The river snare, Nerak’s watchdog, was enormously powerful. Anyone bold and confident enough to breach the moraine’s defences would most likely have the magical power to retrieve the spell table, so Nerak struck at the one common denominator all future sorcerers would share: they would all – including Steven Taylor – be susceptible to losing confidence.
Steven knelt as close to the spell’s centre as he dared and cast his thoughts down inside that cauldron of hopelessness and death to search for Gilmour. Do it! he told himself. You’ll never save him just kneeling here – dive in! He looked around the riverbed, hoping some alternative might present itself, and finally, when nothing did, he channelled the magic into his fingers and hands and dived headfirst into the centre of the swirling spell.
His fingertips entered the mud first, piercing the grim membrane and sending an icy shock through his body, a feeling of abject despair, suffering, ultimate loss. Now elbow-deep, Steven felt himself gripped by a paralysis that left his spine frozen and his legs twitching helplessly with involuntary spasms. Unable to pull back, he felt hope draining through his fingers, pooling beneath him and washing away in the current. This is it, he thought. We underestimated him…
When his hands hit bedrock, Steven felt the bones in two fingers snap and his left ring finger folded in against his palm in a grave dislocation. The pain was astonishing, but his efforts to withdraw his arms from the riverbed were futile. He was trapped up to his elbows, and he could get no sense of what had happened to Gilmour, or how he might extricate the spell table from its prison. Fighting to mute the waves of panic washing over him, Steven closed his eyes. He forced himself to ignore the pain in his hands, to forget everything except bringing back that mystical energy to save his life.
It was several seconds before Steven wondered how Gilmour could have disappeared inside the malevolent circle while he was trapped outside. Somewhere in some momentarily out-of-reach place in his mind, Steven knew there was no bedrock eight inches beneath the mud, yet cogent thought eluded him as his will weakened. He scratched with an intact fingertip at the granite floor. It’s rock, he thought. How in hell did Gilmour disappear into rock?
As his vision faded, he wondered vaguely if the spells keeping him alive beneath the water would continue after he passed out.
That’s when the bedrock pushed back.
The upwards movement, gentle at first, pressed on Steven’s shattered finger and a bolt of pain brought him enough to his senses that he was able to shake his head to clear his vision. He pressed his hands flat against the shifting granite floor and mud slipped away from his forearms, tumbling in tiny avalanches that caught the current and spiralled away towards Orindale.
Something was pushing him free.
A faint wellspring of hope arose and Steven’s own magic responded, slithering back into his hands, healing his bones and searching for some means of escape. Something familiar brushed his fingertips and disappeared. Steven remembered a game he played as a kid: you reached inside a bag and used touch to identify various objects. Bring it back, he thought, I was good at that game – I always figured out the balled-up masking tape, the peeled grape…
He was wrist-deep now, almost free. He cast tendrils of power into the riverbed, past the weakening membrane and into the bedrock beneath his hands. There it is, he thought. But the sensation was gone again… What is this? His right hand came free, then his left, and he pushed himself up and away from the river bottom, watching as the mud began to shift.
Frustrated at being beaten by the riverbed a second time, Steven moved a little closer to the surface and watched, uncertain what to do next, as he saw what had been the genesis of Nerak’s spell break through the silt. It looked like a puddle of heavy oil spilled on the riverbed. It pulsed, shifting its shape slightly as it was forced upwards into the water, flapping like a fish tossed onto dry ground. Christ, what is that thing? he wondered. Having failed to free himself, Steven dared not venture any closer to the sentient-seeming membrane, now apparently struggling for its life. Instead, he waited, and saw the riverbed quaking more violently as it fought to expel something else, something bigger, in an agitated parody of birth.
Suddenly Steven understood what had found his fingertips inside the membrane: Gilmour – it was his Larion magic that had felt familiar, a faint tickling that had held his hand for an instant while it pushed back against the oily, black gullet Nerak had left waiting as a trap so many Twinmoons before.
Gilmour, Steven thought, where are you? Tell me what to do; I’m afraid of that thing, whatever it is. Gilmour!
The microcosmic earthquake continued, and all the while the sifting mud and silt took on an ever more defined shape, almost crowning, like a baby’s head, as whatever it was pressed its way through the muck.
Finally the current carried away a layer of mire from the subterranean womb and Steven dived for the bottom, careful to avoid the inky membrane.
It was the table.
He knelt beside it, convinced that Gilmour was somehow beneath the great stone tablet, pushing with all his Larion strength. Steven summoned his own magic, wrapped it about the table, felt it grip like a dockside loading net, and heaved. The sensation that greeted him was at once familiar and refreshing. It was Gilmour; Steven recognised his friend’s energy, the rippling waves of venerable power. Together, the two sorcerers hauled Lessek’s spell table from the mud and let it come gently to rest on the riverbed.
Steven strained to find Gilmour through the muck and dark mud that washed away in waves as the river scoured the granite artefact clean.
There he was, emerging from beneath the table, looking like a swamp creature from a Saturday morning movie.
Gilmour Stow of Estrad scraped several inches of riverbed from his face, scrubbed another half pound from his hair, wiped his hand over his eyes and looked over at his young apprentice. He was beaming like a devilish child.
Steven grinned back and gestured towards the surface.
When Steven emerged into the wintry morning air, Gilmour was already shouting and hooting.
‘You pimply-faced old horsecock!’ He waved one fist at the sky, and screamed, ‘I beat you, I beat you, you bucket of rancid demonpiss! ‘
‘Gilmour?’ Steven was confused. ‘Beat who? Nerak? He’s not here, is he?’ Panic threatened to take him again, and Gilmour calmed down enough to assure Steven that they were alone in the river.
‘No, no, my boy. Of course not. Nerak is right where you left him, screaming a silent scream for ever as the Fold swallows him into nothingness.’
‘Then what are you talking about? Where were you? I thought for sure you were dead-’
Gilmour patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. ‘I did, too, Steven, especially when you managed to free yourself but I was still stuck there.’
Despite the chill, Steven felt his face flush. ‘Sorry about that; I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘Oh, don’t be. You probably saved my life.’ Gilmour grinned again. ‘Great gods of the Northern Forest, I could use a beer or six.’
‘I still don’t understand-’
‘Because you weren’t there.’ He did another little victory dance.
‘Under the riverbed?’ Steven was getting increasingly bemused.
‘At Sandcliff!’ Gilmour raised his hands in a gesture that said I’ll start over. ‘No, Steven, you weren’t at Sandcliff Palace fifteen hundred Twinmoons ago.’
‘That saved you?’
‘Sure did – and it would have saved you too. When you broke free and kicked clear of the cave, I thought I was done. I could sense that there was a nasty trap in the muck, but I didn’t know what kind of spell it was, but you were clear, so I decided to blast the grettanshit out of the place, maybe throw it off enough to break myself loose. Instead, the whole moraine caved in on me, and there was no place to go but inside.’