And then a movement caught his eye, back the way he had come. And he turned, to see who had followed him from the camp, what rakhene business would disturb his solitude.
When he saw, he froze.
The figure stood with the moon to its back, so that all of its front was in shadow. Thick fabric fell from its shoulders, enveloping it like a cloak, rendering its form doubly invisible. Its face was no more than an oval of blackness, its body an amorphous shadow. But there was no mistaking its shape. Or its identity.
“I see that the lady is well,” the Hunter whispered.
Relief surged up inside him—and moral revulsion also, as fresh within him as the day on which he’d learned the Hunter’s name. The force of the admixture was stunning, and it rendered him utterly speechless. He was grateful that he had no weapon on him—glad that he was thus spared the trauma of having to sort out his feelings, having to decide whether or not this was an appropriate moment to remind the Hunter of their natural enmity.
At last he found his voice. “You survived. The sunlight. . . .”
“It’s all a question of degree, Reverend Vryce, as I told you. Fortunately, the Dark Ones lack such sophistication. Since they had no knowledge of any other option, they died.” His voice was a mere breath, hardly louder than the breezes of the night. It seemed also to be coarser than usual—but it was so hard to hear him at all that Damien couldn’t be certain of that. “I thought you would want to know that I lived. I thought you had that right.”
“Thank you. I’m . . . glad.”
“That I survived?” he asked dryly.
“That you didn’t die . . . like that.” He meant it sincerely and knew that could be heard in his voice. “I intended . . . something cleaner.”
“So you’ll still be coming after me when you leave the rakhlands. I regret that, priest. There’s a quality in you that I would hate to destroy. A certain . . . recklessness?”
“But you’ll manage it anyway.”
“If you try to kill me? With relish.”
“Then I’m sorry to ruin your sport,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for that particular pleasure.” He watched the dark figure carefully as he spoke, wondering what it was about it that seemed so strained, so very . . . wrong. “I’m going east.”
The voice was a whisper, no louder than the wind. “East is the ocean. Novatlantis. The deathlands.”
“And more than that, I’m afraid.” He nodded toward the camp; its fires were invisible in the distance. “The Lost Ones returned, you know. The males, that is. I think the risk appealed to them. They’re cleaning out the last of the Keeper’s warren, braving rock falls and tunnel collapse in order to hunt down her servants. For food, they told me. The last of the Dark Ones will be their winter sustenance.”
“That’s impossible,” the cloaked figure muttered. “Demonic flesh wouldn’t be—”
“It isn’t demonic flesh,” the priest said quietly. “Because the Dark Ones aren’t constructs.” He looked east: toward the mountains, toward the fallen citadel. “Hesseth found a body. We examined it. We thought we could determine what sort of construct it was, maybe find out how had come into being . . . only it wasn’t a construct at all. Hesseth was the first to suspect it, and Ciani confirmed it. The truth.” He drew in a deep breath, remembering that moment. Reliving it, as he spoke. “It was rakh,” he told Tarrant. His own voice little more than a whisper. “The Dark Ones are rakh.”
For a moment, Tarrant’s form was utterly still; Damien imagined he could hear the man’s thoughts racing, aligning fact with fact like the pieces of some vast puzzle. “Not possible,” he said at last. “That would mean—”
“Someone—or something—has been evolving them. Like you did to the Forest, Hunter. Only this time on a grander scale. This time with high-order intelligence.” He felt the tightness growing inside him again, the same restless tension he had felt when the truth first became apparent. His hands in his pockets tightened into fists. “Nature couldn’t do it. Nature wouldn’t. Take a tribe of intelligent, adaptable creatures, and bind them to the night like that? Suppress their own vitality, so that they could only live by torturing others? Those Dark Ones died when you exposed them, Hunter—and you didn’t. You, who’ve spent a thousand years avoiding the sun—whose very existence depends upon constant darkness—you survived. Why would Erna imbue one of her creatures with such a terrible weakness? What point could it possibly serve?”
