The Dark Remains (46 page)

Farr seemed to have no answer to that.

Travis’s nerves buzzed like wires. “If you have a gate, Vani, then you can help us take Beltan back to Eldh.”

“No, I cannot.”

The flatness of her voice shocked him. He stared, as did Grace.

“The artifact of Morindu is powerful, but even as we used it, we did not fully understand it. You see, the artifact is hollow, and when my people first discovered it, it was filled with dark fluid.”

“Blood,” Grace said.

“Yes, blood. And after I used the artifact to come to Earth, I learned from my brother that it was empty.”

Travis ran a hand over his smooth head. “But I don’t understand. Can’t your brother just fill the thing up and bring us back?”

“It is not so simple, Wilder. We do not know what sort of blood was in the artifact.”

Grace spoke in a quiet voice. “Human blood?”

“No,” Vani said, turning toward Grace. “The blood of a man does not open the gate. It was another sort of blood in the artifact, blood of great power. And to open the gate again would take the same kind.”

“But doesn’t the artifact tell you what it needs?” Grace picked pieces of fuzz off her baggy sweater. “You know, like the label on cars. ‘Unleaded blood only.’ Something like that?”

“The artifact does have writing upon it, but although we have been able to translate it from the ancient tongue of Morindu, we do not know what it means. It says that to open the way, we must have blood as powerful as the Blood of Light.”

Grace sighed. “And you don’t have any more idea than I do what that means.”

Vani did not answer.

“So you’re stuck here,” Travis said. “We’re stuck here.”

Vani stood and paced before the window, black leather creaking. “We suspected the blood would be consumed in using the artifact. I knew before I came that the journey would be in one direction only. But then, nearly a year ago, my brother sent word to me that the ones we sought had appeared on Eldh—and that their names were Grace Beckett and Travis Wilder.”

Deirdre let out a low whistle. “That must have been a blow, having come here with no way back, then finding out the ones you were searching for were back on Eldh.”

Vani gazed at Deirdre, mouth twisted in a bitter smile.
“You have a great gift for understatement, Seeker. However, two months ago, my brother sent me another message, telling me that Wilder and Beckett had returned to Earth.”

Travis fought for understanding. “Wait a minute. If you can’t open the gate, how can your brother send messages to you?”

“With this.”

Vani reached into her pocket and drew out a triangle of black stone.

Farr moved closer, peering. “What is it?”

“It is a piece of the artifact of Morindu,” Vani said. “It allows my brother to speak to me through the artifact—although at some cost to him. Without this, the artifact is not complete. Which is quite fortunate.”

“How so?” Farr said.

Vani tightened her fingers around the triangle. “A month ago, the gateway appeared before me. I thought it another message from my brother. It was not. The gate … opened wider.”

Grace sat up straight. “The Scirathi.”

“I did not know it at the time, not for certain. I was caught off guard and barely managed to keep my life. In the chaos of the moment, I could not see my attacker, but last night confirmed my fears. It was indeed a sorcerer of Scirath who came through the gate. He must have wrested the artifact from my brother. And I believe he brought it with him through the gate.”

“Wait a minute,” Travis said. “I thought you said you couldn’t open the artifact without the right kind of blood.”

“Yes,” Vani said. “I did.”

A thrill coursed through him as he understood the truth. However, Grace was faster. That scientific mind of hers.

“You think the sorcerer has learned the secret. You think he knows what kind of blood you need to enable the artifact.”

“He must,” Vani said. “Else he could not have come through.”

Farr looked at Deirdre, his face grim.

“What?” she said.

He rubbed his stubble-shadowed chin. “This is very bad. The events of last night can only mean one thing: The being Vani calls the Scirathi is working in coordination with Duratek. The news report about the attack at the motel had Duratek written all over it.”

Deirdre sucked in a breath. “Which means there’s nothing to stop Duratek from using the Scirathi’s gate to gain access to Eldh.”

Fear bubbled up inside Travis. If Deirdre was right, it meant the end of everything he had fought for, the end of Eldh as a free and separate world. He looked at Grace, and she returned his gaze with frightened eyes.

