Brynne looked to Steven. ‘What did it do to you?’
‘Nothing.’ Steven searched for an accurate description. ‘It felt as though a cold breeze blew through my clothes and pressed against my skin, but then, rather than simply chilling the surface, it pushed on and blew right through me.’
Garec tucked the ends of his blanket beneath Sallax’s heels before asking, ‘What did you mean when you said it was here to help?’
‘He spoke to me. He said his name was Gabriel O’Reilly and that Nerak knew where we were. He tried to tell me more, but something Gilmour said forced him out. He was only able to tell me he wanted to help.’
‘Why did he harm Sallax?’ Garec asked. ‘Especially if he wants to help us.’
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps he felt threatened by the staff. Maybe it can destroy him; it certainly made short work of the almor.’ Steven looked to Gilmour. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think if Nerak knows where we are it is because we have been followed. I have not used enough magic for him to trace me.’ The old man made an awkward motion that Steven found unsettling. ‘If he already knows where we are tonight, we might as well enjoy a few creature comforts. There is no more use trying to hide.’ Gilmour waved one hand over the small campfire and the flames leaped to twice their height. Heat from the blaze warmed their campsite and Steven removed the hunk of boar from its wooden spit.
‘Garec,’ Gilmour directed, kneeling beside the blaze, ‘come and sit here near the fire.’
As the bowman complied, Gilmour rubbed his palms together contemplatively until they glowed the same red hue they had the night he restored Steven’s splintered wooden staff. ‘Bend your knee,’ the Larion Senator commanded, and again Garec did as he had been told. As the old man rubbed his hands gently on both sides of the injured leg, Garec could feel a warmth course through his torn cartilage and strained ligaments. The therapeutic spell lasted only a few moments, but the young Ronan was certain, even before he stood to test the leg’s strength, that Gilmour had healed him completely. In fact, he felt better than he had in Twinmoons.
‘Now for the snow,’ the old man said to himself, rising from the ground. He closed his eyes, concentrated for a moment and gestured with both hands above his head, as if drawing the outline of an invisible dome. A brilliant light shone through the pine boughs, illuminating the forest around them and blinding everyone momentarily.
Steven rubbed the flash from his eyes in time to see Gilmour pull a piece of meat from the roast. ‘There,’ the old magician said, chewing thoughtfully. ‘Now there’s no doubt that Nerak knows where we are.’
Steven could feel the intense heat of their now-roaring fire warm the forest around him. He gazed through the trees and saw snow continuing to drape the pine grove in soft winter white, but no more snow fell in the area immediately surrounding their campsite, as if some kind of mystical canopy sheltered them from the storm. Impressed, he moved near the fire and asked, ‘How would the ghost – or whatever it was – of a dead bank teller in Idaho Springs get here to Eldarn if the far portal on our side was locked away in a safe deposit box?’
‘Nerak must have brought him back through,’ Mark said. He gestured to Gilmour. ‘You said he can cross over with only one portal open. Can he make the trip while in possession of an unwilling soul?’
‘Certainly. And although I believe he, like all of us, is subject to the desultory whim of the weaker portal-’
‘That’s the one that drops you anywhere, right?’ Mark interrupted.
‘Yes, exactly,’ Gilmour continued, ‘even though he would be transported almost anywhere in your world going through, coming back, he has the power to pinpoint the open portal at Welstar Palace.’
‘Can you do that as well?’ Steven asked hopefully.
‘No,’ Gilmour answered almost apologetically. ‘My role with the Larion Senate was to oversee research and scholarship. I learned a few useful spells, but I never had access to the portals like Nerak or Pikan or their team.’
‘But you’ve been researching for so long,’ Garec suggested. ‘Just like Nerak.’
‘That’s true, and I might surprise myself and detect the open portal, but I haven’t made a trip across the Fold in half my lifetime. I wouldn’t want to risk it on my first attempt.’
‘So the ghost of Gabriel O’Reilly haunts the Blackstone Mountains,’ Steven said. ‘Why?’
