Black Sun Rising (15 page)

“And then, along comes Pravida Rakhi. Convincing all concerned that if man had never come here, these creatures would have been the natural monarchs of this planet. They would have become the local equivalent of
us.
The popular imagination is aroused, on all levels of consciousness. Intellectual curiosity, gut fear response, competitive instinct—you name it. Every possible mode of thought, every manner of instinct and emotion, every level of man’s mind, all are focused on the image of these creatures as
pseudo-human.
Is it any wonder that the fae was affected? That these natives, who were a natural part of this world, evolved accordingly?

He shuffled through the sheets that were spread out before him until he found the one he wanted. And placed it before Senzei.

“131 A.S.,” he said quietly.

Erna’s dominant natives had altered drastically in both shape and balance. The back legs were sturdier, the hindquarters more heavily muscled. The spine had bent so that the torso might be carried erect, although the front paws—hands?—were still being used as auxiliary feet. Most dramatic of all was the change in the skull, from the sharply angled profile of an animal predator to something that looked disturbingly human.

Senzei tapped the date on the drawing. “This was when they guessed what was happening.”

“This was when they began to
suspect.
You have to remember how alien such a concept was to their inherited way of thinking. It took five generations of close observation before anyone was sure. And several generations after that, to see if human sorcery could reverse the trend. It couldn’t. Erna had supplied us with a competitor, and one cast in our own image. We had accepted it as such. The work of a single sorceror was hardly a drop in the bucket, compared to that. Generation after generation, the rakh were becoming more human.”

“And we answered with the crusades.”

“Wholesale slaughter of an innocent species. And the unwitting creation of a host of demons, as byproducts of man’s most murderous instincts. All feeding on his hatred, all savoring his intolerance. Is it any wonder that human society nearly devolved into total chaos? That the rigid social patterns of the Revivalist movement seemed to be man’s only hope of maintaining order?”

“And thus the Church was born.”

Damien looked at him but said nothing. For a moment, the room seemed unnaturally still.

“And thus the Church was born,” he agreed. At last he looked down at the table again, and unrolled a heavy parchment sheet atop the pile of drawings. A map.

“The rakhlands.”

Senzei looked it over, muttered, “Shit.”

Damien agreed.

The land that the rakh had retreated to was well fortified by nature to resist man’s most aggressive instincts. To the west, the Worldsend Mountains provided a daunting barrier of ice-clad peaks and frozen rivers. To the east, sheer basalt cliffs carved out by centuries of tsunami offered no easy landing site, no hope of shelter. The southlands were hardly more appealing, acre upon acre of treacherous swampland that harbored some of Erna’s deadliest species. Only in the north was there any hope of passage, between the jagged peaks and wind-carved cliffs that looked out onto the Serpent Straits.

Damien tapped a finger to the mouth of the Achron River, and muttered, “Only way.”

“What about the mountains?”

Damien looked up at him sharply—and realized, in an instant, how little the man had traveled. “Not with winter coming. Not if we want to live to get to the rakhlands. I traveled the Dividers in midsummer, and that was rough enough. Even if the cold doesn’t kill you outright, there are nasty things that inhabit those peaks—damned hungry things—and it’s hard to fight them when your body’s half frozen. Of course, if we wait until summer....”

“I can’t.
She
can’t.”

“Agreed—on all counts. River it is, then. Hell of a landing, but I think it can be done. And you can bet we’ll pay dearly for it. In cash, I mean.” He leaned forward in his chair, intent upon the display before them. “Where’s the Canopy?”

Senzei hesitated. “That depends. Roughly,
there
.” He sketched a rough circle with his finger: up through the center of the Worldsend range, east along the coast, to a curve that extended up to ten miles off the eastern shore, and back through the swamps. “Half a mile wide, in places—and as much as six, elsewhere. It moves, too. Sometimes it edges out into the Straits—which is why most boats avoid that shoreline like the plague. I have better maps at my place,” he added.

“Good. We’ll need them. Tell me about it.”

