The Dark Remains

by Mark Anthony

  He was trapped. Beltan tried to sit upright, but he could not. It was more than mere weakness. Something held him down, pressing him to the odd, angled bed in which he lay. He craned his neck, shut his eyes against a wave of dizziness, then opened them again.

  He was naked, that much had been real. The bed beneath him was made of steel, and he was strapped to it with lengths of a shiny cloth he did not recognize. Either he was very weak, or the cloth was far stronger than it looked. Or perhaps both. His body was thin, his ribs showing plainly, the ends of his bones jutting beneath his skin. He looked like an old man.

  Tubes sprang forth from the flesh of his arms like worms. The tubes were clear like glass, but obviously flexible in nature, so they could not be glass after all. The tubes coiled above him, leading to bladders that hung from a steel rack, and which contained various liquids, most clear, but one pale green, like emeralds in water.

  He studied the bladders and thought he understood. The liquids dripped down the tubes and flowed into his veins. This was unlike the tube they had placed in his phallus, which was obviously intended to collect his piss. Beltan was not one to necessarily assume magic in things he did not understand, but it was hard not to wonder if he wasn’t being held by some kind of wizard.

  Being tied down to the steel bed made him think of dead knights he had helped to carry off countless battlefields, strapped to their shields. But he wasn’t dead—although it seemed to him he should be. He glanced down at his left side. Shouldn’t there have been a wound there?

  A spasm passed through him, the memory of pain. Yes, he was beginning to remember. He had been in Spardis, in the baths, seeking to waylay Dakarreth. Only the Necromancer had been too powerful for him, had forced him down and dug impossibly strong fingers into his side, opening his old wound. Blood had poured forth like warm water on the tiles.

  However, the wound was gone now; Beltan searched with his eyes, but he saw only a pale scar snaking across his skin. He felt a cool tingling dance across his flesh.

  He wasn’t entirely certain, but he thought he must have awakened again in the baths, but Dakarreth had no longer been there. Instead there had been others bending over him, only it was hard to remember who they were. One had leaned toward him. Beltan remembered laughing, then lifting his head up to press his lips against the other’s.…

  I just wanted to tell you that I’m not sorry after all.

  I don’t understand, Beltan. Not sorry for what?

  For this.

  He drew in a sharp breath. Travis. Travis Wilder had been there, and so had Lady Grace and the others. But where were they now? He had to find them, to tell them he was all right.

  And what will you say to Travis when you face him, Beltan? He has not heard the call of the bull—he told you as much. The only reason you kissed him was because you thought you were dying, and you thought you would never have to explain the deed to him. Now here you are, alive. Even when you’re dead you’re a thick-skulled dimwit, Beltan of Calavan.

  He would have to worry about finding a way to beg Travis’s forgiveness for his misdeed later. Right now he had to try to understand where he was and what was happening to him. He could yet end up dead.

  A grunting noise reached Beltan’s ears, rising above the sourceless whir that droned on the air. The sound came again, along with a metallic rattling. With effort, he turned his head to the right.

  It took his numb mind a long moment to understand what he was looking at. Bright metal wires wove back and forth over the frame of a large box raised several feet off the floor. Only when he saw the shadow moving inside did he understand it was a cage.

  The thing inside crept to the edge and slipped long, dark, wrinkled fingers through the holes in the wire. The creature was large—nearly as large as a man. It was shaped like a man as well, but oddly distorted. The creature was short-legged and barrel-chested; its head was small and its face jutting. Black, wispy hair covered the creature’s naked body.

  Sour dread spilled into Beltan’s empty stomach. Was the thing in the cage a feydrim? In some ways it reminded him of the gray, twisted beasts he had fought off at the Rune Gate last Midwinter’s Eve. But the feydrim had been fanged and feral, monsters created by the foul magic of the Pale King. Instead, this creature gazed at him with brown eyes that seemed somehow sad and even knowing.

