(and all the while she was taking out the object she had stolen, praying for him not to notice as she drew it from her pocket and opened it)
and she wove the tidal fae into a glimmering shell that contained them both, a vast knotwork of power that would support and enhance their union. He was too lost in wonder to question it. He was too busy reveling in his newfound potential to consider the implications of such a simple Working. No man has ever Worked like this, he thought to her. Not even among the rakh. While he explored the nooks and crannies of her mind, she wove and wove and wove with all her strength, using every skill that Hesseth had taught her and every ounce of power that the tides made available. Tidal power didn’t work that well on material substance, the rakh-woman had told her, but in matters of spirit it was unequaled. She prayed it was so as she bound them together, forging a bond with her fledgling sorcery to support that which he had conjured, a bond which—she hoped—might never be broken.
Then she struck. Hard and fast, a single upswipe of her right arm that brought the knife—Tarrant’s knife, rescued from the floor of the throne room when no one was looking—straight into her own throat, into that one special place (Damien had said) where the blood drew near the surface of the body as it carried life-giving oxygen to the brain. She struck fast and she struck hard, because she knew she would never get a second chance. And all the while she poured out her rage at this man, she drowned him in her hatred and her grief and her determination to destroy him, emotions she had been desperately holding in check up until now so that he wouldn’t catch on to what she was really doing, but now that the act was done they poured out of her like a tidal wave.
You killed my father! she screamed silently. As the knife cut deep, deep in her throat, freeing the hot blood to gush down her neck, her chest, her arm. There was no fear in her now, only the fierce joy of triumph. You killed Hesseth! You took away everything I had and now you’ll do it to others, so many others! Only you won’t, you won’t, I figured out how to stop you!
He was startled at first, then cocky, indignant—and then he tried to return to his other body, and he couldn’t, and he got scared. He had thought that he could never be killed—certainly not by her!—but now he realized that wasn’t true, she had thought of a way. She would drag him down into death along with her if it took every ounce of strength she had, every bit of power she could conjure. As he struggled to withdraw from her dying flesh, she gripped the tidal power with all her might, holding onto the rainbow tides and using them to reinforce her Binding, to hold onto him, to keep him from slipping free—
Earth-fae rose up from the ground beneath her with a roar, engulfing her in the flames of his fury. Blinded, she could no longer See; stunned, she couldn’t Work. Even as she began the long slide down into the darkness of death she could feel him using his power to unravel the bond between them; he was starting to slip away from her, his spirit abandoning her bleeding flesh for a more dependable body. No! she screamed. You can’t go! But he was going, and she was fading fast.
God, please. She prayed feverishly, desperately. Help me! Her vision was growing dim, as were her other senses; she could hardly feel the flames he had conjured anymore. Please. For Hesseth and my dad and the children with the Terata and all the thousands he’ll hurt, all the thousands who’ll get eaten or worse if he goes free ... please help me. There was a ringing in her ears now, and the pulse of blood from her throat had weakened to a trickle.
“Please,” she whispered. As she fell to the ground, the soft ground, and darkness folded over her like a blanket. Soft, so soft. She struggled against it, but its power was numbing, suffocating. Please, please don’t let him go free....
And Something answered. Something that cooled the flames around her until they vanished back into the currents which had given them birth, to flow like water around her supine body. Something that stilled her fears and soothed her hate and quieted the storms of her spirit. Something that reached out and touched the Prince’s soul as well, filling his spirit with Its Presence. Peace. Quiet. Utter tranquillity. He recognized the danger and he fought it, fought it desperately, but it wasn’t the kind of power a man could do battle with. His experience was in games of violence and domination, and those things had no power here. She felt his fear bleed out into the darkness—the soft, loving darkness—and slowly, gradually, his struggles ceased. It no longer mattered to him which body he was in, or whether his flesh was dying; his hunger for life had given way to something far more powerful. Slowly the tidal cocoon about them rewove itself, binding him to her flesh; slowly she slid down into the warm shadows of death, and he came with her.
