Lessek's Key

Lessek_s Key
ORINDALE HARBOUR

The creature huddles in the recessed doorway of a waterfront tavern. Closed now, and empty, the windows look in on an abyss, a room so shrouded in middlenight that the glass might mark the entrance to the Fold itself. Light from sporadic sentinel torches left burning along the Orindale waterfront reflect off the windows, but, ignoring the laws of physics, their glow doesn’t bring any illumination to the darkened tavern; the diffuse glow merely bounces back.

The creature knows well that places exist where nothing matters, where light cannot penetrate, where the absence of perception provides for the absence of reality. The Fold. Isn’t that how the old man described it? It’s worse than death, because death, like life or love, is held so close. Death has meaning; it’s a profound event, feared above most horrors, but meaningful nevertheless. This place is worse, more tragic: the Fold embodied. This is a place so devoid of colour and touch, scent and sound, that nothing can survive. This is the place mothers go after the broken bodies of their children are found washed up on a beach or lying in pieces across a field. It’s the end of all things, the event horizon.

Nothing can remain here long – except for the creature. Stooped and broken, hunched at the waist and dragging much of its torso like a disintegrating appendage, the thing in the doorway resembles a tree that has lived too long, the victim of too many woodsmen hacking deep, disfiguring scars. It can stand upright, but that’s painful, that requires effort, and hope, and the creature refuses to have hope. Instead, it waits. Fortified by its ability to see and understand its own condition, as if seeing itself from above, the creature becomes the darkness, dragging it along as it drags its own body. It sees the mossy nubs that work their way through the rotting planks of the waterfront walkways. It steps in the puddles of piss and vomit that surround the taverns. It watches rats battling over half-stripped chicken bones tossed from windows two and three floors up, and insects devouring half-digested bits of venison regurgitated by drunks reeling towards home, their ships, maybe, or the downy beds of the local whores.

One night it finds a finger, lost in a bar fight and on another, a portion of someone’s ear, which it turns over and over in its fingers, trying to imagine the whole from which this bit was severed. Finally, it stashes the lobe in its robes, tucked beside the finger, the chicken bones and the bits of venison, before starting out again.

This wretched thing would be willing to die if it were willing to allow itself an experience so meaningful. Its pallid flesh is hidden beneath the folds of a stolen cloak as it stares out at the Orindale night, listening, waiting and planning. It does have a mission: it is driven by its desire to hunt and kill the black and gold soldiers. There are so many; thousands have come here, and it kills one, two, sometimes five in a night. Men or women, it doesn’t care. It doesn’t dismember them, or eat them – not much of them anyway, there is plenty of food along the waterfront – and nor does it perform deviant acts with their corpses. Instead, the creature slices them open: through the neck is quiet, but the gullet works well, too. It finds some strange satisfaction watching the young Malakasians struggling to replace handfuls of innards, as if packing lengths of moist summer sausage into a torn canvas sack. From some come moist clouds of exsanguinous fog, particularly when they are gutted in the early morning.

The creature’s pain comes and goes, but when it strikes it is searing, nearly unbearable. Beginning in its neck and shoulders, the fire bolts across its back, paralysing its legs and forcing it ever deeper into its crouch. Though it cannot remember the past very well, it knows that it has brought this upon itself. There are hazy recollections of a frigid river, a flat rock, and an aborted attempt to straighten itself, to regain its previous form, but it did great damage that day, hurling itself repeatedly against the unforgiving stone. Then the pain was glorious, making it see things, hallucinations, nearly translucent lights like wraiths scurrying over hillsides and flitting between sap-stained pine trunks. Now it salves its wounds with the black and gold soldiers.

They’ll never capture it. They’ve tried. It outsmarts them easily; it avoids their snares, because it lives among the things that crawl and slither on the ground, safely beneath the gaze of the Malakasian occupation army.

A stray dog happens by, a filthy, disagreeable mutt with mangy fur, a pronounced limp and a broken canine uselessly askew in its lower jaw. The dog gives the creature a low growl, a warning, more out of fear than any real threat. But it’s too late. Brandishing a long knife, the creature pounces. Cat-quick and deadly, it buries its knife in the dog’s throat and twists with such force the stray can do little more than yelp before dying on the cobblestones.

