The black face smiled; obsidian teeth glinted in a lightless gash. “So sorry you had to come all this way, then, just to be disappointed. The matter isn’t open to debate.”
“I think it is,” Karril insisted. “I think it bears on the very rules we live by. Or would you like to have the matter arbitrated?”
The faceted eyes flashed angrily. “You wouldn’t dare,” he growled.
“Try me.”
“On what basis? Noninterference? This war began long before you got involved in it.”
“He’s been mine for nine centuries, Calesta. That predates any claim of yours and you know it. Remember the rule? No one of us may interfere where another has staked his claim.”
“Yours? He’s been yours?” The black figure laughed harshly. “Come off it, Karril! When did the Hunter ever submit to you?”
“I’ve fed on him—”
“I’ve fed on thousands—millions!—and it doesn’t make them mine. Not in the sense you mean. No, your precious Neocount values his independence too much to truly bond with you—or any of the Iezu—and because of that the rules don’t apply here. So sorry, brother. If that’s what you came for, you may as well leave now.”
“If I do,” Karril said calmly, “it will be to go straight to our maker.”
The obsidian body stiffened. “You wouldn’t dare. I have the right—
“Shall we let her decide that?”
The black figure drew itself up; the sharp edges of its flesh glittered dangerously. “You little fool! Petty god of sweaty couplings, patron prince of masturbators ... don’t you see what you’re interfering with? Can’t you see how many years I’ve put into this, how much planning is behind it? I’ll change this world, Karril. Not just its outward appearance ; I’ll change its fundamental laws. I’ll alter the fae itself! In time the entire planet will resonate in harmony with my aspect. Isn’t that worth the death of a piddling sorcerer or two? Think of it! Our natures are so very similar, Karril; you can feed where I do. You often have. Think what it will be like when this whole planet exists only to indulge us—”
“You don’t have to call off your precious project,” Karril said icily. “You don’t even have to let Tarrant go free. Just lift the illusion from the Terata’s domain. That’s all I came to ask.”
“Why don’t you join me instead?” Calesta asked softly. “We’re so very alike, you and I. Together we could tame this human species, and reshape it to suit our will. Why won’t you do it?”
Karril shook his head. “You disgust me, you know that?”
“Your answer never changes, does it?”
“Did you really think it would? We were born to be symbiotes, not predators. And you’re pushing that line. What would our maker think?” When Calesta didn’t answer, he pressed, “Lift your illusion from the Terata camp so that Gerald Tarrant can see your creations for what they are. Or else I’ll go before our maker and let her ecide the merit of my arguments.” A pause, threat-laden. “I’m willing to take that chance, Calesta. Are you?”
“You’re bluffing,” he accused.
“I’ve never been more serious.”
“She’d kill us both.”
“Very possibly.”
“You haven’t got the nerve to chance it!”
“Is that your final answer?”
Calesta was about to respond when a third voice broke in. “Go ahead, Calesta. Indulge him. It might prove amusing.”
The two demons turned. In the doorway stood a man, tall and blond and perhaps fifty years of age. Though he wore no coronet to proclaim his rank, it was obvious in the way he entered the chamber. This room had been designed to please him. The whole world existed to indulge him.
“Lift the illusion,” he urged. “What does it matter? We’ll have him in the end, all the same.” He came near to where Calesta stood—the demon’s chosen body was rigid with tension—and looked Karril over with eyes that missed nothing. “Friend of yours?”
“Hardly,” Calesta growled.
“So.” He chuckled. “The faeborn have their own wars. I thought infighting was against Iezu law.” When no one responded, he asked, “What’s this one’s name?”
Neither of them answered. There was power in the name of demons, which made their silence a defiant gesture. The prince’s expression darkened.
“As you wish.” He nodded toward Karril. “You came to speak for the undead sorcerer?”
“I came to ask Calesta to lift his illusion,” he said through gritted teeth. How could he threaten this man? How could he coerce him? The prince was human, and thus immune from the kind of threats one would use on a demon; as for human threats, he had already conquered death. What tool was left for manipulation? “So the sorcerer could fight his own battles.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” the Undying Prince assessed.
Calesta said nothing.
“I would like to see him confront the Terata,” the Prince mused. “It would be interesting to see if he makes it to my realm, and in what condition. In fact ...” His piercing gaze wandered to Karril. Fixed there. “I’m thinking he might be put to a better use than a target for Iezu vengeance.”
Calesta hissed.
“Think. How many men are there of that caliber? Perhaps one a generation is born with that ability, and so many die, so many make fatal mistakes.... Here is one who’s survived the centuries—the most challenging art of all—and crossed land and sea against all odds ... and come here. Why waste that power? Why discard that unique intellect? Between us we could tame a planet.”
He turned to Calesta. “Lift the illusion.”
“But my Lord—”
“Lift it.”
The demon took a step backward; anger flashed in his mirror-bright eyes.
“I’m not one of your mindless puppets, Calesta. Remember that. And I’m not that woman in the rakhlands, whom you twisted over the decades. I know your power and I know your limits and I won’t hesitate to use that knowledge. Those are the terms of your service here. I’ve never seen fit to interfere in your hobbies before—not even when you took that woman from my lands, along with half an army—but this time there’s something I want, and I’ll damn well have it. Lift the illusion. Now. Let the Hunter see what kind of power he’s dealing with.”
