Black Sun Rising (21 page)

And especially Senzei, he reminded himself. Ciani had told him that. The man hungered for Sight like a starving man hungered for food; what did it mean to him, to see that kind of power displayed so openly?

“You think he’s an adept,” Ciani breathed.

Damien looked at her. Measured his words. “It’s possible,” he said at last.

She leaned forward slightly; her eyes were gleaming. “You think he could help us?”

For some reason, he was chilled by the mere thought. “That would be very dangerous. We know nothing about him.
Nothing
. Even if he would be willing to join us, can we afford to take on a total unknown?”
Who arrived at just the right moment, he added silently. Too right. I don’t trust it
.

He suddenly looked back at the man, and wondered how much of his response was rational, and how much of it was the result of growing tension over other matters. Like having to sit here in this overfortified inn while the creatures they sought after were probably getting farther and farther away with each passing minute. Like his problems with the boy, the unaccustomed taste of a failure. With an adept’s power to back him....

No. Unthinkable. The risk simply wasn’t worth it.

“To involve a stranger in our personal business—knowing absolutely nothing of his power or his purpose—that would be incredibly dangerous. How could we risk it?”

“The problem is our ignorance?”

He looked at her sharply; there was a note in her voice he couldn’t quite read. “That’s a good part of it, yes.”

She hesitated only an instant, then pushed her chair back and stood.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.

“Knowing,” she said tightly. “In the old Earth sense.” And she smiled, albeit nervously, for the first time since leaving Jaggonath. “Someone has to do it, don’t you think?”

And she was gone. Before Damien could protest. Before Senzei, reaching out, could stop her. The two men watched, aghast, as she wended her way across the dimly lit room. As she waited for the stranger’s attention to fix on her, and then began to speak to him. After a few seemingly pleasant words, he offered her a seat at his table. She took it.

“
Damn
her,” Damien muttered.

“And women in general,” Senzei growled.

“That, too.”

The stranger called a waitress over. It was the same girl who had served Damien and Senzei, but now her blouse was tucked down tightly into her belt, outlining breasts that she was clearly proud to display to him. Whatever charisma the stranger possessed, it seemed to work tenfold on women. For some reason, that was more irritating than all the rest combined.

“You think she’s safe?” Damien whispered.

Senzei considered. And nodded, slowly. “I think maybe she’s in her element.”

He looked at Senzei, surprised.

“Watch her,” the sorceror whispered. There was a kind of love in his voice that Damien had never heard him express before. For the first time he sensed the true depth of their friendship—and he reflected sadly upon the fact that he had never heard such a note in Senzei’s voice when he spoke of his fiancée.

She must have realized that. And it must have hurt like hell
.

Ciani was indeed in her element—tense, wary, but more
alive
than she had been in days. And why not? Whatever it was that had caused her to devote her life to the acquisition of knowledge, that instinct was still intact and thriving. They had taken the facts from her mind, but they couldn’t change what she was.

Seeing that the stranger was responding well to her advances—and that she herself was slowly becoming more comfortable with him—Damien relaxed. Or rather, tried to. But there was another kind of tension within him, and that was growing. Not concern for her, exactly. Rather, more like....

Jealousy. Simple-minded, ego-centered, masculine jealousy. Well, grow up, Damien. You don’t own her. And just because he has a pretty face and some new stories to tell doesn’t mean that he does, either
.

“They’re coming,” Senzei whispered.

He must have been watching them on other levels, because it was several minutes before Ciani and the stranger actually got up. He first, rising effortlessly, then stepping behind her chair to help pull it out for her. The custom of another time, another culture. When she turned in their direction, she no longer seemed afraid; her eyes were sparkling with newfound animation.
Not for the man
, Damien reminded himself.
For the mystery that he represents
.

As if that made it any easier.

If the stranger bore them any ill will for their previous invasion of his privacy, he didn’t show it. He bowed politely as Ciani introduced them but offered no hand for them to clasp. The social patterns of a bygone age—or a paranoid adept. Damien suspected the latter.

“This is Gerald Tarrant,” Ciani announced. “Originally from Aramanth, more recently from Sheva.” Damien couldn’t identify the place name exactly, but like all cities near the Forbidden Forest it had been named for an Earth-god of death or destruction. He was from the north, then. That was ominous. Generally anyone with the Sight steered clear of that region—for good reason. The Forest had a history of corrupting anyone who could respond to it.

“Please join us,” Senzei said, and Damien nodded.

The newcomer pulled up chairs for the two of them, helped Ciani into hers before sitting down himself. “I was hardly expecting company,” he said pleasantly. “Arriving at such an hour, one often receives a less than enthusiastic welcome.”

“What brings you to Briand?” Damien asked shortly.

The pale eyes sparkled—and for a moment, just a moment, they seemed to be reaching into Damien’s soul, weighing it. “Sport,” he said at last. With a half-smile that said he knew just how uninformative that was. “Call it pursuit of a hobby.” He offered no more on that subject, and his manner didn’t invite continued questioning. “Yourselves?”

“Business. In Kale. Family shipping, for Fray—and for us, a chance to get away from town. An excuse to travel.”

The stranger nodded; Damien had the disquieting feeling that he knew just how much wasn’t being said. “It’s dangerous traveling at night,” he challenged the man. “Especially in this region.”

The stranger nodded. “Would that all our pursuits could be completed in neat little packets of time during the day, and we need never stir between dusk and dawn.” He sipped from the goblet in his hand. “But if that were the case, Eman history would be quite a different thing than it is, don’t you think?”

