The Larion Senators

THE MORAINE

The magic hadn’t left him; it was there waiting for him when Steven called it back to his fingertips. He stood on the riverbed, ignoring the possibility that he might once again become ensnared by the subterranean spell; somehow he knew that it wouldn’t reach out for him now; the moraine had caved in on itself and so there was no need for the web to gather up passers-by. The spell table and Gilmour were all but lost.

Steven was warm and he was still breathing, despite having been submerged for over half an hour. Get the spells going and they will go on for ever, like the Twinmoons, or the fountains at Sandcliff. Nerak had certainly put these spells in motion, and they had gone on for Twinmoons – but he and Gilmour had beaten one of them. He didn’t know if they had succeeded in unravelling the magic, but nothing was reaching out to drag him into the moraine, so he was content to believe that it could be done: the magic could be turned, diverted like a stream, or even dismantled.

He was seething now, but he waited just long enough for his anger to take a more definite shape. Once he could envisage his rage focused to a point, he ascended the mound of rocks, boulders and fallen trees. With the magic rumbling beneath his skin, he began to dig.

It might have taken nature a hundred thousand Twinmoons to gather such a heap, or maybe Nerak piled them there over the course of a few days, but Steven needed only a minute or two to cast half of them across the riverbed, finding unexpected reserves of energy and strength. As angry as he was at Nerak – and the riverbed – he hardly noticed that he was chucking eight- and nine-hundred-pound boulders downstream as easily as pebbles. Those too heavy to move, rocks as large as a car, he shattered into manageable sections. He dug, pulled, heaved, tossed and dragged the moraine into pieces until the once-majestic, beautifully flawed piece of sculpture had all but vanished.

When the silty bed beneath the moraine came into view, Steven paused long enough to locate the stone that had fallen over the swirling membranous spell. Gilmour would be down there, beneath that rock, if not already inside the putrid gullet. He shifted the stone, then hesitated as a pang of doubt hit him. It was the same fear that had trapped him on his porch as he sat all night long trying to summon the courage to follow Mark into Eldarn. Reaching into the mud now might mean losing his arm, losing his mind, maybe – who knew what lurked beneath?

The river snare, Nerak’s watchdog, was enormously powerful. Anyone bold and confident enough to breach the moraine’s defences would most likely have the magical power to retrieve the spell table, so Nerak struck at the one common denominator all future sorcerers would share: they would all – including Steven Taylor – be susceptible to losing confidence.

Steven knelt as close to the spell’s centre as he dared and cast his thoughts down inside that cauldron of hopelessness and death to search for Gilmour. Do it! he told himself. You’ll never save him just kneeling here – dive in! He looked around the riverbed, hoping some alternative might present itself, and finally, when nothing did, he channelled the magic into his fingers and hands and dived headfirst into the centre of the swirling spell.

His fingertips entered the mud first, piercing the grim membrane and sending an icy shock through his body, a feeling of abject despair, suffering, ultimate loss. Now elbow-deep, Steven felt himself gripped by a paralysis that left his spine frozen and his legs twitching helplessly with involuntary spasms. Unable to pull back, he felt hope draining through his fingers, pooling beneath him and washing away in the current. This is it, he thought. We underestimated him…

When his hands hit bedrock, Steven felt the bones in two fingers snap and his left ring finger folded in against his palm in a grave dislocation. The pain was astonishing, but his efforts to withdraw his arms from the riverbed were futile. He was trapped up to his elbows, and he could get no sense of what had happened to Gilmour, or how he might extricate the spell table from its prison. Fighting to mute the waves of panic washing over him, Steven closed his eyes. He forced himself to ignore the pain in his hands, to forget everything except bringing back that mystical energy to save his life.

It was several seconds before Steven wondered how Gilmour could have disappeared inside the malevolent circle while he was trapped outside. Somewhere in some momentarily out-of-reach place in his mind, Steven knew there was no bedrock eight inches beneath the mud, yet cogent thought eluded him as his will weakened. He scratched with an intact fingertip at the granite floor. It’s rock, he thought. How in hell did Gilmour disappear into rock?

As his vision faded, he wondered vaguely if the spells keeping him alive beneath the water would continue after he passed out.

That’s when the bedrock pushed back.

The upwards movement, gentle at first, pressed on Steven’s shattered finger and a bolt of pain brought him enough to his senses that he was able to shake his head to clear his vision. He pressed his hands flat against the shifting granite floor and mud slipped away from his forearms, tumbling in tiny avalanches that caught the current and spiralled away towards Orindale.

Something was pushing him free.

