When True Night Falls

by C. S. Friedman

  “Your cause,” the Neocount said coolly. “It hasn’t been mine for some time now.”

  “Where did she die?” the rakh demanded. “When?”

  The past seemed a blur; he struggled to remember. “A day north. Maybe. There was a chasm....”

  “I know the one,” the rakh said. “I’ll send men out there in the morning to confirm it.”

  He remembered Hesseth’s body, so lifeless, so broken. Thank God she had died before this moment. Thank God she didn’t have to witness their defeat.

  The boats were coming into sight now, three long canoelike structures that would seat two men across, three in the center. Two-thirds of the way back was a small metal housing that might contain some sort of engine or turbine, but its shape gave no hint as to its mechanical nature. The combined package was light enough and maneuver-able enough that all three boats were easily brought to shore, and there a man held each in place, bracing it against the river current.

  The rakh walked to the water’s edge and knelt down by it, scooping up a mouthful of the ice-cold water into a pewter cup. When he had enough he stood again, and took out a small glass vial from a pocket in his uniform. This he unscrewed and upended over the cup; Damien saw a thin stream of white powder glisten in the moonlight.

  He walked toward Damien, swirling the cup so that the powder and water might mix thoroughly. When he reached the priest, he held it out to him, close enough that he might touch his lips to its brim.

  “Drink it,” he ordered.

  His heart pounding wildly in fear, Damien asked, “What is it?”

  “It will make you temporarily incapable of Working. I trust you understand why that’s necessary.”

  He looked up at Tarrant, hoping for ... what? Sympathy? Support? He’d sooner get it from a host of bloodsuckers than from that corrupted soul.

  The cup was before him. The rakh commander was waiting. Fear was a garrote around Damien’s heart.

  “You can drink it,” the rakh said at last, “or I can have you beaten into unconsciousness. Your choice.”

  He saw Jenseny’s eyes fixed on him, wide and terrified. For a moment that was all he could look at, all he could bear to see. Then he turned back to the rakh, shuddering, and nodded. The cup was brought to his lips and tilted up; bitter water, ice cold and algae tainted, filled his mouth and throat.

  He swallowed.

  Again.

  When at last the cup was empty, it was removed from him. Trembling, Damien wondered what the potion’s effect would be. Was there truly a substance that could rob man of his power to Work, without damaging his other faculties? He doubted it. Dear God, what had he gotten himself into?

  They pulled him to his feet. Not gently and not slowly; he stumbled once as his legs unfolded, half frozen from their previous immersion. The wind was like ice on his body, its coldness trapped by the folds of soaking wet fabric. Hadn’t he been in similar condition the last time a rakh had taken him prisoner? Ernan tradition, he thought wryly, as they pushed him toward the water once more. In another time and place it might almost have amused him.

  They helped him board one of the canoe-things—no easy task with his hands bound behind his back—and then the rakh came over and clipped his shackles to a chain running along the seat. Worse and worse. He leaned back, shivering, not wanting to look at his captors, not willing to look at Tarrant. “Don’t hurt the girl,” he whispered hoarsely. He could hear his voice shaking. “Please.”

  The rakh didn’t answer. On the shore one of the men had picked Jenseny up and was carrying her to a boat; when she saw it wasn’t the same boat that Damien was in she started struggling, and such was the strength born of her desperation that she wriggled free of him and splashed down into ankle-deep water. He reached for her quickly, but by then she was gone, plunging through the ice-cold river with desperate strength, struggling to get to the priest before they grabbed hold of her again.

  In the end it was the rakh who caught her, yanking her back just before she could reach Damien. She screamed and struggled and clawed and bit, but all to no avail; his species was accustomed to dealing with far more dangerous attacks from their children.

  At last, exhausted, she hung whimpering in his grip, limp as a rag doll. One of the other men moved in to take her.

  Damien met the rakh’s eyes. “What’s the matter?” he challenged. “Afraid that she might hurt you?”

