Black Sun Rising

by C. S. Friedman

“They took him, Calesta. Out of the fire! You said he would burn there forever. You said they would never come—never!—that they would let him burn. And I believed you. I believed you!”

  “You commanded me to look into his heart,” the demon responded. “I did that. You told me to read his weaknesses. I did that. You bade me devise a way of binding him to your purpose, so that he would be helpless to free himself. I did that also. As for the others, you said, Leave them to me. . . .”

  “They came for him, Calesta! How? They were miles from here when last I Knew them—miles! I—”

  “They were never there,” the demon said coolly.

  Blood drained from the enraged face, turning it a ghastly white. “What? What does that mean?”

  “It means that you were wrong. It means that your Knowing was misdirected. It means that these humans anticipated you, and made false replicas of themselves to draw your attention.”

  The word came, a whisper: “Simulacra.”

  The demon bowed its head.

  “Why didn’t you see it happening? Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “I serve,” the demon answered. “I obey. Those were the parameters you set when you first Conjured me. Had you ordered me to inspect the strangers, I would have done so. You didn’t.”

  “So you stayed in the caverns, to feed on the adept’s pain—”

  “I never fed on the adept. I’ve never fed on any of your victims.” The faceted eyes glittered maliciously. “I think perhaps you mistake my nature.”

  Pacing: quickly, angrily, to the window and back again. “I must have him back. You understand that? Him, and the woman. And I want no room for error this time—none at all. You hear me, Calesta? We work out the best way to go after them, and—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the demon interrupted.

  “Meaning what?”

  The demon chuckled. “You need only wait. They’ll come here by themselves.”

  The pacing stopped. The tone was one of suspicion. “You’re sure of that?”

  “Their nature demands it.”

  “After me? Not after the woman’s assailant?”

  “They understand now that the two are linked. They recognize you as the stronger force. The priest will insist that they deal with you first. And the adept will demand your death—or worse—for what you did to him.” The demon paused. “Do you require more than that?”

  “No,” came the answer. “That’s enough.” The voice grew harsh. “They’re coming here? Good. Then we’ll be ready. That’s an order, Calesta. You understand? Watch them. Neutralize them. Take them prisoner. No taking chances, this time. Nothing fancy. Just bind them and bring them to me. To me. I’ll deal with them.”

  Calesta bowed. And it seemed that a hint of a smile creased the obsidian face, gashing its mirrored surface.

  “As you command,” the demon responded.

  Forty-three

  Not until they were near the surface did the four travelers stop, and lower their various burdens to the muddy floor beneath them. As soon as it was clear that they would be staying in one place for more than a few minutes Hesseth sank to the ground, and sat with her head lowered between her knees, her breathing hoarse and labored. Ciani came to where Damien stood and helped him lower Tarrant’s body to the ground. It was a dead weight, cold now, and though neither would voice such a thought they both feared that the Hunter’s spirit might truly have deserted them.

  And what then? Damien thought. What if all this was for nothing?

  Carefully, the two of them unwrapped the battered form. Bits of burned flesh and crusted blood adhered to the wool, tearing loose from the Hunter as the cloak was removed from him; fresh blood dripped from the resulting wounds, making his flesh slick and hard to handle. By the time Damien had freed him from his wrappings the priest’s hands were coated in blood, and the black ash of burnt flesh stuck to his skin as though glued there.

  “Look,” Ciani urged. She pointed to where the Hunter’s arm lay exposed, to the deep gash seared into it by the band of red-hot steel. Blackened skin curled back from the wound, displaying muscles and nerves that had been seared to a bloody ash. But the bone itself was no longer visible. Damien drew in a sharp breath as he realized that, and he turned the man’s arm over, to make sure of it. “My God. . . .”

  “He’s healing,” she whispered.

  He looked at the body—which displayed no other sign of life, and numerous signs of death—and felt awe creep over him. And horror. “He must have had to repair his flesh constantly in order to survive. Drawing on what little fae there was, to replace what the fire destroyed . . . my God.” He looked at the man’s face—or what was left of it—and felt his sticky hands clenching into fists at his side. “It could have gone on forever. He could never have Worked the fire itself, never have freed himself . . . only this.” He worked himself a Knowing, with care; the mere act of Working was painful. “He’s trapped in it,” he whispered. “Lost in a desperate race against the fire. He doesn’t even know he’s out of there.”