Thank you. Voiceless words, silent peace. Thank you.
There were faces now, floating in a whirlpool of light. Hesseth. Her father. Her mother. All the rakhene children. She reached out for them, only to have them dissolve between her fingers like ghosts.
Come, they whispered, reforming just beyond her reach. Time to move on. Come with us.
She walked toward them. A bright figure led the way, a soldier whose armor gleamed golden like the Core, and whose crystal standard tinkled in the wind. She remembered him from a vision she’d had once, of thousands of bright knights preparing to give their lives for their faith. He held out a hand to her and she took it; the contact made her tingle.
Some things, he whispered, are worth dying for.
And then the whole world was filled with light, and there was only peace.
Forty-eight
Well, Damien thought, this is what it’s all come to.
The lamps had gone out maybe an hour ago. The darkness itself wasn’t such a terrible thing—there was just enough fae in the cell that he could Work his sight to see by its dull glow—but the implication of that darkness was the final thread in a vast tapestry of despair. In his previous incarceration he had never been left without light. Men had come down those stairs at regular intervals to see that the wicks were trimmed and the fuel pots were full, so that the lamps might never go out. Now they were empty. And in a palace run with such clockwork precision, Damien could read no other meaning into that than the fact that he was meant to waste away in the darkness, to die at his own slow pace.
He tried to shift position, but pain stabbed through his back as he moved and he had to give it up. He had managed to gather enough fae to work a minimal Healing, enough to stop the internal bleeding, but the power in this underground cell simply wasn’t strong enough for anything more than that. The pain was centered around his kidneys, where the worst blows had fallen, and he knew all too well just how bad that could be. How long would it be before he knew if there was fatal damage? What kind of dying would that entail? Maybe it was more merciful to let his system fill up with poisons, rather than die the slow death of starvation. Maybe he should be grateful.
There was a sound on the stairs. He looked up, startled, but saw only the dim glow of earth-fae as it trickled down over the stone. He listened so hard that it seemed his blood roared and his heart beat like a timpani, but even over those distractions he could still make out the sound of footsteps. Footsteps! They came toward him with excruciating slowness, echoing down the spiral stairwell. And then light, coming toward him like the dawn. Never mind that it was a single lamp. Never mind that the figure who carried it was cloaked, and the folds of his garments cast deep shadows on the cold stone walls. In this place a match flame would have seemed like the sun itself, and the light of a lantern was nothing short of miraculous.
He managed to rise to a sitting posture, though pain shot through his back as he did so. The figure approached the bars. The light of the lamp was blinding, and for a moment Damien couldn’t make out any details of his visitor’s face. At last the figure moved the lamp so that it was off to one side, and its light silhouetted rakhene features that Damien knew all too well.
For a long time Katassah just looked at him, as if trying to read something in his expression. It might have been a trick of the shadows, but his fur seemed st
rangely dull; a thin membrane had drawn across the inner corner of his eyes, making his expression twice as alien as usual.
“He’s dead,” the rakh said quietly. His voice was strangely devoid of emotion, like that of a shock victim. “She killed him.”
It took him a minute to realize what he meant, to accept that the rakh standing before him was exactly that, and not a sorcerer in disguise. The Prince was ... dead? Then they had succeeded, he thought dully. The mastermind behind the atrocities of this region had been vanquished, and his works could now be undone. It seemed unreal, like something in a dream; he had trouble accepting it.
“Where’s Jenseny?” he pleaded. “Is she all right?”
The rakh said nothing. For a minute he just looked at Damien, and then he shook his head slowly. “She took him with her,” he told Damien. “Sacrificed herself so that he might die. All in the name of your god, priest. She bought into your myth and it saved her.”
He reached into his cloak and removed something from an inner pocket; Damien heard the jangle of keys. “Under the circumstances I think it best that you leave here.” He seemed to fumble with the key ring, as though lacking the coordination to manipulate it. “As soon as possible.” The key slid into place and turned; the door swung slowly open. He looked at Damien. “Can you walk?”
