The Larion Senators

by Rob Scott; Jay Gordon

  ‘Then you must mean that things have been awkward since you made me keep my head beneath the blankets in that pine grove so you could pee beside the fire, because it was too cold to go and look for someplace private?’

  Hannah buried her face in the pillows and howled. ‘All right! All right! I give up. Sanctuary! Sanctuary!’

  Hoyt kneeled beside her bed and, suddenly serious, said, ‘Are we all right?’

  ‘All right? Hoyt, I’d be dead six or seven times over without you. I’d be dead and mad and raving like a lunatic on bad fennaroot.’

  ‘So, you’re not angry about… well, that morning?’

  Hannah took his face in her hands. ‘No, Hoyt. I’m not angry, and I’m not sorry, and if I ever find Steven again, I’ll find some way to … oh, fuck it, to let it go, Hoyt. Look where we are. I have no regrets.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Good,’ Hannah laughed again, then stopped herself short. ‘But where are you going?’

  ‘Alen says we’re short of silver. I’m going out for some. I’ll be back before dawn.’

  ‘Do you think that’s smart? I mean— Well, that could be dangerous. We have enough, surely – we can cut back on our expenses. Is it really that much to make the trip to Orindale?’ She sat up in bed and lectured him like a concerned spouse.

  ‘Hannah, Hannah, Hannah,’ Hoyt said, his face reddening again. ‘Please, Hannah, one sympathy jump for a depressed friend does not make you my keeper.’ He tried to keep a straight face, but cracked a smile when Hannah’s mouth fell open.

  ‘Why, you miserable—’ The rest of Hannah’s rebuke was lost as she shouted obscenities into her pillow.

  ‘Nice talk,’ Hoyt said, ‘do you kiss your mother with that foul mouth?’ Laughing, he started towards the door. ‘I’ll be back.’

  Hannah collected herself long enough to say, ‘If you insist on going to work tonight, remember the jewellery rule.’

  Hoyt grimaced. ‘I shudder to ask.’

  Holding one bare arm above the blankets, Hannah said, ‘If I can lift my wrist, it is not large enough.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘My diamonds.’

  ‘Diamonds?’

  ‘Well, whatever passes for precious stones here in Eldarn. God, you do have precious stones, don’t you?’

  ‘All right.’ Hoyt smiled, opening the hallway door. ‘If you can lift your wrist, it isn’t large enough. Got it.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Always. See you in the morning.’

  THE MAGELLAN TOUR

  Steven woke from a dizzying dream to the smell of a long-distance bike ride.

  It had been Mark’s idea, one night at Owen’s Pub after he’d finished the most recent of several-too-many beers and eaten about half a dozen too many of Owen’s spicy burn-your-arse-and-cry-for-your-mama buffalo wings, and he’d named it the Magellan Tour, a circumnavigation of the Denver metro area. He raised his mug and announced, not quite soberly, ‘Tomorrow, Steven Taylor, we round the Horn.’

  ‘Why don’t I like the sound of that?’ Steven replied, grinning.

  ‘Because, my good fellow, you are not a visionary.’

  Howard Griffin had been there too; it was a rare occasion that the bank manager wasn’t with them at Owen’s. He noisily finished sucking the sauce from a chicken leg and said, ‘I understand the winds this time of year are favourable.’

  ‘Oh do you?’ Steven raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes, I do.’ Howard raised his own mug before adding, ‘Of course, I have no idea what we’re talking about.’

  ‘A circumnavigation,’ Mark cried.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Or whom?’ Howard raised an eyebrow too, mocking Steven.

  ‘Dirty old man,’ Mark chided, ‘of our great, sprawling city of Denver, Colorado, where else?’

  ‘We’re going for a drive?’ Steven smiled. ‘All right; I’m in.’

  ‘Not a drive, Steven, a bicycle ride,’ Mark declaimed, as if announcing they were about to take part in the Olympics. ‘Tomorrow, we set forth where no man has gone before.’ He lifted his glass and drank deeply. ‘Although I’m certain hundreds of adventuresome and resilient women have already made the trip, but that won’t mitigate our great pioneer achievement one iota.’

  ‘What is an iota, anyway?’ Howard sounded puzzled.

