The Dark Remains (70 page)

“How much further?” Travis whispered to Sareth.

The Mournish man had said nothing since the shimmering gate vanished. A few times he had hesitated as a side tunnel branched off from the passage they trod, muttering under his breath, but after a moment he always continued onward. As far as Travis could tell, they had moved consistently downward.

“I directed the gate to deliver us to a place just outside the cavern,” Sareth said in a barely audible voice. “However, it seems we arrived somewhat farther away than I intended. Still, we are nearly there. I think.”

The grinding of Durge’s teeth was considerably louder than Sareth’s words, as was Lirith’s sigh. The sound of it seemed to hiss around them like invisible snakes. Lirith quickly clamped a hand to her mouth.

“It feels like the whole world is weighing on this place,” Travis murmured to Grace.

“No, just a city.”

Sareth came to a halt. Once again the passage forked. The Mournish man rubbed his chin, staring first at one opening, then the other. He was muttering, louder than before.

Panic rose in Travis’s throat. The only way they could get back to the surface was to reach the cavern and find the passage Sareth had once taken from the sewers. Sareth still had the gate artifact, but it was empty now, the fairy’s blood consumed by its magic. If they didn’t find the passage, they would be trapped down here forever.

But that wasn’t true, either. The Scirathi would find them sooner or later. If the demon didn’t consume them and the entire city first.

“This way,” Sareth said, moving toward the left-hand passage.

They pressed on down the sinuous tunnel. Travis found himself wondering how these passages had been formed. Not by water. Although they were smooth, here and there sharp edges protruded from the walls. Nor had these tunnels been hewn by men; they were too … organic. All in all, they reminded Travis of the branching pattern of arteries and veins in a body.

Sareth held up a hand. “I recognize this place,” the Mournish man whispered. “We are near.”

“But I sense only emptiness ahead of us,” Lirith said, fingers pressed lightly to her temples.

“Truly, my lady?” Durge rumbled. “For I was thinking I had never in my life breathed air so thick with danger.”

“Emptiness is all there is to the demon,
beshala
,” Sareth murmured. “Perhaps that is what you sense.”

“No, there
is
something ahead,” Grace said quietly. “But it’s hard to make out—like a shadow on black.” She let out a breath. “It’s gone now.”

Travis reached into his pocket and gripped the hard orb of Sinfathisar. “I suppose I had better lead from this point on. The rest of you stay back.”

Lirith started to protest. “But the light—”

“I don’t need light,” Travis said, and started down the tunnel.

Fear rose in him with each step.

This is stupid, Travis. Beyond stupid. Sareth said the demons were capable of eating entire cities. They turned most of the southern continent into some sort of wasteland. What makes you think you can stop it?

He couldn’t—but Sinfathisar could. And because of what Jack Graystone had done to him, making him a runelord, Travis was the only one who could touch one of the Imsari and live. That was why the fairy had brought the Stone to him.

The Stone of Twilight is going to do all the work, Travis. You’re just the deliveryman. It’s not a great job, and not one you asked for, but you can manage it
.

They had not gone far when Travis noticed a faint light on the air, like the splotchy purple afterglow one saw after staring at a bright light. Behind him, Sareth blew out the lantern flame, and Travis guessed it wasn’t only he who saw the light. With each step the purple glow brightened, rippling on the heavy air.

Travis felt it before he saw it. A puff of slightly cooler air moved against his face, and the faint echoes of his footfalls no longer returned to him so quickly. There was a space ahead. A big space. The purple light mottled the darkness now like a livid disease. An acrid reek permeated the air. The walls fell away to either side.

Had it not been for his preternatural eyes, he never would have seen the edge. As it was, Travis’s right boot skittered over the precipice. The rest of his body nearly followed, then strong hands caught his shoulders. Durge.

“I thought you were supposed to be keeping back,” Travis whispered.

“As you wish, Goodman Travis. I will heave you over the edge and return to my place.”

Travis winced. “That won’t be necessary. And thanks.”

The others drew nearer, and Durge’s outstretched hands kept them from drawing too close to the edge. They stood on a flat slab of stone that jutted out into the void. In the center of the slab stood a cylinder of dark stone, about four feet high and as big around as Travis might encircle with his arms. It looked like some kind of pedestal.

