‘What are you doing?’ Mark called.
‘He’s here, just over that hill,’ Steven answered, reaching into his pocket and removing Lessek’s key. He could feel his heart pounding, thrumming in his temples, rushing blood to his cold fingers and causing him to fumble awkwardly with the crooked little stone. He looked up at Gilmour and waited. When the old man nodded, he dropped the key into the hole, covered it with snow and burned a black cross in a nearby tree with one end of the hickory staff.
Steven stood. ‘I don’t know how he could have known we were here.’
Gilmour deliberately tapped the ashes from his pipe and replaced it inside his tunic.
‘Please,’ Steven implored the others, ‘stay here. Don’t come up. Even better, go back to Wellham Ridge and wait there. We were fools to bring you down here.’
No one moved; Steven climbed back into the saddle and rode forward. Gilmour moved to ride beside him. When they reached the top of the short rise, Gilmour said, ‘Yes, you’re right. I can feel him now.’
The hickory staff began to glow, warming Steven’s hands.
The hill sloped down gradually to an irregularly shaped clearing interrupted in several places by isolated clumps of trees. The snow was pristine, with not even animal tracks marring its surface. To the east, the clearing narrowed, and a thin line of snow ran down into the glen and up to the water’s edge. The river there was dark, shadowed, even in the bright midday sun. Several large boulders, some as big as houses, were scattered in the water, creating deep, swirling eddies.
Darkness, deep water, cold shadows, and a wintry clearing that narrowed to a point where rushing water met sedentary earth, and in the middle of it all, a titanic boulder reared out of the water. A young girl sat on top of the boulder, dangling her feet over the edge and gnawing on an apple. She was pretty, with shoulder-length hair, a narrow face and oval eyes set perfectly over the thin bridge of her nose.
‘Who the hell is this?’ Steven whispered.
‘That’s Bellan Whitward,’ Gilmour said, ‘Princess Bellan. Malagon’s daughter. Look at her hands.’
The girl sitting there – she couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old – was wearing black leather gloves. She was already dead, her soul imprisoned alongside her father’s, somewhere in the profound emptiness of the Fold.
‘Welcome Fantus, Steven Taylor,’ she called, her light voice making them all shiver. ‘I must commend you on your powers of deduction, Fantus. I admit, I don’t know how you did it. But given your presence here, I must assume that you have somehow worked out where to find the spell table – maybe you’ve even worked out how to extract it.’
Bellan tossed the apple core into the river, reached inside her tunic and withdrew a red, white and blue pouch of Confederate Son chewing tobacco. She delicately teased out a lump and popped it into her mouth and sat there chewing quietly for a while, savouring the flavour, then she spat bubbly brown juice into the swirling eddy below.
‘I suppose I must blame myself,’ she said. ‘I obviously said too much at Sandcliff, and now here we are.’
Steven rode into the clearing as the trees around him faded from view, melting into one another and leaving just the wintry carpet, the boulder and the girl for him to consider.
Bellan continued, ‘Remind me, Fantus, did I mention the guards?’
Gilmour reined in beside Steven. ‘You said the table was warded by Eldarn itself, and Eldarn’s most ruthless gatekeepers.’
Bellan’s face split in a smile that managed to be both gruesome and coquettish. ‘I did say that, didn’t I? Well, grand. Would you like to meet them, Fantus? Steven? Would you like to meet Eldarn’s most ruthless gatekeepers? Because I have been literally dying to introduce you.’ She giggled and waved a hand; the river started to bubble as small ripples spread across the water, churning white when a number of the horribly familiar bone-collecting monsters tumbled out and skidded across the clearing.
Steven was ready for them. The staff flared to life, glowing red-hot with impatient rage and untapped power. He slid from the saddle, trying not to worry about his horse as the animal reared, whinnied in terror and bolted.
‘I’ll handle these things,’ he said to Gilmour; ‘you keep your eye on Bellan, or Nerak, or whoever it is up there.’
‘Careful, Steven, careful,’ Gilmour warned. ‘There is much more to face here than just these monsters.’
Steven moved purposefully, intent on engaging the bone-collectors before they could reach the slope and his friends, but he was just a few paces away when something inside him – the staff, Lessek’s key, or even some primitive survival instinct – shouted a warning, On your left!
Steven ducked, and whirled to his left, swiping the hickory staff through the air between him and the blurry trees. There was a tear, a rip in the world like those he had seen in the hills above Idaho Springs, and flying out at him was a wraith, one of Nerak’s immortal slaves. He barely brought the staff around in time to slice through the gossamer body and send the ghostly shards reeling through the clearing like so much tobacco smoke; killing it was easy, but there had been something oddly familiar about this wraith and Steven froze as the creature’s wild-eyed, homicidal visage flashed into his mind’s eye.
‘No!’ he screamed, and killed the first bone-collector with a massive bolt from the staff; the subterranean monster exploded in front of him, hundreds of armour-plated legs like so much chitin shrapnel firing through the clearing, into the river and out among the trees.
Steven’s mind raced. It couldn’t be. Please don’t let it be true; not her… please tell me I didn’t just send her soul back into the Fold -
‘When you are running, Steven, run.’ Gilmour’s voice reached through his anguish. ‘When you are running, run, and when you are fighting, fight.’
When you are fighting, fight,’ Steven repeated. ‘When you are fighting, fight.’
We might not make it.
When you are fighting, fight,’ he said again, the rhythm of the words helping him regain his composure.
‘It was her,’ Bellan called sweetly from her perch on top of the boulder, ‘and you just sent her soul back into the Fold for ever. Some friend you are, Steven Taylor. Poor old Myrna Kessler.’
Steven fought to contain his rage. Compassion, Steven. Fight with compassion. It is the strongest emotion in the world: stronger than rage, stronger than fear and stronger than hatred.
‘She will be in there for ever now – and let me tell you, it is an unpleasant place; I’ve been in there once or twice myself,’ Bellan laughed, a cackling chortle that made Steven’s blood rush to his head.
When you are fighting, fight, Steven,’ Gilmour called again. ‘Don’t think about anything else.’
Steven tried to clear Myrna Kessler’s face from his mind, but it burned there, leaving an indelible impression: Nerak had killed her and then sent her against him, and he had damned her soul to the Fold for ever.
THE ATRIUM
The third level of Welstar Palace was as far up as anyone outside Prince Malagon’s personal staff was able to go without permission: a long, wide carpeted hallway hung with tapestries. Torches burned in wall sconces, and the whole floor felt homey, comfortable. Hannah wondered who lived here.
From the main hall lots of smaller hallways ran east or west, some emptying into large rooms and others spilling out through etched-glass doorways onto balconies overlooking the encampment and the river beyond. Halfway down the hall, Hannah nearly ran into a Malakasian soldier, a woman. She had obviously been off duty, for she was struggling to buckle on her tunic belt when Hannah rushed by.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
Hannah allowed her terror to diffuse into her lies. ‘Back there. It’s some kind of attack. We’re going to get Colonel Strellek. He’s supposed to be here in the atrium. But you go, they need help – second level.’