  ‘Don’t interrupt!’ Mark ordered, and went on, ‘Think about it. We’ll park down by Chatfield Reservoir – the car’ll be all right there overnight—’

  ‘Overnight?’ Howard interrupted, ‘optimistic, aren’t we?’

  ‘Don’t interrupt! We ride east through Highlands Ranch to Jordan Road. Granted, we’ll need to pick our way north on the prairie, but from there, we can take Tower all the way up to the 120. We’ll take 85 into Brighton and cut across Route 7 to Lafayette. There’s a hotel off the service road where we can pass out, and then we’ll be up and into Boulder for breakfast—’

  ‘Boulder?’ Steven said, ‘Mark, that’s not a circle, that’s a bloody great oval!’

  ‘Hear me out,’ Mark said, ill-advisedly reaching for another hot wing, ‘so breakfast in Boulder and then we come south along the Hogback on 93. We stop in Golden where I buy you a gigantic slice of blueberry pie at the drugstore—’

  ‘Best pie in the world,’ Howard pointed out.

  ‘It is,’ Mark agreed, ‘but don’t interrupt! Then it’s down past Red Rocks into Morrison and back to our car.’ Mark raised his hands as if to say see, nothing to it at all?

  ‘Why?’ Steven asked. ‘It’s got to be a hundred and fifty miles, and you want to do it on mountain bikes?’

  ‘Because it’s there.’ Mark waved to Gerry, the bartender, and held aloft the empty beer pitcher. ‘We will be there at the advent of a great and timeless tradition for cyclists in the Denver area: the Magellan Tour.’

  Steven grimaced. ‘All right. Never let it be said that Steven Taylor ever turned his back on the great unknown.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Howard groaned, ‘there are convenience stores, shopping centres, motels and fast food restaurants along the entire route. You’ll both have cell phones with you, and the roads are paved, the whole way.’

  Mark frowned. ‘We understand your lack of vision, Howard, but if you buy this next pitcher, we won’t hold it against you.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Sir Edmund,’ Howard said, ‘but you two should probably start drinking water now, lots and lots of water.’

  ‘And we will!’ shouted Mark, ‘for what is beer if not mostly water! Another pitcher, for we have a great adventure to prepare for!’

  The first Magellan Tour had gone nearly as Mark – however drunk he might have been that night – had envisioned, and after that there were numerous other Magellan Tours, mostly on the heels of a long night at the pub or a particularly difficult week at work. Steven participated in all of them, gamely accompanying his roommate, sometimes with other friends, on the two-day ride.

  But what Steven recalled most vividly from that first journey was the smell of onions. It was late autumn and most of the crops had been harvested, but one farmer near Brighton had left a field of onions to rot – maybe he failed to find a buyer, maybe he wanted the rotting vegetables to replenish something crucial in his soil for the following year, but whatever the reason, the aroma of rotting onions had been overpowering pedalling through Brighton, forcing Steven to the side of the road where he’d emptied his stomach, rinsed out his mouth with what was left of his water and limped the last few miles to their hotel, praying for a westerly wind before morning.

  Awake now, slowly bringing his surroundings into focus, Steven smelled onions again, and his stomach clenched and he threw up what little he had left in his body. He rolled on his side, his head lolling until it struck the musty wooden floor. He shook off the last remnants of the dream and wondered how long he had been unconscious. The taste of vomit in his mouth made him gag again and he spat at the floor, trying to get rid of the saliva. He breathed
deeply and stared up at the ceiling.

  There’s a ceiling. That’s good.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked anyone listening.

  Footsteps thunked across the floor; Steven felt them. ‘It stinks in here,’ he whispered, breathing hard, ‘just like Brighton.’

  ‘Where?’ Garec crouched beside him, holding a wineskin and a section of folded cloth. ‘Let me wipe your face. You’re sweating.’

  ‘I puked.’ Steven turned his head again and spat another mouthful of discoloured fluid onto the floor.

  ‘If that means you emptied your stomach, then yes, you did. But no matter, we’ll clean it up.’

  ‘Where are we?’ He struggled to lift his head; Garec helped him sit up. ‘It smells like Brighton, like onions, rotten onions.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know where Brighton is, but what you’re smelling is pepperweed. There’s a whole bin of it there by the doors. It’s rotting, stinks like a grettan’s nightmare, but you’ll get used to it after a while. Pepperweed is strong, like onions but much more popular. A good cook would say it’s more useful in the kitchen, more flexible than onions. You had some in Traver’s Notch, at the Bowman, remember? The roots in that stew?’

