Gone to its destination, Tarrant thought. Gone to deliver its message of death and betrayal.
Alone in the light of the early dawn, the Neocount of Merentha shivered.
THE BLACK LANDS
Twenty-nine
There it is, Damien thought. We made it.
The cities of the coast lay nestled in a crescent-shaped valley whose broad, curving mouth opened to the sea. To the east and west loomed the bald granite peaks of the continent’s two mountain ranges, which curved like pincers about the cities’ bounty and then extended far out into the water. There they became two diminishing lines of weather-worn ridges and jagged islands which stretched southward as far as the eye could see, providing the crescent shore with a vast harbor that was sheltered from storm and from foreign tsunami alike.
Clearly humankind had thrived here. Looking down upon the cities of the south—there were three that he could make out by moonlight, and probably more that would be visible in the light of day—Damien saw all the signs of successful settlement. Lush farmlands hugged the mountains, and a system of roads was visible that spanned the valley like a web. The fact that it was all at sea level, or very near to it, spoke volumes for the natural safety of this fertile niche; if the harbor waters had ever spawned any smashers of their own, man would have sought higher ground.
He stood on a ridge some two hundred feet above the valley floor and gazed at their destination. Some hundred yards to the east of them the waters of the valley—now a sizable river, formidable in current—plunged headlong over the rocky edge, roaring like a hurricane as they smashed themselves upon the rocks below. From there it was another drop, and then another, as the vast waterfall plummeted in stages to the floor of the harbor basin. Damien gazed down into the mist-filled lower valley and thought he saw figures milling about the foaming lake below. Fae-wraiths? Real people? Perhaps lovers, braving the dangers of the night in order to spur on their passion. Or perhaps even tourists, from the Protectorates or beyond; who could say what manner of commerce these thriving cities supported? One thing was certain: after weeks of traipsing through cold forests and over bare granite plateaus, Damien was overjoyed to see people again. Any people. He felt muscles unknot that had not been relaxed for weeks, and even though he knew that the dangers in those cities might be every bit as deadly as those without, he couldn’t help the sense of optimism that filled him at the sight of this thriving human metropolis.
Jenseny was something else again. She wouldn’t even come near the edge of the cliff, but stayed back by the horses, cowering close against their flesh. Humanity meant danger and betrayal to her—how quickly the young learned to fear!—and clearly she dreaded the coming descent. But at least she had stayed with them this long. That was something Damien hadn’t expected, and if he had failed to sketch out plans for her in the past few days it was mostly because he hadn’t really thought she’d still be with them. For a while it had seemed that she might bolt from them, animal-like, at the first sign of danger, disappearing into the brush like a frightened skerrel. Now she seemed somewhat more stable, if no less terrified. Somewhat more human.
How ironic, that the rakh-woman should prove the humanizing factor with her. He wondered if Hesseth had noticed the change. He wondered if she had caught the humor of it.
Love is a universal language, he reminded himself. Then he glanced back at the girl—still terrified, still cowering, but Hesseth had gone to comfort her—and thought, So is loneliness.
With a sigh he looked about for Tarrant. At last he spotted him some hundred yards away, standing by the edge of the river, gazing down upon the valley beneath. He made his way to where the tall man stood and offered him the telescope. But Tarrant shook his head, his pale eyes fixed on the panorama below. Studying the southern cities, with all the special senses available to him. Damien waited in silence. At last the Hunter nodded shortly and stepped back from the edge; fine mist sparkled in his hair like diamonds.
“Our enemy isn’t here,” he said quietly. Despite the roar of the compound waterfall beside him, his words carried easily to Damien’s ears. “Although his people have been to this shore, without question.”
“As invaders?” he asked. He had to shout to make himself heard. Not for the first time, he was jealous of Tarrant’s easy power. “Spies?”
