Damien saw Hesseth reach out for the child. “If it’s really stronger than the earth-fae—”
“But wild, priest. Remember that. There are forces in this world that can never be tamed—”
“—And humans can’t use them because you only think in terms of taming,” Hesseth retorted. “The rakh know that sometimes using a power means submitting to it.” She looked down at Jenseny, now nestled in her arms; her expression was one of awe. “I think she knows that, too,” she whispered.
The girl looked up at them. Her face was streaked by tears and her lower lip was trembling, but her voice was strong as she challenged them, “Take me with you.”
Damien could feel the fury gather about Tarrant like a storm cloud. “Out of the question,” he snapped.
“They killed my father!”
Tarrant ignored her, turned to glare at Damien. “This is your doing, priest. I suggest you find a solution.”
“I want to help you!”
Tarrant stood. He seemed twice as tall in that dusty space, looming over the girl’s head like some spectre the night had conjured. His expression was dark.
“She’s unstable,” he said shortly. “Utterly undisciplined. And I see nothing to indicate that she has any control over the power she uses, or even an understanding of what it is.”
“I know where the Black Lands are!” Jenseny cried out. “And I know the traps there! If you don’t take me with you, you won’t see them, and he’ll kill you!”
For a moment there was silence—a terrible silence, filled to bursting with suspicion and fear and yes, a faint flicker of hope. At last Damien found his voice once more and managed, “What are the Black Lands?”
“Where the Prince lives. The one they call the Undying.” Her tone was defiant now, her wide eyes fixed on Tarrant. Daring him to stop her. “Inside the Wasting. I’ve seen it, I tell you. I could take you through.”
“How?” Tarrant demanded. His voice was like ice. “How do you know all this?”
“I saw ... pictures.” She was clearly struggling for words now, trying to describe something that defied the confinement of language. “He used to tell me stories, and there would be pictures.”
“Your father drew them for you?” Hesseth asked.
“He didn’t know they were there,” she whispered. “He never saw them.” The tears were running freely now, as grief broke through her air of defiance. “Sometimes when he talked they would be there, and I could see what he was saying. Like I’d been there myself. The Black Lands, and the Wasting, and all the places in the south....” Her words trailed off into silence as she lowered her face onto Hesseth’s shoulder. Weeping into the warm golden fur. “I could get you there,” she sobbed. “I could help you make it through!”
“Out of the question,” the Hunter repeated coldly.
Damien was less certain. “If she knows the way—”
“Think about it, priest! Two nations are at war here. The whole coastal region is fortified against invasion. And one Protector goes and visits the heart of the enemy’s territory, right in the midst of all that. Why don’t you ask yourself why, Reverend Vryce. Better yet—why don’t you ask the girl?”
Jenseny pulled away suddenly from Hesseth; her light brown face had gone sallow with fear. “He didn’t mean it!” she cried out. “He wanted to help. He thought he could save them!”
It all came together then in Damien’s mind—her father, the rakh, the bloody invasion.... The Protector of Kierstaad had bargained with the enemy, and had paid for that treachery with his life. Which meant that inasmuch as any one man could be said to bear the responsibility for the recent invasion, Jenseny’s father was clearly guilty.
My God, thought Damien. Watching as the small girl cringed, clearly in terror of their judgment. What a terrible weight for a young soul to bear.
“I won’t put my life in the hands of a child, priest. Valuable or not, we leave her here.”
“No!” the girl cried out, suddenly panicked. “Not here! Not with the voices!”
“Quiet,” the Hunter breathed, and his words, power-laced, made the very air shiver. “Now.”
Choking, she swallowed back on her fear.
“Look at her!” he demanded. “Do you doubt my judgment now? There’s no place in this mission for a child. You should have known that from the start.”
“I couldn’t leave her there.”
“No? So now what? Do you suggest we start interviewing nursemaids? Every time we stop to talk to a local we increase the risk of detection! Perhaps we should approach an adoption service.”
