by Judith Tarr
He did not know what he was doing there. He was quick on his feet and had some little talent for weapons, but he was not a warrior. If it was enough to have killed one of the lords, then the lord’s kin would be disappointed. That had been blind luck. Daros could hardly expect to chance upon it again.
Once again they stood in a featureless space and faced attack. This came in the shape of great looming figures, shapes of darkness that sent off waves of icy cold, breathing forth the stench of tombs. They swarmed through more doors than Daros would have imagined such a room could have. Their claws were long and vicious, their fangs as sharp as a serpent’s.
These were nightwalkers, drinkers of blood. They felled one of the warriors in that first moment, and stooped over him, rending his throat, draining the blood from his still twitching body.
Daros fought for his life and soul. Concealment be damned; he freed Estarion’s knife from its cord. It was a poor enough weapon against such enemies, but it was the best that he had. He set himself with his back to the wall, though that could trap him beyond hope, and built a second wall of cold steel.
Those princes of warrior slaves trusted in their skill, but against enemies faster, stronger, and far more hungry than they, one by one they dropped and died. Only one other withstood the attack. He was quicker than sight, quicker even than the nightwalkers; he seemed to vanish, then to reappear in unexpected places.
One of the nightwalkers fell, gutted by Daros’ steel. He braced against the rest, but they drew back. The other surviving warrior had captured a nightwalker from behind, and snapped its neck.
Those who remained bowed their strange elongated heads and folded their clawed hands and retreated. Daros sagged against the wall, but kept his dagger up, trusting nothing in this ghastly place.
A lord entered through the one obvious door. As much as they all resembled one another, Daros marked him for the lord who had been in the training court. He was alone, but not unarmed.
He ignored the living men to examine the dead. Each, once he had touched it, shriveled and crumpled in upon itself, then sank into dust. He wiped his gauntleted hand on his thigh and straightened, and turned toward the ones who had done the killing. The warrior stood motionless in the middle of the room. Daros had had the wits to stand straight, but still with his back to the wall. The knife was about his neck again, hidden if never forgotten.
The lord smiled thinly. “You will come,” he said.
The warrior obeyed without hesitation. Daros judged it wise to follow suit. Slaves waited outside to dress them in robes of much better quality than they had worn before.
The lord waited with a remarkable degree of patience, but it was not infinite. As soon as they were seen to, he led them brusquely and at speed up through the levels of the citadel.
They passed the walls and wards of the lords’ tower. Daros had what he had hoped for, somewhat after he needed it. In truth he would rather have remained a slave below, free to come and go, and therefore to seek out the mages. A fighting slave was taken through Gates; was a soldier in the war. That was the goal he had aimed for—not to be chosen for this, whatever it was to be.
There was no way out but death. He did not want to die yet. He went where he was led, therefore, and observed as much as he might.
They were near the top of the tower before they stopped. Daros thought that he could hear the humming and whirring of the thing that the king guarded so closely. The air had a throb to it; it pulsed just below the level of perception.
A man was waiting for them in a room full of strangeness: dark shapes that, to Daros, meant nothing. The man was a priest; his face was tired, his expression less than delighted as the lord brought the two slaves to him. “Only two? We need more.”
“We need soldiers. Those we have in plenty. These—they’ll always be rare.”The lord jabbed his chin at Daros. “That one gutted a nightwalker with his bare hands.”
“And killed one of your own clan before that,” the priest said. “Now you own his life. Would that you had brought me a dozen such.”
“Often I bring none at all,” the lord said. “Do your work, old man, and be content with what you’re given. There’s no time for foolishness now.”
The priest snarled to himself, but when he turned his back pointedly on the lord, it was to gather a selection of what must be ritual objects and spread them on the table between himself and the others. The warrior slave had not moved since he was brought here; therefore Daros did the same. They stood shoulder to shoulder, almost exactly of a height, though Daros was somewhat broader.
