Black Sun Rising

by C. S. Friedman

  “You got your sea legs fast, that’s for sure.” He grabbed at another rope from the back end of the boat and affixed that, too; then he tested them both. “Tell you what. I need to arrange for some fuel before I start back. You come with me, I’ll show you the way up to the travelers’ facilities. Okay?” She said nothing. He patted the last of his mooring lines affectionately, then looked back uneasily at the boat. “Think I ought to secure him? I mean, I left him inside and all . . . but those are damned flimsy walls, you know what I mean? Not meant to do much more than keep out the rain.” He glanced at her. Her expression was unreadable. “Think so?” Still nothing. At last he shrugged and climbed back down onto the slowly shifting deck.

  She waited.

  After a moment, there was a noise from inside the cabin. Some quick movement, and one sharp impact against the wall. Then silence.

  She waited.

  The xandu climbed out of the cabin and shook itself quickly, like a cat shedding water. It looked at her, at the well-worn pier, and the distance between them. And then, in one powerful leap, it bypassed all the obstacles. Its feet landed heavily on the thick planks by her side, toenails digging into the soft wood for balance.

  Wordlessly, she took a small bit of cloth from out of her right hip pocket. And wiped its two horns dry, of blood and sea-spray both.

  They walked to where the trees began, and made sure they were well out of sight before she mounted.

  Twenty-one

  Gerald Tarrant arrived promptly at sunset. His height and his bearing made him stand out from the locals, even at a distance: long, easy stride contrasted with their short-legged hustling, fluid grace set against their unrefined simplicity. Aristocratic, Damien thought. In the Revivalist sense of the word. He wondered why the adjective hadn’t occurred to him before.

  The horses had been on edge since being lowered like cargo from the eastern cliff wall; now, as Tarrant approached, they grew even more agitated. Damien moved closer to his mount and put his hand on its shoulder. Through the contact he could feel the animal’s fear, a primal response to dangers sensed but not yet comprehended.

  “I know just how you feel,” he muttered, stroking it.

  Gerald Tarrant was all politeness, as always. And as always, there was a dark undercurrent not quite concealed by his genteel facade. Stronger than before, Damien noticed. Or perhaps simply more obvious. Was that in response to the local fae, which would tend to intensify any malevolence? Or was it simply that the mask of good nature he normally assumed was allowed to slip a bit, now that he was close to home?

  Or your own fertile imagination working overtime, he cautioned himself. Senzei and Ciani aren’t having any problem with him.

  Not quite true. Senzei was polite, but Damien knew him well enough to read the added tension in his manner. The revelation of Tarrant’s origin hadn’t pleased him any more than it did Damien. But Ciani—

  With consummate grace, Tarrant walked to where she stood, took her hand in his, and bowed gallantly. Gritting his teeth, Damien was forced to acknowledge the man’s charm.

  “Watch her,” he muttered, and Senzei nodded. Tarrant’s ties to the Hunter should have been enough to make Ciani keep her distance—except that she was Ciani, and even before the accident she had loved knowledge for its own sake, without the “taint” of moral judgment. With a sinking feeling Damien realized just how drawn she would be to the Hunter, and to the mystery that he represented. It would mean little to her that he tortured human women as a pasttime, save as one more fact for her to devour. For the first time it occurred to him just what a loremaster’s neutrality meant, and it made his stomach turn. He had never considered it in quite that way before.

  Tarrant came over to where he stood beside the horses; instinctively he moved closer to his own mount, protecting it. Tarrant regarded the animals for a moment, nostrils flaring slightly as he tested their scent. Then he touched them lightly, one after the other. Just that. As contact was made with each animal it calmed, and when it was broken each lowered its nose to the planks of the deck, as if imagining that it was not at sea, but somewhere on its favorite grazing ground.

  “Not mine,” Damien warned him.

  “As you wish.” They were being approached by the boat’s captain and owner; the grubby mariner of the day before had been transformed by a shave and a change of clothing into something marginally neater, but no less obsequious. He clearly considered Tarrant the master of this expedition.

