When at last he was done, he leaned back, exhausted, and studied his creation. Out here in the field it looked good, but if the Prince turned his attention upon it....
Then we’ll find out if I’m right or not, he thought grimly. The hard way.
Forty-five
“Damn stairs,” the guard muttered. “Don’t know why he can’t keep his prisoners on the ground floor this time, like all the others.”
He was less than thrilled about having drawn this duty, but he was hardly going to admit that to the captain. You didn’t tell a rakh that you’d rather do sentry duty than walk a simple food tray down ten turns of stairs. He’d read you for a wimp in two seconds flat, and then there’d be some damn animal pecking-order bullshit and the next thing you knew you’d be hauling out garbage or waxing canoes or some such crap thing like that. No, better to just walk the vulking tray down the vulking stairs and try not to think about the climb back up.
He was about halfway down when a hand grasped his shoulder from behind. Startled, he turned around as fast as he could. Instinct said go for your weapon! but instinct also said don’t drop the tray! and the result was that in his panic he nearly dropped them both.
“No need to be startled,” a cool voice assured him. The hand fell from his shoulder; his flesh was faintly chilled where it had grasped him.
The foreign Neocount. That’s who it was. For a minute his testicles drew up in cold dread, because he’d heard what the man was and what he could do. Then he remembered what the captain had told him: that there were at least a thousand wards in the palace all fixed on this man, all waiting for the first time he used his power against the Prince. Let him mutter even the first word of a Knowing, the rakh had assured him, and those wards will fry him to a cinder. Which meant that he was safe, didn’t it? Didn’t hurting one of the palace guards count as hurting the Prince?
Then the smooth, perfectly manicured hands closed about the sides of the tray and he could feel its woven surface grow cool in his hands. For a moment he held onto it, thinking that the captain would give him hell if he let go—and then he looked into those eyes, those bottomless silver cold-as-ice eyes, and his hands lost all their strength.
“I’ll deliver it,” the Neocount told him. “You can go back up.”
He almost started to protest, but his voice failed him. At last, realizing that he was outgunned and outclassed and not about to start an argument with a sorcerer in a dark place like this where no one could hear him yell, he nodded his acquiescence. The Neocount’s gaze released him and he shivered as the tall, cold figure passed him in the stairwell.
Oh, well, he thought. I didn’t want to climb the damned stairs anyway, right?
Shaking, he went back up to tell his captain that the food had been delivered.
The light was dim, and in order to read by it Damien and Jenseny had to sit with their backs to the bars. Thus they were positioned now, with various piles of coins and cards and miscellaneous small items spread out between them. They were filthy, worn and bruised, and their attention was clearly fixed on the cards in their hands. Neither of them noticed Tarrant as he approached.
“Two,” the girl said, and she took two cards from her hand and put them on the floor. “Give me two.”
The priest counted two cards off the deck and gave them to her. Evidently he had heard Tarrant move then, for after that he turned around—
And stared. Just long enough for Jenseny to turn around and see Tarrant and gasp. Just long enough for the Hunter to read the venom in his gaze. Then he turned back to the pile of items before him and picked up a coin. With studied disdain he cast it through the bars to the Hunter’s feet; it rolled to a stop against his boot.
“You can leave it by the bars,” he said shortly. “We’ll get to it when we’re done.”
He turned his back on the man then, and counted three cards for himself off the deck.
“Jen?”
“Two coins,” she said. She pushed them to the pile between them, where two other coins already lay.
He considered his cards, then added two coins of his own. “I’ll see you that, and raise you ... a piece of chalk.”
“I’m out of chalk.” She dug a grimy hand down into her pocket, searching for any miniscule tidbits that previous searches had not revealed. At last she came up clutching something. She held it up into the light and asked, “What is it?”
He studied the small bits of dark rock and rendered judgment. “Lava.”
“What’s it worth?”
He considered. “Half a chalk each.”
Tarrant came forward as she counted off two pieces and added them to the pile of wagers. He put the tray down on the floor, right by the bars. “I thought you would want to know what happened,” he said.
“I vulking well know what happened,” Damien muttered through gritted teeth. Then to the girl, “What have you got?”
“Three Matrias.”
“Damn. Pair of sevens.” He watched as she pulled the booty over to her side, then cast another coin down between them. “Your deal.”
“I thought you should understand—”
“I understand, all right!” He got to his feet in one sudden motion and turned to face the man; he felt as taut as a watchspring that had been overwound, about to snap. “I understand that I fed you for five vulking months so you could get here and sell us out to the man we came to kill, that’s what I understand! What did he offer you, anyway? A house of your own with some nifty crystal architecture, maybe a few girls to run around and bleed for you? What?”
“Immortality,” the Hunter said.
Stunned, Damien couldn’t find his voice.
“The real thing.”
“God,” he whispered. He shut his eyes. “No. I can’t outbid that. Good God.”
“We didn’t have a chance,” the Hunter told him. “Not with a Iezu involved. I couldn’t get within ten feet of the Prince without half a dozen wards attacking, and you ... you wouldn’t last a minute. The first time you even hinted at a threatening gesture your senses would be so warped by Iezu sorcery that you couldn’t tell dream from reality, and then it would all be over. No contest at all.”
