by Rob Scott
Steven twisted onto his stomach, lifted his head and managed a real breath, then another. He managed to avoid being crushed by a skeleton of logs still lashed together, maybe the frame for a thatched roof, ripped from the top of a Falkan farmhouse.
Then he was beneath the surface again, tumbling backwards and waiting for the impact that would knock him senseless. Part of him continued to kick and thrash, fighting a madman’s battle, while the rest of him floated, fluid and graceful, watching the devastation unfold and witnessing the carnage in its wake. He didn’t know if the magic was somehow granting him a welcome feeling of distance from the nightmarish cyclone in the centre of the wave but he did summon enough clarity to regret that he had come so close to finding Hannah, only to die at his best friend’s hand.
He stretched out, arching his back and trying to knife through the water like a human surfboard. It was surprisingly effective, and in that moment’s grace, he folded his hands over his face, covering his head while waiting for the lights to shut off.
They didn’t. The tea colour of the surface water – bright enough to give him hope that he might kick hard with his good leg and get free – began to dim. He wasn’t sinking; the surfboard strategy was keeping him afloat, but it was growing dimmer… something was coming down on him. Steven didn’t know whether it was the crest of the wave, finally breaking, or part of the sailing vessel he had seen somersaulting along the watery ridge moments before, but it was large enough to cast a shadow over everything around him. If it was the ship, he would be broken, but if it was the wave itself, he would be dragged along the riverbed and his skin peeled away in an Eldarni version of what Mark liked to call macadam rash.
Gambling that the ship might not crush him to pieces in deeper water, Steven tried to bend his body into a makeshift rudder, to catch the current and force himself towards the bottom, and perhaps to safety. It didn’t work. The current was too unpredictable for him to do anything more than ride it out. He continued to slam into branches and rocks, felt stones and dirt pelt him in a hundred places at once: his face, hands, neck and back, as he waited for five tons of Falkan schooner to come slamming down on him from above.
He rolled into a ball, tucked his head down, filled his lungs and waited, wondering in a desultory manner if Garec and Kellin had survived, and if he would ever find Gilmour again.
It was some time later when he awakened.
What’s broken?
The world came into focus, as light and colour emerged from behind the curtain of hazy grey and blurry black. Eldarn repositioned itself around, under, above and beside Steven Taylor. He was lying in a shallow puddle of mud and cold river water. Fearing to exacerbate his injuries, he didn’t move.
Tibia and fibula, broken; they must be. Head hurts. What’s the head, anyway? Cranium. That’s it, your pointy little head, dummy. That feels broken, too, maybe a hairline crack. Shoulder’s badly scraped… a pound of flesh? Take two; they’re small… but intact, and my back’s all right.
He snaked a hand down his thigh. I can’t have broken this leg twice in four months; I just can’t. He pulled his hand back. Later. Check it later.
Now, what hurts?
That one was easy: everything.
Take your time; let’s see what you remember. What hurts? Ulna, radius, coccyx… that’s your arse, for everyone in the cheap seats, thank you very much… both clavicles, ribs on the left, ribs on the right, and the knee bone, the patella, feels like it is connected to the shoulder bone, which feels like it’s still connected to the grille of a passing garbage truck. That’s it. That’s all I know, good for probably a D+ on your average biology exam.
Lying still, he tried to focus on anything but the fact that he might have rebroken his leg. Without lifting his head, he endeavoured to take in as much of Eldarn as he could from his current vantage point beside what remained of the Medera River.
He could see a rock, as big a small truck, resting on the razed, muddy ground as if it had been deposited there by a fast-moving glacier. There were countless uprooted trees, lying in myriad ungainly positions throughout the clearing as if they’d been tossed about. If this was a clearing. It was probably a forest until five minutes ago.
