“Tried to stop him,” Senzei gasped. “Tried. . . .”
Slowly, Damien sheathed his sword. Pain pierced through his arm like fire, but he gritted his teeth and managed to ignore it. Ever aware of the hot blood that was dripping from his wounded arm, he snapped open the pouch affixed to his belt. Inside it, in a carefully padded interior, two special flasks lay side by side. One was silver, and now held most of the Church’s precious Fire—the Patriarch’s gift. The other, its original vial, was glass; if he threw it hard enough it would shatter on contact, and the moisture still clinging to its inner surface should be enough to burn the life from any night born demon.
“Don’t be a fool!” Tarrant hissed. He seemed to draw back—but whether in fear or in preparation for a Working, Damien couldn’t say.
“You claiming power over this as well?” He drew it out—and even as little moisture as remained in the fragile vial was enough to send beams of golden light lancing through the clearing. Tarrant breathed in sharply in pain as they struck him, but made no effort to escape them.
“You idiot . . . do you really think you can hurt me with that? I can blast the ground beneath your feet faster than you can move—or the air between us, before you can take a breath.”
“Give me Ciani,” Damien said coldly.
Tarrant winced. Seemed to be struggling within himself. At last he whispered, hoarsely, “You can’t help her now.”
“Give her to me!”
If he didn’t throw the flask then, it was because of the expression that came over the man’s face: so human, so strangely tormented, that for a moment he was too shaken to attack.
Tarrant’s voice was hoarse. “I vowed once that I would never hurt this woman. But when that woman’s Working hit, with the full force of the tidal fae behind it . . . it awakened a hunger too intense. I feed on vulnerability, priest—and she was too close. Too helpless. I lost control.”
“So much for your precious vow,” Damien growled.
Something flickered in those lightless eyes that was not rage or hatred. Pain? “The true cost of that is beyond your comprehension,” he whispered.
Damien took a step forward. The clearing spun dizzily about him. “Give her to me,” he demanded.
Tarrant shook his head, slowly. “You can’t help her,” he said. “Not without killing me.”
His fingers tightened on the flask. “Then we’ll just have to try that, won’t we?”
The Hunter tensed. He raised his sword overhead, a gesture more of display than of active aggression—and if Damien hesitated for an instant, it was in the hope that the man would let go of Ciani before he attacked. So that she would be out of danger. But then the blazing sword was suddenly thrust point downward into the earth, deep into the dirt between them—
And earth-fae met earth-fae in an explosion that rocked the entire ridge. The ground erupted toward Damien, a wall of dirt and shattered stone that hit him like a tidal wave. He was knocked to the ground with stunning force, half buried by the clumps of earth and gravel and rotting wood that the explosion had thrown at him. With a moan he tried to move, but the effort was too much; he tried to close his hand, to see if he still held the precious vial, but his fingers were numb and packed in earth, helpless to move. He made one last effort to get himself up, or at least to dislodge some portion of the debris that covered him . . . but it was too much, or else the blood loss was too much, or all of it was too much combined. He slid down slowly into darkness—and even the curse that might have accompanied his passing was muffled by the earth, and went unheard.
Twenty-two
Dirt. Clogging his nostrils. Dirt filling his mouth and throat, mud-wet with blood. Pounds upon pounds of it, covering him over like grave-filling, burying him alive. He struggles, coughs, tries to take in air. Fights to free himself from the monstrous weight that pins him down—tries to turn over, or sit up, or even just raise up an arm, any sign of life—but the earth clings to him like an incubus, mud-fingers gripping his clothing, pulling him down. . . .
“Damien.”
He pits all his strength against the weight of the earth above him and feels himself move at last, so that he can strike out at the fingers that clutch at him—
“Damien!”
Hundreds of them gripping his skin, holding him down. He strikes out with all his strength at the creature that must be out there, somewhere, whose hands dig so deeply into his flesh that it seems they must draw blood—
“Damien, you hit me once more, I’ll give it to you good. You understand me? Damien!”
