Steven screamed, nothing intelligible, just a release of pent-up anger, frustration and fear. He understood Gilmour’s lunatic behaviour now as he continued to pour thousands and thousands of gallons of water into the cloud. His senses sharpened by the magic, he caught sight of the almor, acid-scarred and full of hatred, below him, sliding towards a rapidly diminishing puddle.
‘Not so fast,’ Steven cried from his place atop the makeshift river, ‘back you go to the hell that spawned you!’ He used the magic to toss the opaque demon back into the acid cloud. Again the almor screamed, but Steven kept his feet and continued his barrage.
All of a sudden it was over. The cloud, saturated, fell across the hillside in a rainy death, killing some of the trees and shrubs, but mostly absorbed by the cold dirt above the palace. The north tower looked as though it had melted away. Steven hoped the Windscroll would give them the answers they needed, because anything left in those tower rooms, Harren’s remains included, had dissolved to nothingness.
Steven searched the hillside, through the wispy clouds of foul-smelling mist, for the almor. He was certain it had survived – an acid bath wasn’t enough to kill it, but it would have annoyed the demon, and hopefully made clear that Steven and the hickory staff were a formidable enemy. It was just a matter of time before the two of them battled again.
His rage sated and his need to avenge Rodler met, Steven felt the magic recede. Maybe Mark had been right: there were no hickory trees in the foothills where he had found the staff; that was anomalous enough, but it responded to Steven’s needs so perhaps there was something to Mark’s claims that he was a sorcerer, compelled to remain in Idaho Springs all those years by Lessek’s key. Steven inspected the familiar length of hickory for any damage and wished he had the answers.
If Mark really was a king and he really was a sorcerer, they were doing a right hideous job of saving the world.
‘Steven?’ Gilmour’s voice came from the forest below. Are you all right, Steven?’
‘Am I all right?’ Steven shouted back. ‘I’m not the one who did a full-on Charlie Hustle all the way down this aqueduct. Where’s your head, Gilmour? That thing could have caught you and sucked you dry before I had any chance of warding it off. How did you know it wouldn’t catch you?’
Gilmour’s face was bloody and one arm hung at his side, unmistakably broken, but he sounded fine, even enthusiastic. ‘I was right rutting surprised at how fast it came after me. I do love it when we take the fight to them, though, don’t you?’ Gilmour was enjoying himself, as if he had momentarily forgotten that the spell table was missing.
‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ Steven said. ‘It’s invariably the highlight of my day. I find few things as invigorating as going toe-to-toe with homicidal clouds and ancient demons. It’s like a double shot of espresso. How do I get down there?’
‘I came the easy way.’ He pointed towards the palace wall, ‘Bounced right off and fell into that bush over there. It was quick, but I don’t recommend it. I’m going to have to do some work on this old fisherman’s body, I’m afraid. I suggest you hike back up the chute and jump down.’
‘I think I’ll take option two,’ Steven said. Water began flowing down the chute from the hidden caverns and subterranean aquifers, chilling his feet even through his boots.
Ignoring his injuries, Gilmour kept pace. ‘How did you know the water would drive off those clouds?’ he asked.
‘It wasn’t just water. That fountain was caked with limestone, deposited over the Twinmoons by that trickle. The water flowing into the palace is heavy with lime – you can scrape it off the nails holding these joints together.’
‘Limestone?’
‘Calcium carbonate, Gilmour, simple high school chemistry: in solution, limestone raises the ph of water.’ The old man still looked bemused. Steven clarified, ‘It makes water less acidic: the solution can be used to neutralise acids. I didn’t know what the concentration was, or whether it was enough to stave off those clouds, so I used a lot.’
‘I’ll say!’ Gilmour grabbed a low-hanging tree branch with his good arm and pulled himself up the slope next to where Steven could jump down from the elevated waterway. ‘I wasn’t sure there would be any water left in the mountain after that little display.’
Steven landed beside him and started mopping the blood from Gilmour’s face. ‘You’re a damned mess.’
‘Oh, I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘It seems I’ve rediscovered a few vagrant skills here at the old homestead.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Steven said. ‘We’re going to need them to find that table.’
Gilmour’s enthusiasm faded.
‘Sorry,’ Steven said, ‘I didn’t mean to remind you.’
‘Oh, it’s all right.’ Gilmour forced a smile. ‘But I do love it when we take the fight to them!’
From somewhere on the hillside, the almor screamed, a raging cry of anger and frustration. Its hunger wouldn’t wane until it had taken them all. Steven winced as the inhuman shriek resonated along his spine, chilling him through his already wet clothes.
‘Let’s get inside,’ Gilmour said. ‘We’ll have to be careful drawing water while we’re here, and even more careful when we leave.’
Steven fell in beside the old man and they carefully picked their way down to the palace gate.
Rob Scott Jay Gordon
Lessek's Key
BOOK III
The Wolfhound
MALAKASIA
‘Thank you, Alen.’ Hoyt’s eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Where did you get these?’
Alen gestured as if all of Eldarn were within his reach – yet Hoyt had never known the old man to be anywhere but Middle Fork. ‘Oh, here and there.’
‘But these are vintage – nothing like this has been printed in over nine hundred Twinmoons.’ Hoyt brushed the cover of the top volume in the stack of thirty or more: the most comprehensive collection of medical texts he had ever seen.
‘There are more,’ Alen said.
‘Where?’ Hoyt immediately hated the fact that he sounded so greedy and tried to curb his enthusiasm slightly. ‘Sorry, I mean- thank you so very much for these, Alen. It would have taken me ten Twinmoons or more to steal this collection – I’d love to know where you managed to find them. And if there are others, well, you know I just want to be as thorough as possible in my training-’
‘Please stop apologising,’ Alen said with a smile. ‘There are more, and I want you to have them. They’re doing no one any good where they are. Once you get this bunch stashed away somewhere, I’ll show you a significant private library here in Praga, and another over in Rona.’ He considered his pipe and rapped the bowl against the fireplace to empty it, then stored it in a rack on the mantel. The old man’s dog wandered in from the hallway, nuzzled against Hoyt’s hip until he patted the big animal behind the ears. Satisfied for the moment, it padded over to a rug near the fire to sleep away the morning aven.
Hoyt had dreamed of such books. He had wanted for so long to be a healer – more than that, he wanted to be a doctor. Stitching a wound, setting a bone, even delivering a baby: these skills he had learned during his travels, and he was respected in Southport as a talented healer, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy him. A thousand Twinmoons of Malakasian rule had seen the deterioration of so much in Eldarn – education, public health, welfare, scientific research, and especially medicine. Given the opportunity, Hoyt Navarra of Southport was happy to burden himself with the resurrection of medicine in Eldarn. These books were a good start.
Being found with even one of these publications would mean death; being detained with thirty ancient medical treatises would almost certainly ensure a slow, tortured death: a tag hanging. He would be forced to wear a placard naming him as an illegal smuggler of outlaw writing, and then hanged for an entire Twinmoon until his body rotted. Hoyt had seen tag hangings before; by the end of the Twinmoon, the foul stench of decay was overwhelming. Once he had seen a woman caught with fennaroot; she’d refused to put on the placard so the Malakasian officials had acted swiftly. A soldier nailed the placard to her chest.