When Darkness Falls

by Mercedes Lackey

  Cilarnen saw the expression on the Mage’s face when he realized what it was he was facing. Childhood nightmares come true. Bad dreams and Commons’ nursery tales brought terrifyingly to life.

  It straightened to its full height, and even though Juvalira was mounted, It was able to look him in the eye. Juvalira’s horse skittered wildly sideways, but that did not save him. The Demon plucked him from the saddle as easily as if he were a small child and sprang into the sky with him, unfurling Its great scarlet wings with a snap.

  It had only taken seconds.

  Juvalira screamed, but his screams were lost in the other screams of men and horses, for the other Demons that had flown behind the first had landed.

  One landed on the back of Juvalira’s now-riderless horse. It was trapped in the midst of two-score other horses, all of which had only one thought in their minds: run. Those of the Militia who were still mounted—for many had been thrown in the first seconds after the Demons made their appearance—had no control over their panicked animals at all. Cilarnen heard the screams of those who had fallen beneath the trampling hooves and knew, miserably, that those who died in this way were the lucky ones.

  What happened next maddened the terrified animals even further. The Demon that had landed on the gray’s back reached forward. It dug its fingers into the base of the animal’s neck—impossibly, they seemed to sink in, as if they were knives.

  Then It gave a savage yank, and the horse’s head and neck parted from its body as easily as a man might tear soft fruit into pieces. Blood jetted from the wet red stump, and the Demon bounded into the air again as the dismembered body collapsed to the earth.

  Cilarnen should have felt rage, despair, horror, but he knew that if he felt any of those things it would break the spell. And the most important thing of all—far more important than his own feelings—seemed to Cilarnen to be that he should see and remember what happened in Nerendale today, so that someone, somewhere, would know the truth. Though he knew that what he had seen was only the beginning of the horrors to come, he forced himself to continue watching.

  Thekinalo’s horse had thrown him when the first Demon had landed, and he had run into the village’s small Temple of the Light. The sacred enclosure gave him no protection from the Demon that followed him. It killed the Light-priest packing up the sacred objects in the shrine with one backhanded blow.

  Thekinalo’s face was chalk white with fear, but he had enough courage to try to fight. He summoned up a spell and cast it at the Demon.

  There was a bright flash, and the Demon was enfolded in light. At first Cilarnen thought it must be Fire. But then he realized, as the light grew brighter and brighter still, that Thekinalo had prepared a cantrip for Lightning—a dangerous spell, one a Journeyman should not, by rights, know.

  Cilarnen held his breath, hoping it would work.

  But the light faded, and the Demon was still there, untouched. It was laughing. All around it, the Temple was burning, as if the lightning had sprayed away from its body like water to kindle everything it touched.

  The Demon grabbed Thekinalo. His robes smoked and began to burn where the Demon touched him. The Lightning spell had blown away a large section of the roof and wall; the Demon rose up through the opening, not using its wings at all. Only when they were level with the roof did Thekinalo seem to notice what had happened and begin to struggle.

  As if that were some sort of signal in the Demon’s mind, the entire Temple became a roaring blaze, as if it had been suddenly soaked in oil. Thekinalo struggled to throw himself down into the blaze, but it was no use. The Demon, its wings beating strongly now, bore him off into the sky.

  They’re taking Juvalira and Thekinalo away alive so that they can torture them to death. Because they’re Mages. Because pain and death fuel the Dark Magic. And if They can get into Armethalieh, They’ll have a whole city full of Mageborn to fuel Their magic. And who knows how strong that will make Them?

  In the square beside the village well, Demons barred the way to freedom. Some of the Militiamen had tried to fight, but their only arms were sword and truncheon, and Cilarnen was willing to bet that they had never used either one in actual battle. They were soldiers of Armethalieh, after all. Who could there be to fight?

  The Demons had torn those few who had dared to oppose them apart with their bare hands. They hadn’t even bothered to use spells.

