The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [19]
“Sar,” Travis said again, willing the stones to obey him. Then he gripped the end of a broken beam that protruded from the wreckage. “Meleq.” Power resonated through the wood. Hold strong, bind together, do not break.
Tarus gave him a curious look. “What are you doing?”
“I think I've stabilized the debris.” Travis leaned back, wiping sweat from his brow. “For now at least.”
Beltan gazed at him, only what his look contained—love? pride? fear?—Travis couldn't say. “Where do we dig?” the knight said to Aryn.
She scrambled around the side of the rubble heap. “Here. They're under here. Six of them. You have to hurry.”
Some of the guards had fetched shovels and picks, but they were worthless against the heavy stones. Instead the men used bare hands to push aside the rocks, as well as levers fashioned from broken planks. It was dreadful work. Acrid smoke rose from the still-smoldering beams, and dust caked their faces and filtered into their lungs until all of them were coughing.
Travis was awed by the tirelessness of the three knights. Beltan and Tarus stood shoulder to shoulder, working together to move stones that had to weigh a quarter ton or more. Durge moved stones nearly as heavy on his own. Soon the dusty mask of Durge's face was creased from effort, and his knuckles were raw and bleeding, but he didn't stop. None of them did.
As Aryn guided the diggers, Travis kept his hands on the debris, speaking Sar and Meleq under his breath. He felt every vibration through the beams, every shift in the blocks of stone. The more wreckage the men removed, the more unstable the heap became.
You must hold on, Travis. He wasn't sure if the voice that spoke in his mind was his own, or that of Jack Graystone and the other runelords whose power flowed in his veins. If you cease speaking the runes, the stones will come crashing down, taking all of you with it. It will be your burial mound.
Travis kept muttering runes.
It was only when Beltan called out “I need light!” that Travis realized it was growing dark.
“Lir,” he croaked, his lips cracked and dry from his endless litany of runes.
Silver radiance sprang into being, shining into the gap in the rubble the men had made. Frightened eyes peered out. Beltan and Tarus reached in and pulled out a guardsman, scraped and battered but alive. Five more times they reached in, and five more men came out. Some held broken limbs or clutched the stumps of missing fingers, but all were alive.
A groan rose up through the debris mound. Travis felt terribly heavy. “You have to get out of here,” he gritted the words through his teeth. “I can't hold on much longer.”
Tarus barked orders. The guardsmen who had been digging helped their wounded brethren over the beam and down the passage that led outside. Tarus and Durge accompanied Aryn, then it was only Beltan and Travis.
Travis was so weary. All he wanted was to sink to the ground with the stones, to let them bury him. It would be cool beneath, and still. He could never hurt anyone there, he could never break an entire world. “Go, Beltan. I'll hold the stones back until you reach the other side.”
“That's not how it works, Travis. We're going together or not at all.”
Travis looked up, and the light in Beltan's eyes was so fierce and so tender that his breath caught on his lips, and he could speak neither runes nor mundane words. The magic he had forged with Sar and Meleq shattered. The mound slumped in on itself.
Beltan grabbed Travis's arm and hauled him across the beam. They reached the other side just as the beam slid backward, pulled in by the cascade of stone. Hand in hand, Travis and Beltan pounded down the passage and burst into the lower bailey along with a cloud of pulverized rock. He staggered around in time to see the walls of the guard tower sheet downward, sending a gray plume into the sky.
“I couldn't save it,” Travis said. His mouth was full of dust. “I tried, but in the end I couldn't stop the tower from falling down.”
Beltan wrapped a strong arm around his shoulder. “It was beyond saving,