He nodded and tried to get up, but pain shot through his back. Breathing heavily, he gritted his teeth and tried again. This time he got as far as a kneeling position. From there it was only one lurching twist and a gut-wrenching extension to a standing position. He reached out for the nearest bar and used it to steady himself; the lamplight was swimming in his vision. The rakh offered no aid and voiced no concern, but he waited patiently until Damien had released the bar and then said, “Come with me.”
The Prince is dead, he thought. Waiting for the joy to come. But there was no room for it in his soul, not with so much grief already filling him. Later, he promised himself. Later.
Ten stairs. A hundred. Each one was a separate trial, an individual agony. More than once he had to stop and lean against the wall, fighting to catch his breath. The rakh said nothing, offered nothing, waited. At last, when they were close enough to the top that his Worked sight revealed enough earth-fae, he muttered, “A minute. Please.” When the rakh stopped and turned to him he gathered up the precious power and patterned it into a Healing, a blessed Healing that poured through his broken flesh, cooling the fire of his pain. With desperate care he rewove broken blood vessels, mended shattered cells, prompted his body to clean out the pool of waste fluids that had accumulated in his wounded flesh. At last, satisfied that he had done the best he could possibly do, he let the Working fade and leaned against the cold stone wall, breathing heavily. Thank God the pain was fading quickly; that didn’t always happen right after a Healing.
“All right,” he muttered. Pushing himself away from the wall at last, forcing himself to move again. For the first time since they had started their climb, he felt as if he might really make it. For the first time, it sank in that they had won.
No. He had won. Hesseth was dead, and Jenseny also, and as for Tarrant ... how many hours had it been since the Prince had consigned him to the dawn? He wanted to ask, but he couldn’t find the breath. At the top, he promised himself. He’d ask when they reached the top.
The stairwell was beginning to lighten, reflecting light from the palace above. The rakh drew up his hood to shield his face, and wrapped the cloak tightly around his body. His people are sensitive to sunlight, Damien remembered. Was he injured when the Prince conjured light to attack Tarrant? Was the Prince willing to accept that pain in order to guarantee his victory?
It could have been him in that situation, he realized. Hell, it almost was. What was that like, to have another mind controlling your arms, your legs, your eyes and hands, perhaps your very thoughts? It was too horrible to consider. Thank God Jenseny had died before the Prince had subjected her to that.
Two turns. Three. The light was brilliant now, and Katassah put up a hand to shade his eyes. Damien noted that the fur of his arm was matted and stained. With blood, it looked like. Whose? The rakh staggered then, and it was clear he was having trouble. Was he hurt also? If so—
“I can help you,” Damien offered. “There’s enough fae here for a Healing if you need one.” He reached out toward the rakh, intending it as a gesture of support, but the rakh snarled and backed off. Sharp white teeth were bared; the matted, stained fur of his mane bristled with aggressive vigor. Damien stepped back as far as he could, to where his back was against the inner wall; it didn’t seem far enough. This was an animal display far beyond Hesseth’s civilized snarlings, and he sensed that if he moved too fast or said the wrong thing those long, thin claws would slash his face to threads before he could draw another breath. Frozen, tense, he waited. At last the rakh seemed to shudder, and his claws resheathed. His lips closed over his sharp teeth, hiding them from sight. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, and he clearly had to struggle to discipline it into human words.
“I’m ... sorry.” The words were clearly hard for him; how often did he have to apologize. “Human contact—”
“Hey.” Damien managed to force a smile to his face. It was stiff and awkward but he thought it communicated what it was meant to. “I understand.”
Together they ascended into the light. After so many hours in darkness the brilliance of the palace was blinding; both he and the rakh paused at the topmost step, shading their eyes, struggling to adapt to it. “He didn’t care,” the rakh muttered. “He could see using the fae, and that was enough. He didn’t care if the light damaged my eyes.”
