He bowed his head in affirmation. “And the answer is what I’d hoped for.”
Again the woman whispered to Toshida. He glanced about at the other civilians—his advisers?—and took quiet council from one of the men as well. Damien glanced over at the captain, noted that he was visibly calmer. Good. The man’s instincts, unlike his own, would not be clouded by religious optimism. If he thought all was going well, it very probably was.
He could hear his heart pounding as he waited, and wished he had the fae to draw on for insight. This Toshida clearly had the power to grant them official sanction, or consign them to an ocean-bound grave. He would have given anything to Know the man better.
At last he spoke to them. “I will see this ship of yours for myself, before I render my verdict. Verda?” He paused, as if waiting for a response. “Unless you object.”
Without hesitation—because he had picked up enough of what was going on to recognize that hesitation would be damning—Damien bowed his assent. “In God’s Name.” And he added, “We are your servants.” Just for good measure.
“But Your Eminence—” one of the civilians protested, and another began, “Lord Regent—”
Toshida held up a hand in warning and the protests were silenced. “The first trade mission from west to east deserves no less,” he said. “If that’s what this is. I came out here precisely because I felt the situation merited it. Would you have me make my decision without seeing the truth for myself?”
The advisers were silent. They didn’t look happy.
He turned to the captain. “I’ll need to inspect your vessel: its crew, its cargo, its passengers, every nook and cranny and packing crate within its hull. If you are what you say you are, then you have nothing to fear. If not ...” He shrugged suggestively.
“The merchants won’t be happy,” he warned.
“Merchants rarely are.”
“They’ll want reassurance that their goods won’t be fooled with.”
“If all we find are simple trade goods, then they have it.”
“On whose authority?” he challenged.
Far from being insulted by the captain’s tone, Toshida seemed almost to approve of it. The captain’s protecting his own, Damien thought. That’s a good sign in any decent company. For some reason that exchange, more than any other which had preceded, reassured him as to their captors’ intentions.
“On the authority of the Lord Regent of Mercia. Who is high priest and ruler enfacto of the capital city of this region, and therefore of its ruling center. Bien basta?”
The captain looked at Damien, who nodded slightly in approval. The exchange did not go unnoted. “If they’re at war,” Damien dared, “they need to know we’re not the enemy. You and I would do no less under the circumstances.”
The captain winced but nodded. “Aye,” he agreed. And then to Toshida: “You can tour the ship all you like, for that purpose. Just make sure it doesn’t go beyond that, okay?”
“You have my word,” the Regent promised.
We are not at war, the Regent told him, as they rowed their way back to the Golden Glory. A half-dozen guards sat erect in each of the two boats, as tense and alert as if they feared something might leap from the sea to devour them. Damien was glad they were beyond the reach of the earth-fae, which might have created just such a creature for them. We are not at war, but we have an enemy to the south. And sometimes the best way to avoid a war is by preparing to fight it.
I understand, Damien assured him. And he did, more than the Regent could possibly know.
I understand exactly.
The inspection was precise, efficient, and ruthless. It was also—viewed from the Regent’s perspective—absolutely necessary. Who could say what evil thing might not crouch hidden in a dark corner, might not nestle behind sleeping livestock, might not take up its shelter in a crate of canned goods bound for distant markets? Their enemy feared the sunlight, and therefore any place that might serve as a shelter against the light must be uncovered, opened up, searched.
They gathered the passengers together on the open deck, so that the Regent might see them. “Is this all?” he demanded. Damien was halfway through a head count when Tyria Lester informed them that her brother Mels was laid out with a hangover, and had not managed to get out of bed that morning. “Get him,” the Regent commanded, and Damien could almost hear the unspoken command that went with it: Let me see him in the sunlight. The man studied each of them in turn while the captain explained to all his rank, his power, his purpose. Damien could see the fear in their eyes, and he sympathized; since they didn’t know what the Regent was looking for, how could they be certain that he wouldn’t discover it in them? But his eyes passed over them quickly, one after another, and he nodded a curt approval to indicate that the lot of them had passed muster.
Then he turned to Hesseth.
She was dressed in her traveling garb, which is to say in layers that covered her from head to foot and then some. Only her face was visible—her altered face—and that was blistered from exposure to the sunlight, with angry red patches that ran across her cheekbones and down the ridge of her nose. It hadn’t occurred to any of them at the time that her tender rakhene skin, normally protected by a layer of fur, would have no mechanism for tanning. He wondered what the Regent would make of such a burn. Was that one sign enough to condemn her in his eyes? He tensed, wondering if this was the moment when all their work would come to naught. Wondering what he could do to save her, if it was.
And then the Regent stepped back from her and bowed. Bowed! Deeply and reverently, as one might to an equal. She managed to maintain her poise somehow, but her frightened eyes met Damien’s and begged him, why? To which he could only shake his head in mute response: I don’t know.
The cabins were searched then, quickly and efficiently. The protests of the passengers and crew went unheeded. A phalanx of guards protected Toshida while he went through each room, while a handful more took up watch on the deck, to make sure that no people or weapons were shuffled from cabin to cabin ahead of him. He was as polite as he could be under the circumstances, but he was thorough. No living creature could have hidden from his scrutiny.