A faint wellspring of hope arose and Steven’s own magic responded, slithering back into his hands, healing his bones and searching for some means of escape. Something familiar brushed his fingertips and disappeared. Steven remembered a game he played as a kid: you reached inside a bag and used touch to identify various objects. Bring it back, he thought, I was good at that game – I always figured out the balled-up masking tape, the peeled grape…

He was wrist-deep now, almost free. He cast tendrils of power into the riverbed, past the weakening membrane and into the bedrock beneath his hands. There it is, he thought. But the sensation was gone again… What is this? His right hand came free, then his left, and he pushed himself up and away from the river bottom, watching as the mud began to shift.

Frustrated at being beaten by the riverbed a second time, Steven moved a little closer to the surface and watched, uncertain what to do next, as he saw what had been the genesis of Nerak’s spell break through the silt. It looked like a puddle of heavy oil spilled on the riverbed. It pulsed, shifting its shape slightly as it was forced upwards into the water, flapping like a fish tossed onto dry ground. Christ, what is that thing? he wondered. Having failed to free himself, Steven dared not venture any closer to the sentient-seeming membrane, now apparently struggling for its life. Instead, he waited, and saw the riverbed quaking more violently as it fought to expel something else, something bigger, in an agitated parody of birth.

Suddenly Steven understood what had found his fingertips inside the membrane: Gilmour – it was his Larion magic that had felt familiar, a faint tickling that had held his hand for an instant while it pushed back against the oily, black gullet Nerak had left waiting as a trap so many Twinmoons before.

Gilmour, Steven thought, where are you? Tell me what to do; I’m afraid of that thing, whatever it is. Gilmour!

The microcosmic earthquake continued, and all the while the sifting mud and silt took on an ever more defined shape, almost crowning, like a baby’s head, as whatever it was pressed its way through the muck.

Finally the current carried away a layer of mire from the subterranean womb and Steven dived for the bottom, careful to avoid the inky membrane.

It was the table.

He knelt beside it, convinced that Gilmour was somehow beneath the great stone tablet, pushing with all his Larion strength. Steven summoned his own magic, wrapped it about the table, felt it grip like a dockside loading net, and heaved. The sensation that greeted him was at once familiar and refreshing. It was Gilmour; Steven recognised his friend’s energy, the rippling waves of venerable power. Together, the two sorcerers hauled Lessek’s spell table from the mud and let it come gently to rest on the riverbed.

Steven strained to find Gilmour through the muck and dark mud that washed away in waves as the river scoured the granite artefact clean.

There he was, emerging from beneath the table, looking like a swamp creature from a Saturday morning movie.

Gilmour Stow of Estrad scraped several inches of riverbed from his face, scrubbed another half pound from his hair, wiped his hand over his eyes and looked over at his young apprentice. He was beaming like a devilish child.

Steven grinned back and gestured towards the surface.

When Steven emerged into the wintry morning air, Gilmour was already shouting and hooting.

‘You pimply-faced old horsecock!’ He waved one fist at the sky, and screamed, ‘I beat you, I beat you, you bucket of rancid demonpiss! ‘

‘Gilmour?’ Steven was confused. ‘Beat who? Nerak? He’s not here, is he?’ Panic threatened to take him again, and Gilmour calmed down enough to assure Steven that they were alone in the river.

‘No, no, my boy. Of course not. Nerak is right where you left him, screaming a silent scream for ever as the Fold swallows him into nothingness.’

‘Then what are you talking about? Where were you? I thought for sure you were dead-’

Gilmour patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. ‘I did, too, Steven, especially when you managed to free yourself but I was still stuck there.’

Despite the chill, Steven felt his face flush. ‘Sorry about that; I wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘Oh, don’t be. You probably saved my life.’ Gilmour grinned again. ‘Great gods of the Northern Forest, I could use a beer or six.’

‘I still don’t understand-’

‘Because you weren’t there.’ He did another little victory dance.

‘Under the riverbed?’ Steven was getting increasingly bemused.

‘At Sandcliff!’ Gilmour raised his hands in a gesture that said I’ll start over. ‘No, Steven, you weren’t at Sandcliff Palace fifteen hundred Twinmoons ago.’

‘That saved you?’

‘Sure did – and it would have saved you too. When you broke free and kicked clear of the cave, I thought I was done. I could sense that there was a nasty trap in the muck, but I didn’t know what kind of spell it was, but you were clear, so I decided to blast the grettanshit out of the place, maybe throw it off enough to break myself loose. Instead, the whole moraine caved in on me, and there was no place to go but inside.’

‘Inside that oily thing?’

‘Right. And I knew it was a vicious bastard, but I didn’t know what it would do to me, so all I could do was hope against hope that something would come to me when I got sucked inside.’

