by Mark Anthony
The stones knew their name, and they obeyed.
The rocks flew away from the heap, whistling through the air. Lirith and Durge were forced to duck to keep their heads from being knocked off. With resounding crashes, the stones fell harmlessly to the floor dozens of feet away. Where the stones had been, a figure stirred and sat up. Pebbles fell from his clothes, and he blinked dust from his eyes.
“Sareth!”
Lirith flung her arms around him, then seemed to think better of it and moved away. Sareth’s dark eyes were suddenly thoughtful in his dusty face.
“But you are not crushed to a pulp at all,” Durge said, sounding surprised and perhaps a little disappointed. “Not even your head.”
Sareth grinned. “I had something to prop the stones up with.”
The Mournish man held up a length of wood, and Travis wondered where he had found the prop. Then Sareth screwed the piece of wood back onto the end of his leg, solving the mystery. Durge helped him to stand.
Sareth grinned at Travis. “Thank you, sorcerer. You are skilled at … uncovering things.”
Travis winced. He supposed he had just convinced Sareth that he was going to dig up the lost city of Morindu the Dark after all. He opened his mouth to say something—anything—that might discourage the thought, but Lirith spoke first.
“By Yrsaia, what is that thing?”
The witch pointed to an oddly clear space amid the rubble on the floor. In the center of the circle was a lump of black rock the size of Travis’s fist. If he squinted, he could almost see what looked like an inhuman face in the rock, the pit of a mouth open in a soundless scream.
Sareth drew close to Lirith. “It is the demon. Or what remains of it. That is the rock the sorcerers of old bound it into.”
“Rock or nothing,” Travis murmured.
Lirith glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
He slipped his hand in his pocket, drew out the smooth shape of Sinfathisar. “The demon was a rock, and at the same time it was nothing. The Stone let me choose to make it just one.”
“It is a marvel,” Sareth said.
“Actually,” came Melia’s clear voice, “the real marvel is that you were able to act at all, Travis.”
He turned around. The others were close now, picking their way across the rubble toward the center.
“I’m curious, dear,” Melia said. “Even I was not able to resist the spell of the demon. How was it that you were able to use the Stone against it?”
Travis gazed down at the Stone of Twilight, quiescent now, and he thought of the girl who had given it to him in his dream—who had given him what he already had, but what he had been too afraid to accept as his own.
Forgiveness.
I love you, Alice.
But aloud all he said was, “I had a little help from my sister.”
Melia cocked her head, but before the lady could ask more, Falken spoke, eyeing the rock that had contained the demon.
“So it’s dead?”
Melia nodded. “I can still feel a fraction of its power lingering on the air, like ripples in water. But the ripples are already beginning to fade.”
She glanced at Grace and Aryn, both of whom nodded in reply.
“It’s over then,” Travis said with a sigh.
The demon was no more—as were Xemeth and a large number of the Scirathi, he supposed. But somehow he and his friends were still alive. One more mystery to contemplate. Grace met his eyes and smiled at him. He smiled back, then his eyes moved past her to Beltan and Vani. What was he going to say to them? He didn’t know. Maybe he would start with—
A shuddering groan rose on the air. Dust and flakes of stone rained down from the fractured dome.
“I do not like the looks of this,” Durge said. “I believe those cracks have grown since I last checked. We should leave this place at once.”
“This way,” Melia said. “The doors of the Etherion are—”
The sound was like lightning passing inches from Travis’s face. The floor gave a violent lurch, and he stumbled back into Durge, Lirith, and Sareth. Grace, Beltan, and Vani fell in the opposite direction, colliding with Aryn, Melia, and Falken. Just as Travis started to regain his balance there was another deafening crack, and the floor shuddered yet again.
Someone screamed—Aryn, he thought—then Travis watched as the solidified demon, along with several heaps of rubble, vanished into a pit of darkness. For a confused moment he thought the demon was not dead after all—if such a thing had ever been alive. Then the pit elongated into a black line, swallowing more rubble as it grew.