The smell of decay found him, tickling the back of his throat. He didn’t want to vomit; he breathed heavily through his mouth for a few seconds, until he was more accustomed to the aroma of upside-down river. It was like autumn, the smell of death and decomposition, but autumn had a way of being delicate about it, of mixing its scents with more pleasant aromas: mulled wine, ripe fruit, mown hay, and wood smoke. This was just the opposite: the hegemonic smell of shit and rotting earth.
Mud and silt coated everything, as if the world had been hastily slathered in a quick coat of something muck-brown, foetid. It was cold now, despite the lingering effects of his warming spell, and he knew he would either need to concentrate enough to recast the magic, or get to his feet and find someplace to dry out.
He could hear the river trickling by somewhere behind him. He guessed he was facing north, lying perhaps two hundred feet from the riverbank. The sustained thunder had passed, even its echoes, and Steven closed his eyes and listened for a moment to the rhythmic babble as the Medera rediscovered its former self and wound its more familiar route towards Orindale. There was no sign of Garec, Kellin or Gilmour, no sign of any of the horses, and no sound of anyone shouting for help… just the river, and the same light breeze he had felt that morning.
Steven closed his eyes. Despite the cold, he might have slept for a few minutes, until the slurp, drag and slurp sounds of something large and broken being dragged through the mud finally roused him. He rolled, with surprising ease, onto his back and lifted his head. It took a moment for everything to make sense; the land looked like it had been bombed. Then, across the mudscape, he saw the grettan, a big female – not nearly as large as the creature that had attacked him in the Blackstones, but a muscular and dangerous animal, nevertheless. She had sustained a serious injury to her back during the floodtide and was dragging her hind legs, grunting as if in pain. The creature’s fur was matted, covered with mud. She bared her teeth with each step, but it was more a show of pain than any real hostility.
‘You planning to eat me?’ Steven pushed himself up. ‘Huh? Eat me and then rest somewhere while you heal?’
The grettan growled something threatening; she hadn’t expected Steven to be alive, never mind capable of mounting a defence.
‘I have bad news for you, sister,’ Steven said. ‘You’re screwed. That’s not going to get better; you’ve got maybe a day or two left, and I wouldn’t recommend any dancing in your condition. So what happened, Dorothy? Someone drop a house on you? I think they dropped a ship on me.’ Steven focused his thoughts inward and brought the magic forth in a tightly woven spell. He thought about just stinging her, driving her off somewhere to die on her own, but that would take time. If there were healthy grettans about, the end for her would be ugly. Instead, he decided to finish her here. ‘Sorry about this, my dear, but it’s for the best.’
He lashed out at a spot between the grettan’s forelegs. The spell slammed into the creature, ripping her apart in a hailstorm of bloody fur and sinew. Steven watched as the animal’s tongue lolled from what was left of its mouth, poking its pink tip into the mud.
‘Nicely done.’
Gilmour. Sonofabitch.
‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling up to a bit of magic. You must be relatively whole, and if you’re not entirely ready for the winter chain-ball tournaments, you’re at least strong enough to sit up and work a spell or two. That’s a relief.’ He pointed towards the grettan’s remains. ‘She was planning on an early lunch, wasn’t she?’
Dragging a leg himself, a bloody piece of cloth over one eye, Gilmour, masquerading for the moment as a Malakasian soldier, made his way across the mud.
‘You’ve got nine lives, old man.’
‘Pissing demons, I’ve got more than nine, Steven. I must’ve us
ed nine up since I met you.’
‘I’ll try to take that as a compliment.’
‘Are you broken and battered?’
‘Am I?’ Steven shrugged. ‘The verdict isn’t in on that yet, but so far, I think I need a new head, new leg, new arse, a new set of tyres and a couple of gallons of paint.’
‘Oh, good. Is that all? I was worried.’ He sat with a sustained groan. ‘Actually, I think there’s a place just up the road where we can get all those things.’
Steven suppressed a chuckle. ‘Don’t make me laugh; my ribs hurt.’
‘Sorry.’
‘How about you?’