‘What was in there?’

‘Oh, that’s immaterial.’ Gilmour waved the question away; he was enjoying his moment of triumph. ‘I’ll tell you in a moment, but that’s entirely beside the point. I was saved the moment that slimy, blackhearted puddle reached out for me.’

Steven ran his hands over his head, smoothing down his matted hair. ‘How? I was lost the moment it touched me. I couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything.’

‘You were hopeless.’

‘Helpless, yes.’

Gilmour wagged a finger back and forth through the air, ‘No, hopeless – the trap was designed to grab hold of you and drain you of all hope.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Steven shuddered.

‘Had you been at Sandcliff Palace fifteen hundred Twinmoons ago, you would have learned that the greatest sin any Larion Senator could commit was that of hopelessness.’

Steven pursed his lips, then said, ‘There are some faiths in my world who teach the same thing.’

‘Hopelessness was the one fault for which there was no excuse and no forgiveness: we were the world’s greatest hope, the world’s teachers, researchers, scientists and leaders. If responsibility for Eldarn’s general welfare rested anywhere, it rested with us. Hopelessness was the worst thing a Larion Senator could feel. So Nerak left a spell here that would leave any Larion Senators who came looking for Lessek’s spell table feeling hopeless, and they would die not only knowing they had failed, but, worse than that, as a cruel added bonus, they would die experiencing the one feeling Larion Senators worked to avoid at all costs.’

‘Ironic little bastard, wasn’t he?’ Steven said.

‘He certainly was.’

‘I’m glad I killed him.’

‘So am I,’ Gilmour chuckled.

‘But-’ Steven interjected, ‘I still don’t know how you survived it.’

‘You saved me.’

‘You keep saying that, Gilmour, but I was out of the game. This was not my finest hour by a couple of touchdowns.’

‘It’s like I said, when you kicked clear of the cave, I brought the whole place down. It was all I could think to do. When the walls collapsed, the rutting rocks came smashing down on me. I think I’ve got two or three broken bones to mend when we get back to shore.’ Gilmour felt along his collarbone with two fingers, checking for a fracture. ‘Anyway, the riverbed didn’t let me go. I was heading into that black circle, going in nose-first-’ He winced and checked the opposite clavicle. ‘I didn’t do anything but hope, Steven. I hoped and I wished and I willed that someone – preferably you – would come along and save my life.’

‘And in fact you did.’

‘What happened to your magic when you reached inside the circle?’ he asked suddenly.

‘It disappeared,’ Steven said.

‘Did it?’ Gilmour looked genuinely surprised.

‘No,’ Steven corrected him, ‘it was still there, but it had faded to such a tiny little point that I couldn’t reach out and get it. I didn’t even try until you shifted my broken fingers and the pain slapped me out of that daze.’

‘Exactly,’ Gilmour said, ‘the magic was still there, but you had lost hope of using it to save yourself – or me, for that matter.’

‘Jesus, that’s a nasty one.’

‘It is,’ Gilmour said, ‘but there’s one guaranteed way to slip past it.’

‘Have hope?’

‘Have nothing but hope,’ Gilmour clarified. ‘If you have hope and the Orindale Chainball Team…’

‘You’re screwed,’ Steven finished.

‘Interesting way of putting it, but yes.’

‘Have nothing but hope,’ Steven said.

‘That’s right.’

Steven’s face changed. All at once angry, he glared at his friend and said, ‘I’ll be right back.’

‘Where are you going?’ Gilmour said. ‘You have other plans? I think Garec has his eye on Kellin, so I wouldn’t pursue that possibility.’ He was obviously still pleased with himself for outwitting his old nemesis.

‘It’s still down there.’ Steven dived for the riverbed, mustering all the hope he could summon. The end this time would be different. He knew how it felt to have nothing but hope; it had been a staple since the moment his best friend disappeared through the far portal in their living room. Now he would use that to his advantage.

The two sorcerers took a break to dry out and warm up. Brand built a bonfire, and both men, despite having been artificially warmed all morning, sat as near to the flames as they could. Steven and Gilmour answered question after question until Steven threw up his hands and begged a half-aven to rest.

‘So where’s the table now?’ Garec asked as Steven unrolled his blankets.

Steven pointed. ‘Just over there in the shallows. We’ll haul it up here after I’ve had a bit of a sleep.’

‘Why’d you leave it?’ Kellin asked.

‘It’s a big table, it’s heavy and cumbersome,’ Gilmour said. ‘Getting it out was one spell. Out of the water it’ll be an entirely different animal.’

‘It will be heavier,’ Garec said.

