The adept’s eyes narrowed somewhat; the memory of that night clearly disturbed him. “If I’d had only myself to consider, they could never have taken me. But being indebted to the lady, and therefore you . . .” he hesitated. “Complicates things.”
“We’ve got a job to do, together. You and I may not like that fact, but we’ve both chosen to accept it. I’ve done my share to make that partnership work—you know that, Hunter. Now it’s your turn.”
Tarrant’s voice was low but tense. “You’re asking to know my weaknesses.”
“I’m asking what you are. Is that so unreasonable? What manner of man—or creature—we’re traveling with. Damn it, man, I’m tired of guessing! Tired of hoping that we won’t get caught up in some situation where my ignorance might really cost us. I might have been able to help you, back at the river—but how was I to know what you needed? What really might bind your power, as opposed to what they thought might bind it? The closer we get to our enemy, the more powerful he looks. Some day very soon we’re going to face the bastard head-on, and you may have to count on one of us for support. God help us then, if all we have to go on then is my guesswork. You want to bank your life on that?”
The Hunter looked at him. Cold eyes, and an even colder expression; his words slid forth like ice. “A man doesn’t explain his vulnerabilities to one who intends to destroy him.”
Damien drew in a sharp breath, held it for a minute. Exhaled it, slowly. “I never said that.”
A faint smile—or almost-smile—softened the Hunter’s expression. “Do you really think you can hide that from me? After what’s passed between us? I know what your intentions are.”
“Not here,” Damien said firmly. “Not now. Not while we’re traveling together. I can’t answer for what happens later, after we leave the rakhlands—but for now, the four of us have to function as a unit. I accept it. Can’t you read the truth in that?”
“And afterward?” the adept asked softly.
“What do you want me to say?” Damien snapped. “That I approve of what you are? That it’s in my nature to sit back and watch while women are slaughtered for your amusement? I swore I’d be your undoing long before I met you. But that vow belongs to another time and place—another world entirely. The rules are different here. And if we both want to get home, we’d damn well better cooperate. After that . . . I imagine you know how to take care of yourself once you’re back in the Forest. Do you really think mere words can change that?”
For a moment, Tarrant just stared at him. It was impossible to read what was in those eyes or to otherwise taste of the tenor of his intentions; he had put up a thorough block on all levels, and the mask was firmly in place.
“Bluntness is one of your few redeeming traits,” he observed at last. “Sometimes irritating . . . but never unenlightening.” The wind gusted suddenly, flattening the grass about their feet. Somewhere in the distance, a predator-bird screeched its hunger. “You ask what I am—as though there’s a simple answer. As though I haven’t spent centuries exploring that very issue.” He turned away so that Damien might not see his expression; his words addressed the night. “Ten centuries ago, I sacrificed my humanity to seal a bargain. There are forces in this world so evil that they have no name, so all-encompassing that no single image can contain them. And I spoke to them across a channel etched in my family’s blood. Keep me alive, I said to them, and I will serve your purpose. I’ll take whatever form that requires, adapt my flesh to suit your will—you may have it all, except for my soul. That alone remains my own. And they responded—not with words, but with transformation. I became something other than the man I was, a creature whose hungers and instincts served that darker will. And that compact has sustained me ever since.
“What are the rules of my existence? I learned them one by one. Like an actor who finds himself on an unfamiliar stage, mouthing lines he doesn’t know in a play he’s never read, I felt my way through the centuries. Did you think it was different? Did you imagine that when I made my sacrifice, someone handed me a guidebook and said, ‘Here, these are the new rules. Make sure you follow them.’ Sorry to disappoint you, priest.” He chuckled coldly. “I live. I hunger. I find things that will feed the hunger and learn to procure them. In the beginning my knowledge was crude, and I found crude answers: blood. Violence. The convulsions of dying flesh. As my understanding grew more sophisticated, so did my appetite.—But the old things will still sustain me,” he warned. “Human blood alone will do that if nothing else is available. Does that answer your question?”
“You were a vampire.”
“For a time. When I first changed. Before I discovered that there were other options. A pitiful half-life, that . . . and gross physical assault has never appealed to me. I find the delicate pleasures of psychological manipulation much more . . . satisfying. As for the power that keeps me alive . . . call it an amalgamation of those forces which on Earth were mere negatives—but which have real substance here, and a potential for power than Earth never dreamed of. Cold, which is the absence of heat. Darkness, which is the absence of light. Death, which is the absence of life. Those forces comprise my being—they keep me alive—they determine my strengths and my weaknesses, my hungers, even my manner of thinking. As for how that power manifests itself . . .” He paused. “I take on whatever form inspires fear in those around me.”
“As you did in Morgot.”
“As I do even now.”
Damien stiffened.
“The lady knows that I can mimic the creatures that attacked her, make her relive that pain any time it pleases me. That’s fear enough, don’t you think? With Mer Reese the matter is much more subtle. Say that I embody the power he hungers for, the temptation to cast aside everything he values and plunge into darkness—and the fear that he will do so only to come up with empty hands, and a soul seared raw by evil.”
“And myself?” Damien asked tightly.
