When True Night Falls (55 page)

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, wouldn’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.

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; lonely 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.

“What about the saddles?” Hesseth asked, and after a brief discussion they decided to bury them. It would hardly do to have some sportsman climb that slope and discover their equipment scattered along the ridge. Only when the equestrian gear was well underground, and the earth over it had been tamped down and camouflaged, did Hesseth draw out her linen coif once more and bind it over her head, hiding her tufted ears from sight.
Time for disguises again,
Damien thought darkly. For once he was glad that Tarrant wasn’t with them; one less person to hide. As for Jenseny ... they would have to leave her, down there. Somewhere in those cities. They would have to find her a home, or at least a means of survival, so that they could leave her safely behind when they moved into the enemy’s territory....

And what if she has information that we need? What if her power could help us?
He shook his head, banishing the thought. Too many ifs. Too many unknowns. The walls of her trauma were high and strong, and if they’d had a long month to work on them in safety, perhaps they could have convinced the girl to open up, to share her precious knowledge with them ... but not in a week’s time, and not under these conditions. And there was no way that he would permit her to be broken, not by Tarrant’s power or his own careful lies.