‘A great deal heavier,’ Steven agreed.

‘And you don’t have a spell for that?’ Kellin asked. Remembering what Gilmour had said, Steven noticed that she and Garec had been sitting next to each other through the midday meal. They stood beside one another now, looking comfortable together.

‘Sure we do,’ Steven said. ‘It’s just different, and it takes a bit of concentration.’ He rested his head on his pack. ‘We’ll get it done… later.’ He yawned and closed his eyes.

‘Did you destroy that last spell?’ Garec asked.

Steven sat up again. ‘Did the gods send you here to keep me awake, Garec?’

The Ronan laughed and agreed, ‘They might have, yes.’

‘I didn’t destroy it,’ Steven said, lying back and pulling his blankets tight beneath his chin.

‘But Gilmour said-’

‘I didn’t destroy it,’ Steven interrupted, ‘but a weak-willed, terrified bank manager from Idaho Springs did.’

Garec looked quizzical.

Steven smirked. ‘It was about the easiest spell I’ve cast since I got here. No kidding. It just fell off my fingertips and tore the thing to ribbons.’

Garec said, ‘Nothing but hope.’

‘I know that song, my friend.’

‘Sleep well, Steven.’

‘Watch for Mark. I probably shouldn’t be resting at all, but I’m afraid I’ll screw up royally if I do too much while I’m wiped out.’

Gilmour sat on a folded blanket, his back resting against a pine trunk and his feet propped on a flat rock.

‘How are you?’ Garec asked.

Gilmour shrugged. Not bad, I suppose.’

‘Did you…’ Garec awkwardly mimed what he couldn’t find the words to describe.

‘I did all right,’ Gilmour said, nibbling at a piece of venison. ‘I couldn’t get free from the riverbed or untangle the web, but I managed a few decent explosions and I did outwit Nerak’s hopelessness trap, so all in all, I’m pleased.’

‘You have the spell table, and you’re sitting here intact,’ Brand said. ‘By my reckoning, that’s a successful morning.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Gilmour said. ‘I think I’ve reached a new phase in my life – one I could never have predicted. I thought I had to be a great magician, on par with Nerak, to win this battle, but I don’t.’ He grimaced comically. ‘At least I think I don’t.’

Garec smiled. Regardless of how his life’s work might be evolving, there were things about Gilmour that would never change, especially his propensity for engaging life from a comfortable sitting position. Now, with Lessek’s spell table successfully excavated and waiting in the shallows, Gilmour was stretched out languidly beside the fire and Garec waited to see one of the old man’s ubiquitous tobacco pipes appear suddenly in his bony fingers. ‘So what’s your charge then?’

‘To teach, to mentor. It was always my role, from my first Twinmoons at Sandcliff when I knew I would never be a great sorcerer. I lost sight of that over the last few hundred Twinmoons. With only me and Kantu left, I thought I had to be as powerful as Nerak to beat him.’

‘But you weren’t?’ Kellin asked.

‘Great gods, no,’ Gilmour replied, ‘even if Steven’s claims about Nerak are true, that he was just a hack, a weakling who lied to himself about how good he was, the old bastard was still too powerful for me. The last few Twinmoons have been the worst. I’ve tried spells that have failed; I’ve been terrified to open that spell book. I’ve come face to face with my own weaknesses, and all these things have distracted me from what I was really supposed to be doing.’

‘Guiding him?’ Garec motioned towards Steven.

‘Exactly,’ Gilmour said, then brightened. ‘And what I’m discovering is a new appreciation for everything I had before.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Brand said.

‘I did a lot of work over the last thousand Twinmoons, and before Sandcliff fell I amassed a great deal of knowledge, and a not-insignificant grasp of Larion magic. But recently, especially since Port Denis was destroyed, I’ve been honing skills I knew I lacked and never took the time to stop and appreciate the overall package of who I had become.’

‘You were focusing on the wrong things,’ Garec said, echoing Steven’s own realisation.

‘But now that I’ve had a chance to clear my head, I feel as though I’ve regained my perspective, and some of my strength is returning. I felt it for a while at Sandcliff, especially that first day when we battled the acid clouds and the almor. It was as if everything I needed to know was hidden behind a gossamer-thin curtain; I was so close to clarity there that I could taste it on my tongue like spring rain, but then Nerak arrived and I got distracted again.’

‘He wasn’t playing fair, either, Gilmour,’ Garec said, ‘using Pikan and that sword, and using poor old Harren’s brittle bones to attack us… it’s no wonder you were a bit off-centre.’

‘So what was different today?’ Kellin asked.

‘Today, I stayed inside myself, I trusted that if I showed Steven how to find the right magic, he would free us and find the table. When that didn’t happen, I tried not to panic’

‘Did it work?’