“Then what do you suggest?” the priest demanded. “You tell me.”
His gaze was like ice as it centered on the girl. “You know what I suggest,” he said coldly. There was death in his voice. “You know what my answer is.”
“No,” the rakh-woman hissed, as his meaning struck her. “You have no right—”
“Ah. Are we back to morals again? Have we so soon forgotten the lesson our enemy taught us—that if we hope to succeed, we must be willing to sacrifice everything? Even that?”
“I don’t remember learning that,” Damien growled. And Hesseth protested, “She’s just a child—”
“And you think I don’t know that? I had children of my own, Mes rakh, have you forgotten? I raised them and I nurtured them, and when they got in my way I killed them. Children are expendable—”
“Two,” Jenseny interjected.
Startled, the Hunter blinked. “What?”
“Two of them,” the girl said. Her thin voice shaking. “You only killed two.”
For a moment he stared at her in amazement. And in fear? Then he whipped about and caught up his pouch, shoving it into a pocket of his tunic. “You found her,” he spat at Damien. “You get rid of her.” It seemed to Damien that there was something else in his tone besides anger now, something far less confident. Was it possible the Hunter was afraid?
And then he was gone, and the door slammed shut behind him. Dust coiled thickly in the yellow light.
“Is that true?” Hesseth asked him. “What she said.”
He looked at the girl—and discovered that he, too, was afraid. Was it truly her power that was wild, or was that a manifestation of her own unstable nature? Was there any safe way to distinguish between the two?
“About what?”
“His children. Not killing them all.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t know. The Church says ... I don’t know, Hesseth.” Then he looked toward the door, so recently shut behind the Hunter, and muttered, “I’d better go after him.”
“Damien—”
“He’s right, we can’t waste time here.” And we can’t let our party fall apart now, not when we’re almost within striking distance of the enemy.
He grabbed up his jacket and started toward the door, but her voice stopped him.
“That was tidal fae, Damien.”
He turned back, aware that his expression was one of utter disbelief.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
“But human’s can‘t—” He couldn’t finish. The mere thought of it was too incredible.
“Maybe now they can,” she said quietly. She had drawn the child to her again, was stroking the long dark hair with half-sheathed claws. “Maybe your species is adapting to this world at last. Once upon a time your people couldn’t see or work the earth-fae at all; now human adepts take those skills for granted. Maybe the fae can alter humans, after all—but only slowly, over the course of generations.”
A chill ran up his spine. If the fae was capable of changing humanity like it changed the native species ... he looked at Hesseth’s half-human form, at her oh-so-human features, and shivered. What if adaptation to this world meant giving up the very things that made them human? What if the price of universal Sight was the loss of their human heritage?
He couldn’t afford to think about that. Now now. That was a whole new domain of fear, and
he had enough to deal with. He reached for his sword, then decided not to take it. Too conspicuous. He grabbed up a hunting knife instead and tucked it inside his sleeve, where no stranger would notice it. “Keep her in here,” he warned. “Keep her quiet.”
“Don’t leave me,” the girl whispered.
He looked at her—and knew then and there that Tarrant was right, that the risk involved in taking her with them was incalculable, that she might well cost them all their lives ... but she knew the way. She had seen the Black Lands. Wasn’t it less risky to take her along than to go on that journey blind, feeling their way along trap by trap, danger by danger? Suddenly he didn’t know. Suddenly he wasn’t sure of anything.
“I’ll be back,” he muttered. And he shut the door firmly behind him as he committed himself to the Hunter’s trail.
Cool night. Heavy air, dank with the smell of fish and mildew and human refuse. He breathed in deeply, as if somehow he could catch the Hunter’s scent. A whore stumbled past him, muttering a drunken apology as she banged her shoulder against a brick wall. A young man came over to help her and they moved off together, laughing at some crude sexual innuendo he had improvised. The life of the city, Damien mused. Any city. In the end they were all the same.
