“You may lose your reputation for evil.”
The stranger chuckled. “Unlikely.”
“So what brings you to this place? To me? Or am I to believe that you simply desired my company?”
For a long moment the stranger just looked at him. Karril made himself another full goblet and drank from it, waiting him out; such a silence could mean anything.
“What do you know,” he said at last, “about the incident at the Fae Shoppe?”
The demon’s expression darkened perceptibly. He stood, and turned away from his visitor. Goblet and couch both disappeared; the passionate reds of the room’s interior were exchanged for blue, sullen and grayed. “Why do you want to know?”
“I was at the place earlier this evening. At what remained of it. I worked a Knowing—and a Seeing, and a Divining, and several more things whose titles you wouldn’t recognize. All blocked. It takes more than an apprentice’s skill to block my sight, Karril. Something about that shop was damned important to someone—and they must have worked one hell of a sacrifice to protect it.”
“It doesn’t concern you,” the demon said quietly.
“Everything concerns me.”
“This doesn’t.” He turned back; his expression was strained. “Trust me.”
“I could take it down, you understand. There isn’t an adept in Jaggonath whose Working could stand before me if I was determined enough. But then it would be down for good. And whatever it’s protecting....” He spread his hands suggestively. Karril winced, but said nothing. “Need I remind you that I could simply work a Summoning and bind you?” the stranger pressed. “That you would then have to tell me what I want to know? That’s a much more unpleasant relationship, Karril. Why don’t you spare us both the trouble.”
“Because there’s someone I don’t want hurt.”
The stranger’s eyes widened with sudden understanding. His voice, when it came, was a whisper. Seductive. “Do you really think I’d use you as an accessory to pain? After all these years, don’t you think I know better?”
“Your standards and mine differ somewhat.”
“You feed on the Hunt.”
“I feed on the Hunter. And if his pleasures changed tomorrow, I would celebrate.”
“Even if—”
“Why do you care?” the demon demanded. “What is all this to you, that you bother?”
The stranger sat back, suddenly distant. “A loremaster has been attacked. I happen to be among those who respect the neutrality of such people. Shouldn’t I be upset? The currents in town have shifted—which hint at something much more nasty than a simple accident. Shouldn’t I be concerned? A nonadept sacrifices God knows what, to set up a blockage even I can’t Work through—”
“And something dark that isn’t of the Forest moves into Jaggonath. That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it? Territorialism. Defense of the Hunter’s turf. The loremaster and her mercantile enterprises have nothing to do with it.”
One corner of the stranger’s mouth twitched slightly: the hint of a smile without its substance. “There is that also,” he said quietly.
The blue of the room shifted through gray, to orange.
“I want your word,” the demon said.
“I recently gave that to a young girl,” he mused. “She didn’t know what it was worth.” He looked at the demon sharply. “You do.”
“That’s why I want it.”
“That I won’t hurt the lady Ciani? I have no reason—”
“Your word.”
“You can be very tiresome, Karril.” His tone was light, but his eyes were narrow, his gaze dark. “As you wish. I will neither harm Ciani of Faraday, nor cause her to be harmed, until this matter is dealt with.”
“Ever.”
“All right—ever. Are you satisfied now? Do you trust me?” He smiled, but his eyes were cold. “So few creatures would.”
“But we go back a long time, don’t we? I know where you came from. I know what you are. Even more importantly, I know what you were.”
“Then it’s time you made me equally well-informed.”
“There’s a priest involved,” the demon warned. “A Knight of the Flame. Do you care?”
He shrugged. “His problem, not mine.”
“I wonder if he’ll appreciate that fact.”
Again: an expression that was not quite a smile, a tone that was not quite humor. “It could make it . . . amusing.”
The demon smiled. And made himself a chair. And sat in it. The room faded slowly to red again; plush velvet, in quantity.
“You sure you wouldn’t like a drink?”
“Tell me,” the stranger demanded.
He did.
Twelve
“This is a rakh.”
Senzei took hold of the ancient drawing with care and gently freed it from its tissue cocoon. The paper had yellowed with age and its ink had browned; he was infinitely careful as he turned it toward the lamplight, sensing just how fragile it was.
On it was sketched a mammal, four-legged and tailed as all Ernan mammals were. Visually unimpressive. He read the Latin name inscribed beneath it (Earth words, Earth terms, the species had been renamed so many times it hardly seemed to matter what it had originally been called) and then the date. And he looked up at Damien, startled. “2 A.S.?”
“The original. This is a copy. Done some two hundred years later, but supposedly an accurate reproduction. If the introduction is correct, the artist was copying from a sketchbook belonging to one of the original colonists.”
“The landing crew,” Senzei breathed. Tasting the concept.
Damien leaned back in his leather-bound chair; overhead, the deeply shadowed vaults of the cathedral’s Rare Document Archives seemed to stretch toward infinity. “That’s the earliest representation we have. And, for quite some time, the only one. Evidently, the original settlers didn’t consider the species worthy of too much attention. Of course, they had other things to worry about.”
“Like survival.”
