by Rob Scott
Mark’s watch read 11.22 by the time he reached the upper end of the loose gravel slope. He found two solid rocks on which to brace his feet and shouted to Brynne, ‘I’m going to lower a tree down to you. Grab on with all your strength and don’t let go. I’ll pull you up.’
There was no answer.
‘Brynne,’ he called into the night, his heart racing, ‘Brynne, take hold of the tree. All you need to do is walk up the slope. It’s much easier climbing up here.’
‘I’ll try,’ he heard her answer weakly, ‘but you are well past the three.’
‘I’m sorry, but I am here now, and I’m going to get you to safety. This tree was tougher than I expected.’ He braced himself, then yelled down again, ‘Sallax, you hang on. I’ll send this back in just a moment.’
‘I can wait,’ Sallax shouted back.
Mark lowered the tree trunk-first, fearing Brynne’s hands might slip on the fragile green boughs near the top; he removed his tunic and wrapped it round the top to ensure his own grip held fast.
He still couldn’t feel Brynne’s weight and was about to call when she shouted up the slope, ‘Mark, it doesn’t reach.’
‘Son of a pregnant, mother-humping bitch!’ he cried into the crevasse, then, thinking quickly, pulled the tree back up the hillside. ‘Hang on, I’ll send it right back.’ Resting the tree beside him, Mark removed his boots and stripped off his jeans. Pulling his sweater off as well, he tied the sweater sleeves to the legs of his jeans and secured the jeans to the tree with his belt. ‘I hope to God this holds,’ he prayed in a whisper, then added, ‘and I hope that godforsaken monster doesn’t kill me here in my boxers.’
This time his makeshift rescue line reached and he soon found himself hauling Brynne up the slope, heaving with all his might. When he pulled her up beside him, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him long and hard on the lips. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief and ran his hands through her thick hair and across the supple skin of her face: he had wanted to touch her for days now.
They might have taken things further had Sallax not interrupted from below. ‘Hello? I’m still down here,’ he called crossly. Mark wasn’t sure if he had seen them kissing, no matter how fiercely he burned for Brynne, this wasn’t the time.
‘Jesus, Sallax,’ Mark exclaimed and lowered the tree once again. The big man was much heavier than his sister and Mark slipped twice, almost pitching headlong into the ravine. Once Sallax was safe, Mark retrieved his clothes and let the tree fall down the slope. They watched as it disappeared from sight, then heard it strike the trail far below. No one said anything, though all three wore a look of great relief.
As he pulled on his jeans, Mark caught Brynne watching him by the pale light of the Eldarni moons. He flushed, and fastened his belt before pulling on his sweater. The stolen tunic, now ripped to shreds, was tossed into the darkness.
‘Follow me up this slope,’ he told the others. ‘It isn’t far and there are solid rock footholds all the way to the trail.’
When they finally reached the safety of the path, they collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily. Sallax reached over and clapped a strong hand on Mark’s forearm. ‘That was well done, very brave. You saved us all.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ Mark replied. As an afterthought, he added, ‘We were there a long time. Did either of you hear anything of Versen passing us along the trail? I didn’t.’
Brynne’s breath caught in her throat. She hadn’t thought of the woodsman since fleeing the campsite. ‘Lords, do you think we lost him?’
‘I guess we’ll find out tomorrow, when we get off this mountain. That almor leaves behind the barest remains of its victims, but if it took Versen, there should be enough left for us to identify him,’ Sallax said, putting into words what they knew, but were hesitant to say out loud. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘right now we have to worry about ourselves, and the others up there-’ he pointed up at the wide, flat area atop the mountain. ‘They have no idea that thing is coming.’
‘Mark, can you get us up there by dawn?’ Brynne was worried. ‘I mean, we can’t go up the hillside again.’
‘I can get us there,’ he answered, ‘but we’ll never make it by dawn. We have to risk the trail.’
‘So be it.’ Sallax punctuated his decision by standing and tossing his saddlebags over one shoulder. He reached down to help Mark to his feet. ‘Like breasts on a sleeping woman?’