The floor of the Etherion was cracking apart.
“Back!” Durge shouted. “You must get back!”
The knight pulled at Travis with strong hands. Lirith and Sareth were already fleeing from the crack. On the opposite side, the others did the same.
Again the floor convulsed, and with terrible speed the crack grew until it was a rift fifteen feet across, cutting the Etherion in half. The edges crumbled, falling into the chasm. Stones crashed down from above.
“Travis!”
It was Beltan. There was fear in his voice, in his eyes. Then Travis understood why.
“We can’t get to the exit, can we?” Lirith said.
“Not unless you care to leap that.”
“It is far too wide,” Durge said.
And it was getting wider. Another tremor, and more of the floor sagged into the abyss. The crack was beginning to reach up the walls.
“Melia!” Falken called out above the din of falling stone. “Can’t you retrieve them?”
The lady’s face was anguished. “Preventing us all from falling was all I could do. I have no strength left for such a deed.” She held out a hand. “Oh, my dear ones.”
“We must go,” Vani said, glancing at the sagging dome.
“But we can’t just leave them!” Aryn cried. She reached out her trembling hand—but it was not Lirith’s name she called, nor Travis’s. “Durge …”
“Do not fear for us, my lady,” the knight said, his voice stern but his eyes strangely gentle. “You must go now.”
The baroness’s face was stricken.
Grace struggled to keep her feet. “Travis, what about your runes?”
He shook his head. If there were any runes that could transport them out of here, he didn’t—
Travis smacked his forehead with a hand.
“Sareth, the gate!”
The Mournish man’s eyes went wide. “Ga’dath! We are fools!” He pulled the gate artifact from his pocket.
Lirith moved close. “Do you still have the scarab, Travis?”
He pulled it from a pocket.
“I would advise making haste,” Durge rumbled.
“Vani!” Sareth called out. “We have other means of making our escape. You must get the others out of here. Now!”
Vani’s eyes shone with understanding. “I shall see you on the other side, my brother.”
Beltan raised a hand. “Travis?”
He grinned and waved back. “I’ll see you outside, Beltan!”
The knight smiled at him, then nodded.
“Run,” Vani said to the rest of them. “We must run!”
Beltan turned and helped Grace and Aryn scramble across the rubble. Vani moved nimbly over the tumbling stones, guiding Melia and Falken through the maze. The six of them disappeared through an archway and were gone.
Stones tumbled down all around, shattering into sharp fragments. Travis turned to see Sareth squeeze the wriggling scarab. One drop of blood oozed forth and fell into the artifact. That meant there was one drop left. It was good to know they had a backup.
Lirith placed the prism atop the artifact, and instantly the gate sprang into being: a black oval ringed by blue fire.
The gate sizzled and wavered.
Durge eyed the portal. “What is wrong with it? It looks sickly.”
“I don’t know,” Sareth said. “Perhaps some lingering effect of the demo
n interferes with its magic. But it is open, and we must go through.”
As if to punctuate Sareth’s words, a full quarter of the blue dome caved in, burying the archway through which their friends had fled moments before. The rest of the dome sagged.
“Now!” Sareth shouted.
Together, the four lunged for the gate.
Travis tripped. The sack he had managed to hang on to through everything—and which held his precious objects—slipped from his shoulder and tumbled to the stones. A glinting object skittered out of the pack, halfway slipping into a crevice. His spectacles, the ones which had once belonged to the gunfighter Tyler Caine.
He jerked his head up. The others had already vanished through the gate. It was sputtering. But he couldn’t leave the spectacles—Jack had given them to him. Desperate, he groped into the rocks. His fingers touched wire and glass, then closed around the spectacles.
With a cry, Travis hurled himself forward and fell into the crackling gate.
86.
As stone rained down in the Etherion, something stirred beneath a pile of dust and rubble. A figure unfolded itself, its black robes torn to tatters and gray with dust, its serene golden face dented but intact. The figure was broken and bleeding, but it was not dead.