“No,” Vani said, “do not despair so easily. All hope is not lost.”

Farr looked at her. “Forgive me, Vani, but you don’t know Duratek. They’ll exploit any chance they have to get to Eldh and claim its resources for their own.”

“You are wrong, Seeker.” Vani’s eyes glittered. “I do know this group of sorcerers you call Duratek. I have watched them, even as I have watched you. And while they have the knight, the gate, and the secret of the blood, there is yet one thing they do not have.”

Even as she unfolded her fingers, Travis remembered.

“The stone triangle. You said the artifact isn’t complete without it.”

“Yes,” Vani said. “When the prism is separated from the artifact, it acts as a focus for the gate. As long as I have this, all gates opened by the artifact will lead to the prism. To open a gate back to Eldh, both artifact and prism must be brought together.”

“Then there’s a chance,” Travis said. “If we can get Beltan and the artifact, and if we can learn what the Blood of Light is, then we can get to Eldh.” However,
even as Travis said this, he realized how ridiculous it sounded. Even with the help of Vani and the Seekers, how were they going to do that?

“Vani,” Grace said softly, “there’s still one thing you haven’t told us. Why have you and the Scirathi been looking for me and Travis?”

Vani bowed her head, a black silhouette before the window. Then she looked up, her golden eyes brilliant.

“Because, Grace Beckett,” she said, “you and Travis Wilder are fated to raise the lost city of Morindu the Dark from the sands of Moringarth.”

Not for the first time, Beltan swam upward through the dark waters of unconsciousness, broke the viscous surface, and found himself naked and motionless upon a hard, cold slab.

He struggled for comprehension. Was this the crypt beneath Calavere where his father slept, the life stolen from him by murder? It was impossible to be certain; a fog lay before his eyes. How had he gotten there? He remembered the fire burning along his veins. Poison. Yes, she had poisoned him and had brought him here in order to turn him into a thing like herself. Kyrene.

Do not take my heart, witch!

But why did it matter if she cut the organ from his chest, if she placed in its stead a lump of cold iron? What need did he have of a heart?

You love him
.

No, that was no reason; that was his usual stupidity. What did love matter? He had loved his father, King Beldreas, and what had it meant in the end? Again Beltan saw the image that had once haunted his dreams and
now—because of the Necromancer Dakarreth—his waking mind: a knife sinking deep into a man’s strong, broad back, and a hand pulling away, covered with blood. Beltan’s hand. He had worshiped Beldreas, his father, and he had murdered him—stabbed him when he wasn’t looking. Wasn’t that what love always led to in the end—pain, betrayal, death?

No, it’s not the same. I only want to see Travis Wilder once. That’s all. I just want to tell him I’m sorry
.

But he wouldn’t have the chance. Lady Kyrene was going to cut out his heart. And maybe it was better this way. Maybe it was better to have the thing removed than to destroy yet another who could not possibly return his love.

Except something was wrong. He had seen Kyrene die. And it was too bright here to be the crypt beneath his father’s castle. The gray was dissolving into hard, lifeless white.

A metallic
click
, then a voice drifted on the air: a woman’s voice, though strangely sharp and guttural.

“Subject E-2, medical log. Seven October, cassette two. Test results and duplicate blood and tissue samples have been forwarded to headquarters for analysis and verification, and we are waiting for a directive on how to proceed.

“Since yesterday, I’ve had time to review the security videotapes, and I’m convinced now that the aboriginal does not speak English. On the tape’s audio track, the subject’s speech is unintelligible. The logical explanation is that, startled by his unexpected awakening, I projected words I could understand onto the sounds the subject made. I had been on shift for thirty-six straight, and while meds can keep you going, they can do it only for so long without impairment. But I’ve had a good seven hours of real sleep since yesterday.