  “Welcome on board, your lordship.”

  “The wind is adequate?” Tarrant asked.

  “Excellent, your lordship. Of course.”

  “It will hold until we reach Morgot,” he promised.

  “Thank you, your lordship.”

  Tarrant glanced about the deck, taking in all of it: the travelers, their luggage, the newly docile mounts. And Damien, with his own horse nervously pawing the deck. He spared an amused, indulgent nod for the pair of them, then told the man briskly, “All’s in order. Take us out.”

  “Yes, your lordship.”

  Mooring lines were cast off, sails were raised to catch the wind, and they began to move. The piers gave way to open harbor, and then to the sea. Dark waves capped by moonlight, and a wake of blue-white foam behind them. When the ride was smooth enough for study, Senzei took out his maps again and began to go over them with Ciani. Trying to inspire her enthusiasm? Damien winced at the memory of how lively she had been only a handful of days ago. And he ached anew, for the loss of the woman he had come to know so well.

  After a time he moved to the bow of the small ship, and tried to make out the shape of what would be Morgot. But the island was too dark, or too small, or else too far away. For a moment he thought he saw mountains in the distance—but no, those must be low-lying clouds that fooled his eye. The northern mountains were too far away to be glimpsed from here.

  “You’re apprehensive.”

  He whipped about, a combat-trained reaction. How did the man manage to come up so close behind him without him being aware of it?

  “Shouldn’t I be?” he retorted stiffly.

  Gerald Tarrant chuckled. “Here, where no rakh-born demon can reach you? Remember the power of deep water, priest. They can’t even sense your trail, over this.”

  He moved so that he could look out over the waves without quite losing sight of Tarrant. Miles upon miles of water surrounded them, flowing over earth and earth-fae alike. Far beneath them, hidden from sight, the currents still flowed northward, but they clung to the surface of the earth’s crust. Here, above the waves, such power was all but inaccessible. Faeborn creatures usually avoided crossing bodies of water for that reason; shallow waters might rob them of their special powers, and deep enough waters might cost them their life.

  He wondered if the creature called the Hunter could survive such a crossing. Was that why he sent out his minions, his constructs, but never left the Forest himself? Or was his form simply so unhuman that the men who plied the straits for a living would respond poorly to his overtures—unlike their response to the elegant, courteous Gerald Tarrant?

  Easy, priest. One quest at a time. Let’s clean up the rakhlands first, then take a good look at the Forest. Too many battles at once will cost you everything.

  Black water, pale blue moons. Domina overhead, rising as they sailed northwards, and the whiter crescent of Casca counter-rising in the west: a heavenly counterpoint. For an instant he sensed a greater Pattern forming between them, as if the tides of light and gravity were cojoined with the rhythms of lunar rotation in a delicate, ever-shifting web of power. Then the moment was gone, and the night was merely dark.

  “Yes,” Tarrant whispered. “That was it.”

  Damien looked up at him.

  “Tidal fae. The most tenuous of all powers—and the most potent.” The silver eyes looked down on him, reflecting the cool blue of moonlight. “You’re a very fortunate man, Reverend Vryce. Few men ever see such a thing.”

  “It was beautifu
l.”

  “Yes,” Tarrant agreed. There was a strange hush to his voice. “The tidal power is that.”

  “Can it be worked?”

  “Not by such as you or I,” he responded. “Sometimes women can See it—very rarely—but no human I know of has ever mastered it. Too variable a power. Very dangerous.”

  Damien looked up at him. “You’ve tried,” he said quietly.

  “In my youth,” he agreed. “I tried everything. That particular experiment nearly killed me.” The pale eyes sparkled with some secret amusement. “Does it comfort you, to imagine I could die?”

  “We’re all mortal,” he said gruffly.

  “Are we?”

  “All of us. Even the faeborn.”

  “Certainly the faeborn. They lack the innovation—and thus the initiative—to make it otherwise. But men? With all this power waiting to be harnessed? Have you never dreamed of immortality, priest? Never once wondered what the fae might do for you, if you harnessed it to fend off death?”