“We don’t know much. A wall of living fae, that first appeared shortly after the rakh fled into the Worldsend. No natural fae-current passes through it. No Working can pass from one side to the other. Tamed fae that’s Worked in the middle of it can go wild, and do anything. Ships that flounder into it discover that their instruments have suddenly gone haywire, that the very shoreline seems changed ... but so much of our technology is fae-based, how can we be sure of what that means?”

“What’s it made of? Earth-fae? Tidal? Solar?”

Senzei shook his head. “None of those. Nothing we humans understand. Ciani thought there might be some sort of force inherent in the rakh themselves—we see similar things in other species—and that the Canopy is an extension of their communal existence. Their need for protection.”

“From man,” Damien said grimly.

There was no need for Senzei to comment.

“Do we know what the rakh are now? Did Ciani ever say?”

“We know they survived. We know they must be at least moderately intelligent in order to have manifested the kind of creatures that she encountered. And that there are large numbers of them—or the Canopy wouldn’t exist. That’s all. I can list a hundred rumors for you ... but you know how reliable those are. There’s no way of knowing whether they followed through on their initial Impression, and eventually developed a human-compatible form, or went off in some other direction entirely. The fact that their demons can adopt human form seems to imply the former—but I wouldn’t bet my life on that conclusion. Some demons are very versatile.”

Wouldn’t a world without demons be better?
Damien wanted to argue.
Worth sacrificing for?
But he bit back the words before they were spoken; this was neither the time nor the place for theosophy. Senzei and he would be spending a long time together, under very trying circumstances; anything that might add additional tension to the situation was a course to be avoided, at all costs.

“Let’s prepare for everything,” he said. “Once we get there, there’ll be no sending home for supplies. If it’s small and it might be useful, we take it with us. If it’s large and heavy ... maybe we pack it anyway. Often it’s the little things that make a difference—especially when you don’t even know what it is you’re going to be facing.

Senzei leaned back, but there was nothing relaxed about the posture; his body was stiffly erect, tense. “You really think we can do it?”

Damien hesitated. Met his eyes. Let him see the doubt that was there, inside him. “I think we have to try,” he said quietly. “As for the rest ... there’s no way of knowing that until we’re inside, is there? Until we can see what we’re up against. The odds are certainly against us.” He shrugged. “But we won’t even know what they are until we get there.”

“We need an adept,” Senzei muttered.

Damien looked around, as if checking for eavesdroppers. The gesture reminded Senzei of where they were—as it was no doubt meant to do. “Not here,” he muttered. He began to gather the drawings. “Good enough for research, but for the rest ... it isn’t appropriate.”

“I understand.”

“We’ll go to your place. All right? I’ll have copies made of the map, and sent there.” He glanced about, paused just long enough to draw Senzei’s attention to the two other priests, ritually clad, who were within hearing distance. “We need to have this worked out as well as we can before we take a single step toward the rakhlands, you know.”

“And gods help us then.”

Jarred by the plural, Damien looked up at him. “Pray long and hard, if you want your gods to interfere.” His voice and manner were strained. “And do it soon. Because once we get under the Canopy, and that silence stretches between us and Jaggonath ... no god of this region is going to hear your prayers. Or anything else, for that matter.”

She lay still as death on Senzei’s guest cot, glazed eyes staring out into nothingness. The light of a single candle illuminated her face and hands in sharp relief, from the stark white highlights of her colorless flesh to shadows so sharp and deep that they might have been carved in stone. Even her eyes seemed paler, as though sorrow had leached the color from them. As though her assailants had drained her not only of memory, but of hue.

The food that had been placed beside her was untouched. Damien moved it carefully out of the way and then sat by her side.

“Cee.” His voice was no more than a whisper, but in the absolute silence of her chamber it might as well have been a shout. “Cee. We’re going after them. Do you understand?” He put a hand on her shoulder—ice-cold flesh, without response—and squeezed gently. “You’ve got to get hold of yourself.”