‘Cuts, scrapes, abrasions in embarrassing places and some damage to my hip, but I’m betting you can fix that.’
‘I’ll need a box of Band-Aids and a couple of quarts of hydrogen peroxide. Any broken bones?’
‘A dislocated finger, but I took care of that before I came to find you.’ Gilmour held up the swollen knuckle. ‘Let me see your leg.’
Steven indicated his calf, the same leg that had been nearly bitten off in the Blackstones, the same leg that had tripped him up in the landfill outside Idaho Springs, where Lessek’s key had been buried. ‘It’s numb. The cold helps.’ He ran his hands along either side of his knee and down. ‘Actually, it doesn’t feel…’ He stopped, then tried to bend it. It complied, with only a twinge of muscle cramp. ‘Holy shit!’ he cried, looking enormously surprised.
Gilmour smiled. ‘You used the magic?’
‘No, not here, not since I woke up here – oh, I did! It was right as the wave was swallowing me up; I just let fly with whatever I had inside me. I called it up and it blasted out into the water. I didn’t think it did-’
Gilmour finished his thought. ‘It did. That’s good. It kept you relatively safe.’
‘I don’t feel relatively safe.’ He rubbed one of several lumps that had welled up on the back of his head.
‘Imagine where you would be right now without it,’ Gilmour said.
‘You’re right,’ Steven agreed, ‘my leg would have been broken, at the very least, and I suppose I would have ended up drowning… oh, shit, what about Garec and Kellin?’
‘I haven’t seen them,’ Gilmour said quietly.
Ignoring his aches and pains, Steven pulled himself to his feet, then helped Gilmour. ‘We need to look for them; they could be lying anywhere, injured badly, dying-’
‘We’ll look for a day or two,’ Gilmour sighed, ‘but then we’ll have to move on. We can’t forget where we’re going, or why.’
Steven grudgingly agreed. ‘We keep to our schedule: twelve days from now, we need to be on the Ravenian Sea, off the mouth of that fjord. I watched them get swept up by the wave, but they were much further north than I was; they might have tumbled around for a bit and come out just fine.’
Gilmour didn’t seem hopeful. ‘We’ll attempt a crossing in Mark’s skiff if they’ll don’t manage to meet us with a vessel.’
‘But that will mean using-’
‘I know.’
‘But he’ll sense us coming-’
‘I know.’ Gilmour frowned. ‘There’s nothing else we can do.’
‘Shit.’ Steven opened his tunic and checked his shoulder. It was deeply scraped and bloody, but once clean, it would heal over.
‘You saw the remains of that schooner riding the wave before it crashed over us?’ Gilmour asked. ‘It was too big for this river, certainly this far east.’
Steven paled. ‘You mean it came all the way from Orindale? But that would mean that Mark…’
‘Right again,’ Gilmour said. ‘Even if Garec and Kellin reach the city, they may not find much in the way of seagoing transportation available.’
Steven wiped his eyes and swept the wet hair off his forehead. ‘So it may be just you and me. Where’s the spell book and the portal?’
‘I hope they’re still tied to my saddle. I caught a whiff of them from over there.’ He pointed, then added, ‘I don’t think it’s very far. I was on my way when I stumbled on you and your ladyfriend.’
‘All right,’ Steven said, ‘let’s go.’
‘First,’ Gilmour said, grabbing hold of him, ‘I need you to think about fixing my hip.’
‘I don’t know anything about hips, Gilmour.’
‘Sure you do,’ he replied, ‘you fixed Garec’s lung, didn’t you? You kept your own bones from breaking.’
Steven was confused. ‘But they were moments of- well, heightened emotion, really. I just took what I knew about physiology and infused it with-’
‘Exactly,’ Gilmour said. ‘Where do you think new spells come from? Why do you think we spent all that time in your world? Collected all those books? Sponsored research and medical teams from Sandcliff for all those Twinmoons?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Think about the magic you’ve done, the crafty spells, not the bombastic stuff.’
