The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [103]
Grace blinked, her expression startled. “What was that?”
“Death,” Vani said.
Travis glanced again at his stiletto; the gem in the hilt was dark, quiescent. The danger had passed. For the moment, at least.
Sirens cried out. Flashing lights approached, then whizzed past them. So the police were finally coming. However, Travis didn’t need Vani to tell him that no matter how hard the officers searched, they would find no sign of the gorleths or the one in the gold mask.
“Where are you taking us?” Grace said, her face frightened, yet resolute.
“Somewhere you will be safe.”
“And then?”
“We must free your companion, the knight. They cannot be allowed to hold him.”
Next to Travis, Grace went stiff. He felt his heart lurch again, but this time it was beating too swiftly.
“Beltan?” Grace whispered. “You know where Beltan is?”
“I do.”
Travis studied her reflection in the rearview mirror. In a way, her eyes were as gold and serene as the sorcerer’s mask. But there was a life to them the mask had not held. He drew a deep breath.
“You’re from Eldh, aren’t you, Vani?”
Travis did not take his eyes off Vani’s in the mirror. At last she nodded.
“Why have you been following me? And why did you help us tonight?”
For a moment it seemed sorrow crept into the reflection of her eyes. Then the glare of passing headlights blinded Travis, and by the time his vision cleared she had turned the mirror so that all he could see was darkness.
“Because,” Vani said softly, “it is my fate to return with you to Eldh.”
34.
Lirith stood at the prow of the Fate Runner and watched a hundred domes of gold rise into the shimmering air, growing larger with each splash of spray against her cheeks.
The sea was a silver plate, beaten and dimpled by the relentless hammer of the sun. Chalky cliffs soared toward the lapis sky, their summits crowned with precisely spaced colonnades of slender ithaya trees that transmuted the brilliant light through yellow leaves. The wind was steady off the Summer Sea, and the sleek, two-masted ship that had borne them from the Free City of Gendarra streaked like a dolphin past towering twin obelisks hewn of the same white stones as the cliffs, into the encircling arms of an azure bay and toward the oldest city in all of Falengarth.
“There she is,” said a voice as rough as a gull’s behind her.
She turned from the railing, then smiled, the wind unfurling her hair behind her like sails. “Captain Magard.”
The captain of the Fate Runner was not an old man—certainly he was no more than ten years Lirith’s senior—but life on the sea had taken its toll. His powerful shoulders were hunched from years of gripping the tiller, and his coarse hands bore something less than the usual complement of fingers. However, Magard’s billowing red shirt and trousers were every bit as bold as the stories he had a habit of telling.
Lirith turned again to face the swiftly growing city. Birds drifted among the domes like flecks of white down. She could see that Tarras rose up in a series of concentric circles, each walled in buff stone, to a cluster of fabulous spires at the summit.
Magard laughed, as it seemed he did at everything, and gestured to the massive obelisks even now slipping past them to either side. “No matter how many times I sail into Meron’s Gate, I never tire of this sight.”
Lirith agreed. She had never seen anything like them in her life. The obelisks stood upon the ends of two rocky prominences that reached from the shore, encircling the bay of Tarras. They were surely twice as high as the tallest towers in the Dominions, yet as slender as needles, their pale stone carved with words and symbols softened by vast centuries of salt and wind. There was space enough for a score of ships to sail through Meron’s Gate without any risk of collision, and the obelisks seemed to hold up the sky.
“Meron was the son of Taron, First Emperor of Tarras,” Magard said. “The stories say he raised the obelisks as a monument to his father’s victories. At least, that