The Dark Remains (79 page)

But it is to me
, Travis wanted to say. He knew this place. But how? He remembered stepping through the gate, and the freezing gray nothingness of the void.…

The void. But there shouldn’t have been a void, not when passing from one place to another in Tarras. The gray emptiness existed only between worlds.…

At last understanding cracked through the ice that encased his brain. They weren’t in Tarras. They weren’t even on Eldh. This was Earth.

Not just Earth, Travis
.

Yes, there was McKay’s General Store, as well as the opera house, the assay office, and the Mine Shaft Saloon—

The Mine Shaft? But the saloon couldn’t possibly be there. He had watched it burn down with his own eyes. Yet it was. Which meant this could only be one place.

“It’s Castle City,” he murmured.

The others gave him sharp glances.

“You mean your home village, Travis?” Durge said. The knight’s brown eyes went wide. “This is your
world?
”

Travis staggered forward. “Yes, it is. But …”

But something was wrong.

“What happened to us, Sareth?” Lirith said. The witch laid a hand on his arm, her gaze imploring.

The Mournish man hefted the black stone artifact. “I cannot say. The gate was acting strangely. I suppose some magic of the demon must yet have lingered on the air, distorting the power of the artifact.”

“But we have one last drop of the scarab blood,” Durge said. “Can we not use it to go back?”

Travis hardly heard them. His brain raced. What was going on here? The storefronts, Elk Street, Castle Peak
looming in the distance—all of it looked familiar. But it all looked
wrong
. He took another step forward.…

He almost didn’t see it in time. A dark shape came rattling around a corner and hurtled down Elk Street. A whip cracked, and horses neighed.

“Travis!”

Durge’s strong hands grabbed his shoulders and jerked him back just in time to keep him from being run over. Travis blinked and watched the stagecoach bounce down the rutted swath of Elk Street toward the Silver Palace Hotel.

“That is a most curious sort of wagon,” Lirith said. “Is it a common conveyance for your world, Travis?”

Common? Not in the last hundred years or so.

“It can’t be,” Travis whispered. “This is impossible.”

But hadn’t the demon distorted the flow of time? Wasn’t that part of its power?

A dust devil whirled around them, catching them in a gritty embrace, and a piece of paper struck Travis, clinging to his face. He pawed at the paper, pulled it away, then gazed at the large, black words printed across the top:

He didn’t want to look. All the same, he forced his eyes to the small print beneath the masthead, forced the letters to stop swimming. Despite the sickness that flowed into his gut, Travis knew he had not mixed the numbers up:

“What is it, Travis?” Lirith said, words breathless.

Even the gate couldn’t help them. Not unless they

wanted to get back to Tarras over a hundred years before
their friends ever arrived there. He looked up from the newspaper and met the eyes of the witch, the knight, and the Mournish man.

“I think we’re lost,” Travis said.

Mark Anthony learned to love both books and mountains during childhood summers spent in a Colorado ghost town. Later he was trained as a paleoanthropologist but along the way grew interested in a different sort of human evolution—the symbolic progress reflected in myth and the literature of the fantastic. He undertook this project to explore the idea that reason and wonder need not exist in conflict. Mark Anthony lives and writes in Colorado, where he is currently at work on
Blood of Mystery
, the fourth book of
The Last Rune
. Fans of
The Last Rune
can visit the website at
http://www.thelastrune.com
.

BLOOD OF MYSTERY

BY
MARK ANTHONY

Travis Wilder has returned to Castle City, Colorado—along with loyal companions Durge, Lirith, and Sareth—but because of the time-twisting magic of the demon, the year is 1883. While Travis possesses the gate artifact of Morindu, as well as a drop of scarab’s blood to invoke its magic, using the gate would send them back to Eldh over a century too soon. There’s only one person who can help them return to their own time: Travis’s friend, the runelord Jack Graystone—dead in the present day, but alive here in the Old West. However, dark forces have taken over Castle City. An evil has followed them through the gate, and it will do anything to keep Travis from succeeding.

On Eldh, rumors of war fly across the Dominions like ravens. Both witches and warriors prepare for the Final Battle, and Aryn finds herself torn between obeying her conscience and betraying her sisterhood. Meanwhile, guided by starry portents and a mysterious message, Grace Beckett embarks on a quest to find Travis Wilder. Along the way, she must journey to a frozen kingdom in search of the shards of Fellring—the ancient sword that is her birthright, and which is the only weapon capable of defeating the Pale King before he opens the door to Eldh for his master: the vengeful god of nightfall, Mohg.

COMING IN SPRING 2002