Oh, my God.
For a moment he was unable to move, and barely able to think; if one of the ghostlings had attacked him then and there, that would have been it for him. Because a thought had just occurred to him that was so terrible, so absolutely devastating in its implications, that his mind could barely touch on it without opening a gateway to utter panic.
Tarrant.
Had awakened at sunset.
Had transformed himself in order to return to them.
Had Worked?
He remembered the earthquake which had so recently shaken their granite mount, rock shards tumbling down on them as the ground convulsed from horizon to horizon. And yet that physical upheaval was nothing compared to what preceded it. To the surge of earth-fae which flowed just ahead of it, swallowing everything in its path....
How alert was the Hunter when he first awoke? How careful? Did the deathlike trance release him so suddenly when sunset came that his mind was alert and functioning mere seconds later? Or was there, as with the living, a short period of dullness in which the brain struggled to throw off the bonds of sleep and get on with the business of living? Was that precisely disciplined soul so perfectly oriented that he would never think of transforming his flesh without first checking the currents for an earthquake’s subtle warning signs? Or had he Worked his own flesh so many nights now, so fearlessly, that a glance at the earth-fae would seem enough? A token gesture without real concentration behind it—
“What is it?” Jenseny demanded. “What’s wrong?”
Shaking, he wrapped his arms around his chest and tried to believe that everything was all right. Because if Tarrant was gone, then there really was no hope for them. They might get through the desert, they might even find a willing ear or two among the rakh, but without Tarrant’s power to back them up there was no way they could defeat a man like the Prince. Not a sorcerer who was so deeply entrenched here that even the plants served his will.
Oh, God, he thought, shivering. Let him be all right. Please.
“Nothing,” he managed, in answer to the girl’s question. With childlike acuity she seemed to sense that he was lying to her, but with rare maturity she accepted his words at face value and did not press the point. Perhaps she was afraid to. Perhaps, after Hesseth’s death, she had little stomach for bad news.
“Come on,” he muttered. “Let’s eat something.”
They went through the motions mechanically, silently. The dry food was tasteless to Damien, and the girl hardly picked at her portion. Another slight tremor shook the ridge as they washed the meal down with water—precious mouthfuls, carefully rationed—but the aftershock was of little consequence. Hopefully there would be no more of them as they traveled; Damien didn’t relish the thought of the black earth rupturing beneath his feet.
When they had packed away the food and hooked the canteens to their packs, Damien took out his one spare shirt and pulled off the bloodstained one he was wearing. Neither was clean by any standard, but the new one was at least still in one piece; the other was so badly scored by claws that it pulled free of his body in strips, glued to his flesh by the blood and the sweat that had soaked into it. Not a pretty sight, he thought grimly as he packed away the ragged garment. Tarrant, with his usual hygienic chauvinism, would doubtless make some disparaging comment when he arrived.
If he arrived.
They watched together as the Core followed the sun into its western grave, the golden light turning amber and then blood-red as it was filtered through Erna’s veil of volcanic dust and windborn ash. Still the Hunter did not return to them.
Tarrant, I need you. I need your knowledge, I need your insight, I even need your God-damned cynicism. Get back to us soon, will you please?
But Tarrant didn’t come.
And in time, his heart as cold as ice, his brain a numb morass of confusion, he whispered to the girl, “We’re on our own.”
To do what? Confront the rakh?
Numbly he lowered himself to the lava plain, and helped her down beside him. Numbly they started off across the black earth, their movements mechanical, their conversation strained. Again and again Damien went over their situation in his mind. Again and again he didn’t like what he saw.
You’re on your own, Vryce.
The girl might help him somehow. She had been close to Hesseth, close enough to absorb some of her language and a number of her memories; Damien regretted now that he had respected their privacy too much to explore the parameters of that absorption. And Jenseny had power. Wild power, untamed power, but power nonetheless. A power the Prince could neither foresee nor dominate, if ever she could learn to wield it properly.
If.
The miles passed beneath their feet like an abstract painting, details blurred by the brushstrokes of a distracted mind. Occasionally Damien surfaced from his thoughts long enough to see a tree, an outcropping, a blistered dome. Most of it passed unnoticed by him as he trod the hard earth, careful always to set a pace that Jenseny’s young legs could manage.
The river. That was the thing. They needed to reach the river first, and then all the rest would follow. Fresh water would renew them in body and spirit, and give them the strength to plan. If they were lucky, there would be some kind of food there, some plant or animal whose flesh could supplement their meager dried fare. And perhaps there would be time enough and safety enough for him to wash up a bit, so that when Tarrant arrived—
He stopped suddenly, unable to walk any farther. Emotion welled up in him with such force that it nearly drove him to his knees; only the knowledge that the trees were waiting for him to do just that kept him standing.
Tarrant was gone. There was no doubting it now, not after all these hours. First Hesseth, and then the Hunter ... and the most painful part of all was that he couldn’t begin to untangle his emotions, couldn’t tell where the grief began or the anger ended or the pragmatism of their quest gave way to genuine caring ... did he really care if Tarrant lived, beyond the practical advantages of their partnership? He abhorred what the man stood for so passionately that it was painful even to ask the question, and he dared not try to answer it.