‘Actually, it did.’ Gilmour finally produced a pipe and began smoking. ‘I trusted what I knew, rather than what magic I wished I had with me. Even after I was drawn beneath the river, I kept my wits, tapped my strength and managed to bring the table back out.’

‘So you were stronger than the hopelessness snare,’ Kellin said.

‘No, I was smarter,’ Gilmour corrected her. ‘In the end, my wits are what saved me.’

‘What was down there?’ Brand asked.

Gilmour puffed at his pipe. The embers glowed red a moment before a wisp of sweet Falkan smoke escaped. ‘It was a chamber of sorts, about chest-deep with water. The ceiling – the riverbed – was a dark blanket, just out of reach. I never realised how noisy a river is until I spent those few moments beneath this one. The whole place echoed with the sound of perpetual motion. It was black as pitch, damp, smelling of mould and decay – and guarded by five or six of those bone-collecting creatures we faced in the glen.’

‘Rutting whores,’ Garec exclaimed, ‘how’d you handle so many?’

Gilmour shook his head. ‘I didn’t. They were all dead, just hulking masses of stinking rotten flesh. It looked like they’d been feeding on each other, until the last one, a big bastard with about ten-thousand of those nasty pincers, died of its wounds – I’m guessing from its final battle. The humidity down there made it even worse, like wandering about in a big city’s sewage.’

‘I wonder why they killed one another?’ Kellin mused.

‘There wouldn’t have been enough food in that chamber – not even in this whole stretch of the river – to keep even one of those beasts alive for very long,’ Gilmour said. ‘Nerak most likely had them guarding the new Larion spell chamber for a few days at a time in turn, replacing each other when it was time to feed. When Nerak decided to retrieve the spell table on his own, he probably called off the rest of the monsters and forced those inside to remain where they were. They were probably killing and eating one another after a couple of days. I’m sure it didn’t take long.’

‘And when we arrived in Meyers’ Vale-’ Garec started.

‘Or when Nerak received word that we were coming this way,’ Gilmour added.

‘Who could have told him?’ Garec interrupted.

‘His men would have alerted the southern occupation officers when we gave that mounted battalion outside Orindale the slip.’

‘Oh, right.’ Garec winced and avoided looking at Kellin. ‘I’ve tried to forget that day.’

Kellin wrapped an arm around the bowman’s shoulders; Garec allowed himself to be drawn in, snuggling beside her.

‘No matter,’ Gilmour said. ‘When we started south along the river, Nerak marshalled the rest of the bone-collectors to meet us in the glen. By that time, if this bunch wasn’t already dead, any hope of getting replacements was lost.’

‘How did you get the table out?’ Brand asked.

‘That was an old spell,’ Gilmour admitted. ‘Any Larion sorcerer could have cast it. One of our duties was the loading and unloading of barges at docks half an aven’s ride from Sandcliff. Often we’d have to endure nasty stinging rain showers – even in summer, the weather in Gorsk can be positively petulant. Anyway, when it was rainy, the duty, however coveted on nice days, was delegated and re-delegated down to the greenest sorcerer on the campus. So even the most wet-nosed of beginners quickly learned the spells that helped the lifting, moving, shipping and shifting of heavy cargoes.’

‘So you hefted it up and pressed it through the mud of the ceiling? The riverbed?’ Garec asked.

Gilmour nodded. ‘Just as if I was unloading a pallet of lumber from a Ronan schooner.’

‘But the hopelessness snare…’ Kellin began.

‘I was trapped beneath the river in a death chamber full of decomposing bone-collectors. For all I knew, Steven had failed, and I would have to spend several days, Twinmoons even, eating rancid meat and waiting for our young friend over there to figure out the river trap and come down to retrieve me. For lack of a better option, I employed a beginner’s spell to help get the table up and into the mud. And when I encountered the hopelessness snare a second time, to say that all I had left was hope would be to understate my condition significantly.’

‘Then Steven destroyed the snare,’ Kellin said.

‘Right again. I outwitted it to save my life. Once he figured it out, he eviscerated it, literally ripped it apart from the inside out.’

Brand blew a low whistle through pursed lips.

‘I couldn’t have said it better myself. There is enormous power in that young man, enormous power.’

Garec glanced at Steven, asleep on the opposite side of the fire. ‘Why don’t you rest for a while, Gilmour? The three of us can work on fortifying that cart, and you two can… do whatever it is you need to do when Steven wakes up.’

Stretching his feet even closer to the flames, Gilmour refilled his pipe, smiled contentedly and said, ‘If you insist, Garec’