Damien nodded. “Look at these.” He pushed a pile of sketches—chronologically arranged—across the table. Silently, Senzei began to leaf through them. After a while his eyes narrowed slightly and he shook his head, amazed. Then he went through them again, more carefully.
“It’s incredible,” he said at last.
“One can see why the settlers were frightened.”
“Gods, yes. If they didn’t understand the fae. . . .”
“And this is before First Impression was verified. Before they really understood how man’s presence had altered the natural pattern here.” He picked up the first sketch and studied it. “Animal,” he muttered. “No more than that. Hardly worthy of notice, until Pravida Rakhi declared it to be the most sophisticated life-form native to this planet. That was forty-one years After Sacrifice. Man’s innocence lasted only that long.” He tipped the fragile paper toward the light, careful not to crease it. The creature that posed on its surface could have been related to any one of half a dozen species he knew—or even one that had ceased to exist. With but one aged sketch, it was hard to tell.
“You think they began to change after Rakhi’s announcement?”
Damien shook his head. “No. Before that. As near as I can tell, it started right after the Sacrifice. But when Rakhi declared that this species was man’s Ernan equivalent—that but for man’s presence, the species would have developed advanced intelligence and complex dexterity and eventually taken to the stars—the pace picked up alarmingly. Such is the power of the popular imagination.”
Senzei leafed through the sketches again, laid several out before him in chronological order. Though they were done in a variety of hands using dissimilar media, the overall pattern was clear.
The species was changing.
“Of course, now we understand what happened. Now we know that evolution is a very different process here than it was on Earth. Here, if trees grow taller, the next gaffi calves are born with longe
r necks. If lakes dry up, the offspring of underwater creatures are born with rudimentary lungs. Their need affects their DNA, in precise and perfect balance. To us, it seems wholly natural; several adepts have even managed to Work the process, giving us our un-Earth species. But we understand this all now, after centuries of observation. Imagine what it must have meant for our ancestors, to see this happening before their eyes!”
Senzei looked up at him. “When did they guess where it was headed?”
“Not for a while. Not until Rakhi. The settlers observed that changes were occurring—but they were occurring in hundreds of species, in every ecological niche on the planet. And they had, as you say, much better things to worry about.”
“So now, imagine the rakh in that time. Moderately intelligent, seemingly self-aware, possessing opposable digits and thus a fair degree of manual dexterity. Inhabiting the very same ecological niche that man’s primitive ancestors did on Earth, in that evolutionary instant before he gained his true humanity. Changing, generation after generation—adapting to man’s presence, to the sudden appearance of a rival species. Slowly. Erna was feeling its way along genome by genome, testing out each new evolutionary concept before making the next adjustment. Keeping the ecosphere in balance.
“And then, along comes Pravida Rakhi. Convincing all concerned that if man had never come here, these creatures would have been the natural monarchs of this planet. They would have become the local equivalent of us. The popular imagination is aroused, on all levels of consciousness. Intellectual curiosity, gut fear response, competitive instinct—you name it. Every possible mode of thought, every manner of instinct and emotion, every level of man’s mind, all are focused on the image of these creatures as pseudo-human. Is it any wonder that the fae was affected? That these natives, who were a natural part of this world, evolved accordingly?
He shuffled through the sheets that were spread out before him until he found the one he wanted. And placed it before Senzei.
“131 A.S.,” he said quietly.
Erna’s dominant natives had altered drastically in both shape and balance. The back legs were sturdier, the hindquarters more heavily muscled. The spine had bent so that the torso might be carried erect, although the front paws—hands?—were still being used as auxiliary feet. Most dramatic of all was the change in the skull, from the sharply angled profile of an animal predator to something that looked disturbingly human.
Senzei tapped the date on the drawing. “This was when they guessed what was happening.”
“This was when they began to suspect. You have to remember how alien such a concept was to their inherited way of thinking. It took five generations of close observation before anyone was sure. And several generations after that, to see if human sorcery could reverse the trend. It couldn’t. Erna had supplied us with a competitor, and one cast in our own image. We had accepted it as such. The work of a single sorceror was hardly a drop in the bucket, compared to that. Generation after generation, the rakh were becoming more human.”
“And we answered with the crusades.”
“Wholesale slaughter of an innocent species. And the unwitting creation of a host of demons, as byproducts of man’s most murderous instincts. All feeding on his hatred, all savoring his intolerance. Is it any wonder that human society nearly devolved into total chaos? That the rigid social patterns of the Revivalist movement seemed to be man’s only hope of maintaining order?”
“And thus the Church was born.”
Damien looked at him but said nothing. For a moment, the room seemed unnaturally still.
“And thus the Church was born,” he agreed. At last he looked down at the table again, and unrolled a heavy parchment sheet atop the pile of drawings. A map.
“The rakhlands.”
Senzei looked it over, muttered, “Shit.”
Damien agreed.
The land that the rakh had retreated to was well fortified by nature to resist man’s most aggressive instincts. To the west, the Worldsend Mountains provided a daunting barrier of ice-clad peaks and frozen rivers. To the east, sheer basalt cliffs carved out by centuries of tsunami offered no easy landing site, no hope of shelter. The southlands were hardly more appealing, acre upon acre of treacherous swampland that harbored some of Erna’s deadliest species. Only in the north was there any hope of passage, between the jagged peaks and wind-carved cliffs that looked out onto the Serpent Straits.
