“One of who?”
The Hunter seemed about to speak, then shook his head instead. “Not until I know for sure. But if it is that....” There was an odd tone to his voice, that Damien was hard put to identify. “It would ... complicate things.”
And then he realized what the tone was. Fear. The Hunter was afraid.
“You want to go on?” he asked. Suddenly not so sure himself.
Tarrant nodded. “It’s still far off. Perhaps if we get closer I can read its source. Let’s hope.”
He swung himself back up onto his horse’s back. Damien expected him to move his mount forward, and prepared to urge his own horse to follow. But Tarrant turned back to them instead, twisting about in the black leather saddle.
“There’s something else,” he told them. “Something I don’t understand at all. I sensed very clearly that there was human life in this valley, somewhere to the south of us. That trace should be growing stronger as we travel toward it. A simple Knowing should reveal it.” He shook his head in frustration; his fine hair, mist-dampened, glistened in the lamplight. “It’s not there now,” he muttered.
“What? The trace?”
“Anything. Any sign of humanity. It’s as if no other humans were in these woods—as if no other humans have ever been in these woods. But I know that’s not the case. It simply can’t be.”
“An Obscuring?” Damien asked. “If a band of hostile humans wanted to hide themselves—”
“No.” He shook his head sharply, almost angrily. “Even that would leave a trace. A kind of echo, which should still be discernible. No, it’s as if ... as if they ceased to exist, somehow. As if they ceased to ever have existed.”
“Are you sure of that?” Hesseth demanded.
He glared at her. “Do you doubt my skills?”
“You were misled in the rakhlands,” she reminded him.
The Hunter’s expression darkened. “I’m not a fool, you know. I do learn from my mistakes.” Anger flared coldly in his eyes. “I’m not saying there isn’t more to this than meets the eye. If human sorcery were a simple affair, then any idiot could guard himself against it. Obviously, anything I see in the currents might have been put there for our benefit. But all Workings leave some mark, even a misKnowing; now that I know to look for such things, I’m hardly likely to miss it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. By the tension in her body Damien could tell just how much those words were costing her. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Obscure us if you can,” he said shortly. And he kneed his horse into sudden motion, so that it practically leapt ahead into the mist.
They traveled for over an hour through the fog-shrouded woodland, until their hair and their clothing and the horse’s flesh beneath them were all damp from the omnipresent moisture. With the day’s miserly warmth long gone from the earth the air grew more and more chill, the mist more and more icy. They moved at a slow but steady pace, and Damien and Hesseth took turns walking so as not to push their communal horse past endurance. If the day had been pleasant, the exercise would have been welcome; as it was, he was glad when at last Tarrant signaled for a break.
He brushed the horse down a bit, more to reassure it than for any other reason; there was no real hope of getting the animal dry. It was more a ritual of normalcy than anything else, a chore so automatic that his mind could wander while his muscles worked. Trying to untangle Tarrant’s words in his own mind, to come up with an explanation of who or what might be ahead of them ... but if the Neocount of Merentha couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation, how could he hope to?
We need more information, he thought. And he prayed that the information would come to them before the danger with which it was surely allied.
They rested and ate in silence, and in silence they remounted and resumed their course. Tarrant led the way. Damien sensed a growing unease in him—dare he call it fear?—but he had no way to address the issue, no safe way to draw him out on it. They would just have to function in ignorance until the Neocount decided that it was time to share his fears.
The forest changed as they traveled farther south. Subtly at first, one species of tree giving way to another, one type of clinging vine giving way to its cousin. It was hard to say exactly where or when the flora began to seem threatening, or to pinpoint what was wrong with it. All the elements of a normal forest were in place, along with the smell of rot and a hundred varieties of mold that the omnipresent mist fostered. If anything, it should be a surprise that plant life growing under these conditions should seem so normal.
