“It wasn’t wasted,” the Hunter said softly. “Given three more nights and total control over your environment I could have managed better ... but for what it was, it served well enough.”
“You can Work now?”
“If the currents allow. The fae was fairly weak as I recall—or at least it seemed so when we landed. I wasn’t in the best of shape then.”
“But you’re all right now.”
“Yes.” For a moment he seemed to hesitate. Searching for the right words? How many centuries had it been, since he had last been indebted to a mere human being?
“Thank you,” he whispered at last. The words clearly came hard to him. “I am . . . very grateful.”
Somehow, Damien managed to shrug.
“All in a day’s work,” he assured him.
The watcher hadn’t come back. That was the first piece of news that greeted them when they made their way down from their protective niche in the cliff wall. Whatever manner of creature had watched them as they made their way to shore, it had not returned. Damien wished he could read something optimistic into that, but it was still too early to judge. And optimism could be dangerous, when it was founded on mere guesswork.
While they ate—a haphazard stew of dried rations and the meat of some reptilian creature Senzei had managed to shoot during his first watch—Gerald Tarrant withdrew, ostensibly to test the currents. When he returned to them, his expression was grim. Yes, he said, the earth-fae was sparse here, and the currents that governed its motion weak and insubstantial. Which made no sense, he told them. No sense at all. He seemed almost angry, as though the fae were somehow consciously plotting to frustrate him. When Senzei started to question him further, he went wordlessly to where their packs were stored and withdrew a thick tube of maps from among his own possessions. The heavy vellum sheets had come through undamaged, rolled tightly inside waterproof, wax-sealed containers.
“Here,” he said, and he unrolled one of the precious maps before them. Firelight flickered on its surface as he weighted its corners down with stones. “See for yourselves.”
The map—undeniably ancient, certainly from the time before the Canopy had been raised—depicted local currents in the region they were now traversing. They could see rich currents of earth-fae flowing along the fault lines, eddies of power that swirled about the foothills of the Worldsend Mountains and the eastern range, just as it should be. Tarrant stared at the maps, as though trying to reconcile them with the reality he himself had observed, and at last shook his head in frustration.
“The fae here is weaker than it should be,” he said finally. “There’s no natural law I know of that would account for its being so—but it is. Unquestionably. Which means that all our Workings—including my own—will be that much less effective.”
“What about our enemy?” Senzei asked.
“Probably the same for him. But I wouldn’t bet my survival on that,” he warned.
“You don’t think this could have occurred naturally?”
“The earth-fae is, and always has been, a predictable, ordered force. Faithful to its own laws of motion and power which, when understood, can be manipulated. Or have you forgotten your Prophet’s teachings?” he asked dryly.
“Excuse me for challenging your canon.”
His pale eyes glittered with amusement.
“What about its reactive power?” Ciani asked him. “That’s not predictable, is it?”
He hesitated—as if a dry, mocking answer was ready upon his lips, about to be launched into their company. Then he swallowed that, with effort, and said simply, “It is. Utterly predictable. The complication with man’s Working it is that there are too many levels to human consciousness, and the earth-fae doesn’t distinguish between them. If man’s fears resound louder than his prayers, the former is what will manifest results. The fault lies within ourselves, lady—not with the fae.” He looked down at the ground beside him and touched slender finger to it: observing the current, Damien decided. Using his adept’s sight to determine its strength. “With every new seismic event, earth-fae rises to the surface of the planet. Eventually it congregates, in pools and eddies and currents that we can map. Except that here those aren’t what they should be. Not at all.” He paused, and looked at each of them in turn—studying them for reaction? “To my mind, that hints at outside interference.”
But the scale of it! Damien thought. What kind of creature—or force—could be responsible? He envisioned that vast atomic furnace which was the planet’s core, tons of magma thrusting upward against the crust of the planet until the continents themselves shifted in response, earth buckling and cracking from the pressure of the assault—seismic shockwaves releasing that power which they had come to call the earth-fae, in quantities so vast that no human being dared touch it, so powerful in its pure form that the merest attempt to Work it was enough to fry a man to cinders. And here it was weakened. How? By what process? What had happened here, in the centuries since the rakh had claimed these lands, that had altered the very nature of Ernra?
Or is it simply our understanding that’s lacking? Damien wondered. What clue is here we’re not seeing That we perhaps don’t even know how to look for?
Carefully, Gerald Tarrant withdrew another sheet from its protective tube. Its value was evident in the way he handled it, in the reverence of his motions as he carefully unrolled it and weighted its corners down with smooth, water-polished stones.
At first, Damien couldn’t make out what it was. He moved one of the lamps in closer, saw the tenuous outline of a continent subdivided by several sharp red lines. The shoreline was unfamiliar to him, but after a while, by looking only at the larger forms, he began to make out familiar shapes. The eastlands. The rakhlands. The Serpent. With a start he realized that the Stekkis River coursed westward rather than to the north, and met the sea at Merentha. The Lethe had also shifted, and the coastline by Seth was markedly different.
“It’s old,” he murmured.
