The Last Rune 4: Blood of Mystery Read online

  “What does it read, Falken?” Melia asked.

  Grace licked her lips. “It reads, ‘Is it fate?’ The words are written next to a passage about the prophecy of the one called Runebreaker.”

  Aryn sat up straight. “Runebreaker?”

  “Yes, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that—”

  Falken brushed the page. “—the first letter of ‘fate’ is written backward.”

  Beltan leaped to his feet and pounded the table. “By the blood of the Bull, it’s Travis! He’s a mirror reader—you said so yourself, Falken. And this was written backward. It has to be him. He’s in Tarras somewhere.”

  “Calm yourself,” Falken said in a warning tone. “We don’t know for certain that Travis wrote this.”

  Except Grace knew the bard didn’t believe that. A note in English with one of the letters reversed, scribbled next to a passage about Runebreaker. Who else could it be but Travis? Only how could he have written a note in a book that had obviously been lost for years at the University of Tarras?

  Grace took the half-coin back from Falken, then flipped to the front of the book. A slip of paper was pasted inside the cover. On it, the librarian had written the date Grace was to return the book to the library—a fortnight hence. Above it, crossed out, was a list of previous due dates. Grace looked at the one just above hers in the list.

  Durdath the Second, in the thirty-seventh year of the blessed rule of His Eminence, Ephesian the Sixteenth.

  A gasp came from behind Grace. It was Melia; she had risen to read over Grace’s shoulder.

  “But that’s impossible,” the lady said. “The sixteenth Ephesian died well over a century ago.”

  Some of Beltan’s exuberance gave way to confusion. “What are you talking about, Melia? Even I know Travis couldn’t have written something in a book that’s been lost behind a shelf for more than a hundred years.”

  “No,” Melia murmured. “No, I don’t suppose he could have.”

  More conversation and cups of maddok ensued. However, at the end of it all, they were no closer to unraveling either mystery. They could only guess why Tira’s star had vanished—and could only hope both the child goddess and the Stone of Fire were still somehow safe.

  “Maybe the star will rise again tomorrow,” Aryn said, but even the young baroness seemed unconvinced by the hopeful-ness of those words.

  Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed. Outside the windows, the moon and stars had vanished, replaced by flat blue light. Aryn was nodding in her chair, and Falken wrapped his faded cloak around her shoulders.

  “Come, Your Highness,” he murmured, rousing her with a gentle shake. “It’s long past time for bed.”

  Grace pushed a half-finished cup of maddok away. Her nerves buzzed like wires. Exhausted as she was, there would be no sleep for her.

  Melia glanced at Beltan. “I know you’re no longer officially my knight protector, dear. But would you mind helping a weary former goddess up the stairs?”

  Beltan nodded and moved to her. However, his green eyes were haunted, and Grace knew of whom he was thinking.

  She pushed herself up from the table. “I think I’ll go see if the milk has been delivered yet.”

  Grace had found it amusing when she discovered that, just like on Earth in a bygone era, clay jugs of milk and cream were delivered to the villa’s doorstep each morning. She knew the servants would be tired from having to stay up so late serving maddok; if the milk had arrived, she could take it to the larder in the kitchen and save them some work.

  As Melia and Beltan followed Falken and Aryn to the stairs, Grace headed for the front door of the villa. She pushed back the iron latch and opened the door, letting in the moist grayness of morning. She looked down. Something indeed lay on the doorstep, only it wasn’t a jug of milk. It was a man in a brown robe.

  “Beltan!” she called out on instinct.

  In moments the knight was there. “What is it, Grace?”

  She knelt beside the figure that slumped facedown on the stone step. Beltan let out an oath, then knelt beside her. Grace was dimly aware of the others standing in the open doorway, but she focused on the man before her.

  His brown robe was rent in several places, and the fabric was damp with blood, but he was breathing. She pressed two fingers to his wrist. His pulse was weak but even. All of her senses told her his injuries were not critical. But he was cold, suffering from exposure.

  And how is that possible, Grace? It barely got down to room temperature during the night. A naked baby could have slept outside and been fine.

