CHAPTER TWO
Lio should never have returned to Caelin Forest. That had become clear the moment he stepped out from the portal, felt the crunch of bracken and dead brambles beneath his brogues and saw, at long last, the tombstone of the only woman he had ever loved and, immediately after, the three crones who haunted her grave.
The nightmare tableau engulfed him – the almost forgotten smell of pine and wet earth, the bell-like call of the birds, the steepled canvas tents and the faces of those three witches aged as if with chisels and sandpaper in the intervening years since he had seen them last. Now, with sickening familiarity did the remembrance flood back.
‘Lio?’
Catherine Weyer’s voice was a trough of cold water that drenched him.
Robert Liutprand Lashkari stumbled backward, cast a portal and then dove inside, his heart thundering in his chest as he soared through the whirling darkness, darting with grace through a black sea of distant starbursts and sundered spells.
Delusion had been the reason for his return.
Delusion, several glasses of whiskey and a decade spent recounting to himself the story of what had happened in that forest until it morphed into myth.
All of that, and the now tear-stained letter which was folded in his breast pocket.
How truly imbecilic of him to presume that the witches of Acanthi had vacated this forest.
Lio slipped out of the portal, finding himself in an olive grove. He was now far from the forest of his childhood. ‘Ah!’ yelled a farmhand, who then shouted in a language Lio did not know. Lio raced away along the dirt.
Had the witches of Acanthi known he was coming?
Lio cast another portal and leaped in. He wheezed as he dove, again and again, each portal tiring him a little more.
He glimpsed flashes of sun, of lightning, of spirits and limestone and dragonflies and desert.
A city here, a wasteland there. The Acanthi coven knew his magic – they knew its scent, and more than that, Cate had her Sight.
An ordinary Magician would take weeks to find him.
Catherine Weyer, the coven leader, was anything but ordinary.
Lio stumbled out of another portal and onto the roof of a Lessintou church. Was he north of the equator, now?
‘I beg your pardon, son!’
Lio glanced over the edge of the parapet and saw a distraught old man on the cobbles below, staring up at him.
‘What business is it of yours, climbing all over a place of worship?’
Lio huffed and clambered down the side of the building, finding footholds in the stone wall. Once he reached the ground, he hurried along the street.
Lunacy. That was the only explanation for his choice to return to that forest.
But he’d needed to see the grave.
He’d needed to prove that the letter was a fraud.
Lio wiped his brow on his sleeve as he trotted through the drizzly town of terracotta and stucco.
‘That one there!’ came a shout from behind him.
Lio turned. The old man, now flanked by three black-robed priests, gestured wildly at Lio.
Now, Lio spotted the fig trees and the red and black flags about the square.
He was in the country of Ullesion. Here, the punishments for blasphemy were worse than for murder.
‘Damn it to hell,’ muttered Lio. He lifted his hand to cast another portal.
Yet, the effort was too great for him. Magic sparked at his fingertips and fizzled.
The priests neared.
Frantic, Lio cast again. The spell took at last, and he leaped into the portal. He cast and dove again and again, draining his reserves until at last he stumbled out onto the dirt of Beleust.
Lio threw each foot to the gravel, vaulting himself forward.
His left ankle ached terribly. Yet, he pushed on through the crowds and motor cars and into the festival fray of the desert city.
Here, the air was thick with anise and every market stall held upon its table some heaving platter of glazed fowl or candied hawthorn.
Chanting came from the spirits – it was a festival to honour them, it seemed, and in that honour the people wore masks of papier-maché.
As Lio shoved through the crowd, a homemade lion – or was it a wyvern?
– collided with him. Lio apologised in Calléan, which was his language, not theirs, but he did not stop nor slow and when he made it to the end of the street and out of the throng, he flung himself around a final corner and smacked right into a stone wall.
Pain burst across Lio’s face. His vision turned black, and he found himself laying against the dirt, clutching his nose. Wet, warm blood dribbled into his mouth. He tried to get up but the ground swelled and tugged him back down.
Lio took the stick of chalk from his inside pocket.
