Not a good omen, he thought. Not good at all.
Tarrant returned on the fourth night, and it was clear that whatever slaughter he’d indulged in had renewed both his flesh and his spirit. His pale eyes gleamed with the subtle malevolence that Damien had learned to know and hate in the rakhlands, and his movements were a flawless admixture of arrogance and grace. But for all that he despised the Hunter’s facade of dark elegance, Damien was glad to see it back in place. The change meant recovery and recovery meant power—possibly more than Tarrant had wielded since landing in this twisted realm—and power was what they needed right now, pure and simple.
He took his place among them as though he had never been gone, and made no attempt to explain how he had passed his absent nights. Nor did Damien ask. If he had learned nothing else in his months with the Hunter, it was that there were some things he didn’t want to know.
The Neocount looked about the camp with discerning eyes—and looked about the currents as well, with hardly more effort—and then said, “You’ve been here a good day at least. I assume that means you’ve found the valley.”
“Over the ridge.” Damien nodded toward the east. “Not a pretty sight.”
The Hunter went where he indicated, and was soon lost from sight. Damien took the small pot of water from over the fire and placed it to one side, dropping in a few tee pellets. It could be a long wait.
The tee was fully brewed and he’d drunk down half of it by the time the Hunter returned. Tarrant reentered the circle of the fire without a word and sat, lowering himself with a grace and ease that Damien hadn’t seen in a long time.
Damn him. He must have killed a lot.
“What do you think?” Hesseth asked him.
“First tell me what you two saw.”
They looked at each other; at last it was Damien who answered. “A nasty, damp, dismal place with little sunlight and a host of terrain unpleasantries. You’d probably like it,” he added.
“Actually, I do. There’ll be fewer hours of direct sunlight in those depths—if any at all—which means that I can stay with you longer. If the mist holds steady throughout the day it might even be possible—in an emergency—for me to walk abroad at noon. That’s no small thing, you know.”
“I hadn’t thought of it,” Damien admitted.
“There’s no scent of our enemy in the currents, which either means that he hasn’t anticipated our taking this route, or that the new current doesn’t afford him access to us. Hopefully both. Given the force and the direction of the flow, I should be able to Obscure our progress from his eyes with little effort.”
“What about the Terata?” Hesseth asked him.
He seemed to hesitate. “I saw no trace of any creature I could label as such ... but I’m bound by the same basic ignorance that you are. Until we either get closer to them or have better knowledge of what to look for, I don’t think my skills will be much help. I did catch the scent of human life, however.”
“Human?” Damien was startled. “I thought there were no people here.”
“So did I. Apparently we were wrong.”
“What kind of people?” Hesseth demanded.
“Hard to say at this point. But it’s a sizable group, I do know that. Several dozen at least.”
“Living down there?”
“It would appear so.”
“That implies that the Terata can’t be as terrible as we’d heard.” Hesseth’s tone was one of reason. “If they were, the humans would be dead or gone.”
The Hunter’s eyes fixed on her. In the darkness, pupils distended, they were black. Utterly black. Not merely a color, but a manifestation of emptiness.
“You saw what your people became here,” he said softly. “You witnessed what they did. Are you saying that whatever force molded the rakh couldn’t also mold humans, if it wanted to?”
“Do you think that’s the case here?” Damien asked him.
“I think that something is very wrong in this region, and to pass early judgment on anything-even our own species—is a mistake. I saw signs of faeborn creatures in the currents, but what does that mean? Any group of humans will create its own monsters in time. How can we assess their nature from here?”
“You sound more curious than afraid.”
The Neocount chuckled. “Does that surprise you?”
“No.” Despite himself he smiled. “I guess not.”
“We are what we are, Reverend Vryce. And I was a scholar long before I became ... what I am.” A faint smile creased the corners of his lips. “Scholar enough to know what you fear most of all, Reverend. Tonight I’ll Work the weather as best I can, so that tomorrow the valley mist is lifted. If that’s possible,” he amended. “That will make it better for you, won’t it? If you have clear sight of your enemy’s turf?”
“I’d prefer it.”
“You should start toward the valley well before dusk. It will take you some hours to find a safe path down, and then time to descend. I’ll meet you at the bottom.” Though he was speaking to Damien, his eyes were fixed on Hesseth.
For a moment he was silent. The insects about them chirruped softly, to the accompanying crackle of the flames.
“The Kierstaad Protectorate,” he said at last, “is controlled by rakh.” His voice was soft, ever so soft, as though somehow he felt that excessive volume might wound her. “As is the one to the north of it. They’re nearly human in form, but their soul is clearly rakhene; the fae responds to them as it never would to a man.”
Damien thought he saw her shudder.
“Their disguise is supported by human sorcery. I don’t know the mechanics of it—I didn’t dare get that close—but the scent is unmistakable. And I think....” He hesitated. Glanced at Damien. “It was very similar to what I sensed by the crevasse. The same foreign touch.”
Hesseth drew in a quick breath, hissing. “Why?” she demanded. Of the air. Of no one. “What’s the purpose of it all?”
