Black Sun Rising (66 page)

“And he’ll cling to life.”

“He’s terrified of death.”

“Ah.” A deep breath, drawn in slowly and savored. “How marvelous. You do know how to please, Calesta.”

“The pleasure is mine,” the demon hissed.

“Yes. I’m sure it is.” A low chuckle, half humor and half lust, sounded from the Master’s lips. As raw power lapped against the smooth stone walls, staining them with blood-colored fae. The color of pain. The color of delight.

“See that you have something equally suitable arranged for when
she
gets here.”

Snow. It wasn’t unexpected—Hesseth had smelled it coming, and even Damien had made note of the ominous color of the sky that morning—but that was little consolation. The last thing they needed now was for winter to begin in earnest. Damien cursed himself for failing to anticipate such weather, even as he beat the powdery white stuff from his jacket. He should have checked for it regularly. Weather was hard to predict, but not impossible—general trends betrayed themselves some days in advance—and he could have turned this choice bit of misery into something else, if only he had Seen it coming. A little push to the wind pattern there, perhaps a little shove to the jet stream ... there were a dozen and one ways in which the weather might be Worked, but all of them involved advance planning. And Damien had been too wrapped up in other things to remember that a good winter storm might lay ruin to all their plans.

The snow deepened to ankle height, gusted in billowy dunes to the level of their mounts’ knees, caught in their collars and their boot-cuffs and trickled down inside their clothing as ice-cold water. Still they pressed onward, making what progress they could. They couldn’t afford to slow down, not now. Once or twice the snow turned to hail, or hail mixed with freezing rain, and they were forced to stop. Battered, disheartened, they took what shelter they could find and waited for the downpour to lessen. And began moving again as soon as they could, anxious to make up for lost time.

He wondered, in those cold times of waiting, if their enemy might not have sent the storm. Certainly it seemed the perfect tool for his purposes, in that it struck at both their strength and their spirit. And there was damned little Damien could do about it, either way. Oh, he tried. But weather-Working had never been his forte, and trying to alter a storm once it had actually begun was a task that would have given an adept nightmares. The best he could do was to Know it carefully, which allowed him to reassure his party that the worst of it had in fact passed them by; the flatlands east of the mountains had received a tempest ten times worse. But as cold, dark days gave way to icy nights, that was little consolation.

Tarrant could have shifted it away from us, he thought. Tarrant would have seen it coming, and known what to do.
Bitterly he tried to drive such thoughts from his head, but they kept returning. It bothered him that he had any positive feelings about the Hunter, even so vague a one as that. Whatever worth the man had once possessed had become buried beneath so many centuries of corruption and cruelty that the resulting creature was more demon than man, and hardly a suitable subject for admiration. Especially for one of Damien’s calling.

They traveled in somber silence, their passage soundless but for the crunching of fresh snow and ice beneath their animals’ hooves. The xandu were growing restless, in a way that made Damien uneasy. Apparently it bothered Hesseth, too, for when they finally made camp she tethered the animals as though they were horses, so that they might not wander off. Over dinner she explained that the mountain snows of the Worldsend often triggered a migration instinct in the beasts, driving them to lower ground. Perhaps they were responding to that ingrained mandate. All night Damien could hear the xandu struggling against the pull of the leather leashes, snorting in indignation at their bondage. When it came his turn to sleep, he tried to shut out both the noise and the cold with a thick cocoon of blankets, but he was unsuccessful. The best he could manage was a restless half-slumber that refreshed his body but did little for his nerves.

Through calf-deep snow they resumed their travels in the morning. The clouds parted just long enough to confirm that the sun had risen, then closed overhead and plunged them into a timeless dusk of cold, white flurries alternating with sleet. Once Damien’s horse slipped and nearly fell, while precariously close to the edge of a sheer drop—but it managed to stay on its feet somehow and edged past the dangerous spot.

I feel like a jinxer,
the priest thought.
Like some poor fool who Works the earth-fae without even knowing it
—
only it does the exact opposite of what he wants. Isn’t this how it works with that kind? You just manage to figure how bad things really are, and just then another disaster crops up.

Would it be possible to use that as a Cursing? To take a mind that affected the currents naturally, and warp it so that its effect was negative? After several hours’ contemplation—and a cold lunch, eaten hurriedly beneath the half-shelter of a rocky overhang—he decided that it would be impossible. There were too many variables to account for; too much was still unknown about the relationship of brain and fae. If you tried to Work a system like that, the whole thing would come crashing down around your ears. Only nature could alter biology on that scale and get it right.

But then he remembered the trees of the Forest—a whole ecosystem, redesigned to suit its human master—and he shivered, thinking of the kind of man it took to Work that. And what manner of sacrifice he had made, to conjure that kind of power.

A man who could Work the Forest could do it. A man like that could do anything, Then: Anything except save himself,
he added grimly. And he tightened his knees about his horse’s cold flanks, and tried not to think about how much this weather—cold and lightless—would have pleased the Hunter.