  The surviving members of the Militia were as willing to flee as their horses, only there was nowhere to go. The alleyways between the small stone huts that ringed the village square were narrow, and the Demons had blocked them with the bodies of dead horses. The Temple of the Light was burning, blocking that avenue of escape. And Demons barred the road out of the village.

  A few of the soldiers were still in the saddle, though by now most were on foot, in nearly as much danger from their terrified horses as from the Demons. Now the Demons began to move in, perhaps jealous that anyone else should kill today. They began at the edges of the mass of milling animals, disemboweling horses with one swift swipe of their claws and spreading the entrails in glistening ropes across the ground, leaving the wounded dying animal to thrash and scream in agony as They moved on to the next victim.

  Cilarnen forced himself to look around, to see what else was happening here, and that was when he saw four Demons crouched quietly on the roofs of nearby houses. Their wings were folded and Their shoulders were hunched; in Their stillness, They bore an eerie resemblance to the Stone Golems of Armethalieh.

  Why are They just watching?

  Curious and disgusted all at once, Cilarnen moved his glyph farther away, until once more he felt as if he were hovering high above the village.

  When the two Mages had ordered the villagers into their houses, the farmers had not each run to their own homes, but had all crowded into the nearest available shelter: the houses immediately around the village square. Now the children—and the smallest and slenderest of the adults—were climbing out through the windows at the back of the houses and running in groups of two and three down the narrow lanes that led to the fallow fields and the trees beyond.

  The Demons on the rooftops were watching with interest.

  They cannot mean to let the villagers escape … not now that they have seen the sort of creature their enemy is!

  He was right.

  The first of the fugitives was at the edge of the fields when the first of the Demons lofted Itself into the air. It soared like a great and terrible carrion bird over one small band of refugees, and as It did, their bodies burst into flame.

  It seemed to be a contest among the four as to which could kill most inventively with Its spells. Cilarnen saw flesh liquefied, bodies erupt into hideous boils which burst in fountains of blood and pus until the victim had wasted entirely away, saw bones distort and grow through flesh, saw living men and women turned inside out with a gesture.

  And when They had killed everyone who had fled the village, the Demons returned to the houses still sheltering survivors, and took on the forms of four of those who had fled, and climbed in the windows.

  Cilarnen steeled himself against imagining what would happen next, and looked back into the village square.

  It had been perhaps a chime, if that, since he had last looked, but there was nothing left alive. The body parts of the men and the horses had been mixed together into one red jellylike mass. It covered the ground evenly around the fountain. In places blood had pooled in a declivity in the meat, and the blood sparkled in the sun.

  It was hard to imagine that men and horses had been here and been killed. Looking at this strange mess, too horrible for the mind to make sense of, it seemed so much more logical that they had just vanished, somehow, and this … stuff … had been transported out of some other reality to take their place.

  Then Cilarnen saw a hand, perfect and unmistakable, still clutching a cavalry sword, and it took all of his training to hold his emotions at bay.

  He managed.

  Maste
r Tocsel would have approved.

  His father—

  No.

  Cilarnen forced himself to watch, to note every detail, to record all he saw and not to care. Not yet. Strength, insight, dispassion—these made a High Mage. He would master himself. He would master his Gift.

  For the good of all the land.

  The Demons were playing amid the … mess, jumping up and down in the remains to see the blood splash, just as a child would play in a mud puddle.

  They thought it was funny, Cilarnen realized, with a distant sense of discovery. They thought mortality was amusing, they thought pain and death and suffering was entertaining. It was obvious from their behavior that they didn’t think of the humans who had died here today as enemies, nor did they even grant them the basic dignity that the Wildlander farmers gave to the animals they slaughtered for their dinner tables.

  No.

  The longer he watched, the more obvious it was to Cilarnen that the Demons thought that anybody who died was simply stupid. Because if they weren’t stupid, they’d be both immortal and invulnerable, as Demons were. And obviously the feelings of something stupid enough to get itself killed weren’t even worth considering.