  The creature in the cage spread its long, gangly arms. Beltan sucked in a sharp breath. Yes, he knew that gesture. It was the same one the shadow had made to him in the Gray Land, the shadow that had led him to the door. It was a gesture of welcome.

  The animal watched Beltan, waiting. What did it want of him? It was difficult because of his immobility, but Beltan managed to nod toward the creature.

  “Hello,” he said, almost surprised he was able to make a sound, although it was as rasping as the call of a vulture.

  The thing stood up in the cage. There were two slots at the top, places where food could be dropped into the cage. The animal threaded its curled hands through the slots and stretched its long arms outward. The undersides had been shaved of hair. It was easy to see the white, convoluted scars traveling up and down the creature’s arms.

  It seemed the thing was trying to tell him something, as it had in the dream. But what? Then he looked down at his own body and saw the scars left by a score of different wounds he had received in his years as a knight.

  He looked back up into sorrowful, intelligent eyes. So manlike this thing, but not a man. And not a monster, either. He remembered the strange words the voices had spoken above him, thinking him asleep.

  Our tests have shown the effects … not so very different than that of chimpanzees.…

  Beltan studied the scars on the creature’s outstretched arms. Some of the wounds were still fresh, their edges sewn together with black thread. Yes, certainly they had done their experiments on this creature, this chin-pasi, as they called it. Beltan struggled against his restraints, but to no effect. Would they be performing experiments on him as well?

  The chin-pasi drew its arms back into the cage and sat down. It no longer looked at Beltan. Instead it seemed to stare at one of the walls. Beltan followed its gaze.

  The wall was covered with paintings of bones.

  He frowned, studying the paintings. The bones seemed to glow against their dark backgrounds, and only after a moment did he realize it was one of the bright white lamps, set into the wall, shining through the paintings.

  Beltan had seen enough bones in his life to recognize many of the images. In the middle of the wall was a thighbone, then a hipbone, hands, ribs, and a skull. They looked to be the bones of a tall man.

  A shiver crept along Beltan’s naked skin. He looked down at his left hand, strapped next to him. The last joint of the littlest finger was crooked, broken and never reset when he was twelve winters old. He looked back up at the glowing image of the skeleton hand. The littlest finger was also crooked, bent at the last joint.

  The bones in the paintings were his own bones. But how could one paint a man’s bones, down to the smallest detail, when they were still in his body? He could see faint outlines around the bones, like the hazy ghosts of flesh. Again, he disliked assuming magic was at work, but it was difficult to see how else these images could have been made. Perhaps if Melia were there, she would have been able to explain it to him.

  Or not Melia, but Lady Grace. Except he wasn’t quite certain why he thought this. Only that, for some reason, he felt Grace would understand.

  His eyes moved farther along the wall. More bone paintings, glowing like the first, showing hands, skulls, hips. But these bones were shaped differently than his own. One of the skulls was low, its snout protruding, and the hands below it were long and curled. Surely those bones belonged to the chin-pasi in the cage. It still stared at the wall. Was the thing clever enough to recognize its own bones as Beltan had?

  His eyes moved to the last set of bone-paintings. Again, a chill swaddled him. One painting showed a skull that was hig
h, delicate, and pointed, like the shell of an egg. The eye sockets were huge and tilted, the jaw tiny. Was it a child’s skull? But it was far too large. Beneath the skull was the image of a hand. The finger bones were long, even longer than the chin-pasi’s, straight, and terribly slender, like the twigs of a willow. Beltan did not know what creature these bones belonged to, but one thing was certain: It was neither man nor chin-pasi.

  A metallic chunk echoed on the cold air. Beltan turned his head in time to see a steel door open. A figure stepped through: small, slender. A woman. She wore some kind of breeches, like a man, and a thin white coat. Perched on her nose were a pair of spectacles like the ones Travis wore, only these had black frames instead of wire.

  “Well, you’re awake,” she said with a smile.

