Black Sun Rising (10 page)

“Not dead,” young man muttered. “The pilot’s alive. They’re all—
we’re
all—alive. I suppose.”

“You’d better explain yourself,” Jarrom warned. But the fire was out of his voice now, he could hear it. What had happened? What
could
happen, to put that look in a man’s eyes?

“It’s a dangerous route,” the first mate repeated. Empty of emotion, as if the explanation had been rehearsed so many times that it had lost all meaning to him. “First there’s the Shelf, y‘see, and that’s safe enough unless a smasher comes, but who can take the chance? Then there’s the ridges where the Serpent turns—jagged mounts, that can rip a hull to pieces in a minute—and the bars of the eastern Straits, they’re murderous too, and the whitewaters just east of Sattin.... You wanted us to rush your cargo in, Mr. Jarrom, and that means taking a lot of chances. Only a good pilot would dare it. Jafe was the best, y’see? And he took us to where we needed him most, in close to the shore of the rakhlands. All cliffs and boulders and treacherous shoreline, but he said it could save us time enough ... and he knew the way. He said. Knew it all: every submerged mount and rock and how high each one sat, and how deep they’d be when the tides changed, and how much time between tide and countertide there was when a special way was open....” He blinked. “Knew it all, Rafe did.”

“So what happened?” Jarrom demanded. “Why the hell weren’t you here when you were supposed to be?”

The first mate drew in a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. When he spoke again, there was a faint tremor in his voice. “I ... that is, he ...
forgot,
sir.”

“Forgot?”

“That’s right, sir.”

Indignation heated Jarrom’s blood anew, rage coursing through his veins like cheap booze.
“Forgot?
Your vulkin‘ pilot
forgot
the route?”

The first mate nodded. “That’s right, sir. Forgot ... the whole Straits, I think he said. You see, there was this scream ... that’s how we found out. We found him screaming like a looney on the forecastle, threatening to throw himself off. Said something had taken away all his landmarks, just wiped them clean out of his brain. Took three of us just to calm him down.”

Jarrom snorted. “That’s as likely the result of hard liquor as anything.”

The first mate glared, a look all the more accusatory for coming from those bloodshot eyes. Those terrible, haunted eyese “We don’t drink while doing the eastern stretch,” he said coldly. “No one does. The lay’s just too dangerous. Gets you killed faster than you can open a bottle.”

“All right, all right. So your saint of a pilot wasn’t drinking. He was ... his landmarks were taken, all right? Taken right away. So what about his rutters? Were those snatched too? Or did the best Straits pilot in the east not bother taking notes?”

“Oh, he had‘em,” the first mate assured him. “Brought them out and showed them to us. Fine leather volumes, copied in his own hand. A signed hand, all personal symbols and the like.”

“So you couldn’t read them.” The story got more and more preposterous. “And I suppose, he ‘forgot’ how to read?”

The first mate hesitated, seemed about to elaborate. Then he simply nodded, and looked down at his feet again. “Yessir,” he whispered. “That’s the lot of it.”

“And your captain? And the rest of that mangy crew? All their brains taken, as well? You look whole enough.”

“It was like something took a part of you out,” the first mate whispered. “While you were sleeping, it’d happen. And then when you woke, that part just wasn’t there. It never came back, either. The captain ... it won’t do you much good to talk to him, Mr. Jarrom. I say just take your cargo and go, and feel lucky it got here at all. And hope that whatever got us isn’t contagious.” He looked up again, met Jarrom’s gaze with his own. “You catch my drift?”

He turned away, refused to meet that tortured gaze. “I had buyers, you know. With a contract. Gods alone know if they were willing to wait another night, when all I could give them were empty promises. If they—” He stopped, and scowled. Squinting, to see the
Matilla
more clearly in the early evening’s darkness. “Who the hell are
they
?”

Three men were disembarking from the shallow craft. They hadn’t been among the crew, Jarrom knew that. He had signed on the crew himself. “You pick up passengers, boy? That’s against all contract, and you know it.”

“I ... know that.” He seemed to be struggling for words. His hands, Jarrom noticed, were trembling. “I think ... they were marooned. We saved them. I think.”