“You?” He laughed softly. “For you I’ve become the most subtle creature of all: a civilized evil, genteel and seductive. An evil you endure because you need its service—even though that very endurance plucks loose the underpinnings of your morality. An evil that causes you to question the very definitions of your identity, that blurs the line between dark and light until you’re no longer certain which is which, or how the two are divided.—That’s what you fear most of all, priest. Waking up one morning and no longer knowing who or what you are.” Pale gray eyes glittered hungrily in the moonlight. “Does that satisfy you? Is that what you wanted to hear?”
For a moment, Damien said nothing; emotion was too hot in his brain for him to voice it effectively. Then at last, carefully, he chose his words. “When all this is over—when our enemy has been dealt with and we’re safely out of the rakhlands—I will kill you, Hunter. And rid the world of your taint forever. I swear it.”
It was hard to say just what wry expression flickered across the Hunter’s face. Sadness? Amusement?
“I never doubted that you’d try,” he whispered.
They left at sunset. A tremor struck the camp as they were mounting up, which made tent ornaments jingle like windchimes and rakh children run howling about like banshees—but despite the noise of the small quake, it did little real damage. And since it meant that for a short while there would be fresh earth-fae—strong currents—Damien considered it an excellent omen.
On the surface, they seemed a well-supplied company: five travelers, five mounts, and supplies enough to get them all to the east coast and back again. None of them had discussed how likely it was that not all would survive the round trip journey; packing a full store for each of them had been a ritual of hope, a gesture of denial—a necessary armoring against the presence of Death, as they began a journey into his domain. Nevertheless, Damien could not help but notice how the various elements of their small company seemed a composite of opposites: Ciani and Senzei seated on xandus, the rakh-woman clutching a springbolt, himself dressed in clothes made from quickly
-woven cloth, fashioned in the rakhene style. He ought to have been grateful for the thick woolen shirt, for it kept out the autumn chill far better than his human wardrobe, but the vivid pictures that had been hurriedly painted onto it seemed somehow . . . conspicuous. Mere color had never bothered him, of course, and he had worn the stuffed and padded styles of Ganji-on-the-Cliffs without reserve, but to have his exploits—as the rakh understood them—splashed in vivid hues across his person . . . he wondered if there wasn’t just a hint of sarcasm hidden in those cryptic pictoglyphs, some little bit of rakhene humor at his expense. Or was the sight of his personal history splayed across his belly humor enough for their kind?
As for Tarrant, he was . . . well, Tarrant. Tall and elegant and fastidiously arrogant, he rode the last remaining Forest steed as though it always had been and always would be his mount. There had been no question of his taking a xandu, of course; the animals wouldn’t have him, and he clearly considered them to be inferior stock. Much to Damien’s surprise, the party had no sooner left the rakhene camp than the adept urged his black horse forward into a point position. It was as if he was wordlessly daring their enemy to strike at the party through him.
Which means he knows damn well that no one’s going to attack us now, Damien thought. The man’s not a fool.
Then: Not fair, priest. Not fair at all. He reminded himself what the adept had done for him. Not only saved his life at the river, but later cleansed him of the illness that had taken hold in those terrible, frozen hours. He shivered to remember the touch of coldfire in his veins, the pain and terror that racked his body (no doubt feeding the Hunter as it did so) while the killing cure took hold—but the end result was more than he could have managed himself, in his weakened state.
Call it what you like, he thought to the Hunter. It looked like a Healing to me.
Technicalities. He knew now what a true Healing would do to the adept’s compact. Any act of life—or fire, or true light—would negate the power that kept him alive. A hell of a price to pay, for a single act of compassion.
What a thin line you must have to walk in order to travel with us.
Then he looked at the adept’s back—and beyond it, into the darkness that obscured their enemy’s domain. And he shuddered.
What a thin line we’re all walking, now.
Thirty-four
It scared Senzei, that their enemy might See them coming. It scared the hells out of him. Sometimes he found it hard to control his fear, to go about the motions of traveling and camping and foraging and guarding without the fear taking hold of him utterly, making it impossible for him to do anything other than crawl into his bedroll and shiver in terror. How did his companions deal with it? Did they not experience such feelings at all, or were they simply better at hiding it?
For a while he’d been all right. On the way to Kale, through the Forest itself, right up to the border of the Canopy. Because their enemy had been not a man, then, but a measureless abstraction. A faint whiff of evil, a shadow of threat—not a creature with a name and a homeland, a being with armies and citadels and weapons that one could only guess at. An enemy who knew how to read the currents, who might well be watching their every move as they progressed slowly across his realm. Tarrant’s Obscurings might give them some cover, but was it enough? Their presence in the rakhlands, so alien to the local currents, sent out waves of identification so clear and intense that only a blind man could fail to read them. Or so Tarrant told them.
Damn him, for sharing that truth.
There was no other way; that was what Damien told them. No other path to take to get them where they were going, and no better way to travel it. The risk was real but unavoidable. Tarrant Worked each morning and night to reinforce the patterns that would keep their enemy from reading their true identities, the extent of their arsenal, their intentions . . . but whether such a subterfuge was possible, or just a wasted effort, only the gods could say. They did what they could. And hoped ii was enough.