The purplish light flickered in all directions like heat lightning, making it impossible to gauge the size of the cavern. It was huge, that was all Travis could tell—so huge he wondered why the entire city hadn’t already collapsed into it.

Sareth let out a hiss. “It has grown. The cavern was not half this size when I was last here.”

“The demon,” Lirith said quietly, although her words still echoed. “Where is it, Sareth?”

“Should it not be upon us in its hunger?” Durge said. He was holding his greatsword now, as if the massive blade could damage a being that didn’t truly have a body.

“I do not know,” Sareth breathed. “The demon is …”

“It’s gone,” Grace said simply.

The others turned around.

“What do you mean
gone
?” Travis said.

She spread her arms. “Gone. The threads of the Weirding are all tangled, just like you said, Lirith. And some of them are half … eaten. But the thing that did it isn’t here anymore. I’m sure of it.”

“The ground tremble we felt,” Durge said. “Could that have been caused by the demon’s escape?”

Sareth clenched his hands into fists. “No, that is impossible. Had the demon escaped at that moment, there is no doubt we would have known it.”

“Then maybe it just broke free,” Travis said. “Just minutes ago, after we passed through the gate.”

Durge scowled at this. “Surely we would have felt more tremors in the tunnels if it had done so. Logic says that the demon could not have escaped this place so recently. Which means it must still be here.”

“Except it’s not,” Grace said.

Lirith crossed her arms. “One of you has to be wrong. The demon can’t possibly be here and not here at the same time.”

Travis’s mind buzzed.
Time
. Then, in a flash, he had it.

“Time!” he said aloud, and the word ricocheted all around the chamber. “That’s it, Lirith.”

Sareth glared at him. “What are you talking about?”

Understanding fluttered in Travis’s brain, moving so quickly it was hard to pin down. “You were talking about it last night, Lirith. And we saw it when we walked through the city this morning. Gods and people are getting lost in dreams of the past. It’s the demon—it’s been distorting the flow of time here in Tarras, first for the gods of the city, and now for its citizens.”

Lirith nodded. “The demon is not just consuming the Weirding. It’s tangling the very threads of the tapestry of time.”

Grace’s eyes lit up. She turned toward Sareth. “Vani told us the
morndari
don’t have physical bodies. Is that right?”

“It is.”

“Travis,” she said, “do you know anything about the theory of relativity?”

“You’re the doctor, Grace.”

“Yes, but unfortunately not a doctor of physics. Yet from what little I know, relativity says that time, matter, and space are all linked. If something had no body—no mass—it could move at the speed of light. And doing that would have relativistic effects on time.”

Sareth’s angular visage was grim. “I do not pretend to understand what you say, Grace. But while the
morndari
do not have bodies, the demons do. They were
morndari
given form by the sorcerers of Amún.”

“That’s right,” Grace said, chewing her lip. “But what does it mean?”

Travis laid a hand on her arm. “We’ll chat about Einstein later, Grace. However the thing managed it, the demon isn’t here anymore. We have to find Sareth’s passage and get out.”

“Give me a moment,” Sareth said, stepping to the edge of the precipice. “Things have changed since last I was here. I have to think about where the passage to the sewers would be.”

Durge tightened his grip on his sword. “I would urge you to make haste in your determinations. We cannot expect the Scirathi to be tricked indefinitely by Lady Melia’s ruse. And do not the sorcerers have a relic by which they might transport themselves here?”

Sareth said nothing as he scanned the darkness.

“You need light,” Lirith said. She made a weaving motion with her fingers, then held aloft a softly glowing orb of greenish light. The darkness receded a fraction. Grace’s forehead creased in a frown, then she repeated Lirith’s actions. A second globe of greenish light appeared, this time in Grace’s hands.

Still the darkness pressed close.

“
Lir
,” Travis whispered, and the silvery radiance of his runelight joined that of the witchlights. The darkness retreated another fraction. It would have to be enough.

Sareth turned to continue searching. Grace, Lirith, and Durge moved after him. Travis started to follow, then something caught his eye: spidery outlines flickering in the green-and-silver light. He moved toward the circular pedestal he had glimpsed earlier.