The hood of its cloak falls across its shoulders, revealing an ashen face, a man’s face, sickly-white like the colour of spoiled milk. His eyes focus on nothing. Though bent, he is a big man, and powerful. He doesn’t feel remorse: the animal will make a tasty breakfast and, if he rations the meat, lunch too.

The creature – the man – is distracted by something. Licking at the bloody knife, he peers into the darkness hovering over the harbour. He can make out flames, watch-fires, he assumes, that burn on bowsprits, jib-booms, and stern rails though they appear to float above the water. He closes his eyes and listens: something has happened. One of the ships is coming apart; even from this distance, he can hear beams splintering, masts collapsing and planks pulling free and snapping like hickory knots in a bonfire. He judges the distance at well over a thousand paces and decides it can be only one ship. Hazy recollections taunt from just beyond the periphery of his consciousness, and a feeling: this is good, this vessel snapping in two and sinking to the bottom of Orindale Harbour – but he can’t recall why.

Without warning, and surprising himself, he speaks. ‘They must have made it.’ Then he looks around in terror. ‘What does that mean? Who said that?’

‘They must have made it,’ he repeats and this time realises he has spoken. He is hearing his own voice. It’s as if he hid part of himself, enough to preserve the integrity of who he was… hid it far enough away to allow himself… the creature, that is… to eat things like discarded fish innards, severed ears or vomited venison bits. But he is close enough to hear when his doppelganger speaks.

‘Say that again.’ He is looking anxiously about the abandoned waterfront, still aware of the cataclysm taking place in the harbour, but ignoring it for the moment. ‘Say that again.’

‘The ship, the Prince Marek, they must have reached it.’

Bending slowly, an indistinct blur in the darkness, the hunched creature sheathes his long knife. He peers side to side, aware there are things he doesn’t understand, and mumbles, ‘Good then… back to the hunt.’

Sallax Farro of Estrad tucks the dog’s limp form beneath his cloak, pulls his hood up and hurries south along the wharf.

A tangible silence like a spectre creeps across the countryside. Trees ignore the wind and stand upright; leaves quiet their rustle as onshore breezes fade to a whisper. Waves lapping against the shoreline flatten to nearly indiscernible ripples; seabirds land and nest, their heads tucked protectively beneath wings. Even the northern Twinmoon appears to dim, as if unwilling to illuminate Nerak’s disappearance.

All of southern Falkan draws its shades, closes its doors and waits. Nerak is gone, and Eldarn has not yet decided how it will respond. Like a battered child finally witnessing her father’s arrest, the very fabric holding this strange and beautiful land together rumbles with a growing desire to scream out We are free!, but those screams emerge as a nearly inaudible whimper. Many feel the dark prince’s exit, shuddering for a moment, and then returning to the business of their lives. There is a status quo to be maintained. There are expectations and accountability because, of course, the dark prince may return.

South of the city is a meadow, just above the inter-tidal zone: more of an upland bog, rife with sedge, rushes and coarse coastal grass. The meadow, flanked on three sides by the scrub-oak and heavy needle pines that mark the sandy edge of the Ravenian Sea, is an anomaly. The expanse of thick foliage and dense fertile soil, thanks to a narrow stream rushing by just out of sight behind a stand of pines, form an unexpected oasis trapped between the intimidating Blackstone peaks to the east and the cold salt waters to the west.

On this night, the meadow grasses are brushed back and forth by Twinmoon breezes charging unchecked north and south along the narrow channel. Painted pale Twinmoon white, the grasses glow with the muted brilliance of a snowfield at midday.

Gabriel O’Reilly appears, interrupting the ghostly surface, a blurry cloud of spectral smoke. His battle with the almor has taken him across the Fold, through the great emptiness and within a breath of the evil force lying restlessly inside. He has seen the centre of the world, has passed through the dead of the Northern Forest and through the great cataclysm that pushes the edges of the universe ever outwards. It is all he can do to maintain his sanity as he looks into the face of a god – it must be a god, for nothing else could generate such beauty, such destruction and such pure, uncomplicated power. But this isn’t his God; he’s not home yet.