Then belowdeck, to the vast storage space within the hull. Every corner was searched. Every crate whose size or weight seemed consequential was pried open, to the accompanying protests of its owner. Gold ingots flashed in the lamplight, bricks of spices, flasks of perfume, books and gems and herbs and furs and bolts of silk, fine wool, silver bullion. It was the first time Damien had actually seen what his co-travelers were bringing with them, and he was stunned by its diversity and its value. No wonder they were terrified; Toshida could take it all from them if he liked, and claim some foreign law as justification. What could they do to stop him? How could they fight back? Whom would they turn to for justice?
But he had no interest in their baubles, nor in their complaints. Silently he continued through the ship, sparing a sharp glance for the space that Gerald Tarrant had so recently occupied. For a moment he paused, and Damien wondered if it was some structural anomoly that had caught his eye, or a whisper of power that had somehow seeped into the ancient wood, defying their ritual cleansing. He was suddenly very glad that Tarrant was gone, and even more glad that they’d brought down the ship’s great mirrors and flooded this space with sunlight. If he had still been here, or his cabin still remained ... he shuddered to think of the consequences. Thank God for the Hunter’s foresight.
Last on the list was livestock. They went to the forward end of the hold where the horses were kept, and for a moment the Regent just stared at them; it was clear that to him they were totally alien creatures. Finally he motioned for one of his guards to inspect their space, and it said much for the man that despite his obvious misgivings he did so without hesitation. He needn’t have worried. The horses’ owners had fed them an herbal mixture designed to keep the animals docile while on the long journey, and to prevent the mares from coming into heat. Even t
he stallions were tractable.
“How very beautiful,” the Regent murmured. He turned to Damien. “Pack animals?”
“Mostly,” he lied. “But they’ll carry a man.” For some reason he found that he wanted to keep the horses’ true strength a secret. It was a minor advantage, but at least it was something.
“We brought breeding stock,” Mels Lester informed him. Five of the horses were his. “Just in case.”
“Then I congratulate you on your foresight. Nyquist’s expedition attempted to bring what they called ‘unhorses’ with them, but more than half died enroute. Including all the males. A terrible loss.” He held out his hand to the nearest mare, who sniffed at it with passing interest. Damien could see the effect of the drug in her eyes, in her coat, in her mane, but to one who didn’t know the species’ natural state she must still have seemed a magnificent animal. “These may prove to be worth more than all the rest of what you have on board,” Toshida told them. His guard had made the rounds of the enclosure, and nodded tightly toward the Regent. Nothing there, the gesture said. Proceed as you see fit.
The Regent turned to face them. In the shadowy closeness of the hold his gaze was piercing, the whites of his eyes glittering like polished gemstones against the darkness of his skin as he studied first one man, then another.
This is a man who could condemn us to death without a moment’s hesitation, Damien thought. And he would, if he thought we posed any threat to his domain. God grant that he would prove an ally once this trial was over. God grant, above all else, that he not become an enemy.
“I see nothing on board this ship that would be a threat to my people,” the Regent said at last. A communal sigh of relief seemed to resonate from the westerners, and Damien could feel his own muscles unknotting. “And I also see nothing to indicate that you aren’t exactly what you claim. In which case....”
He smiled. It was an expression of genuine warmth, as different from his previous mien as night was from day. And yet it was equally natural to him, the flip side of a nature that must judge men as often as it must reward.
“Welcome to the promised land,” he said.
Five
Blaack shapes scurrying across white sand, darting from boulder to boulder and dune to dune with predatory caution: the rhythm of invasion. Seen from up above, the creatures looked like rats or insects—anything but men. Vermin, the Protector thought, as he watched them swarm across his precious beach. That’s what they are: vermin. The mere sight of them made him sick inside.
He stood by the wall at the top of the cliff and watched them as they made their approach, hands clenched tightly at his sides. It was the penance he had set himself, that he should stand here and watch the result of his treachery. Finally he could stand it no longer and he turned away, back toward the garden. All about him crystal tinkled, delicately crafted trees shifting in the night’s chill breeze. It was his wife’s creation, this wondrous place of wrought-glass flowers and etched leaves, and standing in it he imagined he could hear her voice. What would she say, if she were here tonight? Why rush things, my love? Why not wait, and see what opportunity the future brings? There must be a better way.
But we’re running out of time, he thought darkly. You can see that, Mira, can’t you? It has to be done now, for all our sakes.
Suddenly, from far below, screams resounded. Human screams. His men. Shadows of the invaders danced before his eyes. Demon-spawned, nightborn, what was this battle to them? A chance to feed on their enemies’ blood, to revel in the destruction of humanity’s best. He winced as one particularly loud scream ended abruptly, and wished—not for the first time—that it could have been done some other way. But that just wasn’t possible. There had to be blood shed. There had to be bodies—enough so that when the investigation came no one thought to question their numbers, or check to see whether the guards’ weapons had been sufficient. Because they hadn’t been. He had seen to that.
