Feynard

by Marc Secchia

  Once they were out of earshot, Kevin asked, “What was all that about?”

  Troll-Alliathiune smiled grimly at her companion. “That was one foolish Faun trying to show his bravery by baiting the Troll Captain.”

  “Really? What made him so angry?”

  “I didn’t understand the first insult, I must admit, but after that our precious Akê-Akê told the Troll Captain with anatomical precision exactly what he could do with the bribe he was demanding.”

  A ferociously ugly face glared back at them. “In case you were wondering, you meddling bush-brain, no amount of cajoling would have swayed that monument to stupidity back there. I simply advanced the most expedient method of winning our passage to the Gorge.”

  “Oh, well done. You could have at least warned us.”

  “And have it look staged?”

  “Will you stop speaking Standard?” hissed the Witch. Kevin decided she looked better as a Troll. “There is no telling when we’ll run into more of them.”

  Not very likely, thought the Human, because the waterfall thundering to their right drowned out anything but a shout right in one’s ear. He tried to distract himself from the precarious trail that clung to the gorge’s edge like string tacked to a wall by thinking about the Blight. The trail plunged into the murky depths in a succession of damp-slick loops and rocky furrows interspersed with great, lichen-covered boulders that gave him vivid nightmares about sliding off into the great blue yonder and smashing himself to death on the rocks below. The footing was treacherous. Only the Lurk appeared to progress with ease, although Kevin did catch him glancing over the edge frequently.

  But they did not fall. As afternoon drew in, coming early to the foetid depths as Indomalion drew behind the nearby peaks, they neared the base of the waterfall and looking back in awe at the path they had traversed. Despite the gloom, they began to catch glimpses of the spectacular salt and sulphur formations for which the gorge was famous. The flow of Broadleaf Valley’s waters could now be seen to be jetting through a narrow cleft high above in a single, unbroken white plume that leaped thousands of feet into the plunge-pool below, before bubbling away into the mountains.

  “We should make camp,” said Amadorn. The long descent had been especially hard on him. “It was well done this lighttime to win through to the Gorge. Shadowmoon Keep lies within our reach–by darktime after next, we shall descry its evil silhouette against the darkling roof of our world. We should rest, and make plans.”

  “Aye,” grunted the Faun. “Perhaps these waters may yield a fish for our dinner.”

  “I shall ascertain, good Faun.”

  “Forthwith, noble Lurk. May your paw be swift and true.”

  Kevin’s eyebrows twitched in amusement. Oh, there were certain things about Driadorn’s culture that he could never get enough of, and their fondness for wordiness was one such aspect. It was something of a gentle competition at times. How they vied for supremacy in a subtle dance of wills!

  But he was reminded of Amberthurn’s dire warning about a door that not even Ozark could open, the failures of his experiments released to roam the Keep, an army of Trolls, four elemental Dragons, a ruby key, and an emerald key, and the Magisoul. Was this another test of his wizardry? The Dragon-Magus had claimed that his name was now written on the scroll of wizards. Not for the first time, Kevin wished to quiz the Unicorn on the matter. It was a complete mystery–to Amberthurn as much as to him, judging by his reaction. And what of that mysterious knell that had sounded as he accepted the challenge? What did it mean, since he felt no different and his skills were just as pathetic as ever?

  They unpacked, and made camp.

  So this gorge was supposed to conceal the only known deposits of korialite, that strange mineral which could store magic. Kevin looked about idly, wondering how one would go about finding and extracting it from the native stone. There were no obvious signs of mining operations. The path appeared little-used, save he supposed by Troll patrols combing the neighbourhood for any creature so foolish as to dare the back road to Shadowmoon Keep.

  Raw industrial waste. His mind jumped back, way back, to when they used to live by the canal in Liverpool. Good heavens, he remembered being thrown into that scummy, polluted water as though it were yester-lighttime. Setting the minor issue of impossibility to one side, he supposed it would be a good way for an unscrupulous company to dump their effluent–what better place, or worse, than to quietly lose kilolitres of waste in another world, which had neither hope nor opportunity of fighting back?

  He would not stand by and let Feynard suffer a fate that Earth was surely storing up for itself. They deserved better. Alliathiune and Zephyr deserved better. Kevin touched the Unicorn horn at his belt, vowing quietly to see justice done.

