In a carefully measured voice, the young man said, “It’s a dangerous route, Mer Jarrom. You know that. Orrin’s a damned good captain, and Jafe was as good a pilot as Erna’s ever seen. It’s still a nightmare of a trip, and you knew that when you hired us. Knew we might not make it at all, contract or no contract.” His voice faded away to a whisper. “Almost didn’t. Gods help us.”
“That’s through no fault of mine—eh? No big storms this way, no smashers out of the east, a small quake down south but that’d barely shake the waters, so what—” It struck him suddenly what the first mate had said. “What the hell do you mean, was? You lose a pilot, boy? Is that your excuse? Jafe Saccharat die on route?”
The first mate raised his head, and met Jarrom’s eyes at last. And Jarrom nearly took a step backward from the force of that gaze. He was a strong man, to be sure, and brave in the way that the strong can afford to be brave; he had seen his share of dockside violence and come out on top of most of it, had even wrestled a succubus once and not had his life sucked out in the process—which was as close to victory as anyone ever got with that kind. But though none of those situations had ever made him really afraid, the look in the boy’s eyes was enough to make his blood run cold. Bloodshot orbs stared out from a pale, hollowed face, underscored by purple crescents dark enough that they might have been bruises . . . but that wasn’t what shook him up so. A dozen men a day looked that bad, dockside, and Jarrom neither pitied nor feared them. No. It was something else that took him off guard, which he’d never seen before, not in man or demonling, or even dockhand. Not something in the first mate’s eyes, exactly. Perhaps . . . something absent?
“Not dead,” young man muttered. “The pilot’s alive. They’re all—we’re all—alive. I suppose.”
“You’d better explain yourself,” Jarrom warned. But the fire was out of his voice now, he could hear it. What had happened? What could happen, to put that look in a man’s eyes?
“It’s a dangerous route,” the first mate repeated. Empty of emotion, as if the explanation had been rehearsed so many times that it had lost all meaning to him. “First there’s the Shelf, y‘see, and that’s safe enough unless a smasher comes, but who can take the chance? Then there’s the ridges where the Serpent turns—jagged mounts, that can rip a hull to pieces in a minute—and the bars of the eastern Straits, they’re murderous too, and the whitewaters just east of Sattin. . . . You wanted us to rush your cargo in, Mr. Jarrom, and that means taking a lot of chances. Only a good pilot would dare it. Jafe was the best, y’see? And he took us to where we needed him most, in close to the shore of the rakhlands. All cliffs and boulders and treacherous shoreline, but he said it could save us time enough . . . and he knew the way. He said. Knew it all: every submerged mount and rock and how high each one sat, and how deep they’d be when the tides changed, and how much time between tide and countertide there was when a special way was open. . . .” He blinked. “Knew it all, Rafe did.”
“So what happened?” Jarrom demanded. “Why the hell weren’t you here when you were supposed to be?”
The first mate drew in a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. When he spoke again, there was a faint tremor in his voice. “I . . . that is, he . . . forgot, sir.”
“Forgot?”
“That’s right, sir.”
Indignation heated Jarrom’s blood anew, rage coursing through his veins like cheap booze. “Forgot? Your vulkin‘ pilot forgot the route?”
The first mate nodded. “That’s right, sir. Forgot . . . the whole Straits, I think he said. You see, there was this scream . . . that’s how we found out. We found him screaming like a looney on the forecastle, threatening to throw himself off. Said something had taken away all his landmarks, just wiped them clean out of his brain. Took three of us just to calm him down.”
Jarrom snorted. “That’s as likely the result of hard liquor as anything.”
The first mate glared, a look all the more accusatory for coming from those bloodshot eyes. Those terrible, haunted eyes “We don’t drink while doing the eastern stretch,” he said coldly. “No one does. The lay’s just too dangerous. Gets you killed faster than you can open a bottle.”
“All right, all right. So your saint of a pilot wasn’t drinking. He was . . . his landmarks were taken, all right? Taken right away. So what about his rutters? Were those snatched too? Or did the best Straits pilot in the east not bother taking notes?”