He drew in a deep breath, slowly. No dirt. The hundreds of fingers became dozens, became ten. He opened one eye—the other seemed to be swollen shut—and studied a hazy outline that might or might not be Senzei.
“Thank the gods,” the sorceror muttered. “You all right?”
It seemed that the words had miles to travel before they got to his mouth. “I . . .” He coughed heavily, and the dirt-filled mucus that clogged his throat loosened; the words came easier. “I think so. Where’s Ciani?”
“Gone.” Senzei’s face was coming into focus now—pale, bruised, hollowed by misery. “He took her.”
“Where?” He tried to sit up. Pain lanced through all his limbs and his head—especially his head—with such searing force that he fell back, gasping. “Where, Zen?”
“Take it easy.” There was another hand, now, smaller and gentler, and it laid a cool cloth against his brow. Damien snatched it away.
“Where, Zen?”
He hesitated. “The Forest is my guess. As good as any. She said he went north—”
He managed to get his other eye open; a second Senzei swam hazily in his vision. “Who said that?”
“The woman.”
“The one who . . .” He floundered for words.
“Yeah. That one.”
“Merciful God.” He raised up a hand to rub his temple, but the touch of flesh against flesh burned him like acid. “What happened, Zen? Tell me.”
The sorceror reached out and took his hand, and gently put it down by his side. “Take a deep breath first.” Damien started to protest, then obeyed. He coughed raggedly. “Again.” The next one went down a bit easier. He took a few more voluntarily, until the flow of air seemed a bit more reliable.
Then he forced both eyes open and took a look around. It was a small room, windowless; Senzei was standing by the bed on one side, a plain, middle-aged woman was seated on the other. An older man in more formal clothing stood at the foot of the bed, scowling in disapproval. After seeing that Damien was both conscious and coherent, the latter figure stalked out.
“Tell me,” the priest whispered.
“After Tarrant—” Senzei drew in a shaky breath. “There was an explosion. Most of it went your way, I think. It must have knocked you out. It hit me, too, but not nearly as hard. I thought I saw a figure picking its way over the mounds of earth . . . it must have been him. I couldn’t see Ciani. No details. I passed out. No idea how long. When I came to again . . .” He bit his lower lip, remembering. “There was something on top of you. Feeding. The woman was pulling it back, twisting its neck so it would let go . . . it had scaled wings, and a tongue like a snake, and its mouth was dripping with blood . . . she snapped its head off. Just like that. And threw it over the edge, harbor-side. Then she . . . she dug the dirt out of your mouth, so you could breathe. And she took something out of her clothing and rubbed it on your arm, where the wound was. She did some other things—I couldn’t see clearly, I was barely conscious myself—and then she stood, and this . . . some kind of animal came to her, walking like a horse but it looked like something else, and it had two long horns, like rainbow glass. . . .” He closed his eyes, remembering; his voice sank to a whisper. “I asked, where did he go? For a moment, she didn’t acknowledge me. Then she looked out toward the northlands, and pointed there. ”Forest,“ she said. ”Where men devour men.“ He coughed heavily. ”Then she mounted and rode off. I tried to get to you, so I
could help—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. The pain was so bad . . . I thought I was dying. Then the sun rose, and they came to help.“
“They?”
“From the inn. They’d heard the explosion.” He glanced at the woman, then away. His voice was bitter. “They waited till dawn before they went outside. Afraid for their precious skins. So we lay there without help till then. The sun rose, and they came outside and got us. They did what they could for our wounds. They gave us blood. You were delirious. It’s been hours. . . .”
Damien tried to sit up. The room swirled around him, and blood pounded hotly in his temples . . . and he tried it again. And again. On the third try, he succeeded.
“We need to go,” he muttered.
Senzei nodded. No questions about why, or where. He understood. “You’re in bad shape,” he warned.
“How bad?”
“The doctor said you’d be out for days.”
