‘To teach, to mentor. It was always my role, from my first Twinmoons at Sandcliff when I knew I would never be a great sorcerer. I lost sight of that over the last few hundred Twinmoons. With only me and Kantu left, I thought I had to be as powerful as Nerak to beat him.’
‘But you weren’t?’ Kellin asked.
‘Great gods, no,’ Gilmour replied, ‘even if Steven’s claims about Nerak are true, that he was just a hack, a weakling who lied to himself about how good he was, the old bastard was still too powerful for me. The last few Twinmoons have been the worst. I’ve tried spells that have failed; I’ve been terrified to open that spell book. I’ve come face to face with my own weaknesses, and all these things have distracted me from what I was really supposed to be doing.’
‘Guiding him?’ Garec motioned towards Steven.
‘Exactly,’ Gilmour said, then brightened. ‘And what I’m discovering is a new appreciation for everything I had before.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Brand said.
‘I did a lot of work over the last thousand Twinmoons, and before Sandcliff fell I amassed a great deal of knowledge, and a not-insignificant grasp of Larion magic. But recently, especially since Port Denis was destroyed, I’ve been honing skills I knew I lacked and never took the time to stop and appreciate the overall package of who I had become.’
‘You were focusing on the wrong things,’ Garec said, echoing Steven’s own realisation.
‘But now that I’ve had a chance to clear my head, I feel as though I’ve regained my perspective, and some of my strength is returning. I felt it for a while at Sandcliff, especially that first day when we battled the acid clouds and the almor. It was as if everything I needed to know was hidden behind a gossamer-thin curtain; I was so close to clarity there that I could taste it on my tongue like spring rain, but then Nerak arrived and I got distracted again.’
‘He wasn’t playing fair, either, Gilmour,’ Garec said, ‘using Pikan and that sword, and using poor old Harren’s brittle bones to attack us… it’s no wonder you were a bit off-centre.’
‘So what was different today?’ Kellin asked.
‘Today, I stayed inside myself, I trusted that if I showed Steven how to find the right magic, he would free us and find the table. When that didn’t happen, I tried not to panic’
‘Did it work?’
‘Actually, it did.’ Gilmour finally produced a pipe and began smoking. ‘I trusted what I knew, rather than what magic I wished I had with me. Even after I was drawn beneath the river, I kept my wits, tapped my strength and managed to bring the table back out.’
‘So you were stronger than the hopelessness snare,’ Kellin said.
‘No, I was smarter,’ Gilmour corrected her. ‘In the end, my wits are what saved me.’
‘What was down there?’ Brand asked.
Gilmour puffed at his pipe. The embers glowed red a moment before a wisp of sweet Falkan smoke escaped. ‘It was a chamber of sorts, about chest-deep with water. The ceiling – the riverbed – was a dark blanket, just out of reach. I never realised how noisy a river is until I spent those few moments beneath this one. The whole place echoed with the sound of perpetual motion. It was black as pitch, damp, smelling of mould and decay – and guarded by five or six of those bone-collecting creatures we faced in the glen.’
‘Rutting whores,’ Garec exclaimed, ‘how’d you handle so many?’
Gilmour shook his head. ‘I didn’t. They were all dead, just hulking masses of stinking rotten flesh. It looked like they’d been feeding on each other, until the last one, a big bastard with about ten-thousand of those nasty pincers, died of its wounds – I’m guessing from its final battle. The humidity down there made it even worse, like wandering about in a big city’s sewage.’
‘I wonder why they killed one another?’ Kellin mused.
‘There wouldn’t have been enough food in that chamber – not even in this whole stretch of the river – to keep even one of those beasts alive for very long,’ Gilmour said. ‘Nerak most likely had them guarding the new Larion spell chamber for a few days at a time in turn, replacing each other when it was time to feed. When Nerak decided to retrieve the spell table on his own, he probably called off the rest of the monsters and forced those inside to remain where they were. They were probably killing and eating one another after a couple of days. I’m sure it didn’t take long.’
‘And when we arrived in Meyers’ Vale-’ Garec started.
‘Or when Nerak received word that we were coming this way,’ Gilmour added.
‘Who could have told him?’ Garec interrupted.
‘His men would have alerted the southern occupation officers when we gave that mounted battalion outside Orindale the slip.’
‘Oh, right.’ Garec winced and avoided looking at Kellin. ‘I’ve tried to forget that day.’
Kellin wrapped an arm around the bowman’s shoulders; Garec allowed himself to be drawn in, snuggling beside her.
‘No matter,’ Gilmour said. ‘When we started south along the river, Nerak marshalled the rest of the bone-collectors to meet us in the glen. By that time, if this bunch wasn’t already dead, any hope of getting replacements was lost.’
‘How did you get the table out?’ Brand asked.
‘That was an old spell,’ Gilmour admitted. ‘Any Larion sorcerer could have cast it. One of our duties was the loading and unloading of barges at docks half an aven’s ride from Sandcliff. Often we’d have to endure nasty stinging rain showers – even in summer, the weather in Gorsk can be positively petulant. Anyway, when it was rainy, the duty, however coveted on nice days, was delegated and re-delegated down to the greenest sorcerer on the campus. So even the most wet-nosed of beginners quickly learned the spells that helped the lifting, moving, shipping and shifting of heavy cargoes.’
‘So you hefted it up and pressed it through the mud of the ceiling? The riverbed?’ Garec asked.
Gilmour nodded. ‘Just as if I was unloading a pallet of lumber from a Ronan schooner.’
‘But the hopelessness snare…’ Kellin began.
‘I was trapped beneath the river in a death chamber full of decomposing bone-collectors. For all I knew, Steven had failed, and I would have to spend several days, Twinmoons even, eating rancid meat and waiting for our young friend over there to figure out the river trap and come down to retrieve me. For lack of a better option, I employed a beginner’s spell to help get the table up and into the mud. And when I encountered the hopelessness snare a second time, to say that all I had left was hope would be to understate my condition significantly.’
‘Then Steven destroyed the snare,’ Kellin said.
‘Right again. I outwitted it to save my life. Once he figured it out, he eviscerated it, literally ripped it apart from the inside out.’
Brand blew a low whistle through pursed lips.
‘I couldn’t have said it better myself. There is enormous power in that young man, enormous power.’
Garec glanced at Steven, asleep on the opposite side of the fire. ‘Why don’t you rest for a while, Gilmour? The three of us can work on fortifying that cart, and you two can… do whatever it is you need to do when Steven wakes up.’
Stretching his feet even closer to the flames, Gilmour refilled his pipe, smiled contentedly and said, ‘If you insist, Garec’
MONTHS AND TWINMOONS
Gabriel O’Reilly moved undetected through the Malakasian ranks, flitting between rocks and trees in his search for Mark Jenkins. It was obvious the dark-skinned foreigner might look less conspicuous than he had in the Blackstones, when he had been wearing a bright red pullover and a pair of unusual leather boots, but Gabriel was still hopeful.
The infantry battalion stationed at Wellham Ridge did have several soldiers with dark skin, natives of the Ronan South Coast whose families had emigrated to Malakasia generations earlier. Gabriel passed as close to these few as he dared, careful not to make contact for fear of alerting them to his presence. The soldiers were weary and footsore, and it looked like most had been marching about as long as they physically could without a break. Some moved as if in a trance, mumbling strange sounds, barely able to lift their feet. There was a nervous lieutenant and an angry captain, both on horseback.