The circle was finished now, and all the designs that the botanist had chosen to add to it. He poured the last handful of powder back into the bag, tied it shut again, and set it aside. Case tensed, ready to interfere the minute Ian went for his captives. But the man simply stepped back, so that he stood in the exact center of the circle he had marked, and shut his eyes. For a moment he was silent, as if readying himself. For what? Case wondered. What arcane operation did the man imagine would give him control over this violent, unpredictable world?
If only it were that easy, he thought bitterly. Draw a few signs on the ground, recite an ancient incantation or two, and behold, all problems disappear ... for a brief moment he wished that he shared the botanist’s delusion. He wondered if he, too, might not be willing to spill a little blood, if he truly believed it would help the colony survive. Human blood? It was a disturbing question, and not one he wished to investigate further. God save him from ever discovering that the shell of his morality was as thin and as fragile as that of Ian Casca’s sanity....
The botanist stirred. Slowly, breathing deeply, he raised his hands up by his sides, and opened his eyes at last. The lamplight barely picked out his features, but even so Case could see the concentration that burned in his eyes, the sweat of tension that gleamed on his brow. He began to chant, in a manner that was half speech, half song. Case caught a few words of something that sounded like Latin, intermingled with bits that might be Greek, then Hebrew, then Aramaic. It was as though Ian had taken all the ancient tongues of Earth and sifted through them for words he needed, then mixed them indescriminately to create this custom-made ritual. Words of power, Case thought. For one sickening moment he wondered if Ian might not be right, if Earth’s magical traditions might not wield some true power in this extraterrestrial forum ... but a moan from beneath the blankets brought him back to his senses, and his hand tightened about his gun. Even if it did work, he thought grimly, it’s not worth the price.
Then Ian stopped. Stared into the night. His whole body was taut, rigid with tension. “Erna, hear me,” he intoned. “I offer you this sacrifice. I offer you the most precious thing we possess: the lifeblood of Terra. In return I ask this: Take us in. Make us part of you. We tried to be aliens on your soil, and your creatures defeated us. Now make us part of this world, as those creatures are part of it. And in return ... I offer you the heartsblood of Earth. The souls of this colony, now and forever.” He shut his eyes; Case thought that he trembled. “May it please you,” he whispered. “May you find it acceptable.”
His hands dropped down to his sides once more. For a moment he was silent; perhaps waiting for an answer? Case saw one of the bundles on the trams begin to stir, as if trying to free itself. Apparently so did Ian. The movement awakened him from his seeming trance, and he began to move toward the tram and its contents. Stepping over the line he had drawn, across the sigil-girded circle he had so carefully created. Drawing a slender knife from his belt as he moved.
That was enough for Case. He was on his feet in an instant, and Lise was right behind him. While she moved to intercept the man, to keep him from reaching the tram, he took up a solid position at the edge of the clearing and leveled his gun at the man’s heart. “That’s enough,” he announced. “Party’s over, Casca. Stay right where you are.”
The botanist reeled visibly, as though Case’s words had not only stopped him in his tracks but had awakened him from some kind of trance. He turned toward the commander and gaped at him, as if trying to absorb the fact of his presence.
“Leo,” he said at last. Starting to move toward him. “How did you—”
“Stay where you are!” Case ordered. “And keep your hands where I can see them.” He glanced toward Lise and nodded; she was kneeling on the tram’s bed, inspecting its contents. “No fast movements, you hear me? Just stay where you are and keep quiet.”
Lise had cut the tie on one of the bundles and was freeing its occupant. “Well?” Case demanded.
“It’s Erik Fielder.” She reached a hand in to take his pulse, and added, “He’s alive.” Quickly she moved to the other bundle and unwrapped its upper end. “Liz Breslav. Out cold. I see bruises, some sort of impact damage to the side of the head ... can’t say how bad it is without MedOps. We need to get her back to the ship.”
