Rob Scott - Lessek_s Key

Steven struck the water with a bone-jarring splash as the roiling flames passed overhead.

Gilmour gazed across the Falkan fjord; the glassy surface reflected a canvas of black, white and grey. There was no whisper of wind this far inland and the water looked as though it had frozen over in the half aven since the three companions had pulled their boat beneath the trees. The Northern Twinmoon had broken days ago and now two glowing white orbs illuminated the former Larion Senator.

He stretched the old fisherman’s legs towards the campfire, soothing the weary tissues with a thought. If he were like Nerak, he would be enjoying a more youthful body, but Gilmour had only ever taken those in the last few moments of life or the first few moments of death, and although young people died as well, in recent times he had been guided to elderly men. The first had been the logger Gilmour, who stripped and rode naked pine trunks downriver. He’d been called upon to free an especially disagreeable trunk that had become lodged between two submerged rocks. The river had been running low that season, lower than any of them could recall, and none of the woodsmen working the drive had seen the hidden trap before, but the jam it caused stretched upriver for nearly half an aven’s ride. Hundreds of thousands of logs were crushed against the stubborn singleton, enough potential energy to level a small town. Gilmour had been quick about his duties, but as he moved lightly across the jam he caught the toe of his boot on a tiny pine knot, scarcely bigger than a thumbnail, and fell just as the mass of trees broke free.

Finding the old man’s body tumbling along, Fantus had taken him, then clawed his way out from under the logs and, for the benefit of his new colleagues, cursed like a madman at the entire logging industry. As surprised as they were to see him alive, they never doubted it was their longtime friend: they never had any idea Gilmour had died on the river bottom.

He had enjoyed being Gilmour the logger, and had stayed on, riding trees with all the skill and balance of a court dancer. The forest had been a good place to hide from Nerak and his hunters; Gilmour suspected that was why Lessek had led him to the river that morning.

He had been in the logger’s body for nearly eight hundred Twin-moons and Gilmour – Fantus – had nearly forgotten what he had originally looked like before becoming the wiry old man. He shook his head and shrugged at the frozen sea. ‘What does it matter, anyway?’

Now he was getting used to the body of the fisherman, Caddoc Weston. He had been inhabiting it for days now, but had not taken to the new name; he preferred Gilmour. It suited him, even more than Fantus, his own Larion label – what sort of name was that? His mother had certainly never given him that name… for a moment, Gilmour tried to recall his mother. He grimaced with the effort, but a faint swishing sound and a glimpse of a yellow dress was all he could bring back from those days. Two thousand Twinmoons – most of the current Era. He had lived it all, and for his troubles the swishing sound of fabric and a fleeting image of a woman’s yellow skirt were all he had left of his mother.

Caddoc Weston had fallen face-first into a slimy haul of jemma fish while drifting in a skiff, several days south of Orindale, though he died from some sort of respiratory ailment – ironic given his workplace. Gilmour assumed the dampness of the Ravenian Sea had finally caught up with the old fellow. When he arrived, led once again by Lessek, Gilmour, like Versen and Brexan before him, had wondered how such a frail man had found the strength to haul jemma nets alone.

Gilmour had tossed most of the fish overboard, hoisted the skiff’s tiny sail and caught the breezes north into Orindale. Luck and a bit of nefarious espionage had reunited him with his Ronan partisan friends.

As he tried to make his new body more comfortable, he wondered how long he would be in it – and if it would be his last; after all, he and Nerak were moving at a breakneck pace towards their final confrontation. He tossed a log onto the campfire, watched as flames began slowly to devour it and decided that if this was to be the last body he would inhabit in his lifetime, he would make some improvements. With a gesture, he toughened the muscles in the old man’s legs, strengthening the ligaments and tendons. He coated the vertebrae in the scrawny man’s back with a fresh calcium shell and he breathed thick, healthy blood into the worn disks between them. He straightened the fisherman’s posture, healing a tear in the labrum of his right shoulder and curing the arthritis that swelled his joints and made tying his pack painful. Finally, Gilmour sharpened his sight. Now, when he looked across the fjord, he could make out the nearly invisible rise and fall of the sea as it breathed slowly, asleep beneath the twin moons’ nightly vigil.

He adjusted his position against the boat’s unyielding transom, wedging his pack between the small of his back and the sandy ground. Their stolen vessel was tucked under a stand of oak and maple, camouflaged in case the partisans needed to reclaim it. He didn’t imagine their travels would bring them back this way, but knowing there was one exit route left open gave him some comfort. Gilmour enjoyed the feeling of renewed strength in his muscles and stretched out to catch the fire’s warmth on his feet.

Garec and Mark slept. The young foreigner had returned to his position in the bow, despite the fact that the vessel, now beached, was listing precariously to port. Garec had rolled into his blankets and jammed his own pack up against an exposed maple root near the fire. Gilmour had not slept since Nerak had followed Steven through the far portal and into the foreign world, three days past – it didn’t trouble the old sorcerer; he didn’t need that much sleep, but he would have liked to doze here tonight, where there was a feel of autumn further inland.

He shivered involuntarily. Winter would be upon them soon, even here in the flatlands; he didn’t look forward to crossing the Falkan plain with freezing rain and snow at their backs.

He drew thoughtfully on his pipe, dragging the acrid cloud into his lungs; he was waiting for the tobacco to numb his senses and blur his vision. Caddoc Weston had not used tobacco much, but like it or not, he was a smoker now. One little vice wouldn’t kill him, after all. Gilmour clucked; the poor fellow was already dead. It was well worth the headache he knew he would have in the morning. ‘And no magical cures,’ the old sorcerer scolded himself with a cough. ‘You’ll pay for this one just like any hundred-Twinmooner with his father’s pouch.’ Puffing again, Gilmour felt the smoke’s warm caress tickling the back of his throat and he coughed violently. ‘Rutting mothers,’ he grunted, ‘that was a bad one.’

He reached for a wineskin. They didn’t have much left, three or four skins of the Falkan red, that was all. Gilmour promised himself a few sips from this one would be his last for the evening. His throat hurt and his mouth tasted like a sheep-herder’s ash pouch; a few swallows were all he would need. Then he would try to sleep.

As he rooted around behind the transom, his hand brushed across the wool blanket wrapped around the book of Lessek’s writings. He recoiled with a start, then peered around until he found a full wineskin. Why had he left the book there? He hadn’t thought of it, that’s why: the library had been in ruins. Scrolls had been torn to pieces, or burned to ash; others had still been in flames when he woke. His vision had been clouded, and the smoke from Pikan’s explosion had burned his throat.

The pipe smoke drifting lazily into the sky now tasted like that night, acrid yet sweet, the flavour of burned corpses and plague. Gilmour told himself it was just a mistake, though he had known the book was there, and he had the spell to release it. He could have taken the book – forget the Windscrolls – but he could have taken the book, studied its secrets and crushed Nerak’s bones with it. But he had not. He had dropped his broadsword in terror and run screaming and crying until he had struck the frozen ground outside Sandcliff’s ballroom window. And then he had kept running.