  That thought could wait until she was sure the patient was out of danger. She started to turn him over so she could check for more wounds.

  “Beltan, help me.”

  With strong, gentle hands, he turned the man over while she held his head steady. The front of his robe wasn’t torn; whatever had caused the injuries had come at him from behind. A heavy cowl concealed his face. Grace pushed it back.

  For the third time since the sun last set, shock coursed through her. He was a young man, mid-twenties at the most, his eyes shut. His face was broad, with a flat, crooked nose and thick, rubbery lips. However, despite its homeliness, there was a peace about his visage that was compelling.

  “By Vathris, I recognize him!” Beltan said, and by the gasps of the others they did as well.

  But how can it be, Grace? He helped you save Travis from being burned by the Runespeakers at the Gray Tower. Only then he vanished, and you never saw him again.

  Until now.

  Grace brushed damp hair from his heavy brow, and his brown eyes fluttered open. For a moment she saw fear in them, then they focused on her, and his lips parted in a grin. He mouthed the words Lady Grace, and she glimpsed the stump that was all that remained of his tongue.

  He lifted bloodied hands, moving them in a gesture that communicated with uncanny eloquence. Good morrow, my lady. I hope you’ll forgive my appearance.

  Grace didn’t know if he meant his sudden arrival, or the state of his robes. Nor did it matter. This was utterly impossible. But maybe that was all right; maybe sometimes the impossible did happen.

  She flung her arms around Sky’s thick shoulders and laughed.

  5.

  If he didn’t look too hard, Travis Wilder could almost believe he was finally, impossibly home.

  Panting for breath, he paused at one of the numberless switchbacks the trail made as it snaked its way up the eastern escarpment of Castle Peak. He wiped sweat and grit from his stubbly bald head with a handkerchief and adjusted the lumpy canvas pack slung over his sore shoulder. A thousand feet below, the valley trapped the last rays of late-afternoon sun like flecks of color in a Fifty-Niner’s gold pan. The thin sigmoid of Granite Creek flashed in the light, sleek and silver as a trout, but purple shadows already made pine-thick islands of the moraines at the foot of Signal Ridge.

  He knew he should ignore the fire in his lungs and keep moving. Night came early to the mountains, and it wouldn’t be long before he was no longer sweating. Even in July, frost was no stranger at ten thousand feet once dusk fell, and they didn’t want to spend a second night like the first. For what seemed an eternity the four of them had huddled together on the dirt floor of the abandoned miner’s cabin, silent and shivering, while wind sliced through the chinks in the logs.

  You could have used a rune, Travis. He touched the hard lump in his shirt pocket. Sinfathisar let you speak runes the last time you were on Earth. Just because this is a di ferent century doesn’t matter. You could have spoken Krond and lit a fire. Lirith was blue this morning, and there was ice on Durge’s mustache. And Sareth...

  However, the idea of trying to speak the rune of fire had been more terrifying than the possibility of freezing to death. When he used magic, things had a tendency to get burned and broken. And sometimes those things were people. He didn’t know if he was really the one Lirith and the Witches called Runebreaker, but he knew they were right
to fear his power. He did.

  You need to get back. Sareth didn’t look good when you left. He’s probably coming down with altitude sickness, and the others won’t know what that is. He needs to drink a lot of fluids, but the water up here isn’t safe until you boil it, and that’s not going to happen until you get there with the matches.

  His boots of Eldhish leather stayed stuck to the trail. If he half shut his eyes, the valley didn’t look much different than the last time he had gazed out over it. The stegosaurus-backed silhouette of the mountains hadn’t changed, and the high plain at their feet was speckled with the same dusty green sage. However, when he opened his eyes fully, his preternatural vision quickly picked out everything that was wrong.

  Below and to his right, the southern flanks of Castle Peak were populated with cabins and rough-milled mine shacks that, in his memory, were no more than weathered gray splinters. Heaps of tailings, red and umber, oozed down the mountainside like the discharge from fresh wounds. A heavy mist of pulverized rock drifted on the air, and the sound of the last powder blast still echoed off the peaks like late thunder.

