Crown of Shadows

by C. S. Friedman

  The ground split before them with a roar, and a vast, black chasm opened just before their feet. The bodies on its edges spilled down into the guts of the earth, still twitching their death-dance as they fell. It seemed to Damien that the bodies moaned as they fell, or perhaps some hellish wind that scoured the chasm’s depths merely mimicked the sound. Instinctively he stepped back, but the demon would not permit him to retreat.

  “You summoned it,” she growled. “You deal with it.”

  Something in the chasm’s blackness made his stomach clench in terror, but he knew in his heart that Karril was right. Tarrant’s captors were clearly aware of their journey here—as he had guessed—and they had answered his challenge. It was too late to undo that. All he could accomplish now, by refusing their invitation, was to anger them enough that they closed the way out of here forever.

  He walked slowly to the edge of the chasm and gazed down into it. Though his human eyes could make out no details in the blackness, other senses picked out motion within the lightless depths, of things that slithered and flew and ... waited. A sickening reek rose up to his nostrils, all too like the one that had been in Tarrant’s apartment. He had barely been able to tolerate that assault; how well would he handle this, its hellish source? As he stared down into the abyss, he suddenly wasn’t sure.

  Well, you should have thought of that before you came here, priest. It’s too late now.

  The lip of the chasm near his feet wasn’t a sheer drop, as elsewhere, but an angled and rocky slope. Clearly it was the only way down, short of jumping. With a last glance at Karril and a pounding in his heart, Damien slipped free of the demon’s grasp and began the precarious descent. Into the black, rent earth. Into a darkness so total that despite the light from above, sharp yellow shafts making the lips of the chasm glow as if they were burning, he couldn’t make out the shape of his own hand in front of his face, much less any detail of his surroundings.

  Then the darkness closed in overhead, and all sight of the world above was gone. He breathed in deeply, trying not to give way to the claustrophobia that suddenly gripped his heart. At last, when he felt capable of moving again, he began to work his way down the slope by feel alone. When the path seemed to dissolve beneath his hands, he fought hard not to panic, and waited it out. The blackness surrounding him was close and thick and evil-smelling, but his sense of impending danger had become so great that those things took a back seat in his consciousness. As did the pain of his many wounds, now burning anew as the darkness rubbed against them.

  “Karril?” he whispered. “You with me?”

  “Unfortunately.” He felt the demon brush against him and reached out to take her hand; from the strength of her returning grip he judged that she wasn’t any happier about this place than he was. He was suddenly glad that she had come here in a female form. It didn’t matter worth a damn in reality—a demon was a demon—but he would have felt like an idiot squeezing hands with a man in this darkness, even knowing the truth. Thank God for Karril’s insight.

  Something brushed against his leg—and a wave of loathing rose up in his gut, clogged his throat, made his brain fill with images of hatred and destruction. An instant later it was gone. What—?Then another thing slithered against his back, and for an instant he was consumed by such jealous rage that all conscious thought gave way before it. That, too, passed quickly, fading into the darkness that surrounded as soon as its messenger lost contact with them.

  “Hate-wraiths,” Karril whispered. “Rage-wraiths. And more. Every species of evil that man has ever produced is here, given independent life by the force of the planet. Congregating in this one place, like drawn to like, until their sheer mass gave them a kind of consciousness no lone demon could ever enjoy.” Damien could sense her eyes fixed on him; could her Iezu senses function in this darkness? “That’s your Unnamed, priest. Erna’s great devil. Like everything else, a creation of your own species.” Damien could feel her twisting, as if to look about them. “And a damn lousy host, besides.”

  He was about to respond when a voice whispered, See. Others echoed it, fragments of speech that entered his skull not through his ears, as human speech might, but through his very skin. Whispers that etched their way into his brain matter without ever making a real sound.

  See

  Intruders!

  No place

  Go

  Go

  See

  Invasion!