  The rakh hesitated, then looked at Tarrant. Well, Damien thought, that’s the end of it. After all the times that he’s urged me to kill her, he’s hardly about to indulge her now.

  But to his surprise Tarrant nodded. The rakh released Jenseny, and the girl splashed over to where Damien was. One of the men grabbed hold of the back of her shirt and lifted, and between that and her own efforts she was soon sitting crumpled in the bottom of the boat, her arms about Damien, sobbing into his chest.

  “Chain her up?” one of the men asked.

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” the rakh said coldly. “Our guest will answer for her behavior.” He shot a quick look of warning at Damien, then turned away to give orders to another man. Damien looked down at the girl.

  “Shh,” he whispered to her. “It’s all right. We’ll be all right.” It was such a lie he could hardly stomach it—and he was sure that she recognized it as such—but the moment seemed to demand a ritual reassurance.

  If Tarrant told the Prince about her power, then it’s only a question of time until they kill her. If not ... then she may live long enough to see me killed first.

  The rakh turned to Tarrant. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  The Hunter shook his head. “I’ll be there tomorrow after sunfall. Tell his Highness to expect me.”

  The rakh bowed his assent.

  Damien’s head felt fuzzy, and his thoughts were becoming muddled. Was that the drug? What must a potion do to a man’s body in order to keep him from Working? How long would it last?

  Dear God, I’m sorry. We tried our best. Forgive my many failures, I beg you. All that I did was done for love of You. Even my death. He sighed and shut his eyes. Most of all my death.

  The boats were pushed into deep water and the current caught them up. Damien felt the thin hull bob as the last of the soldiers boarded, and then they were floating free. A few terse orders were voiced, after which the only sounds were the quiet dip and splash of oars and the near-hysterical sobs of the small, frightened child who clung to his chest.

  Alone on the shore, impassive and aloof as always, Gerald Tarrant watched in silence as the river carried them away.

  Forty-two

  The rakft children were gone.

  She had heard them scream when Hesseth fell—a shrill high-pitched keening that bespoke pain and fear and loss all in one sound—and then the noise was gone, and they were gone, and Hesseth was gone. Forever.

  Jenseny shivered as she huddled close to the priest, partly from cold but mostly from fear. She had no one left in the world but him now, and it took no great stretch of intellect to realize that the chains on his wrists and the soldiers which surrounded him meant that he might soon be taken from her as well. She didn’t know if she was more scared for herself or for him, but the combination of fears was overwhelming. All she could do was hold him, cling to him, press her face against his cold, wet chest, and pray. To his god, who believed in protecting children. Damien had said he wouldn’t help them here, that he didn’t do that kind of thing, but she wasn’t so sure. When you really cared about someone, didn’t you want to help them? Why would a god be different?

  She could feel the priest’s exhaustion as he leaned back against the engine housing, could sense his bone-deep weariness as the length of chain binding him tinkled and rattled into its new position. It wasn’t just a tiredness of the flesh, like you felt when you had walked too far, or had gone too long without sleep, but a tiredness of the soul. She had never sensed anything like that in him before. She didn’t think it was because of the long walks, o
r because of having to carry her so far, or even because of Hesseth’s death. All those things were a price he had been willing to pay to get where he was going, to do what he felt he had to do. No, it was more than that. This tiredness was because he had been fighting hopelessness for so long, so very long, and now he was losing the battle. And she didn’t know what to say or do to make it better, so she just stayed very quiet and held onto him and tried to keep him warm with her body, while the boats of the Undying Prince brought them closer and closer to the enemy’s seat of power.

  Black walls gave way to higher walls yet, speckled with rosettes of white and gray. She tried to focus on them as a way of fighting back the panic, but it welled up inside her anyway, sharp and hot and demanding. What was the Prince going to do with them, now that he had taken them prisoner? Each thing she thought of was more terrible than the last. It was clear that they had to get away from these people, but how? Once the Light flashed briefly and she tried to use it like Hesseth had taught her, to break through his chains, but she just wasn’t strong enough, or maybe she didn’t do it right. Or maybe it was like Hesseth had said, that the Light did its best work with minds and souls, and wasn’t that good with inanimate objects. The failure filled her with frustration, and with anger. Tarrant had said that the Light was a kind of power, but what good did that do if she couldn’t Work it?

