Lessek's Key

CHICAGO CREEK ROAD

‘Nerak, you sonofabitch!’ Steven shouted at the empty lot, ‘did you have to flatten my house?’ He was turning in circles, one way and the other, trying to take in the enormity of what had happened to 147 Tenth Street.

To the right, Dave and Cindy Siegfried’s yellow-sided, split-level place sat quietly against the hillside as usual. Their cars were missing from the driveway; Steven assumed they were already at work, unharmed and completely unaware of the Eldarni dictator’s foul presence in the Rocky Mountain foothills.

The morning sun reflected off the recent snow, almost blinding Steven as he paced furiously. His gaze fell on the winter-thin hedgerow that separated 147 Tenth from the corner of Tenth and Virginia and his attention shifted: without the end wall of the front room, here was a completely different view of Idaho Springs. Down there were Abe’s Liquor Store, the 24-hour convenience place, and the ten-minute Oil amp; Lube he ignored until his car was four or five thousand miles late for a change.

He shuddered, an involuntary response to the chilly air against the layer of sweat that had broken out on his face and neck, then realised it was something more. He felt the familiar crackle of magic, the hickory staff’s magic, as it rippled across his shoulders, between his ribs and down his thighs into his very bones.

He felt calmer now. The far portal was gone, and that meant Lessek’s key was gone also, but now was not the time to collapse in despair. Years ago, his cross-country coach, claiming it to be Buddhist philosophy, announced, ‘Men, when you are running, run.’ It took years for Steven to understand what his coach meant, but the coach’s words came back to him now.

‘When you are looking, Taylor, look,’ he chided himself, and drew a deep breath of home.

Almost immediately, he saw it, bent askew, a small sign pegged into the ground near the sidewalk that had been almost covered by snow. Brushing it clean, Steven read aloud, ‘Lot for sale. Call Trevor Hadley at-’ He crouched and considered the sign. ‘Lot for sale,’ he repeated. ‘But that’s not right… Trevor Hadley.’ The phone number was someplace up the canyon in Georgetown, he thought.

Steven shook his head and tossed the sign aside, watching as it disappeared into a snow bank. ‘Not right,’ he mumbled again, and took several steps back towards the centre of the vacant lot.

He looked again at Dave and Cindy’s house, and this time he noticed something he’d missed earlier: the bright yellow siding was darker along the bottom edge. Trudging over, he scratched the discoloured area and peered at his finger.

‘Soot,’ he said, sniffing it. ‘Smoke, creosote, some damned thing. Fire. Goddamnit, our place burned down. And maybe-’ Steven rushed back to the expanse of flat ground that had been his front room. ‘There’s nothing here now, no debris. It was a fire. It burned. Maybe it happened a month ago, two months ago.’ The excitement in his voice grew. ‘Nerak might have got here first, but there’s nothing here. The house burned down!’

He turned in a circle again, getting more excited as he continued, ‘Look, it’s flat – too damned flat. It was never this flat. They brought in a bulldozer, bulldozed the place level.’ He was running now, small laps around the property, taking in the boring emptiness from every angle. ‘Nerak!’ he shouted, not caring that someone might see him raving like a madman, Nerak, you don’t have anything! You might have been here, but you don’t have the key or the portal, you arrogant bastard. Didn’t expect this did you? Well, what are you going to do now, you invisible prick? Freeze your spirit nuts off out here, I’ll bet!’

Reality caught up with Steven so suddenly that he slipped and fell headlong into the snow. The key and the portal were gone. That much was obvious. But where would they be? Where would a load of fire debris be taken in Idaho Springs?

He retrieved his watch-cap and scarf and began sprinting along Tenth Street towards town. If he knew where to look next, he had to assume Nerak would take someone, kill them – Cindy or Dave, maybe – and come to the same conclusion. Didn’t they usually drive to work together? Why were both cars gone this morning?

Steven didn’t spare more than a glance at Abe in the window of his liquor store, or the mechanics working in the open pits at the Oil amp; Lube. Nor did he notice the neon signs blinking their ceaseless messages across the intersection at Tenth and Virginia, COLD BEER westward towards the mountains and OIL CHANGE $26.99 east across the foothills.

