Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
THE PROMISED LAND
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
VALLEY OF MISTS
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eigfiteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
THE BLACK LANDS
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Epilogue
Novels by C.S. Friedman available from DAW Books:
THE MADNESS SEASON
THIS ALIEN SHORE
IN CONQUEST BORN
THE WILDING
The Coldfire Trilogy
BLACK SUN RISING
WHEN TRUE NIGHT FALLS
CROWN OF SHADOWS
Copyright © 1993 by C. S. Friedman.
All rights reserved.
DAW Books Collectors No. 926
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
eISBN : 978-1-101-46433-5
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First Trade Printing, October 2005
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
S.A.
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Michael Whelan, whose beautiful art
brings dreams to life.
The author would like to thank Todd Drunagel for saving chapter two from computer oblivion, and Mark Sunderlin for rescuing her from computer hell several times. (Sometimes a world without technology can be very appealing!) And very special thanks to Daniel Barr, for costuming above and beyond the call of duty.
Prologue
I can’t believe we’re doing this.
Colony Commander Leonid Case lay full length upon the damp Ernan soil, his hands clenched into fists before him. This whole plan was insane, he thought. His furtive departure from the settlement, his midnight stalk through these alien woods, and now hiding in this gully like some forest-born predator, alert for the scent of prey ... in fact, the only thing crazier than the way he was acting was the situation that had brought him here in the first place. And the man responsible for it.
Damn Ian! Damn his delusions! Didn’t the settlement have enough problems here without his adding to them? Wasn’t it enough that people were dying here—dying!—in ways that defied all human science? Did Ian have to add to that nightmare?
The blackness of despair churned coldly in Case’s gut, and panic stirred in its wake. He couldn’t let it get to him. He was responsible for this fledgling colony, which meant that the others depended on him—on his advice, his judgment, and most of all on his personal stability. He couldn’t afford to let despair overwhelm him, any more than he could allow himself to openly vent his fury over his chief botanist’s behavior. But sometimes it seemed almost more than he could handle. God knows he had signed on for better and for worse, well aware of all the tragedies that might befall a newborn colony ... but no one had prepared him for this.
Thirty-six dead now. Thirty-six of his people. And not just dead: gruesomely dead, fearsomely dead, dead in ways that defied human acceptance. He remembered the feel of Sally Chang’s frozen flesh in his hands, so brittle that when he tried to lift her body it shattered into jagged bits, like glass. And Wayne Reinhart’s corpse, which was little more than a jellylike package of skin and blood and pulped organs by the time they found it. And Faren Whitehawk ... that was the most frightening one of all, he thought. Not because it was the most repellent; Faren’s corpse was whole, the flesh still pliant, the expression almost peaceful. But all the blood was gone from the body, impossibly drawn out through two puncture wounds in the neck. Or so the settlement’s doctors had informed him. Christ in heaven! Looking down at those marks—ragged and reddened, crusted black about the edges with dried blood and worse—he knew that what they were facing here was nothing Earth could have prepared them for. Monsters drawn from Earth’s tradition, their own human nightmares garbed in solid flesh and pitted against them ... how did you fight such a thing? Where did you even start? When Carrie Sands was killed three nights later by some winged creature that had accosted her while she slept, he wasn’t surprised to hear her bunkmate describe it as a creature straight out of East Indian mythology. Something that fed on nightmares, he recalled. Only this time it got carried away, and fed on flesh as well.
Jesus Christ. Where was it going to end?
Thirty-six dead. That was out of the three thousand and some odd colonists who had survived the coldsleep journey to this place, to stand under the light of an alien sun and commit themselves body and soul to building a new world. His world. Now they were all at risk. And dammit, the seedship should have foreseen this! It was supposed to survey each planet in question until there was no doubt, absolutely no doubt, that the colonists would thrive there. If not, it was programmed to move on to the next available system. In theory it was a foolproof procedure, designed to protect Earth’s explorers from the thousand and one predictable hazards of extraterrestrial colonization. Like rival predators. Incompatible protein structures. Climatic instability.
The key word there was predictable.