Now vines proliferated, and they were not the healthy green vines of home. Thick ropy stems twined about the trunks of trees, sprouting spongy leaves that looked like some kind of fungus. They were not even green, these vines, but a kind of ghostly white that shimmered wetly in the party’s lamplight. Damien went out of his way to see that the mare didn’t touch them. In some places they had grown so thick that a mat of tangled vines hung between the trees like sheets, and small mantled insects scurried in between the knots and the funguslike leaves. Toward the treetops the vines took on a green cast, but that was because they had sucked the color from their hosts; dead branches swayed in the chill night breeze, moldy bark fingers with white leaves at their tips. The whole of it reeked of rot and decay, and Damien had no doubt that thousands of tiny scavengers were eating their way through the dying trees’ flesh, so that all that was left in the end was a ghostly shell, a husk of dead bark, a grotesque trellis for the clinging vines.
It’s just nature, he told himself. Species have adapted to meet the special demands of this place. But that didn’t seem right, somehow. Tarrant’s Forest had been horrible, but all the elements were interlocked in perfect biological harmony; you could sense that balance, even though you were repelled by its tenor. But here ... there was too much death, he decided. Too much decay. It was as if Nature’s precious balance had somehow been overburdened, as if something had been introduced or removed—or changed—that threw the whole system out of kilter. What would the vines feed on when all their hosts were dead? They rode past dense mats of tangled vines, that covered their trees like a blanket. What happened when that growth became so thick that sunshine could no longer reach the host tree’s leaves? If one listened closely enough, could one hear the sounds of a forest dying? The moans of an ecosystem in collapse? The thought of it made him shiver, so that Hesseth twisted around to see what was wrong with him. Her expression was grim, and the thin ridge of scar tissue which was all that remained of her inner eyelid was drawn in as far is it would go. So. She felt it, too. There was some comfort in that, at least.
They rode for hours, with brief stops so that he and Hesseth and the horses could eat, and so that Tarrant could study the currents. The rotting forest seemed to close in about them as soon as they stopped, for which reason Damien and Hesseth ate as quickly as they could, and took no more rest than was absolutely necessary. Even Tarrant seemed uncomfortable in this place. And when you really thought about it, Damien reflected, didn’t that make sense? The Hunter was a creature of order and precision, whose creative genius had embraced not only man’s faith, but nature in all her vast complexity. Was there any greater ugliness than this, an ecosystem corrupted past saving?
After a time—no telling how long, he had lost all sense of measuring the hour—the Hunter turned east. They followed him without question, trusting in his sense of purpose. Overhead the vine-blanket thickened, and spongy tendrils hung down low enough to brush their hair as they passed. The sour smell of decay was nigh on overwhelming, even to Damien’s merely human senses; he could only guess at how much Hesseth was suffering. Lower and lower the tangled masses hung, until at last Tarrant had to draw his sword and cut a path through them in order to continue. The coldfire light of the Worked steel was reflected by the mists about them, turning the whole world a cold silver-blue. Tendrils of vine shattered like glass as he cut through them, tangled mats becoming shards of ice in an
instant, glittering like stars as they fell.
And then they were in the open again. Tarrant cut a tunnel through the last thick tangle—a veritable wall of white vines and fungus, with mold clinging to every available surface—and then the vines were behind them, and the trees also, and the party looked out upon an expanse of water so clean and fresh that just looking at it made Damien feel renewed.
Tarrant nodded toward the water. “I thought that under the circumstances the river might offer you the best campsite.” His choice of words made Damien glance up at the sky. No good; there was still enough mist to keep him from seeing how exactly dark the sky was. But Tarrant’s manner made it clear that dawn was coming, and in this place it would take him some time to find a suitable shelter.
“You sure you wouldn’t rather stay with us?”
He hesitated. “There’s no shelter for me here. I regret.”