Damien tapped a finger to the mouth of the Achron River, and muttered, “Only way.”
“What about the mountains?”
Damien looked up at him sharply—and realized, in an instant, how little the man had traveled. “Not with winter coming. Not if we want to live to get to the rakhlands. I traveled the Dividers in midsummer, and that was rough enough. Even if the cold doesn’t kill you outright, there are nasty things that inhabit those peaks—damned hungry things—and it’s hard to fight them when your body’s half frozen. Of course, if we wait until summer. . . .”
“I can’t. She can’t.”
“Agreed—on all counts. River it is, then. Hell of a landing, but I think it can be done. And you can bet we’ll pay dearly for it. In cash, I mean.” He leaned forward in his chair, intent upon the display before them. “Where’s the Canopy?”
Senzei hesitated. “That depends. Roughly, there.” He sketched a rough circle with his finger: up through the center of the Worldsend range, east along the coast, to a curve that extended up to ten miles off the eastern shore, and back through the swamps. “Half a mile wide, in places—and as much as six, elsewhere. It moves, too. Sometimes it edges out into the Straits—which is why most boats avoid that shoreline like the plague. I have better maps at my place,” he added.
“Good. We’ll need them. Tell me about it.”
“We don’t know much. A wall of living fae, that first appeared shortly after the rakh fled into the Worldsend. No natural fae-current passes through it. No Working can pass from one side to the other. Tamed fae that’s Worked in the middle of it can go wild, and do anything. Ships that flounder into it discover that their instruments have suddenly gone haywire, that the very shoreline seems changed . . . but so much of our technology is fae-based, how can we be sure of what that means?”
“What’s it made of? Earth-fae? Tidal? Solar?”
Senzei shook his head. “None of those. Nothing we humans understand. Ciani thought there might be some sort of force inherent in the rakh themselves—we see similar things in other species—and that the Canopy is an extension of their communal existence. Their need for protection.”
“From man,” Damien said grimly.
There was no need for Senzei to comment.
“Do we know what the rakh are now? Did Ciani ever say?”
“We know they survived. We know they must be at least moderately intelligent in order to have manifested the kind of creatures that she encountered. And that there are large numbers of them—or the Canopy wouldn’t exist. That’s all. I can list a hundred rumors for you . . . but you know how reliable those are. There’s no way of knowing whether they followed through on their initial Impression, and eventually developed a human-compatible form, or went off in some other direction entirely. The fact that their demons can adopt human form seems to imply the former—but I wouldn’t bet my life on that conclusion. Some demons are very versatile.”
Wouldn’t a world without demons be better? Damien wanted to argue. Worth sacrificing for? But he bit back the words before they were spoken; this was neither the time nor the place for theosophy. Senzei and he would be spending a long time together, under very trying circumstances; anything that might add additional tension to the situation was a course to be avoided, at all costs.
“Let’s prepare for everything,” he said. “Once we get there, there’ll be no sending home for supplies. If it’s small and it might be useful, we take it with us. If it’s large and heavy . . . maybe we pack it anyway. Often it’s the little things that make a difference—especially when y
ou don’t even know what it is you’re going to be facing.
Senzei leaned back, but there was nothing relaxed about the posture; his body was stiffly erect, tense. “You really think we can do it?”
Damien hesitated. Met his eyes. Let him see the doubt that was there, inside him. “I think we have to try,” he said quietly. “As for the rest . . . there’s no way of knowing that until we’re inside, is there? Until we can see what we’re up against. The odds are certainly against us.” He shrugged. “But we won’t even know what they are until we get there.”
“We need an adept,” Senzei muttered.
Damien looked around, as if checking for eavesdroppers. The gesture reminded Senzei of where they were—as it was no doubt meant to do. “Not here,” he muttered. He began to gather the drawings. “Good enough for research, but for the rest . . . it isn’t appropriate.”
“I understand.”
“We’ll go to your place. All right? I’ll have copies made of the map, and sent there.” He glanced about, paused just long enough to draw Senzei’s attention to the two other priests, ritually clad, who were within hearing distance. “We need to have this worked out as well as we can before we take a single step toward the rakhlands, you know.”
“And gods help us then.”
Jarred by the plural, Damien looked up at him. “Pray long and hard, if you want your gods to interfere.” His voice and manner were strained. “And do it soon. Because once we get under the Canopy, and that silence stretches between us and Jaggonath . . . no god of this region is going to hear your prayers. Or anything else, for that matter.”
She lay still as death on Senzei’s guest cot, glazed eyes staring out into nothingness. The light of a single candle illuminated her face and hands in sharp relief, from the stark white highlights of her colorless flesh to shadows so sharp and deep that they might have been carved in stone. Even her eyes seemed paler, as though sorrow had leached the color from them. As though her assailants had drained her not only of memory, but of hue.
The food that had been placed beside her was untouched. Damien moved it carefully out of the way and then sat by her side.
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