It took him a minute to put the names in context; when he did, he darkened. Ian’s choice of victims was all too practical. With true night coming, the colony’s other members would have been huddled together in their makeshift cabins, seeking the dubious safety that could be found in numbers. It would have been hard for Ian to single out one or two of them, much less knock them out and drag their bodies from the camp without being seen. But Fielder and Breslav had drawn special guard duty for the night, which meant that they were already outside the camp, standing watch over the ship and its contents a good mile away. They would have been especially vulnerable, Case thought, if their enemy was not a creature of Erna, like they expected, but one of their own kind. A glib man who might talk his way into their company, and then strike at them from behind when they least expected it.
His mouth tightened into a hard line as he raised the gun. “That’s proof enough for me.”
Sudden understanding gleamed in Ian’s eyes. Understanding ... and fear. “Leo, listen to me—”
“The charge is endangering the welfare of the colony,” Case said steadily. “The verdict is guilty.” Something tightened inside him, something cold and sharp. Something that hated killing, even in the name of justice. It took effort to get the words out. “The sentence is death.”
It’s not a killing, he told himself. It’s an excision. A cleansing. Ian had to die so that the rest of them could live. Was that murder?
Call it a sacrifice.
“Listen to me,” the botanist protested. “You don’t know what you’re doing—”
“Don’t I?” he asked angrily. With the toe of one boot he kicked at the nearer side of Ian’s circle, erasing the chalk line. “Damn it, man! This isn’t some primitive tribe in need of a shaman, but a colony in desperate need of unity! I have enough trouble from the outside without having to guard against my own people—”
“And how many more deaths can you absorb?” the botanist demanded. “You know as well as I do that the death rate is increasing geometrically. How many more nights does this colony have before it loses the numbers it needs to maintain a viable gene pool?”
“Two Terran months,” he answered gruffly. “But we’ll learn how to fight these creatures. We’ll learn how to—”
“Erna will create new ones as fast as you destroy the old! And if you learn to kill one kind, then the next will be different. Don’t you see, Leo, it’s the planet you’re fighting, the planet itself! Some force that controls the local ecosphere, keeping everything in balance. It doesn’t know how to absorb us. It doesn’t know how to connect. But it’s going to keep trying.” With a shaking hand he brushed back a lock of hair from his eyes; it fell back down almost immediately. “Leo, this planet was perfect. No drought, no famine, no cycles of surfeit and starvation like there are on Earth ... think of it! A whole ecology in utter harmony—a true Eden. And then we came. And threatened that harmony by our very presence—”
“And you think these rituals will change all that?” Case asked harshly.
“I think they’ll give us a tool. A means of communication. That’s the challenge, don’t you see? We have to impress the power here with Terran symbology, so that we have some way to reach out to it. To control it, Leo! If we don’t manage that, then we may as well pack it in here and now. Because all our technology won’t stop it from killing, when it controls the very laws of nature.”
“So you answer it with more killing? Feed it blood—”
“Sacrifice is the most ancient and powerful symbol we have,” Ian told him. “Think of it! When primitive man sought to placate his dieties, it was that blood of his own kind that he burned on the altar. When the God of the Jews dec
ided to test Abraham’s faith, it was the sacrifice of his own flesh and blood that He demanded. Moses saved his people from the Angel of Death by smearing the blood of animals on their doorposts. And when God reached out His Hand to man with His message of divine forgiveness, He created a Son of His Own Substance to serve as a sacrificial offering. Sacrifice is a bridge between man and the Infinite—and it can work for us here, Leo. In time it can end the killings. I believe that.” When Case made no response, he added desperately, “You can’t understand—”
“I understand,” Case said quietly. “All too well.” He gestured with the gun. “Move away from the tram.”
“You can’t stop it now. The offer’s been made. The sacrifice—”
“Is canceled, here and now. Move back from the tram.”
For a moment Ian just stared at him; comprehension dawned at last. “You thought I was going to kill them,” he whispered hoarsely. Incredulously. “You thought I would kill my own people—”
“What the hell was I supposed to think?” Case snapped. “You took them from the camp. You dedicated a sacrifice, then came at them with a knife. You tell me what conclusions to draw from that!”
