There was no surprise on her face when they came into camp—armed and wary, she had probably spotted them coming some time ago—but the joy that suffused her face was a welcome greeting after hours of painful hiking. She came up to Damien and put a hand to the side of his face, rubbing gently. Sharing her scent, he realized; it must be a rakhene custom. He grinned at her in turn, not quite knowing how to respond. She even vouchsafed a minimal smile for Tarrant, a rare and precious gesture. He responded with a nod that said yes, he knew just what she meant by it, and yes, he was appropriately moved.
They traded their tales over the campfire, while Hesseth brewed warm tee and dug out the freshest of their rations. Damien could have eaten a horse. As for Tarrant, he stood apart from them while they ate and talked, scanning the darkness for danger. It was not a role Damien would have chosen for him in his current state, but he was glad to have him do it. He was so stiff by now that it was all he could do to lower himself to a sitting position and take the food that Hesseth offered. It was going to hurt like hell in the morning, he thought miserably, as he bit into a strip of dried meat.
He was acutely aware of Tarrant listening to him as he described their exploits of the night before, rediscovering his own actions through Damien’s words. A strange concept. How much they had come to depend on each other on this trip!
Danger makes strange bedfellows.
When he had told her everything, and when she had shared her own journey through the narrow gap, he set his food aside and applied his attention to their wounds. His groin ached like hell as he stretched forward to reach her arm, but thank God physical infirmity didn’t affect one’s Working. His own arm throbbed hotly as he studied her rakhene flesh, then used the fae to knit the broken cells together once more. After that he applied his skills to himself, and though his concentration was less than perfect, the currents were strong in this region; half an hour later, when he was secure that all the serious damage had been repaired, he relaxed and let the Working fade. His body still hurt like hell, but that was something he couldn’t fix. Pain is the brain’s way of signaling that something is wrong, his master had taught him. Alter that system and you’re messing with the brain itself. In time his throbbing nerves would figure out that the source of the problem was gone, and would quiet down.
It was partly his own fault, of course. He hadn’t Healed himself completely. But when earthquakes were as frequent as they were here, you didn’t waste precious time cleaning out a leftover hematoma; it was just too risky to Work that long. And besides (he told himself, wincing as he shifted position), no one ever died from a black-and-blue mark. Right?
When they were done with all that, Tarrant rejoined them. He looked slightly better than before, but that might have been the lighting; the warm light of the campfire was kinder to him than the moonlight. Certainly he was still weak, and when he lowered himself to the earth beside them, Damien saw his balance wavering.
“We’re still far from the valley,” he said. His voice sounded better, at least. “The map shows another two ridges between us and it, although what that translates to in terms of real-life mountains is anyone’s guess.”
“It’s a climb,” Hesseth agreed. “What about pursuit?”
“Unlikely, I think. They can’t follow your trail through the gap; I saw to that. And I’ve Obscured ours since dusk, so that it will be next to impossible to find.”
Given his condition, Damien was surprised. “Did you?”
The pale eyes fixed on him. “I only make a mistake once, priest.”
“Then we should get moving as soon as night falls.” Hesseth re-wrapped the dried meat so that it would keep. “By then we should all be rested enough, anyway.”
The Hunter seemed to hesitate. “You can move when night falls,” he said quietly. “Or even before that, if you like. But I would recommend not entering the valley until I’m with you again; the Terata are said to hunt there.”
“What—” Hesseth began. Though she was clearly surprised by his intentions, Damien wasn’t. He’d been expecting something like this since Tarrant had climbed out of the cave.
“He needs food,” he said. He could hear the edge in his own voice. “That means humans. And there aren’t any where we’re going.”
“I could hold out for long enough to make it down south,” Tarrant explained, “but not in this condition. Nor would I be of any use to your—or to our communal—purpose without substantial healing.”
“Which requires killing,” Hesseth challenged.
Tarrant didn’t answer. No words were necessary.
“You’ll have to be careful,” Damien muttered. “They’re looking for us.”
“They won’t expect me to return, least of all on wing. I can fly right over their traps and their armies, into villages where no one lies in wait for me. The land is full of people,” he said evenly. His eyes were fixed on Damien, daring him to protest. “I’ll be safe enough.”
“How long?” the priest managed. Not meeting his gaze.
“At least a day or two. I’ll want to go far enough that no act of mine is linked to our presence; it would be a shame to escape their clutches now, only to inspire them to new pursuit later. I’ll be careful. Trust me.”
“Like you were in the cities?” Damien said sharply.
“Like I was in the cities,” he answered coolly. Not missing a beat. “Cover what ground you can in the next few days. But don’t go into the valley without me. If you get to it before I come back, then stop and rest. The horses will be grateful for it.”
He stood, then, and Damien could see by the motion how weak he was. How stiff. How much blood would it take to heal a weakness like that? How many deaths? He tried not to think about it.
You hire a demon to fight a demon, and this is the price you pay. “Where will you go?” he asked. Hating himself for his curiosity, even as he wondered which Protectorate would surrender its women to sate the Hunter’s appetite. God, if there were only an alternative.