Mark grinned. ‘That’s right – but if you’ve never seen any, I’d be happy to explain the concept to you.’
Steven hurried along the trail as quickly as he could without leaving Garec and Gilmour behind. Perhaps he was worried for no reason: maybe his friends had moved their camp to a safer location, inside the canyon and out of the open. But scrambling over rocks along the treacherous pathway, he was certain something dreadful had befallen them; he had a gut feeling he couldn’t ignore. If only he had looked over the cliff sooner; they could have been halfway down the mountain by now. Instead, he’d wasted half the day trying to work out the confusing dreams and visions sent to them by Lessek’s spirit. He still thought his dream was just that: a memory of three friends together at work, nothing more.
Steven actually remembered that day well; that afternoon he had met Hannah for the first time. Myrna was planning to go out with her friends and Howard had sent him to pick up tickets to a football game that Sunday. There had been nothing mystical, magical, or even questionable about that day at work. Steven played it over in his mind, but every time he came to the same conclusion: Lessek had nothing to say to him, and he was happy with things that way.
Reaching the floor of a shallow gully, he paused to allow Garec and Gilmour to catch up. Seeing Garec in his boots, Steven was sorry he had agreed to trade for the day. Garec’s own footwear was made of soft tanned deer hide, but it didn’t compare with his own top-of-the-range boots. It was obvious Garec agreed; Steven could only hope he’d get them back one day.
Gilmour was quiet, almost brooding. Although he hustled along at Steven’s urging, his thoughts were elsewhere, deep within Riverend Palace or buried among the Windscrolls at Sandcliff. He made Steven promise to reflect on his dream in an effort to uncover anything out of the ordinary; Steven agreed he would investigate every single detail, if only they could just hurry back down Seer’s Peak. He needed to know the others were safe – after that, he would be happy to spend days talking about his recollections of Howard and Myrna.
Cresting a short rise in the path, Steven could see eastwards towards the sunlit end of the ridge trail. To his surprise, he saw Mark, Brynne and Sallax climbing towards him. Turning back to Garec and Gilmour, he shouted, ‘They’re here!’
Gilmour looked up. ‘Who is here?’
‘Everyone, I think – well, everyone except Versen. I can’t see him yet.’
The old magician hurried up, using Steven’s bloodstained hickory stick for support. Squinting at their companions rushing along the dangerous ridge, he calmly warned, ‘Get ready. Something’s wrong.’
Gilmour handed Steven the staff and dashed along the path with the speed and agility of a mountain goat. Steven could barely keep pace; Garec, still nursing his sore knee, was left well behind.
Working to keep his footing, Steven cursed Gilmour as they trotted over rocks, loose soil and rotting deadwood. Razor-thin bottlenecks had sheer drops to the forest floor on either side.
‘He’s like a damned Sherpa,’ Steven muttered to himself, angry for believing, even for a moment, that there was anything Gilmour could not do. He lost sight of the old man around an enormous boulder that lay directly on the trail, then, hurrying past it, he nearly ran headlong into him: Gilmour had stopped suddenly on the opposite side and was now standing motionless. About twenty paces away, Mark, Brynne and Sallax, mirroring Gilmour, were standing absolutely still as well, their eyes fixed on one another. No one moved or spoke.
‘What’s happening?’ Steven asked of anyone listening.
‘Quiet,’
Gilmour commanded. ‘It’s the almor. It has found us.’
Embarrassed that he had been unable to keep up with the older man, Steven swallowed hard and endeavoured to catch his breath quietly.
‘Where is it?’ he whispered. ‘Is it hunting us?’
‘It is hunting me,’ Gilmour replied.
Garec had climbed up onto a small pile of rocks some fifty paces behind them; he had his bow at the ready, an arrow nocked and two full quivers at his feet. But even though Steven had never known a bow could be fired with the accuracy and precision Garec showed with every shot, he wasn’t filled with confidence; he didn’t believe traditional weapons would have any effect on the soul-sucking demon.
Still no one moved. It was the world’s largest game of Russian Roulette and no one knew when the gun would fire.
