‘Why hasn’t Nerak used the far portal to go looking for himself?’ Brynne asked.
‘Because he’d have to abandon Malagon’s body.’ Steven shuddered. ‘Then he’d need another host.’
‘And because he assumes we have the key,’ Garec reiterated. ‘Now that Gilmour is dead, Nerak isn’t in any tearing hurry – he’s probably quite happy to wait for us in Orindale. But he’ll have the far portal with him in case he catches us, devours our minds and discovers the key is sitting on Steven’s desk.’ Garec began to feel queasy.
‘Why not wait for us in Malakasia?’
Steven felt himself grow cold as he answered, ‘Because he must be ready to operate the spell table.’
Brynne swallowed hard and Mark shifted uneasily.
‘He came here to find us, kill us and to retrieve the key if necessary – but his primary reason for coming must be now that Gilmour’s dead, Nerak feels he’s quite safe going back to Sandcliff Palace to continue his studies, or to release his master from the Fold.’ As Steven spoke, the enthusiasm drained from the small group.
Brynne put Mark’s thoughts into words: ‘So, he is ready to use the spell table.’
Garec sighed. ‘He’s either ready now, or he wants to continue his preparations with the table at his disposal. Perhaps he can learn faster if he has a chance to experiment, to work things out firsthand.’
‘So he feared Gilmour enough to have him hunted down and killed, but he doesn’t fear Kantu,’ Mark mused aloud. ‘I wonder why.’
‘I don’t know,’ Steven answered. ‘Maybe Gilmour knew how to kill him, or how to banish the evil possessing his soul.’
Mark looked as though he had been slapped hard across the face. His soul, the essence of his life. Nerak feared Gilmour, because Gilmour could kill him and banish evil’s minion: that’s the only thing in all Eldarn that frightened Nerak. Gilmour had it, but Kantu did not: but what was it? Knowledge? Magic? Power? Why had he planted such a seed in Sallax’s memory, so long ago? Twenty-five Twinmoons ago – that meant Nerak had been afraid of Gilmour for a long time. Nerak might not know his own weaknesses, but maybe Gilmour had… but if that were the case, why had he waited so long to attack? Why was it important that Gilmour died before Nerak travelled to Sandcliff?
Mark thumped his own head, as if to shake up his thoughts: he growled with frustration as he wondered whether Nerak’s weaknesses would be exposed at Sandcliff Palace – but no, he was convinced Nerak had no idea he had any weaknesses.
‘It must have something to do with the table,’ Mark said out loud. ‘Maybe Nerak will be vulnerable when he operates it.’
‘I hate to take that chance,’ Steven commented dryly. ‘I’d hate to wait until he is there, actually working the table, before we do anything.’
‘But we are going to do something,’ Mark retorted. ‘We’re going onto that ship and back to Idaho Springs for the key.’
‘Assuming he doesn’t kill us all and go back for it himself,’ Garec said, feeling nauseous again.
‘We can’t think about that now.’ Brynne tried to imagine what her brother would do in this situation, but drew a blank. She’d have to go with her own best guess. ‘We have to get there first. Then we can work out who’s going to board the ship and take those risks. It may well be pointless for all of us to go.’
‘She’s right,’ Steven agreed. ‘Without magic, you’d all be marching to your deaths.’
‘You might be doing the same,’ Brynne pointed out.
‘That’s true, but at least Garec and I have been able to use the magic. I think it should be just Garec and me going on board.’
The Ronan bowman nodded.
‘I’ll be coming as well,’ Mark added quietly.
‘Why?’ Brynne asked under her breath.
‘Because I’m going to figure out how to kill him.’
Mark took his place in Timmon’s longboat and hefted an oak oar into the adjacent oarlock. He had insisted on rowing alongside those soldiers who had not been too badly injured in Steven’s stony hailstorm. Each of the remaining longboats was outfitted with sconces running along the gunwales which Steven ignited with a quick touch of the hickory staff – after Gita had suggested, ‘Let’s just light them one at a time this morning, shall we?’
Steven’s laugh reassured Mark: he was glad to see they were getting along. He had no idea what was waiting for them in Orindale, but it was comforting to know they had the confident support of the local Resistance forces, even if they were a little threadbare.
Brynne sat in the stern with Garec, mending arrow fletching and sharpening arrowheads; Garec would make new arrows once he found suitable trees from which to cut shafts. In the meantime he attended to those he had, fastidiously grating stone against stone to create a rough edge and then working over each tip and blade with what looked like a thick wad of chamois. He made final alterations with the tip of his knife and a small wooden brush with coarse bristles.
Mark was curious; he was sure he had seen more conventional arrowheads in Garec’s quivers before and asked, ‘No metal?’
Garec shrugged. ‘No money.’
‘Ah, I see,’ Mark laughed.
‘Anyway,’ he said, gesturing at the array of stones and tools in his lap, ‘this is a skill I like to keep up.’
‘Like falling off a bike, I guess.’
Garec waved his knife. ‘Some days, Mark, it’s impossible to understand you.’
Steven was on board Gita’s longboat so they could work out a code the Ronans could use when they got to Traver’s Notch. It was obvious the entire Falkan Resistance wouldn’t be barracked in town, so they needed passwords to ensure their safe passage from Traver’s Notch to the Falkan encampment.
Somewhere near the bow, a rough voice began calling out a slow but steady rhythm: ‘Stroke, stroke, stroke.’
Mark fell to rowing and allowed his thoughts to wander back to Idaho Springs.
He remembered smelling the pizza Steven carried as they approached their house; they had been drinking and Mark was hungry. He grinned to himself: he’d gone hungry a time or two since their arrival in Eldarn, but nothing could rival the need for food after too much beer – the kind of hunger that bore no relation to how much one had eaten or how recently. He and Steven called it foraging, because so few places were open that late at night in Idaho Springs: Owen’s Pub and the diner were pretty much it. Despite his burgeoning appreciation for good tecan, Mark suddenly pined for a steaming mug of coffee, served in a white ceramic mug.
That night was typicaclass="underline" when they got back to 147 Tenth Street he and Steven had fallen on the pizza like starving serfs. They’d finished most of it, washed down with more beer, and finalised plans for their assault on Decatur Peak. Finally Steven had opened the briefcase. What happened next was hazy. Mark’s brow furrowed as he tried to recall overlooked details. There had been a rosewood box, padded inside with something like felt; they had been amused that William Higgins had created such a beautiful box for a commonplace chunk of rock. Then Steven had opened the cylinder. It had unscrewed smoothly, as if it had been oiled once a month for the past century and a half.
‘Stroke, stroke, stroke,’ the voice called, muted, as if from across the lake. Slow and steady, slow and steady.
Wait. Go back again. He was missing something. The cylinder. The cap opened smoothly, no stiffness or rust or corrosion. The rosewood box. That was it. The box. Rosewood. Where had he seen rosewood? In Rona: tight-grained rosewood grew in those forests – Garec’s bow was rosewood. That wood had come from Rona. There had been hinges on the box as well. They had opened smoothly too, like the cylinder, with no rust or squeaking. The rock was the only thing inside – no, not a rock , Lessek’s Key. That rock was Lessek’s Key, the keystone to the spell table, the most powerful collection of magic imaginable, and Mark couldn’t remember anything.
Go back to the box. They had opened it; the hinges had not creaked. The key had been inside, and they had thought nothing of it. They had laughed and set it aside. Mark had made a joke about mercury poisoning; he had even given the rock a name, Barry… Bernie… Betsy. Steven had set it aside, but there had been something about the key, it had made him feel something, a familiarity, as if he had suddenly happened upon someone he had known for a few moments many years before.