“Cee.” His voice was no more than a whisper, but in the absolute silence of her chamber it might as well have been a shout. “Cee. We’re going after them. Do you understand?” He put a hand on her shoulder—ice-cold flesh, without response—and squeezed gently. “You’ve got to get hold of yourself.”
She turned to him slowly. Her face was dry of tears, but he could see the streaks of salt-stiffened flesh where they had coursed. The desolation in her eyes nearly broke his heart.
“What’s the point?” she whispered.
He Worked her then. Gently, praying that she wouldn’t notice. Worked a link between them that would keep her attention on him, keep her from falling back into unresponsive darkness. “We need you.”
For a moment it seemed as if she would turn away again, but something—perhaps the fae—held her steady. Her voice, when it came, was a dry, dehydrated whisper. “For what?”
“Ah, Cee. I thought you would have guessed that.” He took her nearer hand, prying it gently from the blanket’s edge to enfold it in his own. Cold flesh, nearly lifeless. How dilute was her vitality now—how fragile had that thread become, which binds such a woman to life? “You have to come with us.”
For a moment she looked startled; there was more vitality in that single expression than he had seen in all the days since the assault. He felt something in himself tighten, tried to quell the tide of hope rising inside him. Or at least, control it. So much depended on how she took this. . . .
“We can’t leave you here,” he told her. “You’d be unprotected. There’s no ward Senzei or I could Work that would hold them off, if your own didn’t. And he’s not all that sure that the illusion he Worked at the shop would hold once he’s under the Canopy. They might suddenly realize that you’re alive . . . and we’d have no way of getting back to you. Or even knowing what had happened.” He took a deep breath, chose his next words carefully. “And without you, Cee . . . we can’t find the one who did this.” He felt her stiffen beneath his hand, saw the fear come into her eyes. He continued quickly, “If not for the Canopy we could rely on a Knowing, but with the Canopy between us . . . no one can read through it, Senzei said, not even an adept. And God knows, we’re not that. With you on one side and us on the other, locating your assailant would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Even worse: like trying to find one single blade of hay in that stack, when you don’t know which one you’re searching for. How would we even know where to start?” He squeezed her hand gently, wished he could will some of his own warmth into her flesh. His own vitality. “We need you, Cee.”
She shut her eyes; a tremor of remembered pain ran through her body. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You can’t possibly understand.” A tear gathered under her lashes, but lacked the substance to free itself; her body was too dehydrated to spare that much fluid. “What it’s like to live with the fae. Like adepts do. Zen thinks it’s like a constant Seeing, but it’s not that at all.” Her brow furrowed as she struggled for words. “It’s everywhere. In everything. There are so many different kinds that I don’t even have names for them all, some so fleeting that they’re just a spark out of the corner of your eye—a flash of light, of power—and then they’re gone, before you can focus on them. And the currents flow through it all—everything!—not just around it, like he Sees, but permeating every substance on this planet, living and unliving, solid and illusory. Sometimes you’ll be looking at the sky and the tidal-fae will flux for an instant and there it is—like a flaw in a crystal that suddenly catches the light, a spectrum of living color that’s gone before you can even draw a breath. And there’s music, too, so beautiful that it hurts just to listen to. Everywhere you look, everything you touch, it’s all permeated with living fae—all in a constant state of flux, changing hourly as the different tides course through it. And the result is a world so rich, so wonderful, that it makes you shiver just to live in it. . . .” She drew in a shaky breath. “Do you understand? When I touch a stone, what I feel isn’t hard rock—I feel everything that stone has been, everything it might become, I feel how it channels the earth-fae and how it interacts with the tidal fae and how the power of the sun will affect it, and what it will be when true night falls ... do you understand, Damien? That bit of rock is alive alive—everything is alive to us, even the air we breathe—only now—” She coughed raggedly, and he could hear the tears come into her voice. “Don’t you see? That’s what they took! It’s all dead now. I look around, and all I see are corpses. A universe of corpses. Like everything I see is sculpted out of rotting meat . . . except it’s not even rotting; there’s life in corruption, you now, even carrion has its own special music . . . and here there’s nothing. Nothing! I touch this bed—” and she grasped the bedframe with her free hand, and squeezed it until her knuckles were white with the pressure, “—and all I feel . . . gods, there’s no life in it . . . can you understand? It wasn’t me they drained, it was the whole of my world!”