He glanced around at his friends, looking from face to face. Everyone was anticipating the inevitable. When would the gun go off? Whom would the almor choose?
Mark, Brynne and Sallax looked as though they had already been in a war; they were ready to collapse from fatigue. He guessed they had run up the trail overnight to warn him. Versen’s absence must mean the Ronan woodsman had been the demon’s first victim. What had it been like? Would he have felt the almor grab him from beneath the surface of the ground? Or perhaps his consciousness simply faded to black, like Steven’s had when he had his appendix removed.
Versen knew. It had killed Versen and now it was here for Gilmour, and doubtless anyone else who stood between it and the old man. Steven felt fear begin to well up inside him once again, but he forced it back down.
‘No! My dream didn’t mean anything,’ he said to himself. ‘Lessek did not speak to me because I’m done here; I did my job. I showed a surviving Larion Senate member where to find Lessek’s Key. That was my role. I can go home now and God can shit on this place. I can go home and be a coward for ever. I can be a coward who murdered a Seron. That’s goddamned perfect. I’ll be a murdering coward, assistant manager in a small town bank, overqualified and uninspired. That will be my lot. Great.’
Steven had never given much thought to the possibility that his life had evolved the way he allowed it to. He knew only that he was unhappy and disappointed with choices he had made. Choices. That was the crux of his problem. He never made any choices. A fatalist and a coward, he left things to the winds and accepted consequences, jeopardising and abandoning whatever values he may have had to keep his life heading roughly in the right direction.
Versen had not been that kind of person. Versen made decisions in the best interests of his friends and family. He worked to free Rona from the chokehold of Malakasian occupation. Versen was a better person, a stronger person. Steven realised in an instant that he would never be that brave, that compassionate, or that willing to cling to his beliefs no matter what the consequences were.
At that moment, Steven’s fear was overshadowed by rage, not the blind rage he had felt whilst battling the Seron, but a seething, controlled rage spiralling up from twenty-eight years of cowardice.
Without thinking, he strode to the centre of the path, separating Gilmour from Mark, Brynne and Sallax. They all cried out, almost in unison, for him to stand still, but he ignored them. It was clear what he had to do.
Steven began banging the staff against the earth, as if he were summoning the devil from its core.
‘Come out, you demon bastard!’ he shouted. ‘Come out here and fight me!’ He cried out at the top of his lungs, as if anything less would mitigate the moment, ‘Show yourself, you chickenshit tapioca nightmare. I’ll kick the shit out of you – if you’re not afraid to come out here and take me!’
Mark, watching from a distance, was dumbfounded. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he screamed. ‘It will kill you, Steven!’
He started down the path towards his roommate, but Sallax tackled him from behind, pinning him to the ground. ‘You go and it will kill you both,’ he whispered urgently in Mark’s ear. ‘This way Gilmour will know where the almor lies waiting and perhaps be able to save your friend’s life.’
‘No!’ Mark shouted, but his plea was muffled by the explosion of earth and rock that enveloped Steven as the almor burst once again from the depths of Seer’s Peak.
Blinded momentarily by the eruption of debris around him, Steven held his breath and tried to maintain his footing. The demon had not yet taken him. It towered above him, all around him. His vision was blurred, his hearing dulled by the cloudy fluid of the almor’s mass.
Then Steven realised why he was still alive as the ghastly abomination spoke. ‘We will battle now and you will learn what it means to feel fear.’ The hollow voice rang in his head like the reverberations of an out-of-tune pipe organ.
‘Then you can teach me nothing,’ Steven shouted as he raised the hickory staff. He figured he had one shot before the beast dragged his soul into hell.
‘I will savour your energy for a thousand lifetimes,’ it roared back, but Steven was not listening; he was preparing for his last act of defiance: a mighty swing of the hickory staff he had found in the forest south of the Blackstone Mountains. That swing held all his trepidation and insecurity, all his tendencies to please others at his own expense, all his cowering in the shadows waiting for safe opportunities to be or become Steven Taylor. He held nothing back. He had one strike only and even that would be useless: a whittled section of tree branch had no chance against an ancient, otherworldly demon. He was about to die.
