She was about to name them, hoping it would add more credibility to her claim, when she caught herself – if any of them had been killed and Jacrys knew it, she would be caught.
‘No you don’t. It was a good try, though,’ Jacrys said.
‘But I do,’ she answered. Keep him talking. Keep him talking.
‘Then why did you follow me all day?’
‘Because I don’t believe they have the stone.’ What are you saying, Brexan? Think of something else, anything else. What if he knows the stone is back in Colorado?
‘Really? And why is that?’ He was getting bored, she could tell.
‘Because if they had it, Gilmour would have taken it to Sandcliff Palace, right?’
Jacrys, in control now, prepared his bait. ‘Why don’t you tell me where they are?’
‘Take your knife away from my throat and perhaps I will,’ she said firmly. Despite the cold, Brexan could feel sweat breaking out on her forehead. ‘I saw them just the other day, two days ago – no, three days ago.’
‘Really? Gilmour and the others?’ The master spy set the hook. ‘You saw Gilmour and the Ronan partisans, here in Orindale?’
‘Yes,’ Brexan sighed, ‘Gilmour and the others. They are south of the imperial palace, hiding in an old wine shop. It looks closed, as if the merchant is only there for the warm season.’
Jacrys moved in close. Brexan could feel his breath on her face, the warm, damp feel of Estrad. Had it all begun in Estrad? Had she really come this far, only to be killed by the man who had started her on this journey?
Pressing his cheek against hers, the spy renewed his grip around her throat. ‘Gilmour is dead, my dear. I killed him last Twinmoon. Goodbye.’
With Jacrys’ cheek caressing hers, Brexan remembered Versen, lashed to the bulkhead in the schooner’s hold, and how he had manipulated his bonds so that he could lie flat on his back. When she did the same, their cheeks had touched in the darkness. Brexan thought it was the most intimate thing she had ever done with another person. Waiting to feel the sharp pain of the blade pierce her ribs, she tried with all her might to remember every detail of Versen’s stubbly cheek coming to a gentle rest against hers. Goodbye, Versen, she thought and waited to feel her life drain away.
Then there was someone else with them. Mercurial-quick, the cloaked intruder dropped down on them from above. He must have been on the roof, Brexan thought in the instant before Jacrys, as startled as she, was pulled away from her and tugged roughly down the alley. Brexan didn’t wait to see what happened; she took to her heels and ran into the street, about to escape into the anonymous throngs moving along the wharf, when she stopped. ‘Sallax!’
She almost knocked over an elderly couple walking hand-in-hand along the pier and she reversed direction, shouting, ‘Sallax!’ as she ran back towards the alleyway.
THE FAR PORTAL
‘I can’t open it until five o’clock.’ Steven suppressed his irritation. Jennifer Sorenson was upset, and even he had to admit his story didn’t sound especially convincing.
‘Five o’clock, because that’s when your roommate will lay out his charred, egg-stained rug, and you’ll land right in his lap?’ Her scepticism was salt rubbed in his wounds – wounds that Hannah’s mother was responsible for; he felt as though he had been in a car accident. His ribs and abdomen throbbed furiously from her kicks and his head was about to break open. He felt certain the roadmap of cuts and bruises across his head would never heal.
They sat together in front of the television, watching the coverage of the unprecedented winter firestorm that had already claimed eight square miles along Chicago Creek Road. Between interviews with townspeople and firefighters, the square-jawed anchorman spoke to a helicopter pilot who was monitoring the damage from above. The arrhythmic jouncing of the picture as the helicopter navigated the tricky thermals along Clear Creek Canyon made Steven feel even more nauseous.
It was 4.10 p.m. and it had taken two hours to recount his tale. He left out the part about being able to work magic with the hickory staff. If there was a slim chance that Jennifer Sorenson didn’t already believe he was insane; that, he was quite sure, would have her calling the local psychiatric hospital. She had stopped him several times, throwing up her hands and shouting, ‘That’s enough, Steven, I’m calling the police.’ So far he had persuaded her to let him continue, begging her to wait until five o’clock, when he could prove he was telling the truth.
In the past fifteen minutes the conversation had taken a turn for the worse and Steven knew Hannah’s mother wouldn’t make it through the hour.
‘All right, I’ll do it, but we can only leave it open for a second,’ he agreed reluctantly.
‘Why? Why not leave it open until Hannah comes back, or until Mark finds her?’ Jennifer’s tone was half disbelief and half sarcasm.
Steven, for all his sympathy for the woman, began to get angry. ‘You’re not helping,’ he said. ‘I have been in Hell. I have had my life threatened every day for two months, and I am telling you that, regardless of whether you believe me, you need to have a little faith for forty-five more minutes.’
‘No. Do it now.’ Jennifer’s eyes were hard.
‘Fine, but if Nerak finds us because I open this now, I – we – may have to escape through it, and that means we might be dropped on top of a glacier, or at the bottom of a river, or anywhere. There is nothing I can do about that. Do you understand?’
‘Oh, sure. The demon creature trying to release all the hounds of Hell onto the funny little world you discovered will be right here in the next ten minutes, because you took two seconds to show me a carpet? You are mad, Steven Taylor, mad and dangerous, and I want to know what you have done with my daughter.’
Without another word, Steven took a book from the coffee table, something big with black and white photos on the cover, and handed it to her. He rolled out the Larion far portal, holding one corner, and turned back to Jennifer. ‘When I tell you, throw that book onto the portal. Do not touch it, don’t reach out over it, whatever you do, do not, for your own sake, step on it.’ He looked her straight in the face to be certain she was taking him seriously, but all he could see was her open scepticism.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t have time for your doubts, Ms Sorenson, but if this is what you need to believe me, then fine.’
With that, Steven released the edge of the far portal. The moment the last corner of the tapestry struck the floor the energy level in the room rose, that same shimmer he and Mark had felt in Idaho Springs. Now Steven recognised the feeling: it was the same magic as the hickory staff. He felt it pulsing in the air, breathing him in and out, as if he were just a passerby interacting with an ancient force for a fraction of a second on its interminable journey though the ages.
He looked at Jennifer: she was standing in mute stupefaction: he had been telling the truth. ‘Throw it!’ he shouted, ‘throw it, Ms Sorenson. Throw the book now.’
She threw the book awkwardly, but before it struck the tapestry, it disappeared. Steven used a small metal shovel he had taken from the array of fireplace tools beside Jennifer’s hearth to create a shallow range of hilly wrinkles in the tapestry. In a moment, the shimmer in the air had faded away.
He crouched down and folded the portal in half, then moved to stand beside Jennifer, who was looking far older than her sixty years – decades older than the raving mother who had beaten seven shades of shit out of him earlier that afternoon. She stood looking down at her hands, thin and delicate, Hannah’s hands, as if the book with its tasteful photographs, etudes of light and shadow, would somehow reappear in them. She was a practical woman, and believed her eyes.
For a few moments longer she struggled with the notion that greater things than anything she had ever imagined were at work right in her own living room, then she started to sob. ‘She’s alive? Hannah? Please- I’m sorry, Steven, but please tell me if she-’