“Oh, he had‘em,” the first mate assured him. “Brought them out and showed them to us. Fine leather volumes, copied in his own hand. A signed hand, all personal symbols and the like.”
“So you couldn’t read them.” The story got more and more preposterous. “And I suppose, he ‘forgot’ how to read?”
The first mate hesitated, seemed about to elaborate. Then he simply nodded, and looked down at his feet again. “Yessir,” he whispered. “That’s the lot of it.”
“And your captain? And the rest of that mangy crew? All their brains taken, as well? You look whole enough.”
“It was like something took a part of you out,” the first mate whispered. “While you were sleeping, it’d happen. And then when you woke, that part just wasn’t there. It never came back, either. The captain . . . it won’t do you much good to talk to him, Mr. Jarrom. I say just take your cargo and go, and feel lucky it got here at all. And hope that whatever got us isn’t contagious.” He looked up again, met Jarrom’s gaze with his own. “You catch my drift?”
He turned away, refused to meet that tortured gaze. “I had buyers, you know. With a contract. Gods alone know if they were willing to wait another night, when all I could give them were empty promises. If they—” He stopped, and scowled. Squinting, to see the Matilla more clearly in the early evening’s darkness. “Who the hell are they?”
Three men were disembarking from the shallow craft. They hadn’t been among the crew, Jarrom knew that. He had signed on the crew himself. “You pick up passengers, boy? That’s against all contract, and you know it.”
“I . . . know that.” He seemed to be struggling for words. His hands, Jarrom noticed, were trembling. “I think . . . they were marooned. We saved them. I think.”
“You’re not sure of much, are you?” They were pale men, and they moved with almost feral grace. Dressed like locals, but the cloth sat awkwardly on their bodies. They were used to something else, clearly. Something less? One of them turned toward Jarrom and grinned briefly—a cat’s grin, a hunter’s grin, lean and hungry—and above all else, amused. Though all his instinct said he should go and confront them, Jarrom suddenly found he didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to go toward them, not for any purpose.
“I remembered enough myself,” the boy was whispering. “Barely enough. We went north, a different route. Safer up there, if you strike ground; some hope of getting moving again. Had to take it slow, you understand? Couldn’t help the schedule, sir. We’d have died, otherwise. Had to take it slow, do you understand?”
The strange men were gone now—vanished like fae-wraiths into the deep evening shadows—but Jarrom felt as if their eyes were still on him, mocking him. Felt his skin crawl, in a way it never had before. “Well,” he said loudly—as if somehow mere volume could overcome his growing unease. “We’re lucky you didn’t forget also, aren’t we?”
The reddened eyes blinked once, slowly. “I didn’t forget the route,” he said softly. “No. Not that.”
Suddenly, an eruption of sound and color whirled across the dock toward the two of them. “Bassy!” Silk taffeta rustling like the wind, tiny feet beating a rushed staccato on the fog-dampened timbers. Perfume, in feminine quantity. “Bassy, honey! You made it!”
Then she was in his arms, a tiny girl even thinner than the boy was. And she was crying with joy, and kissing him, and leaving smears of lipstick all over his tan, weathered face. “I was so scared, honey, so scared! When they said you all hadn’t come in on time—and I know how prompt Captain Rawney is, but you can imagine all the terrib
le things I thought of, when no one knew where you were—”
And Yiles Jarrom would never forget the look in the first mate’s eyes, when the boy’s fiancée embraced him. Never. Though days and weeks and even months might occlude the rest of that awful night in his memory, it could never erase that terrible vision—of a glance which said, in a single instant, what volumes of prose could never have expressed so eloquently. So horribly.
Who is she? the reddened gaze begged him. Who?
Help me!
“Gods help us all,” Jarrom whispered.
Seven
The Patriarch remembered:
“Mom?”
The house was quiet, preternaturally so. The boy hesitated at the doorway. “Mom?” No answer. He dropped off his school books in the hallway, on the heavy alteroak cabinet put there for that purpose. “Mom?” Suddenly he felt cold inside, and angry. Cold, because something was obviously very wrong. Angry, because he knew what it probably was.