“Clearly they mean to control this continent,” the Hunter mused.
For a moment she just stared at him. Trying to absorb what he had said, with all its implications. “Maybe in the south,” she admitted. “Maybe ... although that shouldn’t have turned them into monsters. But what about the north? What about the Matrias? They have control of the Church hierarchy, but what good does it do them? They still have to live among humans, hiding their own identity. Is that really power?”
“Power enough to affect human society,” Damien pointed out. “The Church here has its own record of atrocities. Maybe by a slow manipulation—”
“Are you saying that my people are responsible for the crimes of humans?” Her amber eyes flashed angrily.
“I’m saying that in addition to rakhene power, the one pattern we’ve seen here—over and over—is degradation of spirit. Does it really matter which species serves as a tool, if some master hand is at work? We’re all equally vulnerable.”
She sat back, and forced her bristling fur back into place. Damien thought he heard her growling softly.
“An interesting concept,” Tarrant mused. “It may give us our first real insight into the nature of our enemy.”
“You think he feeds on degradation?”
He shook his head. “The rakh have been affected, and faeborn demons don’t feed on that species. No, it’s got to be more than that ... but this is a start. Any common link must be a clue to our enemy’s purpose.”
“And therefore to his identity,” Damien added.
“And therefore how to kill him,” Hesseth hissed.
The sheer venom in her voice startled Damien. Not because it surprised him, or because he hated their unknown enemy any less than she did, but because for the first time he was hearing her hatred in the context of other patterns. And what he heard disturbed him.
Are we changing also? Is that the price we pay to come hers? Are we allowing this place to degrade our spirits as surely as it did with the rakh, and with my Church?
What ha
ppens if we reach the enemy at last, only to discover that in the end we are no better than his other puppets?
“Damien?” It was Hesseth.
“I’m all right,” he managed. But he wasn’t, and he knew she could hear it in his voice. “Something personal.”
“Indeed,” the Hunter said softly. He didn’t need to look at Tarrant to know that the man’s eyes were fixed on him, and that he was studying Damien with more than mere sight. “A night of prayer would do you good, Reverend Vryce. It would cleanse your spirit.”
He looked up sharply at Tarrant, expecting to see mockery in those pale eyes. But to his surprise there was none. Instead he saw something that might, in another man, be called compassion.
Was that possible? Had so much of the Hunter’s veneer been stripped away by their recent experience that he was capable of such an emotion? His cruel persona had been forged and tempered in the solitude of the Forbidden Forest, where his only companions were demons and wraiths and a few carefully chosen men who had likewise sacrificed their emotional birthright. Was it being worn so thin by the constant presence of humanity that a hint of the original Neocount could begin to peek through?
We’re making you more human, he mused.
The thought was strangely chilling.
He took out the Fire near morning, when the skies were a muted gray and Tarrant had left them in search of a daylight haven. The thick layer of varnish that protected the crystal vial had dulled, cataractlike, to a milky finish; the light that shone from within was hardly enough to illuminate his hand, and its miraculous warmth was nearly intangible even when he closed his palm around it.
But it was faith. Pure faith. Faith distilled into material substance, that had witnessed centuries of conflict. The faith of a million souls in the mission of his Church. The faith of a thousand priests in their last battle against evil. The faith of a single Patriarch in the one priest he sent east, believing—in his own words—that a single man might succeed where an army of men would fail.
May you be right, Holy Father. May I be worthy of your trust.
He prayed.
Rain fell in the morning, a brief thundershower. Soon after that the wind shifted direction, gusting with enough power that Damien felt uneasy about riding too near the edge of the steep granite drop. Whatever that combination amounted to down in the valley, it did manage to thin out the mist until it was no more than a translucent cloud. Through it, between the treetops, Damien could make out brown-black earth and an occasional clump of green. A gap in the trees revealed water—a river?—that snaked along the valley’s floor, gleaming blackly between the evergreen branches. Not a pleasant land, but not overtly threatening either; after they had spent a good hour studying it through Hesseth’s telescope, Damien felt immeasurably better about what lay ahead.
Getting down there was another matter. As they rode along the upper edge of the valley wall—hundreds of feet above the valley floor—Damien realized that descent might well prove impossible. The steep slope was mostly rock, which offered no sure footing for man or horse. Occasionally there were sections that sloped down more gently, or hills that abutted the valley wall from below, but none of those extended more than half the distance they needed, and all of them ended in steep granite inclines that would have been a challenge to a skilled mountain climber. Not to mention a skilled mountain climber with a horse.
But there had to be a way. The maps convinced him of that. The gap they had ridden through was labeled a pass, and what was a pass but a way through the mountains? If this course was useless, if it truly dead-ended, then no one would have assigned it that designation. Right? Logic said there had to be a way through, close enough that they could find it. Right?
He worked hard on believing that. It gave his mind something to focus on besides the terrain, which offered an unpleasant choice between heavily wooded slopes and sheer granite flats. More often than not they chose the latter, which meant riding dangerously close to the edge of that vast chasm. The horses seemed to prefer it to the woods, though, and Damien decided to indulge them. Trust the animals to know their own capacity.
