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The car bounced hard over something in the road and Steven rammed his head into the roof, bouncing again when the rear wheels cleared the obstacle. In the mirror he saw a ponderosa pine, perhaps eighty feet long, had fallen across the northbound lane of Chicago Creek Road. ‘Sonofabitch, that hurt,’ he said, slowing down. He felt the gash on his head, bleeding badly now.

‘I don’t remember that-’ Steven’s voice trailed away as he watched, further ahead, as another pine pulled up from its roots and fell across the road.

He swerved around the second tree and avoided a third, slowing again another hundred yards along as a boulder, as large as a cement truck, crashed through the forest, bounded across the road and into the pines on the opposite side. As he drove down the twisting curves, rocks and trees came at him from all angles, some blocking his passage, others attempting to crush the car, heading for the outskirts of town and the Interstate 70 ramp.

Steven grinned as he dodged Nerak’s attacks: this he had mastered; it was predictable. He twisted and turned the Thunderbird, alternating between accelerator and brakes as he wound his way to freedom. The bighorn had been terrifying, but this wasn’t so bad.

‘Keep them coming, Nerak,’ he shouted. A cold wind blew through the broken windshield to numb his face. ‘I’ve got your number now, you motherhumper.’ He was less than a mile from home when, second nature, he checked the rear view mirror.

Terror gripped him and Steven froze, though the car continued at a steady fifty miles an hour. With his eyes fixed in the mirror, he inadvertently drove over the thick brambly limbs of a fallen pine and bashed his head against the roof a second time. He snapped his attention back to the road and braked hard, skidding to a sideways stop. He needed to see for real.

There, in the great draw between Devil’s Nose and Alps Mountain: an avalanche of flame was cascading downhill towards Steven Taylor and the resilient old T-Bird. Nerak hadn’t wanted to crush him with the pines and the boulders; he had slowed Steven’s escape long enough to bring all the fires of Hell roaring through the valley. The two million pines that had melted together to show him the three tears in God’s canvas were all in flames.

Steven watched, truly horror-stricken, as thousands of acres of forest were engulfed, then, screaming obscenities at the inferno rolling down on him, put the car in gear – just as a Ponderosa crashed down on the back of the Thunderbird, flattening both rear tyres.

So that was that. Steven reached into the back and grabbed the tapestry and stone, ramming the far portal into Howard’s backpack and the key into his pocket, then saluted the fallen Thunderbird and set off at a run down Chicago Creek Road. Behind him, the fire raged on. His only hope was to run as fast and as far as he could.

Coming into the outskirts now, he ran past the high school, recalling the rules his running coach had pounded into them twelve years earlier. Drop your forearms and bring them up until they are parallel with the ground. Done. Not fast enough. He could feel the heat tickling at the hairs on the back of his neck. Exploding trees were hurling bits of flaming bark and fiery brambles past him. Keep your head up and your hips forward. Done. Still not fast enough. Steven heard the Thunderbird explode with a devastating crash. Get up on the balls of your feet. Tough to do in Garec’s boots, but he tried.

Then he saw the bridge, a short span over Clear Creek that separated the city in the north from the high school in the south, the same span every high school student in Idaho Springs crossed every morning and every afternoon from September to June. How many times had he crossed that bridge in his lifetime? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? And yet, at the moment, he couldn’t remember what the stream looked like beneath the concrete structure. How far down was it to the water? Far. Maybe twenty-five feet? How deep was the water down there? Not deep enough. You’ll break your legs. Don’t do it.

The first flames passed on either side of the road, taking trees six and seven at a time, moving faster than any forest fire he had ever seen. Clear Creek was his only option. Don’t think about it. Just get there. He had less than a hundred yards to go, but his back and legs felt as though they were already on fire and he thought he could smell melting synthetic fibres. Was he already burning? No, not yet. The aroma wasn’t that strong, like the faint scent of tobacco in the demon ram’s saliva.

To his left, a pine tree exploded, and a moment later Steven felt boiling sap and burning needles slam into him, knocking him to the pavement. He fell hard, tearing the skin from both palms, rolled over and bounded to his feet once again. A droplet of boiling sap stuck to the side of his face and he felt it boring into his skin. In pounding agony now, he ripped at the sap droplet with bloody fingertips until he had rubbed it off his face.

‘Don’t think about it,’ he shouted between coarse, shallow breaths. ‘When you are running, run.’ And he did, covering the last fifty yards and throwing himself bodily over the guardrail at the edge of the narrow bridge. As he leaped, he tried to twist in the air so his feet were down, and in the long fall he prayed he would find a pool free from jagged rocks.

Steven struck the water with a bone-jarring splash as the roiling flames passed overhead.

Gilmour gazed across the Falkan fjord; the glassy surface reflected a canvas of black, white and grey. There was no whisper of wind this far inland and the water looked as though it had frozen over in the half aven since the three companions had pulled their boat beneath the trees. The Northern Twinmoon had broken days ago and now two glowing white orbs illuminated the former Larion Senator.

He stretched the old fisherman’s legs towards the campfire, soothing the weary tissues with a thought. If he were like Nerak, he would be enjoying a more youthful body, but Gilmour had only ever taken those in the last few moments of life or the first few moments of death, and although young people died as well, in recent times he had been guided to elderly men. The first had been the logger Gilmour, who stripped and rode naked pine trunks downriver. He’d been called upon to free an especially disagreeable trunk that had become lodged between two submerged rocks. The river had been running low that season, lower than any of them could recall, and none of the woodsmen working the drive had seen the hidden trap before, but the jam it caused stretched upriver for nearly half an aven’s ride. Hundreds of thousands of logs were crushed against the stubborn singleton, enough potential energy to level a small town. Gilmour had been quick about his duties, but as he moved lightly across the jam he caught the toe of his boot on a tiny pine knot, scarcely bigger than a thumbnail, and fell just as the mass of trees broke free.

Finding the old man’s body tumbling along, Fantus had taken him, then clawed his way out from under the logs and, for the benefit of his new colleagues, cursed like a madman at the entire logging industry. As surprised as they were to see him alive, they never doubted it was their longtime friend: they never had any idea Gilmour had died on the river bottom.

He had enjoyed being Gilmour the logger, and had stayed on, riding trees with all the skill and balance of a court dancer. The forest had been a good place to hide from Nerak and his hunters; Gilmour suspected that was why Lessek had led him to the river that morning.

He had been in the logger’s body for nearly eight hundred Twin-moons and Gilmour – Fantus – had nearly forgotten what he had originally looked like before becoming the wiry old man. He shook his head and shrugged at the frozen sea. ‘What does it matter, anyway?’