‘Yes, I remember, “Explosions aren’t magic”.’
‘Good. You’ve been paying attention. But think about how you managed to heal Garec, to neutralise the acid-cloud, to find and defeat the almor, to keep yourself warm beneath the water, to keep yourself free from the need for oxygen for so long. There is a common denominator for all those spells, Steven.’
‘What’s that? Knowledge?’
‘Of course. The knowledge and experience you have of anything, human lungs for example, impacts the power you bring. It’s how we used to generate common phrase spells, the complex spells called via a series of common phrases in their incantations. Those spells weren’t constructed because their incantations were similar; their incantations were derived because their etiologies, their origins and impacts overlapped: they had common effects, because they were based on overlapping fields of knowledge or research.’
‘But I’ve tried to operate out of compassion…’
‘And your magic is powerful when you’re compassionate,’ Gilmour assured him, ‘far more powerful than anything I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been at this for some Twinmoons. Remember what happened when you handed the hickory staff to Nerak; even I doubted you.’
Steven sighed. ‘All right, I’ll try it. Let me see your hip.’
‘That’s the spirit, my boy. Fix me up; I might have a race to run later today.’
‘Wait a moment.’ Steven looked up at his friend. ‘Why don’t you fix it?’
‘I don’t know how to.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Maybe.’ Gilmour smiled. ‘I want to see you do it. You’re the sorcerer, Steven. I’m just an old teacher, and we still don’t know if Mark can detect your power. Nerak certainly couldn’t.’
‘Grand, a physiology test.’
‘Don’t think about it that way.’
‘How should I think about it? As a Larion magic test? At least I passed physiology!’
Gilmour laughed and Steven scolded him to hold still. He examined the injury, then asked, ‘So Nerak was the one who put all the common phrase spells together?’
‘Many of them, yes.’
‘I would have thought it was Lessek who did that.’
‘Well, Lessek built the foundations which Nerak – all of us – were able to build on, that’s true, and Lessek summoned and created magic. He called all the magic in the known universe into the spell table; it was an impressive and powerful feat. What Nerak did was to refine and enrich the Larion magic, to expand it through research and knowledge – just like you’re doing now.’
And he did it through common phrase spells?’
‘Amongst other things, yes.’
‘The same spells he eventually used to destroy the Larion Senate?’ Steven felt around Gilmour’s hip joint with his fingertips.
‘Some of them, yes. But for a long time, Nerak’s resources went beyond hatred and destruction. He was a powerful asset to the Senate. How’s it going?’
Steven said, ‘You dislocated the joint, similar to your finger, but this joint is much bigger and a dislo
cation here involves a good deal more tissue damage. The bones are back where they belong; that probably happened when you were tumbling about, it popped out and then popped right back in. But the damage is to the muscles and connective tissue holding the whole works together. You can’t play sports for twenty years and not see a few of these, so you’re in luck this time. Just don’t come to me with a case of lung cancer or anything.’
‘Not to worry.’
‘The way you smoke, you might surprise yourself.’
‘Just heal me so we can be on our way, please.’ As he felt the familiar tingle and itch of magic at work beneath his skin he closed his eyes and tried to remain still.
Steven went back to his previous subject. ‘So how long before the fall of the Larion Senate was Nerak generating the spells that eventually became his undoing?’
Gilmour stared at a spot in the distance. He answered quietly, ‘I have no idea, Steven, but I fear it was a long time.’
‘So he might have found critical bits of what he needed while visiting Earth?’
‘I’m almost certain he did.’
‘And he might have experimented with spells to desecrate or destroy long before he brought them to bear against his own brotherhood?’
‘Again, I’m sure he did.’
‘Why didn’t he kill you earlier?’
‘He didn’t kill me at all; I’m standing here right now.’
Steven laughed, and a bit of magic slipped from his finger to lance through Gilmour’s thigh. As he winced, Steven apologised. ‘Sorry, sorry. I was distracted. Sorry.’
