‘Yes, sire, he is,’ the little man mumbled, dropping his leggings back into place.
‘What’s that?’ Steven asked. ‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing, sire,’ he said, ‘I didn’t say anything, sire.’
Steven caught the aroma again, something tangy and pleasant, but not coffee. He stopped and sniffed at the air again.
Mark looked at him quizzically. ‘What’s up?’ He clapped a hand across Steven’s shoulder.
‘Do you smell that?’
‘Nope. What is it?’
‘I can’t put my finger on it, maybe it’s just me, but I keep getting a hint of something-’ He paused, sniffing again. ‘You sure you don’t smell anything… anything from home?’
Mark tested the air again. Nope. Sorry.’
‘All right, it’s me going mad.’ Steven moved along after the crippled ex-miner. ‘I just need a couple of nights in a bed, that’s all.’
‘Yes, sire. A bed. The Bowman, they have comfortable beds, sire. Warm stew, cool beer, sire.’
‘Would you stop that?’ Steven asked as politely as he could.
‘Stop what, sire?’
‘Stop calling me sire. I’m not- well, I don’t need to- yes, just stop. Can you do that?’
‘Yes, sire,’ the man grinned and pointed towards a two-level building at the top of a short rise. ‘The Bowman, sire. There it is, sire. Come this way. It’s a shortcut, sire.’ He moved off through a small wooded area, a city park maybe, that ran along the edge of the brook and cut off the corner between the street and the inn at the top of the rise. ‘Just through the trees here, sire.’
Steven followed him in, glancing back to see Garec shrug and gesture him forward. Mark came after and Gilmour trailed behind, gazing along the street, an inquisitive look on his face, as if he had dropped something and didn’t know where to begin searching for it.
‘You all right, Gilmour?’ Steven asked.
‘Oh, yes, for a moment I thought I felt something back there, but then it was gone.’
‘This way, sire. This way,’ their guide insisted, ‘here, through the trees, sire, a shortcut.’
‘Right, right, we’re coming,’ Steven said irritably. Looking back again, he saw Gilmour hesitate. The grove of trees was small but relatively thick, and the old man appeared strangely well-lighted outside the overhanging branches.
Steven’s foot splashed through a puddle, invisible in the darkness beneath the trees. ‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘Look at that; now my feet are wet. I’ll be so glad to be under a roof again. Do you think they have hot and cold running water?’
‘I wouldn’t get my hopes up,’ Mark answered as he moved ahead of Garec. ‘From the look of this ground, it must have rained or snowed here recently. That doesn’t bode well for us heading into those hills. We’ll be slogging through drifts in no time.’
The crippled merchant muttered something and Steven froze. ‘What did you say?’ Shadows of dying leaves, faded dusty brown, were caught in scattered puddles marking the trail through the grove. Steven watched his own shadow pass over a puddle. Ahead, the little man had stopped, turning to wait for them. Steven moved forward and inhaled deeply again, still seeking the curiously elusive aroma he had detected earlier. He flexed his fingers.
Mark’s voice came to him, as if from far away. ‘I agree, I am so owed a hot bath. A shower would be even better, but I know that won’t happen.’ Steven heard Mark’s boots slosh through the same puddle, and waiting, holding his breath, he heard the Falkan miner’s reply.
‘Yes, sire. Yes. Hot water. They have hot water at the Bowman, my prince.’
Mark looked ahead. ‘What was that?’ He gave a startled cry when Steven whirled on their guide, swinging the hickory staff in a deadly arc. The staff, glowing with rage and ancient power, sliced through the cool air, leaving its own contrail. It didn’t appear to slow as it passed through the man’s body and tore through clothing, sinew, flesh and brittle, undernourished bone to emerge on the other side.
Mark watched in horror as the small man simply fell apart. Save for the terrible look in Steven’s eye and the heartrending scream that accompanied the attack, it was an almost comical caricature of death as the broken man split at the waist. There was no blood, though, no wet entrails. Nothing splashed up to hit Mark except for the backsplash from the puddles he danced through to get clear of the hickory staff, still aglow with rage.
Holy shit, Steven!’ Mark fell backwards into Garec, who stumbled, but managed to keep both of them upright. ‘What did you do?’
Steven was standing over the remains of their guide and staring at Gilmour. ‘You didn’t feel it?’ he asked calmly, ‘how could you not feel it?’ Neither Garec nor Mark spoke.
Gilmour stammered, ‘I thought I did – out there on the street, I thought – I don’t know.’ His neck throbbed and his ribs burned as if they had been rebroken. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’ He lowered his eyes to the ground.
‘No time for that now!’ Steven was agitated. ‘He’ll be back. I don’t know where he is, but he’ll be back. Can you cloak us?’
‘I-’
‘Gilmour!’ Steven barked. ‘Can you do it? Can you cloak us?’ The old man’s form stood out stark against the trees. ‘Well? Can you cloak us?’ he asked again.
‘Are you sure?’ Gilmour took a few tentative steps forward.
Without replying, Steven knelt beside the body and dug through the threadbare clothes until he found what he was looking for.
‘Yes,’ he said firmly, ‘I’m sure.’
Gilmour’s features hardened and a glimmer of angry confidence flashed in his eyes. ‘Then we must run, as quickly as possible. Come, right now, back the way we came. It’s the shortest path out of the valley.’
‘Can you cloak us?’
‘I don’t – I’m not certain… I’ll try, but we must run anyway. A cloaking spell won’t protect us for long.’
Mark regained his composure and yelled, ‘Steven what the hell is going on? You just hacked that guy in two. Jesus Christ, you killed him in cold blood. What’s this about?’
Steven tossed his roommate the thing he had removed from the dead man’s clothes: a crumpled red, white and blue pouch of Confederate Son chewing tobacco. ‘I knew I smelled something. I smelled it that day when he came after me in the mountains. Believe it or not, I could smell it on that old ram’s breath as it was pressing its face through the windshield of Howard’s T-Bird. This bastard had been chewing it sometime today.’
‘But how can that be?’ Mark didn’t know whether to look to Gilmour or to Steven for his answer. ‘I thought he had to-’
‘I don’t know,’ Steven said abruptly, ‘but Nerak’s back and he’s here, right here somewhere.’ He kicked the dead body aside, retrieved his saddlebag and began running back towards the street. ‘Come on. There’s no telling what he’ll do when he gets over the hit he just took.’
*
Nerak roared and the middlenight darkness that had swallowed him shuddered. Huge monolithic towers, ornate with carvings and stained-glass, rose up before him and collapsed beneath their own weight, the thunderous echo of destruction in their wake. Cities grew, withered and died before his scream faded and the light came, brightened, blinded him momentarily and then passed away. Smoke from gigantic forest fires rose in billowy clouds, lending colour to the night and choking off the cries of souls trapped for ever in his cavernous prison. Part of him was back inside the Fold. How had that happened? He could feel the earth, the frosty grass and the chill of the little river that passed through Traver’s Notch, but he couldn’t see them.
He screamed again, and his rage rattled the nothingness. Great stone keeps, palaces of granite and mortar, welled grandly up from the abyss, only to shatter in a hailstorm of grey and black stones. Reaching out with his mind, he found himself, dazed and wandering in the foothills outside Traver’s Notch. With careful concentration, Nerak elbowed his way back through the Fold and into northern Falkan.
He would kill Steven Taylor; nothing in the past thousand Twinmoons would come close to the pleasure he would enjoy torturing that boy for all time, an immortal prisoner for ever in pain, in an endless, empty cave.