  He felt bile rise in his throat, and swallowed hard, willing himself to have the detachment he needed to maintain the spell.

  Control. Detachment. Power.

  One of the four that had been in the houses stalked out into the square. It had resumed its own form.

  It wore a human skin like a cape.

  It looked upward, to where the Glyph of Far-Seeing was.

  And smiled, baring long bloody fangs.

  It knew I was here all along—they all knew! They wanted me to watch—or let me watch—because—because—

  It was, at last, too much. With a cry of horror Cilarnen struck out at his worktable, knocking it sideways. His wand, a jar of incense, the small brazier, the Elvenware bowl, were all swept from its surface. The vision vanished like smoke as the bowl spun to the ice. The sound it made when it hit and shattered had a horrible flat finality, like snapping bone.

  The terrible spectacle Cilarnen had forced himself to watch unfeelingly came cascading back into his mind, and this time he did not have the needs of the spell to protect him. He staggered out of the ice-pavilion, and the unfiltered light of day struck his eyes like a blow. The normalcy and familiarity of his surroundings should have been soothing, after what he had watched happen in Nerendale, but they were not. Cilarnen looked at the wide expanse of gray sky above, the luminous white of the untouched snowfield below, the green-shading-to-black of the forest’s edge in the distance, and he could see none of these things as themselves, only as what they were not.

  Not the sky filled with Demons.

  Not the ground soaked with blood, covered with fragments of men and horses, each piece reminding him, as if a story were being spoken aloud in his head, of how some living thing had died in agony at the hands of Demons.

  Not the houses that had become killing-pens for the last of the villagers, who had died at the hands of those they thought were their own kin.

  Knowing these things at all was like poison. To know the Demons had let him see them …

  It was as if he had been a willing participant in what They had done.

  Cilarnen fell to his knees in the snow, gagging. Of course he had fasted in preparation for the spell, so there was nothing in his stomach to bring up, but that only made things worse. He felt as if while he had been watching the Demons, somehow They had been looking into him as well. He felt unclean—Tainted—and try as he might, he could not spew up that foulness, make it a thing outside himself.

  He felt the old pain return behind his eyes as he scrubbed at his face with snow. Tainted. Somehow he was Tainted, in a way none of them could find the answer to. No one could see it—not Shalkan, not Vestakia, but more than ever Cilarnen was certain that somewhere deep inside himself there was a trap cunningly laid by Master Anigrel when he had sent Cilarnen’s Magegift to sleep.

  The thought dissolved before he could fully grasp it, swept away by exhaustion and urgency. The others would want to know all that he knew, and he must tell them immediately.

  He forced himself to his feet, shaking with cold and everything he had forced himself not to feel while the spell was running. Tears froze on his face as he stumbled across the snow toward his sleeping pavilion. He would need his warmest clothes for the walk back to the main camp.

  MENERCHEL and Hindulo were the ones that found him. Hindulo had scented strange magic on the wind, which was what had brought the two of them so far from their assigned patrol area in the first place. The chestnut unicorn lowered his golden horn to touch the fallen body in the snow experimentally.

  “This is not good,” Hindulo pronounced, as Cilarnen stirred only sluggishly. “We need him.”

  “Fool of a human and a child!” Menerchel burst out in exasperation, going to his knees beside Cilarnen and lifting Cilarnen to his feet. The boy blinked at him groggily, obviously unaware of how close he had come to death out here in the cold. Cold stole one’s wits, encouraging even adults to believe that they could lie down for a few minutes rest in the snow and arise safely. “Though even children know better than to wander in the snow at night,” Menerchel added.

  “Proper children do not come from the Mage City, where they do not have weather,” Hindulo reminded his rider.

  “I wasn’t wandering,” Cilarnen protested. His voice was hoarse and slurred. “I must see Redhelwar. Or Idalia.”

  “An odd selection of choices,” Menerchel observed. “But Idalia you must certainly see. And quickly, I think.”