The demon’s glassy form blazed in the lamplight. “You command this?” he demanded.
“I do.”
The tendrils of smoke agitated about him, forming a thick black cloud. “I’ll give him the eyes to see through it,” he hissed. “No more. The others will just have to suffer.”
“The others aren’t my concern.” The Prince turned to Karril. “Is that sufficient?”
Karril managed to nod.
“There’s a service you’ll do for me in exchange. Tarrant’s too far away for me to contact him directly against his will. You’ll take him a message. Ask him to receive it.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
The blue eyes glittered. “That’s his choice. But he might regret it later, I think. Mention that.”
“I won’t do anything that causes him to be hurt.”
The Prince chuckled softly. “Loyalty in a Iezu is so refreshing. Isn’t it, Calesta?” He waved expansively. “It’ll be no more than a message. You can view it yourself if you like. He won’t even have to open a channel to me to listen to it ... although he might choose to do that, in time. Yes. I think that he will.”
He turned and left then, as silently as he had come. Not until he was gone—and safely out of hearing—did Karril whisper, “Strange game you’re playing here, Calesta.”
The black face cracked; the foggy tendrils twisted. It might have been a smile.
“Not strange at all,” Calesta assured him. “Merely complex. So stay out of my way, will you? Because as you said, the price of open conflict would be high.”
And his faceted eyes glittered as he added sweetly, “Brother.”
Twenty-seven
The one thing he wanted
almost as much as freedom, Damien decided, was a bath.
Morning light illuminated all too clearly their current state. Hesseth was clean enough, having started the previous day in fresh clothes, and while rakhene fur had its own distinctive odor it lacked the foulness of stale human sweat. Damien had supplied the latter in abundance. It was hard enough trying to keep clean with only one set of clothes to his name—the rest having been lost a small eternity ago, back at the gap—but when the only available river was seeded with nasty carnivores, and then their juvenile captors decided that the only water necessary was a single cupful for the three of them to pass around ... he wanted a bath. Badly. And he suspected that his cellmates wanted him to have one.
They were all covered in mud, of course. And God alone knew what else that mud contained. Thus far his only need for biological relief had been satisfied by urinating into a corner, but it occurred to him that if they stayed here much longer they’d be adding more solid substance to the mucky chamber as well. And what about the girl? He got the impression she had been here some time already. Did they let her out for a toilet break now and then, or had she grown adept at hiding her own waste beneath the muddy cover? His nose was so numbed by the reek of mold and rotted meat which seemed to hang about the Terata island that he could no longer sort through the foul odors surrounding him to analyze their source. Hesseth must be suffering quite a bit, though. Thank God his sense of smell was only human.
The girl. What was she? When he awakened in the gray light of dawn—surprised to find that he’d fallen asleep at all in this dismal place—he found the Fire by his side, set one end upright in the mud. Sometime during the night the girl had crept back to her tiny hole and curled up there like an animal, head tucked down by her knees. After a moment he took the vial up and put it back in its protective pouch. What had she been doing with it? Why the strange reaction? And come to think of it, how the hell had she known that he was a priest? Without his sword there was no obvious sign of his profession, and he hardly looked like a clergyman.
A priest of swamps, he thought, rubbing a coating of grime from his chin. Stubble raked his hand. Serving a god of mud.
Gently, very gently, he worked a Knowing. He didn’t know how sensitive she was—or even what form her sensitivity would take—but he did his best not to wake her. The currents were sluggish, but at last they responded. He felt Hesseth drawing near beside him as the pictures formed, ghostly tableaux that were nearly as confusing as the girl herself. Could the ralch-woman see his Knowing for what it was, or did she merely sense the flow of power? He had never thought to ask.
Images misted through the gray morning light, fading one into the other like fae-wraiths. Contrasting images that seemed to come from different worlds, even different realities. Warm scenes from a secure home. A garden of crystal leaves, shimmering in the moonlight. A coat drenched in blood. The darkness of a cavern. A young girl running. The face of a priest contorted in hatred, the downstab of a ritual sword ... he felt her almost awaken as that image formed, and had to dim down his Knowing until sleep once more claimed her. Then: Religious images, drenched in blood. A mother’s smile. A predator’s grin. A woman so twisted by age and neglect that her joints had thickened like tumors, her eyes tearing blood and pus. Malformations. Unhealed wounds. And running, always running; that image surrounded all the others, flanking them, creating a fragile web of unity that bound them all together.
Terror. That’s what all those pictures were born of, he thought, as he let the Knowing fade. He had no way of guessing how many of the images were real, and how many were the result of terror feeding on itself. Imagination could do terrible things in a place like this, especially to a young mind. Especially to one so infinitely vulnerable as this.
He longed to go to her. He hungered to comfort her. It went against all his training—against his very nature—to see such suffering and not move to heal it. But the priest’s face that he had seen in his Knowing loomed large in his mind, radiating a hate that was almost palpable. Real or not, it was real to her, and that was all that mattered. Maybe that was the face she saw when she looked at him. Maybe it was what she had learned to expect from his kind.