As he unleashed his blow, Steven began to feel his own life force draining into the almor. It was all right. He did not mind, just as long as he had just this one chance to do something for himself, of his own volition.
Against all the odds, it worked. He felt the shaft tear through the milky fluid of the almor, rending it open and spilling its malodorous blood into the dirt of the Seer’s Peak ridge trail. The agonising cry rang in his head like an artillery volley and he nearly passed out at the shock wave.
Falling back, he watched as Garec fired into the creature as quickly as he could draw and release; shaft after shaft passed through the almor’s frame. And as he fell outside the demon’s grasp, Steven felt the blast of Gilmour’s magic slam into the monster, opening the wound further and casting the creature off the cliff and down to the forest below. It screamed inside Steven’s head as it fell, the terrified roar of a god’s fall, an immortal seeing the ash-grey face of mortality.
The force of the almor’s savage grasp tearing itself from Steven’s mind caused him to roll over and vomit repeatedly into the dirt. He felt the creature slam into the rocks below. It was a surprisingly soft thud. Then it was gone.
Steven’s head swam as he fell in and out of consciousness. He had done it. He had challenged and bested the demon. Dazed, he managed a smile – and realised Mark was supporting his head and shoulders. ‘Do not try that at home, boys and girls,’ he mumbled.
Mark laughed, a nervous chuckle to mask his fear and exhaustion. His voice cracked as he asked, ‘You reckless bastard, do you need some water? What can we get for you? Anything?’
He tried to give his roommate a drink from Garec’s wineskin, but Steven shook his head. ‘Need?’ he rambled on, delirious, in English. ‘Need? I need to go home. I need a howitzer, the defensive squad of the New York Giants and a tactical nuclear weapon. We’ll show that Nerak a thing or two.’
Garec leaned down to offer the young foreigner his hand. ‘Can you stand?’
‘Sure, I can stand,’ Steven looked up into the faces of his newfound companions. The relief in their eyes was in such contrast to the stark fear he had seen there only moments earlier, he decided that alone was worth the risk he had taken in summoning the almor to the surface.
‘I can stand,’ he repeated shakily, then passed out on the dusty, rock-strewn trail.
When Steven woke again, it was dark. He rolled over to find Gilmour sitting near a small campfire. Around him, the others slept, breathing the steady rhythm of those who were troubled by noth
ing. As he sat up, he found they were once again camped on the flat surface of the landing. Gilmour waved him over nearer the fire.
‘We’re back up here,’ Steven observed, stretching.
‘It was the safest place for all of us,’ Gilmour replied. ‘Brynne, Sallax and Mark had a long night reaching the ridge-trail. You slept most of the day.’
‘Versen?’ Steven asked, fearing the worst.
‘They’re not sure what happened. No one saw him taken by the almor, but then again, no one saw him along the trail either.’ Gilmour filled his pipe bowl with tobacco. ‘We will return to camp tomorrow morning to see if we can find his remains.’
Steven nodded, then changed the subject. ‘You know that staff is magic.’
‘I do,’ the old man confirmed, ‘but I have no idea where it comes from. It is not familiar to me. It’s not mentioned in any of the scrolls or spells I have studied for the past nine hundred and eighty Twinmoons. It is either very, very old, or essentially brand-new.’
‘Seems strange.’
‘If there’s anything I’ve learned, Steven, it’s that if it seems strange, it’s probably strange.’
‘You should wield it,’ Steven said. ‘Think of how powerful it would be in your hands. You’re the sorcerer, after all.’
‘It would do nothing in my hands, Steven. It chose you.’
‘Chose me?’
‘Of course. We both know there were no hickory trees in that valley. That staff found you, a half instant before you desperately needed it.’ He tossed a big chunk of bark onto the fire. ‘It found you for some reason, Steven, but I don’t know what it is.’
‘Why did it shatter that night but remain intact today?’
‘The power of the magic you wield.’
‘I don’t wield any magic,’ Steven said.
‘Sure you do. We all do.’ He thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Tell me, what did you feel the night you killed the Seron?’
