Lessek's Key Read online

  Also by Robert Scott & Jay Gordon from Gollancz:

  The Hickory Staff

  In memory:

  Jay Mark Gordon

  (1944-2005)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Last year, while Jay and I were busy telling Steven Taylor’s story, there were many people who took time to tell Jay’s. His family and I are indebted to all of them but my sincere appreciation goes to Heather Nicholson, Tali Israeli, Sam Altman, and Richard Marcus. I know Jay appreciated their efforts as well. I would be remiss if I did not mention the staff of caring people who helped Jay remain comfortable in the last months of his life. Ardent supporters of his writing, Jay’s nurses took time from a gruelling daily regimen to celebrate every bit of good news he received about the Eldarn books. Speaking for Susan, Stacy and Karen we cannot thank all of you enough.

  I owe thanks to Bill Bixby, Jamie Addington and the staff at Bull Run for their ongoing support and flexibility. Thanks Gena Doyle and Uncle G for reading, asking questions and calculating irritating math problems. If reading chapter drafts wasn’t enough, Pam Widmann was invariably willing to drive around Idaho Springs with a cell phone and a camera, snapping pictures of roadside ditches, empty lots, alleyways and even the city landfill. Thanks Pam. Thanks to everyone at Caribou Coffee for the 239 gallons of free refills, and thanks to Mr Macbeth and the Gypsyman for their efforts to rouse the cheering section around the world.

  As ever, I owe sincere thanks to Jo Fletcher and the staff and writers at Victor Gollancz. Jo herself has given countless hours to these books – weekends, late nights, vacations, even commuter time. My gratitude also goes to Gillian Redfearn, Jonathan Weir, Sara Mulryan, Simon Spanton, and James Lovegrove for making a fledgling writer’s introduction to this industry painless and enjoyable.

  Finally, thanks to Kage, Sam and Hadley for their love and support.

  Contents

  Also by Robert Scott & Jay Gordon from Gollancz:

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION: The Aftermath

  Orindale Harbour

  Middle Fork, Praga

  Silverthorn, Colorado

  BOOK I: The Keystone

  The Journey West

  The Fjord

  Idaho Springs

  Chicago Creek Road

  Casks on the Quay

  The Canyon

  The Redstone Tavern

  Denver

  The Far Portal

  BOOK II: The Ash Dream

  The Fjord Camp

  The Forest of Ghosts

  The Salt Marsh

  The Falkan Plain

  Orindale’s Southern Wharf

  Near the Gorskan Border

  Carpello’s Warehouse

  Traver’s Notch

  The Gorge

  The Border Crossing

  The Raid

  Sandcliff Palace

  The Spell Chamber

  BOOK III: The Wolfhound

  Malakasia

  The Topgallant Boarding House

  The Larion Senators

  The Interrogation

  The Border Guards

  The Barstag Residence

  The Welstar River

  The Bowman Inn

  BOOK IV: The Hickory Staff

  The Prison Wing

  Wellham Ridge

  The Slave Quarters

  Bringer of Death

  Meyers’ Vale

  The Atrium

  The Glen

  The Flying Buttress

  The Staff’s Secret

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  The Aftermath

  ORINDALE HARBOUR

  The creature huddles in the recessed doorway of a waterfront tavern. Closed now, and empty, the windows look in on an abyss, a room so shrouded in middlenight that the glass might mark the entrance to the Fold itself. Light from sporadic sentinel torches left burning along the Orindale waterfront reflect off the windows, but, ignoring the laws of physics, their glow doesn’t bring any illumination to the darkened tavern; the diffuse glow merely bounces back.

  The creature knows well that places exist where nothing matters, where light cannot penetrate, where the absence of perception provides for the absence of reality. The Fold. Isn’t that how the old man described it? It’s worse than death, because death, like life or love, is held so close. Death has meaning; it’s a profound event, feared above most horrors, but meaningful nevertheless. This place is worse, more tragic: the Fold embodied. This is a place so devoid of colour and touch, scent and sound, that nothing can survive. This is the place mothers go after the broken bodies of their children are found washed up on a beach or lying in pieces across a field. It’s the end of all things, the event horizon.

