Guards held onto Damien as the rakh/Prince approached Tarrant’s body. The Hunter had drawn up one arm to shield his face from the conjured light; the rakh kicked it away. “You’re not the only one with a storage system, you know.” He nodded toward one of his guards. “Take him to the roof of the east tower,” he ordered. “I’ve prepared it for him. See that he greets the dawn in suitable attire.”
With a sick heart Damien saw them gather up the Hunter’s ravaged form and carry it away; Tarrant might have been dead already for all that he fought them. I led you from fire into fire, the priest thought. The rakh was coming back to him now, and the guards forced the priest to his knees to receive him.
“You can’t kill me,” he said coldly. “Not with your knives and not with your Workings. All you can do is force me to take another body before I’m ready, and that will hurt me a bit. But the pain is nothing permanent, I assure you—and in the end you’ll answer for my discomfort.”
Damien looked for Jenseny, found her crouched down some ten feet away, shivering like a frightened animal. Had she Seen the change? What a horrifying thought! “What happened to Katassah?” he demanded.
“Oh, he’s still within this flesh. He just ... relinquished control for the moment.” He brushed one hand down the front of his uniform, savoring the touch of its decorations. “He’s not too happy about the change in command, but that can’t be helped. It’s easier to claim a host when you know him well, and I was pressed for time. He’ll have to understand.”
He nodded to the guards holding Damien, who pulled him to his feet. “You destroyed the Terata,” he accused. “That breeding-ground of adepts which I depend upon for rejuvenation. You destroyed them just when I was making arrangements to have a suitable youth brought to me ... so I think it’s only fitting that you take his place.” He reached out a hand to Damien, and though the priest jerked violently back the guards held him in place; sharp claws stroked down the side of his face, as if testing the resiliency of his skin. “You’re older than I would like, and it won’t be ten years before deterioration begins ... but look at that from the bright side. In ten years you’ll be free again. You won’t have to live in a body that moves without your willing it, or gaze out through eyes that are under another’s control ... by then you’ll be grateful for what’s left to you, priest. I guarantee it.”
“No.” It was Jenseny. “No!” She started forward toward the rakh, but not fast enough; one of the guards tackled her roughly to the ground. “No,” she sobbed. “Don’t do it!”
“Your little friend is loyal,” he noted. “But never fear, there are compensations. You’ll share an adept’s vision for nearly a decade; there are men who would kill for a single year of that. Although admittedly, some don’t cope too well when the vision is withdrawn.” Again the claws touched his face, this time not so gently; the contact made his skin crawl.
“Don’t take him!” the girl yelled. “Take me! I’ll do it!”
The rakh smiled coldly. “I took a woman for a host once,” he told them. “I lived in her for nearly forty years. When I left her at last, her mind snapped; apparently the gender change combined with the loss of adeptitude was a little too much for her.” He bowed toward Jenseny, a mocking salute. “So I thank you for the offer, little one. But I think I’ll stick to my own sex this time. As well as my own species.”
He turned back to Damien, about to speak.
“You could see like I do!” the girl cried.
Damien realized in an instant what she meant, what she was doing. “Jenseny, no!”
The rakh studied him for a moment, then turned back to the girl. “And how is that, little one?”
“Don’t,” Damien begged. Struggling in vain to get free, to go to her. “Don’t tell him!”
But she didn’t listen, or else she just didn’t care. “I can see the tidal fae,” she said proudly.
The rakh was stunned. “What?”
“I can see the tidal fae,” she repeated. Defiantly. “And more than that. I can Work it a little. Hesseth said I could learn to Work it more, only we didn’t have the time....” The last words were choked out as memory overcame her; she lowered her head, trembling. “Only now she’s gone,” she whispered.
“Is this true?” the rakh whispered. It was not so much a question addressed to her as a key to a Knowing; Damien could feel the fae gathering around him as he used it to test the truth of her words. “Gods of Earth,” he whispered. “You can.”
He walked over to her, knelt down by her side, put a hand to the side of her face. Though there was fear in her eyes, she did not back away. His fingers wiped a narrow path through the grime and the tears on her face and then fell back, releasing her.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Jenseny—” Damien began, but one of the guards struck him and he went down, hard.
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said. “And I don’t want to be afraid any more. I’m tired of running and I want to have a place to live and I want the voices to stop. I think you know how to stop them. Don’t you?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Do you know what it is I do? Do you understand it?”
“Does that matter?” Damien demanded from where he lay. He was struck in the back and in the side; one blow landed right in his kidneys, and the pain nearly blinded him.
“I saw you move into that body,” she told the rakh. “And I can see that he’s still inside it, too. You’re sharing it, aren’t you? The two of you together. I could do that. You could use my eyes to see the tidal fae ... and I wouldn’t have to be alone any more.” She choked on those words, and the pain in her voice made Damien’s heart lurch in sympathy. “Not ever again,” she whispered.