I did it for her, Mira. To protect our daughter. And he whispered—softly, as if she were standing there beside him—“She has your eyes.”
When the screams at last subsided, he forced himself to move again. There was a low stone wall that guarded the cliff’s edge, and this he followed until he was far from the manor house and its crystal garden, until the darkness had swallowed up all signs of human habitation. Only then did he come to the place where the stone wall ended, and a steep staircase—no more than shallow rungs and handholds, painstakingly carved into the cliff’s steep surface—provided access to the beach beneath.
He could hear them scrabbling up the granite incline, sharp claws scraping against the unyielding rock. For a moment he thought how easy it would be to send them plummeting to their deaths, one by one as they reached the top ... and then the first set of hands came over the edge, and a sleek body followed—catlike, wary. And the moment was gone forever.
Chalk-white skin, eyes as black as jet. Hair that seemed more like tangled fur, a mouth that was hard and cruel, without any lips to speak of. Like its face its body was human in form, utterly inhuman in substance. This is the face of my treachery, he thought. This is what I’ve loosed upon the land. He felt sick inside.
The creature grinned; sharp teeth glinted in the moonlight. “You must be the Protector.” Its voice was a serpentine thing, sleek and sinuous. “What—no armies to guard you? No weapons at hand?”
“We made a bargain,” he said shortly. His heart was pounding. “I kept my end of it.” Another was climbing up now, sharp claws gripping the topmost step as it levered itself over the edge. Something thick and crimson dripped from the blade that it held between its teeth. Blood. Human blood. The blood of his men. “I was told you would keep yours.” What were these things, anyway?
The creature said nothing. For a moment it merely studied the Protector, its dark tongue stroking the razor-sharp teeth. Then it looked toward the manor house and its eyes narrowed, as if it had seen someone approaching.
The Protector looked back that way—and something struck him from behind as he did so, something sharp and hard, that drove him to his knees in a shower of pain. He put his hands up to his head to protect it from further assault, felt something warm and sticky clinging to his scalp. Matting his hair.
“So sorry about your bargain,” the invader hissed. “But there are things we need to do here, and leaving witnesses ... ssssst!”
“My people,” he gasped. “You promised! They know nothing ...”
He saw it through a mist of blood and pain: the creature was changing. Its thin body gained in height, took on new weight. Its pale skin darkened. Its features, almost human, took on a more familiar cast—and as he looked into its eyes, as he recognized its chosen form, the sickness of pure horror overwhelmed him. He tried to cry out in warning—to his retainers, his soldiers, anyone!—but another blow, even more brutal, drove him to the ground. His moan of pain was smothered by dirt and blood. His vision was drenched in red.
“So sorry,” the invader crooned. Using his accent. His voice. “But war is war, you understand.—Of course you do, Protector. And as for your people....” The creature chuckled; its tone was horribly familiar. “I’m afraid we need them,” it whispered. His own voice. His own features. “I’m afraid we need them all.”
I’ve failed you, Mira. I’ve failed us all. May God have mercy on my soul....
It was the sound of his own laughter that drove him down into the final darkness.
Deep within the Protector’s keep, in a chamber with no windows, Jenseny played with the fringe of her gown and savored its rhythm with her fingers. She’d tried to explain that to her father once, how all the tiny threads hanging there together were a kind of music and how she could feel it through her fingers when she stroked them, but he didn’t understand. He couldn’t hear that and he couldn’t hear the other things: the fall of rain on waxy leaves, the screech of living fibers as they were ripped from the earth, the beat of the spindle and the soft shuffle of the loom as it wove, wov
e, wove.... Some days when the Light was strong she thought she could hear the marketplace, too, old women squabbling over prices while her father’s hands stroked the soft cloth, drawing notes from it like it was a harp. She tried to share all that with him, but he couldn’t hear it. Just like he couldn’t hear so many things that were in her world.
Sometimes he would take her outside. Sometimes in the dead of night when his people were asleep he would come and wake her up and they would sneak outside, to stand in the moonlight with the soft wind blowing on their faces, listening to the music of the night. And he would tell her tales of the outside world, trying to draw pictures with his words so that she could see it all for herself. What he didn’t know was that sometimes his words would make the pictures real, so that she had to fight not to reach out and touch them. And then sometimes he was sad and she could see the sadness, too, a thick gray stuff that clung to him like mud. Or black, like when her mother died. Black, like on that terrible day....
Suddenly she heard footsteps, and her heart skipped a beat in excitement. It was that time of night when her father usually came to her, just before he went to bed. Maybe he was coming to her now. Maybe he would take her outside again, and let her look upon her mother’s world. She unwound her fingers from the silken fringe and made her hands lie still in her lap, paying no attention to the tinkling murmur of her dress as it fell back down to her knees. It upset him when she listened to things he couldn’t hear. He said it reminded him of why she was here, of how the Church would kill her if they found out he had been keeping her hidden away all these years, so that she could grow up secretly. As always, she felt a quiver in her stomach at the thought of her father—a quiver that was made up of love and awe and excitement and dread and a thousand other things combined. For him, and the world he represented. Because she feared the outside world as much as she hungered for it, and he was its representative.
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