  Nothing can remain here long – except for the creature. Stooped and broken, hunched at the waist and dragging much of its torso like a disintegrating appendage, the thing in the doorway resembles a tree that has lived too long, the victim of too many woodsmen hacking deep, disfiguring scars. It can stand upright, but that’s painful, that requires effort, and hope, and the creature refuses to have hope. Instead, it waits. Fortified by its ability to see and understand its own condition, as if seeing itself from above, the creature becomes the darkness, dragging it along as it drags its own body. It sees the mossy nubs that work their way through the rotting planks of the waterfront walkways. It steps in the puddles of piss and vomit that surround the taverns. It watches rats battling over half-stripped chicken bones tossed from windows two and three floors up, and insects devouring half-digested bits of venison regurgitated by drunks reeling towards home, their ships, maybe, or the downy beds of the local whores.

  One night it finds a finger, lost in a bar fight and on another, a portion of someone’s ear, which it turns over and over in its fingers, trying to imagine the whole from which this bit was severed. Finally, it stashes the lobe in its robes, tucked beside the finger, the chicken bones and the bits of venison, before starting out again.

  This wretched thing would be willing to die if it were willing to allow itself an experience so meaningful. Its pallid flesh is hidden beneath the folds of a stolen cloak as it stares out at the Orindale night, listening, waiting and planning. It does have a mission: it is driven by its desire to hunt and kill the black and gold soldiers. There are so many; thousands have come here, and it kills one, two, sometimes five in a night. Men or women, it doesn’t care. It doesn’t dismember them, or eat them – not much of them anyway, there is plenty of food along the waterfront – and nor does it perform deviant acts with their corpses. Instead, the creature slices them open: through the neck is quiet, but the gullet works well, too. It finds some strange satisfaction watching the young Malakasians struggling to replace handfuls of innards, as if packing lengths of moist summer sausage into a torn canvas sack. From some come moist clouds of exsanguinous fog, particularly when they are gutted in the early morning.

  The creature’s pain comes and goes, but when it strikes it is searing, nearly unbearable. Beginning in its neck and shoulders, the fire bolts across its back, paralysing its legs and forcing it ever deeper into its crouch. Though it cannot remember the past very well, it knows that it has brought this upon itself. There are hazy recollections of a frigid river, a flat rock, and an aborted attempt to straighten itself, to regain its previous form, but it did great damage that day, hurling itself repeatedly against the unforgiving stone. Then the pain was glorious, making it see things, hallucinations, nearly translucent lights like wraiths scurrying over hillsides and flitting between sap-stained pine trunks. Now it salves its wounds with the black and gold soldiers.

  They’ll never capture it. They’ve tried. It outsmarts them easily; it avoids their snares, because it lives among the things that crawl and
slither on the ground, safely beneath the gaze of the Malakasian occupation army.

  A stray dog happens by, a filthy, disagreeable mutt with mangy fur, a pronounced limp and a broken canine uselessly askew in its lower jaw. The dog gives the creature a low growl, a warning, more out of fear than any real threat. But it’s too late. Brandishing a long knife, the creature pounces. Cat-quick and deadly, it buries its knife in the dog’s throat and twists with such force the stray can do little more than yelp before dying on the cobblestones.

  The hood of its cloak falls across its shoulders, revealing an ashen face, a man’s face, sickly-white like the colour of spoiled milk. His eyes focus on nothing. Though bent, he is a big man, and powerful. He doesn’t feel remorse: the animal will make a tasty breakfast and, if he rations the meat, lunch too.

  The creature – the man – is distracted by something. Licking at the bloody knife, he peers into the darkness hovering over the harbour. He can make out flames, watch-fires, he assumes, that burn on bowsprits, jib-booms, and stern rails though they appear to float above the water. He closes his eyes and listens: something has happened. One of the ships is coming apart; even from this distance, he can hear beams splintering, masts collapsing and planks pulling free and snapping like hickory knots in a bonfire. He judges the distance at well over a thousand paces and decides it can be only one ship. Hazy recollections taunt from just beyond the periphery of his consciousness, and a feeling: this is good, this vessel snapping in two and sinking to the bottom of Orindale Harbour – but he can’t recall why.