  Across the valley, a thin line of steam rose from a train just pulling into what must be a temporary depot. Travis could make out the pale line of the railroad grade that reached toward town. Just ten more miles of narrow-gauge track to lay, and the engines would be pulling into Castle City proper, bringing more people and cheaper goods from Denver, and taking raw ore from the mines back to the rock mills, where bright silver was freed from black carbonate of lead.

  Castle City itself was far bigger than he had ever seen it. But then, it was a strange trait of Colorado mountain towns that, unlike most cities, they grew backward. A rich gold or silver strike could turn a small mining camp into a clapboard city of five thousand people overnight. Then, as one by one the mines played out and shut down, people moved on, and the city shrank. A few such towns found rebirth a century later as winter playgrounds for the wealthy. Castle City was one of the rest—a patchwork of Victorian frame houses, rust-roofed shacks, and not-so-mobile homes where just a few hundred souls dwelled, a ghost of its former splendor.

  At least, that was how things were in Travis’s memory. But just then, in the valley a thousand feet below him, that ghost was alive and well.

  He still hadn’t gone all the way into town. That thought had frightened him as much as speaking the rune of fire. This was every bit as much an alien world as Eldh was the first time he had set foot in the Winter Wood. How would people react to his Mournish clothes or his twenty-first century accent? Would he even be able to communicate with them?

  His fears hadn’t been entirely unfounded.

  While in this era, as in his own, McKay’s General Store would have had everything he needed, he had instead stopped at the first shop he came to a half mile outside Castle City. Its square false front couldn’t hide the crude cabin that skulked behind, but Travis didn’t care. The store was situated close to the mines of Castle Peak, and—no doubt like a lot of the miners—Travis was more concerned with proximity than selection.

  He pushed through the door into a dim space, the air stinking with smoke. Wooden crates made a haphazard maze. Guns, tin lanterns, hams, and pickaxes hung from low rafters. The only person in view was a short, dour woman who stood behind a counter fashioned from a plank slapped over two barrels. Her oily hair was pulled back in a severe knot, and she wore a heavy black dress, its shoulders dusted with white flakes of dandruff. She looked up from the ledger open before her and gazed at him with narrow eyes in a puffy red face.

  “So what are yeh now, some kind o’ bilk?” Even with the help of the silver half-coin, her high, nasal words were only barely understandable. “An’ here I was thinkin’ the Cousin Jacks out o’ Cornwall were a queer lot, what with their tales an’ all. Well now, I cain’t help yeh if yer grubstake is already bust. I don’t give nothing away for free. ’Cepting for lead, that is.” She nodded to the gun lying on the counter within easy reach of her hand—a small derringer with a mother-of-pearl grip.

  Travis started to brush the dust from his flowing Mournish garb, then forced himself to stop. He didn’t want to draw more attention to his outlandish clothes. He cleared his throat and tried to speak in as plain a voice as possible.

  “I have these.” He held out the small hoard of thick gold coins he and the others had collected by rummaging through their pockets. It wasn’t much. All the same, a fire lit in the woman’s eyes.

  “Well, don’t jes’ stand thar. Give me them eagles.”

  He gave her the gold pieces, and she frowned, no doubt realizing they weren’t U.S. coins after all. Taking up a small knife, she scratched several flakes off the edge of one of the coins. She grunted, then placed the coins on one side of a small scale and piled brass weights on the other. Travis noticed her thumb lingered along with the weights, but he said nothing.

  “I’ll give yeh fifty dollars for ’em. Well go on.” She waved her stubby hand. “Take yer pick o’ the store. I’ll tell yeh when yeh’ve hit yer limit.”

  By the chortling in her voice, Travis knew she was getting the better end of the deal, but it didn’t matter. He just wanted to get out before someone else came along. Hastily, he gathered an armload of goods and brought them to the counter. She was clearly disappointed when, after totaling the bill, she still owed him twenty dollars. Curtly, she counted the large, rumpled bank-notes into his hand. He loaded the canvas pack he had bought and headed for the door.