“North,” the Hunter told him. “The way we came. Some place large enough to harbor an army ... or a sizable raiding party. Some place that already smells of blood.”
He heard Hesseth draw in her breath sharply as she realized what he meant. Who it was he meant to kill.
Damien thought of the village they had passed through. The bodies, the blood ... the children huddled in the bathroom, their necks cleanly slit. Whoever had killed them, their crime would taint the currents for miles. For one with the Hunter’s sight, they would be easy to find.
Easy to kill.
“The least I can do for the man who saved me last night is choose suitable prey,” the Hunter said. Standing back now, so that the shadows of the night might enfold him. So that the darkness might lend him its power. For a moment Damien was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to summon the power he needed, that his strength was too far gone. Hadn’t he once said that transformation was the most difficult of all workings?
Then the coldfire flared, blindingly bright, and from its pyre arose a great black bird. It beat the night air with its wings—once, twice—and then rose up into the air, where the night obscured its motion. Garnet talons glittered in the moonlight.
“Be careful,” Damien whispered. Watching as its great wings tamed the night wind. Watching as it rose yet higher, until distance and darkness hid it from sight.
Only later, when he knew for a fact that it was out of hearing, did he add—very quietly—“Good hunting.”
Twenty-two
It took them four days to cross the mountains. They could have made better time if they’d tried, but there was no reason to rush. Knowing after Knowing made it clear that none of their pursuers had followed them, which gave them the luxury of leisure time for the first time in their journey. And after what they had seen and done in the Protectorates they needed it, both to regain their strength and their composure. Fortunately, the fertile silence of the wooded slopes was a perfect balm for human and rakhene soul alike.
Even the horses seemed grateful for a few easy days.
Damien tried hard not to worry about Tarrant. Tried not to remember that once in the past the Hunter had left their company and then not returned. It seemed so long ago that he’d been captured, almost in another life ... but the enemy was the same. In the rakhlands it had taken the form of a woman, here it might be a man or rakh or even a true demon—but there was no question in his own mind that the two powers were linked. And so Damien worried about Tarrant’s safety, and Hesseth no doubt worried about Tarrant’s safety, and they tried hard not to inflame each other’s fears by talking about them. That would only make it worse.
How much I’ve changed, he mused as they made camp one night. Once I would have stood back and let him die. Once I thought that nothing could be worse than freeing the Hunter to feed again. Now I protect him without a second thought, and calmly wave good-bye while he goes off to murder countless innocents. But the situation was different now and he knew it. Tarrant had saved his own life several times, and while he understood that it was always for a selfish purpose—the Neocount never did anything except to benefit himself—the fact remained that he had done it. That changed how you looked at a man, whether you wanted it to or not. And the people he’d be killing weren’t innocents this time, were they? Murderers deserved to die. Since the justice of the Church couldn’t touch them, let the Hunter provide their punishment. Whatever he did to them, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what they did to that village. Could it?
Be honest, he chided himself. We can’t succeed in this mission without him. That’s the bottom line. You need him, and so you must endure him. Protect him, even. It’s all part of this dark game we’re playing.
Use evil to fight evil, the Prophet wrote. If you’re lucky, they’ll destroy each other. Is that what I want? That Tarrant should die in combat, delivering the world from two evils at once?
He shut his eyes. His hands were shaking.
I don’t know. I’m not sure anymore. Not sure of anything.
He said that his presence would corrupt me. Has it begun already? Is this what corruption feels like?
God, protect my spirit, he prayed. The enemy can have my body, my life ... but preserve my soul, I beg You. I’ve placed it in such jeopardy with this alliance. But there was no other way. You can see that, can’t You? No other way to succeed.
At night, while they set up camp, he tried to explain to Hesseth about the earth-fae. Though she manipulated it unconsciously—as all native species did—she didn’t really see it, at least not in the sense that Tarrant did. And so she listened to his descriptions in rapt wonder, like a child listening to fairy tales. He tried to explain it all. How the earth-fae surged up from the beneath the planet’s crust with enough force to kill. How it settled down soon after and then flowed like water over the land, in currents that could be mapped and harnessed, from the strongest tide down to the tiniest ripple. Since humans used the earth-fae for their Workings, he explained, then all their Workings must flow with the currents. Thus Tarrant or he could attempt to Know their enemy—in other words, interpret the effect of his presence upon the earth-fae—but it would take tremendous power to launch an active assault against the current. For their enemy, of course, the opposite held true. It would take almost superhuman force to draw information upcurrent for hundreds of miles, but any message or assault which was launched from the south would naturally flow toward them. That’s what had worried Tarrant so much about the foreign touch in the currents near the crevasse, he explained; if it was an attempt to focus on their exact position, it might mean that something very big and very nasty was on its way.
And then, when he was done, he dared to ask her about the tidal fae. It was the first time since the rakhlands that he had broached the subject directly. He wasn’t sure she would take it well—in the past she had responded to such questions with downright hostility—but though she was silent for a moment, he sensed that it was not because she was offended by his question, but because she was trying to find words for something that was beyond all language.