The Hunter brushed back a lock of hair from his forehead; water dripped from it like a tear. “I’m not sure. The traces are complicated, and layered about each other like the rings of a tree; it’s hard to sort them out. But I would say from the fortifications here—” and he waved an eloquent hand out over the valley, “—or rather, from the lack of them, that whatever conflict now exists is diplomatic rather than martial. Hardly what one would expect,” he mused.
He turned to look at the river by his side, whose chill water rippled and foamed as it gushed over the edge. It gave Damien a rare moment in which to study the man unobserved. There had been a change in him recently, and not for the better. Damien would have been hard-pressed to capture it in words, but he could sense it clearly enough. Maybe it’s hunger, he thought. He thought of the cities before them, nestled in the lower valley, and shuddered. He considered how many nights had passed since they’d left the Terata camp, long nights spent traveling in an empty land. Though Tarrant hadn’t talked about his needs, it was clear what the cities must mean to him. Fresh food. Rejuvenation. Maybe even—with the right luck—a hunt.
Damien felt sick inside, and turned away. You never get used to it. Not ever. You never learn to accept it.
God help me if I ever do.
In recent nights Tarrant had avoided Jenseny, and the rest of the party as well. He no longer rode with them but flew overhead as they traveled, keeping pace with them far above the thick canopy of treetops. Which was just as well, Damien mused. God alone knew how he would have reacted if they’d asked him to ride double with someone, or how Hesseth’s mare would have handled it if they tried to put three people on her back. There was a limit to what even strong horses could handle. No, it was best that they travel as they did. He just wished he didn’t feel in his gut that this was just another facet of the strange darkness which now hung about the man like a shroud, which seemed to grow as the long days of travel progressed.
He stood in the presence of God, he reminded himself, and was rejected. He’s faced the truth of his own damnation head on. Wouldn’t that change a man? Shouldn’t that change a man?
Repentance meant death, the Neocount had told him. And death, in his philosophy, meant eternal judgment. Was there any way out of that intellectual trap which the sorcerer had crafted for himself? Was there any path he would accept? The thought of saving that twisted soul instead of destroying it was a heady concept, and not one that he had considered before. He wasn’t yet sure it was possible.
“We’ll need to get rid of the horses,” the Hunter announced.
“What?” It took a second for him to get his conversational bearings. “Why?”
“Because they’ll give us away. There’s no creature native to the east that’s even remotely like them, and the Matrias know that. If they’ve sent any warning to these people, it’ll include a description of our mounts. In the mountains we could hide them, but down there?” He gestured toward the city lights below them.
Damien considered it. He hardly relished the thought of traveling south without the beasts, particularly in the unknown lands of their enemy ... but the Hunter was right. Even if they could hide the animals in the midst of a city—a dubious enterprise at best—they could hardly book sea passage without revealing their existence. And if the Matrias had indeed alerted this region, they might as well emblazon their coats with bright red targets as go down to the coast with two horses in tow.
Damn the luck. Damn it to hell.
“What’s the alternative?” he asked gruffly.
“Kill them,” he said easily. “Or set them free here, before we descend.”
“That would just be a slower death, wou
ldn’t it?”
A faint smile curled the Hunter’s thin lips. “Mine’s a resourceful beast, Reverend; he’ll survive well enough. And Hesseth’s mare might choose to stay with him, which would give her a better chance.”
“Yeah. What are the odds of that?”
“The ancient xandu mated for life. Some of that instinct no doubt still remains in their descendants. I’m sure that between your skills and mine we would have no trouble reawakening it.”
Damien stared at him, incredulous. “Haven’t you forgotten something?” When the Hunter didn’t respond, he pressed, “What about the mating part? Isn’t that kind of important?”
“My horse wasn’t gelded,” he pointed out.
“Sure. He isn’t exactly a raging stallion either. If he was, don’t you think with a mare present—”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t altered, Reverend Vryce. I stopped up the flow of certain hormones to render him tractable in mixed company. That can be undone easily enough. Given a few months of normalcy ...” He shrugged. “I imagine the old patterns would reassert themselves soon enough.”