“Mom!”
Damn it all, if she was doing that stuff again . . . he searched the house for signs of her presence, her self-indulgence: half-empty bottles lying wherever they happened to fall, thin foil wrappers with the remnants of cerebus powder—and the paraphernalia of her household tasks scattered about, left lying wherever the mood happened to strike her. But for once, all the obvious signs were absent. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t that. The tightness that had begun to build in the boy’s chest eased somewhat, and he thought: she’s still sober. Then added: maybe.
“Mom?”
The house was silent, except for a strange chittering sound that came from the kitchen. He walked that way, one hand nervously playing about the handle of his ward-knife. Any minute now his friends would start calling for him, impatient for his return. They might even come in after him, if they got bored enough with waiting. He had to find his mother before that happened, deal with her quickly, and get out. The shame of having them see her when she was doubly loaded was something he had no desire to experience. It had been bad enough with alcohol, when she was only doing that. Now that she had started mixing cerebus powder into her drinks, it was a hundred times worse.
That combination will kill you, the doctor had warned her. It’ll eat your brain right up. Is that what you want? Is that what you want for your family?
One of the boy’s friends hammered on the front door, impatient. The boy quickened his pace. He just had to find her, get permission to cross the river with the others, and then he could go. It didn’t even matter if she was wholly conscious of what she was saying when she gave him permission; as long as he did his duty and asked, he was covered. The important thing was, if he did it all quickly enough his friends would never have to see her. Oh, they could probably guess why they hadn’t been invited in . . . but that still wasn’t as bad as having them actually see. Not by a long shot.
As he put his hand on the kitchen doorknob he found that he was shaking. What if she was really in trouble? What if the doctor was right—that mixing illusory drugs and alcoholic disinhibition was really more than the human brain could handle? That someday she would fry her brain for good? What would he do, if that had finally happened?
Shaking, he forced himself to turn the doorknob. Not wanting to know what lay beyond.
Please, Mom. Be okay. Be sober . . . at least long enough to talk to me. Please.
He opened the door.
And saw.
And screamed.
Somewhere in the distance, a heavy alteroak door slammed open. He barely heard it. Terror had filled his throat so that it was impossible to breathe; he tried to step backward, but his hand was locked on the doorknob. In the kitchen, dozens of things chittered; dark things, wet things, things with shining claws and sharp teeth that dripped bright crimson on the Everclean tiles. Things that sat on his mother’s shoulders, dipping bright claws into her matted hair and bringing up soft, slimy tidbits to eat.
He managed to take a step backward. Heart pounding. Mind reeling.
Two steps. Another.
It’ll eat up your brain, the doctor had said.
He ran.
Eight
Never sleep through the true night, Damien’s master had taught him. Whether you mean to use its power or not, you should be awake to observe its passage. There are too many things in our world that draw their life from that ultimate Darkness, too many evils that can only be Worked when all sunlight is gone. So be awake, and take your enemy’s measure.
He sat on the wide ledge of his room’s northernmost window, looking out over the city. His nerves still jangled from the dream which the harsh mechanical alarm clock had dispelled. It was 3:05. The true darkness would last a mere three minutes tonight—and true to his training, he was awake to watch it happen. He pulled open the heavy curtains at his window, saw Casca’s yellow-green crescent sinking defiantly in the east. He watched as its light slowly faded from the night sky. Then: utter darkness. The Core was gone, and with it the millions of stars that marked the heart of the galaxy; Erna’s night sky looked out on desolation, across an emptiness so vast that it was easy to forget there were other stars at all, much less other planets where living things flourished and fought and gave birth and died . . . much less any place called Earth.
