The Dark Remains
Page 61
Her heart lurched, and she looked up at the others, cold despite the balmy air. “It was me. I was the one who did it. I didn’t remember it that way. I don’t … I don’t think I understood at the time. But now, seeing it again, it was so clear.”
Aryn moved toward her. “What was clear, Grace?”
“The fire. I was the one who started the fire that burned down the orphanage. With a spell.”
The baroness stared in amazement, and Melia pressed her lips together and nodded.
“I have heard,” Melia said, “that sometimes a witch’s talent can first manifest in a moment of great duress.”
Dizziness swept over Grace. Duress. Yes, that was one word for it. She remembered the stairs, the door opening, and Mrs. Fulch on the chaise, the gaping wound in her chest …
She gasped and looked at the bard. “Falken, I have to tell you something I saw. It was so horrible, I must have … I must have locked the memory away somewhere inside myself. But now I remember everything. I …”
The others gazed at her, concern on their faces. Falken took her shoulders in his hands and held her firmly but gently.
“What is it, dear one?” the bard said. “You’re safe here. You can tell us.”
It was so hard to speak. The words tumbled out of her like fragments of glass.
“Ironhearts. At the orphanage on Earth. I saw them making one. Mrs. Fulch. They put it in her chest, the lump of iron, and she woke up. And the other was there. The Pale One. And then I saw it in the wraithling’s light—the symbol of the Raven Cult.” She shook her head. “But it’s not a raven’s wing. It was an eye … an eye set in a horrible face, and they said they were going to help him get back, to return to his world and rule it all.”
Melia’s face was ashen. Falken’s fingers dug into Grace’s flesh, his eyes intent.
“Who, Grace? Who were they trying to help get back to his world?”
Somehow she forced the words out one by one. “The Lord of Nightfall.”
Melia gasped, and Falken swore. The bard seemed to realize he was squeezing her brutally and let go.
“Grace, forgive me, I …”
She shook her head, laid her hand on his arm. Her mind worked furiously, putting the pieces together, making her terrible diagnosis.
“It’s him, isn’t it, Falken? I asked you about it once—how if the Little People could come back, why couldn’t the Old Gods? And it turns out he’s been there all along, on Earth, searching for a way. He’s been behind everything—the Pale King, the Raven Cult. Even the Scirathi. I’m sure of it, from what Xemeth said. He’s the cause of all of this.”
Aryn and Beltan exchanged puzzled looks, and Vani frowned.
“Who do you speak of?” the assassin said. “Who is the master of all these evils you describe?”
Grace licked her lips. “Mohg.”
Melia was shaking. “The eye … of course. We should have seen it before. Not a raven’s wing, but an eye. The eye that was blinded—”
“—and which sees once more,” Falken finished.
Melia’s face was stricken. She held her arms out to Grace, then pulled them back in. “Oh, my dear one, what did we do to you? We thought to protect you, and instead we sent you into the very hands of darkness. How you suffered because of our deeds. You must hate us.”
Grace couldn’t bear it. She had not regained her heart only to have it break like this.
“I love you, Melia,” she said softly. “I love you and Falken both, so much.”
The amber-eyed lady turned back, her face writ with agony and astonishment, as was the bard’s.
Grace moved to them. “You fought for the lives of my parents, and for my life as well. How could I do anything but love you both?”
She caught them in a fierce hug. For a moment the bard and the lady were too stunned to move, then they returned her embrace.
“My little Ralena,” Melia murmured.
“No,” Falken murmured. “Our Grace, all grown up.”
At last they stepped back from one another.
Beltan was gazing at them, green eyes hazed with confusion. “I don’t understand, Falken. No surprise there, I know. It seems I’m always the last to catch on to these big, world-shaking sorts of things. But why does Mohg want to get back to Eldh?”
Aryn clasped Beltan’s hand. “You’re not the only one who’s slow at catching on, cousin.”
“He wants to finish what he began a thousand years ago,” Falken said, voice hoarse. “He wants to do what together the Old and New Gods prevented him from doing once before.”
“Which is?” Beltan said.
“Mohg wishes to break the First Rune and reforge Eldh in his own image, enslaving it and all of its people forever.”
These words left them speechless. Outside the lane, the crash of stone had ceased, and the soldiers had done their work, for the streets of the Second Circle were clearing.
Vani moved with lithe steps and peered out. “I do not like this.”
“What is it?” Melia said, drawing closer.
Vani turned around, her gold eyes gleaming. “My brother, Travis, and the others. They should be here by now.”
Only as she said this did Grace realize it was true. They had been so caught up in their discoveries they had forgotten about Travis, Sareth, Durge, and Lirith.
Falken scratched his chin. “Doesn’t it take some time to go through the gate? I just assumed it did.”
“No,” the assassin said, her words sharp as knives. “Transport through the gate is instantaneous.”
A frown lined Beltan’s face. “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“What does it mean?” Aryn said.
Vani met each of their gazes in turn, and Grace felt fresh, new dread well up inside of her.
“It means,” Vani said, “that something has gone wrong.”
88.
This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be.
Travis blinked as a brisk wind kicked up gritty dust in his face. Tumbleweeds danced and rolled across the broad dirt street that stretched before him. Wooden buildings lined the street, their sharp square fronts jutting up into the blue-quartz sky.
