The Dark Remains (19 page)

Farr grimaced. So he was capable of a real reaction.

“That was hardly my idea,” he said. “I think you know me well enough to see the truth in that.”

Deirdre looked away, into the darkness. “I don’t know what I know anymore.”

Farr reached out and took her hand. She was suddenly too weary to resist. The absinthe, of course.

“Listen to me, Deirdre. We need you.
I
need you.”

Still she did not look at him. “I doubt I can help you. In case you’d forgotten, he doesn’t like me any more than he does the Seekers. You saw to that.”

“Damn it, Deirdre, I’m not talking about Travis Wilder. I’m talking about you. You’re one of the bloody best the Seekers have ever had. We need you more than ever now.”

At last Deirdre turned her gaze to him. “When I first met you, Hadrian, I thought I would do anything to understand the mysteries you talked about, that I would pay any price. But the price was too high, after all. I lost a friend.”

“Did you?”

“What do you mean? That I didn’t betray Travis?”

“No, I mean maybe he wasn’t really your friend. Friends don’t just turn their backs and run away. They forgive us our mistakes.”

Deirdre shook her head.
You’re wrong
, she wanted to say. But her lips couldn’t form the words. Maybe she didn’t really believe them.

“Please, Deirdre. You don’t have to make a decision now. Just come back to the Charterhouse with me. An
hour, that’s all I’m asking. Then you can go if you want, and we’ll leave you alone. On the Book, I swear it.”

The short hairs on the back of Deirdre’s neck prickled. Why was Farr making an offer like this? It was hardly his style. Then, in a bright flash that cut through the green mist shrouding her brain, she understood.

“Something’s happened,” she said, sitting up straight. “What is it? Tell me.”

Farr drew in a deep breath, then nodded.

“She’s called,” he said.

Even in the cement-covered heart of the city, Travis Wilder could always tell when the wind was about to blow.

He turned his back just as a gritty blast of air hurtled down Sixteenth Street, its force magnified as it squeezed between the narrow glass and stone canyons of downtown Denver. Two women in power skirts and tennis shoes were blown into a street fountain gone mad, and shrieked as water frothed around them. Several teenagers huddled together, trying in vain to keep the dust out of their fresh piercings. And a legless man held up shaking hands and laughed without teeth as pieces of trash whirled and danced around his wheelchair like bright paper fairies.

As suddenly as it had come, the wind ceased. The fountain returned to the confines of its circle, releasing the two women. Paper settled back to the sidewalk, lifeless trash once more. Travis started walking again. He had been down this street a dozen times before, and each time he had seen no sign of them. All the same, he knew he had to keep searching. What else was he supposed to do?

Motion flickered on the edge of his vision: a tall, pale
figure clad all in black striding down the street on long, lanky legs. Sudden hope surged in his chest, and he turned. At the same moment the figure halted and faced him. The breath held hostage in his lungs was released as he understood.

Travis approached the plate-glass window. Even after two months, he still didn’t recognize the man reflected in the window’s surface. He was tall and almost lean, with shoulders far broader than Travis had ever pictured. The other was clad all in black despite the brilliant late-September day: jeans, T-shirt, trench coat. The skin of his hands and face was smooth and powder-pale, and his eyes were hidden by dark glasses. His head was shaven clean, and a short red-brown goatee framed the solemn line of his mouth.

You’ve been looking for him so long you’re starting to look like him, Travis. Brother Cy
.

Not that Travis had much choice in the way he looked. His new skin—burnt and reborn in the hot flames of Krondisar—was still soft and exquisitely sensitive. He was forced to keep it covered and protected, hence the black thrift-store coat even on fine days like this.

His eyes were the same story. That first day he and Grace had returned to Earth, he had discovered he no longer needed his glasses. It was still possible to wear the old gunfighter’s spectacles, but everything was warped and strange-looking through them. These days he kept them in his pocket as a memento of Jack Graystone—as if he needed another reminder besides the secret rune that marked the palm of his right hand.

Like his skin, his new eyes were highly reactive; bright light hurt them, although he found he could see shockingly well at night. He had bought a pair of wraparound sunglasses for three bucks from a street vendor and never took them off from dawn to dusk, and sometimes not even then.

As for his bald head—that had been his own choice.
His hair had begun to grow back not long after their return, and over most of his body it had come in as he remembered it, if a bit redder than before. However, the shocking, flame-colored curls that had sprouted on his crown had nothing in common with his old, sandy brown hair.

It was too much for Travis—too strong a reminder of what had happened to him—so he had taken a razor and shaved it off. At least his skull wasn’t a moonscape of ridges and craters; that was one difference between him and Brother Cy.

The goatee had come a few weeks later. He had never worn one before in his life, but something told him he had never worn this
body
before, so the change seemed appropriate. And as for the silver rings dangling from each of his ears—well, Travis had had a hard time explaining them to Grace when she asked.

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? The 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.