  He recognized her voice. She was one of the two shadows who had spoken over him earlier, the one called doctor. Hadn’t Lady Grace once used the word to describe herself? But that had been a word from her world.…

  Beltan stiffened. The doctor hurried to the side of his bed. She laid a hand on his brow; it was cold. “No, don’t worry. There’s no cause for alarm. We won’t harm you, we only want to learn about you, that’s all.” She sighed. “But why am I bothering to tell you that? You can’t understand me.”

  But he could understand her. And if they did not mean to harm him, why was he strapped down like a prisoner? He swallowed. It was hard to force the words out, but he did, one by one.

  “Let … me … go.”

  Beltan knew there was something strange about the words even as he uttered them. They sounded harsh and guttural, just as her words had, and not only because of his dry throat.

  The woman stumbled back from the bed, mouth open, eyes wide, and reached up to keep her spectacles from tumbling off her nose. Yes, she had understood him. He strained against his bonds; the shiny material creaked. So there was some muscle left in him yet. He spoke again through clenched teeth.

  “I said … let me go.”

  Fear blossomed on the woman’s face. She scrambled for a device clipped to her belt, pulled it off, and held it to her mouth. “I need security in Lab Four. Repeat, security in Lab Four. Now!”

  Beltan knew what those words meant. Guards were coming. He pulled against the restraints, feeling a strength he knew he should by no right possess. Now his entire body tingled, as if he had rolled in snow. Across the room, the chin-pasi let out a screeching sound and beat against the walls of its cage.

  The woman grabbed something from a shelf and stripped paper off of it: a kind of tube with a needle on the end. Using both hands to control her shaking, she slipped the needle into one of the tubes that led into Beltan’s arm.

  Instantly the world grew hazy and dull. Once before a woman had stolen his manhood with a poison spell. Lady Kyrene. Not again.

  “What have … you done to me … witch?”

  His words were barely a whisper. She lowered the needle and stepped back, watching him, but he glimpsed all this as through a veil. The screaming of the chin-pasi faded away.

  Help me, Travis.

  But he knew he didn’t manage to speak these words aloud. Instead the world went not gray but black and, after that, Beltan knew no more.

  31.

  After their conversation with Deirdre Falling Hawk and Hadrian Farr at the museum, Grace and Travis kept to their musty, dilapidated room at the Blue Sky Motel, curtains drawn, waiting for the Seekers to contact them. However, by the third day, Grace was ready to break down the door and bolt, no matter if a whole army of Duratek agents was waiting with chains and shackles on the other side.

  “There’s nothing on TV,” Travis said in a voice that encroached dangerously on a whine.

  They had convinced the manager to replace their TV with one that worked—albeit nominally, and only so long as green was one’s favorite color since that was the only one it displayed.

  Grace didn’t look up from her book of crossword puzzles. They had had this same conversation on pretty much an hourly basis. “Change to a different channel.”

  “You know perfectly well there isn’t a different channel. This is the only one we get.”

  “Then get a mirror and watch this one backwards.”

  This won a snort. “You know, that might be an improvement. Have you seen this guy? His name is Sage Carson. He’s supposed to be some sort of televangelist, but I think he’s really a robot. His hair looks like a vinyl replica of the state of Kentucky.”

  “What’s wrong with Kentucky?”

  “Nothing. Except when it’s on your head.”

  Grace clutched the pen in her hand. She cared for Travis a great deal, had even risked her own life to save him, but she was going to kill him very soon. However, she would make it quick and painless. Nothing said love like a swift jab to the medulla oblongata.

  Travis turned off the TV, flopped onto the other bed, and stared at Grace. “I thought you hated crossword puzzles.”

  “I do. They’re a complete waste of time.”

  “So would you care to explain why you’re doing an entire book of them?”

  “Because right now wasting time is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing.”

  He grunted at that, then leaned on an elbow and picked at a battered cardboard box of donuts. “You know, we’re not prisoners. We can leave here if we want.”

  “Sure. And we’ll just tell our bulky friends outside the motel that we’re stepping out to buy them each a neck, since as far as I can tell neither of them seems to possess one.”