“So much for that diagnosis. What else?”
“Blood loss, concussion, possible internal damage—he wasn’t sure on that last one, might have thrown it in just to cover all the bases. The wound in your arm seems to be closing up all right—whatever she put on it seems to have kept it from getting infected—but all the stitches in the world won’t keep it from opening up if you use it too much. And you’re bruised like all hell.”
“That’s par for the course,” he said. “What about you?”
Senzei hesitated. “Took a thrust in one side. Pretty ugly, very bloody, but nothing vital was hit. Or so it seems. Hurts like hell—but that goes without saying. The doctor said not to exert myself until it heals.”
Damien noted the stiffness with which he moved, the thickness about his middle where bandages were no doubt layered. “She didn’t do anything for you? The woman, I mean.”
Senzei looked away. “No,” he said softly. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot since it happened. At this point I’m not even sure she meant to save our lives. I mean, the timing was certainly fortunate, but it seems like a chancy way to enter a fight. I think she meant it as a kind of . . . test, maybe. To see what we would do. I think . . . she helped you because you tried to save her. Because that was your first instinct, when her Working hit.”
“So what was yours?” Damien asked quietly.
Senzei bit his lip. Shook his head. “Let’s not discuss it, all right? Few of us are as perfect as we’d like to be.”
Damien forced himself to look away. “All right. You’re hurt, I’m hurt . . . simple flesh wounds, maybe an infection or two. Nothing I can’t Heal.”
“Oh, yeah? Using what fae?”
Damien stared at him. And realized what he meant. “Shit.”
“I’ve been a Worker all my life, you know. Moved the toys near my crib without touching them, and all that. Now . . .” He wrapped his arms about himself and shivered. “It almost killed me in Kale. It’d be a thousand times worse here, this close to the Forest. I think I’d rather bleed.”
“We can’t wait for nature to heal us before we leave.”
“I know that,” he whispered.
Damien swung his legs over the side of the bed. The pounding in his head—and the pain—had subsided to a mere throbbing drumbeat. “He can only travel at night, right? It was well past midnight when he left here. Dawn came soon after that, and the sun’s still up. That means he got, what, three hours of travel time on us? We push hard, we’ve got him.” He looked at Senzei. “If we leave now.”
“All our things are packed,” Senzei said quietly.
“Can you make it?”
The sorceror looked at him sharply. “Can you?”
“No question,” he said. “He’s got Ciani.”
Senzei nodded. “Same here.”
Damien drew in a deep breath, tried to gather his thoughts. “If we’re moving fast, we won’t want all the horses. We’ll keep three—two for us, one for backup. And for Ciani. Drop off some of the duplicate supplies in Mordreth, hopefully where we can get at them later . . . but if not, not. We strip down and travel fast. Get that son of a bitch before he knows what hit him.”
“You really think we can take him?”
“Oh, I’ve killed nastier things. None of them were quite so eloquent . . . but remember, we’re not playing by his rules this time. And I do have a weapon that’ll hurt him.” He reached for the padded pouch at his belt—and suddenly panicked, when he realized it wasn’t there. “Zen, they—”
“It’s here.” He reached to the side of the bed, where the pouch and its supporting belt lay coiled atop a small table. “They took it off you when they cleaned you up. I didn’t let it out of my sight.”
“Good man.” He opened the flap of the pouch, and saw both the silver flask and the crystal vial cushioned within. The latter had dirt encrusted in its delicately etched surface; he picked at it with a fingernail and muttered, “I’m surprised this survived.”
“You had it gripped so tightly it didn’t have a chance to get broken. Even in your delirium you wouldn’t let go; we had to pry it out of your fingers.”
Damien tried to fasten the belt around himself, but his wounded arm—swollen, stiff, and throbbing with pain—lacked the dexterity. Senzei helped him.
“You sure you can make it?”
