Crown of Shadows

by C. S. Friedman

  “It’s over,” the demon announced. Not to Damien. To the air above him ... or something in it. “You failed, brother! Give it up!”

  —And the illusion was suddenly gone from Damien’s eyes, the false backdrop of night that had blinded him to a deadly truth. To the east of him dawn blazed brightly—dawn!—and even as he watched the white sun breached the horizon, filling the valley beneath it with fatal, unforgiving light. Had Tarrant been shelterless right now ... He felt sick just thinking about it.

  “This way,” Karril said gently, and he led Damien into the cavern’s darkness.

  Immersion in the blackness of the underearth was blinding after such a vision; he fumbled for his lantern and lit it with trembling hands, praying that Karril wouldn’t leave him behind while he did so. But the demon waited patiently, and not until he had the wick adjusted and the perforated door latched shut did he urge him onward, into the mountain’s heart.

  Two chambers later, safely beyond the reach of the sun’s killing light, they found Tarrant. The adept was sitting with his back to stone, his eyes shut as if in pain.

  “It’s dawn,” Damien said quietly.

  “So I gather.” The pale eyes slid slowly open, fixing first on Damien and then, at last, on Karril. “You saved my life,” he whispered. “In defiance of Iezu law.”

  “He broke our law.” The demon’s tone was defiant. “Should I sit back and let him be rewarded for that?”

  The Hunter shut his eyes again. Now that the illusion had been lifted, Damien could see that his face was reddened where dawn’s light had fallen upon it. What kind of power did these Iezu wield, that could blind a man to his own pain?

  Perceptual distortion, he mused. That’s all it is. A power more deadly than any other, if used without reservation.

  “Thank you,” Tarrant whispered. Not to Karril alone, it seemed, but to both of them.

  The demon hesitated. “I can give you dreams—”

  “No. Leave me the pain.” He lifted a hand to his face, wincing as the fingers made contact. “Let it be a reminder to me of what we’re fighting.”

  The stars, Damien thought suddenly. The stars had been wrong. Arago shouldn’t have risen that high until the sun was nearly up. He should have known the truth from that. He should have guessed.

  “Don‘t,” the demon said gently. They can read what’s in your heart. “You couldn’t have known. Not even we knew, until the dawn was well underway.”

  He looked sharply at the demon. “We?”

  Karril nodded. “There are others here. Some as human as I am, others so alien in form even I can’t speak to them. And the mother of us all is stirring, after so many centuries of inactivity that some of us thought she might be dead.”

  “Toward what end?” Damien asked sharply. “Will she get involved in this?”

  The demon shrugged wearily. “Who knows? Those few of us who can speak to her use a language I don’t understand. Most think that she’ll respect her own law and stay out of it. But then, we also thought that Calesta would be punished long before this.” He looked at Tarrant; his expression was grim. “I can’t keep my brother from using his power to stop you, but I won’t allow him to kill you directly. That much I can promise.”

  “Karril—”

  “It’s not much of an assurance, I know.” His tone was frankly apologetic. “But it’s the most I can offer right now. I’m sorry.”

  “Karril, please—”

  But the demon had already begun to fade. A few seconds later only his voice remained, and a few precious words that lingered in the dark cavern air before they, too, dispersed into nothingness.

  Whispered:

  Good luck.

  Thirty-four

  The creature called Amoril ran through the halls of the Hunter’s keep, howling out his frustration in a wild, inarticulate cry. Over the shapeless mounds of what had once been human flesh—the Hunter’s servants, now half-eaten and left to rot—past curtains soaked in blood and urine, past golden sconces which had once held torches but which now, in deference to Amoril’s new Master, held only darkness, he made his way to the Hunter’s chapel, where an even greater Darkness awaited.