While the lord watched with a show of disdain, the priest built a spidery structure of metal and glass, clicking each part into the next. When it was done, it looked somewhat like the visor of a helmet. He performed no incantation, raised no power, but at a flick of a finger, the thing came to life. He laid it over the warrior slave’s face.
The man screamed, brief and piercing. Daros came nigh to leaping out of his skin. The priest betrayed neither shock nor surprise. Even as that terrible cry died away, he lifted the visor of metal.
The warrior slave opened narrow dark eyes—in shape like Daros’ own, though his face was different, rounder, smoother, and his skin was like old ivory. He seemed neither glad nor frightened to be given back his eyes. Or perhaps he had not, not exactly. There were no whites to them. They were black from edge to edge, but glistening as eyes were wont to do. They were alive; they were unmistakably present. They were like the lords’ eyes; exactly like.
The priest approached Daros. Daros’ mind gibbered, shrieking at him to flee. But if he moved, he was betrayed, and therefore dead.
His shields were as strong as he could make them. He steadied himself as the visor came near to his face. It was cold, no warmth in it of the man who had made it or the one who had worn it just before him. It clasped him like icy fingers. In the last possible instant, out of pure instinct, he shut down mage-sight, and squeezed his eyes tight shut.
The pain came without warning. It was exquisite—it was agony. It was like needles thrust into his eyes. A scream ripped itself out of him, leaving a taste of blood in his throat.
The cold metal thing retreated. His eyes were open. He still had them. What he saw …
A world in shades of red and black. Patterns of heat and cold. Shapes that he could recognize, but altered immeasurably.
Mage-sight was still there. He could see with that as he had seen before. But his own eyes, the eyes of his body, were no longer as they had been.
Many things that he had done were irrevocable. But this one, somehow, seemed more than that. He should have run; should have made himself invisible, and hidden with the mages. He could have freed slaves, fomented revolt. He might even have found another way to win passage through the lords’ Gates.
It was all he could do to stand as if it did not matter. When the lord said, “Follow,” he followed, because he had left himself no other choice. He must not despair. Despair was death.
The lord led the two of them to yet another barracks, but much smaller than those that Daros had seen before. It could hold perhaps a hundred men, but at the moment he counted barely three dozen standing at attention beside the bed-niches. All were dressed as he was, with eyes that saw the dark as no dark at all. They were all armed: each with a sword and a knife, and a sheath of a shape that would carry the weapon that flung dark fire. Even here, it seemed, those weapons were kept locked away.
These men had volition. They looked on the newcomers as men of any fighting company might, in a mingling of hope and doubt. If their souls were bound, it seemed their minds, to some extent, were not.
The warrior who had passed the test with Daros was coming to himself. He stumbled somewhat as he walked to the end of the ranked fighters. When he took his place there and turned to face the lord with the rest, his face twitched, then twisted in confusion.
Daros fell in beside him, but he had had enough of playing deception. He looked the lord in the fa
ce, level and expressionless. The lord seemed somehow amused. When he spoke, the words were addressed to both of them, but his eyes remained on Daros. “Be glad now, both of you. You are the best of the best, the chosen ones, the strongest of all. You serve at our right hands; when you die, the Night will take you as her own.”
Daros’ fellow recruit bowed his head in submission. Daros refused.
The lord laughed and saluted him. “Good! We need the strong ones. Serve well, and more rewards may yet await you.”
He left then, still laughing, as hard and cold as everything else in this world. In his wake, the company of the chosen eased visibly. Their eyes turned toward the newcomers; some of them smiled. There was no warmth in those smiles, and nothing remotely comforting.
“New meat,” one of them said, smacking his lips. “Tender and sweet. Tell us, meat—did you taste nightwalker blood?”
Neither answered. The others closed in, smiling and smiling. Daros found himself pressed shoulder to shoulder with the other, and then back to back as the circle eased them away from the wall and out into the free space of the hall.