“Then you could have told me that!” he spat. “When I asked you in Esperanova, you should have told me that. God damn it! I trusted you.”
“And I warned you not to,” the Hunter reminded him. “Several times.”
“You could have told me!”
“I did. I told you there was almost no hope. I told you your only chance lay with one wild element—and it didn’t come through, did it? That’s hardly my fault.”
Damien’s hands had clenched into fists by his sides; his knuckles were white with rage. “Damn you,” he whispered hoarsely. “Damn your infernal honesty!”
“I gave you the odds. You made your decision. Isn’t it a little hypocritical to play the martyr now, priest?”
He might have answered—if he could have gotten words out past the rage boiling up in his throat—but at that moment another person entered the chamber, and her presence startled him so much that words abandoned him.
She was slender. She was dark. She was beautiful, in the way that the Hunter preferred beauty: fragile, delicate, vulnerable. It was clear from the way she looked at Tarrant that she feared him, feared him terribly, and yet she approached him, drawn to his presence in the way a mesmerized skerrel might be drawn to a hungry snake. Every instinct in Damien’s soul cried out for him to go to her, to help her, to shelter her from the Hunter’s cruelty, but the chain binding his legs and the thick iron bars before him made any such movement impossible. Whatever Tarrant might do to this woman, Damien could do no more than stand and watch.
She looked at the priest, then at the Hunter, then quickly away. Her hand on the wall was trembling, and her voice shook slightly when she spoke. “His Highness says to please come see him when you’re finished here, he has some business he needs to discuss with you.” A bare whisper of a voice, so fraught
with fear that Damien’s heart ached to hear it. And for good reason, he thought; he could almost feel the Hunter’s hunger reaching out to her, caressing her, savoring her terror—
“Leave her alone!” he choked out. Powerless words, futile sounds. There was nothing he could do if the Hunter chose to harm her. Nothing but watch, and hate.
Tarrant moved to where the woman stood. Though she drew back from him in terror, she made no move to get away. He lifted a long, slender hand to her hair, then stroked it; his finger passed down along the line of her throat, pausing gently to test the heat of her pulse. She moaned softly, but made no move to escape him. Her dark eyes glittered with fear.
“Tarrant. Please.” How he hated his helplessness! His hands closed tightly about the thick iron bars, but mere desperation couldn’t bend them. “She just came to bring you a message. Don’t hurt her.”
The Hunter chuckled coldly. “Our journey together is over now, priest. I no longer have to indulge your tedious morality.” He leaned down to the girl and kissed her gently on the forehead, a mockery of human affection; Damien saw the girl shiver violently. “Sisa belongs to me. A gift from the Prince, to cement our alliance. A fitting tribute, don’t you think?”
“You can’t own a person,” Jenseny protested.
“Can’t I?” the Hunter smiled. “Last night I hunted her in the Black Lands. Tonight she lives only because I chose to spare her life. From this moment onward her every breath will be drawn in at my will—or extinguished at my command. That’s ownership in my book, Mes Jenseny.”
He had to turn away. He couldn’t watch it. Helplessness was a cold knot in his gut, a tide of sickness in his soul. “Listen to yourself!” he said hoarsely. “Look at what you’re doing! That isn’t the Gerald Tarrant I knew. What’s happening to you?”
“Come now, priest, you would be the first to catalog my sins. What makes this woman different from a thousand others? My hunger hasn’t changed. My techniques are hardly different.”
“You told me once about how you hunted when you were in the Forest. How you gave your victims a chance to escape you—”
“A chance so slim it was all but nonexistent.”
“But you gave it to them! Slim or not. You told them that if they could evade you for three nights you’d let them go free. Didn’t you?” He waited for an answer, and when none came pressed on. “You told me how you hunted them on foot, and how you wouldn’t Work even if you wanted to because then they would have no chance at all. Remember that? Remember how you told me that at the end of three nights they would either die for your pleasure or be free of you forever, that that was part of the game?” He drew in a deep breath, struggling to make his voice steady. “What you did to those women was finite, Tarrant. It tore them apart, but it ended. What you’re doing here....” He couldn’t look at the woman’s face. It would bring tears to his eyes, to match those which were forming in hers. “This place is corrupting you,” he whispered. “First your loyalties, now your pleasures ... what will you be when it’s all finished? Immortal and independent? Or a slave of the Black Lands?”
“Maybe I have changed,” the Hunter said quietly. “Maybe the freedom to cast off all fear of death has given me options that I lacked before. Or maybe ... maybe you never really knew me as well as you thought. Maybe you saw what you wanted to see and no more. Only now the blinders have been removed.” He stroked the woman’s hair possessively. “Now the truth is uncovered,” he said. “Now I can be what I was meant to be, what I might have been centuries ago had I not wasted half my energies in the paltry mechanisms of survival.”
“Come,” he said to the woman, when he released her. “I’m finished here. Let’s go see your Prince.”