Myrna Kessler glanced at the digital display on the clock radio she kept tuned to her favourite Denver station. 9.04 a.m. Eight hours to go and she would be on her way up the canyon and over Loveland Pass to meet friends at a restaurant in Frisco. From there they’d spend the evening in Breckenridge, then she’d find someplace to crash until morning and get a few runs in before the tourists battled through their hangovers or the locals made their way up from the city.

Her car was packed; she had $ 108 in her pocket and about enough wiggle room left on her Visa card for an inexpensive dinner and a couple of drinks during happy hour. Myrna was attractive; she never had any problem finding men to buy her drinks, but setting out deliberately to do that, shaving off thirty IQ points and wrestling herself into a Wonderbra, always left her feeling as though she was on stage in some outdated farce. What was the point? $25 would cover her drinks, and Howard’s if necessary, and she could wear whatever she wanted. Anyway, she could be bumming around in her oldest sweatshirt and she was still noticed: men paid attention to women who had a pulse.

There had been a few customers, but the weekend rush wouldn’t hit until 11.30, when most of the town, Friday paycheques in hand, started their lunch break. Myrna and Howard would work the windows together until 1.00 p.m., when, as quickly as it had started, the queue would be gone. Then Howard would trundle sadly across Miner Street to Owen’s Pub and she would be left to close the bank at five o’clock, locking the doors and shutting off the lights.

Howard had been depressed since Steven and Mark’s disappearance. He had refused to fill the assistant manager’s position, even with a temporary employee, and he followed the investigations assiduously every day. Word around town was that he had climbed as far up the Decatur Peak trail as he could before the snow grew too deep for him to go any further. Myrna didn’t like to think of her boss up there, battling through thigh-deep snow and shouting for Steven and Mark until his voice gave out.

The police had been little help and Howard would never forgive them for it; he didn’t think the local authorities had done a comprehensive investigation into the mysterious disappearance of his friends.

It didn’t help that the roommates’ house at 147 Tenth Street had burned to the ground the day they had gone missing – a highly suspicious accident. No remains had been discovered in the ashes, and the fire marshal believed one of them had left the gas stove burning. Apart from the cars parked out front – Hannah Sorenson’s car was there, too – there was no evidence to show where the trio might have gone. Because of the snow, the police couldn’t even determine when Hannah’s car had arrived, or if Steven or Mark’s cars had been moved since that Friday afternoon. It hadn’t been a good day for climbing, and no one could work out how the trio had reached the trailhead unless someone else had come by to pick them up before dawn Saturday morning.

Both Myrna and Howard had been interviewed three or four times during the investigation, by local police, a city detective and then by members of a state police missing persons team. Each time the procedure had been the same: the officers arrived and had asked to speak with Howard; Myrna had shown them to the manager’s office. And after an hour or two, one or more of them had come back to the lobby and invited her to join them. Howard always shot her a glance as he sidled past to take up her position at the teller window. Invariably, Myrna was offered Howard’s chair and made comfortable before the interrogation began. Always the same questions:

Had Steven ever spoken of enemies, people who disliked him or those from whom he had borrowed money?

No.

Had Steven changed dramatically after meeting Hannah Sorenson?

No more than any twenty-eight-year old who finds someone he cares about.

Hadn’t Myrna studied in Mark Jenkins’ class at Idaho Springs High School?

Yes, history.

Had he ever given her the impression that he had extreme political beliefs?

No.

Had Steven?

Steven didn’t have political beliefs.

What did Steven and Mark do in their free time?

Climbed, went biking, they did some distance running, and Mr Jenkins was a swimmer.

Did Steven swim, too?

Do you really think he might be off swimming somewhere? All this time?

Just answer the question, please.

No, Steven was not a swimmer.

Was Mark Jenkins in love with Hannah Sorenson?

I don’t know.

Could there have been bad blood between them after Hannah came into Steven’s life?

They went climbing that Saturday. It snowed that day.

Were they gay?

Why are you talking about them in the past tense and how is their sexual preference going to help you find them?

Just answer the question, please.

No.

Have you climbed Decatur Peak?

No.

Have you climbed with Mark and Steven?

No.

The questions had gone on, a rhythmless poem of point and counterpoint, until one of the officers had thanked Myrna for her time and encouraged her to call if she thought of something or remembered something, as if Steven’s political beliefs or his preference for peanut butter over cream cheese or Mark’s swimming in the town pool would help locate them under seventeen feet of mountain snow.