He’s dead. And you wanted him dead. So forget him.
But the memory of the man hung about him like a ghost. Was that because of the channel that had been established between them? Or simply the force of the man’s personality? It was impossible to say. But sometimes when he looked at Ciani he saw the ghost there, too—a fleeting image, in the back of her eyes. What had gone on between the two of them, in the Hunter’s last days? Damien hungered to know—and didn’t dare ask. It was dangerous to pose questions, when you weren’t sure you could handle the answers.

All day, the snow continued to fall. They rode. And somewhere in the distance, an unknown number of unknown rakh hiked northward, snow blinding them to the sight of their destination. Five of them, or perhaps three. Wearing alien faces, marching to an alien purpose. Struggling their way through this very storm. To their deaths.

Or—Damien thought suddenly—had that Working dispersed when its maker died? That was a frightening thought. What if the simulacra had never started out in the first place? What if, now that Tarrant was dead, the party had no cover at all?

Then we must depend on Hesseth’s skill,
he thought. And he looked at the rakh-woman, and wondered just how strong her power was. And how willing she would be to harness it to their need if all other defenses failed them.

Fire. Brilliant, like sunlight: white-hot, molten, filling the air with a blazing heat. Senzei’s face, like wax: melting, sizzling, running down into the grass like Fire, sucked down into the soil. Flesh running free like water, blood and bones dissolving into liquid fire, essence burning, dissolving ... transforming. Until the hair is Core-golden, soft strands tangling in the thermal gusts. Until the eyes are silver-white, hot as metal freshly poured into a wound. Until the mouth is solid enough to voice a scream
—
and it screams, and the screams resound along with the roar of the flames, across the burning heavens, and as far beneath as the gates of hell and beyond.

 

 

He awoke. Suddenly. Not because of the dream. He was too exhausted for a mere nightmare to awaken him, too in need of the sleep that had been shattered. Besides, he’d seen those images before. Never in that form, never with such terrible clarity ... but ever since Tarrant’s disappearance he had been envisioning fire, both waking and sleeping. Had dreamed of Tarrant, in fire. Ciani had also. He’d had to reassure her that such dreams were only natural, given their recent experiences. Her dreaming brain was combining the elements of Senzei’s and Tarrant’s deaths, fusing the two disasters into a single, gut-wrenching nightmare. It was frightening, but only that. Not meaningful, he assured her. It couldn’t possibly be meaningful.

Could it?

Carefully, he freed himself from his blankets. More than anything else he hated this weather because of the vulnerability it fostered. The tight cocoon of blankets which he needed to combat the cold was the last thing he wanted to be trapped inside if danger came calling. Even fully clothed it was bad enough—and he knew damned well that if he
really
wanted to be warm he should be naked inside that cocoon, his body heat warming the blankets and the air inside it rather than lost to his clothing. But that was where he drew the line. He’d once had to fight off a pack of ghouls in below-zero weather with nothing on but a pair of socks, and it wasn’t an experience he was anxious to repeat.

He looked about the campsite, quickly took in details: Ciani, curled tight in uneasy slumber; Hesseth crouching by the campfire, springbolt in claw; the mounts half-asleep, restless. Nothing else amiss—or at least, nothing that was immediately obvious. Thank God, the snow had stopped at last.

He came to where Hesseth was and crouched down beside her. But the position which came so naturally to her rakhene form was painful for his cold-stiffened limbs, and after a moment he simply sat.

“How goes it?” he asked quietly.

She nodded toward where their mounts were tethered. “The horses are starting to get edgy now.”

“And the xandu?”

She shook her head. “Increasingly restless. There’s obviously something here they’re responding to ... but damned if I know what it is.”

“Scent of a predator, perhaps? If something were following us—”

“I’d smell that,” she reminded him.

He drew in a sharp breath. “Of course. That was ... human of me.” He managed a halfhearted grin. “Sorry.”

She shrugged.

He looked out into the night, wondered what unseen dangers the darkness was obscuring. As he had done each night since Tarrant’s death—and each day, and morning and evening besides—he Worked his sight and studied the currents. They were harder than ever to see now, faint blue veins of shadowy light barely bright enough to shine through the blanket of snow that covered them. But after a few minutes he was able to focus on them and discern their current state. Which was just what it had been yesterday, and the day before, and probably countless days before that as well. Weaker than earth-fae should be here. Weaker than earth-fae should be in any mountain range.

It’s as if there was no seismic activity here,
he thought.
None at all.
But that simply wasn’t possible. Even on Earth the mountains weren’t that quiescent. Or so logic dictated. Certainly the colonists had been familiar enough with the nature of seismic disruptions to scan for such activity when they arrived—which said that they understood the nature of that particular danger, because they had experience in dealing with it.

Weak currents. Inexplicably stable terrain. A nest of demons. And a human adept who had settled himself right at the juncture of three crustal plates, heedless of the risk which that entailed. How did those elements fit together? It seemed to Damien that if he could only determine how they were interlinked, he could find the answers they so desperately needed. But the more he studied the puzzle, the more it seemed as if there was a vital piece missing. One single fact, which might make the whole pattern fall into place.