by Mark Anthony
The air was paling to silver. The darkness receded; it was nearly dawn.
“I must go now,” the one cloaked in shadows said.
“When will we speak again?”
“Soon.”
There was a faint rustling, then the woman knew she was alone. She turned and walked from the garden. By the time she reached the entrance of the main keep, the sun was just cresting the horizon. A guardsman nodded to her as she approached the doors.
“Good morning, my lady,” he said. “Were you out for an early stroll? It’s a beautiful morning—full of promise.”
A smile touched her lips. “Yes,” Liendra said as she stepped through the castle doors. “It is.”
18.
Dr. Grace Beckett drifted like a ghost through the antiseptic corridors of Denver Memorial Hospital and prayed to the gods of another world that no one would recognize her. If anyone saw her—anyone who remembered her face, or the events of last October—then this would be over in an instant.
She tugged at the too-short white coat she had pilfered from the Emergency Department locker room, hoping it covered her shabby jeans and thrift-store sweater. Maybe tall and bony worked for supermodels and actresses, but right now Grace wanted to do anything but stand out. She had found a broken stethoscope tossed on a shelf and looped it over her neck. It would do as long as no one asked her for a consult on a rattling lung.
She punched a red button and slipped through a pair of stainless-steel doors as they whooshed open, into a pastel peach hallway. The sound of respirators whirred on the air like the wingbeats of vultures. Hold on, Beltan. I’m coming. But the words were pointless. Even if she could have sent them along the spindly, sooty tatters of the Weirding that existed in this city, he couldn’t possibly have heard them.
A pair of smooth-faced young men in khakis and short white coats appeared from around a corner. Grace stiffened, then relaxed. First-year interns—their too-tight neckties were dead giveaways. No doubt both of them were fresh out of medical school that spring. Which meant they were new enough not to know all the residents at the hospital yet.
They fumbled their hellos. Grace gave them a clipped nod in return—no intern would believe a friendly smile from a resident they didn’t know—then pushed on past. Only as she turned a corner did she let herself breathe again.
This is idiotic, Doctor. You know there’s been no change in his condition—Travis was here just this morning. Beltan is still in a coma, and all you’re going to accomplish with this stunt is to get yourself caught. What are you going to tell Travis when you have to use your one phone call at the Denver police station to talk to him?
Then again, the police weren’t the only ones looking for her.
She kept moving. It had been nearly a year since she had last set foot in this place, since the night she had slain the dead man with the iron heart and had fled into darkness and another world. Yet it was easier than she might have guessed to slip back into her old rhythms. She strode with cool purpose through the halls, keeping her gaze high and distant, as if this were a dominion and she its ruler. More people passed by—nurses, technicians, janitors, medical students—but none of them gave her more than a cursory glance.
And why should they have recognized her? The Keep of Fire had changed her, just as surely as the girl Tira had been changed when she closed her small hands around the Great Stone Krondisar. Certainly Grace was not the same person who had haunted these sterile hallways, healing the wounds of others while she ignored her own.
As if this thought were an invitation, the shadow that dwelled on the edges of her vision rushed to the foreground. Its dark folds surrounded Grace, suffocating her. She stumbled, clutching for a wall she could no longer see as memories oozed forth. Once again she smelled the dusty air of the shed, the sharp reek of blood. Once again she was ten years old.
In the name of God Almighty, what have you done to her, Grace Beckett?
But I was trying to help her. Ellen used the wire on herself, Mrs. Murtaugh. She said she had to get it out—she said Mr. Holiday put something in her.
You are a wicked liar, Grace Beckett. And you are a murderess. Surely the fires of Hell will burn you for what you have done to Ellen Nickel.
No, you don’t—
You must pray, pray on your knees here in her blood, and beg God for repentance.