  The river meandered through the wasteland, twisting and turning as its current carried them westward. The walls were so high that Jenseny couldn’t see the trees above them at all, not even when the moonlight was strongest. And then Domina—if that big moon was Domina—began to set, and sometimes the light would be lost behind a twist in the canyon. That was a very scary thing, when they were all in darkness except for the single great lantern at the head of each boat. Jenseny thought she could see things stirring along the edges of the water then, things that sometimes looked like white trees and sometimes animals and sometimes the Terata. Were those fear-things which they had made? Tarrant had explained that once, how the fae could make shapes out of fears and hopes and give them a life of their own. Did that mean she might see her father one day, reflected in the fae’s dark substance? She huddled close to Damien, afraid of the thought. Tarrant said that all the fae-things fed on people, even when they looked like things you loved. What a horrifying concept, that your most precious dreams could be turned against you! How she longed to be in her own room again, where the love and order of her father’s house had protected her from such nightmares!

  Slowly, mile by mile, the canyon walls lowered. Equally slowly the river widened, until it was hard to see the far shore in the darkness. The nearer shoreline glistened like Tarrant’s handful of gems had, only all white and silver and black, with no colors. She looked up at Damien to see if he was watching it, but he was gazing into the night with unfocused eyes, his brow furrowed as if in painful concentration. “Are you all right?” she whispered. She made her voice as soft as it could be, so the soldiers wouldn’t hear her. For a moment the priest’s eyes turned her way, but they remained as glazed and unresponsive as before. He seemed to be trying to talk, but for a long time no words would come. “Can’t think,” he gasped at last; it was clear those two words were a triumph. “The potion....” Then his strength failed him, or maybe it was just that the words deserted him; he sagged back against the engine housing and shut his eyes, shivering in the cold of the night.

  “It’ll be okay,” she promised him. Echoing his earlier words, hoping they would comfort him. “We’ll get through it okay.”

  You can’t be strong anymore, so I’ll have to be strong for both of us.

  She was hungry and she was thirsty and there was not much she could do about it. The soldiers had taken Damien’s pack and that was where all the food was. She could scoop up water in her hand if she stretched down as far as possible, but she was afraid of drinking too much and then having to go to the bathroom. That would be incredibly embarrassing. She had gotten used to slipping off behind a rock or a bush to do her stuff, but there were no rocks or bushes here and she figured the soldiers would be quick to anger if she fouled their boat. What did they do when nature called?

  “Water,” the priest whispered, and she cupped her hands and scooped some up—almost falling out of the boat in the process—and brought it up to his lips. He sipped a little, then nodded for her to spill back the rest. Evidently he didn’t want to fill up his bladder too much either.

  And then the three boats turned, bright oars managing the maneuver with practiced precision. That brought them into a cave that led from the river, and they were quickly swallowed up by its narrow confines. Lamplight glittered on a crystalline ceiling not ten feet from their heads; if one of the men had stood up, he could have reached up and touched it. She wondered what would happen if the river got higher. Maybe after a hard rain they couldn’t use this route at all.

  After a time, the walls opened up. The ceiling gave way to darkness, then to stars. They floated on the surface of a lake so black that it could hardly be distinguished from the land surrounding it. And then before them....