At last, in the late afternoon, they found what looked like a moderately safe descent. Crumbled earth and fragmented granite offered a slope that was daunting but not downright suicidal, and they decided to try it. Half-sliding, the horses struggled for balance as they negotiated the treacherous slope. Their movement set rockfalls in motion that sculpted the mountainside anew even as they descended, and more than once the animals nearly went down. At one point the black horse began to limp and Damien had to stop to Heal it, knitting its damaged tendon together while gravel trickled past him like a river. All in all, he thought, the only thing worse than trying to descend this slope would be trying to climb it. Thank God that whatever happened they would not be coming back this way.
It took them more than an hour to reach the halfway point. By then the sun was already sinking below the crest of the western mountain, and the Core was right behind it. At least there would be stars for a while to guide them. By the light of the galaxy they fought for their descent, sometimes riding the horses and sometimes leading them. Finally, exhausted, they came to solid ground at last. By then even the Core had set, and Damien breathed deeply as he cast a last glance back toward the deadly slope, now cloaked in deepening shadow.
Tarrant was waiting for them.
Wordlessly Damien dismounted and handed him the reins of the Forest steed. He glanced up at Hesseth to see if there was any need to explain the arrangements—or to argue them—but clearly she had come to the same decision that he had. He swung up behind her with considerably more care than he had with Tarrant. She was small and fit easily in the slope of the saddle before him. There was a scent about her fur that was musky and warm and not unpleasant; he hoped that she found his own human odor at least tolerable. Between her acute sense of smell and his own semiclean state he had his doubts—he had done the best he could under the circumstances, but it was hard to stay truly clean when your changes of clothing were buried in a saddlepack more than fifty miles back—but in the name of diplomacy she made no comment about it. God bless her for that.
Silently, filled with foreboding, they descended the last mossy slope and entered the misty forest.
The valley mist wasn’t as bad as it might have been, thanks to Tarrant, but combined with the midnight’s darkness it had the effect of isolating them from the world outside. The few stars which were left were hidden from sight, and even the treetops overhead were thoroughly obscured by the drifting shroud of fog. Damien lit a lantern, which illuminated the ground about their feet but also the mist itself, so that it was impossible to see more than twenty or thirty feet in any direction. It was as if a shell had been erected around them, a perfect sphere of translucent substance that glimmered pale amber, reflecting the lamplight. It was uncomfortably claustrophobic, and dangerously limiting.
And if it’s this bad now, he thought as they rode, just wait till Tarrant’s conjured weather passes. This is probably heaven by contrast.
In silence they made their way, slowly and ever so carefully. Though normally Damien didn’t worry about mere predators—most larger animals shied away from humans, unless hunger made them desperate—their lack of visibility made him feel particularly helpless. He noticed that Hesseth was tense between his arms, and her ears pricked forward at the slightest sound, their tufted tips scanning the path ahead, beside, behind them. Only Tarrant seemed to be taking it all in his stride, but Damien knew him well enough now to guess at the tension that lay coiled tight inside him. The Hunter hated what he couldn’t control.
At last Tarrant signaled for them to stop. When Hesseth’s horse had pulled up alongside his own he dismounted, then knelt to touch the ground with one slender finger. Testing the currents. Tasting the earth-fae. Damien Worked his own sight and saw a powerful northerly flow, sparkling with alien secrets. He didn’t attempt a Knowing, but drank in the vision in its pure, uninterpreted fo
rm. Was this how adepts saw the world? Or was the richness of abstract power somehow translated into meaningful form in their brains, so that no formal Knowing was necessary?
“Odd.” Tarrant stood; his eyes were still fixed on the ground. “Very odd.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“I’m not sure you should.” The Neocount bit his lip as he studied the currents; Damien could see his pale eyes tracing the earth-fae’s motion, again and again. “There’s something there. Sorcery, I think. The trace is very faint; I can hardly make it out. And yet....”
When he didn’t finish the thought, Damien prompted him, “What?”
“By sorcery I mean that someone is consciously altering the fae. And yet, the patterns are not what I would associate with Working.” He looked up at Damien. “Not with a normal Working.”
“Rakh?” Hesseth demanded.
He shook his head. “No. The flavor of it is decidedly human.”
“Or demonic,” Damien said quietly.
“Yes,” the Hunter whispered. “That is the other possibility.”
“I don’t understand,” Hesseth protested.
Tarrant studied the currents again as he spoke; it was almost as if he were addressing the earth-fae, not her. “Demons are born of humankind. They feed on humans, they manipulate human fantasies, some even define themselves in human terms. Their fae-signature is therefore very similar to that of humans ... sometimes so much so that it’s hard to tell the two apart.”
“But demons don’t do sorcery, do they?” Damien struggled to remember exactly what the textbooks said. “They don’t Work the fae like we do. Right? So their signature would have to differ in that respect.”
For a moment the Hunter said nothing. Then he said, very quietly, “There is one kind that does. I think. The trace might look like that, if one of them were active here.”
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