The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [243]
Grace skidded a few more inches away from the knight.
“You had best hurry, dear,” Melia called to Beltan, her words calm yet commanding.
Beltan hooked one of his legs around the column, then inched forward on his belly. Bits of paper and shredded cloth streaked past him. A chair sailed out of a nearby alcove, striking Beltan’s head and shoulders, and he grunted in pain.
The chair tumbled over the knight, then scuttled across the floor past Grace, like a thing alive. She started to follow it with her gaze.
“No, Grace! Look at me and nothing else.”
She kept her eyes on Beltan. Blood streamed from a cut on his forehead.
“Take my hands, Grace.”
He stretched out his arms. She reached for him, but it was no use; a gap a foot wide remained. Carefully, Grace lowered herself onto her belly and extended her arms toward Beltan.
It was a mistake. She had no friction in that position. At once she felt herself start to slide across the stone.
“No!” Aryn screamed.
Grace tried to lift her head, to get one last look at her friends before she careened away.
“Got you!” Beltan said, grinning fiercely as he clamped his hands around her wrists.
His grip was so strong it hurt; Grace didn’t give a damn. Beltan pulled her back. Vani was holding his legs, anchoring them to the column. The blond knight gave one last heave, Vani pulled, Grace kicked, and then all three of them were huddled together, pressed against the column.
Melia sighed. “Thank the gods.”
“That was close,” Falken said, his voice all but lost in the wind.
Grace turned her head. Her hair tangled in front of her eyes, then blew back, and a coldness filled her stomach as she saw what Beltan had told her not to look at.
They were on the same broad balcony where they had gathered before, overlooking the floor of the Etherion fifty feet below. Half of the balcony’s balustrade had been broken away, leaving only a sheer edge. Grace had been no more than three feet from the precipice. Had Beltan not grabbed her when he did …
Another chair hurtled past them and flew over the edge of the balcony. However, it did not fall to the floor. Instead, it sped through the air, into the vastness of the Etherion—
—then abruptly slowed and changed direction. Grace watched, breath suspended, as the chair began to describe a circuit around the edge of the Etherion, drifting in midair.
The chair was not alone. Hundreds—no, thousands—of other objects cluttered the air. There were more chairs, and tables, benches, statues, vases, metal bowls, cups, and chunks of broken stone large and small. As she watched, a piece of the balcony’s balustrade drifted past. Several parchment scrolls followed, then an entire marble altar. All of the objects floated in a circle around the center of the Etherion.
No, not a circle, Grace. A spiral.…
She could see the pattern now. It looked like something straight out of her college astronomy class, like a miniature model of a galaxy: flattened at the edges, thicker at the middle, all the matter orbiting around a central point, growing closer and closer with each revolution.
A brilliant spark of light ignited in the center of the spiral and just as quickly faded. What was happening? The objects were so thick in the middle of the spiral Grace couldn’t see.
She cast a wide-eyed look at the others. “What happened here?”
“A band of sorcerers broke through the emperor’s soldiers,” Vani said through clenched teeth. “That was one of them.”
She nodded toward the sorcerer who still clung to the bench beyond Falken and Aryn. He gazed back with frightened eyes; with his mask damaged, he was powerless.
“Together, Melia, Beltan, and I were holding them off,” Vani went on. “And then—”
“A shadow came,” Beltan said. “A shadow like none I’ve ever seen before.”
Grace followed his gaze back out into the Etherion. With a jolt of sickness, she saw them drifting among the other objects: forms in black robes, their gold masks gleaming. She counted at least