Case looked up at the starless night sky—so black, so empty, so utterly alien—and found himself shivering. What did a Terran seedship do when it had surveyed a thousand systems—perhaps tens of thousands—and still it had found no hospitable world for its charges? Would there come a time when its microchips would begin to wear, when its own mechanical senility would force it to make one less than ideal choice? Or was all this the fault of the programmers, who had never foreseen that a ship might wander so far, for so long, without success? Go outward, they had directed it, survey each planet you come across, and if it does not suit your purpose, then refuel and go outward farther still. He thought of Erna’s midnight sky, so eerie in its utter starlessness. What was a program like that supposed to do when it ran out of options? When the next move would take it beyond the borders of the galaxy, into regions so utterly desolate that it might drift forever without finding another sun, another source of fuel? Was it supposed to leap blindly into that void, its circuits undisturbed by the prospect of eternal solitude? Or would it instead survey its last available option again and again, time after time, until at last its circuits had managed wha
tever convolution of logic was required to determine that the last choice was indeed acceptable, by the terms of its desperation? So that there, tens of thousands of light-years from Earth, separated by a multimillenial gap in communication, the four thousand colonists might be awakened at last.
We’ll never know, Commander Case thought grimly. The bulk of the seedship was high above them now, circling the tormented planet like an errant moon. They had brought all the data down with them, each nanosecond’s record of the ninety-year survey—and he had studied it so often that sometimes it seemed he knew each byte of it by heart. To what end? Even if he could find some hint of danger in the seedship’s study, what good would it do them now? They couldn’t go back. They couldn’t get help. This far out in the galaxy they couldn’t even get advice from home. The seedship’s programmers were long since dead, as was the culture that had nurtured them. Communication with Earth would mean waiting more than forty thousand years for an answer—and that was if Earth was there to respond, and if it would bother. What had the mother planet become, in the millennia it had taken this seedship to find a home? The temporal gulf was almost too vast, too awesome to contemplate. And it didn’t really matter, Case told himself grimly. The fact that they were alone here, absolutely and forever, was all that counted. As far as this colony was concerned, there was no Earth.
He shifted uncomfortably in his mossy trench, all too aware of the darkness that was gathering around him. It was a thick darkness, cold and ominous, as unlike the darknesses of Earth as this new sun’s cold light was unlike the warm splendor of Sol. For a moment homesickness filled him, made doubly powerful by the fact that home as he knew it no longer existed. The colonists had made their commitment to Eden only to find that it had a serpent’s soul, but there was no escaping it now. Not with the figures for coldsleep mortality in excess of 86% for second immersion.
He heard a rustling beside him and stiffened; his left hand moved for his weapon, even as he imagined all the sorts of winged nightmares that might even now be descending on him. But it was only Lise, come to join him. He nodded a greeting and scrunched to one side, making room for her to crawl forward. There was barely room for both of them in the shallow gully.
Lise Perez, M.D. Thank God for her. She had saved his life a few nights back, under circumstances he shuddered to recall. She had almost saved Tom Bennet when that thing got past the eastern fence and launched itself into the mess cabin, and in any case she had prevented it from grabbing anyone else, until a cook finally brought it down by severing head from body with a meat cleaver. She was a competent officer, always collected, she had a nose for trouble—and she had been keeping tabs on Ian Casca for nearly a month now. God bless her for it.
“How long?” he whispered.
She looked at her watch. “Half an hour.” And glanced up at him. “He’ll be here before that,” she assured him.
If anyone else had brought him out here—if anyone else had even suggested that he should come out here, making himself the perfect target for every nightmare beast in this planet’s ghastly repertoire—laughter would have been the kindest of his responses. But Lise had suggested it and he trusted her judgment, sometimes more than his own. And Ian had to be dealt with. There was no way around that. Case should have jailed the man when this all started, but he had chosen to assign him to therapy instead, and now he was paying the price for that decision.
“Listen,” she whispered. “Here he comes.”
He nodded, noting that though her jacket and pants were dark enough for cover her pale skin glowed like a beacon in the moonlight. They should have thought of that. Rubbed her down with charcoal, or lampblack, or ... something. Made her dark, like him, so that they could creep through the night unseen. Too late for that now, he thought. He cursed himself for carelessness and motioned for her to keep low, so that the weeds might obscure her face.
True night was about to fall. Less than half an hour now. Case told himself that the term was a mere technicality, that even on Earth heavy cloudcover might obscure the stars and moon, leaving a man in total darkness—but he knew that there was more to it than that. He had tasted its true power once in the field, by turning off his lantern so that the darkness was free to envelop him—a darkness so absolute, so utterly boundless, that all the shadows of Earth paled by comparison. The mere memory of it made his skin crawl. By now the whole camp would be alight with beacons, bright floods fighting to drive back the shadows of the triple night. As if mere light would help. As if mere walls could keep the serpent out of Eden, or prevent it from reading their secret thoughts, from turning their fears and even their desires against them.