  Something stirred inside Damien, that was half pride and half faith. It was the core of his strength, and he wielded it proudly. “I think you forget the God I serve,” he told Tarrant. “Those of my calling neither fear death, nor doubt their own immortality.”

  For a brief moment, there was something in the other man’s expression that was strangely human. Strangely vulnerable. And then the moment was gone and the cold, mocking mask was back in place. “Touché,” he muttered, with a slight bow. “I should know better than to fence rhetoric with your kind. My apologies.”

  And abruptly he left, for the company of the others. Damien just stared after him. Wondering what it was that he had seen in Tarrant’s face—so fleeting, but so very human—and wondering why it was that that brief hint of humanity chilled him more than all other facets of the man combined.

  Morgot. It took shape slowly on the horizon, a mountain of deep gray jutting up from the glassy blackness of the water. As they came closer, Damien could make out details, etched in moonlight: the jagged upper edge of a crater’s rim, the thick mass of vegetation clinging to its slopes, the place where the walls had collapsed into the sea, permitting entrance into the crater’s mouth. Dark, all of it dark. Was there no night life on Morgot?

  Then, as if in answer to his thoughts, a bright light flashed on one side of the entrance gap. It was followed seconds later by a matching light on the other side, of the same angle and intensity. The ship’s captain hurried toward the mirrored lamp that was affixed to the forward mast. He struck a match and applied it; flame surged upward in the glass enclosure, made triply brilliant by the mirrors behind it. Using shutters to focus its beam, he turned it toward the challenging lights at the caldera’s entrance. Short and long bursts of light in carefully measured proportion flashed across the water toward Morgot; a few seconds later, a similar code was returned. The captain muttered to himself as he interpreted Morgot’s messages, reciting weather warnings, customs codes, docking instructions. At last he seemed satisfied and shuttered the signal lantern.

  “Cleared to go in,” he muttered—then added, for his passengers’ benefit, “Risky passage at night. Could be worse, though.” He grinned. “Could be moonless.”

  He moved to the stern of the boat, then, and kicked the small furnace open. Inside, an orange fire hungrily consumed its store of fuel. He fed it more. Then, when he was satisfied that the heat was as it should be, and that the volume of steam thus produced was to his satisfaction, he engaged the boat’s small turbine. For some minutes more he remained by the mechanism, following each motion with his eye, reaffirming the patterns of how it worked in his own mind. That was necessary to counteract any doubts his passengers might have had about it, as well as the formless fears of the horses. The deep water beneath them meant that such fears couldn’t manifest too easily, but it never hurt to make sure. One good jinxer on board and the whole mechanism could blow sky high.

  When he was finally satisfied with the machine’s performance, he ordered the sails struck and steered them toward Morgot. Entering the gap in the crater wall was like entering a tunnel: dark, silent but for the sound of the turbine, claustrophobically close. The crater’s ragged edge towered over them on both sides, massive walls of igneous rock that seemed precariously balanced, dangerously topheavy. What little moonlight seeped down into the narrow passage only worsened the illusion, and Damien found himself holding his breath, all too aware of what the most minimal earthquake could do to such a structure. And earthquakes there must be in quantity, right at the heart of a collision zone. But then, just when it seemed that their boat wouldn’t make it through to the end, the gap widened. Enough so that another boat, traveling in the opposite direction, could pass them in safety. They came about a sharp jag in the wall—

  And Morgot’s interior unfolded before them in all its luminous splendor.

  Stars. That was Damien’s first impression: a universe filled with stars, upon whose light they floated. On all sides the crater’s walls rose up about them, its curving slopes lit by thousands upon thousands of tiny flickering lights: lanterns, hearth-lights, port markers, open fires. Lights flickered along the shoreline, lights lined the crater’s ridge, lights shone from every boat and pier—and all of it was reflected in the rippling harbor water, each light mirrored a thousand times over, each image dancing energetically to the rhythm of the waves. They were in a vast bowl filled with stars, floating in a dark summer sky. The beauty of it—and the disorientation—was breathtaking.