It was the last of a pack of twelve he had purchased in Valliviell.
Magic was quite legal there, unlike in his home country.
The city had spell shops and cauldron crafters and little stalls selling curious varieties of amplifiers.
As such, he always visited Valliviell when he had the opportunity.
For an amplifier assisted any paltry Magician unable to sustain their spellcraft on their own.
Exhausted and a bit embarrassed, Lio extended his amplifying chalk and drew a wide circle against the ground beneath him.
A line down the centre. Three stars in the upper right corner and two crosses in the bottom left.
He marked in triangles and dashes and finished with one great spiral that ringed the centre and would ensure the rune would disappear as soon as he used it.
He knew that Acanthi would find the spell eventually. This was all he could do to stifle them – hopping from city to city, continent to continent, running, hiding, smearing his trace, if only feebly, all in an attempt to mask his true destination.
Lio stepped into the centre of the rune. He closed his eyes, his nose aching, and began to mutter in a dialect older than his own species. A warm wind tumbled in as the ringing of wind chimes and children’s chanting began. Up kicked the smell of woodsmoke, incense, gunpowder and lime.
A burst of light shot out from the rune and he was gone.
‘He has taken another portal,’ said Moira. She was holding a plucked eyeball up to the sky. Grotesque sinews of optic nerve dangled in the wind and, with her own eyes shut, the aged witch watched the young man weaving through the crowds of a new city, the blood drying against his chin.
‘He has a beard,’ said Cate, almost mournfully.
‘He had a beard before,’ said Agytha.
‘The fluff of a child is what he had before,’ said Cate. Lio was so much older now. His hair was longer, the dark mop cut to his chin. It suited him. ‘Where is the latest of his portals?’
‘Off Main Street,’ said Moira, grinning. ‘And it seems our Mr Lashkari has left something of himself behind. Ran right into a wall and broke his nose, silly thing. His blood’s still drying on the brick.’
Moira dropped the eyeball and wiped her hands against her skirt. A whimper came. The owner of that eyeball lay in the bloodied dirt beside her feet, his remaining eye staring up at her, horrified. The man had been a recreational mountain climber. Perhaps forty. Perhaps a parent. He began to sob.
Moira placed one foot on his shoulder and kicked him from the cliff.
A strangled scream rang out as he tumbled down the rock face and landed against the sharp stone below. After a moment, he dragged himself to his feet and, clutching at his face, scurried away. He should have known better than to wander alone when the witches of Acanthi were in need of an amplifier.
‘The eye-plucking was hardly necessary, was it?’ asked Agytha. ‘Seemed a sweetheart to me.’
Moira’s eyes narrowed. At seventy-four, she was the eldest of the three women. Her dust-coloured hair trailed against the dirt, and a collection of jars gleamed at her waist. ‘A sweetheart?’
‘Don’t start,’ said Cate, winding red yarn between her fingers.
She was almost sixty, and growing more bitter with each passing moon.
She tied a knot in her threads, flipped them around, tied another.
Her threads were also an amplifier of magic.
One which she leaned on with increasing desperation as the years leaped past her.
‘I simply assert,’ said Agytha, ‘that you could have used a kinder magic to find our Lio.’ She was the youngest at fifty-two, with pretty hands and two round spots of rouge against her cheeks.
‘Blood and body’s the most powerful,’ said Moira.
‘I know that,’ said Agytha. ‘But what about a peeper charm? A scrying? Moira, dear, if you leave a gouged man in every town we visit, people will eventually notice.’
‘I wanted to kill the mountain climber,’ said Moira. ‘Burn the body. Hide it. But you two would have gotten cross.’
‘Of course we would have,’ cried Agytha.
‘I don’t see why,’ said Moira. ‘He wasn’t important.’
‘How would you know? Say he was some monarch’s nephew, then quite suddenly we’ve got a regiment of Grand Magicians after the coven—’
‘Quiet,’ snapped Cate, and the two women silenced. ‘I care not for nephews or the outcomes of blood magic or whatever incessant thing you are about to bicker over next. None of that has any consequence to me. Not if we can’t find her before Lio does.’