  Strike out

  Destroy

  And then a deeper voice, more resonant, that seemed to contain a thousand others: See what it is you came to see, priest. Know your own helplessness.

  A figure some ten yards distant from Damien was made visible, but not by any natural light. Eerie phosphorescence illuminated the form of a man hanging as if bound to some frame, but gave no view of his supporting device. It gleamed off the polished surfaces of belt buckles, buttons, and embroidery, but was swallowed by the darkness surrounding those things before it could illuminate any details of the chamber surrounding. It etched in harsh relief the visage of a man so wracked by pain that his features were almost unrecognizable, and the shreds of his clothing where they hung from his lean frame were little more than wisps of dying color, bleached by the unnatural light.

  “Gerald,” he whispered.

  He was bound as he had been in the fire of the earth so long ago: cruciform, his arms stretched out tautly to his sides, his legs separated just far enough to make room for the bonds at his ankles. But where the Master of Lema had used plain iron to bind the Hunter, the Unnamed had more gruesome tools. The ropes that were wrapped about him glowed with an unwholesome light all their own, and they shifted and twitched as Damien watched, like living creatures. Horrified, he saw one raise its head as if noting his approach; when it decided at last that Damien was no threat to it, it returned to the work at hand, burrowing down between the tendons of the Hunter’s forearm like some hungry animal, leaving a band of sizzling flesh wherever it passed. Now that he knew what to look for, Damien could see that the other “ropes” were much the same, serpentine creatures that twined inside and out of the Hunter’s body, their flesh burning into the man’s own like acid every time they moved.

  He wasn’t surprised that Karril let go of his hand and refused to approach with him. Gazing at Tarrant’s tortured visage, sensing a man so lost in pain that he wasn’t even aware of their presence, he wondered that the Iezu had managed to come even this close.

  You see? a slithering voice pressed, and another whispered, Your Church would approve.

  He tried to focus on why he had come here, on the arguments he had been running through his mind since his discovery of Tarrant’s disappearance. It was hard, with that horrific display hanging just overhead. He flinched inside each time he heard one of the serpent-things move, guessing at the pain they caused.

  “Is this some kind of punishment?” he demanded.

  This is his judgment, many-voices-in-one answered him.

  “For what crime?”

  He could sense agitation in the darkness around him; one or two of the damned creatures flitted near him, but none made contact. For the act of forgetting who he is, and what power sustains him. For the crime of pretending to be human.

  “It must have been a terrible thing he did, that over-weighs nine centuries of service. Tell me what it was.”

  You were there, priest.

  Was that anger in its voice? He tried to keep the fear out of his own as he urged it, “Tell me how you see it.”

  He saved a civilization from ruin, one voice whispered into his brain.

  He circumvented a holocaust that would have fed us all, another proclaimed.

  He gave your Patriarch a weapon no man of the Church should ever have.

  “What—?” He looked up at Tarrant, eyes narrowing in anger as he realized what the voices must be referring to. You son of a bitch. You did it! It was hard to say if he was more amazed or angry, now that he knew. What kind of desperation mu
st the man have felt, to have risked such a thing?

  He forced himself to turn away from the Hunter’s body, to face the unseen creatures once more. He had an answer for that argument, and for any other they might come up with. “Each thing you name, he did for his own purposes. Each thing he did, he did to stay alive so that he could serve you.”

  Doesn’t matter

  Doesn’t matter

  Doesn’t matter

  Traitor!

  His mind racing, Damien struggled to regain control of their interview. “And so what? You’ll keep him here forever? Is that your intention?”

  Until judgment is rendered

  Until the compact is broken

  Traitor!

  “A death sentence,” he mused. “Is that what nine centuries of service are worth to you?”

  He could feel something swelling in the darkness, like a wave gathering overhead, preparing to crash down on him. The next voice was deeper and infinitely more resonant, and played against a background of utter silence; the whispering voices had been sucked into a greater whole.

  We reclaim a gift he no longer deserves, it told Damien. What he does after that is his own concern.