Now Myrna wasn’t sure which was worse: the fact that the police had asked the same pointless questions so often, or that they had stopped entirely. She remembered the morning the Clear Creek County Gazette quoted state officials saying the search along the Decatur Peak trail would be suspended until spring. If they were up there, they were dead. Howard had given a cry, a muted bark that had been half frustration and half rage before running, his squat form at once both comical and tragic, to the town office of the local paper. He had been gone for thirty minutes before Myrna watched him sulk back down Miner Street to Owen’s. Finding it locked, at 8.50 in the morning, he had turned and walked home, never sparing the First National Bank of Idaho Springs a second glance.

This morning, Howard was in his office. He was in a foul mood again and Myrna needed a break; she had been running the bank on her own for the past month and she refused to allow his depression to ruin her anticipation. It was a special day, not just because of her planned weekend, but because she had received her federal financial aid forms. She could finally get to college, leave the canyon and move to Fort Collins. She felt a sudden pang of guilt that Mr Jenkins – after all this time she still struggled to call him Mark – was not around to help her with the application and grant forms. He had promised he would talk her through the paperwork. Myrna said a quiet prayer that the boys would be found before she left for university.

As she started on the forms – her social security number, her income, her mother’s maiden name, and so on – Myrna was distracted for a moment by the piece of paper she kept safe under the glass sheet across her desk. On it was drawn a series of circles in different coloured ink, measuring diameter lengths around each circumference. Pi. Steven had caught her drawing the sketches the afternoon he had first met Hannah Sorenson. Myrna had never taken the time to ask him how he knew that Egyptian architects The small bell above the lobby door rang, waking Myrna from her daydream; she quickly shuffled her financial aid paperwork to one side.

A police officer crossed the lobby with a purposeful stride: not here to open an account, she thought. More questions, terrific. Perhaps he would start with Howard and she could get a few pages done.

‘Good morning,’ she said, not really surprised to be ignored. When he reached the old pine countertop, Myrna realised he wasn’t from Idaho Springs. The patch stitched across his shoulder read Charleston City Police. Unnerved at his silence, and somewhat disturbed by what appeared to be dry blood caked in his ear and across the lobe, Myrna nevertheless offered her most hospitable smile.

‘A bit out of your jurisdiction this morning, aren’t you, Officer?’ Men pay attention to women who have a pulse, she thought, and waited for the young man to respond.

A distressing feeling, like sudden tunnel vision, overtook Myrna Kessler. Still trying to be polite, she tried to discreetly shake the weird feeling, closing her eyes and tossing her head sharply. She didn’t want to embarrass herself further in front of the out-of-town police officer – he might have news of Steven and Mark – Myrna ignored the sudden itch on her left wrist. She swallowed hard, trying, with her last breath, to maintain the professional integrity of the First National Bank of Idaho Springs.

‘Officer? Can I help-?’

‘I want Steven Taylor,’ the policeman said before crumpling to the floor. He struck his chin on the countertop hard enough to split the wood.

Myrna reached through the slatted window and ran her fingers along the fissure. A black, festering wound opened on her left wrist and without even trying to scream, she let herself go. The splintered edge of the broken countertop was the last sensation she felt before spiralling away.

Myrna stood up, stepped into the bank lobby and crossed to David Mantegna’s discarded form lying on the floor. With an unexpectedly vicious kick to the ribs she turned Mantegna’s body over, then bent down and withdrew the officer’s 9mm pistol from the leather holster in his belt. She rooted around in his pockets until she found a pouch of chewing tobacco, which she stuffed into her blazer pocket.

Without looking back she walked out into Miner Street and the brilliant, snow-blinding morning.

‘Myrna?’ Howard called from his office. He leaned to one side to see if he could catch a glimpse of the young teller without getting out of his chair. ‘Myrna?’ he shouted again, listening in vain for the sound of her footsteps, or the soft hum of a receipt gliding through her desktop computer. Nothing.

‘Shit, Myrna, you’re supposed to tell me before you go to the can.’ As he got up to attend the teller window he glanced along the narrow hall, past Steven’s silent office. The bathroom door was open and the light switched off. ‘Where the hell did she go?’ he growled. ‘Goddamnit, if I’ve told-’

Howard’s gaze fell on the broken section of pine countertop outside Myrna’s slatted window. Reaching through to feel the fractured edge, he felt wetness: a shallow pool of what appeared to be dark blood.