Gabriel O’Reilly has felt the fires of the demon lands, smelled their putrid stench and sensed their inhabitants: legions of creatures marshalling their resources in an effort to weaken his resolve and purloin his very essence. At times, he has seen home, Virginia, and though he doubts any of it is real, he imagines he can smell it, touch it, feel those lush rolling hills beneath his bare feet. Slamming through forests and burrowing through mountains, O’Reilly and the almor careen, a tangle of demon limbs in a ghostly fog across time and worlds. As they pass through the pristine wilderness of his home, he checks beyond the rise of each hill, hoping for just one glimpse of a Confederate brigade marching to face the Army of Northeastern Virginia.

And all the while he holds on to the demon almor, the one sent to take Versen and Brexan, the only friends he’s made in five lifetimes, forcing himself to remember why he grips the creature so hard, hanging on despite the drain on his sanity.

Now the almor is gone. O’Reilly has no idea how long they have battled, but suddenly the demon vanishes, falling away into the burned over wastelands of a distant world. It is as if its will to engage him has run dry.

Has it been days? Years? O’Reilly doesn’t care. Instead, he casts his senses about the meadow, detecting no sign of Brexan, Versen or the scarred Seron they fought together. As much as he can remember of disappointment, the spirit feels it now. He had hoped that beating the almor would have given him a way home: the path to heaven, the right to look upon the face of his own God.

But it hasn’t happened, and he is still here in Eldarn. O’Reilly floats above the meadow another moment, his indistinct face a mask of loneliness; then without a sound he slips between the trees and disappears into the forest.

He is not gone a moment when others appear along the edge of the meadow, following O’Reilly through the trees, hunting him. One, the leader, pauses to stare across the Ravenian Sea. It has been many years since William Higgins has seen the sea, long before his daughter was born, before he left his family in St Louis to seek his fortune in the mountains above Oro City, Colorado. He turns after the others; they are close behind O’Reilly now. As the cavalry soldier-turned-miner fades from view, his ghostly white boots pass through a fallen cottonwood tree. The sound of a spur, chiming through the ages, rings once above the din of the onshore breeze.

*

Although the sounds of the Prince Marek shattering in the harbour do not reach her, Brexan Carderic is unable to sleep. Moving north, she is less than a day outside Orindale, expecting to reach the outskirts of the Falkan capital before dawn. She doesn’t hear the Prince Marek coming apart, but the stillness that follows in the wake of the ship’s death reaches her. She makes her barefoot way slowly along the shore, recalling the loss of her boots, discarded in the Ravenian Sea after she cut Versen loose from the stern rail of the fat merchant’s ship. With every step towards the city, the Malakasian imagines first how she will find this man and second how she will torture him when she does. Burning Versen’s body was the most difficult thing she’d ever done, yet she did it meticulously, thinking she will have one chance to get something right, but she will live with its memory for ever. She chose every branch carefully, avoiding green wood so her fire would blaze quickly into a fury. Even as the flames claimed Versen’s body, Brexan sat, imagining the horror of failing to get that first spark to kindle.

She cries as she remembers that day, sitting by his side, rising only to find a piece of scrub-oak, a pine bough or a thatch of cedar brambles. She didn’t speak to him, or kiss him goodbye, nor did she take any of his scant belongings as keepsakes. Instead, she sat with him, watching as his pyre burned down and eventually out.

Mark Jenkins stands on the forward bench of a small skiff borrowed from an elderly fisherman he believes now to be the Larion Senator, Gilmour Stow of Estrad. He has a half-moon gash above one eye, and blood clouds his vision. Mark thinks he must have been hit by a splinter of glass when what was left of the aft end of the Prince Marek began breaking apart; he ignores the bleeding and, screaming out her name, searches the wreckage for any sign of Brynne. He scans the castaway spars, rails, barrels, beams and sections of sailcloth that have begun floating away. He has given up hope that the Pragan woman will appear alongside the skiff, offer him an alluring grin and ask if she might come aboard. He tries to spot a pale upper arm, a bare cheek, temple or even a supple leg in the light cast across Orindale Harbour by the northern Twinmoon.

Before him, the great sailing vessel sinks away. Apart from avoiding the undertow as the tons of metal, wood and tar careen towards the bottom, Mark doesn’t give the remains of the Prince Marek more than a glance. He is shouting Brynne’s name, but it fails to occur to him that Steven and Gilmour might be lost as well.