  ‘Please, Garec, don’t remind me of that stew. I’ll be hurling again.’

  Garec laughed. ‘Right. Sorry. It is good to see you awake, though. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Like the foul end of a buffalo herd.’ Steven dragged his hands through his hair. ‘How long have I been out of it?’

  Brand and Kellin joined them, kneeling beside the confused foreigner. ‘Four days,’ said Brand.

  ‘Holy shit! Four days? Where are we? Is this a barn? Did we get to a farm?’

  ‘We did,’ Kellin said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘You had a seizure, a gods-rutting horrible seizure. It went on for so long, Steven, we thought you were going to die.’

  ‘I might have,’ he said. ‘Where’s Gilmour?’

  Kellin winced.

  Brand said, ‘We lost him. There was nothing we could do.’

  ‘He’ll be along,’ Garec assured. He tried to sound convincing, and hoped he was right.

  ‘You keep saying that, Garec, but I watched those snakes. They killed him.’ Kellin was visibly upset.

  Garec took her hand. ‘I know what you saw, Kellin, but he’ll be back. We’ve lost Gilmour before. Trust me; the last time I burned his body on a pyre myself, and the old bastard still came back. It’ll take more than a nest of – well, whatever they were – to kill Gilmour.’ Garec hoped the others couldn’t read the doubt in his face. The snakes had been hideous, otherworldly monsters and he was afraid that perhaps Mark had summoned them because they were powerful enough to kill even a Larion Senator.

  ‘He’s right.’ Steven tried to stand, felt dizzy and gave up. ‘What was it? Snakes?’

  ‘It was Mark,’ Garec said. ‘He’s working the table. He hit you with that seizure and then set a pack of unholy snakes on Gilmour.’

  ‘They came out of that book,’ Kellin said.

  Steven nodded. ‘That’s Mark. He knows that book scared the dog-piss out of Gilmour on the way to Traver’s Notch. He used it against him, I’m sure.’ Steven looked around the barn. ‘Where’s the body?’

  ‘Back through the woods, about two days’ journey from here.’

  Steven looked surprised. ‘You left him?’

  ‘There was nothing we could do,’ Brand said. ‘The serpents were all over him. Garec managed to shoot a few of them, but the others were all coiled around his arms, his neck; they were even inside his tunic!’

  Steven drank; his body was aching from dehydration. He still had no memory of the seizure. ‘Has Mark gone north?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ Brand said. ‘He’ll be at Wellham Ridge by tomorrow. The table is intact; Mark has it loaded on a wagon. His soldiers look bad, though, beaten by the forced march.’

  ‘They must be,’ Kellin said. ‘Look at the ground they’ve covered in so little time. He must be pushing them day and night.’

  ‘Did you see him?’ Steven asked.

  ‘No, nor Gabriel either,’ Brand said. ‘I was well hidden and didn’t want to risk going any closer. With you unconscious, the last thing we needed was to be chased back here.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Steven said, and then to Garec, ‘He must be one of the officers.’

  ‘Right. There’d be no other way for him to take command of such a force in so little time.’

  ‘So he’ll take the table back to the barracks, probably to the commanding officer’s private quarters.’

  ‘It’s a good guess. So … we follow them tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Steven said. ‘I need to eat. I might be able to whip up a spell to sort myself out, but I’m certainly not up for a fight right now.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Garec said. ‘Staying here will give Gilmour another night to catch up as well.’

  Kellin looked sceptical, but said nothing more.

  ‘Where’s the farmer?’ Steven asked. ‘Who’s our host?’

  ‘No idea,’ Brand said. ‘There’s no one here, no one we can find, anyway.’

  ‘Some of these farmers work winter crops in Rona,’ Kellin said. ‘They might be on the other side of the Blackstones for the season.’

  Steven wrinkled his nose again. ‘I suppose they must be somewhere else. No one would be able to live with that stench all winter.’

  ‘Good point,’ Garec said. ‘So we’re in no hurry. You rest. We’ll wait another day for Gilmour, and if he shows up, terrific, and if not, we’ll work our way carefully into Wellham Ridge and wait for an opportunity to steal the spell table.’