“Meat,” said the one who seemed to speak for the rest. He was tall and lean, a whipcord man. His skin to mage-sight was as white as new milk, his close-cropped hair pallid gold. His eyes, like the eyes of all those here, were black from rim to rim, but Daros had a fugitive thought that when he had lived in the light, they had been the color of a winter sky.
“Meat,” he said again. “Fresh meat. How many did you kill, meat? Did you eat any of them?”
“Was it required?” Daros asked. It was certainly folly, but he could not help himself. “I barely had time to work up an appetite.”
The pale man moved in close, crowding him, sniffing like a hound. His teeth were small and even, which was rather surprising; Daros would have expected a direwolf’s fangs. “Pretty,” he said. “Very, very pretty. Have we destroyed your world yet? Are your women as pretty as you?”
“Almost.” Daros bared his own teeth. They were much longer and sharper than this man’s; much more truly a predator’s. “Did your women geld you themselves or did they trust the dark lords to do it for them?”
The pale man’s attack was completely silent, not even a growl of warning. But Daros had provoked it; he was waiting for it. Even with that, the other’s weight bore him back and down. He twisted in the air. He half succeeded: he came down hard, but the other toppled beside him.
For the third time in that brutal day, he fought for his life. He was tired; the other was fresh. He had a weapon, but he must keep it hidden if he could. He had his hands, and his teeth if he would use them. He had the depth of his anger at all of this, at what had been done to the two worlds he had lived in, at what had been done to him.
The pale man was as strong as a snake and lethally fast. They were all fast, these warriors of the dark. Daros defended himself blindly, striking without thought, beating clawed fingers from his eyes, locked and rolling across the hard stone floor. The pale man jabbed a knee up hard, aiming at his privates. He blocked it and thrust it aside, wrenching with all his force, ripping sinew, cracking bone. The pale man howled and lunged, clawing at his throat.
He snapped at the hands and the arms behind them. He tasted blood—rich and iron-sweet. The great vein of it pulsed in the white throat. He sank his teeth in it, his sharp white teeth. He drank deep.
He recoiled in a sudden shock of horror. His mouth was full of blood and worse. He gagged. The pale man convulsed, locked in death-throes. Daros vomited a bellyful of blood, vomited until nothing came but bile.
Hands drew him up, held him. They were surprisingly gentle. The one closest was the warrior who had passed the testing with him, too new to the freedom of his mind, maybe, to be properly afraid.
Daros could not stop retching. If his stomach would only come up, he could die, and it would be over. But it stubbornly refused to leave its place.
Someone held a cup to his lips. He drank perforce. It was water. He kept it down, somewhat to his amazement. It washed the taste of blood from his mouth. It could never cleanse the stain of what he had done.
He had been so sure, so arrogantly sure, that his spirit was free; that this place had no power to corrupt him. Now two men lay dead by his doing, and the blood of one stained his face and hands. He was as dark as any other man in that room, as deeply tainted by the tide of shadow.
He stood straight. The men about him drew back. There was fear in their eyes. One still held the jar of water. He cleaned himself with it as best he could. They watched him as wolves watch the one who has killed their pack-leader.
“If you are thinking that I will lead you,” he said, “stop thinking it now. I have no presence here. I know nothing of what your veterans know.”
“The lord who brought you—he leads us,” one of the warriors said. “We fight as he bids. Who leads here, that’s won by combat. You did win that. Don’t tell us you didn’t mean it.”
Daros bit his tongue. He had meant it—willingly or no. He had known what he did when he locked in combat with the pale man. He must have known in his heart how it must end. How could he not?
“Tell me, then,” he said: “what we do here, what we are for. Be sure it is the truth. I will know if you lie.”
They blanched—in the strange sight he had been given, their faces darkened as blood, and therefore heat, drained away. One spoke for them all. He marked that one: a warrior from Tanit’s world, he would wager, a giant of a man with the full lips and blunt features and the dark gleaming skin of the lands to the south of the black land. He had a deep voice, like stones shifting.
