And then she found it. She thought it was a riverbed at first, a trough scoured into the mud by some flash flood that had swept down from the mountains. But holding her lantern close, she saw the footprints that marked its bottom. They were horses’ prints, the triune markings of an eastern breed. She had found the Church’s trail at last.
A sense of relief so intense that it was almost painful welled up inside her. Not until this moment had she been willing to admit to her greatest fear, which was that the Hunter’s realm might swallow all signs of Andrys’ passage, so that no one could follow him. But these tracks were so clearly marked, so utterly mundane in form, that she felt a sudden rush of confidence, and even the sour stink of the Forest seemed to fade for a moment, as if to acknowledge, This is it. This is right. Follow him.
Turning up her lantern wick, she followed the soldiers’ trail deep into the Forest. The lumps of horse droppings scattered here and there were still damp and pungent, which seemed to imply that they weren’t far ahead of her. Thank the gods! She tried not to think about what her reception would be when she finally caught up with them. The Church soldiers would be furious, but Andrys ... she could feel his need now, as though there were a cord connecting them. Andrys was all that mattered. And if his god truly meant to bring down the Hunter, surely he wouldn’t let the love of a single woman stand in his way?
The region’s thick darkness folded about her like a shroud as she walked, until the light of her lantern was all but smothered. Trembling, she kept her eyes on the ground before her, refusing to search for threats in the looming darkness at either side. If the Forest meant to attack her now, then it surely would do so, and no single lantern could stop it; she had gambled everything on the Hunter’s promise, and now, with his words ringing in her ears like a prayer, she gave her whole attention over to following the trail before her. It wasn’t easy. The earth was dryer this far into the Forest, which meant that the marks she was following were more shallow, less certain, easily confused with the scrabblings of local animals. It was so hard to see in the gloom that once she went down on one knee so that she might run a hand along the trail for a foot or two to confirm its presence by touch, but the sudden sense of something burrowing beneath the soil, something filthy and hungry and drawn to her heat, made her stand up quickly again. It won’t hurt me, she told herself. Her heart was pounding; her hand felt clammy against the lantern’s handle. Nothing here will hurt me. But despite that self-reassurance she moved quickly forward, whispering a prayer to her goddess that her feet might stay on the right path, even as she fled unseen horrors beneath the earth.
Hours passed, cold and immeasurable. She found a hump of rock and sat down on it, resting just long enough to catch her breath and wash down a bit of dried biscuit with a swallow of water. Had she truly run in this place once for three days and nights? She trembled to recall those hours of terror. Could Andrys sense the Hunter’s constant presence here, or was that sensation reserved for the woman he hunted? For his sake, she prayed he was immune.
At last, her strength renewed by the meager meal, her courage somewhat bolstered, she lowered herself down from the rock and prepared to take up the Church’s trail once more.
Then she heard the noise.
It wasn’t like the other noises that surrounded her, although it would have been hard for her to describe the way in which it differed. A thousand creatures had skirted the edge of her lamplight since she had come here, and their scrabblings and slitherings had become an accustomed counterpoint to her own footsteps. This noise was different. This noise echoed with purpose. This noise, as it mirrored her own footsteps, warned of something intelligent, something focused ... something dangerous. Something unbound by the Hunter’s promise, that was free to sate its own hunger in these nightbound woods.
Her heart began to pound, but she forced her stride to stay even. Surely anything that belonged in this darkness could outpace her easily; the trick was not to run, not to provoke it. The Church soldiers couldn’t be far ahead—right?—and if she could just get within hearing range of them, maybe the thing that was following her would be frightened off. Or maybe she could cry out and get someone to come to her, fast enough to keep it from moving in on her—
And then there was a sound ahead of her, and another to her side. She heard footsteps first, like those which followed her, and then a kind of snorting. She felt a chill crawl along her skin, and only the knowledge that displaying her fear would make things a thousand times worse kept her legs from locking up in terror beneath her. Everything in the Forest is his, she chanted silently. Nothing of his will hurt me. But what if her fears had manifested some new creature, some demonling not yet broken to the Hunter’s ways? Would she still be protected then? There was rustling on both sides of her now, so loud that she knew it was deliberate ; the things that echoed her steps were taunting her. Goddess, help me. Please.... Her legs were numb, her feet so heavy she could hardly move them. Could her pursuers smell her fear? Did it whet their appetite? Oh, Andrys, what have I done!
A figure moved into the path before her. At first it seemed to be some kind of animal and she took a step backward involuntarily, trying to put herself out of range of its teeth. But then it straightened up, and stretched somehow, and when she held the lantern up so that she might see it better, she saw that it was human in shape, human in countenance ... but not human in substance. That much she saw with her heart, if not her eyes.
It was the white man, the Hunter’s servant. But not as she remembered him from their meeting years ago, a slender, lithe creature with ghostly white skin that gleamed in the moonlight, feral hunger that gleamed in his eyes. This was a creature of plague and rot, a living manifestation of the malignance that had assailed the entire Forest. His hair—if hair it could be called—was a matted mass of dirt and slime that seemed to move of its own accord as he watched her. His body seemed somehow distorted, in posture if not in form, his clothing was torn and filthy and reeked of urine, and his eyes ... those were the most horrible thing about him, she thought. Not human eyes at all, but pits that seemed gouged into his flesh, emptiness where eyes should have been, framed by a ring of flesh pulled back so hard against his bone that she could see black veins pulse beneath it.