But I was trying to help her, Mrs. Murtaugh! We have to take her to the hospital. Maybe she’ll be all right. Please, you have to listen to—
No, try none of your spells on me, you Jezebel. I know you have given your soul to Satan. I have heard you utter your chants to him—at night, and in no tongue spoken by good Christians. Now take this wire in your hand. Take it! Use it on yourself as you did upon Ellen Nickel. And pray that you have enough blood in you to win your salvation.…
Crimson light flashed, and pain pierced Grace through to the center, bright, sharp, and—
With a sound like gushing water, the shadow receded. Grace blinked against the fluorescent glare, relieved to see the hallway was empty. At Castle Spardis, Beltan had been dying, his old wound reopened by the Necromancer. In order to use the Touch to sustain the knight while they journeyed to Earth, Grace had had no choice but to accept the shadow attached to the thread of her own life, the shadow that for so many years she had pretended didn’t exist. And now that the door had finally been opened, she could not shut it again.
There was never any logic to the shadow’s coming; it seemed anything could trigger a regression. Some were brief, as this one had been. Others were … not. All of them left her sweating and shaking, feeling as if she had been cut with scissors from a sheet of stiff, white paper. So far she had managed to keep her episodes concealed from Travis; there was enough for him to worry about with Beltan’s condition. However, she wondered how much longer that could last.
She still didn’t remember everything that had happened to her at the Beckett-Strange Home for Children—there was so much, and the shadow was so deep—but it seemed almost every day new details came to her. Just when she thought there couldn’t possibly be more to remember, the shadow was there and she was a child again: five years old, a pale nine, thirteen with flames dancing around her.
She forced her mind to focus on deciphering the hospital’s inscrutable room-numbering scheme. Even when she had worked here it had made no sense. Then she saw the etched plastic plate: CA-423. That was the number Travis had given to her. She pushed through the door and into the room beyond.
Machines and monitors hissed and beeped, filling the cold, white space with their drone like a chorus of electronic monks. A thick-waisted nurse stood beside the bed, her salt-and-pepper hair neatly bound at her neck, checking the drip on an IV. She looked up, her expression curious but not surprised.
Grace hesitated, then breezed into the room. During her time in the Dominions, she had discovered that if you acted as if you belonged in a place, people invariably assumed you did.
“Can I help you, Doctor?”
“I doubt it,” Grace said. She made a quick glance at the chart by the bed. “Dr.… Chandra mentioned he had a persistent vegetative case in here. I’m doing a study.”
The nurse frowned. “A study? Which department is funding it?”
Indignation rose in Grace, so strong it startled her. Who was this woman to question her authority? She started to open her mouth to speak outraged words.
Stop it, Grace. No one thinks you’re a duchess here. You can’t just dismiss someone with a wave of your hand.
True, she was no noble. But she was a doctor, and in this place, that meant more than a jeweled crown.
She gave the nurse a stiff, impersonal smile. “Why don’t you leave us for a minute?”
The nurse stared at her for a heartbeat, then in one swift motion folded her aluminum clipboard and sailed from the room—no doubt off to the lounge to warn the other nurses that there was a skinny new witch of a doctor to watch out for. She wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Forge
tting the nurse, Grace approached the bed.
She had not seen Beltan since the day she and Travis had touched the half-coins together in Spardis, leaving Eldh behind. A heartbeat later, they had blinked as the silver light dimmed around them and had found themselves next to a Dumpster not twenty feet from the ED entrance. Travis had run inside for help, and seconds had passed, each one an agony. The Weirding was present on Earth—Grace had sensed it at once now that she knew how to look for it—but it was crowded, noisy, and dirty. And thin, so terribly thin, a silk cloth worn into a filthy rag. The thread of Beltan’s life had begun to slip through her fingers. She couldn’t hold on.
Then, thankfully, in a rush of commotion and light, the ED personnel were there. In the confusion, Travis slipped away and pulled Grace with him. She had wanted to stay, to make sure they could stabilize him, to warn them he had never had a tetanus shot or inoculation in his life, but Travis had pulled harder. It was too dangerous for them there. She had cast one last glance back at Beltan, pale as a ghost on the bare asphalt, then they had run into the dry Denver night.