He leaned back against the coarse brick of the hotel’s facade, all too aware of how well he fit in with the natives here. I’ll buy a clean shirt first thing in the morning, he promised himself, fingering one spot on his elbow where the heavy linen was wearing through. Clean pants. A change of underwear.
God! What a sad luxury....
When he was sure that no one was watching him, he relaxed against the building, half-shutting his eyes as he fought to concentrate. Although there was a channel established between him and Tarrant, he had never before tried to access it, or to use it for his own purposes. On a certain level it bothered him to do so, for there was certainly an unspoken agreement between himself and the Hunter that neither of them would use that channel for a Working except by mutual agreement. To hell with that, he thought grimly. He tried to sense that tenuous link, tried to grab hold of it with his mind and lend it some real solidity. It wasn’t easy. A channel wasn’t a thing in itself, simply a path of least resistance for the fae to follow. It took him some time to figure out what it felt like and an even longer time to become sensitive to its messages. Where is he? he demanded of it. Trying to sense its strength, its direction, its tenor. How far? He received no answer in words, nor in images as such, but had a vague feeling of which way to go. Good enough. He started off down the narrow street, and just in time; a head peeking out of a third-floor window warned him that he had been noticed, and no doubt if he had stayed in place a few minutes longer some kind of local policeman would have stopped by to see what he wanted. And that....
Would have been the end of it, he thought. Chilled by the image the Hunter had raised, of a whole city primed for ambush. If they didn’t get out of here soon, he realized, they might never get out of here at all.
He followed Tarrant’s trail through the heart of the slums, feeling the flow of earth-fae along the channel that bound them and guiding his steps by its direction. Past the crowded slums of the city’s center, past the tightly packed houses of its outer districts, past the wider lawns and whitewashed walls of a richer residential neighborhood at its border ... at first he was afraid that the Hunter might have gone out to kill, to slake his fury in a brutal bloodletting, but now he knew better. If Tarrant had gone this far without feeding, then he was after something else. Escape. Solitude. Silence within and without him, in which to gather his thoughts. In which to regain control.
There were wraiths outside the city borders as well as more solid demonlings, enough of the latter to make him sorry that he hadn’t brought his sword along. The price of traveling with Tarrant (he thought as he dispatched one particularly nasty winged thing, which had managed to dig its claws into his shoulder before he gutted it with a backswipe of the hunting knife) was that you tended to forget such things existed. They sure as hell didn’t manifest in the Hunter’s presence.
Which was how he found Tarrant, eventually. Like a child playing warm-and-cold, he went in the direction where the creatures seemed most scarce, until he came to a place where there were none at all. A few steps more brought him over a broken ridge, to a place where a steep mound of boulders lay piled against a vertical wall of sheer granite. Tarrant stood at the pinnacle of the mound, his dark nature devouring the night’s power before any wraith or demonling could make use of it. In the distance, barely visible from that vantage point, the sea cast white-capped waves against a jagged granite island; in the stillness of the night it was just possible to hear the surf.
When the Hunter made no move to descend, Damien sheathed his knife and climbed up after him. When he reached the top, the Hunter didn’t look at him, or otherwise stir to acknowledge his presence, but he said—very softly—“Your shoulder is infected.”
With a soft curse Damien sat, and he worked a quick Healing to cleanse and close his wounds.
The delicate nostrils flared, sifting the night air for scents. “The rest of the blood?”
“Just scratches,” Damien assured him. Then: “There’s a lot of nasty stuff in this region.”
“Local constructs can’t feed inside the city. Therefore they gather outside the gates and wait for food to come to them.”
His eyes remained fixed on the south. Looking for signs of the enemy, or simply watching the sea? His profile, outlined against the moonlight, was a chill and perfect mask. So utterly controlled, Damien thought. Every hair in place. Every inch of skin spotless and smooth. And cold, so cold. No wonder mere sunlight could kill him.