The rakh stood. For a long time he just looked at her, assessing the situation. “It would be hard to rule in such a body,” he said at last. “But to see the tidal fae—to Work it!—that might be worth the inconvenience.”
He turned back toward Damien, who lay gasping on the carpet. “Take them back down,” he commanded. “I need time to think. I need—”
“Don’t put me back with him!” the girl cried out. “He’ll try to stop me, try to talk me out of it ... he might even hurt me if he thought I’d help you. Please, don’t put us together.”
Oh, Jenseny. His eyes fell shut as despair filled his soul to bursting. Please don’t do this. He’ll hurt you like no one else ever could, and you won’t be able to get away from him. Not ever.
“All right,” the rakh agreed, and he told his guards, “Take her to the west wing and watch her there. He can wait in his cell until I’m ready to deal with him.” The venom in his voice left no doubt as to what Damien’s eventual fate would be.
Strong hands hauled him roughly to his feet; vomit welled up in his gut as pain shot through his back, and he struggled to keep it down. Spears of fire lanced through his left side with every step, and his feet were numb beneath him. How much damage had they done when they beat him? How long would he last if he couldn’t Heal himself?
Down, down, down, they took him, down into the earth. Far beneath the crystal palace, whose walls still burned with the killing light. Miles beneath the place where Tarrant lay, his body left to catch the first rays of dawn. Down into the insulating depths where earth-fae was sparse and hope was nonexistent and pain was the only companion he had left.
Don’t let him hurt her, God. Please. She’s young and she’s scared and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Protect her, Lord, I beg of you.
Alone in the darkness, Damien Vryce wept.
Forty-seven
Jenseny waited.
It was a small room they had brought her to, cluttered with furniture and wall hangings and so many scatter rugs that she could hardly see the crystal walls surrounding. That was all right with her. The Prince’s architecture still burned with the false sunlight that had disabled Gerald Tarrant, and she couldn’t look at it without sharing his pain, his terror, his despair.
Jenseny remembered.
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That moment in the big room, that awful moment when the Prince’s essence had left one body and moved to the next: she couldn’t get it out of her mind no matter how she tried. Not just because the change itself was terrifying. Not just because the image she had seen in that instant was so like the one that marked her father’s killer: a slavering beast with blood on its jaws, hungry to devour its next victim. Hesseth had explained to her that the visions she saw didn’t necessarily reveal what things really were, but their inner essence. So she understood that the Prince and her father’s murderer might look the same because they both fed on death, and not because they really were the same kind of creature. That wasn’t a problem.
It was what she had seen in the instant after that still chilled her soul. Snippets of a vision so bizarre that try as she might she couldn’t explain it away. A white, shriveled form that might once have been human. A vast sea of green and brown mud, foul-smelling. Small things that fed on slime and rot and a wormlike creature that crawled along spongy flesh ... the images were so real that they were with her even now, and none of the techniques that Hesseth had taught her did anything at all to control them. Only knowledge would do that, she sensed: knowledge of what she had seen, and how it connected to the rest of this nightmare.
Jenseny feared.
This wasn’t like running away from her father’s house, when she knew that the creatures who had killed him were coming after her. There was a chance they might not catch her, after all. It wasn’t like quivering beneath the onslaught of the solar fae, like she had that first day out. Even then she knew the sun would set in time. It wasn’t even like cowering in the corner of a Terata dungeon, watching as malformed children and crippled adults beat members of their own tribe to death. Because even then she had prayed for freedom, and in some small corner of her soul she had dared to believe that somehow she might gain it. This fear was different. This was the kind of thing you felt when you had made a choice so terrible that you wanted to take it back more than anything in the world, but you knew you couldn’t. It was like jumping off a cliff and then having to wait those terrible seconds while the ground rushed up at you, and maybe you wanted to change your mind now, but it was too late, too late, sometimes there’s just no turning back....
The Light was still there; at least that was something. It wasn’t strong but it was enduring, and that was a good sign. Hesseth had told her about something called a soft tide, when the tidal fae might last for hours. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as a hard tide, which was when several planetary rhythms came together at once and their joint friction made the whole world glow, but it was much more reliable. And reliability was what she needed right now.
She wrapped her hands around her chest and shivered. He’d be coming soon. The hungry beast in a rakhene body, ready to abandon that furred flesh which he had claimed and move into hers. She wondered how Katassah would handle it when the Prince finally left him. Would he be like he was before, with a few hours of unclear memories? Would he be angry with the Prince for having used him like that, or grateful for having been able to serve him? Had he tried to fight the Prince in that first few seconds of possession, so that deep inside he might be hurt and afraid? I’ll know soon enough, she thought unhappily. Wrapping her arms even tighter about her body, as if she could squeeze all the fear away.
A knock. She turned about quickly, just in time to see the heavy door swing open. It was the rakh guard, the Prince-thing.