  * * * *

  Anurmar Gorge was so deep it saw only a few hours of sunlight each lighttime. The bottom of the river gorge was deeply shadowed, as warm as a dragon’s intestines, and crawling with Trolls. The river trail was easy hiking, for the most part running along the sandy left bank, but Kevin saw there was a secondary trail higher up, above the waterline. Perhaps the river flooded at certain times of the year, he theorised. The upper trail was much more difficult, but more than once allowed them to hide from oncoming Troll patrols.

  He wished he could wear a clothes-peg on his nose. The river ran thick and foul with detritus from Shadowmoon Keep, and–so he assumed from the occasional half-eaten carcass which floated by–from the Troll hunting grounds north of the Keep. It was also the communal sewer.

  “Troll droppings,” said Akê-Akê, readily helping Kevin identify what he had taken for brown logs floating by.

  “Yuck!”

  They hiked steadily through the morning and into the afternoon, sweating in rivulets, hiding in the abundant caves or behind huge, jagged crystalline formations of salt, sulphur, and other minerals, some of which Kevin estimated at fifty or more feet in height or length. Great flowers of crystals protruded from the sheer rocky walls, catching and throwing back Indomalion’s noontime glare with dazzling force. Rainbows of light refracted all around–carnelian and indigo, turquoise and sapphire, jade and milk-white. The trail ducked beneath crystal bridges and clambered uneasily over great steps of yellowing sulphurous rock, and everywhere around them, Kevin began to sense first as a prickling in his damaged hand, there was a power like electricity in the rocks and the air.

  Just after a short break at noon to share waycrust and sip cautiously from their water gourds, Hunter spotted a huge reptilian bird flying southward carrying a Troll in its talons. It had membranous wings, but a feathered head like an eagle.

  “I mislike that,” muttered Amadorn.

  “One of the Dark Wizard’s creations,” agreed the Faun. “That was no summoning. We should proceed with caution.”

  Later, as Indomalion finally dipped beneath the gorge’s rim, giving respite from the unrelenting glare, they came to a place where bones cluttered the canyon from side to side. The ribs were taller than Snatcher, and the thickness of his thigh.

  “What manner of creature was this?” growled the Lurk, hefting his club purposefully.

  They walked steadily along beneath the backbone until they reached the great head, fully twenty of Akê-Akê’s strides long, and furnished with a thicket of teeth that made Kevin whistle through his teeth.

  “Some malformed Dragon,” suggested the Witch, making a sign against evil. “Look back at the shoulders. There were six wings, three each side–like a swamp dragonfly.”

  With his eyes, Kevin followed the lines of bones, long and thin like fish bones, up the side of the gorge. He shook his head. “Some wingspan. Two hundred feet or more. I wonder if it could even fly? Or if it lived on Trolls, down here in the gorge?”

  Beside him, Alliathiune shuddered. “This is a place of much evil, good Kevin, and–by the Hills! Look at your hand, it’s glowing!”

  Now, in the gathering shadows, Kevin saw that she was right. He raised his blue hand in fascin
ation. “What’s that?”

  “An overload of magic,” Amadorn said. “You’re absorbing magic from all around us. You need to stop that, good Kevin, and discharge the excess into the ground, or into the atmosphere, before it builds up enough to damage you.”

  “As before,” said the Witch. “Can the outlander do any spells?”

  “Great heavens, no. He can’t even make a reading light.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Akê-Akê,” Kevin muttered. “Look, magic doesn’t exist. This is some kind of energy. I suppose it’s just a matter of control and manipulation. Look, if I point my finger like this, I can probably–”

  BOOM!

  Before he knew it, lightning sparked from Kevin’s forefinger and blasted a segment of the Dragon’s skeleton away across the stinking river.

  “Forgot the control bit there, old sprout,” said Akê-Akê, imitating Kevin’s accent perfectly.

  Alliathiune stifled a chuckle as the Witch hissed, “Fine, now you’ve alerted every Troll for leagues about of our presence, you snivelling little idiot!”

  “Come,” said Amadorn, crooking his forefinger. “I’ll teach you control.”