“Sweet guy,” Damien muttered. “Sorry I didn’t get to know him better.” And then he dared, “Speaking of light....”
The rakh understood. “Your friend?”
Friend. What a bizarre word that was. What an alien, almost incomprehensible concept. Could one call the Hunter a friend? Would one ever want to?
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Tarrant. Is he alive?”
The rakh hesitated. “I think so. I went to him first when it happened, because time was such a factor.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do anything. Maybe you can.”
“How much time is left?”
He glanced toward one of the walls, but if there was some kind of clock there Damien couldn’t see it. “Not much,” he muttered. “I’ll take you there. You can see for yourself.”
There were more stairs, crystal stairs that glowed with all the brilliance of the sun. It was clear that the light hurt Katassah’s eyes, and more than once he stumbled. Was the whole damn palace Worked?
Two men came into sight. They looked startled to see Katassah there, but were far more surprised by Damien’s presence. After a moment of confusion and hesitation they both bowed low to the rakh and then hurried away in pursuit of other business. Katassah stood still just long enough to accept their obeisance, then resumed the long climb by Damien’s side.
“They don’t know, do they?”
The rakh shook his head. “No one knows. No one will know, until I tell them. Or until they guess.”
He would have asked him more about the Prince’s death, but at that moment the stairs grew steep and uncomfortably narrow, and he decided that his attention was better spent on his footing. They climbed perhaps twenty feet that way, to a narrow tunnel which opened onto darkness—
And the night sky unfolded before them, in all its pre-dawn glory. Overhead the heavens were as black as ink, with a spray of stars scattered across the east like drops of fire. Beneath that was a band of pale blue rising along the horizon, and it was bright enough already that the stars directly over it were nearly invisible. Damien had watched the sun rise often enough on this trip to know how little time they had left.
“Where is he?”
The rakh pointed. It was hard to make out shapes on the glowing rooftop, but he thought he saw a man-sized shadow in the direction indicated. Carefully but quickly he mad
e his way over to where it lay; the walking was treacherous, and more than once he stumbled over one of the sharp crystalline growths that littered the roof of the palace. In the end he made his way more by feeling than by sight, to the place where the Hunter lay.
Gerald Tarrant had been bound, but not by chains. There were wards etched into the glassy surface beneath him, and the crystal substance of the palace roof had grown over his arms and legs in several places, binding him in arched fragments of a faceted cocoon that hugged his flesh tightly, cutting into it in several places. Whoever had brought him up here had torn his outer robes from his body, leaving only his leggings and boots and—ironically—his sigil necklace. Prepared to meet the sun, Damien thought grimly. He remembered what a moment’s exposure had done to Tarrant in the rakhlands, and knew there was no hope of him surviving a longer immersion.
He knelt down by his body, noting the strain on the Hunter’s face, the subtle tremors in his body. He was conscious, then, and struggling to overcome the pain the light was causing him long enough to free himself from his sorcerous bonds. But the light was too strong, too lasting; even Damien could feel its power, and he lacked the Hunter’s sensitivity. The priest ran a hand over the nearest of the wards and worked a Knowing, but it netted him little real knowledge; whatever patterns had been used to grow those bonds were too subtle and complex for a man of Damien’s skill to unravel it.
He glanced east, saw the sky just above the mountains brightening ominously. There wasn’t much time.
“Can you unWork it?” the rakh asked.
He looked at the wards, at the Hunter’s crystal bonds, at the Hunter himself. I should leave you here, he thought. The world would be a better place for your absence. But somehow it didn’t seem the time or the place to be making that decision.
“Do you have a sword?” he asked.
For a moment Katassah looked at him like he had gone crazy, but apparently he decided not to question the request. He reached inside the folds of his cloak and drew his own sword from its sheath: a short sword, narrow-bladed, which was meant to complement gunfire rather than replace it. Damien took it from him and noted the thick quillons, the heavy pommel. Good enough.
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