“All the same, on the chance the sounds made by the subject represent indigenous speech, I’ve forwarded the
tape to headquarters for digitization and cross-comparison with the current known lexicon. However, I doubt they’ll find any matches. I’m sure now the subject was not speaking in any language, but merely uttering sounds of pain and fear. In the meantime, for security reasons, we are keeping Subject E-2 sedated at maximum safe levels. After such a long incapacitation, even accounting for the effects of the alternate blood serum treatment, the strength he displayed was … surprising. We’ll wake him up when we receive instructions, hopefully tomorrow. End entry.”

The light was growing brighter, resolving into shapes.

But I am awake, witch!
he wanted to shout, only his jaw would not work. She had thought her poison would keep him asleep until tomorrow, yet it had not. Once before a witch had underestimated him. Kyrene. That was how he had been able to rise from the stone bier, to throw her down, and to put the torch to her.

Why was it he had twice proved a witch’s spell weaker than she had thought? He wasn’t sure, but his own mother, Elire, had been a witch after a fashion.

As a young man, before he became king, Beldreas had gone riding into the marches of western Calavan to hunt stag and had come upon Elire in the village of Berent. Her green eyes had drawn him to her bed. However, when he learned the next day that the other villagers held Elire to be the village wisewoman, he had flown into a rage. Never had the followers of Vathris been fond of witches, and Beldreas had been a warrior to the marrow.

He came upon her in the village common, and he would have struck her down in his rage had she not told him that his bastard son was already alive and quickening inside her belly. Young and hot-tempered as he was, even Beldreas would not harm a woman who was with child—his child.

However, she was still a witch, and Beldreas would have nothing to do with her. He rode back to Calavere, and Beltan had spent his first seven years in Berent with
his mother. Often she made him drink bitter teas she brewed, or bade him chew on some foul-tasting piece of root that would make him go green and vomit. He never knew why. She would only tell him,
It will make you strong, my little prince
. But he had loved her and had never disobeyed, and when the potions made him sick, she would take his head in her lap, stroke his hair, and sing until he slept.

Then, the summer he was seven, Elire caught a fever, and while she would have tended to any villager so stricken with some of her simples, there was no one to make simples for her. Despite all she had done for them, no one in the village would lift a hand to bury a witch. So Beltan had placed her favorite green scarf in her stiff hands where she lay on her bed and had kissed her cold cheek. Then with a lamp he had set fire to the little wooden house where they had lived and watched it burn.

Such was the measure of Beldreas’s honor—if not his affection—that he would not see his only child, bastard or no, live as a pauper in a provincial village, and so he sent his seneschal, Lord Alerain, to bring Beltan to Calavere. Quickly enough, Beltan grew to adore Beldreas and his new home. But he never forgot his mother, or how in the end her witchwork had betrayed her—and ever after Beltan believed it to be a treacherous art.

Yet Lady Grace Beckett was a witch. And perhaps it was from all the simples his mother had made him drink as a child that he had some resistance to them now. Even as he remembered these things, the room grew clearer. He could see the flat ceiling, and the strange, blue-white lights. He made out a shadow on the other side of the room: slender, sitting at a table, head bowed over something in her hand.

It was good that he had not managed to cry out. This way she did not know that he could hear, that he could somehow understand her words—or at least some of them, for there was much she said that indeed sounded like the words of a witch’s spell.

Another
click
. Now she spoke in softer words.

“Personal note. We know that the subject is genetically a fully modern human being. The results of the phylogenetic analysis based on the DNA sequencing came back yesterday, and the most parsimonious tree suggests a divergence from northern European populations five thousand years before the present, with a margin of error of one thousand years.

“My own ancestors came from Norway. In a way, I suppose you could say we’re cousins of a sort. All the same—even knowing how close he is to us, to me—there is a brutishness to him I find alien and disturbing. Is this what the Vikings were like, the ones who raped and pillaged their way across Europe?

“Headquarters says the civilization level of the aboriginals is medieval, approximately eleventh century, with some tech-specific variance of plus or minus two centuries. I still find it amazing that development could happen in such parallel with Earth, just lagged a thousand years. But that’s what our historians have been telling us all along. Humans are humans. It’s population density and probability theory that are the controlling factors, not individual will. Maybe the high-ups are right. Maybe manifest destiny exists after all.