  “Not fair!” he screamed. The human words felt strange to him, tattered remnants of another life. But his anger couldn’t be vented without the proper words and so he remembered them, formed them, forced them out. “It’s not fair!” he howled to the black space surrounding him. The smell of blood was thick in the air, and he could see crusted stains on the altar, left over from his nightly human sacrifice. “We made a deal!”

  For a moment it seemed that he was truly alone in the room. If so, it would hardly be the first time. The dark forces which he had courted back in his human past didn’t take an active role in his life; rather, having remade him so that he served their purpose, they preferred to sit back and feed in silence on the fruits of his labors. Now, however, something stirred. Its presence was pain and fear and insufferable hunger, and the thing called Amoril whimpered as it manifested itself.

  Have patience, came the black whisper.

  “You promised me the Forest,” he choked out. “You said it would be mine!”

  It will, a thousand voices assured him. As soon as the Hunter is dead.

  “You said you were going to kill him!”

  We said that he would die, the voices corrected. And so he will, once the compact is broken. Soon.

  “There are men in the Forest,” he growled. “Church men with weapons, coming here to the keep. The Forest should be stopping them, but it isn’t. He still controls it!” Phlegm clotted suddenly in his throat and he spat it out onto the floor, a thick black mass. “Why would he let them come here? Why won’t his Workings stop them?”

  There was silence for a moment, such utter silence that for a moment he feared his Masters had deserted him. Then the voices returned, a sibilant whisper that filled the cold room.

  The cause of that is irrelevant. Gerald Tarrant will be dead before the next sunrise, and the Forest will be freed from his control. You will have enough time to stop them.

  “You said he would die before and he didn‘t,” he accused. “Why should I believe you now?”

  The answer was pain. Black pain, cold pain, that wrenched at his limbs and sent needles of ice stabbing down into his flesh. With a cry of anguish he fell to the floor, his body contorting into shapes no human form should ever adopt, racked by the Unnamed’s punishment.

  At last, whimpering, he lay on the floor like a beaten dog, echoes of the terrible pain scraping across his nerves like a rasp.

  Your role is not to question, but to serve. The whispers had become one voice now, that filled the whole chamber with its venom. He trembled, knowing how merciless the owner of that voice could be. Tarrant will not fight this death. He embraces it willingly, for the power it will give him.

  “Power?” he whispered weakly. Suddenly he was struck by a new and terrible fear: what if the Hunter, in his dying moment, struck out against the servant who had betrayed him? The man whose sacrifice had sent him to Hell? What then? He began to gasp out a question, but the sounds of it caught in his throat. What if the Unnamed perceived in that question further defiance? He whimpered softly and drew up his body into a tight ball, as if that simple posture could somehow save him. No. Better by far to say nothing. Better to bear this fear in silence.

  But the voice must have heard his thoughts, for it answered him. The power he invokes will be directed at another, not you.

  It took a minute for the words to sink in. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

  But the voices were gone. He waited for a while longer in his huddled position, shivering with dread, but no new power assaulted him. At last, very slowly, he unfolded his limbs. No response. Very carefully, very slowly, he raised himself up. Still nothing. With a whimper that was half fear and half relief, he finally got to his feet again. Still nothing. The Unnamed had truly gone.

  One more day, he thought. He
could taste the Forest’s power on his lips, a heady tonic. Just one more day, and then it’ll all be mine. Won’t you be sorry then, my brave little Churchmen!

  Then all the human words deserted him. Hungry, restless, the creature called Amoril set off at a frantic lope to find his pack.

  Thirty-five

  The Forest had changed.

