The Dark Remains (77 page)

“Very well, Melia,” Falken bellowed, spinning slowly head over heels and getting tangled in his faded blue cloak. “You can set us down now. Just do it slowly.”

“It’s really not quite that simple. I’m either holding you or I’m not. There isn’t exactly an in-between.”

Falken groaned. “What do you mean there’s not an in-between. All I want is to get—”

The word
down
turned into something of a yelp as Falken abruptly dropped a dozen feet, then stopped. A second later the rest of them did the same, and Travis nearly succeeded in biting off his tongue as he jerked to a halt. In several more fits and starts, the rubble-strewn floor grew successively closer. The final drop was no more than five feet, although Travis managed to land rear-first on a decidedly pointy chunk of stone.

He was still in the center of the Etherion, the others about a dozen paces away on either side of him. He didn’t know which group to move to first. Then he saw Vani stand, and Beltan helped Grace to her feet, her face
smudged with dust. A warmth surged in his chest at the sight of them. They were alive; they were all alive.

“Travis!” Beltan called out.

Grace held on to the big, blond knight for support. She looked up and grinned. Vani stood beside them, hands on hips, her golden eyes gleaming.

Travis wasn’t certain of much in his life. He still didn’t know why Jack had chosen him, or who Brother Cy really was. For that matter, he didn’t usually know right from left. But at that moment he knew beyond any doubt that these three people meant everything to him. Grace was the closest friend he had ever had. And he knew now that it didn’t matter whether he
could
love Beltan because he
did
, loved him body and soul. Then there was Vani—and what Travis felt when he gazed at her he didn’t know, except that it felt like …

It felt like fate.

But you’re not supposed to have any fate, isn’t that right, Travis?

Chalk that up as one more thing he didn’t know. Impossible that he had never really found love in his life, and now he had found it twice. He started to pick his way through the rubble toward the trio.

“No!”

The cry came from behind him, along with the sound of sliding rock. He halted, turned around. Lirith bent over a pile of rubble as Durge hurried to her. The two began pulling at the stones, heaving them aside.

“Goodman Travis,” Durge called out, “we require your assistance. Quickly.”

Then Travis understood what it was the two were trying to free from the heap of stones.

Sareth had vanished.

Travis shoved Sinfathisar into his pocket and broke into a run, pawing his way over piles of stone.

“What happened?”

Durge’s face was grim, white with rock dust. “The heap of stones on which he fell was not stable. It collapsed as he tried to climb down it, covering him. I imagine that the worst has transpired.”

Lirith opened her eyes. “No, he’s alive. But he doesn’t have any air. We’ve got to get him out.”

Durge began heaving stones from the pile with furious efficiency. Lirith pulled at the rubble, hands bleeding. Travis started to push aside a rock, then stopped. There was a better way to do this.

“Stand back,” he said.

Knight and witch gaped at him.

“Now!”

He was surprised at the metal in his tone, but there was no time to wonder at it. The two obeyed, and Travis gathered his will. He laid his right hand on one of the stones, then spoke a word echoed in his mind by a hundred other voices.

“
Sar!
”

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 demon 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.

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.

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
.