Black Sun Rising (28 page)

“We’re all mortal,” he said gruffly.

“Are we?”

“All of us. Even the faeborn.”

“Certainly the faeborn. They lack the innovation—and thus thr initiative—to make it otherwise. But men? With all this power waiting to be harnessed? Have you never dreamed of immortality, priest? Never once wondered what the fae might do for you, if you harnessed it to fend off death?”

Something stirred inside Damien, that was half pride and half faith. It was the core of his strength, and he wielded it proudly. “I think you forget the God I serve,” he told Tarrant. “Those of my calling neither fear death, nor doubt their own immortality.”

For a brief moment, there was something in the other man’s expression that was strangely human. Strangely vulnerable. And then the moment was gone and the cold, mocking mask was back in place. “Touché,” he muttered, with a slight bow. “I should know better than to fence rhetoric with your kind. My apologies.”

And abruptly he left, for the company of the others. Damien just stared after him. Wondering what it was that he had seen in Tarrant’s face—so fleeting, but so very
human
—and wondering why it was that that brief hint of humanity chilled him more than all other facets of the man combined.

Morgot. It took shape slowly on the horizon, a mountain of deep gray jutting up from the glassy blackness of the water. As they came closer, Damien could make out details, etched in moonlight: the jagged upper edge of a crater’s rim, the thick mass of vegetation clinging to its slopes, the place where the walls had collapsed into the sea, permitting entrance into the crater’s mouth. Dark, all of it dark. Was there no night life on Morgot?

Then, as if in answer to his thoughts, a bright light flashed on one side of the entrance gap. It was followed seconds later by a matching light on the other side, of the same angle and intensity. The ship’s captain hurried toward the mirrored lamp that was affixed to the forward mast. He struck a match and applied it; flame surged upward in the glass enclosure, made triply brilliant by the mirrors behind it. Using shutters to focus its beam, he turned it toward the challenging lights at the caldera’s entrance. Short and long bursts of light in carefully measured proportion flashed across the water toward Morgot; a few seconds later, a similar code was returned. The captain muttered to himself as he interpreted Morgot’s messages, reciting weather warnings, customs codes, docking instructions. At last he seemed satisfied and shuttered the signal lantern.

“Cleared to go in,” he muttered—then added, for his passengers’ benefit, “Risky passage at night. Could be worse, though.” He grinned. “Could be moonless.”

He moved to the stern of the boat, then, and kicked the small furnace open. Inside, an orange fire hungrily consumed its store of fuel. He fed it more. Then, when he was satisfied that the heat was as it should be, and that the volume of steam thus produced was to his satisfaction, he engaged the boat’s small turbine. For some minutes more he remained by the mechanism, following each motion with his eye, reaffirming the patterns of how it worked in his own mind. That was necessary to counteract any doubts his passengers might have had about it, as well as the formless fears of the horses. The deep water beneath them meant that such fears couldn’t manifest too easily, but it never hurt to make sure. One good jinxer on board and the whole mechanism could blow sky high.

When he was finally satisfied with the machine’s performance, he ordered the sails struck and steered them toward Morgot. Entering the gap in the crater wall was like entering a tunnel: dark, silent but for the sound of the turbine, claustrophobically close. The crater’s ragged edge towered over them on both sides, massive walls of igneous rock that seemed precariously balanced, dangerously topheavy. What little moonlight seeped down into the narrow passage only worsened the illusion, and Damien found himself holding his breath, all too aware of what the most minimal earthquake could do to such a structure. And earthquakes there must be in quantity, right at the heart of a collision zone. But then, just when it seemed that their boat wouldn’t make it through to the end, the gap widened. Enough so that another boat, traveling in the opposite direction, could pass them in safety. They came about a sharp jag in the wall—

And Morgot’s interior unfolded before them in all its luminous splendor.

Stars. That was Damien’s first impression: a universe filled with stars, upon whose light they floated. On all sides the crater’s walls rose up about them, its curving slopes lit by thousands upon thousands of tiny flickering lights: lanterns, hearth-lights, port markers, open fires. Lights flickered along the shoreline, lights lined the crater’s ridge, lights shone from every boat and pier—and all of it was reflected in the rippling harbor water, each light mirrored a thousand times over, each image dancing energetically to the rhythm of the waves. They were in a vast bowl filled with stars, floating in a dark summer sky. The beauty of it—and the disorientation—was breath-taking.

He heard soft footsteps coming up behind him, guessed at their source. But not even Tarrant could make him turn from that glorious vision.

“Welcome to the north,” the man said quietly.

Colored lanterns marked each of the boats in the harbor; their captain fitted a colored gel to his own signal lantern, and red sparks danced in the water on all sides of them. “Not bad, eh? Best beer in the eastlands, to bet. It’s out of Jahanna.”

“Jahanna?”

“The Forest,” Senzei explained. He and Ciani had come up to join them at the bow, to watch the sea of scarlet stars part before their hull.

“The Forest makes beer?”

The captain grinned. “Can you think of something that place’d need more, besides a good drink?”

The harbor was busy—so much so that Damien wondered if Earth hadn’t looked like this, once; a place where night contained no special dangers, where business—and pleasure—might be conducted at any hour. What was Earth like now? It had been half-covered in steel and concrete when the colony ships first left it. How many tens of thousands of years ago was that? The colonists had crossed a third of the galaxy in coldsleep to get here; how many Earth-years would that take? Damien knew the theories—and he also knew that any real knowledge of how interstellar travel had worked had been destroyed in the First Sacrifice. All they had left were guesses.