‘Oh, shit,’ he breathed, and hustled through the connecting door, stopping abruptly as the sight of the dead body of the Charleston City Police Officer. Kneeling beside the young man, Howard searched for a pulse, and, feeling nothing, tried a few uncertain thumps where he thought the breastbone was. Still nothing.

He looked up and screamed through the empty bank, ‘Myrna!’

Steven picked his way hurriedly to Howard Griffin’s house on Fourteenth Street, north of Miner, but close to the city centre and the First National Bank of Idaho Springs. He estimated the time at nearly 9.00 a.m. on Friday; even at his most tardy, Howard would be at the bank by now. Avoiding the front door he made his way to the back and used the spare key stashed beneath a loose plank in the deck to open the patio door. Cautiously, he stepped in.

He waited a full minute, counting down the seconds while listening for sounds: his boss preparing breakfast, or showering, or hefting his not inconsiderable bulk up the Mt Griffin Stairmaster. After sixty seconds or so he moved quickly through the laundry alcove and into the old bachelor’s rarely used kitchen. There, taped to the refrigerator like a gallery of child’s art, were a series of newspaper articles chronicling the story of Steven and Mark’s disappearance and the ensuing weeks of investigation and recovery efforts along the Decatur Peak trail. He stood transfixed by the headlines. The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Clear Creek County Gazette – even the Washington Post and New York Times – there were cuttings from all of these, affixed to Howard’s refrigerator, a yellowing testament to the missing roommates. Steven collected them all and folded them carefully in his back pocket. Right now he didn’t care that Howard would know someone had been in his house: he and Mark needed to know what had gone on.

The house was well-heated, even with Howard out at work all day, and Steven was finding it too hot to breathe. He unravelled the wool scarf from around his face and as he tossed it over the back of a chair he noticed a small cork board hanging on the wall in the breakfast nook. More newspaper features were displayed there, and Steven hastened around the table to retrieve these as well.

He unpinned the first and glanced at the headline. These were different. The first, clipped from an October issue of the Rocky Mountain News, was headlined Denver Woman Listed Among Springs Missing. His hands began to shake and he rubbed his palms roughly against his denimed thigh. He was certain he could feel the staff’s magic again, that familiar slowing of time and the tickling sensation of its power dancing along beneath his skin.

Shaking his head, he said, ‘No. No. Stop it. It’s too far away. You’re just upset. Get hold of yourself. This just confirms it. That’s all. This is nothing new.’ He sat down, his heart racing, until his pulse slowed and the dizziness passed.

Upstairs, he stole a nylon backpack from the hallway closet. In the bedroom, he took several pairs of wool socks, two neutral-coloured sweaters, as many pairs of gloves as he could find, two cigarette lighters from the bedside table and a lined Gore-tex jacket. Over one arm he carried a second jacket for Mark. They had used their stolen silver to outfit themselves in Orindale, and the sailboat Mark and Brynne had repaired was well stocked with essentials, but socks and coats from home would be welcome, for Mark too.

He struggled into the backpack and ran down the stairs, stopping short at the bottom. ‘A watch, damn it,’ he cursed and pushed past the door into the living room. Apart from a large recliner that Howard always treated with all the deference of a holy relic, the room looked like a bomb had hit it. Books, newspapers, dirty dishes, an errant shoe, orphan socks – even a pair of forgotten boxer shorts – lay scattered about. There was a teetering pile of out-of-date TV Guides against one wall. Steven whistled. ‘Holy Vicksburg,’ he said, ‘Howard, how the hell do you live in this?’

Ignoring the mess, Steven bravely ploughed his way towards the baby grand piano, which was decorated with a half-empty bottle of beer and a gnawed pizza crust atop a wrinkled dishcloth. Behind, on the large bookshelf, was Steven’s prize: an old wristwatch lying forgotten on a pile of creased paperbacks.

He grabbed it: off by an hour, so it had obviously been up there since before the clocks had gone back some months before, but the second hand was sweeping round inexorably. ‘Okay, 9.22,’ he said, adjusting the watch back sixty minutes. ‘Now it really is time to get going-’ He stopped, remembering a promise he had made months earlier, then peered around, grinning as he appropriated one final item from Howard Griffin’s living room. ‘Vicksburg,’ he said softly.