The rift in the floor stretched like a hungry mouth. The high walls groaned, slumping inward. In a moment it was all going to collapse.
Then the figure saw it not ten paces away: a black oval of nothingness surrounded by blue fire. A gate—they had opened a gate. But it was closing in on itself.
The figure sprang into motion, ignoring pain as it scrabbled over sharp stone. A final, dying groan of rending stone shuddered on the air, then the remains of the dome and the walls all fell inward.
With a cry, shredded robe fluttering, the figure flung itself forward—
—and passed through the shrinking iris of the gate.
Like an eye shutting, the gate blinked out of existence, and the Etherion of Tarras—which had stood in splendor above the city for two thousand years—collapsed, forming its own burial mound as it fell.
87.
Grace huddled alongside the others, watching as the great blue dome of the Etherion slumped, sagged inward, and collapsed. Thunder rumbled on the air, and a white plume of dust rose into the sky.
The citizens of Tarras crowded the streets of the Second Circle, pointing and crying out as they watched the collapse of the great edifice. Tarrasian soldiers ran in all directions, barking orders. No one paid any attention to the companions, nor had anyone seen them run from the Etherion, for a cloud of rock dust had billowed forth with them, concealing their escape.
Everyone will think an earthquake brought down the Etherion, Grace. They’ll never know about the demon that almost consumed the city and everyone in it.
But maybe it was better that way. Maybe it was better they thought it an act of nature rather than an ancient and ravenous magic. Sometimes it was best not to know what dark things dwelled in the world.
Now the walls of the Etherion fell inward, sending more dust into the sky. Aryn sighed, leaning her head on Grace’s shoulder, and Grace wrapped her arm around the young baroness.
It’s all right, she spun the words over the Weirding, amazed at how easy it was. We’re safe now, Aryn.
I know, the young woman replied, and sighed again.
Beltan and Vani stood close to one another, their expressions thoughtful. Grace was suddenly struck by how brilliant the big, blond man was next to the dark-haired assassin. He was like bold, bright day to her deep, secret midnight. She couldn’t imagine two people who were greater opposites.
But they have something in common, don’t they? They both love Travis. Beltan because that’s what his heart tells him, and Vani because of the cards.
“I can’t bear to watch it,” Melia said softly, tears shining on her coppery cheeks.
She turned away from the destruction, and Falken held her, his faded eyes grim. In her arms the small lady held a tiny black kitten. Grace wondered where it could possibly have come from. The kitten let out a soft mew and patted Melia’s cheek with a paw.
More soldiers ran into the street, sun glinting off their breastplates, shouting at the onlookers to stay back.
“We should not draw attention to ourselves,” Vani said. “There might yet be Scirathi about. We cannot hope all of their number were destroyed in the Etherion.”
They moved into the mouth of a narrow street where they could watch the chaos from blue shade. Again came a low rumbling, and more dust rising into the air.
“Xemeth,” Vani murmured, her eyes full of pain.
Grace glanced at the assassin and thought maybe she understood. In a way it was because Vani had rejected Xemeth’s love that he had allied himself with the Scirathi and freed the demon. All the same, that had been Xemeth’s doing, not hers. Grace gently disentangled herself from Aryn and moved to the T’gol. She hesitated, then laid a hand on Vani’s arm.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
Vani gave a stiff nod but did not reply.
Falken flexed his black-gloved hand. “Now that the demon has been destroyed, I hope the river of time will return to its rightful flow.”
Melia had dried her tears. “It already has. Mandu tells me that there are yet a few eddies and ripples, but no more, and that even those are growing calm. We shall not lose ourselves in the past any longer.”
Beltan shuddered. “Yes, that’s what it was like—getting tangled in the past.”
Aryn looked up, her eyes wide. “I thought … I thought it was just me.”
Grace gazed at the young woman, concerned. “What happened, Aryn?”
