Lodestone Book One: The Sea of Storms (41 page)

“What makes the game so
fascinating is that with the number of different possible
designations of pieces and the various combinations of strategies
between them, the possibilities are virtually endless. No two games
are ever alike.”

Pieces were being thinned out as
they were moved across the board. Both sides of the table were
littered with those captured or sacrificed. A subtle change in the
players was also taking place. Alondo’s moves were becoming faster
and more confident. Keris, on the other hand, was hesitating more,
her brow furrowed in concentration.

Shann cupped her hand to Lyall’s
ear. “When does it end?” she whispered.

“When one side or the other no
longer has the right pieces to form a strategy, they cannot win,”
Lyall confided. At that point ‘Kada-Lorran’ is declared.” He
registered her puzzled expression. “It means ‘victory and
defeat.’”

“Ah…” she acknowledged, adding,
“Who do you think will win?”

Lyall’s eyes were smiling a
secret smile. “Wait and see.”

Keris seemed paralysed by
indecision. Finally, she moved two pieces so that they were
adjacent to a third.

“Facing?” Alondo
asked.

“Oh, er…North,” she replied
distractedly.

Alondo smiled his sweetest smile,
went to a piece immediately and moved it ten spaces into the centre
of the board. Still smiling, he turned it. “South.” Keris was
staring at the board intently. “Did I make a wrong move?” he asked
innocently.

“What? No…no…” her voice trailed
off.

“I think your Wheel is
threatened,” he suggested, helpfully.

“Yes, I see that, thank
you.”

Shann’s face was buried in
Lyall’s shoulder. She was stuffing the brocade on the lapel of his
jacket into her mouth to try and suppress her laughter. Her small
body shook with the effort.

Keris shot her a look of
irritation. She turned back to Alondo, her voice formal.
“Lorran.”

“Kadda.” He announced with a mock
version of her own formality. He stood up from his stool and bowed.
“Thanks for the game. I could give you a handicap next time, if you
like?”

Shann finally lost control. She
released Lyall, doubling up in fits of raucous laughter, drawing
attention from nearby tables.

Keris ignored her with some
effort. “You deceived me,” she accused Alondo.

Alondo’s eyes widened. His hands
moved to his chest in a gesture of injured innocence.
“Me?”

“You led me to believe you were
less experienced than you are.”

Lyall moved to intervene. “Well,
I’m surprised a trained investigator couldn’t spot the clues.” He
ticked off his fingers one by one. “First, he’s a genius. Second,
he’s a musician by trade. Where do you think musicians spend most
of their time?”

“Playing in inns and public
houses,” Keris acknowledged.

“Exactly.”

“So the two of you set me
up?”

“Only in fun…and as a way of
helping you to relax. After all, he did give you a challenging
game.”

Keris appeared mollified by
Lyall’s explanation. She rose from her stool and formally returned
Alondo’s bow. “Thank you. I look forward to our next
encounter.”

Shann had her
arm around Alondo’s shoulder.
Good
friends. Good food. Good company
. She
could not remember a time in her life when she had felt so
contented. “How about another drink?” she suggested
amiably.

Far off in another corner of the
Calandra, a figure in a black and red tunic and black trousers sat
alone at a table half in shadow, watching the party
surreptitiously. As he raised his mug to his lips, a ring was
visible on his index finger, bronze and set with a single stone of
the deepest ebony.

Chapter
26

Shann awoke the next morning
feeling muzzy-headed. They had secured two rooms at the Calandra,
one for Lyall and Alondo and one for her and Keris. Boxx had
naturally accompanied Keris and no-one had argued the
point.

As she came to and struggled to
focus, she quickly realised that Keris and Boxx were gone. She was
alone. Like everything else at the Calandra, the bed was soft and
sumptuous–not at all what she was used to, but highly pleasant for
all that. She was sorely tempted to turn over and go back to sleep,
but the light level told her that it was well past the time for her
to rise. Besides, she was curious as to what the others were up
to.

Reluctantly, she pushed back the
covers and padded across the wooden floor to a side table where a
basin of fresh water stood. The rush of cold water on her face
brought her to full wakefulness. She found some clean clothes in a
dresser and slipped out into the corridor. Going to the door of the
adjacent room, she knocked lightly. The door opened and she was
gratified to see Alondo’s round face.

He beamed at her. “We thought you
were going to sleep all day.” He opened the door fully and beckoned
her inside. Lyall and Keris stood to one side, watching Boxx. The
Chandara had the machine from the past set up in the middle of the
floor. Light reflected off the gold and silver coloured workings,
but the device was otherwise inactive. Shann and Alondo took up a
place on the other side of Boxx.

Lyall looked up. He seemed
pleased to see her. “How are you this morning?”

Shann was still feeling a little
fragile. She realised she probably needed some food inside her, but
that would have to wait. “I’m fine. What is Boxx up to?
”

“You got here just in time,”
Lyall informed her. He was wearing a rustic brown tunic and
trousers, in sharp contrast with his ostentatious outfit of the
previous evening. “Boxx says that Annata is due to contact us
shortly.”

“She will expect us to be on the
other side of the world by now,” Keris reminded them. “We are going
to have to break the news that the tower was destroyed.”

“Do you think there is another
way to get there?” Shann asked.

Keris was
looking tired and anxious. Her hair was uncombed. “Let’s hope she
knows of one. And that we are not already too late.”
Was she being genuine? Or was she merely saying
what she thought they wanted to hear?
She
remembered what Lyall had said about the difficult journey that
both she and Keris were on. Lyall had been prepared to give her a
second chance, but in doing so, he had chosen a dangerous path for
everyone. It was a second chance for her to betray them all. She
claimed that she had turned against her overseer and left him dead
in the Gilah, but there was no way of verifying that–they only had
her word. One persistent thought kept nagging at the back of her
mind–
Keltar do not turn against the
Prophet
.

