Rob Scott - Lessek_s Key

‘Tell me how to free you!’ Gilmour took another step forward and reached out as she gestured towards the hillside. She was trying to show him something, maybe some way to free her from Nerak? He turned and watched the trees as Harren Bonn stepped into the meadow.

‘Oh northern gods,’ Gilmour gasped, ‘not you, too – please, not you.’ He felt his knees buckle and then give way as guilt overwhelmed him.

‘Gilmour!’ someone shouted.

‘Harren, I’m so sorry, I should have been out there with you. I belonged on those steps with you – I told myself I would be the final defence, inside the spell chamber, but that wasn’t true.’

‘Gilmour!’

‘I locked you in that stairwell because I was too terrified to stand with you, I was afraid to die. Harren, if I could go back-’

‘Gilmour, get up!’

A bolt of lighting passed through his body; Steven had struck him with the hickory staff. Shrieking, he sprang to his feet. ‘Damnation, Steven Taylor! I hate it when you do that!’

‘When you are fighting, fight,’ Steven growled.

The old sorcerer was suddenly awake and turned back to his former students in time to watch them change from the beautiful young people he had loved to hideous, ghostly killers. Their faces blurred, melted away, and their mouths fell agape beneath empty eye sockets. It was too late to ward himself magically as they attacked together, but Steven was there at his side, and one slash with the glowing hickory staff sent both tortured souls to the depthless abyss of the Fold.

Steven reeled right and incinerated another of the monsters, then strode back to face Gilmour. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, clapping Gilmour on the back. ‘We never could have anticipated this.’

‘But I don’t know how to fight them,’ the old man said with a shudder.

‘Can’t you see it?’

‘What?’

‘The Fold is open: there, there, and there.’ He pointed to three places around the clearing. ‘Three tears, just like I saw that morning at the dump. That’s where the wraiths are coming through; the bastard’s sending people we knew, hoping it will weaken us.’

‘I can’t see them,’ Gilmour said, straining to make out these rips in the fabric of the world.

‘Then leave them to me.’ Steven swallowed hard. ‘We have to turn the tide. We’ll never beat him if he keeps us on the defensive, because eventually, one of us will slip.’

But Steven knew Nerak was winning, for the fallen Larion sorcerer was forcing him to fight out of anger and hate, keeping him on his toes, striking out at him again and again. He recognised too many of the wraiths he annihilated, almost weeping as he saw friends and neighbours of Jennifer Sorenson, but having to steel himself as he sent them all into the Fold. There was no compassion here as he ripped through their souls, slicing them open and batting the pieces through the blurry mystical backdrop and into the darkness beyond.

He stood in front of Gilmour, protecting his mentor from the wraiths while the old man blasted away at the bone-collectors until the last of them, one eye blinded and dragging two of its jointed legs, retreated into the river and disappeared with the current.

All the while, Nerak-as-Bellan watched from above, casting a spell down on them from time to time which Steven deflected with ease. The girl watched her ranks of wraiths attack endlessly, enjoying Steven’s display of heroism and bravery and marvelling at his determination to live, to protect his mentor and to win the day. Nerak was impressed with the foreigner’s decision to be compassionate, an emotion he had nearly forgotten in the past thousand Twinmoons, and he felt Steven weakening every time he rended these otherwise peaceful, departed spirits.

That made Nerak chuckle. With a wave, he summoned the final three wraiths; these would weaken Steven enough that he would be able to sweep him up and cast him into the Fold alongside all those he had slain. But first, he needed the key.

Bellan jumped nimbly from the boulder as Steven hacked through the ghost of the little girl Nerak had killed in Rona when he needed a body for his trip across the Fold into Colorado.

‘Well done, Steven,’ Nerak said. ‘I’m sure that little one will enjoy an eternity of cold, dark emptiness, don’t you?’

Steven started towards him. ‘I’m-’

‘No, wait a moment, I have something for you,’ Nerak said, raising Bellan’s hand to stop him.

‘No,’ Steven said as he continued towards the girl. No more tricks, no more games, no more keeping us on our heels. It’s time to send you back to hell.’

Bellan shrugged, raising both palms to the sky. ‘Whatever you say, but here they are anyway.’

Steven stopped as Gabriel O’Reilly, the Seron warrior Lahp and the young mother who had carried her baby onto the plane in Charleston came towards him. In his mind’s eye he saw the mother, barely out of girlhood herself, and he heard the baby screaming in his memory, its cries weaving into Nerak’s amused laughter; a polyphony that threatened to drive him insane. Gabriel and Lahp: these were more than just friends, he owed them his life; without them he would have died in Eldarn.

There was no way he would be able to battle these ghosts.

‘Use the staff, Steven, do,’ Nerak chuckled. ‘It’s quite the most impressive spell Fantus has ever worked. He has my compliments. A silent talisman, really, I am impressed. I look forward to using it myself in the near future – in the very near future.’

Steven felt like he had been punched. ‘What did you say?’

Bellan’s face showed a little surprise at the question. ‘I look forward to using your staff when you and old Fantus are gone,’ Nerak repeated.

‘This staff?’

‘That’s the only one here, my friend.’

‘Mark was right about you,’ Steven said, feeling the staff’s power rise in burgeoning waves. ‘Everything he said was right. I just didn’t put it all together until now.’

‘Mark Jenkins? The Eldarni prince? Worry not, little sorcerer. I have plans for him too.’

‘Shut up,’ Steven spat. ‘Lessek told us about your weakness, and Mark was right all along: this is it, this is the best that you can do. A few ghosts, an almor here and there, and maybe a big spell from time to time when you need to wipe out a city like Port Denis, but all told, that’s all the bullets you have in the gun, Nerak. The evil creature that came through the Fold and took you never knew it, because you never knew it. Or if you did know it, you forced yourself to forget.’

Nerak was amused at Steven’s bravery. ‘I am not sure what you are trying to say, Steven Taylor, but you won’t be saying much more-’

‘I am saying that you are a hack, and you always were a hack. The evil that took you believed what you believed about Eldarn, about the Larion Senate, about the Fold, but especially about a second-rate sorcerer named Nerak.’ Now Steven laughed. ‘You don’t understand power, because as a human, as a sorcerer, you never understood mercy, compassion and love. If you did, you would have been a much more powerful dictator. I am tired of you, Nerak, so now I am speaking to the creature that married you, the creature and the master it serves out there in the Fold somewhere. You picked the wrong magician, creature.’

‘Enough!’ Nerak roared; Steven felt like his head would explode with the noise. ‘That was amusing, Steven Taylor, but you are forgetting one thing: I don’t have to be the most powerful sorcerer the lands have ever known. I only have to be powerful enough to defeat you and that sorry milksop you’ve been following these past Twinmoons. With Lessek’s key in my possession, I will open the Fold and realise all the glory of its power and I will rule all the worlds in eternity.’