Damien glared. “I have to. We both have to.” He patted the pouch into place over his hip, felt the outline of the flat silver flask within. “I guess if we’re going to leave the extra horses behind, we should try to sell them. We’ve been going through capital like water—”
“I sold three of them this morning,” Senzei told him. “Not a great price, but it covered the medical bills. And I gathered our things—what was left of them—and settled with the people here, for their time and supplies. And I found this.” He dropped a small golden object onto the bed beside Damien. It took the priest a moment to realize what it was.
“My God,” he whispered. He picked it up, and held it by the broken chain so that the earth-disk dangled before his eyes. Its reverse side, engraved with a delicate sigil, caught the light as it turned.
“I found it near where he’d been standing. She must have pulled it off him when he attacked her. Damned lucky accident, don’t you think?”
“Knowing Ciani, I would say . . . not an accident at all.” He imagined her in that last moment of terror, some precious particle of her mind clinging to sanity long enough to reason out what they might need, striking out in seeming chaos until his tunic front was torn open, until her fingers closed over the precious gold and pulled. . . .
“What a woman,” he breathed. “Give me ten like that, and I could take an empire.”
Senzei forced a smile. “It’s getting hard enough just keeping track of one.”
Slowly, Damien eased himself forward. He braced both his hands against the edge of the bed—and paused for a minute, breathing heavily. Then he pushed upward, forcing his legs to bear the weight. Pain shot like fire up his left arm—but it was going to do that for quite some time, he might as well get used to it. After a moment, he managed to stand. A few seconds more, and the room stopped spinning. He managed a step. Two. The room was steady. The pain in his arm subsided to a stabbing throb.
“All right,” he said. He looked at Senzei. “Let’s do it.”
“And no more going unarmed,” he said harshly, as the ferry carried them across to Mordreth. “I want you with a weapon on you at all times. That means if you go behind the bushes to take a piss, you have a sword in your hand when you do it. You go off to bed a woman, I want a sword on the pillow next to you. Got me?”
Senzei looked out over the water. “I guess I deserve that.”
“Damn right you do. It’s a miracle you didn’t get yourself killed out there. And miracles rarely repeat themselves.”
There were a number of small tables at the center of the ferry, a few of them occupied by travelers: eager merchants conversing over lists of merchandise, a group of laborers quickly bolting down sandwiches, a nursi
ng mother. Damien found them a vacant table and pulled over two chairs for them.
“Let’s get to work.”
He spilled out a box of ammunition on the table between them, picked one bolt up and turned it about, thoughtfully. The short wooden shaft had a metal tip on one end, a curved band on the other. He took out his pocket knife and, with the tip, tried to pry off the two metal pieces. The tip came off easily. The band at the base was tight, and took some work.
“Wax,” he muttered. “Adhesive.”
Senzei rummaged through the pack that held their smaller supply items. After a few minutes he managed to find a small chunk of amber wax. The stick of glue took longer.
“Would there be any point in asking what you’re doing?”
“Preparing for war,” Damien muttered. “Watch and learn.”
He laid the naked shaft before him on the table, and rolled it over until he was satisfied with the placement of the grain. Then, carefully, he used his knife blade to split it open. It took little encouragement to get it to crack open along the grain, down the length of the shaft.
He looked about to see if anyone was watching. But the other passengers were perusing their own work at their own tables, or sitting on the long benches that flanked the staircase to the second level, casually chatting, or else standing at the rail that guarded the edge of the deck, watching the muddy green water course by.
He took the silver flask out of its pouch and carefully—reverently—opened it. And he dribbled a few precious drops down the exposed center of the wooden shaft, until the Fire was absorbed into the wood. The shaft glowed dully, like cooling charcoal.
“Now.” He capped the flask and put it beside him—carefully, oh so carefully—and took the glue from Senzei. The halves went together easily, with only a narrow scar where his knife had been applied. Next he briskly rubbed the wax onto the surface of the shaft, until the whole of it was coated. The metal tip and anchoring band he glued carefully back in place.