Then there was
Boxx. In some ways, its role in all of this was just as much of a
mystery.
Chandara do not
lie
; Lyall had said as much. Deep down,
Shann believed that to be true. But could it be deceived? Was it
possible that the Keltar had somehow run across Boxx and the
machine from the past and had seen an opportunity to use the
situation for her own ends?

Shann could not
help but think back to last evening’s game of shassatan. During
their epic journey together, moves had been made; gambits employed;
strategies followed. Now was the decisive point. Kada-Lorran.
Victory or Defeat.
It all comes down to
this
.

“It Is
Time.”
Boxx’s announcement brought a
deathly silence to the room. Shann hardly dared to breathe. The
Chandara stretched forth its left middle forelimb and touched the
panel set into the mechanism’s circular base. It did so again. And
a third time. Nothing. No gentle hum emanated from the delicate
components. The row of lights remained stubbornly dull. It was for
all intents and purposes dead.

Broken. She
broke it after all
. Shann was filled with
despair and disgust. She fired a look at Keris, but the older woman
was looking intensely at the scene in the middle of the room and
did not notice, or pretended not to.

Alondo had moved to Boxx’s side
and was on his haunches, inspecting the device. His hand touched a
part of the inner apparatus, then went to his chin.

“Well?” Lyall finally broke the
silence.

Alondo was continuing to stare
into the unfathomable mix of brightly coloured parts. “All I can
say for sure is that there is still no power getting to the unit.
Whether that is due to the earlier damage, or the fact that no
power is being transferred to it, I just don’t know. I’m
sorry.”

A pall had settled over the
gathering. Finally Lyall drew himself erect and spoke to no-one in
particular. “Well, it seems we have some thinking to do–and I for
one don’t think well on an empty stomach. I am going to order up
breakfast. I want everyone downstairs as soon as it’s ready.” His
tone brooked no argument.

The group slowly dispersed, each
one to their own private room of dejection.

~

The table at
the back of the Inn was laden with a sumptuous repast of
flatbreads, sweetmeats and an amazing variety of fruits, both dried
and fresh. At any other time, Shann would have happily piled her
platter high and ate her fill. Yet now she was doing little more
than picking at the seeds on a pastry or rolling a janaberry around
on her plate. The others were showing scarcely more of an appetite
than her. Only Boxx seemed unaffected as it munched a yellow fruit
contentedly with its eyes closed. She envied the little creature.
The little girl in her resented the thought of all that food going
to waste.
Maybe later
.

Lyall was seated at the head of
the table; his eyes rested on each of them in turn. When he reached
Shann, she met his look and smiled encouragingly. She did not want
to let him down, although she was not sure what any of them was
supposed to do now.

Finally he began, “I can
appreciate that you are all disappointed. We made the journey here
in the hope that Annata would contact us and tell us how we might
cross the Great Barrier. However, for whatever reason, it seems she
has been unable to do so. She told us before that she had devoted
her life to the salvation of the Kelanni of our time. I believe
that she is even now doing everything she can to get through to us.
In the meantime, we must continue to do our part.” He paused as if
waiting for a response, but no-one spoke. He tied the threads of
his purpose into a single knot. “We must cross the Great Barrier
ourselves.”

Keris who was seated to his left,
lifted her head from her empty plate. “And how do you propose that
we do that?”

Lyall smiled enigmatically. “I
was hoping that you were going to tell me.”

Alondo smiled back from the seat
on his right. “I thought jokes were my speciality.”

“I mean it.” Lyall leaned back on
his stool and spread both hands wide. “Look, The Great Barrier of
Storms lies over there,” he pointed vaguely towards the front of
the inn, “just across the Aronak Sea. All we need to do is cross
it.”

“None of us knows how to sail a
vessel,” Alondo pointed out.

“It doesn’t
matter
.” Keris was staring down at her
plate once more. “The storms are impenetrable. Any ship that
approaches would have its sails torn to shreds. If it strikes sail,
it would have no way to push against the massive winds. At best it
would be blown back to this side; at worst it would be swamped and
capsize.
There is no way
through
.”

Keris’ summary
was like a funeral oration. Silence descended once again. Then, as
if out of nowhere, the merest suggestion appeared at the back of
Shann’s mind.
Something Keris had just
said.
She scrabbled around in the junk
room of her memories, as if desperately searching for a lost
volume. Her hand closed around a book and she picked it up. There
was a single word on the cover.
Push
.

“Maybe we could use lodestone?”
she heard herself say. She looked around and saw that her
companions were all staring at her.

“How do you mean, Shann?” Lyall
asked in a kindly voice.

Shann swallowed. She was now the
centre of attention. The idea was still taking shape in her mind,
and she was concerned that she might sound foolish. She gathered
her wits and addressed Lyall directly, as if the others were not
there. “The…the training stones you showed me at the farmhouse–do
you still have them?”

Lyall reached down to his belt
and produced a small pouch, handing it across the table to Shann.
“There you go.”

Shann hastily rearranged and
stacked plates and mugs until she had a clear section of table in
front of her. Then she untied the string at the neck of the pouch
and peeked inside, selecting two stones; one white, one black. The
black stone resisted her pull slightly. She set the white disc on
the table and the black one next to it. Immediately, the two discs
began to move in the direction of the white disc until both dropped
off the end of the tabletop. She bent down to pick them up, and
held up the white disc between her thumb and forefinger. “Say the
white stone is our ship.” She held the black disc in her other
hand. “We could use lodestone to push it from behind using …a barge
or something.”