“This does not look like Tarras to me,” Durge said in his rumbling voice.
That was an understatement. Travis opened his mouth, but it was too hard to speak. The unnatural cold of their passage still gripped him. As he watched, frost evaporated from their clothes in curls of steam, sublimating under the bright force of the sun—a sun that seemed at once whiter and smaller than the sun that shone above Tarras.
Lirith shook her head, moisture glittering in her black hair. “Sareth, what is this place?”
The Mournish man took a step forward, his wooden leg stirring up more dust. “I do not know, beshala. Nothing about it is familiar.”
But it is to me, Travis wanted to say. He knew this place. But how? He remembered stepping through the gate, and the freezing gray nothingness of the void.…
The void. But there shouldn’t have been a void, not when passing from one place to another in Tarras. The gray emptiness existed only between worlds.…
At last understanding cracked through the ice that encased his brain. They weren’t in Tarras. They weren’t even on Eldh. This was Earth.
Not just Earth, Travis.
Yes, there was McKay’s General Store, as well as the opera house, the assay office, and the Mine Shaft Saloon—
The Mine Shaft? But the saloon couldn’t possibly be there. He had watched it burn down with his own eyes. Yet it was. Which meant this could only be one place.
“It’s Castle City,” he murmured.
The others gave him sharp glances.
“You mean your home village, Travis?” Durge said. The knight’s brown eyes went wide. “This is your world?”
Travis staggered forward. “Yes, it is. But …”
But something was wrong.
“What happened to us, Sareth?” Lirith said. The witch laid a hand on his
arm, her gaze imploring.
The Mournish man hefted the black stone artifact. “I cannot say. The gate was acting strangely. I suppose some magic of the demon must yet have lingered on the air, distorting the power of the artifact.”
“But we have one last drop of the scarab blood,” Durge said. “Can we not use it to go back?”
Travis hardly heard them. His brain raced. What was going on here? The storefronts, Elk Street, Castle Peak looming in the distance—all of it looked familiar. But it all looked wrong. He took another step forward.…
He almost didn’t see it in time. A dark shape came rattling around a corner and hurtled down Elk Street. A whip cracked, and horses neighed.
“Travis!”
Durge’s strong hands grabbed his shoulders and jerked him back just in time to keep him from being run over. Travis blinked and watched the stagecoach bounce down the rutted swath of Elk Street toward the Silver Palace Hotel.
“That is a most curious sort of wagon,” Lirith said. “Is it a common conveyance for your world, Travis?”
Common? Not in the last hundred years or so.
“It can’t be,” Travis whispered. “This is impossible.”
But hadn’t the demon distorted the flow of time? Wasn’t that part of its power?
A dust devil whirled around them, catching them in a gritty embrace, and a piece of paper struck Travis, clinging to his face. He pawed at the paper, pulled it away, then gazed at the large, black words printed across the top:
THE CASTLE CITY CLARION
He didn’t want to look. All the same, he forced his eyes to the small print beneath the masthead, forced the letters to stop swimming. Despite the sickness that flowed into his gut, Travis knew he had not mixed the numbers up:
FINAL EDITION—JUNE 13, 1883
“What is it, Travis?” Lirith said, words breathless.
Even the gate couldn’t help them. Not unless they
wanted to get back to Tarras over a hundred years before their friends ever arrived there. He looked up from the newspaper and met the eyes of the witch, the knight, and the Mournish man.
“I think we’re lost,” Travis said.
Here ends The Dark Remains, Book Three of The Last Rune. The tales of the companions on both worlds will continue in Book Four, Blood of Mystery.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Anthony learned to love both books and mountains during childhood summers spent in a Colorado ghost town. Later he was trained as a paleoanthropologist but along the way grew interested in a different sort of human evolution—the symbolic progress reflected in myth and the literature of the fantastic. He undertook this project to explore the idea that reason and wonder need not exist in conflict. Mark Anthony lives and writes in Colorado, where he is currently at work on Blood of Mystery, the fourth book of The Last Rune. Fans of The Last Rune can visit the website at http://www.thelastrune.com.
DON’T MISS
BOOK FOUR OF THE LAST RUNE
BLOOD OF MYSTERY
BY
MARK ANTHONY
Travis Wilder has returned to Castle City, Colorado—along with loyal companions Durge, Lirith, and Sareth—but because of the time-twisting magic of the demon, the year is 1883. While Travis possesses the gate artifact of Morindu, as well as a drop of scarab’s blood to invoke its magic, using the gate would send them back to Eldh over a century too soon. There’s only one person who can help them return to their own time: Travis’s friend, the runelord Jack Graystone—dead in the present day, but alive here in the Old West. However, dark forces have taken over Castle City. An evil has followed them through the gate, and it will do anything to keep Travis from succeeding.
On Eldh, rumors of war fly across the Dominions like ravens. Both witches and warriors prepare for the Final Battle, and Aryn finds herself torn between obeying her conscience and betraying her sisterhood. Meanwhile, guided by starry portents and a mysterious message, Grace Beckett embarks on a quest to find Travis Wilder. Along the way, she must journey to a frozen kingdom in search of the shards of Fellring—the ancient sword that is her birthright, and which is the only weapon capable of defeating the Pale King before he opens the door to Eldh for his master: the vengeful god of nightfall, Mohg.
COMING IN SPRING 2002