His stomach growled, but Howard’s refrigerator offered only beer, a suspicious-smelling bottle of milk and a box of muesli bars. Howard was the only person Steven knew who would follow a healthy breakfast of orange juice, dry wheat toast and a healthy grain and dried fruit bar with a three-beer-grilled-beef-and-onion-ring lunch and think he was eating well. He grinned in remembrance as he stuffed a handful of the bars into his pack, followed by several cans of beer. In the freezer he found a full can of ground French roast coffee, which he appropriated, together with a packet of filters lying on the counter.

‘That ought to do it,’ he murmured. ‘Thanks, Howard. I’ll pay you back.’ Steven carefully wrapped the scarf around his face, pulled up his collar and left the house, relocking the door and stashing the key where he’d found it.

The city dump was a long way out, so Steven decided to borrow Howard’s dilapidated 1977 Thunderbird, a powder-blue, long-nosed sedan the size of a small whale. It sat rusting in the driveway with the keys dangling from the ignition, exactly where he expected them to be.

‘No one’s going to steal my car, are they?’ Howard had laughed when Steven had borrowed the behemoth once before, ‘their family and friends might see them in it!’

And now, a year or more later, there they still were, hanging by the steering wheel. Steven was almost shocked when the engine immediately roared into life. Thank you, Howard, he thought as he backed out of the drive. I really will pay you back one day.

He turned towards Chicago Creek Road and the Idaho Springs City Dump.

Nerak tossed the gun onto the passenger seat of David Mantegna’s car, then extracted a large pinch of chewing tobacco from the red, white and blue packet and pushed it into his mouth – and gagged violently, spitting the wad onto the floor. He swore: the girl had apparently not developed any taste for tobacco.

‘Too bad, my dear,’ Nerak said silkily, his voice a sinister echo in Myrna’s dying mind. ‘You’ll just have to get used to it.’ He retrieved the clump of tobacco, then, ignoring the bits of dirt that had stuck to it, popped it back into his – Myrna’s – mouth. ‘I love this stuff,’ he told the dying spirit, glad of Mantegna’s nicotine addiction; he so enjoyed that warm buzz. ‘If I had more time in this tired old world, I might harvest a season’s worth.’

He glanced over at the pistol and grinned. He had enjoyed that too – in fact, the carnage had almost made this annoying side-trip worthwhile.

Nerak could have made Idaho Springs from Charleston in eighteen hours if he had driven Mantegna’s Mustang nonstop at top speed, but he had taken some unplanned – most entertaining – detours. Somewhere in Kentucky he had stopped to refuel and to satisfy his – and Mantegna’s – craving for tobacco. When the hapless clerk demanded payment for the fuel and the distinctively coloured pouches of Confederate Son, Mantegna’s favourite, Nerak shot him. What an ingenious invention, Nerak told Mantegna; much easier to handle than his first guns, more than a hundred years before, and so much more efficient than the unwieldy weapons in Eldarn.

He turned from the bloody remains of the clerk and squeezed the trigger again, this time firing into the glass doors of the cool cabinets, and bottles shattered, spilling multi-coloured liquids onto the floor. The cash register was next, then a beer advertisement hanging on the back wall, where several half-naked women were playing a game in the sand – volleyball, the word appeared in his mind. Nerak fired once through the ball and once through the broad forehead of a muscular young man watching, a beer bottle dangling from one hand.

Finally, curious, Nerak fired into Mantegna’s hand, his own hand, just to experience the weapon himself – and as the bullet blew most of it off, an excruciating arrow of white-hot pain raced up his arm. ‘Outstanding!’ Nerak screamed as his ruined hand dripped gore.

Nerak collected his chewing tobacco, stopped the blood spurting from his wound with a thought and stepped outside to continue his journey. Three fingers and half of his palm lay abandoned on the floor behind him.

As he crossed the parking lot, the dark prince waved his hand and changed the car from blue to red, jumped in and sped off, laughing hysterically. He drove at breakneck speed through Missouri, chasing the fleeing sun and taking pot-shots out the window at anything that took his fancy – passing cars, livestock, backpackers he spotted outside St Louis. The police officer had been an enthusiastic member of the NRA and Nerak found three boxes of ammunition beneath the front seat. He turned the car yellow, the colour of pus, to celebrate.