The Hunter nodded. “Over twelve hundred years. And not designed for permanence, even then. If not for my Working, it would have crumbled to dust long ago.”
“Over twelve centuries?” Senzei asked sharply. “That would mean—”
“It’s a survey map,” the Hunter informed him. “A tectonic extrapolation. Done on board the Earth-ship, before the Landing. According to one document in my possession, that was standard procedure aboard such vessels. They would scan each possible landing site for seismic activity—and other variables—to assess the dangers that the colonists might face. It normally took five to ten Earth-years to determine whether or not a planet was suitable for colonization. In the case of Erna, nearly ninety were invested.” He tapped the map with a slender forefinger. “This was the reason.”
“Seismic activity.” Damien’s tone was bitter.
The Hunter nodded. “Enough to make colonization difficult, if not downright impossible. Maybe if there’d been an alternative, the ship would have moved on. Maybe somehow it knew that there was nothing beyond this—that it had come so far, rejecting so many planets along the way, that if it rejected this one there was nowhere left to go. It was balanced on the brink of the galaxy, with nothing but darkness ahead of it, and it knew only two options: wake up the colonists and settle them here, or move on. No turning back. No going home. Those were the rules.”
“They were crazy,” Senzei whispered
“Maybe so. As were those men and women who braved the eastern sea to find out what lay beyond it, and those who traveled to Novatlantis despite the constant eruptions in that place . . . and the lady here, who passed through the Canopy unattended, to explore forbidden lands. It’s a human craziness, the need to explore. The hunger for a new frontier. But since we are its children, I would say we have little right to criticize.”
He tapped the map with a slender forefinger, indicating a point some three hundred miles to the east of them. “Assuming we do indeed have an enemy,” he said quietly, “thi
s is where he will be located.”
“How can you be so sure?” Damien demanded.
“Simply put: because there is no better place.” His finger traced a red line that coursed upward through the eastern mountain range to where another, sharply angled, intersected it. “Look at the fault lines. Three continental plates meet here, each forced against the other by earthly powers too vast to contemplate. The plates collide, continents crumple into mountain ranges, rivers are rerouted . . . and a vast amount of raw power is released each time it happens.” He sketched a circle around the intersection of the fault lines, approximately forty miles in diameter. “This is what we call a point of power—a wellspring of the earth-fae—and if there’s anything in this land that feeds on the fae, or Works it . . . it will be here. Somewhere within this periphery.”
“Why not on the point itself?” Ciani asked.
He looked up at her, and there was something in his eyes that made Damien tense. Not his usual amusement at an ignorant question, or his customary derision toward the rest of the party. Something far more subtle. More intimate. Damien was reminded of the seductive undulations of a snake, as it mesmerized its prey.
“Only a fool builds his fortress on a fault line,” Tarrant assured her. “It’s one thing to ward against the tremors of an earthquake—and quite another to try to maintain a structure when half the ground beneath it suddenly rises, or sinks, or moves to the west of that which remains. Even an adept will die if the roof falls in and crushes his head, lady. Especially if it happens at the one time he dares not Work to save himself.”
“I see,” she whispered.
“What it means,” he said, rerolling the map, “is that we have a difficult journey ahead of us.”
“And an enemy who knows we’ve arrived,” Senzei added soberly.
Tarrant looked up at the cliffs; his eyes narrowed as if somehow he might see the watcher again if he looked carefully enough.
“Impossible to read that trace,” he muttered. “Damn the weakness of the currents here! In the Forest I could have told you who it was that saw us, and what his or her intentions were. . . .”
“Or its,” Damien reminded him.
A cold breeze gusted in across the Serpent. For a moment there was silence, broken only by the sound of the horses feeding. The shifting of sand as Ciani began to douse the fire.
“Yes,” Tarrant said at last. Clearly not liking the taste of the word, or its implications. “His, her, or its.”
“Come on,” the priest said. “Let’s get moving.”
It had never occurred to Senzei that he might wind up the most powerful of them all. No, not powerful exactly . . . more like useful. Adaptable.
Maybe it came from all those years of watching the currents at home, of focusing on their intensity with a desperate need to perceive minute changes, as an affirmation of his skill. Maybe it was from all those years of watching Ciani Work, of honing his Sight while she refined more concrete skills, knowing that whatever else he might choose to do she could do better and more easily. Whatever. The end result was that here and now, in this special place, Senzei Reese had exactly the skills required to get his companions from one point to another in safety.
Trudging through the chill autumn waters, mostly on horseback, sometimes on foot, his eyes fixed on the swirling liquid before them, he used his Sight to feel out the currents that lay beneath that saline froth. Used his Sight to ferret out the rock formations that might cause them to stumble, the hairline faults and pebble-filled hollows that would cause the ground to shift if too much weight was put on it. Each was reflected in the earth-fae as it shimmered up through the water, each had its own special flavor, its own peculiar light. As he had guided their boat through the rakhland’s shallows, he now guided his party along the shoreline, across terrain that shifted from pebbled beach to half-submerged boulders to waist-high waters in a matter of minutes. And no one else could do it as well as he could. That was simple fact. The priest specialized in Healing skills, the arts of Life; the adept Gerald Tarrant, for all his awesome power, seemed ill at ease Working through the water, and preferred to leave that duty to another. And Ciani . . . it hurt him to think he was benefiting from her disability, but the truth was that he had never experienced this kind of pleasure before—this absolute certainty of being needed, of having the skills which the moment required and needing to use them. Of being the only one who could use them. His years with her had been rich ones, in both experience and friendship, but he realized now just what it had cost him to function in her shadow all these years. How much of him had never lived, before this moment.