“You think someone’s done it,” he whispered. “Deliberately.”
“There’s no question in my mind,” he said grimly. “And it would have to be on a massive scale, to succeed like that—the corruption of a whole environment. There’s nothing like that in the human lands. Remember what the rakh-girl said? They came from the east.”
“So you’re going after them.”
“Five expeditions have tried to cross that ocean. Two in your own age, three in the centuries after. None were ever heard from again. But that doesn’t mean that they failed, does it? For all we know, humankind managed to populate those regions . . . and gave birth to something which has warped the very patterns of Nature. I think that what we saw here . . . that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think we need to know what the hell is going on over there before something far worse comes over.” He looked at the dark figure before him, and felt something stir in him that was not quite revulsion. Not wholly abhorrence.
“Come with me,” he whispered. “Come east with me.”
The figure stiffened. “Are you serious? Do you know what you’re asking?”
“A chance to strike at your real enemy. The one behind all this; the force responsible. Doesn’t that appeal to you?”
“In the past few weeks,” Tarrant said darkly, “I have been bound, humiliated, starved, burned, blasted with sunlight, tortured in ways I will not describe, and nearly killed on several occasions. I, who have spent the last five hundred years building myself a safe refuge from such threats! Are you suggesting that I should court such disasters again? Truly, I shouldn’t have taken so much of your blood,” the dark figure mused. “The shortage clearly affected your brain.”
“You have no curiosity? Or even . . . hunger for vengeance?”
“What I have, Reverend Vryce, is a haven of absolute safety. A domain that I have built for myself, stone by stone, tree by tree, until the land itself exists only to indulge my pleasure. Should I give that up? Commit myself to the eastern ocean, with all the risk that entails? I’m amazed you want me with you in the first place.”
“Your power’s unquestionable. Your insight—”
“And it would keep me out of trouble, eh? For as long as I was with you, there would be no hunting in the Forest. No innocent women suffering for my pleasure. Isn’t that part of it? Isn’t that how your conscience would deal with the fact of my continued existence, when you’ve sworn on your honor to kill me?”
Despite himself, Damien smiled. “It has its appeal.”
“Let me tell you what that ocean means, to my kind. Thousands upon thousands of miles of open water, too deep for the earth-fae to penetrate. Do you understand? The very force that keeps me alive, that I require for most of my Workings, would be inaccessible. Which means I couldn’t help you, or myself, if anything happened. One good eruption out of Novatlantis when we’re in that region and no power of mine or yours could do anything to save us. Why do you think no one crosses that water? Why do you think it was only attempted five times, in all the years that man has been here? And, I would be all but helpless. At your mercy. Do you think that appeals to me? Such vulnerability is unthinkable, for one of my kind.”
“I gave you my word before. You know I was good for it. Try me,” he dared him.
The figure stared at him in silence for a moment; unable to see the Hunter’s expression, Damien was unable to read its cause.
“I thought you traveled alone,” Tarrant said at last.
“Yes. Well.” He looked back toward th
e camp. “Hesseth’s going. She insisted. You should have seen her when we learned the truth, when she realized that her own species was being corrupted. . . .”
“And the lady Ciani?”
His expression tightened; it took him a moment to find the proper words. “This is her life’s work,” he told the Hunter. “The rakhlands. Their culture. I didn’t know that before because she didn’t have the memory . . . but then, I didn’t know so much about her.”
For a moment there was silence, then: “I’m sorry,” the figure said softly.
He forced a shrug. “It was good while it lasted. That’s the most you can ask for, isn’t it?” He forced his hands to unclench inside his pockets. Forced his voice to be steady. “We’re from two different worlds, she and I. Sometimes you forget that. Sometimes you pretend it doesn’t matter. But it’s always there.” He looked up at the figure, toward where his face would be. Like all of him, it was sheathed in darkness. “There’s something growing in the east,” he said. “Something very powerful, and very evil. Something that’s had both the time and the patience to rework the very patterns of this planet, until Nature was forced to respond to it. Don’t you want to know what that is? Don’t you want to make it pay for what it did to you?”