  He heard soft footsteps coming up behind him, guessed at their source. But not even Tarrant could make him turn from that glorious vision.

  “Welcome to the north,” the man said quietly.

  Colored lanterns marked each of the boats in the harbor; their captain fitted a colored gel to his own signal lantern, and red sparks danced in the water on all sides of them. “Not bad, eh? Best beer in the eastlands, to bet. It’s out of Jahanna.”

  “Jahanna?”

  “The Forest,” Senzei explained. He and Ciani had come up to join them at the bow, to watch the sea of scarlet stars part before their hull.

  “The Forest makes beer?”

  The captain grinned. “Can you think of something that place’d need more, besides a good drink?”

  The harbor was busy—so much so that Damien wondered if Earth hadn’t looked like this, once; a place where night contained no special dangers, where business—and pleasure—might be conducted at any hour. What was Earth like now? It had been half-covered in steel and concrete when the colony ships first left it. How many tens of thousands of years ago was that? The colonists had crossed a third of the galaxy in coldsleep to get here; how many Earth-years would that take? Damien knew the theories—and he also knew that any real knowledge of how interstellar travel had worked had been destroyed in the First Sacrifice. All they had left were guesses.

  The efficacy of sacrifice, the Prophet had written, is in direct proportion to the value of that which is destroyed.

  And Ian Casca damned well knew that, Damien thought bitterly. And understood its implications, all too well. If only they could have stopped him. . . . But there was no point in pursuing that train of thought, and he knew it. What was done was done. If mere regret could have brought the Earth ship back, it would have done that long ago.

  Wending his way through a bewildering array of light and shadow, the captain brought them unerringly to the proper pier, and came up against it with hardly a bump to jar their concentration. The horses looked up slowly, dazed, and Damien and his two companions moved to get them off the boat before their full faculties returned.

  When they had finished that job, Damien turned to pay the captain for their passage—and found Gerald Tarrant counting out coins from a small velvet purse. Gold, by the look of it.

  “That isn’t necessary—”

  “The Forest pays its servants well,” he said shortly. “Which is why such men are willing to serve us at inconvenient hours.” Then he looked
up at Damien; his pale eyes sparkled. “One of the reasons.”

  “Damien.” It was Ciani; she pointed along the pier with one hand, holding reins in the other. A man in uniform was walking toward them.

  “Police?”

  “Probably customs.” Tarrant tucked the small purse into his outer tunic, then opened that garment at the neck. The gold of the Forest medallion glinted conspicuously between layers of blue and black silk. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Is there anything you haven’t prearranged?” Damien said sharply.

  He seemed amused. “You mean, do I ever leave anything to chance?” He smiled. “Not by choice, priest.”

  He moved off to deal with the official. When he was out of hearing, Damien walked over to where Ciani was, and helped her fasten the travel packs back onto their mounts.

  “He’s interesting,” he said quietly. An opening.

  “And you’re jealous.”

  He stepped back and feigned astonishment.

  She tightened the last strap on her own mount’s harness, then turned to him. “Well, you are.” She was smiling—not broadly, not energetically, but with genuine humor. It’s a start, he thought. “Admit it.”

  And suddenly he wanted her. Wanted her as he had in Jaggonath, wanted any little bit of the old Ciani that was left inside her, wanted to take that bit and nurture it and coax it into life, until she could look at him and smile like that and her eyes would be the same, her expression would be what it once had been . . . and that precious feeling would be there again, binding them, making them oblivious to Tarrant and the rakh and all such mundane concerns.

  The sudden rush of emotion took his breath away; with effort he managed, “Tarrant?”

  “Deny it,” she dared him.

  “Jealous!”

  “Damien.” She stepped forward toward him, close enough to touch. And she put a hand to the side of his face, soft warm palm against the coarseness of a long day’s stubble. “Women know things like that. Did you think you were hiding it?” Her eyes sparkled—and it did seem that there was life in them, a hint of a younger, unviolated Ciani. “You’re not a subtle man, you know.”