  Without warning, and surprising himself, he speaks. ‘They must have made it.’ Then he looks around in terror. ‘What does that mean? Who said that?’

  ‘They must have made it,’ he repeats and this time realises he has spoken. He is hearing his own voice. It’s as if he hid part of himself, enough to preserve the integrity of who he was … hid it far enough away to allow himself … the creature, that is … to eat things like discarded fish innards, severed ears or vomited venison bits. But he is close enough to hear when his doppelgänger speaks.

  ‘Say that again.’ He is looking anxiously about the abandoned waterfront, still aware of the cataclysm taking place in the harbour, but ignoring it for the moment. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘The ship, the Prince Marek, they must have reached it.’

  Bending slowly, an indistinct blur in the darkness, the hunched creature sheathes his long knife. He peers side to side, aware there are things he doesn’t understand, and mumbles, ‘Good then … back to the hunt.’

  Sallax Farro of Estrad tucks the dog’s limp form beneath his cloak, pulls his hood up and hurries south along the wharf.

  A tangible silence like a spectre creeps across the countryside. Trees ignore the wind and stand upright; leaves quiet their rustle as onshore breezes fade to a whisper. Waves lapping against the shoreline flatten to nearly indiscernible ripples; seabirds land and nest, their heads tucked protectively beneath wings. Even the northern Twinmoon appears to dim, as if unwilling to illuminate Nerak’s disappearance.

  All of southern Falkan draws its shades, closes its doors and waits. Nerak is gone, and Eldarn has not yet decided how it will respond. Like a battered child finally witnessing her father’s arrest, the very fabric holding this strange and beautiful land together rumbles with a growing desire to scream out We are free!, but those screams emerge as a nearly inaudible whimper. Many feel the dark prince’s exit, shuddering for a moment, and then returning to the business of their lives. There is a status quo to be maintained. There are expectations and accountability because, of course, the dark prince may return.

  South of the city is a meadow, just above the inter-tidal zone: more of an upland bog, rife with sedge, rushes and coarse coastal grass. The meadow, flanked on three sides by the scrub-oak and heavy needle pines that mark the sandy edge of the Ravenian Sea, is an anomaly. The expanse of thick foliage and dense fertile soil, thanks to a narrow stream rushing by just out of sight behind a stand of pines, form an unexpected oasis trapped between the intimidating Blackstone peaks to the east and the cold salt waters to the west.

  On this night, the meadow grasses are brushed back and forth by Twinmoon breezes charging unchecked north and south along the narrow channel. Painted pale Twinmoon white, the grasses glow with the muted brilliance of a snowfield at midday.

  Gabriel O’Reilly appears, interrupting the ghostly surface, a blurry cloud of spectral smoke. His battle with the almor has taken him across the Fold, through the great emptiness and within a breath of the evil force lying restlessly inside. He has seen the centre of the world, has passed through the dead of the Northern Forest and through the great cataclysm that pushes the edges of the universe ever outwards. It is all he can do to maintain his sanity as he looks into the face of a god – it must be a god, for nothing else could generate such beauty, such destruction and such pure, uncomplicated power. But this isn’t his God; he’s not home yet.

  Gabriel O’Reilly has felt the fires of the demon lands, smelled their putrid stench and sensed their inhabitants: legions of creatures marshalling their resources in an effort to weaken his resolve and purloin his very essence. At times, he has seen home, Virginia, and though he doubts any of it is real, he imagines he can smell it, touch it, feel those lush rolling hills beneath his bare feet. Slamming through forests and burrowing through mountains, O’Reilly and the almor careen, a tangle of demon limbs in a ghostly fog across time and worlds. As they pass through the pristine wilderness of his home, he checks beyond the rise of each hill, hoping for just one glimpse of a Confederate brigade marching to face the Army of Northeastern Virginia.