“It’s like a heartbeat,” she said at last. “Like the whole world has a heartbeat, very slow and very resonant. Sometimes, when I want to Work, it’s as if I can feel the blood of the planet surging through everything, through the land and the sky and through me, and I can shape it with a thought ... and sometimes the world is silent, and there’s nothing to shape. Nothing at all. There’s no telling which it will be, either. No predicting any given moment. Because I say it’s one heartbeat, but it’s really like a thousand, and the rhythm between them is what matters ... including my own pulse. And all the rhythms of my body. Do you understand? It’s so hard to explain something you don’t think about. Something that humans never sense.”
“Do you see it in any form?”
“Sometimes. A flash of light, when several beats come together. As brilliant as a lightning strike when a lot of power is involved. Sometimes the whole sky will light up—just for an instant—like the whole world was a piece of shattered glass, with light glistening along every flaw. Light broken into a thousand colors. So very beautiful....” She shut her eyes, remembering. “It can be dangerous, though. I know of at least one khrast who was hunting when the tidal fae pulsed, and when the light blinded her, the quarry turned and charged ... so we try not to see it, we train ourselves not to look. It’s a matter of survival, you understand.”
He asked her gently, “Do you succeed?”
“Mostly,” she smiled. “But it is very beautiful. And that’s part of what we learned from your species: how to hunger for beauty.” She sketched a pattern in the dirt with a claw while she spoke: circles within circles within circles. “And it’s part of what stands between us and our males. The defining difference, you might say.” She looked up at him. “Your women don’t see it?”
“Tarrant says that a few can, with effort. Occasionally a man gets a glimpse, but no more.”
“More sorcery.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re such strangers to this world, you humans. You come here and redefine our very world, you sculpt our native species as though they were clay, you spawn a thousand monsters each time you draw a breath ... but you never really belong here. Not even after all these years. You live on this planet, but you’re not part of it.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Tell me about it.”
Days of traveling, nights of rest. A luxurious schedule, which he could indulge in only because of Tarrant’s absence. On the third night there were five minutes of true darkness, when the sun, the stars, and all three moons were hidden behind the bulk of the planet, and he wondered if Tarrant was taking advantage of its power. The true night might be a time of terror for most men, a time when humanity’s darkest imaginings borrowed substance from the night and came calling, but for the Hunter it was a time of unequaled power and potential. Maybe (Damien thought as he severed the spine of something gruesome which the dark fae had conjured) Tarrant could use it to get a handle on who or what they were going after. God knows, they could use information.
On the third day they came over a ridge and saw the valley at last. Vast, dramatic, forbidding, it was unlike anything he had ever seen before. He was accustomed to valleys that lay comfortably in the cradle of their surrounding mountains, flat plains which were a cohesive part of the mountain range which flanked them. This was a whole different creature. It was as though the earth had folded crisply in two, so that between the rocky hills they had just crossed and the soaring granite peaks of the eastern coastal range there was a deep crease—perhaps sea-level deep—with walls so steep that climbing them would be all but impossible, and a bottom that was lost in a sea of tree tops and mountain shadows. A white mist seemed to fill the whole of the valley, twining about the treetops like hazy serpents. The late afternoon sun did little to illuminate it, but cast its light instead on the sheer granite cliffs opposite them, so that the peaks seemed crowned in fire, and the depths were doubly dark by contrast. There wou
ld be precious few hours of the day in which the sun would rise high enough to shine directly down into the vast gorge, and even then the thick mist would protect the gloom that blanketed the miles like a shroud.
Despite the relative warmth of the afternoon, Damien found himself shivering. “That’s the route, huh?”
“The one he wanted.”
He stared at it a while longer, taking the measure of its gloom. As if by doing so he could somehow alter it. “It’s that or climbing mountains all the way south.”
“Or going back to the Protectorates.”
“Yeah.” A breeze drifted up to them, damp and cool. “No thanks.”
He braced himself, drew in a deep breath, and patterned a Knowing. For a minute the fae didn’t respond, and he was afraid that he was too far from the valley’s current to access its secrets. Then the familiar patterns appeared, and he dissected them carefully for information. He found no evidence of anyone watching them, or of anything lying in wait. Not yet. But there was a feeling about the area that he didn’t like, and he was almost disappointed when the Knowing failed to define a specific threat. Better an enemy you could give a name to than a cold, clammy ignorance crawling up your spine.
“Is it all right?” she asked.
He sighed, and let the Knowing fade. “For now.” He looked back to where the horses were waiting, saw Tarrant’s black mount grazing on a nasty-looking weed. Hesseth’s mare, as usual, was more circumspect. “I think this is as far as we should go without Tarrant. We’d better make camp and wait for him.”
She nodded.
He went to the black horse and gathered up its reins. “Come on,” he muttered. “Time to move.” Beside him Hesseth urged her own mount back, until the two animals faced away from the daunting panorama, back toward the mountain’s crest.
Without a word. That was the eerie part. Neither of them saying a thing, but moving in silent and perfect concord. Both of them knowing that the thing to do was to cross over the crest again and descend partway down the mountainside, so that they might pitch their camp out of sight of the dismal valley.
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