“Ah,” he whispered, and the sound was more a growl than any human utterance. “It seems we have company.” His voice gurgled thickly in his throat, as if some growth within that passage made human speech a trial. “So rare, these days.”
Stay calm. You know how to deal with him. Just stay calm and do it. She tried to reach a hand into her jacket pocket, but she was shaking so badly that she couldn’t find the opening. Wolflike creatures were moving into the circle of light now, and like their master they were horribly deformed, filthy satires of a once-proud pack. If the Hunter’s own servants could be so twisted, what did that imply about their master? She trembled to think about it. Stay calm! Then her hand slid into the pocket—finally—and she clutched the thing within it, grasping it like a lifeline. Even as he took a step toward her she jerked it out and held it up before him, wielding it as a warning, a weapon. The Hunter’s token dangled in the lamplight, glints of gold along its edge warning back those demons who would defy his will. It had worked once before, when this creature meant to toy with her. Surely it would do so now.
The white man stared at her amulet for a long, silent moment.
Then he laughed.
Goddess! She felt her soul flinch as the sickening figure came toward her. Help me! She tried to back up, but something large and cold had come up behind her legs; it took all her remaining strength not to fall backward over it, into its waiting jaws.
“The Hunter isn’t around right now,” the white creature informed her. He grinned, displaying a mouth full of rotting and bloodstained teeth. “But don’t worry. I’m sure we can manage to entertain you in his absence.” “
He reached for the amulet then and she tried to back away from him, but the beast behind her knees moved
suddenly and she fell over it, her lantern hurtling to the ground far out of reach. She tried to regain her feet, but it was impossible; the beasts closed in on her even as she struggled to get to her knees, their jaws closing tight about her arms and legs, their rank weight forcing her down again.
She screamed. Hopeless effort! What did she think it would gain her, in this land where even the laws of sound would surely be warped by sorcery? But the cry welled up from a core of terror so stark, so primitive, that mere logic could not silence it. And the white man laughed. He laughed! The whole Forest was his now, not only its plants and creatures but the very air itself. Who could hear her, if he willed it otherwise?
And then his face bent down close to hers and his hands closed tightly about her wrists—icy flesh, dead and damned, that sucked out her living heat through the contact—and she could feel her frail grip on sanity giving way, the darkness of terror closing in about her brain even as the flesh of the albino’s pack closed in around her body. Sucking her down into depths where was neither terror nor pain, only mindless oblivion.
Andrys! she screamed, as the darkness gathered in thick folds about her. The sound built up in her throat and left her mouth, but made no tremor in the air. Andrys!
He couldn’t hear her. No one could. No one except the Hunter’s servant, whose beasts even now were mauling her frozen flesh.
Oh,Andrys....
Thirty-six
Sunset was sandwiched between earth and ash, its light like a wound in the darkening sky. Though the sun itself had disappeared behind distant mountains, its rays, stained blood red by a veil of ash, lit the bellies of the clouds like the fire of Shaitan itself. Now and then a wind would part the ash-cloud overhead and the light of the Core would lance through, but it was a fleeting distraction. The day was dying.
Pointedly not looking down at the landscape that spread out beneath his perch, Damien squeezed his way back into the shelter that Karril had found for them. The lantern he had left at the first turn was still burning, and he caught it up as he made his way back to the place where Tarrant waited. Unlike the Hunter, he needed light to see.
Tarrant was exactly as he had left him, resting weakly against the coarse wall of the cavern. By the lamp’s dim light Damien could see that his burns hadn’t healed, and that was a bad sign; a full day’s rest should have restored him. His scar alone remained unreddened, and its ghostly white surface, framed by damaged flesh, reminded Damien uncomfortably of the scavenger worms of the Forest.
“Sun’s gone,” he said quietly. No response. He put down the lantern and lowered himself to the ground beside Tarrant, striving to maintain an outer aspect of calm when inside he was anything but. Come on, man, we’ve got a long way to go and not a lot of time to get there! But something about Tarrant’s attitude scared him. Something that hinted that the worst damage wrought last night might not be that which was visible, but some wound inside the man that was still bleeding.
At last, unable to take the silence any longer, he ventured, “Gerald?”
The pale eyes flickered toward him, then away. Staring at something Damien couldn’t see, some internal vista.
“We can’t win,” the Hunter said weakly. The pale lids slid shut; the lean body shivered. “I thought we could. I thought there must be limits to his power. I thought that human senses were complex enough to defy absolute control—”
“And you were right—” he began.
“No. They aren’t complex at all. Don’t you see? What we would call a view of the sun is no more than a simple pattern of response in the eye, which is translated into simple electrical pulses, which in turn pushes a handful of chemicals into place within the brain ... there are so many places in which that flow of information can be interrupted, and with so little effort! Our enemy has that power, Vryce. One spark in the wrong place, one misaligned molecule ...” He gestured up toward his ravaged face with what seemed like anger, but for once Damien didn’t think the emotion was directed at him. “The only thing stopping him was Iezu custom. Now that he’s willing to disregard the law of his own kind, what chance do we have?”