  As promised, Farr had stationed a pair of operatives to keep watch on their room. Grace pegged them as former football players or professional wrestlers. Their expensive Italian suits strained across their shoulders, and both of them looked as if they could crush subcompact cars with their bare hands. Neither of them seemed anatomically capable of smiling.

  Every few hours one of them—either Stewart or Erics, who could only be told apart because Stewart was gigantic while Erics was merely huge—knocked on the room’s door to verify that everything was all right. Grace had tried to engage them in conversation a few times, but to no avail. Evidently language skills had not been part of the job description when the Seekers hired them. A few times a day they brought food and beverages. However, Travis had made the mistake of saying they liked King Donut, and so at least twice a day that was what they got.

  Holding a donut in his mouth, Travis moved to the window and peered out a narrow gap between plaid curtains. He bit off half the donut, swallowed. “They may be big, but I bet they’re slow. I say we can outrun them.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.” Travis ran a hand over his freshly shaved head. “Aren’t you getting tired of waiting here? We could just find Beltan ourselves.”

  Grace looked up at him, and he winced.

  “You know, I think that evil eye of yours actually works.”

  “I am a witch. Then again, what you’re feeling might have something to do with the fact that that’s your fourth donut in the last half hour.”

  He slumped against the wall and tossed the donut into the wastebasket. “I know, Grace. I know we can’t go out. It’s just that he … I mean, they could be doing anything to him.”

  Grace set down the crossword puzzle book. It was more than mere boredom eating at him, at both of them. “I’m worried about him, too, Travis. No, not worried—terrified. But the Seekers have resources far beyond our means. And as long as Duratek is looking for us, and as long as the police are looking for me, it’s not safe to go out there.”

  “Maybe it’s not safe for us to look for him, Grace.” He turned his gray eyes on her—that unsettling seriousness again. “But what if it’s right? Both of us have … abilities that the Seekers don’t.”

  Grace hugged her knees to her chest. It was true. They both had learned so much since they had last set foot on Earth. But this wasn’t Eldh, and while there were still a few shreds of magic left on this world, as far as Grace c
ould tell they were exactly that: a thin, polluted trickle that had once been a great, primeval river. Magic was not going to help them, not here.

  “I’m going to get some ice,” she said, grabbing a cracked plastic bucket from the nightstand. “We could both use a drink.”

  Travis nodded. “I’ll get the bottle.”

  Grace stepped onto the second-floor walkway, and the door of dented, orange-painted steel closed behind her with a heavy chunk. No wonder fugitives always picked motels to hide in. Metal doors.

  The day had surrendered. Thick, purple air settled over the cars in the parking lot below. Above, fluorescent lights flickered spastically, filling the air with a sick light and a humming drone. A few late, lazy flies spiraled toward the glow. Somewhere out of sight children laughed, splashing in chlorine-rich water, while a woman called out in the wordless, angry, universal tongue of mothers. Motel twilight.

  Bucket in hand, Grace moved along the walkway. At once she felt attention upon her, and she didn’t need to look back to know one of the Seeker operatives watched her through the tinted glass of the black sedan in the parking lot. Stewart—he usually staked out the front of the motel. Right then he was probably soiling his expensive, too-tight Armani suit and talking hotly on the radio to Erics stationed on the other side of the motel. Grace knew she wasn’t supposed to leave the room. But she was only going to the ice machine. Besides, the boys needed a little excitement once in a while.

  She rounded a corner and found the ice machine lurking in a dim alcove, gurgling and rattling like an old man in a rusted iron lung. Grace positioned the bucket and pushed the lever. After several minutes and an inordinate amount of raucous groaning, the bucket had collected exactly six milky ice cubes. Good enough. Gripping the bucket to her chest, Grace headed back along the walkway.

  The sounds of splashing had ceased. The pool was closed, the mother victorious, the children dragged back inside, roughly toweled, set down on vibrating beds to eat hamburgers from a paper bag and watch TV. Traffic whirred beyond the motel’s overgrown privacy fence, and a crescent moon glowed like a half-shut eye.