The Dark Remains

by Mark Anthony

  In some of the neighborhoods I’ve been searching, people stare if you don’t have a piercing, Grace.

  She had accepted his explanation, but he wasn’t certain he had been entirely honest with her. Not that he truly understood the reason he had let the muscular, nose-pierced young man at the tattoo parlor talk him into it.

  It doesn’t matter if you want them, man, he had said, running his hands over Travis’s smooth head. You need them.

  Maybe the man had been right. The Stone of Fire had destroyed Travis, then had forged him anew. And even though he was still a man—neither god nor monster by choice—he wasn’t sure he was entirely the same man. He still had Travis Wilder’s name. He still had his thoughts, his memories, his fears. And he still had the magical symbol branded deep into the flesh of his right palm. All the same, instinct told Travis that every atom in his body was utterly new. Somehow, looking different made the mystery of that change easier to bear.

  Travis had taken his hat off when he sensed the wind coming. Now he pulled it from the pocket of his trench coat—the same pocket he had found it in after buying the coat for four bucks at a thrift store on South Broadway. The hat was black, shapeless, and vaguely beretlike. Grace said it looked like a bad toupee or a dead cat, depending on how she squinted. Travis liked it.

  As he settled the hat on his head, he caught a glimpse of mountains behind his image in the window. They hovered in the gap between two buildings like gray ghosts on the horizon. For a moment he wished he could go back there, to the mountains, to Castle City. Wasn’t that where they had always helped him decide what he was supposed to do—Brother Cy, Sister Mirrim, and the dark Child Samanda?

  But the strange trio wasn’t there anymore. It had been risky, maybe even stupid, to let anyone know that he was alive and on Earth, but a few nights ago Travis had picked up the phone and dialed information.

  What city please? the recorded voice droned.

  He had hesitated, then said the words. Castle City.

  What listing?

  That was harder. He had thought about Jace Windom, but she was a deputy. Wouldn’t she have to report any conversation with Travis to Sheriff Dominguez? After all, twice now he had vanished from the scene of a fire in which others had died.

  Davis or Mitchell Burke-Favor, he said before he really thought about it.

  One moment please.

  Davis and Mitchell had always come to the Mine Shaft Saloon every Friday to dance to the country music on the jukebox. They were close enough friends that they would help him, but not so close they would be compelled to come find him. Besides, their ranch was just south of town, not far from the Castle Heights Cemetery. If anyone might have seen Brother Cy there, it would be them.

  This time it was a real operator that spoke. She gave him the number. He hung up, then dialed. The phone rang twice, then a deep, twanging voice answered. Hello, you’ve got Mitchell.

  Travis’s throat had nearly closed. Finally he managed to speak.

  Mitchell, it’s me.

  A silence, filled only with the hiss of distance. Then, Travis? Travis Wilder?

  Their conversation had been short, but surprisingly not awkward. Although he had every right to do so, Mitchell had not asked where Travis had gone, what had happened to him, or where he was calling from. Instead he listened to Travis’s questions, then answered in a deep, melodious voice that made Travis think of a cowboy poet he had once heard on the radio. Unfortunately, Mitchell didn’t have much to tell. He hadn’t seen a tall man in black around town. And no, the revival tent that had popped up last October had not reappeared. Travis ran out of questions.

  There’s a grave for you, Travis. Up on the hill in Castle Heights.

  I know, he said simply. It was enough.

  Be well, Travis. We’ll sure miss you.

  Travis didn’t know what else to say. He settled for, Give Davis my best. It was Mitchell who hung up first, leaving Travis with the lonely sound of static in his hand.

  While he was glad he had made the call, it had only confirmed what Travis’s instincts had already told him. Brother Cy wasn’t there anymore, in the mountains. But he had to be somewhere. That was why Travis had spent these last weeks searching for him here, in the city.

  Besides, even if Brother Cy was still in Castle City, you couldn’t go back there, Travis. It’s too dangerous. That’s the first place they’d be looking.