  “That’s all the gold yer likely to see on that thar mountain,” she called after him.

  He hesitated. “I’m not looking for gold,” he said, then stepped outside.

  Now the sweat had dried on his head, and the wheezing of his lungs had subsided to a faint rattle. Travis turned and continued up the trail.

  By the time he reached the abandoned cabin, the whole valley lay in the shadow of the mountain. Travis was the one who had spotted the cabin the previous afternoon. Weary after their battle with the demon in the Dome of the Etherion, and dazed at finding themselves on Earth, they had fled the people and noise of Castle City. They needed a place where they could think and get their bearings. Then Travis had looked up and had seen the small, boxy shape perched above them on the slopes of Castle Peak. The cabin had been abandoned, no doubt by a miner whose claim had yielded not silver, but worthless rock.

  Travis opened the cabin’s sun-beaten plank door to find that the others had been busy while he was gone. Durge, in a bout of good Embarran industriousness, had chinked the walls with the mud from the tiny creek that trickled past the cabin, shutting out most of the drafts. Lirith had swept the hard-packed floor with a bundle of sticks and cleaned out the crude stone fireplace, laying a neat stack of wood inside. However, Sareth sat in a corner, his usually coppery face ashen.

  “It’s good you’re back,” Durge said, not voicing the words Travis could see in the knight’s deep-set brown eyes. We were worried about you.

  Travis eased the pack off his shoulder, which immediately began cramping. “How are you doing, Sareth?”

  The Mournish man grinned. “I keep trying to tell Lirith my head has cracked open, but she refuses to believe me. By now she’s probably swept my brains out the door. And my breath seems to come but grudgingly.”

  Durge nodded. “The air seems strangely thin here. Is it always so on this Earth of yours?”

  “It’s the altitude,” Travis said. “We’re the better part of a league higher up than we were in Tarras. Everyone needs to drink lots of water.”

  “But you told us earlier not to drink the water,” Durge said, glowering.

  “That’s because we need to boil it first.” He started to say more, then stopped. He was too tired to explain about microscopic amoebas and how they could play havoc with your intestines. Right now Durge could simply think he was contradictory.

  Lirith knelt beside the pack. “Did you get the...mashes you talked about, so we can make a fire?”

  “Matches.
Yes, and more.”

  Travis knelt beside her, and they unloaded the contents of the pack. It looked like less than it had at the store. Even in 1883, thirty dollars didn’t seem to buy much. Of course, Travis knew prices had been outrageously inflated in the booming mining towns. A sack of flour could go for a hundred dollars. But with the nearing of the railroad, prices were probably on their way down.

  Along with a tin kettle for boiling water and a single cup they could share, he had gotten some food—soda crackers, a small wheel of cheese, a lemon, and a few cans of sardines. The cans probably had lead in them, but that was the least of their worries at the moment.

  There were also new clothes for each of them, garb that would hopefully keep others from thinking they were bilks, whatever those were. There was a pair of canvas jeans and a calico shirt for each of the men, and a brown poplin dress for Lirith. Their Eldish shoes would have to do, but Travis’s and Durge’s boots were plain enough to go unnoticed, and the low shoes Lirith and Sareth wore weren’t so far off from moccasins. The handkerchief Travis had used to mop his head had been a last-minute luxury. He wasn’t certain why he had gotten it; he just seemed to remember something about how you weren’t supposed to run off on an adventure without one.

  “I also got this,” Travis said, pulling out a small purple bottle. “They didn’t have any aspirin.”

  Lirith frowned at the bottle. “Aspirin?”

  “Don’t worry about it—I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been invented yet. But I think this is almost the same thing.”

  The small label glued to the bottle read salicylate of soda. Lirith took the bottle, unstopped it, and held it beneath her nose. She raised an eyebrow and looked up.

  “It smells like tincture of willow bark.”

  Travis nodded. “It should help Sareth’s head.”

  Soon they had a fire going, and the kettle of creek water hung from an iron hook over the flames. However, Travis was a bit disappointed the others didn’t seem to regard the matches as magical in nature.