“In which case....” He looked back at the horses. “They might breed.”
He sensed, rather than saw, the Hunter’s smile. “Very probably.”
“How successfully?”
“It’s hardly an ideal gene pool, but I’d say they stand a chance. Certainly more than they would if we took them with us.”
Wild horses. Not xandu. Not some tamed equivalent. A truly wild gene pool, adapting itself to this hardy terrain. The concept was intriguing, he decided. God knows, this valley needed some new input.
And then another thought struck him, and he looked sharply at Tarrant. “Are you doing this for their good, or for yours?”
He shrugged. “The species was wild once, and might be wild again. How much of its survival instinct survived the process of forced evolution? I would be lying if I said that the experiment didn’t appeal to me.”
And that’s the heart of it, Damien thought. Once you’ve started a project, you can’t let go of it. This whole planet is no more than a vast experimental laboratory for you, a testing ground for your pet theories. And nothing else really matters to you, does it? Ten thousand men might be slaughtered in front of you and you wouldn’t bat an eyelash, but if anyone threatened one of your precious experiments you’d move heaven and earth to destroy him. What manner of dark vanity could produce such a finely honed selfishness? It was almost beyond his comprehension.
“Well?” the Hunter pressed. “What’s your judgment on the matter? Since I’m so biased,” he added dryly.
Damien resisted the temptation to glare at him. Narrowly. “Don’t you think we ought to ask Hesseth what she thinks? There are three of us,” he reminded him.
Only there were four of them now, he realized with a start, not three. How long would the girl stay with them? He had given passing thought to the concept of finding her a home in one of the coastal cities, but how likely was that? And what about the information she had hinted at, but never dared reveal?
“Let’s ask Hesseth,” he repeated quietly.
He didn’t just mean the horses.
What made you want to be a priest? the girl had asked him.
So hard to answer. So difficult to choose the right words. So hard to explain to this child what the Church was to him—what God was to him—when he knew that in the back of her mind were all the atrocities the Holies had committed. All the years she had spent locked away from light and life, for fear of his God.
And yet she asked him. Eyes wide and bright, with only a flicker of fear in their depths. Compelling an answer.
What made you want to be a priest?
Was there a moment of revelation he could share with her, one single instant which turned him away from secular courses and fixed his heart on this most difficult of paths? It seemed he had always been a priest, had always wanted to be a priest. But the decision had to come sometime, didn’t it? Certainly he hadn’t been born to the priesthood.
There was one incident he did remember clearly, and he shared it with her. He had been young, very young, and they were studying Earth History in school. He remembered the teacher tying together facts and fragments into a narrative that breathed life into the mother planet, unlike the usual dry recitation that graced those schoolroom walls. And that night he dreamed. Fantastic dreams, terrifying dreams. Dreams of what Earth might have been like, a chaos of energy and ambition and hope, almost too intense to absorb. He remembered gleaming tubes of metal that darted across the earth without a horse to pull them, capsules of painted metal that soared through the sky with effortless grace, words and pictures flying across the length of a continent in less than the time it took to draw a breath. And of course the greatest accomplishment of all: the Ship. Vast as an ocean, powerful as an earthquake, it stood ready to tame the wastelands of the galaxy, to spread man’s seed throughout the universe. Those visions were so bright, so solid, that when he awakened his heart was pounding, and his breath was dry in his throat. And he understood about Erna at last. He understood. Not in some little pocket of his brain, which memorized Earth-facts only to spew them out on a standardized test and then forget them, but in his heart. In his soul. He understood what Earth had been and what Erna could be, that awesome and terrible birthright which was the very core of man’s heritage. And he understood, for the first time in his young life, just what the fae had done to his species. To his future.