Then a thought nudges him. There’s something… he has seen something, something he can’t remember at the moment, but even that is enough to give him pause, to turn him around stiffly, a mannequin on a rotating pedestal. The last few minutes have been too traumatic; his search for Brynne has distracted him. There are other problems, other threats.

Where’s Garec?

They left him sleeping in the catboat. That isn’t it. There’s something more.

Versen? No.

Mark’s voice fades until he can barely hear himself whisper the Ronan woman’s name.

The clouds. Those clouds of mist. Where are they?

He saw one; it had been coming out over the harbour, right before the ship shattered in two. He searches the night, rubbing a sleeve across his face to wipe the blood from his eyes. There it is. It’s as if a black fogbank has blown west to hover over the harbour. Despite Mark’s certainty that he witnessed the cloud moving away from shore, towards the Prince Marek, not ten minutes earlier, now it looks to have stopped – not retreated; rather, it remains stolidly in place, about two hundred yards off the waterfront. But it’s frozen there, impervious to the efforts of the onshore breeze to carry it back into town, thicker than any normal cloud and heavier than fog ought to be. Like a column of ethereal soldiers poised to charge, the mist looks as though it is awaiting its next set of orders: fall on the partisans and kill them all, or perhaps, return to the city and await further instructions.

If the cloud advances, he’ll swamp the skiff, turn it over and hide in the air pocket below, praying the thin boards of the fisherman’s boat will be enough to stave off the deadly fumes. Mark clears his throat and begins shouting again for Brynne.

Gilmour Stow allows himself to be pulled beneath the surface as the colossal ship sinks by the bow, then, opening his eyes, mumbles a quick spell in a cloud of bubbles, and his underwater vision improves. Brighter, nearly in focus now, the Prince Marek floats effortlessly towards the bottom, picking up speed and casting off loose cargo, rigging and more than a few bodies. It’s a beautiful sight; ironic and tragic that such a ship would look most glorious when wrapped jib to spanker in the very water that buoyed her for so many Twinmoons. He watches until it disappears from view.

In one hand, Gilmour clasps Steven Taylor’s hickory staff and in the other, the only existing copy of Lessek’s spells, notes and reflections on the nature of magic and the Larion spell table. He had been so certain the book had been lost a thousand Twinmoons earlier; he curses himself for not realising Nerak had it all along. He is a powerful foe. Thinking back to their battle just moments earlier, Gilmour wonders if the fallen Larion magician had given his best: granted, it had been a titanic blow, and it had required all of Gilmour’s concentration to keep from being pulverised. But had it been Nerak’s best? Had he really felt the sum force of the dark prince’s power? Kicking towards the surface, he wonders if Nerak was telling the truth: That was naught but the tiniest of tastes, Fantus, a minuscule sample drawn from the very furthest reaches of my power.

The only blow Nerak had an opportunity to land: had it been a feint, a flick of the wrist? Would a focused spell, carefully woven over time, tear Gilmour to ribbons or reduce him to dust? He hopes he will be in possession of Lessek’s key and in control of the spell table before he has to discover the full extent of Nerak’s power.

Clutching the staff close, Gilmour emerges from the depths and immediately forgets the dark prince. Fear and regret seize him as he hears Mark Jenkins, nearby but invisible in the darkness, screaming Brynne’s name.

‘Rutters!’ the older man murmurs, realising Brynne is lost.

It’s not the crashing and snapping of beams in the Prince Marek that finally wakes Garec Haile of Estrad, but the faint sound of shouting. His gaze slowly focuses on the heavy weave of a blanket he borrowed from his sister’s room the previous Twinmoon. The archer wriggles to a sitting position, shrugging off layers of wool, draws a few stabilising breaths and feels the gentle undulating rhythm of the harbour tide. ‘I’m on the boat,’ he says out loud.

In a rush, the events of the past avens return; he jerks himself upright. ‘Steven! I’ve been shot. Oh, gods, I’ve been shot!’ He reaches for the arrow, the black Malakasian arrow he knows he will find jutting crookedly from his ribs – but despite the recollection of an intense burning pain as the polished shale pierced his skin, the young freedom fighter can find no sign of injury. ‘Gone,’ he says, feeling nothing but a tear in his tunic and the sticky remnants of blood drying on his clothing. ‘How can this be?’

Wishing for more light to conduct a thorough examination, Garec takes a deep breath. There is no rattle, no telltale vibration of fluid pooling in his lungs. He places a hand over his heart; it, too, seems strong, thrumming beneath his fingers.