  “You’re sentencing him to death.”

  Again there was the dizzying sensation of something gathering just beyond his sight, drawing back like an incipient bore wave. Panic shot through his flesh like hot spears, but he sensed that it was some kind of assault from that presence, and he struggled to stand his ground.

  Whether he lives or dies is not Our concern.

  “Your sentence means his death,” he persisted. Sensing that there was an intelligence behind the voice now, and a malevolence, far greater than anything it had contained before. “You know that. He knows it.” And he dared, “Taste the knowledge inside him, if you doubt me.”

  Something dark and unwholesome moved close by his cheek, almost touching him as it passed; it took everything he had not to collapse in a heap of gibbering panic at the near-contact. God in Heaven! What would happen if it had actually touched him, like the others had? Then he heard a sharp cry behind him, and the straining of flesh against living bonds. Whatever method of Knowing the owner of that voice was using, it was clearly painful.

  I’m sorry, he thought to Tarrant. Wishing the man could hear him. There was no other way.

  At last the struggling behind him subsided, and he was aware of the dark thing withdrawing to its place. What you say is true, it rumbled. It’s still no concern of Ours.

  “He served you for nine centuries,” Damien challenged. “He tortured and killed and maimed and corrupted whole generations, all in your name. He warped an entire region so that it would serve his hunger—your hunger—and made himself into a legend that’ll feed you with fear long after he’s dead.” He paused dramatically; his heart was pounding. “For all that service he should deserve some kind of chance for survival, don’t you think?”

  Perhaps, a lighter voice whispered, and others echoed the thought. The sense of overwhelming malevolence had faded ever so slightly, for which Damien was grateful. Would that greater being have accepted his argument? For the first time he sensed what Tarrant must have gone through, putting his soul in the hands of a creature who changed its very definition with each passing second. Or perhaps instead We should judge him by the company he keeps. You defend him as if he were one of your own, priest. If he were truly as evil as you claim, no living man would stand up for him like that.

  “I need him!” he snarled. Making his voice as callous as it could become, smothering every last bit of sentiment his human heart might nurture. “I need him as a tool, and when that’s done I couldn’t give a damn what happens to him. Let Hell have him if it wants. God knows, he’s earned it.”

  Silence. Damien glanced over desperately to where Karril must be, but saw no sign of her in the darkness. Would his argument work? Clearly the Unnamed’s response to such things had as much to do with the form it was in at the moment, as any inherent merit his argument might have. Was it in Damien’s favor that the voices had stayed joined together through most of their interview, or would the fragmented whispers that flitted about like insects have been easier to convince?

  At last, after long minutes of silence, the voices whispered, Judgment is rendered.

  He looked back at Tarrant, then into the heart of the darkness once more. “What is it?” he demanded.

  Death may take him, another voice whispered. But not by Our hands. There was a pause; Damien could feel the blood pounding hot in his head, and it felt near to bursting. One longmonth from today, the compact that sustains him will be dissolved. If he can find an alternate means of survival before that, so be it. If not, then Hell may have him.

  You will see that he understands Our terms.

  “Yes,” he whispered. Numbed by the seeming victory. “Of course.”

  A stench of foulness spilled into the space surrounding Tarrant, a smell so unclean that it made Damien’s stomach heave in protest. A hot, bitter fluid filled his mouth; he forced himself to swallow it down as the living ropes unwound themselves from about the Hunter’s limbs, withdrawing themselves from his flesh. One by one they slithered off into the stink and the darkness, and became invisible. One and one only remained, coiling about Tarrant’s neck like a restless serpent.

  We leave him with this, the voices whispered, as a reminder of Our power.

  The snakelike creature lashed out at Tarrant’s face suddenly, and such was its speed and its force that it cracked like a whip as it struck his flesh. The Hunter cried out sharply, and his body bent back in agony. Then that creature also slithered away, leaving Tarrant’s body to fall from its unseen frame to a lifeless heap on the floor. A shapeless sack of bones, no more, so tortured and starved and exhausted by fear that it lacked even the strength to cry out as it struck.