“Cee.” He stroked her hair gently from her face, letting his fingers warm her skin. “Cee. We’re going to get it back for you. Do you understand? But we need your help. We need you to come with us. It’s all a waste if you don’t. Cee?” He continued to stroke her hair—gently, as one would a frightened kitten‘s—but she only moaned softly, wordlessly. As the tears finally came.
“We’ll help you, Cee,” he whispered. “I swear it.”
The books and documents that had been brought to Senzei’s workroom had long since overflowed the confines of his desk; when Damien entered the room he found him sitting on the floor in the center of his sigil-rug, surrounded by carefully ordered stacks.
Damien waited until Ciani’s assistant looked up at him. “I’m going to kill them,” he hissed. “Going to kill those sons of bitches—hard, and slow. You hear me? I’m going to make them suffer.”
“Thus speaks the guardian of peace.”
“There’s nothing in my Order’s charter about peace. Or in the Church’s Manifesto, for that matter. That’s post-war PR.” He grabbed a free stool, put it down by the desk, and sat on it. “Find anything?”
“A simple question for a complex task.” Senzei began to point to the piles around him, naming them one after the other. “Things we should take with us. Things we should read before we go. Things we should take with us except they’re too large, fragile, or heavy to carry, so we should have the information in them copied into something else, preferably with waterproof ink. Things we—”
“I get the picture.” He flipped back the cover of a leather-bound volume that sat on the edge of the desk—Evolutionary Trends in Native Species: a Neo-Terran Analysis—“How about the manpower problem? Any progress there?”
Senzei hesitated. “I have her records, you know—one of the few things I saved. Detailed dossiers on all adepts living in this region. Depressing as hell, given our situation.”
“You don’t trust their power?”
Senzei sighed. “I don’t trust them. Need I remind you that the gift of adeptitude is utterly random, that we don’t understand the least thing about how it comes to those it does, or—more importantly—why? The adepts in Jaggonath are an utterly random sample of humanity: most of them are self-centered, unstable, intellectually limited . . . replete with all the flaws that define us as a species. One or two are marginally hopeful . . . but I don’t like it, Damien. I don’t like trusting a stranger in this, adept or no.”
“You were the one who wanted us to find someone.”
“I wanted Ciani,” he said bitterly. “Someone like her. Only there isn’t someone like her. She was the exception. I can’t imagine any of these people,” he waved his hand over three of the nearer piles, “taking on the cause of a stranger, like she would have done. Risking their lives just to find out what’s on the other side of those mountains. All right? I was wrong. So shoot me.”
“Easy.” Damien made himself a place on the rug and sat down, opposite Senzei. “You can’t let it get to you, Zen.
Not this early in the game.” He picked up a piece of paper from the pile nearest—a fae-map of the Serpent Straits—and looked it over as he said, “I’d just as soon have an adept along, too, but if we can’t, we can’t. You and I have power enough, in our various fields. It’ll have to suffice.”
“I hope,” Senzei said miserably.
He put the map down again, tried to change the subject. “How about the rakh?”
He hesitated. “What exactly are you asking?”
“When can we find one? How can we do it?”
Senzei stared at him for a moment, clearly astonished. “You mad? We need to stay clear of them at all costs. Their hatred of humanity—”
“Was last documented almost a thousand years ago. I’m not saying it’s not still in effect—might even have worsened—but is it safe to assume that? I do know that we’ll be crossing their lands, and I’d be surprised if we can avoid any contact. Don’t you think we’d be better off approaching one or two under carefully controlled circumstances, than riding blindly into a city full of potential enemies?”
