Gambling that the ship might not crush him to pieces in deeper water, Steven tried to bend his body into a makeshift rudder, to catch the current and force himself towards the bottom, and perhaps to safety. It didn’t work. The current was too unpredictable for him to do anything more than ride it out. He continued to slam into branches and rocks, felt stones and dirt pelt him in a hundred places at once: his face, hands, neck and back, as he waited for five tons of Falkan schooner to come slamming down on him from above.
He rolled into a ball, tucked his head down, filled his lungs and waited, wondering in a desultory manner if Garec and Kellin had survived, and if he would ever find Gilmour again.
It was some time later when he awakened.
What’s broken?
The world came into focus, as light and colour emerged from behind the curtain of hazy grey and blurry black. Eldarn repositioned itself around, under, above and beside Steven Taylor. He was lying in a shallow puddle of mud and cold river water. Fearing to exacerbate his injuries, he didn’t move.
Tibia and fibula, broken; they must be. Head hurts. What’s the head, anyway? Cranium. That’s it, your pointy little head, dummy. That feels broken, too, maybe a hairline crack. Shoulder’s badly scraped… a pound of flesh? Take two; they’re small… but intact, and my back’s all right.
He snaked a hand down his thigh. I can’t have broken this leg twice in four months; I just can’t. He pulled his hand back. Later. Check it later.
Now, what hurts?
That one was easy: everything.
Take your time; let’s see what you remember. What hurts? Ulna, radius, coccyx… that’s your arse, for everyone in the cheap seats, thank you very much… both clavicles, ribs on the left, ribs on the right, and the knee bone, the patella, feels like it is connected to the shoulder bone, which feels like it’s still connected to the grille of a passing garbage truck. That’s it. That’s all I know, good for probably a D+ on your average biology exam.
Lying still, he tried to focus on anything but the fact that he might have rebroken his leg. Without lifting his head, he endeavoured to take in as much of Eldarn as he could from his current vantage point beside what remained of the Medera River.
He could see a rock, as big a small truck, resting on the razed, muddy ground as if it had been deposited there by a fast-moving glacier. There were countless uprooted trees, lying in myriad ungainly positions throughout the clearing as if they’d been tossed about. If this was a clearing. It was probably a forest until five minutes ago.
The smell of decay found him, tickling the back of his throat. He didn’t want to vomit; he breathed heavily through his mouth for a few seconds, until he was more accustomed to the aroma of upside-down river. It was like autumn, the smell of death and decomposition, but autumn had a way of being delicate about it, of mixing its scents with more pleasant aromas: mulled wine, ripe fruit, mown hay, and wood smoke. This was just the opposite: the hegemonic smell of shit and rotting earth.
Mud and silt coated everything, as if the world had been hastily slathered in a quick coat of something muck-brown, foetid. It was cold now, despite the lingering effects of his warming spell, and he knew he would either need to concentrate enough to recast the magic, or get to his feet and find someplace to dry out.
He could hear the river trickling by somewhere behind him. He guessed he was facing north, lying perhaps two hundred feet from the riverbank. The sustained thunder had passed, even its echoes, and Steven closed his eyes and listened for a moment to the rhythmic babble as the Medera rediscovered its former self and wound its more familiar route towards Orindale. There was no sign of Garec, Kellin or Gilmour, no sign of any of the horses, and no sound of anyone shouting for help… just the river, and the same light breeze he had felt that morning.
Steven closed his eyes. Despite the cold, he might have slept for a few minutes, until the slurp, drag and slurp sounds of something large and broken being dragged through the mud finally roused him. He rolled, with surprising ease, onto his back and lifted his head. It took a moment for everything to make sense; the land looked like it had been bombed. Then, across the mudscape, he saw the grettan, a big female – not nearly as large as the creature that had attacked him in the Blackstones, but a muscular and dangerous animal, nevertheless. She had sustained a serious injury to her back during the floodtide and was dragging her hind legs, grunting as if in pain. The creature’s fur was matted, covered with mud. She bared her teeth with each step, but it was more a show of pain than any real hostility.
‘You planning to eat me?’ Steven pushed himself up. ‘Huh? Eat me and then rest somewhere while you heal?’
The grettan growled something threatening; she hadn’t expected Steven to be alive, never mind capable of mounting a defence.
‘I have bad news for you, sister,’ Steven said. ‘You’re screwed. That’s not going to get better; you’ve got maybe a day or two left, and I wouldn’t recommend any dancing in your condition. So what happened, Dorothy? Someone drop a house on you? I think they dropped a ship on me.’ Steven focused his thoughts inward and brought the magic forth in a tightly woven spell. He thought about just stinging her, driving her off somewhere to die on her own, but that would take time. If there were healthy grettans about, the end for her would be ugly. Instead, he decided to finish her here. ‘Sorry about this, my dear, but it’s for the best.’
He lashed out at a spot between the grettan’s forelegs. The spell slammed into the creature, ripping her apart in a hailstorm of bloody fur and sinew. Steven watched as the animal’s tongue lolled from what was left of its mouth, poking its pink tip into the mud.
‘Nicely done.’
Gilmour. Sonofabitch.
‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling up to a bit of magic. You must be relatively whole, and if you’re not entirely ready for the winter chain-ball tournaments, you’re at least strong enough to sit up and work a spell or two. That’s a relief.’ He pointed towards the grettan’s remains. ‘She was planning on an early lunch, wasn’t she?’
Dragging a leg himself, a bloody piece of cloth over one eye, Gilmour, masquerading for the moment as a Malakasian soldier, made his way across the mud.
‘You’ve got nine lives, old man.’
‘Pissing demons, I’ve got more than nine, Steven. I must’ve used nine up since I met you.’
‘I’ll try to take that as a compliment.’
‘Are you broken and battered?’
‘Am I?’ Steven shrugged. ‘The verdict isn’t in on that yet, but so far, I think I need a new head, new leg, new arse, a new set of tyres and a couple of gallons of paint.’
‘Oh, good. Is that all? I was worried.’ He sat with a sustained groan. ‘Actually, I think there’s a place just up the road where we can get all those things.’
Steven suppressed a chuckle. ‘Don’t make me laugh; my ribs hurt.’
‘Sorry.’
‘How about you?’
‘Cuts, scrapes, abrasions in embarrassing places and some damage to my hip, but I’m betting you can fix that.’
‘I’ll need a box of Band-Aids and a couple of quarts of hydrogen peroxide. Any broken bones?’
‘A dislocated finger, but I took care of that before I came to find you.’ Gilmour held up the swollen knuckle. ‘Let me see your leg.’
Steven indicated his calf, the same leg that had been nearly bitten off in the Blackstones, the same leg that had tripped him up in the landfill outside Idaho Springs, where Lessek’s key had been buried. ‘It’s numb. The cold helps.’ He ran his hands along either side of his knee and down. ‘Actually, it doesn’t feel…’ He stopped, then tried to bend it. It complied, with only a twinge of muscle cramp. ‘Holy shit!’ he cried, looking enormously surprised.