As he listened for the sound of Ian’s approach, he remembered the night it had come for him, the serpent incarnate in an angel’s form. Remembered how all his fear and his skepticism and even his innate caution were banished from his soul in an instant, as though they had never existed. Because what had stepped out from the shadows was his son—his son!—as young and as healthy as he had been ten years ago, before the accident that took him from Case’s life. And in that moment there was no fear in the Commander’s heart, no suspicion, not even a moment’s doubt. Love filled him with such force that he trembled, and tears poured down his cheeks. He whispered his son’s name, and the figure moved toward him. He reached out his hand, and the creature touched him—it touched him!—and it was warm, and alive, and he knew it by touch and scent and a thousand other signs. Christ in heaven, his son was alive again! He opened his arms wide and gathered the boy up, buried his face in his hair (and the smell was familiar, even that was right) and cried, let all the pain pour out in a tsunami of raw emotion, an endless tide of grief and love and loss....
And she had saved him. Lise. She had come, and she had seen, and she had understood at once. And acted. Somehow she’d killed the unnatural thing, or driven it off, and she’d dragged Case to MedOps. Barely in time. Later, when he had regained the wherewithal to communicate, he asked her what she had seen. And she answered, steadily, It was devouring you. From the inside out. That’s what all these creatures do, one way or another. They feed on us.
In the distance now he could hear the low rumble of a tram approaching, its solar collectors vibrating as it bumped over the uneven turf. Ian. It had to be him. The trams had proven to be dangerously unreliable—two had exploded while being started up, and three more simply would not work—but Ian was one of the few who seemed capable of making them run, and they gave him no surprises. Likewise the man’s weapons functioned perfectly, while others jammed and backfired, and as for his lab equipment ... the botanist lived a charmed life, without question. But at what price?
In his mind’s eye Case could see the grisly stockpile that Lise had discovered one night, after following Ian from camp. Small mammals, a few birds, a single lizard ... all beheaded or dismembered or both, and hidden beneath a thornbush at edge of the forest. When Case had confronted Ian about them the botanist had made no attempt to dissemble or even defend himself, but had said simply, There’s power in the blood. Power in sacrifice. Don’t you see? That’s how this planet works. Sacrifice is power, Leo.
Sacrifice is power.
The tram was coming into sight now, and it was possible to make out the form of a man behind its controls. Lamplight glinted on red hair, wind-tossed: Ian Casca’s trademark. In the back of the tram was something bundled in a blanket, that might or might not be alive. Case felt a chill course through him as he gauged the size of the trapped animal, and he thought, Might be human. Might be. He couldn’t see Lise’s expression, but it was a good bet she was thinking the same thing.
The blood is the life, the Old Testament proclaimed. Lise had shown him that passage in Casca’s own Bible, underscored by two red lines on a dog-eared page. He wondered if Ian had made those marks before or after this horror began.
The tram had entered the clearing now, and after a few seconds of idling Ian braked and shut it down. The harsh purr of the motor died out into the
night, leaving a silence so absolute that Case’s breathing seemed a roar by contrast. Even the insects were still, as if they, too, feared the darkness that was about to fall.
Case tightened his hand about his gun. Waiting.
The old formulas will work, Ian had claimed. He was lifting a bag from the cargo section, a specimen case whose soft sides bulged when he set it down. From it he removed a long strip of red cloth and a canvas sack. All we have to do is learn to apply them. He hung the cloth about his neck so that its ends fell forward, brushing against his calves as he worked. Painted sigils glittered on its surface: geometrics bordered with Hebrew figures, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, something that might have been an astrological symbol ... Case shook his head in amazement as the man reached into his sack and drew out a handful of white powder. The trappings of his madness were so precise, so deliberate, so painstakingly detailed ... which made him all the more dangerous, Case reflected. A careless madman would have gotten himself locked up long ago.
Lise touched him on the arm. He turned back to look at her, saw the question in her eyes. But he shook his head. Not yet. He turned back to watch the botanist, who was now tracing a circle on the ground, dribbling powder through his fingers to mark its circumference. When he was done with that he began to sketch out more complex figures, his fingers trembling with fear—or excitement—as he worked. On the bed of the tram one of the bundles had begun to move, and Case heard a soft moan issue from it. Human, he thought. No doubt about it. His jaw tightened, but he forced himself not to move forward. Not yet. Erna had no jailhouse, and at the rate things were going wrong they might never get the time to build one. If Ian’s madness had turned murderous, then for the sake of the colony he would have to be disposed of. Excised, the way one excised a cancerous tumor to save the flesh beneath. And as judge, jury, and executioner, Case had better be damned sure that what he was doing was justified.