“We are the lords’ warriors,” he said, “their bodyguards, the commanders of their raiding parties. They give us their eyes, so that we can see as they see, and give us back the great part of our will, so that when we fight in one of the worlds, we may make choices in difficult circumstances, and protect the lesser troops under our command.
“We are not free. You killed a lord in the testing—he was one they could afford to lose, or they would never have given him such duty. You will not be permitted to do such a thing again. If you have dreams of finding your way back to your own world, give them up. You will go back, very likely, if your world exists at all—but you are now of this world and not of that one. Its light will blind you and its sun destroy you. You belong to the dark world now. Never forget that.”
“I was exiled from my world,” Daros said.
“So were some of us,” said the giant. “And some of us were sent to fight the enemy that came out of the night, and were taken into his armies instead. There is no escape from our lords or from the darkness they serve. You are wise not even to dream of it.”
“Slave-warriors,” Daros said. “My world has had them.”
“This world lives by them,” the giant said. “Mountains, worlds full of slaves, all bound to the will of the masters. We are the highest of them, the strongest and best. We are the chosen. There is pride in that, if your heart knows any such thing.”
“My heart knows the taste of blood,” Daros said, “and the lure of oblivion.”
“The lords will love you,” the giant said, “if you can restrain yourself from killing any more of them. Slaves’ blood—you may drink that with fair freedom, if you do it wisely. They’ll blame it on the nightwalkers; those will escape and feed, if they can manage it. But lords—never touch those. Lords are our gods. However much you hate them, they hold the cords that bind your soul.”
“I shall remember,” Daros said.
He turned to face them all. They kept a wary distance. “If I lead you, you do as I bid—barring a lord’s command. Yes?”
“Yes,” they said in a ragged chorus.
“Good,” he said, letting them see the teeth that had ripped the pale man’s throat. “Dispose of that carrion. Then come with me. I have weapons to win, and fighting muscles to find again. I was too long below, among the cattle.”
They glanced at one anoth
er. Oh, yes, he thought as he scanned their faces: he was a bold, bad man, and would be bolder and badder when he was strong again. Which had best be soon.
He could feel the worlds shifting, the tides of darkness turning. It was growing stronger. It was inside him, eating away at his heart. If he was to have any hope at all of vanquishing it, he could not tarry much longer.
“Weapons,” he said to the men whose command, by sheer blind luck, he had won. “Now.”
They leaped to obey him. He sauntered in their wake, as a prince of slaves should do.
THIRTY-ONE
WITH THE SIGHT HE HAD BEEN GIVEN, DAROS COULD AT LAST distinguish between night and day in this place. Night was cooler, gentler on the eyes. Day was perceptibly brighter. If he turned his eyes toward the sky, he saw the swirling darkness, clouds of heat and cool, and beyond it the furnace of the sun.
On the third day, he was at weapons-practice with the rest of his company. The dark flame was not dark at all; it was red within red within red, a seethe and coil of power that consumed whatever it touched. The weapons that hurled it were simple enough to wield. They needed little precision, only strength to lift them. Swords, bows, spears—those needed art, and of that, he had much to learn.
As he practiced his archery in the largest of the courts, he was aware that one of the lords had come to watch, attended by men like those about him: slave-warriors with living eyes and bound souls. It was a great temptation to spin on his heel and aim his arrow into the lord’s heart, but he was stronger than that—barely.
Pity, he thought as he lowered his bow and released the arrow from the string, and turned slowly to face the lord. It was the king himself. His dark-on-dark eyes fixed on Daros. “Prepare your men,” he said. “You raid tonight.”
Daros bowed. The king’s lip curled in what might be a dour smile, or might be scorn. “Take many slaves,” said the king. “Empty all their storehouses. But leave the fields. We may need them later.”