  “Can you Work through to him?”

  He shook his head. “He would suck me in, as fuel. Never even know who or what I was.”

  “So what do we do?” she demanded. There was an edge of hysteria in her voice that he had to force himself not to respond to. It was all too easy to abandon reason, and let blind emotion reign.

  He reached up to where his sleeve had been sliced open, over his wound. The makeshift bandage was already soaked with blood, and as he wound it off it dripped carmine spots on the floor. He felt dizzy and his arm throbbed hot with pain, but that had been the case for so long now that he had grown accustomed to it. He gritted his teeth as he pulled the bloodsoaked length free at last and flexed his arm to keep fresh blood from flowing. With his other hand he bunched up the cloth and brought it to Tarrant’s lips. What remained of his lips. And squeezed.

  Red blood, warm and thick. It dribbled onto the corner of his mouth, coated his lips with glistening wetness. He squeezed again, and forced a trickle between the parted teeth.

  “Drink it,” he urged. His voice was a hoarse whisper, half hate and half anxiety. “Drink, damn you!”

  “Damien, he’s not a—”

  “He is. Or at least, he was. And he said he could feed this way again, if he had to. I’d say he has to.” He pressed the bunched-up cloth against his arm again; it soaked up the fresh blood like a sponge. “Drink,” he whispered, squeezing the precious fluid out into Tarrant’s mouth. “Or so help me God, I’ll take you back down there and stick you in the fire myself. . . .”

  He thought he saw movement, then. A flicker of wetness, within the mouth: a tongue tip? He squeezed harder, and saw the lips move slightly. The skin of Tarrant’s throat contracted slightly, and crusted flesh cracked off from its surface. Beneath, the tissue was pale and moist.

  Damien began to collect more blood—and then cast the bandage aside, and lowered his gashed arm to the Hunter’s mouth. Sharp teeth bit into his flesh, a blind and desperate response to the presence of food; he bore the pain of it with gritted teeth as the cavern swayed about him, telling himself, He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know who you are.

  And then, at last, with a shudder, the teeth withdrew. He pulled back and pressed the wound closed, watching the man’s face closely. The blackened crust was flaking off, and beneath it new tissue gleamed moistly in the lamplight. The process reminded Damien of a snake shedding its skin.

  “Come on,” he muttered. “Come back to us.” He Worked his vision and saw the dark fae gathering about the Hunter’s body, saw it weaving a web about the man’s flesh that acted as a buffer between him and the light. Between him and the world. Cutting him off from the source of his pain—and with it, the rest of the living universe. “Tarrant!” He grasped him by the shoulder, but his blood-slicked hand slid off—and took with it a layer of burned flesh, revealing the newmade skin beneath. Cell by cell, layer by layer, the Hunter was restoring his body.


  Hesseth hissed softly to get his attention and held out a flask of waxed leather toward him. He took it, somewhat perplexed, and smelled the stopper. And then nodded gratefully. The smell was familiar to him, the same odor that had clung to his flesh after their fight on Morgot. He poured a bit of the rakhene ointment into his right palm and rubbed it into and around his wound. And thanked her.

  Then Tarrant stirred. A shiver passed through his frame, as though somewhere inside that battered flesh a spark of life was fighting to manifest itself. Damien reached out to him—and then, remembering what the Forest’s monarch had said about Healing, used the hand that was free of ointment to grasp him by the shoulder. No telling what the rakhene liniment might do to a man who thrived on death.

  “It’s over,” he told him. “Over.”

  “The fire. . . .” It was hoarsely voiced, barely a whisper—but it was speech, and it was audible, and he used it as a lifeline to reach the man.

  “Gone. Left behind.” He dared a comforting lie: “Extinguished.”

  The eyes opened, slowly. Fresh new lids of smooth, pale flesh, smeared with blood and black ash. For a moment he gazed emptily at the ceiling; then he shivered, and moaned softly. His eyes fell closed again.