‘I think he escaped,’ Garec suggested softly.
‘What’s that?’
‘I think he escaped. I think he managed to get away from Nerak.’ He drew his hunting knife and began slicing thick portions of meat. ‘When I dreamed of Rona that night on Seer’s Peak, I saw hundreds, perhaps thousands of those wraiths moving through the forbidden forest near Estrad. I thought they were the souls of people I’ve killed coming back to haunt me, but I’ve not killed nearly that many. Seeing Gabriel O’Reilly again, I think he might be an unwilling member of a terrifying army of spirits, each one the disembodied soul of another of Nerak’s victims. I am not sure why Lessek showed them moving through southern Rona, but I don’t like to think about those implications.’
‘Holy Christ,’ Mark whispered under his breath.
‘So, what’s he doing here?’ Brynne asked.
‘He’s obviously trying to tell us something,’ Garec answered. ‘He must be aware of who he is, or who he was, and he’s defying Nerak by making a trip across Eldarn to warn us about another assassin, or some pending challenge.’
‘Like facing an army of those things?’ Mark asked.
‘Perhaps,’ Garec shivered, ‘although I really hope not.’
Noting Sallax still asleep near the fire, Mark began to grow anxious. O’Reilly’s ghost, a benevolent wraith with good intentions, had sidelined the company’s toughest and most dedicated warrior in a matter of seconds. How could they fight an army of wraiths, especially an army bent on killing them? They would be overrun in a heartbeat. ‘We can’t fight them,’ he said cautiously, hoping the others would agree.
‘That’s right,’ Gilmour agreed. ‘We could manage a few, but if Nerak controls the souls of every victim he’s ever possessed, we would be defeated very quickly.’
‘So what do we do?’ Brynne asked. ‘What if Garec’s vision comes to pass and we find ourselves facing thousands of those things?’
Gilmour reached for a second helping of roast boar. ‘We’ll just have to move through them undetected.’
Mark looked down at the slab of cooked meat resting in the bottom of the wooden trencher he had been using since the company of travellers rode north from the orchard outside Estrad. Trench mouth. As a student he’d misheard the term and thought it was the result of eating from wooden bowls, trenchers that had begun to rot. Disgusting. Although he later found out the only thing close was some equally unpleasant disease of the mouth and throat, named for Vincent Price, Vincent van Gogh, Vincent-his-sister’s-dry-cleaner- who knew? Vincent someone, anyway, but whoever it was, he’d never liked using porous crockery. Just to be on the safe side, he had fastidiously cleaned and dried his trencher after each meal. Now his determination to avoid bacteria seemed pretty trivial. Fight an army of ghosts? Move through them undetected? It made trench mouth sound little worse than a cold.
He and Steven had learned to trust Gilmour, but he wasn’t convinced the old man could make them all invisible enough to get past a homicidal ghost army. Shaking his head, Mark turned to watch Steven. He looked very different these days: unwashed, sporting a short beard, and he ate heartily, wiping the grease from his mouth with handfuls of snow from the forest floor. The hickory staff lay across his lap and he seemed more confident than he had ever been. Mark could not remember when Steven had changed from the man terrified of the staff’s power to the man who went nowhere without it.
For a moment Mark wished he had a mirror in which to check the progress of his own transformation. Eldarn was changing him as well; he could feel it. He knew he was losing weight, and that his face was drawn and tired. But what of the wraith hidden within his soul, whatever would be left if Nerak won? Steven said the ghost that haunted them along this trail was the same man whose picture hung in the bank lobby, a grainy black-and-white photograph that radiated seriousness and superiority as only a nineteenth-century professional man could. The wraith version of Gabriel O’Reilly’s soul still looked like the man in the photograph. Mark wondered whether his own spirit would look like an unshaven, emaciated black man lost in a foreign world. Ignoring any bacteria festering in his trencher, he picked up the roughly hewn chunk of meat and began to eat.