  And all the while he holds on to the demon almor, the one sent to take Versen and Brexan, the only friends he’s made in five lifetimes, forcing himself to remember why he grips the creature so hard, hanging on despite the drain on his sanity.

  Now the almor is gone. O’Reilly has no idea how long they have battled, but suddenly the demon vanishes, falling away into the burned over wastelands of a distant world. It is as if its will to engage him has run dry.

  Has it been days? Years? O’Reilly doesn’t care. Instead, he casts his senses about the meadow, detecting no sign of Brexan, Versen or the scarred Seron they fought together. As much as he can remember of disappointment, the spirit feels it now. He had hoped that beating the almor would have given him a way home: the path to heaven, the right to look upon the face of his own God.

  But it hasn’t happened, and he is still here in Eldarn. O’Reilly floats above the meadow another moment, his indistinct face a mask of loneliness; then without a sound he slips between the trees and disappears into the forest.

  He is not gone a moment when others appear along the edge of the meadow, following O’Reilly through the trees, hunting him. One, the leader, pauses to stare across the Ravenian Sea. It has been many years since William Higgins has seen the sea, long before his daughter was born, before he left his family in St Louis to seek his fortune in the mountains above Oro City, Colorado. He turns after the others; they are close behind O’Reilly now. As the cavalry soldier-turned-miner fades from view, his ghostly white boots pass through a fallen cottonwood tree. The sound of a spur, chiming through the ages, rings once above the din of the onshore breeze.

  *

  Although the sounds of the Prince Marek shattering in the harbour do not reach her, Brexan Carderic is unable to sleep. Moving north, she is less than a day outside Orindale, expecting to reach the outskirts of the Falkan capital before dawn. She doesn’t hear the Prince Marek coming apart, but the stillness that follows in the wake of the ship’s death reaches her. She makes her barefoot way slowly along the shore, recalling the loss of her boots, discarded in the Ravenian Sea after she cut Versen loose from the stern rail of the fat merchant’s ship. With every step towards the city, the Malakasian imagines first how she will find this man and second how she will torture him when she does. Burning Versen’s body was the most difficult thing she’d ever do
ne, yet she did it meticulously, thinking she will have one chance to get something right, but she will live with its memory for ever. She chose every branch carefully, avoiding green wood so her fire would blaze quickly into a fury. Even as the flames claimed Versen’s body, Brexan sat, imagining the horror of failing to get that first spark to kindle.

  She cries as she remembers that day, sitting by his side, rising only to find a piece of scrub-oak, a pine bough or a thatch of cedar brambles. She didn’t speak to him, or kiss him goodbye, nor did she take any of his scant belongings as keepsakes. Instead, she sat with him, watching as his pyre burned down and eventually out.

  Mark Jenkins stands on the forward bench of a small skiff borrowed from an elderly fisherman he believes now to be the Larion Senator, Gilmour Stow of Estrad. He has a half-moon gash above one eye, and blood clouds his vision. Mark thinks he must have been hit by a splinter of glass when what was left of the aft end of the Prince Marek began breaking apart; he ignores the bleeding and, screaming out her name, searches the wreckage for any sign of Brynne. He scans the castaway spars, rails, barrels, beams and sections of sailcloth that have begun floating away. He has given up hope that the Pragan woman will appear alongside the skiff, offer him an alluring grin and ask if she might come aboard. He tries to spot a pale upper arm, a bare cheek, temple or even a supple leg in the light cast across Orindale Harbour by the northern Twinmoon.

  Before him, the great sailing vessel sinks away. Apart from avoiding the undertow as the tons of metal, wood and tar careen towards the bottom, Mark doesn’t give the remains of the Prince Marek more than a glance. He is shouting Brynne’s name, but it fails to occur to him that Steven and Gilmour might be lost as well.

  Then a thought nudges him. There’s something … he has seen something, something he can’t remember at the moment, but even that is enough to give him pause, to turn him around stiffly, a mannequin on a rotating pedestal. The last few minutes have been too traumatic; his search for Brynne has distracted him. There are other problems, other threats.