He stepped into the room and gestured to the men behind him. “Leave us,” he ordered, and they did. He pushed the door and it swung slowly shut, closing with a click as it finally met the frame.
She could see him as a man now, if she tried. His features kept shifting, maybe because he had taken so many bodies. Maybe she was seeing all of them at once.
“Mes Jenseny—” the Prince began.
Kierstaad,“ she said defiantly. ”My name is Kierstaad.“
The rakh eyes narrowed in irritation and for a moment she was afraid that he was angry enough to hurt her, but then she realized that she couldn’t possibly be safer. In a very short while he would be living inside her body; surely he wouldn’t want to lay claim to damaged property.
She thought suddenly of that thing moving inside her and for a moment she almost panicked. Did she have to do this? Wasn’t there some other option?
No, an inner voice said gently. No other option. Go on. Do it.
“Mes Kierstaad,” he said. “Does your offer still stand?”
She whispered it. “Yes.”
“I’ll need to have a look at your motivation first. Just to make sure there are no ... surprises.”
She nodded. And shut her eyes. And concentrated oh so hard on everything she wanted him to know: how she really was tired and she really felt lost and she really was terrified of being alone, so much so that she would welcome him into her soul just to make that feeling go away. And she wanted to save Damien, she mourned for the loss of Hesseth, the voices followed her everywhere—everywhere!—and she wanted them to stop, she just wanted to be safe and warm and not be afraid any more, not ever afraid again. All those things were true, painfully true, and as his Knowing unearthed her feelings she felt tears come to her eyes, tears and a sorrow so intense that her whole body started shaking violently. Never mind that those weren’t the real reasons she was doing this; if he believed them, then that was enough.
Evidently he was satisfied, for the next thing that happened was that the room was gone suddenly, along with its rugs and its furniture and its crystal light. She heard him moving toward her and she forced herself not to back away, not even when he reached out and touched her, not even when the power flowed from his flesh into hers—
From his flesh into hers—
Suddenly she Saw. Not the creature she had seen before, and not the man he pretended to be. She saw what he really was, the secret that was the core of his very existence. And the vision was so horrible that she almost tried to draw back from him, using the tidal fae to establish some kind of barrier between their souls so that no more visions could come. But he was inside her now and there was no turning back, not ever. Her eyes were his eyes.
She saw a space deep underground, a chamber fortified by so many quake wards that every inch of its inner surface was inscribed with signs of power. In the center of the room was a glass tank, and though the light cast by several of the wards was dim she could see it quite clearly, and smell its reek, and understand its purpose...
“No,” she gasped. “No.”
Floating in the tank was a man. No, not a man any more. It had four limbs and one head and it wore a man’s shape, but there the resemblance ended. The fingers were thick and white, and in the place of fingernails grew a dense brown fungus. The body was so bloated and its surface was so mottled with various growths and discolorations that it would have been a stretch of the imagination to call it human. The face ... the face was a thing of pure nightmare, its hair and eyebrows long since rotted away, its eyes coated with thick brown sludge, its lips distended to serve as a gateway for the tiny finned creatures that used its mouth as home. All about the body there was movement: snails and slugs and tiny leggy things, all scrounging for the waste matter exuded by their host. There were plants to eat the leggy things and fish to eat the plants, a cycle of life so perfectly balanced that a little light and an occasional infusion of oxygen was all that was required to keep the tiny ecosystem alive.
My first body. The words were not spoken so much as placed in her mind; the taste of them was sour, the feel of them unclean. Keeping it alive makes me all but invulnerable. And no man will ever find where it is buried. She saw how the nutrients in the water were absorbed by that pliant flesh, so that the brain it housed might go on living year after year, century after century, sending out its spirit to claim more attractive bodies while it floated in the semi-darkness, slugs and snails for its nursemaids.
And then it was inside her. Unclean and loathsome, it slithered int
o her brain and coiled within like a serpent. She could feel its tendrils reaching out through her arms, her legs, all her extremities, and parts of her body began to twitch as it tested its control. Panic welled up inside her, and for an instant she nearly gave in to it. How easy it would be to go crazy now, to release her feeble grip on reality and slide down into madness for thirty years, forty years, until her body burned out and began to age and the Prince no longer wanted it. How easy....
Do it, he urged her. Hungry for a kind of control he could never have if she remained active in her flesh. I’ll give you dreams. I’ll give you peace.
She didn’t give in, nor did she draw away. Instead she opened her eyes so that he might see as she did, to fully cement their bargain. Combined with his own abilities her vision was doubly powerful, and the brilliant, scintillating Light of the tidal fae filled the room almost to bursting. She could sense his shock as he shared her vision; she could taste his hunger as if it was her own. Watch me, she thought. I can Work it. As he gazed out in wonder through her eyes, she took up the tidal fae and wove it into pictures for him, beautiful pictures that stunned him with their power, pictures he could feel and taste as well as see
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