  “Come—I shall carry the two of you as close to the main camp as I can, and you will take him the rest of the way. Be sure and find out what he thought was so important that he forgot everything he’d learned about weather,” Hindulo added.

  “I can hear you,” Cilarnen said, sounding faintly irritated. It was still difficult to understand his speech, but Menerchel could tell he was making a great effort to be understood. “I could tell you now, if you like.” He took a deep breath and began to cough.

  Menerchel picked him up and set him on Hindulo’s back, then mounted up behind him. Cilarnen slumped forward against the unicorn’s neck before he could stop himself. He struggled to sit upright; the warmth Hindulo radiated was enough to thaw him to the point his teeth began to chatter violently.

  His shivering passed after a few minutes, and Cilarnen began to talk, his voice stronger now, and clear. His speech was as blunt as a sword-cut, but Menerchel was not offended. It would be foolish to hold Mages—especially young human Mages—to the same standards of conduct as his own people. Different peoples had different customs, after all. And Mages were different from everyone.

  “There is—there was—a village called Nerendale in the Delfier Valley, where the Mountainfolk come—came—to trade with the City. The—They—came there, and killed them all. And the men and the horses—They took the Mages away with Them—Juvelira and Thekinalo—I knew them—I worked with them at home… .” The boy’s voice faltered, catching on a sob.

  “How could you see this?” Hindulo demanded, not pausing in his easy trot across the surface of the snow. “The Wildmages have not been able to see what goes on in the City.”

  “I am no Wildmage. The High Magick does what I tell it to do,” Cilarnen said, his voice going hard. But Menerchel could feel his body shaking beneath the heavy cloak with something that was more than cold.

  “No further,” Hindalo said regretfully, stopping.

  The edge of the main camp lay just ahead. In the darkness, the pavilions that had their lanterns lit glowed as if they themselves were enormous colored lanterns, and the sound of laughter and even music could be heard across the distance. Near the camp the deep loose snow had been cleared from the ground so that the Centaurs and the various mounted units could drill; what remained was hard-packed and easy to walk upon.

  “Menerch
el will wish to know if he must carry you,” the unicorn added for Cilarnen’s benefit, tossing his head.

  “I can walk!” Cilarnen said instantly. “But… I will be grateful if you will come with me, Menerchel. And I thank you—both—for being there tonight.”

  “It is a small matter,” Menerchel said. “Do not think of it.”

  He swung down from Hindulo’s back, and helped Cilarnen to dismount. The boy was a little unsteady on his feet, but in much better shape than he had been when they had first found him.

  “I will wait for you at the edge of camp,” Hindulo said, turning and springing away. His body was a golden gleam against the snow as he sprang through the darkness.

  Cilarnen turned to watch Hindulo go.

  “They are the most beautiful things in all the world,” he said, as solemnly and intensely as if he were passing judgment.

  “In that matter, you and he are in full agreement,” Menerchel said with a smile. “And I as well, for that matter. Come. It is not far.”

  Hasty and strange the young human Mage certainly was, but anything that loved unicorns as Cilarnen High Mage so obviously did was certainly of the Light.

  A High Mage was something Menerchel only knew of from the oldest of Master Belesharon’s Teaching Stories. He had never expected to meet one—in fact, if anyone had asked him five years ago, he would have solemnly assured them that it was far more likely that he would meet a Knight-Mage first—even though as far as anyone knew at that time, there were no Knight-Mages at all, and there was an entire city of High Mages at the other side of the Wild Lands.

  But to meet a High Mage—if he had been foolish enough to attempt it—Menerchel would have had to leave the Elven Lands (and he had been entirely happy in Thultafoniseen, working in his family’s tea business, when he and Hindulo were not engaged in other duties), cross the Wild Lands, and successfully enter Armethalieh, something his friend Hyandur had not been able to do—doing much to prove, in Menerchel’s mind, that the thing could not be done save by overwhelming force.