The days that followed had seemed peculiarly unreal, as if it were Earth, not Eldh, that was the foreign world. Again and again Grace reached out with the Touch, but she was like a fresh amputee groping for a phantom limb. For instead of a shimmering web of gossamer spanning between every living thing, all she found were faint echoes of magic.
Then there was the shadow, leaping out to consume her without warning. And when she was not failing to use the Touch, or caught in the shadow of the past, she spent her time thinking of Tira—the fragile, mute, red-haired girl who had turned out to be so much stronger than any of them. But while Tira was gone, she was far from lost. It was Grace who felt lost.
If it hadn’t been for Travis, she didn’t know what would have happened to her. He seemed to adjust to life back on Earth far more quickly than she, as if he really belonged here. It had been his idea to sell three gold Eldhish coins—their faces deliberately scratched—at an East Colfax pawnshop. With the money they had gotten food, then had hopped a bus west down Colfax, past peeling storefronts and spastic neon signs. At the Blue Sky Motel they took a room that looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the carefree, shaggy, burnt umber days of 1965. The TV was so old Grace had expected it to show I Love Lucy when she flicked it on. Instead, a faint column of smoke drifted up as several cockroaches wriggled out the ventilation holes in the back. In a way, it was every bit as entertaining.
The next morning, Travis had left while Grace lay on the bed, staring at the sagging ceiling and trying in vain to Touch the Weirding. He returned at noon with bagels and a fake social security card.
“Say hello to Hector Thorkenblat,” he had said, holding up his new card.
She had wrinkled her nose. “That doesn’t sound so much like a name as something you have to clean up.”
A few days later, once they felt more confident that his face wouldn’t be remembered from the night of their arrival, Travis had taken his new card down to Denver Memorial and gotten Hector a job as a night janitor. And that was how they had learned that Beltan was alive but in a coma.
Since he had started working at the hospital, Travis had been checking on Beltan every few days. Grace knew Beltan was getting the best care this world had to offer—which was considerably more than the last. All the same, she had to see him, to touch him for herself. Even here, there were things she could sense that no electronic monitor could detect.
Grace gripped the metal railing of the bed. It had been more than two months, and she knew what happened to long-term coma cases. All the same, a gasp escaped her.
“Oh, Beltan …”
In her memory she saw him tall and strong, clad in chain mail and holding his sword, a fierce grin on his face. The man on the bed bore little resemblance to that memory.
He looked old. The limbs that protruded from the hospital gown were white and thin, as if his sharp-edged bones had been stretched impossibly long. Beneath the gown, his muscles had atrophied, and the hands that rested at his sides looked like bundles of sticks.
Her eyes moved past the IV tubes and monitor leads—he was not on a respirator at least—to his face. They had let his scruffy beard grow. It seemed dull, brownish rather than gold, and it took her a moment to find the homely, cheerful face she knew beneath. She would have given anything to see one of his brilliant smiles, but he was motionless save for the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Grace pushed aside the gown and let her fingers dance along the mass of pink scar tissue on Beltan’s left side. She shut her eyes and concentrated. It was dim and murky—like a blurry X-ray with no backlighting rather than a computer-colored, three-dimensional scan—but Queen Ivalaine had been right. Even on Earth, Grace had the talent.
His old wound had healed well—far better than it ever had on Eldh. Abdominal surgery and antibiotics still had an edge on magic. However, his blood loss had been catastrophic, and it was this that had induced the coma. The doctors could repair his body, reinfuse his veins with blood, but no amount of surgery had the power to wake him.
Maybe he needs some magic after all, Grace.
She replaced the gown, then laid a hand on the high expanse of his forehead. There were more lines on his brow than she remembered. For some reason she felt like singing to him, which was very undoctorlike. Then again, didn’t research suggest that familiar voices could help coma patients to wake from unconsciousness? Words came to her lips, so old she had all but forgotten them.
