea as to what he should do now.

His house, the small yard at the back, the two-car garage and the fence separating 147 from Dave and Cindy’s place next door were gone.

‘Oh, great pissing demons, Churn, it’s not that high up.’ An exasperated Hoyt patted Churn’s saddle encouragingly.

Churn replied with a series of tentative hand gestures, embarrassment clearly evident in his face.

‘Do you expect us to walk all the way to Welstar Palace?’

With no trace of humour, the burly mute nodded.

‘No,’ Hoyt said, ‘you are getting up there and you are going to ride this horse. Churn, I have seen you overcome obstacles that would kill any normal person. You can’t tell me that riding a horse is going to get the better of you. You, the man who took six Malakasian guards outside that arms warehouse… alone… you are going to give in to a child’s fear of – of what? Heights? Big animals?’

‘Heights,’ Churn signed. ‘And it was seven guards.’ The Pragan rebel tugged distractedly at a leather strap hanging from the open neck of his tunic.