Kansas had been the highlight of his journey as he’d cruised across the flatlands at one hundred and thirty miles per hour, pursued by the regional militia, or state troopers, in Mantegna’s lexicon of law enforcement. They had come after him on two-wheeled motorised vehicles of some sort – motorcycles, Mantegna interjected dully – and two-tone, heavy-bodied sedans with clamorous sirens and sparkling red and blue lights whirling about overhead. Best of all, they had tracked him with a wonderful flying helichopper-copter-whirlybird thing. Mantegna had so many words for this glorious contraption that Nerak was not sure which was the common term.

With a wave of his hand he had flattened the front tyres of the motorised cycles, chuckling in high good humour as the riders had spun off into the air.

The helichopper-copter had reacted aggressively, dropping from the sky to force Nerak off the road. It scraped the side of the Mustang with one of its landing rails, and though he could have crashed the whirlybird with a gesture, instead, relishing the challenge, he had taken aim and fired Mantegna’s weapon several times into the shining belly. The helichopper-copter reeled away, banking like a frightened plover in a gale and Nerak watched the man inside wrestling with some sort of control, trying to save the giant bird’s life.

It was too low, though, and the great blades slashed the ground, sending up sparks as the metal hit the roadway’s stone surface. One of the chasing sedans was caught by the whirling scimitars, which sliced off the car’s nose and sent the helichopper-copter spinning over a harvested corn field where it crashed, tail-first, and exploded so powerfully that it almost drove Nerak’s car into a ditch.

Kansas had been enjoyable.

Nerak slipped a fresh clip into the 9mm and returned the weapon to his waistband, then grinned and spat a mouthful of foul brown juice out the window. He wasn’t surprised to find the house he was seeking had been razed to the ground: Myrna had known, so Nerak learned of the disaster moments after taking the young woman’s soul. But it wasn’t the house he was interested in; he got out and strode confidently across the vacant lot, casting a magic net aloft to search for the stone. He was a few paces across the level expanse of frozen ground that had been Steven and Mark’s front porch before he saw footprints in the snow.

Nerak bent to touch a print. Splaying Myrna’s fingers, he murmured, ‘You have been here this morning, Steven Taylor.’ He closed the woman’s eyes and reached out again for the stone key. Nothing. It was gone.

‘Where is he?’ he asked Myrna, but she was dead now and didn’t respond – no matter, the Eldarni dictator knew everything she had ever known. He concentrated for a moment, then smiled. ‘The city dump. Won’t that be lovely this morning?’ He shook his head, a gesture that was faintly reminiscent of Myrna. For a minute he considered incinerating the rest of Idaho Springs, sending a tidal wave of fire rolling from peak to peak across the canyon. That would teach the meddling foreigner a lesson.

‘Anyone you love live here, Steven Taylor?’ Nerak spat a stream of tobacco juice at a grey squirrel that had wandered too close and added, No… no need. I know where you’ve gone.’

Instead of returning to Mantegna’s battered car, Nerak sat down, cross-legged, on the snow, facing south through Clear Creek Canyon. He pulled out the pistol and placed it at his side. ‘Are you up there, my young sorcerer? Digging in the mud and shit for my keystone? Gilmour is far away, Steven, and you will spend a very long time regretting this little journey.’ The dark prince closed his eyes and began searching the distant canyon.

The Idaho Springs City Dump was located south of town on Chicago Creek Road, a two-lane highway that wound its leisurely course through the Arapahoe National Forest towards Juniper Pass and the Mt Evans Wilderness. Steven looked up at Devil’s Nose on his left and Alps Mountain on his right, feeling intimidated, as though he were driving beneath the twin shoulder blades of a sleeping god.

He parked Howard’s Thunderbird beside a chain-link fence with a large green sign on the locked gate reading:

City of Idaho Springs Landfill and Recycle Facility

Hours of operation: Tues. – Thurs. 6 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Sat. amp; Sun. 6 a.m. – 12 noon.

Or by Appointment

A phone number at the bottom had the words leave message after it in small block capitals crookedly affixed, the kind often stuck onto mailboxes.