Damien breathed deeply, and patterned a Seeing so that his vision might respond to the fae’s special wavelengths. Below him, in the city streets, deep purple shadows stretched tentatively forth, as if testing their strength. Tendrils of deepest violet—so dark they could hardly be seen, so intense that to look on them was painful—began to creep their way into the city’s open spaces. Shopping plazas, city squares, even rooftops: places where the sunlight normally kept such things at bay, now made defenseless by the true night’s special darkness. Damien watched the flow of it, muttered a prayer of thanksgiving that there were no people in the streets. Of all the forms the fae might take, this was the most dangerous. It could manifest in minutes what would otherwise take hours, if not days—and with a much more violent tenor. Thank God for the light of the Core, which kept the stuff at bay half the year, and the three moons, sun-reflecting, which guarded the darker nights. Most of the darker nights.
He tried to get some sense of the local currents—to read who might be Working this special darkness, and why—but it was like trying to focus on a single ripple in the midst of white-water rapids. At last, exhausted by the effort, he let his Vision fade. Back home he could have identified every sorceror in town by now, and spotted those few who dared to Work the stuff—but the currents here were so volatile and so complex that his skill was barely more than a child’s by comparison.
He watched as the point of Domina’s crescent slipped over the eastern horizon, right on schedule. Watched the deep violet light thin out and dissipate, as if it were no more than an early morning ground fog scattered by sunlight. He watched it recede into the myriad cracks and crevices that would protect it from the light, while fresh moonlight scoured the streets and rooftops clean of its deadly presence. He watched until the moon was half-risen, then went back to bed.
3:35. He fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.
Fifteen minutes later, the explosion came.
“What the hell?” He sat up groggily, still half-immersed in sleep. Remembering a loud, sudden noise that hadn’t been fully incorporated into his dream, which was gone before he was awake enough to identify it. Was it his imagination? He shook his head to clear it, and heard doors slam along the corridor of the Annex. Feet running in the hallway, slipper-shod. No. Not his imagination at all.
He threw on a cotton robe and, as an afterthought, grabbed for his sword. No telling what was going on, he’d best be prepared. Out into the corridor then, to quickly take his bearings. A sister-priest from Kale was just emerging from the room opposite his; her face was white. “Southwest,” she whispered, and he realized that the window of her room must face that way. “What is it?” he asked, but she shook her head: No, can’t help you, I don
’t know.
Southwest. He ran down the corridor as quickly as he could, took the broad central stairs two at a time. The outer door was just closing as he reached it. There was too much light coming in through the windows, much more than the crescent Domina should have provided. A light that flickered, like flame gone mad. As he put his hand to the door and flung it open he realized, with a start, that even that was wrong. Fire should be yellow, orange, even yellow-white; this light was a chill blue, as if from some unnatural flame.
Outside the Annex, some two dozen guests of the Church stood with their heads thrown back, gaping at the sky. Damien didn’t stop to look. If the fire—or whatever it was—was to the southeast of here, he was in the wrong place to determine its source. He sprinted around the side of the Cathedral, until that building no longer blocked his view. And then saw—
Fire. Spurting heavenward. Not a natural fire, no; cold blue, like the quake-wards. Fae-spawned flame, without a doubt. Damien tried to visualize the city’s layout, to determine the fire’s source. And as he did so something tightened inside him, a mixture of dread and fear so cold and so intense that he trembled where he stood.
Ciani ...
He ran. Down Commerce Street, pushing his way past frightened mothers and scurrying vendors and the inevitable rubber-necked tourists. Shoving them out of the way, when necessary. Past Market Lane, past Seven Corners, into the artisan’s district, then through it and beyond. Here, on this quiet street, the Fae Shoppe had done its business. And here, on this suddenly crowded street—
It burned. Burned with a fae-light so intense that it drove him back; he had to fight his every physical instinct to get within a block of it. It was impossible to look at, it burned like a thousand suns, it would surely sear the retinas of anyone who tried. He worked a Shielding for his eyes, felt the light about him dim, then tried to look again. Better. He forced himself forward, past the firewagons that were even now being pushed into place, past an adept in singed robes whose attention was fixed on the fire, past . . . there were too many people to count, running toward the fire or away from it. He got as close to it as he could, with all the force of the faeborn flames pushing back at him. Until he could feel its unnatural smoke in his lungs, and had to work a Shielding against that, too.
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