  As if that thought had somehow been a cue, Travis watched in the window’s reflection as a sleek, black SUV approached along a cross street, moving toward the corner where he stood. The traffic light changed, and the vehicle stopped as pedestrians crossed in front of it. Through the flickering screen of their legs, Travis made out the license plate: DRATEK33.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Travis,” he muttered under his breath. “They’ve got a multinational corporation to run. Not every one of their cars can be looking for you and Grace.”

  In what he hoped was a casual motion, he turned from the window and crossed the street with a cluster of walkers. Only after half a block did he let himself turn and look back at the intersection. The light had changed; the vehicle was nowhere in sight.

  Travis shoved his hands in his pockets. He knew he should keep going; it was hours before he had to be at the hospital for the janitorial night shift. But he was tired of walking, tired of searching. He bought a cup of coffee from a street vendor, then hopped the free shuttle down to the end of Sixteenth Street. He crossed the pedestrian bridge high above the railroad tracks, then descended to a green park beside the Platte River. He sat in the middle of a bank of cement steps and watched the waters of the Platte rush by, as thin and brown as the coffee in his paper cup. He took a sip. It wasn’t maddok, but he felt a faint tingle of jittery energy seep through his veins.

  He set the cup on the step, then drew a small piece of bone on a string from beneath his black T-shirt. It seemed so long ago and so far away—the day he had pulled the bone from the witch Grisla’s bag near the half-ruined fortress of Kelcior. He could still hear the hag’s rasping words.

  I wouldn’t have thought you would draw that one. One line for Birth, one line for Breath, and one more for Death, which comes to us all.

  At the time he hadn’t understood what the rune had meant—much to Grisla’s disgust. It was only later, when he stood in the frozen depths of Shadowsdeep—when Beltan lay dying in the blood-soaked snow, and the Rune Gate opened to release the armies of the Pale King—that Travis had finally understood the meaning of the rune. It was hope. While there was life, there was always hope.

  Travis tightened his hand around the rune. Beltan had nearly given his life so Travis could learn that lesson. Travis was not going to give up on him now.

  Wake up, Beltan. Please. You’ve got to wake up so we can get out of here.

  Travis and Grace didn’t talk about it much anymore; they didn’t need to. Both of them knew they had to get Beltan out of this city before Duratek found them. He started to pick up his coffee again, then halted as a billboard across the river caught his eye. He should have been surprised, but he wasn’t. They were everywhere; he knew that now.

  On the billboard, a man, a woman, and a girl all smiled with imbecilic joy as the girl released a dove into a sky that was far too blue to be beautiful. In that sky, sharp as a sickle, hung an oversize crescent moon that merged into the capital D of their logo. Duratek. Worlds of Possibility.

  Travis winced. He knew all too well what the billboard really meant. Once, one of their agents had told him that the meeting of Eldh and Earth was inevitable, and that Duratek’s mission was only to manage the convergence, to make sure it happened the right way. Travis knew that was a lie. Their real mission was to get to Eldh before anyone else, to conquer its peoples, to pollute its rivers, and to strip its lands of trees and minerals. And Travis was going to do anything he could to keep them from getting what they wanted.

  But even if—even when Beltan woke up, how were they going to get back to Eldh? Th
e silver half-coins seemed to work only in one direction: from Eldh to Earth. Despite all of his and Grace’s experiments, the coins appeared to have no power on Earth. That was why he spent his days searching for Brother Cy.

  “Where are you, Cy?” he murmured. “What are you?” But the words were lost on a gust of air.

  He let his gaze wander. Across the river, a huge, skeletal shape forged of metal girders rose into the sky. Then the wind unfurled the banner that hung from the side of the construction:

  COMING SOON TO DENVER!

  THE STEEL CATHEDRAL

  Everything you seek

  is just around the corner …

  So it was one of those gigantic new megachurches. Bigger is better, wasn’t that the philosophy today no matter what you were selling? If only the words on the banner were right, if only what he sought really was just around the corner. But whether he found Brother Cy or not, they still couldn’t go anywhere until Beltan woke up. And although Travis refused to give up hope, there was no telling when that would be.