He chose for some reason of his own not to transform on the spot, but made his way back toward the midnight confines of the forest. Damien watched as the vine-tunnel swallowed him, then reluctantly turned his attention to making camp. He was worried. Very worried. He had made the offer more as a gesture than as a serious suggestion; he knew the Hunter well enough to know how much he valued his daytime privacy. If Tarrant would actually prefer to stay with them, if he would prefer Damien’s presence to whatever was out there ... that was a sobering concept, indeed.
Daylight. Sort of. The mist turned a deep gray, then a dingy half-gray, but got no lighter. Between the steep walls of the valley and the fog that attended its floor, the sunlight was hard pressed to penetrate. At noon the swirling fog turned white at last, but it was only a brief respite; within an hour the world was gray once more. It reminded Damien of the false dawn of the arctic region, where the late autumn sun teased the eye once a day but never fully rose. It was depressing there, too, he remembered.
There were things that came out of the fog, faint wisps of faeborn life that drifted through the airborne miasma like some ethereal fish. They had no solidity, these creatures, and their forms were as changeable as the mist, but lack of material substance made them no less dangerous. Evidently Tarrant’s presence had kept them at bay during the night, but now—with the light so dim that it could barely hurt them—they drifted toward Damien with the blind instinct of demonic hunger, sensing in his flesh and his human vitality a feast beyond all measure. God alone knew what part of him they wanted; he didn’t stop to figure it out. When two strokes of his sword convinced him that solid weapons were of no use in this case—they passed through the fog-wraiths with little more effect than a wire passing through smoke—he resorted to a Working. He drove them back as far as he could with the threat of a Dispelling, then crafted crude wards to keep them from coming back. His hands shook as he Worked, for he knew how risky it was to spend so much time immersed in the currents; an earthquake now would fry his brain before he knew what hit him. But at last he was done, and he took the eight stones he had chosen and placed them about the circumference of the camp in a rough circle. The coarse rocks were far from ideal for ward-making—the best ward hosts were carefully inscribed, precisely made, symbolically powerful items—but they’d have to do for now. Each of them had been bound to a pattern that would tap into the earth-fae if one of the demonlings tried to approach, and would use that power to drive them away. Since rocks had no brains, the earth-fae could surge all it liked and not do them an ounce of harm.
Hesseth watched him in some amusement, but spared him any derisive comment. Which was good. Because the damned things hadn’t gone after her, had they?
Only when he was done and had rejoined her by the fire did she venture, “He must have been right, you know.”
“Who?”
“Tarrant. About there being humans here.”
He looked back toward the forest, where the last of the faecreatures had fled. “There’d have to be, wouldn’t there? And a lot of them, too. It takes more than a single mind to manifest numbers like that.” Now that the creatures were gone it was hard to visualize them, but he tried. How odd they were ... and how utterly logical that they should exist. “It’s fear of the mist,” he reflected aloud. “That’s what spawned them. Fear of the mist and what it hides. The humans here must have come from outside this valley, and they found the mist threatening. So that when their negative emotions began to sculpt the earth-fae, it took that form. Foglike. Amorphous.” He looked back at the fire, and tried to think. Tried to make it all come together. “There are no more traditional demons here, are there? At least none that we’ve seen yet. Yet most human communities produce a folkloric repertoire—vampires and succubi, human distortions—long before they come up with anything as abstract as this. Strange,” he mused. Something foggy with bright red eyes began to drift in from across the river; when it reached his nearest ward, it shivered and stopped. “I wonder what caused it?”
“Tarrant will probably know,” she murmured. Watching as the demonling turned away, drifting into the mist beyond the wards.
Tarrant didn’t know.
When he returned that night he paused briefly at the outer boundary of the campsite, and gazed upon the ward-stones one after another. Only when he was done, did he join them by the fireside. “These aren’t strong enough to matter,” he said to Damien, “but you should bear in mind that the power I draw on is demonic in nature. Your wards define me as an enemy.”
Damien winced; he should have anticipated that. “Sorry.”