Steven looked around to make sure he was alone, then leaped as high as he could and grabbed the chain-link fence. He hung there for a moment, then pulled himself up and over, landing hard on the other side. Huffing from the exertion, he muttered, ‘Man, you need to get back into shape!’ He brushed the snow off his legs and started up the unmade road to the landfill site, checking signposted turnings to the right and left: Plastic Recyclables, Aluminium Recyclables and Paper Recyclables respectively. As he jogged past Appliances And Used Tyres he saw a rickety overhead arch bearing the words Idaho Springs City Dump – obviously erected in less politically correct times, he grinned to himself.

He stepped over a knee-high chain that ran across the road and heard the thin wail of a siren echoing up the canyon. ‘God, I hope I’m right,’ he said under his breath. The dump stretched out before him: a mountainous landscape in miniature. The rolling hills of rubbish might have looked tiny next to the Rockies that towered overhead, but Steven felt his heart sink: the tapestry – and Lessek’s key, of course – could be anywhere… and there was a hell of a lot of anywhere to search.

He needed a strategy. Mel Fisher’s discovery of the treasure ship Atocha in the 1970s had fascinated him: Fisher had used a grid to map the ocean floor around the wreck… the mathematician in Steven took over and he altered his perspective, looking at the garbage hills as a topographical calculus problem.

There were three hummocks in the foreground about thirty feet shorter than the six or seven hills flanking them. This dump had served Idaho Springs for as long as he could remember, and the fact that there were only ten or eleven hills in the entire valley meant either the landfill was much deeper than it looked, or it took the city a long time to generate a two-hundred-foot-high mountain of trash. But whichever assumption was true, the end result was the same: something dumped as recently as October would be close by.

‘Close by is, of course, entirely relative,’ he grumbled. ‘I bet everything else since October is sitting on top of my house right now and I’m about to spend the better part of the next five years digging around in here looking for a rock. And I didn’t even have the sense to steal a shovel. Am I quite mad? There has to be a better way.’

Nothing immediately sprang to mind so he decided to root around until he found some dates: franked letters, maybe, or old utility bills. Using those as a guide, he could chart a rudimentary map through the mountains based on the passage of time. If he ignored areas where the rubbish came from before October 15, or after the previous week, he hoped to zero in on the final resting place of his and Mark’s charred possessions.

‘Let’s get going!’ Steven said briskly. He took a few steps towards the hill on his left when his toe caught on something solid beneath the snow and he cursed and flailed his arms in a desperate effort to regain his balance. ‘Speed bumps?’ he yelled, ‘Why the hell do we need speed bumps at the damned-’ As his foot landed he felt a shock of pain fire through his leg and he tumbled to the ground. Ah, shit, my knee,’ he groaned, and rolled onto his back, clutching it with both hands.

Anticipating the dull throb of soft tissue damage, he sat up and gingerly straightened his right leg, the one that had nearly been bitten off by the injured grettan in the Blackstone Mountains south of Meyers’ Vale. But though he expected another blast of pain, Steven found to his surprise that he was able to flex and extend his leg with no problem.

‘Huh,’ he said, his voice bright with relief, ‘I must have come down on it crooked or something.’ He stood up carefully, putting a little weight through the leg until he was certain there were no injuries. ‘Thank God! I’d be flat-out screwed, trapped here with a blown knee.’

Below, the siren’s cry came again, and as Steven stepped over the disfigured snow angel he had made another explosion lanced through his leg, spilling him to the ground once more. ‘What the hell is this?’ he shouted up towards Alps Mountain. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ He clutched at his knee with one hand and rolled into a sitting position. Grimacing, he started to straighten the leg – and once again, it was as if nothing had happened. Swearing, he took off his gloves and stuffed them in a pocket, then carefully rolled his trouser leg above the knee so he could see if it had swelled up – maybe he had torn a ligament or something and the cold was numbing it.

‘I’ll bet it was coming over that rutting fence,’ he said, not noticing the Eldarni profanity. ‘Just my bloody luck.’ But the leg looked perfectly healthy. Steven, at a loss, put his clothes to rights and heaved himself back on his feet. He tested the leg again, gingerly at first, then stamping both feet hard, but it felt fine.

Still swearing under his breath, Steven turned back towards the hills of rubbish. This time he stopped dead, his foot in mid-air: when he looked down, he saw he was about to put his boot on exactly the spot where his knee had twice buckled beneath him.