  Secretly, Kevin was rather pleased he had learned to do an offensive spell–er, manipulate energy, Jenkins! But his protestations were becoming weak. Soon, by following Amadorn’s patient instruction, he was sparking off little bits of energy here and there. He frazzled patches of sand, burned a patch of grass, much to Alliathiune’s disgust, and zapped the Faun painfully on his hairy backside. Akê-Akê leaped a good foot in the air and threatened dire retribution.

  “Why don’t you clean the river rather?” the Dryad suggested primly. “Or teach him to perfume the reek of this air?”

  “Because too much magic is dangerous,” said the Witch. “It’s a clarion call to that Dark Apprentice that his enemies are approaching. Although–I suppose it might go undetected in this place. So much korialite.”

  “And which rock, pray tell, is korialite?” Kevin asked.

  The Witch bent to pick up a sapphire-blue shard. “This.”

  “It looks like blue glass,” he said, turning the fragment over in his fingers.

  “Until you apply those forces which you don’t believe in,” said Snatcher, “and what happens is of course a mystery to the nonbeliever. But to a magician, this.”

  The Lurk’s violet nictitating membranes flickered almost too quickly for the eye to follow. At once Kevin saw eldritch sparkles appear deep within the stone; golden, silvery, or some colour just in between, he could not tell. They danced at the very edge of his perception, beckoning him with hypnotic power. His blue hand itched sympathetically. But after a moment, the sparkles dissipated and he felt a pang of loss.

  The Lurk rumbled, “Structure matters–your orderly mind should appreciate that, good Kevin. The art of mining korialite lies in finding the perfect shape. And that is surpassingly rare.”

  And was his left hand some kind of korialite? Changed in its fundamental molecular structure? How did it still work if it had changed to crystal or stone? Organic crystal? Kevin pondered this as they marched on. The Druid Amadorn, stumping along beside him on his stick, began to teach him how to dissipate magical energy into the surrounding environment. ‘Better not to absorb it in the first place,’ he cautioned. ‘Be aware of your limitations. Become a channel. Again. Try it again.’

  He was one big lightning-rod. And that did not comfort Kevin in the slightest.

  All that lighttime, as they marched through the fantastic wilderness of Anurmar Gorge, he sparked and sizzled and discharged every few minutes. Amadorn eventually gave in to Alliathiune’s incessant nagging and taught him the rudiments of cleansing the river–well, boiling it first, then throwing waterspouts about, and after that, he began to grasp the process.

  Come evening the company withdrew to a sandy cavern hidden behind a cluster of huge granite boulders which must have tumbled down into the gorge at some time in the distant past. Because of the cramped quarters, the Druid, the Witch, and the Faun stepped outside to discuss offensive and defensive tactics–how best to utilise and combine their different talents. Snatcher decided the back of the cave was the place to scratch an itch between his shoulders, while Kevin badgered Alliathiune into teaching him how to speak Dryadic. Hunter pulled out a whetstone and began to sharpen her arsenal.

  Later, the Witch removed their disguises. “More Trolls in the morning,” she smiled grimly, but added unexpectedly, “even uglier than before, if I can manage it!”

  Kevin stared. The Witch had made a joke?

  He slept, but very poorly. The magic kept discharging from his hand, even while he dozed, and it jolted him every time. Eventually Kevin pushed himself to his feet with a groan. His companions were all sleeping like babies, except for Akê-Akê, who had taken the second watch.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Hurts too much,” said Kevin, wringing his hand. It did hurt–maybe this signalled the return of sensation to his hand? “Where’s Snatcher?”

  “Lurking down there,” the Faun pointed. He pushed Kevin’s hand down. “By the Hills, will you point that weapon elsewhere? I saw quite a flight of those birds earlier. They must like Troll meat.”

  “Each to their own.” He sat next to the Faun. “Strange place, wouldn’t you say, old chap?”

  “Evil,” said the Faun.

  Kevin gazed upriver. Shadowmoon Keep was still out of sight. Two more lighttimes, Amadorn reckoned. Hmm. But the water was not as still as he imagined; just look at those boulders breaking the flow, visible in the eerie radiance emanating from a few of the crystals. Moving boulders? No, that was … Kevin’s throat closed up; he produced a sound between a cough and a gargle.