  They rose up from the ground suddenly, magnificently, their manifold facets reflecting the moonlight with solar brilliance, their myriad surfaces like mirrors. Vast towers of crystal that soared toward the heavens, their peaked tips sharp against Domina’s brilliance. Some were as wide as buildings and equally as solid; others were slender spines of glass, barely translucent, that jutted out from among their perpendicular brethren at sharp, arresting angles. Here and there a cluster of crystals, diamondlike, adhered to one of the mirror surfaces, or filled in the gap between two towers; here and there a spine had been broken by some mischance of nature and tiny crystals gathered in the wound like blood. It was a chaos of brilliance, of knife-sharp edges and night-black surfaces that flashed with light as the boats moved toward them, a field of living crystal so complex, so intertwined, that it was impossible to focus on any one form, or to trace a single outline to its end. Staring at it, Jenseny felt dizzy and breathless and afraid all at once, and at last she turned away from it.

  “Rakhlands,” the priest whispered. No more than that. Rakhlands. She wished he had told her more about that journey, so that she could understand the reference.

  Directly east of them, low on the horizon, the pale light of dawn was just beginning to compromise the night. Cool sparks played along the edges of the crystal towers where the newborn sunlight touched them, and one mirrored surface, angled perfectly to catch the dawn light, flashed a blue so bright that it hurt her eyes. Jenseny wondered what this place would look like in the sunlight. She wondered if they would live to see it.

  The boats were brought to a gentle shore and there moored. Clearly the beach, like the lake it surrounded, had been deliberately sculpted; the land in this region was a wild mixture of swirling lava and crystalline growths, hardly suitable for a harbor. There were other boats nearby, Jenseny noted, some like the ones they were in and others much larger and much more complicated. None were tall, she noted. She guessed that was because of the cavern they had to sail through to get here.

  When they had reached the beach, the soldiers at the front quickly disembarked, boots splashing in the water as they took up careful positions around their prisoners. They needn’t have bothered. It was clear that Damien could hardly stand, and as two of the soldiers helped him from the boat he went down on his knees, hard; it was clear that their firm grip on his upper arms was the only thing keeping him upright at all.

  She stayed by his side, trying to help him. One of the soldiers tried to push her away, but she clung to the priest’s shirt, unwilling to leave his side for even an instant. From on shore the rakh captain snapped a sharp command, and the soldiers indulged her. Together, with effort, the men got Damien to shore. Together they forced him to his knees.

  “The drug will wear off soon,” the rakh informed him. Jenseny heard the rattle of chain behind her, twisted around just in time to see shackles being fastened ab
out the priest’s ankles. A short length of chain connected them, enough to allow him to walk but not enough to run. Did they fear him that much? She looked up at the striped rakh, found his glistening green eyes fixed on her. They weren’t afraid of him, she realized. Not at all. They were just being careful.

  “Let’s go,” he ordered, and the soldiers lifted Damien to his feet.

  They were marched along a road of sorts, where the lava had been leveled and the crystals had been crushed and the result was a flat bed of black grit that crunched beneath their feet. Higher and higher the towers loomed as they approached, until the tallest of them seemed lost among the stars themselves. Would they be going inside them somehow? Jenseny wondered. Or was there some kind of space hidden in between them? As they passed into the shadow of the first of the great columns she saw Damien look up, not at the looming crystals but straight up at the sky—and she realized with a start that he was looking at the moon and the stars and the dawn because he thought that he might never see them again.

  They passed between two crystal spires, into a space whose faceted walls reflected the soldiers’ lamplight in flashes of molten gold. It was hard for her to see where she was going, and more than once Damien stumbled; the reflected light, constantly shifting, made it seem like walls existed that weren’t really there, and once or twice a real wall was so shadowed that she nearly walked into it. The soldiers seemed to do well enough, but of course they were used to it; there was no doubt in her mind that a stranger would be trapped in this place like an insect in a spider’s web, unable to move more than ten feet without walking into something.

  And then they were going downward. Down past the crystal, down into the earth, on stairs that had been crudely carved from the black rock itself. It was hard going even for her, and she could feel the tension in Damien’s body as he fought the length of chain about his ankles, struggling to descend safely. They seemed to go down forever, and only because she kept count of the lamps that the rakh captain lit as they passed did she have any idea of how far it was. Ten lamps, she counted. Probably ten turns on the rough stone staircase. Far enough that she didn’t look forward to climbing back up.