  Narilka had gone barely ten steps into it, and already she knew something was wrong. It wasn’t a difference she saw as much as one that she felt, but she felt it so strongly that for a moment she just stopped, too shaken to move forward. She remembered the Forest from before. Not clearly, not willingly, but she remembered. The Hunter had set her loose in these woods and she had stumbled through its preternatural darkness like a terrified animal, not yet aware that the creature out of legend who followed her trail was a man, and would never hurt her. Now, as she breathed in the rotting stink that came and went like a breeze, she knew that something was wrong. As she gazed upon the necrotic mold that clung to the trunks of the Hunter’s trees, she knew that no growth like that had been here before. And as she dared to reach out with her hopes and her fears into the heart of the Forest itself, struggling for some fae-borne sense of Andry’s passage, the presence that she sensed within that realm of shadows was enough to make her draw back, sickened. Not a human presence, that. Not the clean demonic signature of the Hunter either, which she knew so well from their two brief encounters. This was something less than human, something so unclean that the Forest itself would surely vomit it up if it had the power to do so. What was going on here?

  She reached out for a nearby tree—one of the few healthy ones—and shivered, trying to absorb it all. Had he changed also, the Forest’s monarch? Was this transformation just a facet of his own soul’s evolution, reflected in the trees and the earth of his homeland as a simpler man might be reflected in a mirror? If so ... She shuddered. The monarch of the old Forest had declared her safe. Would his promise hold in this transformed place? And what about Andrys’ supposed invulnerability? Suddenly she felt very cold, and very alone. Until this moment her quest had been like a dream, her way so brightly lit by the flame of her love that she never got a close look at the shadows which were gathering behind her. Now, suddenly, she felt smothered by them.

  With trembling hands she lit her lantern, so that its earthy light might reassure her. As she adjusted the wick, she heard a sudden sound behind her and she almost dropped it as she whipped about, her free hand going to the hilt of the long knife which was sheathed at her hip. But it was only a forager rooting in the dirt. Thank the gods. For a moment she had thought it might be a soldier, and had braced herself for a far more unpleasant confrontation.

  The guard at the Church camp would be changing soon and they would discover that she was gone. Or maybe it would take them longer than that. Maybe they had enough duties to occupy their time, so that each soldier would think another had attended to her. Maybe hours would pass and the sun would set and darkness would fall again before they realized that she had slipped away at dawn ... and by then it would be too late for them to stop her. Gods, let it be so! She had wanted to circumvent the Church camp entirely, had even turned her horse toward the east with the intention of cirling wide about it and entering the Forest from another direction. Then it had struck her just how foolish that plan would be. There were no roads inside the Forest, and certainly no markers to measure distance or indicate direction. How could she hope to find Andrys unless she followed directly in his footsteps? So she had come back reluctantly to Mordreth, her starting point, and taken the north road directly to the Forest’s edge. Where the Church had made its encampment. Where the soldiers of the One God stood guard against all enemies, real and imagined.

  It had been easy enough for her to explain her presence to them. A lifetime of having men make presumptions about her nature had given her a feel for that game, even though the presumptions were usually wrong. Perhaps she was lucky that men were on guard when she rode into the camp. Surely women would have seen through her subterfuge, and watched more closely for hints of what lay beneath. Men rarely bothered.

  She was afraid for her lover, she said as the guards confronted her. She had spent too many sleepless nights and tortured, distracted days thinking about the dangers he was facing, and at last she had decided to follow him. That was what she told them, and certainly the words were true enough. What was false was the manner in which she spoke them, and the conclusions she inspired the guards to draw. She appeared to be a weak woman, a confused child, a fragile creature who clearly had never considered the hard reality of battle when she set off to be with her loved one. Now, at the edge of the Forest, with these men explaining the true nature of war to her, she would of course understand that she couldn’t ride into the Forest alone, that she didn’t want to ride into the Forest alone, that the best thing for her to do was wait here, in this camp, until her lover finished his manly work and returned to her. They would be glad to protect her until then, they said. And their eyes added: such a woman needs protection.

  Bullshit.