  “Tarrant. Listen to me. You’re out of there. Safe. It’s over. You’re with us now.” He paused. “Do you understand?”

  The lids blinked open, tears of blood in their outer corners. For a minute or two the Hunter stared without seeing, silver eyes fixed on nothing. Then he turned, slowly—painfully—and met Damien’s eyes. There was an emptiness in his gaze that made the priest’s flesh crawl.

  “Where?” the Hunter gasped. “Where is this?”

  “We’re in a cave, near the surface. Judging from the earth-fae, that is.” He hesitated. “Tell me what you need. Tell us how to help you.”

  The pale eyes shut again, as if keeping them opened required more strength than the Hunter had. “More blood,” he whispered. “But you can’t give me that. I’ve already taken as much as your body can spare.”

  “Gerald.” It was Ciani. She crawled over to where the Hunter lay and seemed to be about to reach out to him, but Damien warned her back. “I can supply—”

  “Don’t,” the priest warned her.

  “But I wasn’t wounded. I haven’t lost—”

  “Don’t.

  “Damien—”

  “Ciani, think! He takes on the form of whatever his victims fear the most. That means that if he feeds on you, he’ll become more like them. The ones who hurt you; the ones we’re hunting. I don’t think he’s strong enough to fight it now. I don’t think we can afford to risk it.”

  “But if we don‘t—”

  “He’s right,” the Hunter whispered. “Too much risk. . . .” He shivered, as if from some secret pain. “I would hurt you. I might even kill you. And . . . I would rather die, than do that.”

  Damien watched for a moment as he lay there—his breathing labored, his movements weak—and then asked, “You going to make it?”

  The Hunter raised a hand to his face, rubbed his eyes. The fingers were whole, but stained with blood. Flakes of charred skin fell from his face as he rubbed, revealing smooth white skin beneath. “I think . . . yes. They didn’t do anything that time won’t heal. Not to my flesh, anyway.” He tried to force himself to a sitting position but fell back, weakly. “How long?” he gasped.

  “In the fire?” Eight days, Ciani figured.“

  “It seemed like so much longer. . . .” He looked about weakly—at Ciani—at Hesseth—at the pierced one. His gaze lingered on the latter, and for a moment curiosity flared in those silver eyes. Then exhaustion took its place, and he turned away. “You saved my life,” he whispered. The pale eyes fixed on Damien—and in the back of them, deep in the shadows, was a flicker of something familiar. A faint spark of sardonic humor, reassuringly familiar in tenor. “I didn’t expect it of you.”

  “Yeah. Well. That makes two of us.” He got to his feet, and brushed at some of the caked mud which clung to his clothing. “You get some rest, all right? Finish putting yourself back together, if you can.” He looked at Hesseth. “Will the Lost One stand guard? I think he’s the only one of us left with the strength to do it.”

  She murmured rakhene sounds to the pierced one, who grunted. And then assented, in phonemes that were becoming familiar to Damien.

  “All right.” He turned down the lantern wick as far as it would go, trying to save oil; of the store of fuel they had brought, only half a flask remained. When that was gone . . . he shuddered to think of it. One could only Work one’s sight for so long.

  “Let’s all get some sleep while we can,” he urged his party. “It may be our last chance.” His body felt weak and drained, almost incapable of moving; the combined fatigue of loss of blood and too many nights without slumber. He lay back on a tangle of clothing and blankets, and listened to his heart pounding in his chest: a metronome of exhaustion. Then, slowly, he slid down into darkness. Warm and sweet and utterly welcome.

  For the first time in eight days, he didn’t dream of fire.

  When he awakened, things weren’t where they should be. It took him a moment to place the wrongness, to fight off the dizziness of his recent blood loss and think clearly. The light wasn’t coming from where it should, he decided. Which meant that the lantern wasn’t where he’d left it. He looked around the cavern, saw a spark of light at the far side of the chamber. And a tall figure who held it, whose body eclipsed its minimal light as he moved, casting Damien into utter darkness.

  Tarrant.

  The man had apparently found his clothes—what few items Ciani had salvaged—and had managed to pull on a silk shirt and woolen leggings, which hid most of his ravaged skin from sight. Where his hands and feet were visible his flesh was a chalky white, utterly bereft of living color; it bothered Damien that he couldn’t remember whether that was his normal hue or not.