  Almost every night, usually after 2:00 A.M. when at last things grew still and silent, he would put down his mop and make his way to Beltan’s room. Each time he was struck by how frail the knight looked beneath the tangle of tubes and wires. Beltan had always said he was Travis’s protector, but Travis knew it was the other way around now. Yet somehow it was a comforting feeling. He could stand this, being the strong one.

  For a time each night—a few minutes, maybe longer—he would watch the blond man for any signs of motion, however small. He knew that Beltan loved him. That was what the knight had tried to tell him once in Perridon, although Travis had been unable to hear, for he had just turned the rune of fire back on Master Eriaun, and his ears had roared with the sound of flames. It wasn’t until Beltan lay dying in Castle Spardis, when he kissed Travis with bloodied lips, that Travis finally understood.

  What it meant was another question. Night after night Travis stood above Beltan, trying to imagine how someone could actually love him, and trying to imagine if he could love another, trying to feel if it was even possible. Then, finally, in what might have been an act of desperation, Travis had bent down and had pressed his lips against Beltan’s.

  It had been so easy he had almost laughed. There was no lightning strike, no grand revelation, no resistance or sudden awakening. It was just flesh to flesh. Why had he expected anything else? In all his late-night reveries, he had been so busy wondering if he could love Beltan that he had forgotten to ask himself the simple question if he did. And as for the answer, well—

  Like a dark bird, something fluttered on the edge of Travis’s vision. He looked up.

  The woman stood no more than thirty feet away across the park, in the center of a bare expanse of concrete. She was tall and lithe, her body clad in tight-fitting black leather, her legs apart and high-heeled boots planted firmly. Short, dark hair was smoothed sleekly against her head, and she wore a solemn expression on the bronze oval of her face. She stood without the slightest motion, gazing at him with gold eyes.

  Travis started to draw in a breath. Who are you? he wanted to say. However, before the sound left his lips, the air around the woman rippled and folded, and she was gone.

  21.

  Mitchell Sheridan Burke-Favor sat up in bed aµnd stared into the stone-colored light between night and morning, waiting for the alarm beside the bed to go off.

  It wouldn’t be long now. Life on the ranch started well before dawn, no matter the time of year. The hired hands would be showing up soon, clattering into the kitchen, wanting breakfast. Then there were horses to feed and saddle, cattle to be moved between pastures and watered, and miles of fence to mend. The earlier they started, the earlier they’d be done.

  Not that Mitchell would have minded a few more minutes of sleep. God knew he was tired enough. While the years seemed to be getting shorter, somehow each workday seemed to be stretching out longer. But weary as he was, he was damned if he could sleep an entire night anymore. He was always thinking about the price of cattle, how many they’d have to sell to make it through the winter, and the cost of hay. But then, didn’t they say folk slept less the older they got?

  We’re not young men anymore, Mitchell. There are no kids running around to remind you, so you can almost forget about it. But we’re not thirty, and we haven’t been in a whole herd of years.

  Motion in the bed beside him. Mitchell turned and let his eyes ride over the planes of Davis’s body stretched out beneath the sheet, as sharp and windswept as the high plains. Sleep had smoothed out the lines carved by years of wind and sun, but Mitchell knew they would return the moment Davis woke up and smiled.

  All the same, with his thick wheat-brown hair, Davis didn’t look all that different than when they had first met twenty-five years ago. Davis had been working the amateur rodeo circuit then, and Mitchell had been an announcer at the fairgrounds in Billings, Montana. Davis had lasted only four seconds on the bull. Even before he hit the ground, Mitchell had known their life together was going to last a whole lot longer.

  While Davis was leaner than ever, Mitchell had gotten bulkier with time. A few years back his size 32 Wranglers had quietly given way to 34’s. Then, last month, after some serious complaining on the part of his waistline, he had broken down and bought his first pair of size 36’s down at McKay’s General Store. He was still strong, though—the ranch work saw to that—and his thick, black handlebar mustache did a good job of hiding the creases around his mouth. And as for his balding head—well, only God and Davis ever saw him with his hat off.