Senzei digested that concept. “I suppose. Once we’re inside the Canopy I could work a Calling; that might bring us something with a potentially sympathetic mindset. But we’d have to wait until we get inside to know for sure. If only some of the rakh were outside the Canopy—”
Ciani’s voice interrupted. “How do you know they’re not?”
The two men looked up to find her leaning in the doorway. Wrapped in a blanket and shivering, as though protecting herself from the chill autumn winds that blew outside the house. Despite that—despite her ghastly pallor, hollowed cheeks, and the thin red webbing that filmed her eyes—she looked better than she had in days. Since the accident.
Alive, Damien thought. She looks alive.
“How do you know where they are?” she pressed.
“The rakh never travel outside the Canopy. They—”
Her voice was a ragged whisper. “How do we know that?”
Senzei started to speak again, but Damien put a hand on his arm. Quieting him. On first impression it seemed that Ciani was asking for simple information: What facts had she forgotten which caused them to believe this about the rakh? But on second impression. . . . He looked in her eyes, saw a brief glint of fire there. Intelligence. They had taken her memory, but they hadn’t dimmed her sagacity. They couldn’t.
“We don’t know,” he told her. “We assumed.”
“Ah.” She shook her head sadly; there was a hint of humor in the gesture, a mere shadow of her former self. Weakly, she whispered, “Bad move.”
Senzei stiffened. “You think they might travel? That one or more might be outside their own wall of protection?”
“I have no information on which to base such a guess,” she reminded him gently. Damien could see the pain of it in her eyes, the constant frustration of reaching inside for memories that weren’t there. Of not even knowing how much knowledge she had lost. “But it’s possible, isn’t it?” She hesitated. “Do we know any reason why it wouldn’t be?”
“None at all,” Damien assured her. And then he was up and by her side in an instant, to catch her as her spurt of strength finally died. As she fell. So light, so fragile. . . .
“She needs food,” he said. “I’ll take her downstairs, try to feed her something. Zen—?”
“Working on it,” he responded. He climbed over several stacks of books to reach the desk; once there, he began to rummage through a stack of maps. “I can do a Converging, to draw whatever’s out there. If there’s anything out there. I’ll try to get it to meet up with us on route—that’s better than waiting for it here, don’t you think?”
“Much better.”
“We won’t know what it is, of course. Or where it’s coming from. Not until it gets to us.‘ He looked back at Damien. ”You’re sure—“
“Yes,” he said quickly “A rakh contact this side of the Canopy is worth any risk. Do it.”
“It may not like us.”
“We may not like it,” Damien said dryly. “That’s life.”
And he carried Ciani downstairs.
Senzei found Allesha in the kitchen, washing out the last of their dinner dishes. He waited for a moment in strained silence, hoping that she would notice him. But if she did, she made no sign of it. It did seem to him that her body was somewhat tenser, that her hands were scrubbing more vigorously, as if using the household chore to vent some private anxiety . . . but that was probably his imagination. The stress. Not Allesha.
Finally, “Lesh,” he said softly. He saw her stiffen. She put down the dish she was working on, carefully, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge him. “Lesh? I need to talk to you. Can you spare a minute?”
She turned to him slowly; something in her disheveled manner, so utterly free of cosmetics or artifice, reminded him of when they had first met. How deeply he had been in love with her since that first moment. It made him all the more miserable that a breach had been growing between them. That for all his efforts he seemed unable to recover the joy of those innocent, happy days.
“Lesh? You want to sit?” He indicated the table with its delicately carved chairs. The whole of the kitchen was delicate, like her.
“I’m all right,” she said softly.
He hesitated. Not knowing how to start. Not knowing how to commit to speech all the things she must be aware of, which lacked only official pronouncement. “You know how bad it is with Cee. I mean . . . Damien thinks the only way to change that is to go into the rakhlands. To hunt down the creature that did this and destroy it.” The violent words felt strange on his tongue. Hunt. Destroy. Not words of study, or of quiet city life, but keys to a far darker universe. “I think . . . that is, I mean . . .”