The botanist opened his hand; the knife fell beside his feet. “I was going to cut them loose,” he said. “I brought them here so they wouldn’t get hurt ... Commander.”
Case shook his head sharply. “You forget that we were here. We heard you. I give you the lifeblood of Terra—”
He stopped. Stared. Through the eyes of a man, into the madness that lay beyond.
And he knew.
He knew.
Oh, my God....
The sky to the east filled with light, with fire; he wheeled about to face the source of it, and the sound and the force of the explosion knocked the breath from his body as they struck. Flames were roaring upward from a point some five miles east of them, lighting the sky with a reflected blaze a thousand times brighter than lightning. He staggered back in despair as the hot wind buffeted him, laden with the smell of burning. “You fool!” he hissed. “You goddamn fool!”
The ship. He could see it in his mind’s eye, not the proud ceramic shell of their landing capsule but a ravaged, blackened husk, a cloud of shrapnel and ash where there had once been a wealth of computer-ware, lab equipment, biostorage ... and at the foot of the flames a sea of hot slag, a molten lake which was quickly dissolving all their hopes and their memories and their dreams ... all their heritage. All gone now. All gone.
Eyes squeezing forth hot tears, he managed to regain his feet. A burning dust had begun to fall, fragments of metal and plastic charred black by that terrible fire. He shielded his eyes with one hand so that he could see where Ian Casca knelt—his hands clasped as if in prayer, a look of terrible ecstasy on his face—then he brought his gun hard about and fired. Once, twice, as many times as there were bullets, until the trigger clicked futiley against an empty chamber. And even then he kept firing. The fury in him had a life of its own, and even the sight of Ian’s chest and skull peppered with bloody holes could not quell the storm of despair that was raging inside him.
At last it was Lise who took hold of his arm, who forced the gun from his shaking fingers. Her yellow hair was dusted with ash, and blood smeared one cheek where a chunk of debris had struck her.
“We’ve lost it,” he whispered hoarsely. “We’ve lost it all. You realize that. Everything we had....”
Ever the pragmatist, she whispered, “We still have the settlement. A few trams. Two generators—”
He shook his head. “Won’t last. Can’t repair them. Oh, my God, Lise....” His hands were shaking. A cinder fell to the ground before him, extinguishing itself on the damp soil. He struggled to think clearly, to plan. Wasn’t that his duty? “We’ll have to record what we can. All the data we can come up with ... before people forget. Put it down on paper, write down everything we know—”
“They won’t want to do that.” She said it quietly, but he knew as soon as she spoke the words that they were true. “They’ll want weapons first. Security. They won’t want to waste time recording dead facts when there are things out there waiting to eat them.”
“It isn’t a waste—”
“I know that. You know that. But will they understand?”
He shut his eyes. The sound of the explosion pounded in his brain, a heartbeat of loss. “Then we’ll lose everything we have,” he whispered. “Everything we are.”
There was nothing she could say to that. Nothing she could do but hold on to him, while the sky filled with the black ash of their dreams. The fallout of Casca’s sacrifice, the last shattered remnants of their Terran heritage.
In the firelight it looked a lot like blood.
THE PROMISED LAND
One
Report-in-absence from Damien Kilcannon Vryce, Knight of the Golden Flame, Companion of the Earth-Star Ascendant
To the Patriarch Jaxom IV, Holy Father of the Eastern Realm, Keeper of the Prophet’s Law,
Signed and sealed this 5th day of March, 1247 A.S.
Most Reverend Father,
It is with a mixture of joy and trepidation that I write you on this fifth day of March, from the port city of Sattin. Joy, because I am able to report at last that our mission in the rakhlands was a success. The sorcerous tyrant who was draining that region of life and power has been sent to her final judgment, and the hordes who served her have likewise been dispatched. (Praise God, who makes such triumphs possible!) Trepidation, because I have come to believe that something far more deadly has finally turned its eye upon the human lands. And I fear that our recent victory, so hard won, may prove to be no more than a prelude to a far more bloody battle.
