The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [248]
There's only one operation that will cure this, Doctor, spoke the dispassionate voice in her mind. Make your incision now.
Grace drew Fellring and thrust the sword upward with all her might. The tip of the blade found the gap in the Pale King's armor—then passed through it. The sword shone with silver light as it plunged deep into his chest. There was resistance as the blade met something hard—then clove it in two.
With a flash, Fellring shattered in her hands.
There was a scream, a terrible sound of fury and anguish that should have frozen the marrow of her bones. However, Grace hardly heard it. A coldness came over her, freezing blood and brain. Dimly, she realized she was falling. There was a crunching sound as she struck the ground, and she saw a shadow above her, crowned by antlers. The iron scepter descended toward her head.
Then came another clap of thunder, and the sky broke open.
56.
It was a hooting noise that woke Travis.
The sound was soft, like the calling of doves at day's end, only deeper, so that he could feel it as a thrum through his body. Though toneless, the sound seemed to weave a shroud of music around him, warming his ice-cold body, breathing breath back into air-starved lungs.
Gentle hands touched his legs, his arm, his chest. Travis opened his eyes and stared up into strange brown faces. He tried to move, but pain tingled up and down his limbs, paralyzing him. Had his bones been crushed to splinters when he struck the ground? He had fallen what seemed like forever.
Fingers fluttered across his forehead. The face above him came into focus, and a queer, wrenching feeling filled Travis. It was like looking into a mirror only to see a stranger's visage gazing back. Yet despite the differences, the face was not so alien compared to his own. It was a human face.
The man studied Travis with brown eyes, small and wise beneath a thick, jutting brow. A leather thong held shaggy hair back from a sloping forehead; his nose was flat and broad, and his cheekbones as sharp as the chipped planes of a stone axe. A scraggly beard covered his jaw, which was chinless and receding but delineated by bulging muscles on either side. He wore simple clothes cut of aurochs hide, colored rust orange with ocher.
Others knelt in a circle around Travis, watching him with gentle brown eyes: men and women, and even a few young ones. All of them had the same jutting browridges, the same flat noses, the same chinless jaws. However, unlike the man who touched Travis's forehead, their aurochs hide clothes were not colored with ocher.
“Who are you?” Travis asked. The words came out as a croak.
The man in the ocher-stained hides made a series of sounds. To Travis's ears they were a stream of toneless hoots, clicks, and guttural purrs. However, in his mind he heard words; the magic of the silver half-coin was at work.
We are the ones who waited.
“For what?” Travis said, and the words were still hoarse but louder now.
More hoots and grunts. For you to fall from the sky. We knew you would come. The end of all things is near.
Travis tried to remember what had happened. He had spoken the rune of breaking, and he had felt the gate shatter around him. His last thoughts had been of Beltan and Vani, and he had fallen into the Void. Only then something had happened. A crack opened in the Void between the worlds, and it had pulled Travis in, swallowing him.
He gazed upward, past the faces of the strange people. Above, sickly gray clouds swirled in wild circles, cauterized by forks of red lightning. The sky. There was something wrong with the sky.
Again he tried to move, and this time he succeeded. His body was not shattered, just stiff as if it had been frozen. However, warmth radiated from the people leaning over him, seeping into him, and it was this that caused the pinpricks of pain. Strong hands helped him sit up. His skin was unbroken, but his clothes had been torn to rags.
Mountains loomed all around, black as iron, raking at the bleeding sky.
“What is this place?” he murmured.
The place where hope ends. The