“That you’re going,” she whispered.
Stiffly, he nodded.
She turned away.
“Lesh—”
She waved him to silence. He could see her shoulders trembling as she fought to hold back tears. Or anger? He moved toward her, his every instinct crying out for him to hold her, to use their physical closeness to blunt the edge of his announcement, but she drew away from him. Only inches—but it hinted at a much more vast gulf between them, that had been months in the making.
“Just like that,” she whispered. “So easy. . . .”
His heart twisted inside him. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know when. It just sort of happened, all of it . . . Lesh, I’m sorry, I would have come to you earlier. . . .”
She shook her head. “It isn’t that. It isn’t that at all.” She turned back to him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and not just from the last few minutes. She had been crying. “And it isn’t just Ciani, either. Or the events of the last few days. I want you to understand that, Zen. It’s been going on for too long, and I . . . I can’t take it anymore.”
She turned away from him again; her voice became so low he could hardly hear it. “I think we should end it,” she whispered. “Give up. It’s not going anywhere, Zen—and it won’t get better. Maybe it was a mistake in the first place. Maybe there was a time when I could have changed things. . . .” She looked back at him. “But I’m sorry. I failed you. Failed us both.”
She reached down to the edge of the sink where a slender gold ring lay in a dish of soap-suds. And wiped it clean as carefully and as delicately as if it were fine china. “I think you’d better have this,” she told him. She didn’t meet his eyes as she held it out to him. “You can keep mine. It’s okay. I don’t want it. I wouldn’t want to see it. . . .”
He stared at the engagement ring in shock, not quite believing it. Not quite absorbing.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” she said hurriedly. “I want you to know that. Gods, I’ve been going over it in my mind for so long that I can hardly remember a time when I wasn’t. Isn’t that awful?” She took a deep breath. “Because I realized one day that though I can be many things to you, I can never be first in your life. Never. O
h, I tried to convince myself otherwise—I reasoned that if we only spent enough time together, if you cared enough about our commitment . . . we could work out our priorities, establish the kind of relationship I want. The kind of relationship I need. But we can’t. I understand that now. This incident didn’t start it, it just drove the lesson home.—And it’s all right, Zen, it’s just the way you are, I have to deal with that—”
“If it’s Ciani—”
“It’s not Ciani! Don’t you think I know that? It’s not any other woman. Gods!” She laughed shortly; it was a bitter sound. “I wish it were another woman. I’d know how to compete with a woman. I don’t know how to compete with this.” She was facing him now, and her eyes, normally soft, blazed with anger. With pain. “I mean the fae, Zen. I mean your hunger for something you can never have. Don’t you think I see how it eats at you? Don’t you think I can feel it in you every time I’m with you? Every time we touch? Feel it in you every time we make love—how you wish it could be more, how you wish you could experience it on all those different levels—don’t you think I can sense your frustration? Your distraction?” she drew in a deep breath, shakily. “I can’t live with it any more. I’m sorry. I’ve tried and tried . . . and I just can’t do it any more.”
“Lesh . . . we can work it out. We can work on it—”
“When you come home again? Two, three years from now? Do you really think I should wait—for this?”
He could say nothing. The words were all choked up inside him. Words of anger, pleading, surprise . . . and guilt. Because he had seen it coming. Deep inside him, on levels he hated to probe. And he despised himself for not knowing how to stop it.
“I love you,” he said. Willing all his passion into his voice—wishing he could communicate his emotions directly, without need for such an artificial vehicle as words. “I love you more than anything, Lesh—”
“And I love you,” she whispered back. “I always have.” She shut her eyes tightly; a tear squeezed out from the corner of one of them. “I only wish that was enough to base a marriage on, Zen. But it isn’t. Can’t you see that?”