“You’re lucky they let you in.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “That was fortunate.”

And so on. Damien designed questions that should give him insight into some facet of the man’s existence—and he parried them all, without missing a beat. He seemed to enjoy fencing words with them, and would sometimes cast out tidbits of knowledge to draw them in—only to turn them aside with a quick response or a well-planned ambiguity, so that they came away knowing no more of the man than exactly what he meant them to know. Which was next to nothing.

Damien wondered if he had played the same game with Ciani. Was it possible to play that kind of game with Ciani?

At last the newcomer leaned back in his chair, as if signaling the end of that phase of their relationship. He set the goblet down before him; red liquid glinted within, reflecting the lamplight.

“The lady tells me you’re working on a Healing.”

Startled, he looked at Ciani—but her eyes were fixed on the stranger. He weighed his alternatives quickly and decided at last that there was no better way to test the man than to tell him the truth.

“The Keeper’s son,” he said quietly. Watching the man for any kind of reaction. “He’s comatose. I tried to help.”

He bowed his head gracefully. “I’m sorry.” Which might have meant anything,
Sorry for the illness. Sorry about your desire to help. Sorry about your failure
. “May I be of service?”

“You Heal?” Damien said suspiciously.

The stranger smiled, as if at some private joke. “Not for some time. My own specialty is in analysis. Perhaps that might be of use to you?”

“It might,” he said guardedly. He looked across the room, couldn’t locate the boy’s mother. She must have gone back to his bedside. When a waitress looked in his direction he waved her over, and asked her to please locate the dae-keeper for them. He had news that might interest her.

“She’s wary of strangers,” he warned. “She trusted me because of my calling. My Church. Whether she’ll want you near the boy is another thing.”

“Ah.” The stranger considered that for a moment. Then he reached into the neck of his tunic and drew out a thin disk on a chain. Fine workmanship, a delicate etching on pure gold: the Earth.

And he smiled; the expression was almost pleasant. “Let us see if I can’t convince her to accept my services. Shall we?”

The boy’s room seemed even more quiet after the relative noisiness of the common room. Oppressively so. Damien found it claustrophobic, in a way it hadn’t been before. Or was that his territorial instinct, responding to a newcomer’s intrusion?

Childish, Vryce. Get over it
.

It was just the three of them in the small room. The boy’s mother had agreed to let the newcomer look at her child—fearful, apprehensive, but she had agreed—but she drew the line at admitting the pagan multitudes. Just as well. Damien welcomed a chance to assess the man, without Ciani’s presence to distract him.

Gerald Tarrant walked to the far side of the bed and gazed down at the child. With a start, Damien realized that the man’s skin was hardly darker than that of the boy; flesh sans melanin. It suited him so well that Damien hadn’t noticed it before, but now, contrasted against the boy’s sickly pallor ... the coloring was ominous. And here it was soon after summer, too. Damien considered all the reasons a seemingly healthy man might not have a tan. A few of them—very few—were innocent. Most were not.

Be fair. Senzei’s pale
.
Some men have business that binds them to the night
.

Yes ... and some of that business is highly suspect
.

Slowly, the stranger sat on the edge of bed. He studied the boy in silence for a moment, then made a cursory inspection of obvious signs: lifting the eyelids to study the pupils, pressing a long index finger against the boy’s upper neck to take his pulse, even studying the fingernails. It was hard to tell when he was simply looking and when he was Knowing as well; he was like Ciani in that he needed no words or gestures to trigger a Working, only the sheer force of his will. An adept without question, then.

As if that was in doubt
.

Damien looked at the boy’s mother, and his heart wrenched in sympathy. Because he had vouched for the stranger, she had allowed him to approach her son. But Gerald Tarrant wasn’t a priest, and it was clear that his presence here made her very nervous. She twisted her hands in her apron, trying not to protest. Glanced at Damien, her eyes begging for reassurance. He wished he had it to give to her.

He looked down at the boy again—and froze, when he saw the stranger’s knife pressed against the youth’s inner arm. A thin line of red welled up in its wake: dark crimson, thick and wet.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.

The stranger didn’t acknowledge him in any way. Folding his knife, he tucked it carefully back into his belt. The boy’s mother moaned softly and swayed; Damien wondered if she was going to faint. He was torn between wanting to go to her and desperately wanting to stop this lunacy. What purpose could it possibly serve, to cut the boy open like that? But he stood where he was, chilled by a terrible, morbid fascination. As he watched, the stranger touched one slender finger to the wound, collecting a drop of blood. He brought it to his lips and breathed in its bouquet; then, apparently satisfied with it, he touched the crimson droplet to his tongue. And tasted it. And stiffened.

He looked at the woman. His expression was dark.

“You didn’t tell me he was an addict.”

The color drained suddenly from her face, as if someone had opened a tap beneath her feet and all her blood had poured out. “He isn’t,” she whispered. “That is, I didn’t. ...”

“What is it?” Damien asked hoarsely.

“Blackout.” The cut he had made was still oozing blood; a thin line of crimson dribbled down the boy’s wrist, onto the quilt. “And not all legal, was it?”

She was shaking. “How can you know that?”

“Simple logic. This boy had quite an addiction. If he’d fed it with legals, that would have meant repeated trips into Jaggonath ... and you would have known. On the other hand, with all the travelers that you have passing through here....” He shrugged suggestively. “It guaranteed his secrecy, but at a high cost. He knew the risk, and accepted it. I suspect that was part of the thrill.”