I hope for his sake that he’s dead. That would be far more merciful than the alternatives: To be incapacitated but not killed by the earthquake’s power, so that he must wait out the centuries in a land bereft of food or healing. Or to be captured by the enemy, perhaps, while the earth-power still surged. After what he went through in the rakhlands, I think even he would prefer death to such an imprisonment.
“Are you all right?” the girl asked him.
He drew in a deep breath, then managed to nod. “Yeah. I am now.” He caught up her hand in his—so small, her fingers, and her skin was so cold—and he squeezed it with all the love he could muster. “I was just thinking. Trying to figure out where we’re going....”
“The river,” the girl reminded him.
He chuckled—somewhat sadly—and squeezed her hand again. “Yeah. The river. Thanks, kid.”
They didn’t see it until they were nearly upon it.
The Wasting’s one river had flowed long enough and hard enough to have eroded its way down through the layers of volcanic rock, down through the base rock beneath, carving out a steep canyon whose walls glistened in layers of black and gray and marbled white strata. Between those walls the current rushed westward, audible even from where they stood as it gushed over the rocks at its border. In the center it was deep enough that the water moved smoothly, swiftly, a silken black reflector that cast the moonlight back in a thousand shivering bits. After days in the desert, the smell of it was like something from another world.
For a moment he just stared at it. One moment. A luxury. Then, with a finger on his lips to warn the girl to silence, he worked a Knowing. Casting out a fine net, to trap the scent of danger. But though he directed his Working west and east and then both ways again, there was nothing upstream or downstream that seemed the least unnatural. Nor was there danger lurking h
idden on either side of the canyon.
“Thank God,” he whispered. “Tarrant pulled it off.”
“What?” the girl demanded.
“He was trying to make the Prince think that we were going somewhere else. Somewhere farther west along the river. I guess it worked.” He sighed heavily, feeling a weight lift from his chest at last. One weight among thousands. “We’re safe here, Jen. For a while at least.”
He led her along the edge of the canyon, searching the ground far below by Domina’s light. At last he found a place where descent seemed possible and there was dry ground at the bottom, and after that it was easy. After days and nights of combating wraiths and nightmares and preternatural malaise, he welcomed the logistical challenge of simple rock climbing. Within minutes he had marked his path of descent, and soon after was rappelling downward with the child clutched tightly to his chest. It pleased him that the end of his rope had been looped about the trunk of a killer tree for support; let that species serve him now.
Water. He could feel it at his back even as he looked back up the way they had come, wondering if he should leave the rope where it was or yank it down to them. The water was more than a mere substance now, but also a symbol; in reaching it they had beaten the desert at its own game, at least for this leg of the journey. He breathed in its cool scent gratefully as he turned from the rope, leaving it in place for the moment.
He saw the girl moving toward the river and reached out quickly. “Be careful,” he warned.
She looked at him with frightened eyes; he felt her tremble beneath his hand. “Is something in there?” It was a reasonable question for one who had seen the Terata’s warped creations, and before he answered he muttered the key to a Knowing under his breath. But the water held no secrets beneath its shimmering surface, and he assured her of the fact.
“The current’s fast and the rocks’ll be slippery ... and it’ll be damned cold besides. Wait till the sun comes up, girl. It’ll be safer then.”
It seemed to him that even as he spoke something flickered out on the river’s surface. He recalled the sirens of the Sea of Dreams, the flickerings that had preceded their attack. His hand moved instinctively toward his sword, even as he told himself that it couldn’t possibly be that, or anything like it. His Knowing would have detected such a threat.
Again the flicker. He could see it more clearly now, and no, it wasn’t like the sirens. Those had been beautiful; this was repellent. A sliver of white that curled and uncurled beneath the surface, wormlike, reflecting the moonlight in broken bits. A tendril perhaps, attached to some larger whole? No, he told himself stubbornly. It couldn’t be that. The Knowing would have revealed that.
But it bothered him. It bothered him so much that he didn’t even dare turn back to look at the girl, to make sure that she was safe; he felt as though if he turned his back on the thing for a minute it would somehow manage to bridge the distance between them and do ... what? He wasn’t sure. But he felt in his gut that the thing was deadly, and that constant scrutiny was required. “Stay with me,” he whispered, drawing his sword. “Don’t go near it.” Desperately he tried to study its shape despite the surface reflections that masked it, to figure out what the hell it was and what it was doing here before it could—
Before it—
What?
Too late, he realized what was happening. Too late he realized the pattern of his own thoughts, and what they were doing to him. Too late. Even as he tried to turn around—struggling against a tide of dread that demanded he watch the thing, watch the thing!, not take his eyes off it for a single instant, something struck him on the back of the head hard enough to send him reeling. The water was right before him and he splashed down into it, ice-cold liquid that drove the breath from his body in a startled gasp. Somehow he managed to keep hold of his sword. Somehow he managed to get his head above water before he breathed it in, and to ignore the blinding pain in his skull long enough to get to his feet and turn around—
There were a dozen of them, maybe more. Men in uniform, spread out with military precision along the narrow shore. One of them was holding Jenseny, and above the gloved hand which muffled her screams he could see her wide, terrified eyes pleading with him for help.