She went up the stairs ahead of him, one slender hand brushing the wall for support as she climbed. Damien watched until they were out of sight, then listened until the last of their footsteps echoed down the winding staircase, into silence. When the two were truly gone, he lowered his face into his hands, his shaking angry hands, and his whole body shook from rage. And sorrow. And fury, at his own helplessness.
After a time, Jenseny asked gently, “You okay?”
He drew in a deep breath, tried to make his voice as steady as it could be. “Yeah. I’m okay.” He lifted up his face from his hands; his eyes were wet. “Deal the cards, all right?”
As she laid out the decorated cardboard rectangles, he remembered the food that Tarrant had brought, and after a moment he mastered his anger enough to reach through the bars to get it. There was no space large enough for the tray to pass through, so he had to collect it piece by piece: bread, cheese, meat, something wrapped in a napkin ... the last thing struck him as odd, he couldn’t remember anything like it coming down with previous trays. Maybe silverware, he thought as he unwrapped it. Maybe the Prince was going to trust them with a fork—
It was a knife.
Its handle was mother-of-pearl with a fine silver filigree. Its hilt had the crest of the Tarrant clan embedded in its center. The blade was as bright as sterling, and it glimmered with a light which was too cool to be reflected lampglow, too shadowless to be natural.
He stared at it, stunned. Coldfire. It had to be.
What the hell....
Jenseny crawled over to where he was and pulled his hand toward her so she could see. “What is it?”
“It’s his,” he breathed. He remembered it from Briand, drawing blood from a young boy’s arm. From the Forest, slicing loose infected bandages from Senzei’s stomach. From so many other places.... “His knife. Only it wasn’t Worked back then....”
It was now, there was no doubt of it. And yet ... if that light was the Hunter’s coldfire, then he should be able to feel it through the cloth. He closed his hand about it—gently, lest he tempt the blade—but still he felt nothing. No cold. No evil. None of the sensations he had come to associate with Tarrant’s power, or with the charged sword he carried.
“Is it now?” she asked.
He opened his hand again. The folds of the cloth were dark about the knife, yet the blade was bright. That was the unlight of coldfire, no question about it. He had seen it often enough to know.
“I think so,” he whispered. Thinking: Coldfire! He might be able to control it. No other man could. Even the Prince wouldn’t dare attempt such a thing, not with a power that could suck the life out of him as surely as he drew a breath. The only reason Damien could was because of his link with Tarrant, the living channel between them. But to draw on that now ... he had to fight off a wave of hatred and revulsion just to consider it. That lying, scheming bastard ... but Tarrant had given them this. One chance. One slim, almost nonexistent hope.
The only hope we had, he realized suddenly. The only possible chance he could see.
“Why didn’t he tell you about it?” Jenseny asked.
Even as he heard the words he realized the answer, and his hand closed reflexively about the knife. Wrapping it in its cotton shroud, hiding it from sight. “Because the Prince doesn’t trust him yet,” he told her. “Because he watches him, always.”
As he might be watching us, even now.
“No,” he whispered. “He thinks we’re helpless. Tarrant’s a possible threat; we’re not.”
“What?”
He opened the cloth again and took up the knife to study it; after seeing that it was hinged, he folded the blade into its handle. Thus arranged it was slim and compact, and fitted easily within his hand. Or within a pocket. Or within a sleeve.
“We can’t talk about this,” he told her. Very quietly. “Because if we do, and someone is listening ... then it’s all over. You understand, Jenseny? Not a word.”
Eyes wide, she nodded. He wrapped the knife back up in its napkin, then slid it into his pants pocket. Later, when he was calmer, he would think of what to do with it. Where to keep it. How to use it.
A knife in the heart is as fatal to an adept as it is to a common man. Who had said that? Ciani? Or was it Tarrant? The memori
es were all muddled. God, he needed time to think. He needed time to plan.
“What should I do?” the girl whispered.
“Just play,” he told her. His mind was racing as he cast out a coin into the space between them, a northern half-cent. No, Gerald Tarrant, I didn’t know you. He picked up his cards and spread them, sheltering them with his hands. I didn’t know you at all.
In his pocket, the coldfire burned.
Forty-six
“Damien. Damien, wake up.”
Darkness faded into near-darkness, punctuated by lampfires. There were figures standing outside the bars, the glint of steel by their sides. Jenseny was shaking him.
“They say we have to go see the Prince,” she told him.
Slowly, painfully, he rose to his feet. His legs ached from cold and inaction and the short length of chain that bound them made it hard for him to get up. At last he stood, and faced the men who were waiting outside the cell. Six men in all, and the rakh who commanded them. Katassah.
“His Highness requests your presence,” the maned captain told him.
There was nothing to do but nod his comprehension and then step back while they unlocked the door. Three men came through it and took up position before him. “Turn around,” the rakh ordered. He did. His arms were pulled back behind him, and cold steel bands were snapped shut about his wrists. They were linked by a shorter chain than the last time, he noted. The boys were being careful today.
“Bring him out,” the rakh commanded.
“What about me?” Jenseny demanded. She tried to go to Damien, but a guard held her back. “You’re not leaving me alone here!”
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