He prayed for her quietly. And mourned within, that he could not conjure a balm for her soul half so easily as he could Heal her flesh. Was that not the ultimate irony of his calling?
Food. It was brought to them in small bundles, inexpertly cooked. He tasted his dubiously, then downed a small bit of it. Hesseth studied hers, then decided against it; perhaps its mildly sour smell warned her of contents that her rakhene stomach couldn’t assimilate. His own body had fought off food poisoning often enough that he thought he must have calluses on his stomach lining by now, but even so he ate little. Just enough to keep up his strength. Weakness could be as dangerous as food poisoning in a place like this.
The girl still wouldn’t come near them, but waited until they withdrew to the far corner of the cave before she would claim her share. Even then her movements were strained, and it was clear that she was prepared to bolt the instant that either of them moved. Neither of them did. To Damien’s surprise she didn’t return immediately to her tiny shelter, but sat where the food had been left for her and gulped it down quickly. Her eyes left them only once, and that was when she looked for the cup of water. She gulped from it thirstily, her gaunt throat trembling as the water went down. She hadn’t gotten her share from the night before, Damien recalled, which meant she was probably desperate for fluid. Oh, well. He and Hesseth could manage without for a day if they had to.
But to his surprise she stopped before the small portion was finished, and slowly lowered the bowl. It was clear that she was still thirsty, and that the movement took effort. She glanced down into the cup, as if making sure that there was enough left over, and then placed it in front of her. Pushing it toward them. Then she moved slowly back to her own corner of the cavern, her eyes never leaving Damien.
After a minute he crept forward and took up the bowl. He passed it to Hesseth first, then drank from it himself. The girl hadn’t left them much, but considering how hard it must have been for her to keep from drinking it all it was practically a feast.
“Thank you,” he said. Very gently. Willing his voice to be as soft as it could become. “Thank you very much.”
The girl stared at him, but said nothing.
“Do you have a name?”
Still no response.
“I’m Damien Kilcannon Vryce,” he told her. “This is Hesseth sa-Restrath. We came from the western continent, to explore this land. To see if anyone had settled here.”
For a moment there was no response. Then, in a voice no louder than a whisper, the girl said hoarsely, “Jenseny.”
“Jenseny.” He said the name slowly, let her hear how very gentle it sounded on his tongue. “Are you from here, Jenseny? From the valley?”
“You’re a priest,” she accused.
For a moment he said nothing. Then he nodded.
“A priest of the One God.”
“Yes,” he said. Trying to remove all possible threat from his voice.
Her wide eyes blinked; was that a tear on her lashes? “Priests kill,” she accused.
He drew in a deep breath. Remembering the contorted face in his Knowing, the vicious downstab of a Church sword as it sliced into ... what? A child? Yes, that was the image. And here she was, only a child herself. No wonder she was afraid!
He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that priests didn’t kill. Children had an uncanny ability to tell when you were lying, and he sensed that if he lost her trust now he’d lose her forever. So he said very gently, “Priests kill sometimes. But where I come from, they only kill the faeborn. So that people don’t have to be afraid all the time.” “
He could see her trembling as she considered that. “Never children?” she breathed.
“No, Jenseny. Never. My people would rather die themselves than ever hurt a child.”
He saw her tr
emble then, and she bit her lower lip so hard that there was a bead of blood there when she spoke again. “They do it,” she whispered. “All the time.”
“Yeah.” He could hear the shame of it resonate in his own voice as he whispered, “I know.”
Her eyes moved from Damien at last, and fixed on Hesseth. “She isn’t human,” she accused.
“No,” Damien agreed, and Hesseth said quietly, “I’m rakh.”
She shivered then, and nearly withdrew to the safety of her bolt-hole. Damien thought it said much for her innate courage that in the end she stayed where she was.
“Rakh killed my father,” she said. Tears started to flow down her cheeks, etching ravines into the mud on her face. She simply drew her knees up and clasped them tightly to her. “They ate him,” she whispered feverishly. “They ate him and took his place.”
“Not all rakh are like that,” Damien told her. Willing utter calmness into his voice. Hoping that it would affect her.
But her head snapped up in rage. “Yes they are! They’re all the same! My father knew! My father was there! My father saw....”
And then it seemed to hit her all at once—the loss, the fear, the utter hopelessness of her plight—and she sobbed helplessly into her arms. “He was there,” she whispered hoarsely. “He said they were all the same. All monsters of the dark—”
Damien looked at Hesseth.
“It’s daylight now,” the rakh-woman offered.
But the girl was past all hearing. Her body wracked by sobs, she wept into the mud that coated her arms with a passion Damien ached to heal. But what good could he do, when she clearly feared him so? And when she perceived his traveling companion as one of the tribe that had “eaten” her father? Best now to keep his distance, lest he frighten her even more. Maybe later he could work on increasing the fragile contact between them. Maybe later he could earn her trust.
And maybe later, he thought, he could find out just where this strange girl’s father had been, and what it was that he saw.
When True Night Falls Page 34
