‘We can’t destroy it.’ Gilmour was adamant. ‘We would be cutting off our own hands.’
Like a cheap vaudeville magician, Steven thought.
‘So what do we do?’ Brand asked. ‘We can’t roll this cart fast enough to escape, and if we can’t destroy the table, we have to stand and fight.’
‘Against a whole battalion?’ Kellin looked as if she might tumble from the saddle after all.
‘What option do we have?’ Brand asked. ‘Gilmour needs the table. Steven claims we don’t. What should we do? We’re not sorcerers. If Mark gets it, he’ll use it, and we’ll all be dead; Eldarn will be lost. If he waits to use it in Wellham Ridge or even Orindale, we might be able to steal it back from him – especially after the soldiers return to their normal duties. But there are no guarantees he’ll wait.’ Brand looked at Gilmour. ‘Is that right? Have I missed anything?’
‘That’s it, and we’re wasting time standing here, my friends.’
‘So we fight,’ Brand said. A battalion of soldiers can’t stand against these two. Even if you don’t want to kill them, Steven, you can-’
‘Drop trees on them, catch the forest on fire, bring the river down on them, flood the whole rutting place,’ Garec suggested.
‘Vivid imagination, Garec,’ Steven said wryly.
‘I’d make a great magician.’
‘And we’ll run south with the table,’ Brand said, ‘while you delay the soldiers here.’
‘West,’ Kellin corrected, ‘no one would expect that.’
‘How far west can we go?’ Garec asked. ‘We’re backed up against the foothills right now.’
‘Exactly,’ Kellin said. ‘It might be slower and harder, but with all the horses working, we’ll be hidden in the hills before they get here.’
‘Unless they have scouts spread out to the west,’ Garec said.
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Kellin said. ‘If even one of them sees us, we’re lost. We’d never manage to escape uphill.’
‘Then we cross the river.’ Garec gestured east through the trees.
‘No,’ Steven said.
‘No, what?’
Steven ignored them. Turning to the wagon, he allowed the magic to seep from his body, covering him like a bank of fog over a lakeside village. He reached between the wagon slats and pressed his palms against the spell table.
Gilmour whispered, ‘What are you doing?’
The rear slats slid aside and the table began rolling backwards, its carved pedestal feet turning a sluggish orbit around a tiny slot into which Steven imagined Mark would fit Lessek’s key. The inky granite shone dully in the muted winter light, solid now, impenetrable, but with the forbidding potential to transform into a swirling cauldron of magic and sorcery.
‘Garec and Kellin are right, Steven,’ Gilmour said. ‘We should stand and fight while they get as far from here as possible.’
Steven ignored his friend and focused on his spell, guiding the massive stone artefact out of the cart. He ran his palms over the smoothly polished stone, then reached his fingers into the mal-shaped slot reserved for Lessek’s keystone. With a grimace, he released the magic he had dammed up behind his will and watched as the spell table broke into three ragged shards.
‘Good rutting whores!’ Gilmour shouted. ‘I thought I told you-!’ The old man fell to his knees. ‘After all this time, Steven, have you lost your mind?’
‘Outstanding!’ Steven crowed.
‘What in the name of the great gods of the Northern Forest has come over you?’ Gilmour choked. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
The others stood frozen, gripped by the realisation that something powerful and dangerous was unfolding before them. No one spoke.
‘If it fools you, Gilmour, there’s a chance it’ll fool Mark.’
Taken aback, the Larion sorcerer wiped his eyes and whispered, ‘If it fools me? If what fools me?’
‘Come, see for yourself.’ Steven gestured and Gilmour warily approached the broken pieces, hope returning a breath at a time.
Reaching out to grasp one of the jagged shards, he asked, ‘What did you do?’
‘I cut off my own hand,’ Steven replied simply, ‘for the second time since we came looking for this thing.’
Garec gasped, almost unaware he’d been holding his breath from the moment the spell table had shattered. ‘It’s an illusion? A visual trick?’
Steven nodded. ‘Mark won’t be expecting it. He knows me too well. He knows how I’ve been struggling with this power, and how Gilmour has been working with me on magic’s ability to truly change what’s real, to truly change the nature of something at its most fundamental level. So-’ he smirked again, ‘-I’ve thrown him a curveball. We’ll see if it works.’
‘A curveball?’ Kellin asked herself, then went on quickly, ‘But won’t the key still draw him to this place?’
‘Yes,’ Gilmour answered.
‘So we have to hope he doesn’t touch it,’ Brand said. ‘If he’s in the saddle, he might see that it’s broken and just keep going.’
‘Chasing us, most likely,’ Garec said.
‘Grand,’ Kellin echoed.
‘Can you mask the power emanating from it, Steven?’ Garec waved his hands about, trying to explain what he meant. ‘Can you camouflage the magic coming off the thing as if it really is sitting here useless?’
Steven said, ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then this is a rutting gamble.’
‘I don’t know what else to do,’ Steven admitted. At least this looks like we took the last option available to us: we broke the table to save Eldarn.’
A palpable silence fell over them. No one was comfortable leaving the artefact for Mark, but Steven’s ruse was the only thing they could think of. If it worked, and if they survived long enough, they still had a chance to spirit the table away through the far portal.
Brand was first to speak. ‘So we hide in the hills, wait for Mark to either just pass along the river or to discover the table. We hope he leaves it here, assuming it’s broken and useless, and then we return to haul it north to the nearest farm with a barn.’
‘That about sums it up, yes,’ Steven said, ‘unless anyone has a better idea.’
Garec screwed up his face, racking his mind for anything more promising. Crossing the river was too dangerous, and would take too long. Standing to fight was suicidal. The two sorcerers could ride north to face Mark, but scouts would be bound to discover them while they lugged the table into the foothills. And even if Steven and Gilmour managed to turn the bulk of Mark’s battalion, it needed only one squad of armed Malakasians to easily overtake the partisans as they fled. Garec was deadly with a bow, and he would probably kill most of any squad coming for them, but it just took one soldier to escape alive and the force that followed them would be enormous.
‘What if we open the portal now?’ he asked finally.
Steven frowned. ‘That could be our wisest choice, Garec. With the table, book and far portal gone, there would be no way for Mark to follow us.’
‘But-’
‘But there are massive oceans, vast ice floes and sprawling deserts in my world. When I crossed the Fold from Orindale, I found myself twenty paces deep in the sea, five hundred paces offshore – and I considered myself lucky.’
‘The table might sink,’ Kellin said, ‘but you two could haul it back out, couldn’t you?’
‘The oceans in my world reach depths of over twenty thousand paces, Kellin,’ Steven explained, ‘and there’s enormous water pressure – down there it would crush us to jelly.’
Garec laughed, a nervous chuckle. ‘It was just a thought,’ he said. ‘Let’s go with this instead.’
Brand agreed. ‘If Mark sees through the charade and begins using the table here in the forest, we’ll draw our weapons and charge. It’ll be our only hope, but we’ll have to try and kill him. If he waits, if he hauls the table back to Wellham Ridge or even into Orindale, we’ll be able to steal it back.’
‘Done,’ Steven said. He wasn’t willing to fight Mark to the death, but he needed to get the company moving again. ‘Let’s go.’
Garec looked around. ‘We’ll leave the wagon here; it looks more convincing that way.’