  The Hunter had unhooded the lamp and turned up its wick, and was casting its bright light upon the length of an oddly twisted column. As Damien approached, he reached out and touched the glistening stone, running his hand down its finely grooved surface. And then did so again, more carefully.

  “Not right,” he whispered, as the priest came to his side. “Not possible.”

  Damien studied the formation. It seemed to be oddly shaped for its kind, and there were tiny ridges up and down its length, but otherwise it looked like all the others. And he had seen enough cave formations in the last few days to last him a lifetime.

  “It isn’t just this one,” the Hunter whispered. “They’re all wrong. Every column in this chamber, every formation that bridges between two surfaces. So wrong. . . .” He shook his head in amazement—and even in that simple gesture, so sparingly performed, Damien could read his weakness.

  “What is it?” the priest asked quietly.

  He turned down the lantern’s wick again, to save the last of the oil. Then he put one hand against the gnarled formation: his fingers, like the rest of him, were lean and wasted. “See these ridges,” he whispered. “Each of these is where the column cracked when the earth shifted beneath it. Slowly new minerals would seep in and fill the cracks . . . but they left scars. Thousands of scars.” He gestured with the lantern, toward formations Damien had never noticed before. Fallen stalactites. Severed columns. Jagged shapes, all of them, that defied the normal pattern. “Do you see?” the Hunter whispered. He turned the lantern until its light shone on a slender column nearby; looking closely, Damien could see that it had been split cleanly through the middle, and its upper and lower halves no longer lined up with each other. “This isn’t the result of secondary vibration. We must be right in the fault zone. The earth is deforming right here, all about us, and the cave formations reflect it. Lateral movement along a major fault line. To be reflected in the stone. . . .” His hand closed about the narrow column as if he needed it for support. Damien had to fight the urge to reach out and hold him upright.<
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  “There’s nothing recent,” the adept whispered. “Nothing at all. Not here, not in any place I could look . . . and that’s just not possible. Not possible! But all the fractures have been filled in, and that takes centuries....” He shook his head in amazement. “Am I to believe there’s been no movement here? For that long? That defies all science.”

  “The rakh said there have been no earthquakes here. Not for a century, at least.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Not at all. What’s an earthquake? A series of vibrations that informs us the crust of the planet has shifted beneath our feet. We measure it by how much it inconveniences us— how much we’re aware of it. The earth could move so slowly that all our instruments would never detect it—and it would still add up to the same motion, in the end. The crust of the planet acts in response to the currents of Erna’s core. How could that simply cease? And cease only in one place, while all surrounding areas continued on as normal? Because they do, I know that; I monitor these things. The land all about here is normal, utterly normal. Except in this one place. How?”

  “Our enemy built his citadel right on the fault line,” Damien pointed out. “You said only a fool would do that. But if he wanted the power of this place at his disposal, and could keep the earth from shaking . . .”

  For a moment the adept looked at him strangely. “No one man could ever bind the earth like that,” he said. “No one man could ever hope to conjure enough power to offset the pressures of the planet’s core. And besides . . .”

  He turned away. And shut his eyes. And whispered, “The Master of Lema is a woman.”

  “What?”

  “The Keeper of Souls is a woman,” he breathed. “Our enemy. My torturer. The architect of the House of Storms. A woman.”

  For a moment Damien couldn’t respond. Then, with effort, he managed to get out, “That doesn’t make a difference.”

  The Hunter turned on him angrily; his eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot. “Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “Of course it makes a difference. Not because of gender, but because of power. Raw physicality. What can you know of it—you, who were born with the size and the strength to defend yourself from any physical threat? What can you know of the mind-set of the weak, whose lives are centered around vulnerability? When you hear footsteps behind you in a darkened street, do you fear being kidnapped? Raped? Overcome by the sheer physical strength of your attackers? Or do you feel confident that with firm ground and a reliable weapon in your hands you could hold your own against any reasonable threat? How can you possibly understand what it means to lack that confidence—or what it can drive a human to do, to try to gain it?”