“You’re not sure of much, are you?” They were pale men, and they moved with almost feral grace. Dressed like locals, but the cloth sat awkwardly on their bodies. They were used to something else, clearly. Something less? One of them turned toward Jarrom and grinned briefly—a cat’s grin, a hunter’s grin, lean and hungry—and above all else,
amused.
Though all his instinct said he should go and confront them, Jarrom suddenly found he didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to go toward them, not for any purpose.

“I remembered enough myself,” the boy was whispering. “Barely enough. We went north, a different route. Safer up there, if you strike ground; some hope of getting moving again. Had to take it slow, you understand? Couldn’t help the schedule, sir. We’d have died, otherwise.
Had
to take it slow, do you understand?”

The strange men were gone now—vanished like fae-wraiths into the deep evening shadows—but Jarrom felt as if their eyes were still on him, mocking him. Felt his skin crawl, in a way it never had before. “Well,” he said loudly—as if somehow mere volume could overcome his growing unease. “We’re lucky you didn’t forget also, aren’t we?”

The reddened eyes blinked once, slowly. “I didn’t forget the route,” he said softly. “No. Not that.”

Suddenly, an eruption of sound and color whirled across the dock toward the two of them. “Bassy!” Silk taffeta rustling like the wind, tiny feet beating a rushed staccato on the fog-dampened timbers. Perfume, in feminine quantity. “Bassy, honey! You made it!”

Then she was in his arms, a tiny girl even thinner than the boy was. And she was crying with joy, and kissing him, and leaving smears of lipstick all over his tan, weathered face. “I was so scared, honey, so scared! When they said you all hadn’t come in on time—and I
know
how prompt Captain Rawney is, but you can imagine all the terrible things I thought of, when no one knew where you were—”

And Yiles Jarrom would never forget the look in the first mate’s eyes, when the boy’s fiancée embraced him. Never. Though days and weeks and even months might occlude the rest of that awful night in his memory, it could never erase that terrible vision—of a glance which said, in a single instant, what volumes of prose could never have expressed so eloquently. So horribly.

Who is she
? the reddened gaze begged him.
Who
?

“Gods help us all,” Jarrom whispered.

The Patriarch remembered:

That combination will kill you,
the doctor had warned her.
It’ll eat your brain right up. Is that what you want? Is that what you want for your family?

Please, Mom. Be okay. Be sober ... at least long enough to talk to me. Please.

It’ll eat up your brain,
the doctor had said.

Never sleep
through the true night,
Damien’s master had taught him.
Whether you mean to use its power or not, you should be awake to observe its passage. There are too many things in our world that draw their life from that ultimate Darkness, too many evils that can only be Worked when all sunlight is gone. So be awake, and take your enemy’s measure.

He sat on the wide ledge of his room’s northernmost window, looking out over the city. His nerves still jangled from the dream which the harsh mechanical alarm clock had dispelled. It was 3:05. The true darkness would last a mere three minutes tonight—and true to his training, he was awake to watch it happen. He pulled open the heavy curtains at his window, saw Casca’s yellow-green crescent sinking defiantly in the east. He watched as its light slowly faded from the night sky. Then: utter darkness. The Core was gone, and with it the millions of stars that marked the heart of the galaxy; Erna’s night sky looked out on desolation, across an emptiness so vast that it was easy to forget there were other stars at all, much less other planets where living things flourished and fought and gave birth and died ... much less any place called
Earth.

Damien breathed deeply, and patterned a Seeing so that his vision might respond to the fae’s special wavelengths. Below him, in the city streets, deep purple shadows stretched tentatively forth, as if testing their strength. Tendrils of deepest violet—so dark they could hardly be seen, so intense that to look on them was painful—began to creep their way into the city’s open spaces. Shopping plazas, city squares, even rooftops: places where the sunlight normally kept such things at bay, now made defenseless by the true night’s special darkness. Damien watched the flow of it, muttered a prayer of thanksgiving that there were no people in the streets. Of all the forms the fae might take, this was the most dangerous. It could manifest in minutes what would otherwise take hours, if not days—and with a much more violent tenor. Thank God for the light of the Core, which kept the stuff at bay half the year, and the three moons, sun-reflecting, which guarded the darker nights.
Most
of the darker nights.