The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [90]
Deirdre licked her lips. “You won’t find her.”
“What do you mean?”
Deirdre hardly heard him. It was amazing how one could mourn the loss of something one had never really had. Once again she read the headline:
BRIXTON FIRE REMAINS A MYSTERY
Death Toll Reaches 13
She touched the paper, running her hand over a photo showing the burned-out shells of several storefronts. The destruction had been nearly complete. Newsprint smeared under her fingers like a haze of smoke.
A soft oath behind her. “I’m so sorry, Deirdre. It looks as though someone got there first.”
Yes, someone. But who? Images flashed in Deirdre’s mind: purple pills, a white lightning bolt, an empty bottle. With the discipline of spirit taught to her by her shaman grandfather, Deirdre acknowledged her sorrow, then set it aside to be lived fully later, when the time was appropriate. Now she kindled a fire from anger. It was time to take action.
She shut the lid of the computer and stood, then turned to see Farr watching her with an expression that was both curious and—despite his drinking—utterly sober.
“Yes?” he said simply.
“How about we see what our good friends at Duratek Corporation are up to?”
He arched a single eyebrow. “Do you mean to tell me you know where they are holding the subject from AU-3?”
She grabbed her black-leather jacket from a chair and pulled it on. “Let’s say I have a pretty good hunch. This morning I managed to follow one of their vehicles for a while. And unless they’re opening their new corporate headquarters in an industrial building next door to the dog-food factory, I think we just might be on to something.”
“And why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”
She zipped her jacket up and grinned: a feral, humorless expression. “You were on a plane, Farr. Remember?”
29.
Beltan of Calavan, bastard son of King Beldreas, knight errant, captain in the Order of Malachor, and onetime Knight Protector to Lady Melindora Nightsilver, was running.
He ran through an empty dominion, over flat, gray plains beneath a flat, gray sky. It was impossible to tell if it was night or day; the very air was gray, like everything else in this place, and there were no shadows. Nor was there sound, save for that of his own breath. Even his feet made no noise as they trod upon soft, colorless grass. He was naked.
Beltan did not know where he had run from, or where in this shadowless dominion he was running to. He only knew that he could not remain still; that if he ceased to move there would be nothing to prevent him from fading into the grayness all around until he was gone altogether.
Sometimes as he ran he recalled stories told to him as a child, spoken by grizzled warriors who sat in the warmth of the fire in Calavere’s great hall, their fighting days long done—waiting now for the one final battle which they could only lose. Some were missing eyes, others fingers, arms, legs. They laughed and said that a lost limb went on ahead of a warrior and that it would be waiting for him when he got to Vathranan, the great hall of the god Vathris Bullslayer that lay beyond the marches of the world, so that the dead might fight beside the living in the Final Battle. But sometimes, in hoarse voices, they also spoke of Sindanan, the Gray Land where cowards and traitors went after death, and the hands of the old men shook as they said these things, so that they spilled their beer on the hot stones of the hearth where it hissed into steam and vanished.
Perhaps this was the Gray Land the warriors had spoken of. Perhaps Sindanan was also the place where bastards who murdered their own fathers went when they died.
With his left hand, Beltan gripped his side as he ran. It seemed an instinctive motion. Hadn’t there used to be pain? He looked down, but there was no wound in his flesh. Instead, the skin was smooth and pale, without blemish. Yet there had been a gash there before, he was sure of it, its ragged edges yawning open and closed as he ran like a laughing mouth. How long ago had he last seen it? He didn’t know. Time had faded