The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [260]
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.
86.
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