Step by step, obstacle by obstacle, the four of them worked their way westward, toward the Achron’s outlet. At times the shoreline was almost hospitable, a narrow beach of worn pebbles and broken shells overlaid with thick strands of seaweed that allowed them to ride as quickly as their horses could find footing. But then it would drop away suddenly and the sheer palisades would meet the water without junction, leaving them to work their way through pools of deep, ice-cold water, their horses struggling to find firm footing amidst the potholes and the undertow that were invisible beneath the black waters. It was a dangerous route, rife with tension—but he, Senzei Reese, led them through. Skirting deadly pits which the tides had carved at the base of the cliff walls, finding the one solid path across a mud-covered landscape, sensing the hollows in which venemous creatures hid, obscured beneath mounds of rotting seaweed . . . with a constant Working on his lips to support his special senses he read the oh-so-subtle variations in the earth-fae, and then used that vision to find the one safe path amidst a thousand deadly ones. It was exhausting work, and by the end of the night his head rang with pain from the exertion. But it was a wonderful pain. An exhilarating pain. A pain that was as exquisitely sexual as the first time he had entered a woman, all the heat and the giddy fear and the sense of rightness combined, in one blinding agony of exhaustion.
This is what I was born to do, he thought, as he lifted a hand to rub one throbbing temple. Persevere, where the adepts falter.
They paused once along the way, for food and a brief respite. The horses nibbled uneasily at the rations they were offered, grainy cakes that combined nutrition with a high-calorie supplement; it was better than nothing, but the animals clearly weren’t happy about it. Damien muttered something about hoping they found proper grazing ground before their limited supply of the stuff ran out. They discussed stopping for a while while they were still on hospitable ground, but it was no real option; Tarrant’s presence among them meant they couldn’t travel during the daylight hours, which in turn meant they needed to cover as much ground as possible during the night. So they wrung out their clothing and waited while the priest tamed enough earth-fae to ward off sickness and stabilize the temperature of their flesh—not a sure thing in these currents, he warned them, but better than no effort at all—and they continued.
Their first indication that they were nearing their objective was a faint roaring sound in the distance, not unlike the noise one might hear cupping a shell to one’s ear to catch the sound of blood surging within the body. It had no rhythm, unlike the waters at their side, no heartbeat of surf breaking over an inconstant shore, but was more like the rush of water surging through a confined space: river rapids, Senzei thought. He saw Damien’s head snap up as he first became aware of the sound, and the priest’s expression darkened slightly. Not good? he thought despairingly. He didn’t dare ask. Even his own skills would be of little use in river whitewater, and the footing . . . he shivered as he envisioned it. Gods willing, the land there would be solid enough to serve them.
It took nearly another hour to reach the mouth of the river, across such difficult terrain that for a while Senzei thought they might not make it. But then, when the roar of whitewater had grown so loud that they could hardly speak to one another without shouting, they came around a bend and it was there before them, in all its violent glory. A break in the cliff wall to th
eir left, through which the river poured like a herd of wild beasts in desperate stampede, casting themselves upon the mounds and mudbars that time and the tides had erected. Roaring white surf capped the Serpent’s waters, and moonlight shattered into a million sparks on its wild, frothing surface. A fog of spray rose for yards above the water, and eddies of mist curled like phantoms within it, ghostly forms that were barely born before the water and the wind swallowed them up again.
Senzei moved closer to the cliff wall, blinking the spray from his eyes. It was hard to see, hard to get any sense of where they were, or where they needed to be. He tried to Work, but he had always depended upon vision for his focus—and here, clear vision was impossible.
“There!” He heard Tarrant’s shout with unexpected clarity—but of course, the adept would have augmented his voice. He tried to respond, but his horse had begun to back away from the spectacle before them, and he had to fight to bring it under control before he could look where the Hunter was pointing. Damien’s hand was on Ciani’s reins and he could see that her mount was ready to bolt, might have done so moments ago if not for that restraint.
“There,” the Hunter told them, and he pointed to the cliff wall.
For a moment, it was impossible to see. Then—perhaps by chance, perhaps in response to Tarrant’s will—the worst of the fog parted before them. It was now possible to see the gap where the river poured out, to a short but violent waterfall that met the Serpent in thunder. It was also possible to see that the river had once been higher—or might be again, in a wetter season—and that a narrow ridge, erosion-carved, paralleled the course of the waters. Ten yards above them, perhaps half a mile away. It might as well have been on another planet.
“How are you at parting the waters?” Damien yelled to Tarrant—and it must have been some kind of religious joke, because the Hunter smiled dryly.