The efficacy of sacrifice,
the Prophet had written,
is in direct proportion to the value of that which is destroyed.

And Ian Casca damned well knew that,
Damien thought bitterly.
And understood its implications, all too well. If only they could have stopped him
. ... But there was no point in pursuing that train of thought, and he knew it. What was done was done. If mere regret could have brought the Earth ship back, it would have done that long ago.

Wending his way through a bewildering array of light and shadow, the captain brought them unerringly to the proper pier, and came up against it with hardly a bump to jar their concentration. The horses looked up slowly, dazed, and Damien and his two companions moved to get them off the boat before their full faculties returned.

When they had finished that job, Damien turned to pay the captain for their passage—and found Gerald Tarrant counting out coins from a small velvet purse. Gold, by the look of it.

“That isn’t necessary—”

“The Forest pays its servants well,” he said shortly. “Which is why such men are willing to serve us at inconvenient hours.” Then he looked up at Damien; his pale eyes sparkled.
“One
of the reasons.”

“Damien.” It was Ciani; she pointed along the pier with one hand, holding reins in the other. A man in uniform was walking toward them.

“Police?”

“Probably customs.” Tarrant tucked the small purse into his outer tunic, then opened that garment at the neck. The gold of the Forest medallion glinted conspicuously between layers of blue and black silk. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Is there anything you haven’t prearranged?” Damien said sharply.

He seemed amused. “You mean, do I ever leave anything to chance?” He smiled. “Not by choice, priest.”

He moved off to deal with the official. When he was out of hearing, Damien walked over to where Ciani was, and helped her fasten the travel packs back onto their mounts.

“He’s interesting,” he said quietly. An opening.

“And you’re jealous.”

He stepped back and feigned astonishment.

She tightened the last strap on her own mount’s harness, then turned to him. “Well, you are.” She was smiling—not broadly, not energetically, but with genuine humor.
It’s a start,
he thought. “Admit it.”

And suddenly he wanted her. Wanted her as he had in Jaggonath, wanted any little bit of the old Ciani that was left inside her, wanted to take that bit and nurture it and coax it into life, until she could look at him and smile like that and her eyes would be the same, her expression would be what it once had been ... and that precious feeling would be there again, binding them, making them oblivious to Tarrant and the rakh and all such mundane concerns.

The sudden rush of emotion took his breath away; with effort he managed, “Tarrant?”

“Deny it,” she dared him.

“Damien.” She stepped forward toward him, close enough to touch. And she put a hand to the side of his face, soft warm palm against the coarseness of a long day’s stubble. “Women know things like that. Did you think you were hiding it?” Her eyes sparkled—and it did seem that there was life in them, a hint of a younger, unviolated Ciani. “You’re not a subtle man, you know.”

He was about to respond when Senzei coughed diplomatically: Tarrant was back. Damien stepped back from Ciani, putting a less intimate distance between them—but there was an unspoken challenge in his expression as he turned to face the Forest’s servant, and he knew without doubt that it communicated exactly what he meant it to.

“Can you pick up a trail?” he asked him.

“Unlikely,” Tarrant answered. “Not here, at any rate. A live volcano exudes its own fae, in quantity; that, and the strength of the northbound current, will muddy the trail considerably.” He looked up toward the crest of the cone, at the lights that marked the crater’s upper edge. “Perhaps up there it can be managed. Perhaps. There should be an inn, at any rate, and the three of you will want refreshment.” He began to lead them toward the narrow shoreline, but Damien stopped him.

“A
live
volcano?” he asked. “I thought Morgot was extinct. You’re telling me this thing could go off beneath our feet?”

“The verb you’re looking for is
vulk.
And as for this being an extinct volcano, there’s no such thing. Not in a collision zone. All we know about Morgot is that it hasn’t erupted while man has been present on Erna—a mere twelve hundred years. That’s nothing, geo-logically speaking. Volcanoes can have a period considerably longer than that. Ten thousand years—one hundred thousand—perhaps even longer.” He smiled. “Or twelve hundred and one, for that matter. So I would say that if you want to eat and get some kind of a fix on things we should start moving now. Who knows what the next hour may bring?”

“All the sorcerors in the Forest,” Damien muttered to Ciani, “and we have to get a smartass.”

She grinned at that. And he put his arm around her. And felt for the first time since leaving—the first time since the attack on the Fae Shoppe—that things were going to be all right. It would take a lot of work and one hell of a lot of risk to assure it ... but that was what life was all about, wasn’t it?

The path up to the inn was steep and narrow, a winding switchback road barely wide enough for them to traverse single file. Rushlights bordered the path along its outer edge, illuminating a sheer drop down to the rocky shore beneath.

“Lovely place,” Damien muttered.

After what seemed like hours—but it must have been much less than that, the crater’s edge simply wasn’t
that
high up—the path widened out, and a broad shoulder developed along its outer edge. Soon trees became visible, their roots trailing down like tangled snakes, their bare branches breaking up the moonlight into webwork patterns across the road. As they continued, more and more trees began to crowd the shoulder until the harbor beneath them was no longer visible. Then they reached the crest itself—and they stopped for a moment, to gaze out upon one of the most infamous territories in man’s domain.