And prayed.
For days there was nothing but grassy plains to cross, a seemingly endless expanse of flat land that was host to a thousand varieties of life. Wild xandu grazed on autumn’s browning stalks, and eyed their domesticated brethren warily as the party moved past them. Small tufted scavengers leapt through the grass, then fell to the lightning strike of a sharp-toothed predator. When the company was silent, they could hear that the air was filled with chirpings and cluckings and a thousand varieties of rustling; nature’s kingdom, winding down for winter. Periodically Senzei would Work his vision and See the patterns that dominated this land: even, steady currents, delicate in design, whose gentle whorls and eddies linked predator to prey to carrion hunter, and all those beasts in turn to the fauna around them, the sunlight that warmed them, the weather that supplied them with moisture. Against such a landscape, the humans’ own presence stood out like a fresh wound—livid, swollen, seething with intended violence. It was impossible to imagine that Tarrant could Obscure such a mark—or even mask it in any way. If their enemy had Sight, he could certainly See them—and there was no doubt, in any of their minds, that this was indeed the case.
Gods help us, Senzei thought feverishly. Gods help us all.
At night the demons would come out, bloodsuckers and their kin—but they were mild creatures compared to the denizens of the Forest, or even Jaggonath’s demonagerie: constructs of the party’s fears that had manifested enough flesh to make a fleeting appeal for sustenance, but little more than that. They lacked the substance it would take to withstand even a mild Dispelling, the kind of solidity that comes only from years of feeding on one’s host/creators, of drawing life from the pit of darkness that resides in every man’s soul. Even Senzei could banish them, with hardly a whispered word to focus his Working. Clearly, whatever convolutions of human character created such demons, the rakhene mind had no equivalent. The land Erna’s natives had settled was more peaceful than any the travelers had seen, nearly free of the nightmares that had devoured the first colonists.
So where did the memory-eaters come from? Senzei wondered. Surely one mind couldn’t be strong enough to manifest horrors on that scale.
Mile after mile of featureless terrain passed beneath their mounts’ hooves, each one indistiguishable from the last. Slowly, gradually, the distance behind them blanketed the Worldsend peaks in a haze of soft blue fog. One morning Senzei looked about and discovered he could no longer see any landmarks: not the mountains behind them, nor the eastern range ahead of them, nor any feature to mar the perfect flatness of the earth. In that moment it seemed they might travel forever without seeing any variety in earth or sky, only a few wispy clouds that floated languidly, casting fleeting shadows upon the ground beneath.
Then, without warning, a call came. A whistle, followed by an animal cry—or perhaps a voice crying words, that were almost but not quite English. The thick grass parted to make way for a rakhene warrior, who established himself before them with a bristling mane and obviously hostile intentions. Others followed—a hunting party—fierce nomadic warriors clearly ready to deal with any humans who happened to cross their path. Their tempers were so animal, so volatile, that the one time Senzei dared to See them they left their afterimage seared into his retina, as if he had stared too long into the sun.
It was their rakhene guide who saved them, who bargained for their lives. Hissing commands and arguments in the native dialect, posturing herself to convey a plethora of kinesthetic signals: territorial combat fought with words and hisses, hierarchical issues resolved with the ruffling of fur, the stiffening of neck muscles. Eventually, resentfully, the hostile tribes parted to let them pass. Deep growls sounded low in rakhene throats as the hated odor of humankind drifted past their sensitive nostrils, but they made no move to harm their chosen enemies—and soon enough they, too, were gone, swallowed up by the endless sea of grass that stretched from horizon to horizon, without surcease.
They encountered other tribes, with much the same
result. And Senzei came to realize just how lucky there were that the khrast-woman was with them. They had survived the Forest’s worst, they had maneuvered through deadly surf and earthquakes and an ambush by their enemies, but they would never have made it through the plains without her. The rakh were simply too many, too hot-tempered, too eager to kill humankind. They would have been spitted like shish kebob before the first words of parley came out of their mouths.
Tedium began to eat at their nerves, an all too human response to the endless, identical miles. Tempers flared hotly in the featureless days, petty annoyances transformed into grievous trespasses by the joint powers of fear and boredom. How many hours could one ride thus, sandwiched between terrible dangers but unable to address oneself to them—riding endless miles in the constant company of others, without even a moment of true privacy in which change one’s clothes, or bathe, or defecate, or even just get away? At least Tarrant left each morning. That helped. Senzei could almost see the cloud lift from about Damien when the Hunter finally transformed, adopting the broad feathered wings that would bear him to a daytime shelter. Tarrant refused to take shelter with the rest of the company, and clearly that was the wisest course; who could say when the temptation of an easy kill might overwhelm all prior agreements in the priest’s mind, when all that was required to rid the world of the Hunter forever was the lifting of a single tent flap? The land was riddled with shelters, Tarrant told them, and his adept’s vision easily picked out the subtle variation in earth-fae currents that betrayed the presence of a suitable cavern. So he rested in the earth, like the dead, while they camped and slept and stood uneasy watches. And when he returned each night there was as much regret as relief in Damien’s eyes, that he had managed to get through the day safely.