As they doused the fire and saddled the horses, Damien and Hesseth told him about the strange demonlings. He shared with them his own growing frustration at being unable to get a fix on the humans who must be somewhere in these woods. “It’s not an Obscuring,” he insisted. His tone was almost angry, it seemed to Damien. “But what, then? What could make a dozen or more humans vanish from the currents, so that the earth-fae didn’t acknowledge their presence?”
There was no answer for that, and no other option but to go on. They rode back into the strangling forest, and for once Damien was glad for its closeness. It was comforting to see something besides a wall of gray fog, even if it was this twisted flora.
They spent the night in silence, riding through mile after mile of the alien forest, trying to make out its features by lamplight. Tarrant could see by the fae-light, of course, and Hesseth’s nocturnal eyes worked well in the dark, but for Damien it was a constant strain. Add to that the fact that the forest was changing, and that each mile was stranger than the last, and it was no surprise that by the time Tarrant declared it a night he was exhausted.
Vines strangling trees. Then vines in shreds, white sap dripping from their ravaged ends. Then black things that scuttled up and down the tree trunks, carrying bits of vine and spongy leaves in their mouth. Then larger things, spiderlike, that ate those. Rodents that fed on the spiders. They weren’t intermingled, as natural species would have been, but existed in waves so populous that each new life-form devastated the forest anew, leaving a wasteland of dead trees and shriveled vines and bones. So very many bones. They littered the ground like dead leaves in autumn. Piles so thick that they cracked beneath the horses’ hooves with every step. The smell of decay, of rotting flesh, was so overwhelming in places that Damien wrapped a strip of cloth over his nose and mouth and Worked it to act as a barrier. Hesseth looked so nauseous that he offered to do the same for her, and to his surprise she accepted. Whatever Tarrant did to deal with the smell was private and undiscernible, but Damien was sure he did something. The Hunter was too fastidious a man to put up with that kind of stink for long.
And then, at last, they were back at the river. It was wider now, and the water gleamed as it rippled over a rocky bed. Damien started forward toward it, meaning to gather some river water for their dinner, but Tarrant’s hand on his arm stopped him.
“What is it?”
“The pattern of this region. Think about it. One species takes root, then overbreeds and destroys the environment. So another
is introduced which establishes balance for a while, until it, too, overbreeds. And then another. And another.”
It took him a minute to realize what the Hunter was driving at. “You think someone evolved those life-forms?”
“Nature is infinitely complex, Reverend Vryce. Who knows that better than I? A natural ecosystem is a delicately balanced creation, with all sorts of checks and balances that are continuously evolving in tandem. Nothing like this. The simplicity of it, and the waste ... I sense a human hand behind it. Very inexperienced, limited in understanding, perhaps overwhelmed by its failure to control. Because in order to establish a new species properly, you have to make sure it comes equipped with counterspecies: predators, parasites, diseases, degraders. That wasn’t done here. Such power, without understanding the consequences of applying it. No wonder there was such destruction.”
“Each life-form had its own territory,” Hesseth pointed out.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps instead each life-form was created at some central point, and then allowed to spread. The vines first, and then the animals that fed on them. Predators for them, when they were out of control. And again. Each species spreading out from that central point, like waves across the region. So that as we travel—”
“We’re heading toward that center,” Damien said suddenly.
The Hunter nodded. “That, and we’re due for the next creation. The last was rodents, and large ones. Anything feeding on them would also be a threat to humankind, and thus to their creators.”
“Insects could kill them off,” Hesseth offered. “Or even diseases. Those wouldn’t have to endanger humans.”
“Correct. And I would have used the latter, if this were my game. But whoever’s playing God with this ecosystem lacks that kind of subtlety. So what would be a safe killer, from our sorcerer’s point of view? Another small creature? Too inefficient. Something large? Too dangerous. Perhaps something large but rooted down, so that it isn’t free to roam. Then it could be avoided. But you can’t just scatter these killers at random, can you? The animals would learn to avoid them. They would have to be in hiding, and concentrated some place where all the animals would have to go....”
When True Night Falls Page 30