But let me record these things in their proper order:
We left from Jaggonath on October 5th of 1246, a party of three: myself, the Loremaster Ciani of Faraday, and Ciani’s close friend and professional assistant Senzei Reese. You will recall that the lady had been attacked at her place of business by a trio of demonlike creatures, whose malevolent Workings had robbed her of her memories and her most precious powers. We had determined that these creatures came from the rakhlands and would be returning to that place. It was our intention to follow them to that secret land and destroy them, thereby freeing the lady from their dire influence, and the human lands from further threat by their power.
You know that we set out for Kale, intending to hire passage to the rakhlands from that port. Such a journey meant five days of hard traveling, but nights could be spent in the relative safety of the daes. Since our quarry appeared to be night-bound, we anticipated little risk during this period. I served in my capacity as priest and Healer more than once along this road. And once, following a young boy’s tragic death, I made the acquaintance of a man who shared our road, a traveler named Gerald Tarrant.
How shall I describe this man who later played such a part in our undertaking? Elegant. Forbidding. Seductive. Malevolent. Utterly ruthless. I enclose a drawing of his person, but no simple sketch can possibly capture the essence of the man. As for his purpose ... let me say that I would not put it past him to have staged the whole thing—to have tormented a child until his spirit died, leaving an empty shell—simply because it amused him to watch a Healer flounder.
Despite his obvious power—or perhaps because of it—we chose to avoid this man for as long as we could. In Kale, however, that course was no longer viable. The fae-currents were too strong and too malignant for any of us to Work, which meant we could no longer use the earth-power to locate our enemy. In addition we were unfamiliar with local port customs, which proved a tremendous handicap. In the end we were forced to rely upon Tarrant despite our misgivings, and I must admit that he served us well in those areas.
Together the four of us traveled to the port of Morgot, where we hoped to be able to find a boat and a captain to suit our purposes. It was there that disaster struck. Our enemies ambushed us, their numbers doubled by reinforcements, and I give thanks to God that we
were able to drive them off. But when the dust and the blood had settled, we discovered that the wild energies of Morgot had unleashed a far more deadly adversary, in the person of our dark companion. During the battle Tarrant had turned on Ciani, brutally stripping her of what little strength and memory she had left. When we tried to help her he struck us down, and while we were incapacitated he carried her off: into the wilds of the Forbidden Forest, the lair of the creature called the Hunter.
Senzei and I followed—wounded, exhausted, but desperate to rescue Ciani before she was given over to the master of the Forest. Into that dark land we rode, where the trees were interwoven so tightly that sunlight never reached the ground, where all living things—and semi-living, and undead—existed only to serve that land’s fearsome tyrant. And at last we reached the citadel at the heart of the Forest, a black keep fashioned after Merentha Castle, home to the Hunter and his servants. There, to our dismay, we discovered our companion’s true identity....
I wish that I had gentler words for this, Holiness, that could ease the blow of such terrible knowledge. I wish such words existed. But let me say it simply: the creature known to you as the Hunter, who tracks living women like animals for his amusement and designed this brutal realm called the Forbidden Forest, was known in another time by another name: the Neocount of Merentha, Gerald Tarrant. The Prophet of our faith.
Yes, Reverend Father, the Prophet still lives—if life is not a misnomer for such a corrupted state. The founder of our faith feared death so greatly that in the end he traded his human soul for immortality—and now he is trapped in that nether realm between true death and life, his every waking moment a struggle for balance. What manner of man might survive the ages thus, unable to participate in either death or life, earning his continued survival by practices of such cruelty that legend accorded him the status of a true demon? I sense a spark of humanity still in him, but it is deeply buried. And he believes—perhaps correctly—that to express that humanity is to court true death. The arbiters of Hell are not known for their compassion.