Cresting a short rise in the path, Steven could see eastwards towards the sunlit end of the ridge trail. To his surprise, he saw Mark, Brynne and Sallax climbing towards him. Turning back to Garec and Gilmour, he shouted, ‘They’re here!’
Gilmour looked up. ‘Who is here?’
‘Everyone, I think – well, everyone except Versen. I can’t see him yet.’
The old magician hurried up, using Steven’s bloodstained hickory stick for support. Squinting at their companions rushing along the dangerous ridge, he calmly warned, ‘Get ready. Something’s wrong.’
Gilmour handed Steven the staff and dashed along the path with the speed and agility of a mountain goat. Steven could barely keep pace; Garec, still nursing his sore knee, was left well behind.
Working to keep his footing, Steven cursed Gilmour as they trotted over rocks, loose soil and rotting deadwood. Razor-thin bottlenecks had sheer drops to the forest floor on either side.
‘He’s like a damned Sherpa,’ Steven muttered to himself, angry for believing, even for a moment, that there was anything Gilmour could not do. He lost sight of the old man around an enormous boulder that lay directly on the trail, then, hurrying past it, he nearly ran headlong into him: Gilmour had stopped suddenly on the opposite side and was now standing motionless. About twenty paces away, Mark, Brynne and Sallax, mirroring Gilmour, were standing absolutely still as well, their eyes fixed on one another. No one moved or spoke.
‘What’s happening?’ Steven asked of anyone listening.
‘Quiet,’ Gilmour commanded. ‘It’s the almor. It has found us.’
Embarrassed that he had been unable to keep up with the older man, Steven swallowed hard and endeavoured to catch his breath quietly.
‘Where is it?’ he whispered. ‘Is it hunting us?’
‘It is hunting me,’ Gilmour replied.
Garec had climbed up onto a small pile of rocks some fifty paces behind them; he had his bow at the ready, an arrow nocked and two full quivers at his feet. But even though Steven had never known a bow could be fired with the accuracy and precision Garec showed with every shot, he wasn’t filled with confidence; he didn’t believe traditional weapons would have any effect on the soul-sucking demon.
Still no one moved. It was the world’s largest game of Russian Roulette and no one knew when the gun would fire.
He glanced around at his friends, looking from face to face. Everyone was anticipating the inevitable. When would the gun go off? Whom would the almor choose?
Mark, Brynne and Sallax looked as though they had already been in a war; they were ready to collapse from fatigue. He guessed they had run up the trail overnight to warn him. Versen’s absence must mean the Ronan woodsman had been the demon’s first victim. What had it been like? Would he have felt the almor grab him from beneath the surface of the ground? Or perhaps his consciousness simply faded to black, like Steven’s had when he had his appendix removed.
Versen knew. It had killed Versen and now it was here for Gilmour, and doubtless anyone else who stood between it and the old man. Steven felt fear begin to well up inside him once again, but he forced it back down.
‘No! My dream didn’t mean anything,’ he said to himself. ‘Lessek did not speak to me because I’m done here; I did my job. I showed a surviving Larion Senate member where to find Lessek’s Key. That was my role. I can go home now and God can shit on this place. I can go home and be a coward for ever. I can be a coward who murdered a Seron. That’s goddamned perfect. I’ll be a murdering coward, assistant manager in a small town bank, overqualified and uninspired. That will be my lot. Great.’
Steven had never given much thought to the possibility that his life had evolved the way he allowed it to. He knew only that he was unhappy and disappointed with choices he had made. Choices. That was the crux of his problem. He never made any choices. A fatalist and a coward, he left things to the winds and accepted consequences, jeopardising and abandoning whatever values he may have had to keep his life heading roughly in the right direction.
Versen had not been that kind of person. Versen made decisions in the best interests of his friends and family. He worked to free Rona from the chokehold of Malakasian occupation. Versen was a better person, a stronger person. Steven realised in an instant that he would never be that brave, that compassionate, or that willing to cling to his beliefs no matter what the consequences were.
At that moment, Steven’s fear was overshadowed by rage, not the blind rage he had felt whilst battling the Seron, but a seething, controlled rage spiralling up from twenty-eight years of cowardice.
Without thinking, he strode to the centre of the path, separating Gilmour from Mark, Brynne and Sallax. They all cried out, almost in unison, for him to stand still, but he ignored them. It was clear what he had to do.
Steven began banging the staff against the earth, as if he were summoning the devil from its core.
‘Come out, you demon bastard!’ he shouted. ‘Come out here and fight me!’ He cried out at the top of his lungs, as if anything less would mitigate the moment, ‘Show yourself, you chickenshit tapioca nightmare. I’ll kick the shit out of you – if you’re not afraid to come out here and take me!’
Mark, watching from a distance, was dumbfounded. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he screamed. ‘It will kill you, Steven!’
He started down the path towards his roommate, but Sallax tackled him from behind, pinning him to the ground. ‘You go and it will kill you both,’ he whispered urgently in Mark’s ear. ‘This way Gilmour will know where the almor lies waiting and perhaps be able to save your friend’s life.’
‘No!’ Mark shouted, but his plea was muffled by the explosion of earth and rock that enveloped Steven as the almor burst once again from the depths of Seer’s Peak.
Blinded momentarily by the eruption of debris around him, Steven held his breath and tried to maintain his footing. The demon had not yet taken him. It towered above him, all around him. His vision was blurred, his hearing dulled by the cloudy fluid of the almor’s mass.
Then Steven realised why he was still alive as the ghastly abomination spoke. ‘We will battle now and you will learn what it means to feel fear.’ The hollow voice rang in his head like the reverberations of an out-of-tune pipe organ.
‘Then you can teach me nothing,’ Steven shouted as he raised the hickory staff. He figured he had one shot before the beast dragged his soul into hell.
‘I will savour your energy for a thousand lifetimes,’ it roared back, but Steven was not listening; he was preparing for his last act of defiance: a mighty swing of the hickory staff he had found in the forest south of the Blackstone Mountains. That swing held all his trepidation and insecurity, all his tendencies to please others at his own expense, all his cowering in the shadows waiting for safe opportunities to be or become Steven Taylor. He held nothing back. He had one strike only and even that would be useless: a whittled section of tree branch had no chance against an ancient, otherworldly demon. He was about to die.
As he unleashed his blow, Steven began to feel his own life force draining into the almor. It was all right. He did not mind, just as long as he had just this one chance to do something for himself, of his own volition.
Against all the odds, it worked. He felt the shaft tear through the milky fluid of the almor, rending it open and spilling its malodorous blood into the dirt of the Seer’s Peak ridge trail. The agonising cry rang in his head like an artillery volley and he nearly passed out at the shock wave.