  The light was beginning to fade, but it seemed to Damien that the source of the whispers was also gone. “Karril?” he dared. “Can you do something?”

  He heard something move toward him, and then the demon was by his side. “Here.” She handed him a candle—or the illusion of a candle, more likely—whose feeble light was just enough to illuminate Tarrant’s face. Damien rolled the Hunter gently onto his back. Where the serpentine creature had struck him there was now a scar that glistened wetly as it coursed from his jawline to the corner of his eye. The flesh was puckered about it as if it were a wound badly healed, enhancing its disfiguring power tenfold. He’ll love that, he thought grimly. Tarrant’s eyes were open but glazed, unseeing, their pupils so distended by pain that no hint of the iris was visible. Just as well, Damien thought. Not much worth lookingataroundhere.

  He readied himself to lift the man’s limp form up onto his shoulders—and then shuddered, at the thought of where he had to carry it. “Tell me the way back is easier,” he begged Karril.

  “It’s easier,” the demon assured him.

  He looked up at her.

  “It really is. I swear it.” She reached out to the Hunter’s face as if to touch it gently, but then drew back before contact was made. Afraid to share his pain? “You have him now. I can lead you home directly.”

  “Thank God for that,” he muttered. For a moment longer he crouched by Tarrant’s side, his body aching from its many wounds. Then, with a practiced grip, he heaved the unprotesting body up onto his left shoulder, and rose with it. The weight hurt like hell—so to speak—but that pain was ameliorated by the knowledge of his victory.

  Well—he cautioned himself—partial victory, anyway.

  As he turned to follow Karril, the weight of Tarrant’s limp form heavy on his shoulder, he thought, Pray God it will be enough.

  Twenty

  “Well, well. Look who’s here.”

  Narilka looked up from the window display she was working on and blanched as she saw who was approaching the shop. Gresham must have seen her stiffen, for he asked, “What is it, Nari? Something wrong?”

  “No.” She whispered
the word, wishing she could make it sound convincing. “I was just ... surprised.”

  She hadn’t seen Andrys since that day outside her apartment. She hadn’t heard from him at all, other than to process his payments for the work in progress. She was frightened by the lack of contact, frustrated, mystified. Hadn’t he felt something for her that night, that should surely draw him back to her? Could a man expose his soul like that and then just close it up again, as if nothing had ever happened? Or was the whole thing just an act, part of the game his kind played so well—and if so, why had he never come to take advantage of his gains?

  It frightened her how upset she was, and how out of control she felt. If any other man had acted like this she would have written him off, or taken matters into her own hands and initiated some new contact. With this man she couldn’t do either. At night she lay awake, hopelessly sleepless, aching with a need that was as much pure sexual hunger as any more civilized drive. She had sensed a like need in him when he had kissed her. So why hadn’t he returned? And if it was just a fleeting moment’s pleasure for him, a brief side-track in his sport, why couldn’t she call it that and forget it?

  He was coming across the street now, and there was no denying where he was headed. Her heart pounding wildly, she pushed the last few cake knives into place and stood up straight again. Her hands smoothed her clothing with a desperate need to have everything in place, even as she chided herself for such foolishness. Did she really think a few wrinkles would make a difference ?

  Then the door swung open, its silver bells jingling, and he stepped inside. He met her eyes for an instant, then quickly looked away. Was that shame in his expression, or fear, or simply disinterest? Suddenly panicked, she realized she had lost all ability to read him.

  “Mer Tarrant. A pleasure.” Gresham came around the end of the counter and offered his hand. He glanced at Narilka with some concern as he did so, and she could read his expression clearly enough. Is something wrong? Did he hurt you? She shook her head ever so slightly, her heart aching. No, he hadn’t hurt her. She’d hurt herself.