“First of all,” Damien said, with all the authority his voice could muster, “It isn’t that simple a process. You of all people should know that. Do you think all those molecules in your head are labeled clearly, so that it’s easy to tell which one does what? Oh, youcould . probably figure it out—I wouldn’t put too much past you—but I doubt if Calesta’s got the patience or the know-how for that kind of work. Which means that he may have the power to screw with our heads, but he’s not necessarily going to do it right every time.”
“He did it well enough to—”
“Shut up and listen for once! Just once! All right?” He waited a moment, almost daring Tarrant to defy him. But the Hunter was too weak to spar with him like that ... or perhaps he was simply too astonished. When it was clear that his outburst had had the desired effect, Damien told him, “He didn’t do it perfectly. If you or I had known what to look for, we would have seen the signs, we would have known that trouble was coming, we could have taken precautions—”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The stars, Gerald. He could black out the sun from our sight, but he couldn’t change every one of the stars so that its position was right!” He told him about the constellation he had noticed, that shouldn’t have been so high in the sky until dawn was well underway. “Or maybe he just didn’t bother with details,” he concluded. “Maybe his arrogance was such that he imagined simple darkness would work the trick. Well, now it won’t. Now we know how his Iezu mind works. And if he couldn’t pull off that illusion perfectly, maybe all his work has flaws. Maybe, like an Obscuring, a Iezu illusion succeeds because men don’t think to look at it too closly. Well, now we know to look.”
“And do you imagine that we can remain so perfectly alert at every moment, that not a single detail out of place will escape our notice? Because that’s what it would require, you know. Even if his illusions are less than perfect—and we don’t know that for a fact—he’s no fool. He’ll wait until our guard is down, until we’re being less than perfectly careful, and then what?” He raised up a hand to his face, wincing as the pale fingers traced the scar there. “I didn’t feel my own pain,” he whispered. “I could have died out there, and not until the final moment would I have understood what was happening.”
“Karril said he’d protect us,” Damien reminded him. “He can’t stop Calesta from misleading us, or from making others try to kill us, but he won’t let you walk into the sun. He promised.”
The Hunter’s voice, like his manner, seemed infinitely weary. “And what about Iezu law? What about the rule their creator set forth, that there was to be no conflict between brothers?”
“Maybe,” he said quietly, “there are things that matter more to Karril than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like friendship, for one.”
He dismissed the possibility with a wave of his hand. “The Iezu aren’t capable of friendship. Their venue is limited to one narrow range of emotion, and their only motivation is a hunger for—”
“Oh, cut the crap, Gerald! You know, you’re a brilliant demonologist in theory, but when it comes down to facing facts you can be downright stupid.” He leaned toward the man, as if somehow proximity could give his words more force. “Was it Iezu nature that made Karril take me down to Hell to rescue you? Where does pleasure fit into that? And was it Iezu nature to do what he did last night: defy the law of his creator to step into the midst of his brother’s war, at the risk of angering the one creature on this planet who can kill him? He did that to save you, Gerald Tarrant. For no other reason. Just to save you.” He leaned back on his heels. “That’s friendship by any standard I know. To hell with who or what he is. I’d be damned proud to have a friend that loyal myself.”
“You wouldn’t have said that once. You’d have damned yourself for even entertaining such a thought.”
The Hunter shut his eyes, leaning back against the stone. “I drank,” he whispered.
“Warm blood? Living blood?”
Tarrant said nothing.
“I’m offering, Gerald.”
Tarrant shook his head; the motion was weak. “Don’t be a fool,” he whispered hoarsely. “You need your strength as much as I need mine.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “The difference is that my strength can be renewed easily enough. Or don’t you think that a Healer would know how to accelerate the production of his own blood?”
“You can’t Work here,” Tarrant told him. “Not even to heal yourself. Shaitan’s currents would swallow you whole.”
Damn. Damien drew in a slow breath, trying to think. Were there alternatives? “What about fear? I don’t mean a nightmare this time. The real thing. Straight up.” He managed to force a laugh. “God knows there’s enough of it inside me right now for both of us.”
But the Hunter shook his head, dismissing the thought. “Without an artificial structure? The channel between us isn’t strong enough for that. That’s why I used dreams.”
The words were out before he could stop them. “Then make it stronger.”
Slowly the Hunter looked up at him. Those chill eyes were black now, bottomless, as dark and cold as the fires of Shaitan were bright and hot. “And could you live with that?” he demanded. “Knowing what I am, understanding what such a channel would do to the two of us? Could you live with yourself, knowing that a part of me was in your soul, and would be until one of us died?”
“Gerald.” He said it quietly, very quietly, knowing there was more power in such a tone than in rage. “I knew when we came here that we probably weren’t getting out of this mess alive. So what are we really talking about? A day or two? I’ll deal.”
Crown of Shadows Page 37