Life was pointless, he understood that now. All that mankind was doing on Erna was marking time, fighting for survival on a day-today basis while the planet grew in power and malevolence. Man’s doom was inevitable, and in the shadow of such a judgment his life, his dreams, even his few accomplishments were leached of all meaning. So why go on? Why keep fighting?
It was a terrifying revelation, almost more than his young mind could handle. For months he struggled with it, while all around him others succumbed to the power of similar awakenings. Four of his classmates started seeing counselors as a result, and one—he heard this years after the fact—tried to kill himself. The others blocked it out, or failed to understand, or in some other way avoided the issue. In time they would adapt, begetting children of their own to face this damned and damning planet. In time, perhaps, some of those might become sorcerers.
Why did he become a priest? Because the One God was a living expression of man’s optimism. Because his Church was man’s greatest hope—if not his only hope—on a wild and hostile planet. Because only by devoting his strength and his passion to God did Damien feel he could justify his own existence. Any other profession would have been an exercise in futility.
He didn’t say it in those words. He didn’t want to frighten her the way he had been frightened back then. And most of all he didn’t tell her about the Prophet, whose brilliant vision had given his life a focus. Because that might lead to other questions, which might have lead to certain answers ... and he didn’t want to have to explain to her that the murderous demon who traveled with them was all that was left of that illustrious figure. Not yet. The truth was hard enough for him to come to terms with, and he had spent nearly a year traveling with the man; he didn’t want her newborn understanding—so precious, so frail—contaminated by such knowledge.
And then there was the night that he and Tarrant had fought.
He wondered how much she had seen that night. He found to his surprise that he couldn’t bring himself to ask her. It was as if his memory of the Peace which had filled him was a fragile thing, no more substantive than a dream, which the wrong words might disperse. Any words. And yet it was there between them, always. The answer to all her questions. The core of his lifelong faith.
He looked at her, nestled against the warmth of Hesseth’s fur in much the way that he had seen rakhene children snuggle against their parents, and an unaccustomed warmth suffused his soul. The bond between them truly amazed him. From Jenseny’s viewpoint it made sense, of course; lonel
y and terrified, robbed of home and hope, she would of course cling to the first nurturing soul who welcomed her. But Hesseth? She hated humans and all that they stood for, even (he guessed) human children. So what special chemistry had taken place between the two of them, which permitted such closeness to develop? He didn’t dare ask about it, for fear he would disturb its precious balance.
But he wondered. And he admired. And sometimes—just sometimes—he envied.
They decided to let the horses go. No one was happy about it, but it was clear to all that there was no alternative. Tarrant Worked his own steed so that its hormonal balance would be what nature intended, then stripped it of its saddle and gear and set it loose. He Worked Hesseth’s mare as well—a process that the rakh-woman was clearly not thrilled about—and in the end expressed equal satisfaction with that work. He even tried to instill an instinctive avoidance of such thorned flora as the Terata had created, in the hope that would keep them safe from the worst of those nightmare experiments.
And then they let them go.
Thus have we altered this ecosystem, Damien thought as he watched them canter off—hesitantly at first, then with increasing confidence. The last sight he had of them was the stallion tossing its head in the wind, black mane rippling in the moonlight. Forever. If anyone else had suggested such a move, he would have been worried about the possible repercussions, but in this one area he had utter faith in the Neocount’s judgment. The Hunter’s Forest might have been a fearsome place, but it was also a perfectly balanced ecosystem. And if Tarrant had loosed fertile horses here, then the local environment could handle it; Damien didn’t doubt that for a moment.
Their descent had to wait until the morning. Once the Core had set there simply wasn’t enough natural light for them to negotiate the terraced cliff face safely, and Tarrant was loath to light the lanterns. They didn’t dare be seen descending, he cautioned them, lest some city guard be sent out to greet them. Damien agreed. And so they waited until the sky grew pale with sunlight and the shadows of the peaked islands stretched westward across the water before they moved, packing their camp even as Tarrant took his leave to seek out a more secretive shelter.