Standing, Garec’s legs falter for a moment and he nearly topples headfirst into Orindale Harbour. Balancing, he stretches and cautiously considers his apparent good health. ‘I’m all right,’ he whispers and only then realises he is alone on the catboat. ‘Where is everybody?’

Garec’s question is answered with another cry, faint but urgent. He feels his stomach roil as it comes again: ‘Brynne!’, a sob recognisable in the distant voice. Instinctively, Garec reaches for his bow.

It’s not there.

For a moment, he feels a nearly overwhelming sense of relief. He hoists the vessel’s small sail and almost immediately it is captured by the onshore breeze; the keel turns lazily in a loping circle towards the wharf. ‘Rutting boats,’ he grumbles, picking his way aft to the tiller. ‘I’ll be out here for the next Twinmoon.’

‘Brynne!’ The hopeless cry resonates through his bones; Garec guesses that his friend is dead. What happened? How long had he slept? Had they tried to take the Prince Marek without him? Awkwardly, he pulls the sail taut and gropes for a wooden stanchion along the starboard gunwale; failing to find one, he hangs on to the line in one hand while wresting the tiller with the other to bring the boat about. Navigating as best he can in the moonlit darkness, he sets a course for the sound of the distraught voice.

Carpello Jax shifts three candles closer to the polished looking-glass propped above his fireplace mantel. His beard is coming on nicely: step one in his transformation.

Sweat dampens his face and neck despite the evening breeze. He drags a ruffled linen sleeve across his forehead, a frequent move over the past several days. Not that it has been warm in Orindale; rather, Carpello sweats because he is grossly overweight, and because he anticipates his audience with Prince Malagon. He is sure the dark one knows Carpello’s schooner is moored in the harbour; it won’t be much longer before he’s summoned to the royal residence to present his report. Carpello has prepared a convoluted tangle of lies and remains confident he can sell his story to Prince Malagon: he is a businessman, and he lies for a living.

Through the open windows, Carpello hears the sounds of a cataclysm unfolding in the harbour, but for the moment he doesn’t move to investigate. He is nervous, and that has awakened a handful of sublimated memories. The most tenacious this evening is Versen, the woodsman. Carpello runs a hand across the ample hillock of his abdomen, touching the wound dealt him by the woman just before she went overboard in an effort to free the troublesome Ronan. Carpello had meant to interrogate the girl and then to give her to his crew as a diversion, but things had gone terribly wrong. By the end of that day, he had lost both prisoners and his Seron escort.

Carpello grimaces. It will be a difficult tale to weave for the prince; he reviews his own version once again, to ensure all the details are committed to memory, as if they had actually occurred. The sweaty businessman knows the secret to successful lying is believing one’s own fabrications; Prince Malagon will be Carpello ‘s most challenging audience yet.

Outside, there is another explosion, but Carpello’s thoughts are still with the woodsman. Even facing torture and death, the young man had surprised him: ‘A very good friend of mine looks forward to meeting you,’ he had said. ‘If I were you, I would take my own life rather than ever run into her again.’

‘A woman? I shall be enchanted, I’m sure,’ Carpello had responded.

‘You’ll be dead,’ the Ronan had answered flatly, ‘and she’ll make it last for Twinmoons… a grisly death is on its way to Orindale right now.’

Had Versen been bluffing? Carpello wipes the sweat from around his eyes once more. He doesn’t believe so. Versen had sounded convincing: a specific woman wanted to find and kill him. But why? Carpello feigns ignorance for a moment, trying out his ‘innocent’ face in the candlelit looking-glass. He watches it fall away. He knows why.

Reaching into his belt, he withdraws a thin fillet knife with a tapered point and a polished edge. Wiping it on a chamois, he leans in close to the mirror and, with a steady hand, slices the bulbous mole from the side of his disfigured nose: step two.

Blood blooms from the wound, dripping from Carpello’s sagging jowls to stain the frilly ruffles of his linen shirt. He sways unsteadily, feeling faint. His vision tunnelling, he staggers backwards to sit with a groan in a nearby chair. Carpello Jax begins to cry as Versen’s voice echoes grimly in his head: You’ll be dead… and she will make it last for Twinmoons.