“Set evil against evil, is that it? In the hope that they might destroy each other.”
“You were the one who recommended that. Or don’t you remember?”
“I was very young, then. Inexperienced. Naive.”
“You were the voice of my faith.”
“Past tense, Reverend Vryce. Things have changed. I have changed.” The figure stepped back, breathing in sharply as it did so. In pain? “Years ago, I decided that I would sacrifice anything and everything in the name of survival. My blood. My kin. My humanity. Should I render all that meaningless now, by courting death at this late age? I think not.”
Damien shrugged. “We’ll be leaving from Faraday if you change your mind. In late March or April, probably; it will take at least that long to work out the practical details. I’ll save you a private berth,” he promised. “With no windows, and a lock on the door.”
For a long moment, the dark figure just stared at him. Though the silver eyes were lost in shadow, Damien could feel them fixed on him.
“What makes you think you know me so well?” the Hunter asked hoarsely. “What makes you think you can anticipate me, in ways that go against my nature?”
“I know who you were,” Damien answered. “I know what that man stood for. And I’m willing to bet that somewhere in the heart of that malignant thing you call a soul is a spark of what that man was—and the boundless curiosity that drove him. I think your hunger to know is every bit as great as your hunger for life, Neocount. I’m offering you knowledge—as well as vengeance. Are you telling me that combination has no appeal?”
The figure lifted one arm, so that the folds of his cloak fell free of it. “Appeal or no,” he whispered. “The price is too high.”
Moonlight shimmered on the wetness of bloody flesh, on muscle and veins stripped bare by the force of the sun’s assault. Sharp bone edges poked through strands of shrunken flesh, their tips charred black by fire and crusted with dried blood. The fingers were no more than seared bits of meat, strung together along the slender phalanges like some macabre shish kebob. If a scrap of silk or wool adhered to that flesh, or any other bit of clothing, it had been so torn and so bloodied that it was now indistinguishable from the man’s own tissue.
“Enough is enough,” the Hunter whispered. The arm dropped down, and the cloak fell to cover it. The voice echoed with pain, and with the soft gurgle of blood. “The answer is no, Reverend Vryce. And it will stay no, through all the years that you remain alive.” He gestured toward the distant camp, across the field of spotless snow. “You may consider the life of these tribes my parting gift, if you like—I had once sworn to kill them all, for their audacity in binding me.”
“A few less souls to darken my conscience?” he asked sharply.
“Exactly.”
The Hunter bowed. And the effort that it took was so apparent, his pain throughout the motion so obvious, that Damien winced to see it. How many muscles had been burned to ragged strands, that a man would require for such a gesture? How much blood was being made to flow, for that last show of elegance?
“Good luck, Reverend Vryce,” the Hunter whispered. “I suspect you’ll need it.”
Epilogue
Deep in the bowels of night’s keep, in a chamber reserved for the Lord of the Forest, a figure lay still atop a numarble table. There, where the sun would never shine its baleful light, where earthquakes had never yet disturbed the carefully warded walls, the body of the Hunter lay immersed in dark fae, purple power clinging to his death-pale skin. Utterly cold. Utterly lifeless. Silk robes spilled over the sides of the polished table like a waterfall frozen in motion, their contours hinting at the items that lay beneath. For if this castle was a duplicate of Merentha’s citadel in every other regard, so was its underground workroom a dark reflection of the Neocount’s original—and the straps which had bound Almea Tarrant in her dying adorned the polished worktable like some macabre ornament, now parted to receive the Hunter’s body.
Power: not weakened by sunlight—or even moonlight—and not compromised by the presence of some local primitive mind. Pure power, deep and swift-working—a death-hungry power, that had been building in these caverns for longer than man could remember. It gathered around him like a blanket—a shroud—a barrier against life—and any observer would be hard pressed to say whether the flesh thus protected was cradled in the true chill of death, or in some macabre facsimile.