  “Good outlander …”

  “There!” he squeaked, finally.

  Huge tentacles came writhing out of the river, a ticket of them, each armed with a fat-lipped, sucking mouth. Before the Faun could even scramble to his feet a half-dozen or so mouths plopped down on Snatcher and suctioned themselves eagerly onto his back, shoulders, and arms. The creature began to drag the Lurk to the river. Snatcher bellowed in fury. His spiked club rose and fell with meaty smacks, but the tentacles, perhaps having detected live prey, swarmed down on him now and attached themselves to anything that moved–even nearby rocks, Kevin saw, which were quickly spat out again. Despite his great strength, the river creature inexorably dragged the Lurk toward the water.

  “Awake! Help!” Kevin yelled, even as the Faun sprinted away through the boulders. And then he ran after Akê-Akê.

  Kevin Jenkins had clearly learned one thing on Feynard–madness. He dashed between the boulders, careening painfully off one, but his heart thudded in his ears and his legs moved with a will of their own. All he knew was that his friend was in danger.

  The beast heaved Snatcher off the ground. Struggling furiously, the Lurk employed his club in short, circumscribed arcs. Kevin heard him burbling away in Lurkish; a swamp-dweller spell that would hopefully effect his release. Akê-Akê danced about like a dervish, swiping at the tentacles with his mace. One knocked him over. He howled and writhed as it latched onto his posterior.

  Quick! Kevin gathered his power, as Zephyr had once taught him, and tried to discharge a lightning-bolt toward the Faun. But it was too weak. The flesh sizzled briefly before his fire was spent. A Druid’s bolt tore the darkness apart, flashing jaggedly across his vision, blasting a clutch of tentacles into gobbets of meat. Snatcher dipped and smacked against a boulder. Tentacles latched onto him with renewed vigour. Kevin saw a beak-like mouth above the water’s dark surface. Again! He focussed every ounce of concentration on Akê-Akê. ‘Bar of soap,’ he thought, suddenly. From a height of ten feet or so, the Faun landed flat on his face. Brilliant.

  Maybe he could do the same to the Lurk?

  But with Snatcher now rising above the river and that mouth, now was not the time to grease his path down the creature’s gullet. “Very well, Jenkins,” he murmured.
“Time to take a Kalladon’s charge on the chest.”

  Only, he wasn’t as big and tough as a Lurk.

  Drawing a deep breath, Kevin summoned power from his surroundings. Unfortunately, that was exactly the same instant that the Druid unleashed another of his titanic lightning strikes. Carefully concentrating on channelling energies through his ruined hand, Kevin found himself swamped by a vast charge. He instinctively released the power before it consumed him.

  A blast shook Anurmar Gorge. The concussion cracked and severed crystals, echoed off the high cliffs, and dislodged boulders to thunder down into the river below. Dust exploded around Kevin. Something struck his cheek. He remembered no more.

  * * * *

  When Kevin came to, he found himself sitting propped up against a couple of backpacks. Someone’s cloak had been rolled up and placed behind his neck. He felt as though he had indeed run into a Kalladon–or a Lurk–and groaned, “What hit me?”

  “Half of Anurmar Gorge,” said Alliathiune, so close that her breath brushed his cheek. “Hold still, hero.”

  “Mighty High Wizard,” Akê-Akê corrected.

  “My grateful thanks to you,” rumbled Snatcher, who sat so as to block the entrance of their cavern. Someone had lit a fire. “You saved me investigating the digestive system of that creature.”

  “The Lurk might otherwise have come to a sticky end,” punned the Faun. “Kissed to death by a freshwater octopus–or whatever that thing was.”

  Kevin peered past Alliathiune’s cheek at those of his companions he could see. Her face was close, just a few inches away, as she focussed on cleaning out a cut above his cheekbone, near his right eye. She had an endearing way of biting her tongue when she concentrated. Oh, just look at the Dryadic patterning on her lips! Very fine, intricate whorls decorated the delicate rondure of her lips–phew. Was the cavern hot or was he just imagining it?

  “Better that than kissing your behind, good Faun,” the Dryad replied, and the upward quirk of the corners of her mouth made his heart quirk upward too.