  Besides, there were other ways of staying young. That was why he and Davis had taken up two-stepping a decade ago. They had gotten good enough to win a few prizes at the national competition in San Francisco a while back. When you were dancing, it was impossible to feel old.

  Except now there was nowhere in town to dance anymore.

  Mitchell sighed, and he knew it was not thoughts of horses, cattle, and fences that had kept him awake. Where the hell had Travis Wilder called from?

  Mitchell hadn’t asked when the phone rang two nights ago. You never asked a man where he was from or where he was going; that was the cowboy code. If he told you of his own free will, you just nodded, and that was all. But Travis hadn’t said where he was, or where he had been. All the same, the question had bucked and kicked in Mitchell, and it had been all he could do to rein it in.

  No one knew who had dug the grave for Travis up in Castle Heights Cemetery. Some in town had said it must have been the new grave-digger who had come with the strange heat of summer and left just as suddenly. Mitchell couldn’t say, as he had never seen the man. The summer had left little time for anything outside the ranch; the heat had come close to taking a terrible toll on the animals, and had it gone on much longer it would have.

  Yet while no one had known for sure who had dug Travis’s grave, everyone assumed that whatever was left of him was buried in it. The destruction of the Mine Shaft had been all but complete. A natural gas explosion, the Castle County fire marshal had determined. He had gone through all the old buildings along Elk Street and found a dozen other leaks in antique pipes and boilers. In a way it was a wonder it hadn’t happened sooner. But then why had it happened at the Mine Shaft? Everyone still remembered the fire at the Magician’s Attic a few years back, when Jack Graystone had died and Travis Wilder vanished for the first time. Now the Mine Shaft had burned, and Max Bayfield and several unidentified people had burned with it.

  But not, as Mitchell learned two nights ago, Travis Wilder.

  Through the window—open a crack for air despite the chill mountain night—drifted the sound of tires against gravel. Mitchell sat up in bed. Had some of the hired hands shown up already?

  Outside, a vehicle door shut: solid, heavy, well oiled. Another followed, and a shiver rode across Mitchell’s chest. Neither of those had sounded like the doors of a rusted-out pickup truck, and he was pretty sure none of the hired hands had b
een in the market for a brand-new car. He sure as horseshit wasn’t paying them enough.

  Mitchell stood up from the bed. Cold air slapped his bare backside. Swiftly, he pulled on the pair of jeans slung over a chair. He fumbled on the nightstand, then his hand came back with a pair of glasses rimmed with silver wire. Davis said they made him look handsome and smart. Mitchell knew they made him look old, but damn if he could shoot a target at ten paces without them.

  The sound of footsteps crunched closer. Mitchell cocked his head, counting. Just two. Those weren’t bad odds. He moved to the window, parted the checkered curtain a fraction, and peered into the steely predawn. They were just visible around the front corner of the house: the sleek, black curves of two SUVs parked in the dirt driveway. Two men in dark suits paused, gazing at the horizon with eyes concealed by heavy sunglasses, as if even the pale glow of first light was too much for them. Then they turned and continued toward the house.

  A rustling in the bed behind him, and a sleepy voice.

  “What is it, Mitchell?”

  Mitchell turned from the window and spoke through clenched teeth. “Get your gun, Davis.”

  Two minutes later they stepped out the door of the ranch house onto the broad front porch. The last winds of night fled, as if fearing the coming of the sun. On the other side of the porch railing stood two men in black. The wind seemed to have no power over their stiff hair and heavy suits. Mitchell shivered, and one of the men—his hair coal-black, his features smooth and indeterminately Asian—smiled. It seemed a dead expression, his eyes hidden behind the thick sunglasses.

  “We would have waited,” the man said, “for you gentlemen to attire yourselves.”

  On his way to the door, Mitchell had stopped to slap his Stetson on his head, but other than the blue jeans that was it. Davis had pulled on a white tank top and a pair of battered khakis. Both of them were barefoot.

  “No, no—they are cowboys,” the other man said with a smile that was equally empty. He was tall and Nordic, his hair so blond it shone bone-white in the dawn. “I have seen this in the movies. They are only naked if they do not have their guns. Is that not right, boys?”