She turned to him slowly. Her face was dry of tears, but he could see the streaks of salt-stiffened flesh where they had coursed. The desolation in her eyes nearly broke his heart.

“What’s the point?” she whispered.

He Worked her then. Gently, praying that she wouldn’t notice. Worked a link between them that would keep her attention on him, keep her from falling back into unresponsive darkness. “We need you.”

For a moment it seemed as if she would turn away again, but something—perhaps the fae—held her steady. Her voice, when it came, was a dry, dehydrated whisper. “For what?”

“Ah, Cee. I thought you would have guessed that.” He took her nearer hand, prying it gently from the blanket’s edge to enfold it in his own. Cold flesh, nearly lifeless. How dilute was her vitality now—how fragile had that thread become, which binds such a woman to life? “You have to come with us.”

For a moment she looked startled; there was more vitality in that single expression than he had seen in all the days since the assault. He felt something in himself tighten, tried to quell the tide of hope rising inside him. Or at least, control it. So much depended on how she took this....

“We can’t leave you here,” he told her. “You’d be unprotected. There’s no ward Senzei or I could Work that would hold them off, if your own didn’t. And he’s not all that sure that the illusion he Worked at the shop would hold once he’s under the Canopy. They might suddenly realize that you’re alive ... and we’d have no way of getting back to you. Or even knowing what had happened.” He took a deep breath, chose his next words carefully. “And without you, Cee ... we can’t find the one who did this.” He felt her stiffen beneath his hand, saw the fear come into her eyes. He continued quickly, “If not for the Canopy we could rely on a Knowing, but with the Canopy between us ... no one can read through it, Senzei said, not even an adept. And God knows, we’re not that. With you on one side and us on the other, locating your assailant would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Even worse: like trying to find one single blade of hay in that stack, when you don’t know which one you’re searching for. How would we even know where to start?” He squeezed her hand gently, wished he could will some of his own warmth into her flesh. His own vitality. “We
need
you, Cee.”

She shut her eyes; a tremor of remembered pain ran through her body. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You can’t possibly understand.” A tear gathered under her lashes, but lacked the substance to free itself; her body was too dehydrated to spare that much fluid. “What it’s like to live with the fae. Like adepts do. Zen thinks it’s like a constant Seeing, but it’s not that at all.” Her brow furrowed as she struggled for words. “It’s everywhere. In everything. There are so many different kinds that I don’t even have names for them all, some so fleeting that they’re just a spark out of the corner of your eye—a flash of light, of power—and then they’re gone, before you can focus on them. And the currents flow through it all—
everything!
—not just around it, like he Sees, but permeating every substance on this planet, living and unliving, solid and illusory. Sometimes you’ll be looking at the sky and the tidal-fae will flux for an instant and there it is—like a flaw in a crystal that suddenly catches the light, a spectrum of living color that’s gone before you can even draw a breath. And there’s music, too, so beautiful that it hurts just to listen to. Everywhere you look, everything you touch, it’s all permeated with living fae—all in a constant state of flux, changing hourly as the different tides course through it. And the result is a world so rich, so wonderful, that it makes you shiver just to live in it....” She drew in a shaky breath. “Do you understand? When I touch a stone, what I feel isn’t hard rock—I feel everything that stone has been, everything it might become, I feel how it channels the earth-fae and how it interacts with the tidal fae and how the power of the sun will affect it, and what it will be when true night falls ... do you understand, Damien? That bit of rock is alive
alive—everything
is alive to us, even the air we breathe—only now—” She coughed raggedly, and he could hear the tears come into her voice. “Don’t you see? That’s what they took! It’s all dead now. I look around, and all I see are corpses. A universe of corpses. Like everything I see is sculpted out of rotting meat ... except it’s not even rotting; there’s life in corruption, you now, even carrion has its own special music ... and here there’s nothing. Nothing! I touch this bed—” and she grasped the bedframe with her free hand, and squeezed it until her knuckles were white with the pressure, “—and all I feel ... gods, there’s no
life
in it ... can you understand? It wasn’t me they drained, it was the whole of my world!”