  They let her use his tent for the night. That brought genuine tears to her eyes, to see the manner in which he had left his few possessions, to read his state of mind in their disarray. Belongings were strewn all about the interior, soap and razors, bits of clothing ... and a tassel. She gasped when she saw that. It was a tiny thing, black silk with brass tinsel wound around the base, and she wouldn’t have noticed it at all if it hadn’t been so familiar. She’d owned a scarf with tassels on the ends, just like that. She remembered it. She’d worn it as a belt one night and then lost it. Later she’d thought that maybe she had left it at his place, but when she’d looked for it the next day, it wasn’t there. Or so it had seemed.

  Oh, Andrys. She shut her eyes tightly, and her hand clenched shut about the tiny thing. He must have hidden it among his possessions days in advance so that she wouldn’t find it and reclaim it, more comfortable with the concept of theft than he was with the thought of asking her openly for a keepsake. There were tears coming to her eyes now and for a short while, in the privacy of his tent, she let them flow. Why had she let him come here alone? Why had she ceded to anyone—even his God—the authority to separate them?

  Never again, she promised herself.

  She’d spent that night in the Church camp, huddled among his possessions. In the morning it had rained, which was an event so fortuitous that she whispered a quick thanksgiving to Saris, just in case the goddess had been responsible for it. In the distance she could see the morning guard huddled in their rain capes, keeping watch on the paths that led to and from the Forest. Did they really think something from that darkbound realm would brave the sunlight to strike at them? Or were they more concerned that she might continue her journey, and compromise the purity of their faith-driven campaign with her presence? She had no doubt that they would stop her if they could, and so she planned her next move carefully, knowing that she would have only one chance to get past them.

  There was a cape among Andry’s belongings similar to theirs, and she put it on. Its bulk covered her clothing and her pack and its hood, drawn forward against the rainfall, cast her features into deep shadow. Clad thus, her booted legs imitating the stride of the soldiers as best she could, she made her way to the outskirts of the camp. There was another guard there—a man, she guessed by the height—and for a moment she thought he would recognize her despite her disguise. Heart pounding, she raised up a hand as if to acknowledge his presence, then set off with a firm stride toward the edge of the Forest. He didn’t follow her. Nor did he raise an alarm. She knew that he would have done one or the other if he’d realized who she was; he could hardly allow the sanctity of his Patriarch’s mission to be compromised by the presence of a single pagan woman!

  Remembering the Patriarch’s rejection of her pleas, she shook her head sadly. Is there so little to fear in this world that you have to make enemies out of your neighbors? Does your God have nothing
better to do than pass judgment on the innocent? But deep within her heart, where it hurt to look, she did indeed understand him. And she knew that in a way he was right. She had seen the Forest and she knew its power, and nothing short of the One God Himself was going to bring it down.

  Quietly she slipped out of the rain cape and let it fall to the ground behind her. There was no need for it now that the rain had stopped, and its bulk might slow her down. A faint mist clung to the ground, but despite its clammy touch she was grateful for it, for it made the earth damp enough to hold the mark of footprints. If she could find the place where Andrys and his fellows had entered the Forest, she could surely follow their trail. It was too bad that her improvised plan hadn’t allowed her to bring her horse along; it would have made the journey easier. But if she had tried to bring it along with her the guards would surely have noticed, and therefore she must do without it.

  As she traveled, searching the ground by lamplight for a promising sign, the Forest changed about her. Not in a neat progression, as one might expect, but in fits and starts. In one place the smell of rotting meat was so strong that it nearly choked her, and she held a damp cloth over her mouth in the desperate hope that it would keep out the worst of the stink. Ten steps later, that smell was gone. Unwholesome growths clung to the tree trunks in one place, but left neighboring acres undisturbed. Wormlike creatures writhed at the foot of the great trees as tribes of smaller parasites slowly chewed their way through their skins, but twenty steps away no sign of worm or parasite was visible. She didn’t remember the Hunter’s realm being like that before. She couldn’t imagine that the man who had shown her the glories of the night—fearsome and violent, yes, but ordered as the finest music is ordered, and pristine as the moonlight itself—would have condoned such a state of affairs.