In that place where no sound had been heard for so many days, footsteps now resounded. Soft and measured, slowly approaching. There was a rattle at the door as the great lock was opened, then the slow creak of steel hinges overweighed by the mass of their burden. Fae-light shimmered on an albino’s brow, purple light reflecting bright magenta in the pigment-free depths of his eyes. He regarded the figure that lay before him, then bowed, ever so slightly. And reached out a tendril of his own dark will, to touch the currents that guarded that motionless form.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with infinite slowness, the pale eyelids opened. The dark fae parted as the Lord of the Forest spread his fingers, flexing his hands into motion once more. Stretching his arms, likewise. After a moment he levered himself to a sitting position—and though he winced as though in pain while doing so, it was clear from his movements that the worst of the sun-spawned damage had been repaired.
“Forgive me,” the albino said. “I know you didn’t want to be disturbed—”
“How long has it been?”
“Nearly a long month, Excellency.”
“So long.” He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath slowly, as if savoring the air. “You wouldn’t bother me without a reason, Amoril, I know that. What is it?”
“You have a petitioner, my lord.”
The pale eyes shot open. Their depths sparkled violet in he fae-light. “Indeed? What manner of petitioner?”
“A demon, Excellency. High-order, if I read him right. He said that you would know him, and respect his business. He gave his name as Calesta.”
For a moment there was silence. Then the Hunter said, softly, “I know him. And I think I know his business, as well.”
“Is he the one you fought, in the rakhlands?”
He swung his legs over the side of table, and tested their strength against the floor. “He was a symbiote of the one that I fought. And that kind can’t last long, without some kind of human partner.” He chuckled softly. “I’m surprised I still rate that designation.”
“Partner?”
“Human.”
“You think he wants to link himself to you.”
“Let’s say I consider it possible.”
“After what he did?”
“Demons aren’t whole people, Amoril. Like animals they know only
blind hunger and a channel to the hand that feeds them. And the desire to survive, as passionate as anything humans might experience.” He eased himself onto his feet, until he was standing free of any support. “Calesta’s symbiote is dead. His enemy lives. It’s to his advantage to placate that power which might still destroy him—and perhaps even court it. Demons rank themselves according to such alliances.”
“And would you ally with him?”
The Hunter’s expression grew dark. “I haven’t forgotten what he did to me. But we’re in my realm now, playing by my rules. Let’s see how well he adapts to that, shall we?” He brushed at the silk of his shirt sleeve, binding enough dark fae to smooth out the wrinkles. “Have him come to the audience chamber, and await me there.” And he warned, “I may leave him waiting some time.”
The albino bowed. “Excellency.”
Darkness. Absolute. He let it fill his eyes and his heart for a moment, let it seep deep into his soul to where the sun-born wounds still throbbed. And then he let himself See, and Hear, and breathe in the power of the Forest. A symphony of power rising up out of the earth, all dark and cold and rich with his signature. So beautiful, he thought. So very beautiful. He felt the presence of the trees that dwelled there, remade to serve his special need; the predators that stirred above and below the earth, responsive to his will; the blood-filled life that hovered at the edges of his domain, all restlessness and greed and human recklessness. Their nearness awakened a hunger in him so intense that for a minute it seemed the whole Forest was filled with their blood, and all its air was ripe with the smell of their fear. And the music of their mortality, almost painful in its intensity.
How long ago had it been since last he’d hunted? He ached for the sweet taste of a woman’s terror, for the boundless pleasure of hunting in a land where all life responded to his will—where the land itself could be reshaped, if he so desired it, to force his prey back upon her own path, into his waiting arms . . . he shivered in hunger, just thinking of it. Too many days. Too many nights of rakhene fear and disembodied blood and a need so powerful that it had nearly overwhelmed him. Now there was no need for him to deny himself. Now he could choose his prey and set her loose in these woods, and feed as his nature demanded. Wash his soul clean with killing, until the taint of his contact with humankind was nothing more than an unpleasant memory.
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