  Steven was not looking forward to facing his roommate. If his seizure and Gilmour’s disappearance were any indication of what Mark was able to do with the Larion artefact, the battle would be deadly dangerous for all of them. Disheartened, he said, ‘Fine. I suppose that’s our only option right now.’

  ‘He’s shown a willingness to insert the key and start calling up magic from inside that thing. Those snakes he threw at Gilmour were like nothing I’ve ever seen in Eldarn,’ Garec said quietly.

  ‘So we don’t have the luxury of time,’ Steven finished Garec’s thought.

  ‘Or a lot of discretion,’ Brand added. ‘Without Gilmour to contact Gita, the Resistance attack on Capehill will be a tragic failure. It’s been too many days already.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Kellin assured. ‘Even the fastest riders won’t have made it north yet. There’s still a bit of time, but if Gilmour is coming back on his own, we need him to hurry.’

  Brand said, ‘If you can kill Mark, Steven, you have to do it.’

  Steven didn’t answer.

  Two avens later, while wayward streaks of sunlight dappled the farm in orange, a Malakasian soldier approached from across a field between the barn and the woods near the river.

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ Garec warned, turning from the blurry, blown-glass window.

  ‘Is it him?’ Kellin asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Steven sounded certain.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Garec said. He nocked an arrow and moved towards the sheet of heavy canvas that hung between the storage bins and a wagon-sized loading dock. He pulled back on a corner and stepped out so the lone soldier could see that he was armed. ‘That’s far enough!’ he shouted.

  The others heard the man say, ‘Garec?’

  ‘Who are you?’ Garec called. ‘If you know me, you know I can drop you from here. So don’t come any closer.’

  ‘Of course I know you, you great, blazing rutter,’ the soldier said, his hands in the air. ‘I also know you prefer trout to steak, although God knows why. I know you are one hundred and ninety-six Twinmoons old and that you think Steven’s coffee tastes like burned dirt.’

  ‘Gilmour?’

  No one inside the barn heard his reply.

  Kellin whispered, ‘What’s happening? What did he say?’

  Garec pushed his head back beneath th
e cloth. ‘He’s showing me his wrist. It’s a mess, all bloody.’

  ‘He had to kill one of them,’ Steven said. ‘It’s him, Garec.’

  ‘How do you know? Gilmour’s never had that hole in his wrist before. Demonpiss, it’s awful-looking, even from here.’

  ‘It’s him,’ Steven said again, peering out the wrinkled glass window. ‘He’s only ever taken his hosts in the moment right after they’ve died; that’s why he’s been an elderly man most of the time. It looks like he found Mark’s battalion and picked off one of the soldiers.’

  ‘So he abandoned that other body?’ Kellin shuddered at the thought.

  ‘Exactly,’ Steven said. ‘That’s probably why he’s been delayed.’

  Garec frowned, disappeared outside the canvas flap again, and shouted, ‘When days in Rona grow balmy—’

  Gilmour’s response was faint but enthusiastic, ‘Drink Falkan wine after Twinmoon – but you, Garec, you prefer beer, because you are an uncultured heathen.’

  Kellin smiled. ‘He does seem to know you, Garec.’

  He poked his head back inside and muttered, ‘Wine gives me a headache.’ Then, in a shout, he added, ‘Come on inside, Gilmour.’

  When the Larion sorcerer slipped past the canvas, Steven laughed. ‘You look good.’

  The muscular young soldier shot him a bright grin marred by three seriously crooked teeth. Gilmour’s new body was tall and lean, with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. He had a head of shoulder-length, pin-straight hair, bright eyes and a nose that had been broken and poorly set at least twice. The bloody wound on his wrist was the only sign that he had been killed by the spirit of a disembodied Larion Senator. It was clotted with dried blood, but it was festering.

  ‘Well, I’d never done this before,’ he admitted, ‘so I figured I’d use someone healthy. I found the battalion near the river and sneaked this fellow into the undergrowth two nights ago. It was dark, and the officers were pushing them north so quickly that no one really looked for me. They’re all so rutting tired, I think I could have slipped away with a squad and no one would have been any the wiser.’ He winced. ‘What is that smell anyway? Onions?’