“And farewell words too often part
All their small and paling hearts.
The fragile glade and river lain,
Beneath the hush of silent rain.”
She touched the angular metal pendant beneath her shirt. The song was a thing of her childhood, like the necklace. But where had it come from? Certainly no one at the orphanage had sung it to her. And there was no doubt in her mind that the words were wrong. She must have heard it as a small girl and, like children so often do, transformed strange sounds into familiar words. All the same, the song was comforting. To her, at least, if not to Beltan. She began to murmur the words again.
His eyelids twitched.
Grace drew in a hiss of air. It’s just an autonomic reflex, Doctor. Don’t read more into it than there is. All the same she pressed her hand against his brow and shut her eyes.
Beltan?
It was hard. The threads of the Weirding were so faint around her, like filaments of cobweb. They fell apart as she grasped them.
Beltan, can you hear me? I’m here, Grace. And Travis has been coming to see you every night.
She held her breath, straining to listen. There was only gray silence. Then, just as she started to let go, she heard it. It was far less than a word—a shard of a thought—but she had heard it.
Grace’s eyes snapped open. It was Beltan. He had made the sound in her mind, she was certain. His face was motionless once more, but there could be no doubt about what she had heard. She gripped his hand. Hard. “Come on, Beltan. You’ve got to come back to us. Please try. For me—for Travis.”
Grace knew that if he didn’t wake soon, they would move him to a state institution. This was a public hospital; they couldn’t turn people away, but they wouldn’t let a John Doe occupy a bed indefinitely. Yet that was far from her sole worry.
It was only a matter of time until Duratek found them.
In a way, Grace was surprised the three of them hadn’t already been apprehended. Almost daily she or Travis saw one of the sleek, black vehicles driving down a city street—slowly, as if searching. No doubt Duratek believed that if either Grace or Travis ever came back, they would come here, to Denver. And they were right.
Grace had no idea how they were supposed to do it, but somehow she and Travis had to get back to Eldh. And they had to take Beltan with them. She was certain Duratek would be more than interested to get their hands on a native of the world they sought to rape and conquer.
&nbs
p; Only now Beltan was close to waking. If they could just get him somewhere safe while he finished his recovery, they could start searching for a way back. However, it wasn’t as if she could ask the police for help. To them, Grace was the woman who had handcuffed one of their detectives and threatened him at gunpoint. No matter that Janson had been an ironheart; the police didn’t know that. So where could they go for protection?
But you’ve known all along, Grace.
She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a business card. It was more gray than white now, smudged and torn, but she could still read it:
THE SEEKERS
1-800-555-8294
She had kept the card with her for so long, ever since that night in late October when Hadrian Farr had given it to her. Who else could she go to for help if not them?
You should ask Travis.
But even as she thought this, she headed for the door and the nearest pay phone.
19.
Deirdre Falling Hawk sat in a corner of the dim Soho pub, staring at the glass of clear green liquid on the table before her. On a plate next to the glass was a cube of sugar and a silver spoon. Although they were hard to make out in the gloom of the pub, there were words etched into the surface of the spoon: Drink and Forget.
If only it were really that simple. But wasn’t that why she was here? The board that hung outside the peeling door of the pub read Crumbe’s Cupboard. And the occasional tourist or businessman who stumbled inside found only sticky tables, warm glasses of Bass Ale, and cold fish and chips. But from her visits to London, Deirdre knew that to the locals this place was known as The Sign of the Green Fairy. And they came here for something else.
Quickly, as if afraid she might change her mind, she placed the sugar cube on the spoon and lowered it into the glass. Then she raised the glass and took a long sip of the green liquid. It was sweet and powerfully bitter. The licorice-like taste of anise coated her tongue, and the pungent esters of wormwood rose in her head, an emerald mist to shroud her brain.