No, not pedestal, Travis. Altar
.

A thrill coursed through him as he knelt beside it. He reached out a hand, hesitated, then touched the symbols
carved into the smooth, black stone of its sides, symbols that gleamed in the magical light.

“Everyone,” he said softly, although the word echoed all around, “I think you should come look at this.”

In moments the others were there. By then, Travis had already realized the purpose of the symbols. They weren’t runes or another kind of writing, but rather sharp, angular pictographs: drawings meant to be read without language.

“It’s a story,” he said.

Lirith knelt beside him. “A story about what?”

“A sorcerer,” Sareth murmured, dark eyes gleaming in the witchlight. “Look, there he is.”

Sareth pointed to a stick figure. The figure gripped a curved shape in one hand, and from its other trailed a line of small dots.

“But what is he doing?” Durge said, the pale illumination deepening the creases in his face.

Grace touched the altar. “He’s binding the demon.”

Together, glyph by glyph, they deciphered the story. The sorcerer shed his own blood, enticing a being that was represented only as a dot surrounded by concentric lines of power. The demon. Jagged outlines suggested a crag that could only be the hill of Tarras. The sorcerer created a hollow in the hill and with more of his own blood lured the demon inside.

“But it wasn’t just his own blood,” Lirith said, pointing to a glyph. In the stick-sorcerer’s hand was a dot with eight small lines radiating from it.

Quickly, they read the rest of the story. With the scarab, the sorcerer enticed the demon into the prison in the rock, then worked a great magic. The very last glyph showed a rain of dots pouring from the sorcerer’s body as the circle of the demon shrank in on itself.

“That’s all?” Durge said, frowning. “But the story does not seem complete.”

“I don’t think we’re seeing everything,” Travis said.
“Look, here’s the edge of another glyph. But the rest has been erased somehow.”

Then he understood. On one side, the stone of the altar was warped and rippled like the walls of this place. Whatever power had carved the tunnels had deformed the stone of the altar, wiping out the last part of the story. However, Travis thought he could guess the final symbols: the sorcerer, with his remaining power, carving his story here.

They rose, standing around the altar.

“So it was the scarab of Orú,” Sareth said, wonder on his face. “That was how the sorcerer bound the demon in this place. He used the jewel as the focus of the binding and sacrificed his own blood to forge the magic. I suppose we will never know his name, but he must have been one of the greatest of his kind—perhaps one of the sorcerers who first created the demons before they realized their folly.”

Travis felt a pang in his chest. The sorcerer had sacrificed himself to undo his own magic and save the world. He clenched his right hand into a fist.

“Sareth,” Durge rumbled, “you say the scarab was not consumed by the sorcerer’s magic, but was rather the focus of it.”

“That’s right.”

“Then I think you should look at this.”

The knight brushed dust from the top of the altar. On one side the stone was melted and deformed, but on the other it was unmarred. On this side, set into the surface of the stone, was a shallow round depression.

“It looks like something is supposed to fit in there,” Grace said.

Travis swallowed hard. He brushed away more dust, revealing eight grooves radiating from the circular depression. “Something with eight legs.…”

They gazed at each other, eyes wide in the flickering green-and-silver light. A faint sound echoed on the air,
like a small stone skittering before falling into endless dark.

Dread solidified Travis’s heart. “Lirith, Grace, can you sense any sign of the Scirathi nearby?”

Lirith’s eyes were shut; she was already working. “No, there’s no one else here but us. I—” She drew in a hissing breath.

“Something’s coming toward us,” Grace said, her eyes flying open. “Something—”

Part of the darkness swirled, separated, and drifted toward them: a figure clad in a billowing black robe. Silver runelight and green witchlight glinted off a motionless, serenely smiling face made out of gold.

“Scirathi!” Sareth spat, drawing his sword.

Durge stepped forward, his greatsword raised.

“The mask!” Grace said. “It’s the source of his power.”

Lirith pressed close against her, already weaving her fingers in a spell. Travis swallowed, waiting for the attack of the
gorleths
. Surely the sorcerer had his slaves with him.