“It was horrible.” The baroness folded her arm around herself. “Like a bad dream, only so much more real than that. It was Midwinter’s Eve again, and I …” She drew in a breath and squared her shoulders. “I did something terrible in the dream, something I did once in truth, and of which I am horribly ashamed.”
Grace understood. Leothan. Aryn had slain the young lord with a spell. But he had been an ironheart.
“Then a shadow was there. It wanted me to leap from the highest turret of the castle. But I didn’t.” She looked up, blue eyes shining. “You see, I knew that wasn’t the answer, that dying wouldn’t undo what was done. I think the shadow was furious. It screamed at me, but I ran.”
Grace didn’t know what to say. She took Aryn’s hand—the right, not the left—and held the pale, folded appendage between her own two hands.
“Your dream is not so different from mine,” Beltan said, the knight’s face uncharacteristically sober. “Like you, I saw again a dark deed that I once committed. It was … a man that I killed. Then the shadow came to me, and it bade me to turn the knife upon myself. I started to push the blade into my own heart. And then …”
Grace gazed at him. “Then what, Beltan?”
The big knight shrugged broad shoulders. “Then I realized that, whatever I had done in the past, there was something in my present that made me want to live.”
Grace smiled at him; she didn’t need to speak the name aloud. Travis. But what dark deed could Beltan have possibly done? He said he had killed a man, but he was a warrior. Had he not been forced to slay many men in battle?
Melia touched the blossoms of a lindara vine that climbed up the white wall of the lane. “The shadow in your dreams was the demon, I think. That was part of its magic. Had you done the things in your dreams that it wished you to do, then it would have won, and it would have consumed you.” She looked up, her amber eyes bright. “But you didn’t surrender yourself to the shadow. The ghosts of the past will haunt you no longer.”
Grace knew that wasn’t entirely true. The shadows of the past were still there. If she shut her eyes and reached out with the Touch, she could still see them as she had once before, attached to the gleaming life thread of each of them.
And yet …
The shadows were smaller now, and more distant. E
ven Grace’s own. She thought that, just maybe, she understood the reason. They could never leave their past behind, not completely; like a shadow, it would always trail after them. But also like a shadow, it had no real power, no true form. The dark would always remain, but that did not mean they could not face forward, into the light.
Grace drew in a breath, then she shut her eyes, reached out, and Touched the shimmering web of the Weirding. She did it with abandon, without holding back any fraction of herself, and for the very first time, Grace embraced the glittering threads—embraced the fabric of life—without fear.
It was glorious.
Grace?
It was Aryn’s voice, speaking in her mind.
Grace, are you all right?
How could she explain?
I am, Aryn, she spun back. For the first time in my life, I really am all right.
Doctor, heal thyself.
Grace opened her eyes. The others were looking at her with curious expressions. She grimaced, then laughed.
“Sorry,” she said, and left it at that. As Lirith had once taught her, it was all right for a girl to maintain a little mystery.
Her laughter faded then, and she found herself gazing at Vani, and at Melia and Falken. What had each of them dreamed about while caught in the thrall of the demon? Whatever it was, they seemed unwilling to say. Yet Falken’s weathered visage was haggard, and Grace thought she could guess what moment the shadow had made him live again: the death of a kingdom.
But Malachor isn’t dead, is it, Grace? Not completely, not if you’re here.
It was absurd of course. But then, so were the hundred other things that had happened to her since that October night just under a year ago when she journeyed to Eldh. Back to Eldh.
She touched the steel pendant at her throat. You’re a queen, Grace, whether you like it or not. But lucky for you, you’re the ruler of a kingdom that doesn’t exist anymore. You have to admit, that makes it rather convenient. All of the majesty, none of the burden.
“What about you, Grace?” Beltan said. “What did you see in the shadow?”
She gripped the necklace, licked her lips. “It was the orphanage, back in Colorado. I was there again, the night the placed burned down. Only I—”