The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [185]
Sister Mirrim and Child Samanda had both retreated through a doorway, leaving Travis alone at the table with Brother Cy.
“I'm so tired,” Travis said softly, still watching the pictures of the Steel Cathedral flicker across the TV. “I don't know how much longer I can keep going.”
The preacher squeezed his shoulder with a bony hand. “You'd be surprised, son. You're a whole lot stronger than you think. But take heart. If what Sister Mirrim has seen is true—and I have never known her vision to be false—then your journey is nearly at an end.”
Travis didn't know whether to be relieved by those words or terrified. He gazed around the commissary and found that if he concentrated, he could see them as they really were now. Not the men and women who had come to the mission seeking refuge, but the others—the ones who always traveled with Brother Cy, who helped him in his mystery work: goat-men and tree-women, scampering greenmen and ugly little creatures that flitted about the room on butterfly wings.
Who was Travis to talk of being weary? Brother Cy and his followers been traveling on their own journey for over a thousand years now, ever since they helped banish Mohg from Eldh and found themselves trapped beyond the circle of the world. How long had they drifted in the darkness—not merely homeless, but wordless—until Travis went back in time and inadvertently opened the crack in the world Earth with Sinfathisar? That mistake had allowed Mohg to enter this world. But like the box Pandora foolishly opened long ago, it had allowed hope to steal into the world as well, in the form of Cy and his companions.
“Will you ever go home?” Travis looked up into Brother Cy's black marble eyes. “You and Mirrim and Samanda and the others? When this is all over, will you finally get to go home?”
For a moment a light shone in Cy's gaze—a sorrow so vast and deep it was beyond fathoming.
“Home,” he whispered in his rasping voice. “You don't know, son. You can't possibly know how sorely tempted I have been to dig my fingers into the crack you made in this world, to strain with all my might and pry it wide open.”
He stood, his voice rising into the exultant rhythms of a sermon. “I can envision it now, as clearly as Sister Mirrim might see it. I would march through the gap with my followers behind me. I would stand before the Nightlord and wrestle with him in a battle that would boil seas and shatter mountains to dust. I would wrest the Great Stones from him. And when I arose victorious from the devastation, all the world would kneel before me, and I would tower above, the master of all!”
People in the commissary had stopped to stare, spoons frozen halfway to their lips. Brother Cy was rigid, white and frozen as a statue, staring blindly. Then the preacher sighed, passing a hand before his face, and the moment was over. While he had spoken, Travis had caught a fleeting glimpse of the being he truly was. Majestic, powerful, and terrible: a god. Now he was simply Brother Cy again, gaunt and hunched in his dusty black suit.
“No,” he said, his voice a whisper. “I will not destroy my brother only to become him. Such was my choice long ago. Such was all of ours—Ysani, Durnach, and the others. I will help how I can, but that task is not mine.”
The preacher looked down at Travis. “There's someone I believe you need to talk to before you go, son.” He pointed across the commissary, at the thirtysomething woman in the upscale clothes. Then he walked to the doorway where Mirrim and Samanda had vanished and passed beyond.
A low murmur of noise filled the commissary again as people returned to their soup and their conversations. Travis gazed at the woman in the corner of the commissary, the one Brother Cy had pointed at. Her head was bowed over her hands. Was she praying?
Travis pushed himself to his feet, then headed across the commissary. “Hello.”
The woman looked up. She wasn't beautiful—her