“Is it true?” Damien asked quietly.
“What?”
“What she said about your children. That you didn’t kill them all.”
His voice was a whisper, hardly louder than the breeze. “Don’t you know?”
“I thought I did. Now I wonder.”
“What do the Church’s texts say?”
“That you killed your family. Murdered your children and dismembered your wife. Just that.”
“Just that,” he repeated softly. As if the phrase amused him.
“Is it?” he pressed.
The Hunter sighed. “My oldest son was gone that night. Staying at a neighbor’s, as I recall. I didn’t consider his presence important enough to justify my going after him.”
“The other deaths were enough for you.”
The pale eyes fixed on him, sparkling like cracked ice in the moonlight. “They were enough to establish my compact,” he said. “That was all I required.”
“And that’s it?”
He looked away again, gazed at the distant sea. “That’s it, priest. The whole story. You may add it to your tests, if you like. No doubt the Church will benefit from the correction.”
For a moment he could hardly respond, just stood there in amazement. Then: “You’re full of shit, you know that?” When the Hunter said nothing, he pressed, “You’re asking me to believe that one of your children just happened to be elsewhere that night? The most important Working of your whole damned life and you didn’t plan it well enough to keep all your victims together?” He spat on the stony ground. “How gullible do you think I am?”
The Hunter chuckled darkly. “So you tell me.”
“I think you wanted him alive. I think that vanity is your one weakness, and this time you couldn’t let go. The Tarrant line was something you’d created and you couldn’t resist the temptation to see what he would do with it all—the land, the power, the title—once you were gone. No mercy involved, Hunter—just another one of your precious experiments, to add to all the others.” When Tarrant didn’t respond, he pressed, “Well? Am I right?”
The silver eyes fixed on him—disdainful, forbidding. “Why did you come here?” he demanded.
He answered quietly, “Hesseth says the girl’s using the tidal fae.”
He
heard Tarrant’s response, an indrawn hiss. “So. Humanity adapts to that power, at last.”
“You don’t sound very surprised.”
“Longevity gives one a special perspective, Reverend Vryce. I was born in an era when adepts were rare, and I’ve watched their ranks increase with each new generation. Yet few of us have children of our own, and the Sight is rarely inherited. So what other explanation is there? This planet is changing us, bringing us in line with all the native species. But the tidal fae ... that’s something else entirely.”
He shook his head, folding his arms across his chest. It was a strangely human gesture. Strangely vulnerable. “That night....” he whispered.
Damien didn’t have to ask which night. There was only one that mattered.
“I thought that night ... if our enemy were Iezu ... dear God.” Tarrant’s self-embrace tightened as he leaned back against the rock behind him. Remembering? “We had no chance, you understand. Not against one of that clan. Not against a demon who could turn our own senses against us.” He drew in a deep breath, slowly. “So I thought....”
The words trailed off into silence. In the distance surf rumbled, and the distant roar of thunder warned of a storm closing in. Or passing by.
“No good,” he whispered. “It’s no good.”
“What?”
Tarrant shook his head. Lightning shot over the ocean, a distant spark. “I thought there wasn’t a demon I couldn’t handle in open combat, but a Iezu ... that changes all the rules.”
“What you’re saying is that we need the girl.”
Slowly, as if every word were being weighed and considered before it was spoken, he answered, “Her vision is extraordinary, and seems to pierce through Iezu illusion. I suppose that if we were to continue our intended course, then one might believe we could benefit from that.”
“Which means what?” he demanded. The compound conditionals made his head spin. “She comes, or no?”
“If you wish,” the Hunter whispered.
And that was so unlike him that Damien just stopped speaking altogether and stared at the man. Wondering why his sudden complacency scared him more than all the threats, all the anger. Wondering why he suddenly had the sinking feeling that the very rules he’d been playing by had been changed, only no one would tell him what the new rules were. Or when they had been instituted.