Standing upright, one foot suspended several inches above the ground, he waited until he felt it: a muted sensation, like the soft rubbing of fingertips against an unfinished pine tabletop or the coarse skin of a callused palm. ‘Gilmour?’ Steven whispered, then stepped back, planting his foot away from the impacted snow where he had fallen. It was an urge now, like something – someone – was guiding him; he reached out, palms forward, as if to feel the air before him. He tried to recall how he’d felt all those months ago, when he was so determined to break into the bank safe and see what William Higgins had deposited there a century and a half earlier – he remembered feeling driven as he hurried home to see what was so important it had merited an eternity in a safe-deposit box.

He recognised that feeling; it was back: Lessek’s key and the Larion far portal were here, close by. He was not too late; not yet.

Steven covered his eyes: they were deceiving him, telling him there were acres of garbage to consider. There were not. Now, when he removed his hand, the landfill was gone, blurred into a waxy backdrop of beige, green and white. In its place were three tears, like irregular gashes on an oil canvas. The rips separated the landscape, pulling and tugging at the wash of colour that had been the valley below.

Steven’s breathing slowed as he understood what he was seeing; he had experienced something like this before, when he had touched the leather binding of Lessek’s spell book that night on the Prince Marek. He was overwhelmed with a monumental sense of power, as vast as the Midwest he had crossed just days before. Closing his eyes again, he reached into the air; it was tangible, malleable. When you are running, run, Steven. The way to win the battle was not to battle. The way to win the battle was to create. Ideas and algorithms swirled around him, and for a moment everything that ever was or would be was spread before him: opportunities won and lost, all was clear. It was maths. Maths could do anything, even the Fold could…

When Steven broke free from the magic, he found himself struggling to breathe, as if unseen arms encircled his chest. He cursed the altitude, rubbed his eyes and zipped his jacket up under his chin. It had grown colder; around him, the valley seemed darker.

Delicately, carefully, Steven edged the toe of his boot forward until it reached the point where he had fallen twice that morning. Nothing. No shock of Larion magic this time. He cautiously inched forward; now he knew what he was looking for. ‘A speed bump,’ he said, ‘a speed bump in a city dump. Who would have thought-?’

He walked to the snow bank towering above the road and began kicking at the base of the five-month accumulation of ploughed snow and ice. It was there; he was certain – just a foot or so away from where his legs had given way: a small granite stone, irregular and nondescript. Lessek’s key.

‘A speed bump.’ He shook his head and laughed out loud. ‘It bounced off the truck when it hit the speed bump.’ Steven turned the stone over in his hands, then slipped it into the pocket of his stolen jacket. The distant scream of sirens carried up the valley from Clear Creek Canyon.

He slipped several times on his way up the north face and some twelve feet down the other side of the middle mound of garbage, making him bitterly regret his lack of clean clothing. Wiping off a lump of what he was hoped was only rancid beef, he began digging through the layers of snow, frozen mud and damp rubbish. Three feet of mouldy food, rotten newspapers and dirty diapers later, his torn gloves came away thick with black, smoky mud. Paydirt: the remains of 147 Tenth Street.

Ten minutes later found Steven pulling out a wrinkled, sodden, almost unrecognisable Larion far portal. Though it looked – and felt – disgusting, as he tossed it over his shoulder, he noticed its fragrance, a hint of lilac, Hannah’s perfume. Its energy, the force that had driven him to rob his own bank, hadn’t waned. He could feel it pulsing through the muscles of his shoulder like a second cousin to the hickory staff. He glanced at the stolen watch, 10.54 a.m., six hours until he could get it back again. He hadn’t expected to miss it so much.

As he came down from the trash mountain, Steven wore a look of grim confidence. Lessek’s Larion portal was his; this time all the trepidation and terror he had experienced the night he followed Mark to Estrad were gone. In six hours he would step back into Eldarn, this time without fear, but he would carry with him sadness for Versen’s loss, loneliness without Hannah, and slow-boiling hatred for Nerak.

From the trees to the north came yet another wailing siren. As if he had suddenly heard it for the first time, Steven snapped his attention towards the sound. He swore, and began sprinting towards Howard’s car. Nerak was in Idaho Springs.