Tarrant had failed them. Or perhaps the earthquake had disabled him before he even had a chance to Work; perhaps the misKnowing was never even cast. Even so, there must have been a hell of an Obscuring guarding this company that Damien had never sensed its presence. Which meant there might be a Worker with them, and one of considerable power. If so ... he tried not to think about that. He tried to focus on what he could possibly do against such numbers, the one slim chance he had. With a desperate prayer in his heart he reached with his will down into the water at his feet, the icy current that hid the earth-fae from view—
“Don’t try it,” a cool voice warned.
Startled, he looked for its source. A dark figure was moving among the soldiers, a figure cloaked in heavy wool that walked through the shadows with unhuman grace. The glint of buckles and clasps hinted at a uniform not unlike those which the other men were wearing, but with considerably more decoration. The voice was silken, with a trace of an accent that Damien didn’t recognize.
“Don’t,” the figure repeated. It was holding something up toward Damien, and with a chill the priest realized what it was. A pistol. “If you Work—or even try to Work—I’ll kill you on the spot. You understand me?”
Stiffly he nodded. Desperately he tried to think. There had to be a way out of this. Had to be. But as he looked at the soldiers spanning the shore, at the tall figure who so obviously commanded them, he could feel his heart sinking. There had to be a way out ... but he couldn’t see one for the life of him.
The figure nodded a command, and two of his men waded into the water toward Damien. For a brief instant he considered resistance, and then one of the men raised up a pistol of his own and trained it on Damien’s face. Point blank. He stared down the cool steel barrel in utter despair, icy water swirling about his ankles as the other man yanked his sword from his hand, his knife from his belt, anything and everything that might be used aggressively from his person. If he had been stripped of his clothes in front of all these men, he could not possibly have felt more naked. Despair welled up inside him with numbing force. Was this it? Was this the end of everything they had fought for, suffered for, prayed for? He didn’t want to accept that. He struggled not to believe it.
Roughly they hauled him back to shore, and forced him to his knees. His arms were jerked behind his back and manacles were snapped shut about his wrists; defeat engulfed him then, so powerfully that it nearly brought tears to his eyes. But he wouldn’t give them the pleasure of seeing that. They had beaten him, bound him, stolen his dreams, but he would not give them his weakness as an added gift.
Slowly the cloaked figure approached him. As it did so, it passed from shadow into light, and Damien could see its features. Beside him he could hear Jenseny breathe in sharply, her struggles momentarily halted as she gazed upon the face of their captor.
Rakh.
A glorious, majestic rakh, with a thick silken mane that lifted in the breeze as he moved and eyes that glowed green in the moonlight. Not from Hesseth’s own species, but a sibling race that had been transformed by the same power which remade hers. His face was marked with the bands and stripes of a jungle hunter, sable upon gold, and it gave his expression a fierceness that no human countenance could rival. His mane was not coarse and shaggy like those of the western rakh, but a thick ruff of silken fur that framed his head and shoulders in a corona of gold. Though his features were more naturally human than Hesseth’s had been, the markings made him seem doubly bestial, and like war paint on a human face hinted at a ruthless, unforgiving nature.
“It’s over,” the rakh said quietly.
Spoken in that way—so utterly calm, so perfectly confident—the words were like a spear thrust into Damien’s heart. It’s over. They had failed. I
t was finished.
He lowered his head in despair. God, forgive me. We did our best. What more could we have done?
“Get the boats,” the rakh instructed.
Three men ran off eastward along the narrow shore; moments later they rounded a promontory and disappeared.
“There should be three of them,” a familiar voice pronounced.
Startled, Damien twisted about. Despite the firm hand on his shoulder which kept him from moving too fast or too far, he was able to twist around far enough to see the tall, lean man who was approaching them now, his long silk tunic sweeping the rock wall at his side as he moved.
Gerald Tarrant.
“You bastard,” Damien whispered hoarsely. “God damn you! You sold us out.”
“Where’s your companion?” the rakh demanded from behind him.
He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. He could hardly breathe, so totally consumed by rage was he. Rage, and also despair; because if Tarrant was helping the enemy, Damien and his small ward didn’t have a chance in hell of getting free. Not now, not ever.
With leisured grace the Neocount crossed the space between them. The soldiers carefully kept out of his way.
“Where’s Mes Hesseth?” he demanded.
For a moment Damien couldn’t speak. Then the words came, spiked with a burning hatred. “What’s the matter, you don’t get paid as much for just two of us?”
He was struck on the head from behind, hard enough that for a moment his vision exploded in stars. “Where is she?” the rakh demanded. His voice made it clear that he was ready to strike again if necessary.
“She’s dead,” Damien choked out. He looked up at Tarrant, loathing the lack of reaction on that pale, arrogant face. Had Damien ever truly traveled with a creature that inhuman? Could he ever have really trusted him? “God damn you!” he spat. “She died for our cause.” The words were an accusation, and he poured as much scorn and venom into them as his voice could possibly contain.