Black Sun Rising (62 page)

He touched his tongue to the precious drops and shivered in fear and need as his flesh drew the moisture in. Heat surged through him, not the essence of the Fire yet, but something from a far more human source: a heat in his loins that made him stiffen with need, the hunger of his soul made manifest in his flesh. His heart pounded wildly as he swallowed the church-Worked water, its beat so loud in his ears that he couldn’t have heard his companions if they’d called to him. For a moment, sheer anticipation surged through his veins—and with it a giddy ecstacy a thousand times more intense than sexual excitement, more intoxicating than a gram of pure cerebus. He nearly cried out from the force of it. Pure hunger, pure need, coursing through his veins like blood; he shook from the onslaught, embraced the pain of it, felt tears come to his eyes as the desperate need of an entire lifetime was coalesced in one burning instant.

Do whatever you want to me,
he thought—to his gods, to the Fire, to whatever would listen. He felt tears coursing down his cheeks—and they were hot, like flame.
Whatever it takes. Whatever will change me.

The Fire was inside him now, and its sorcerous heat took root in his flesh. His muscles contracted in sudden pain as the burning lanced outward, heat stabbing into his flesh like white-hot knives. The pain pulsed hotter and hotter with each new heartbeat: the agony of sorcerous assault, of transformation. With effort he gritted his teeth and endured it, though his whole body shook with the effort. Tears burned his face like acid as they coursed from his eyes to his cheeks, and then dropped to the ground; he thought he heard them sizzling as they struck the grass, and the thick smell of dry leaves smoking filled his nostrils, crowding out all oxygen. Inside him, he could feel his heart laboring desperately to keep pace with the transformation, and its beat was a fevered drumroll inside his ears.

He had shut his eyes in the first onslaught of pain; now, somehow, he managed to open them. The trees about him had been stripped bare as if by fire, and he could see between their blackened trunks to the sun beyond, a thousand times more bright and more terrible than any mere sun should be. With one part of his mind he acknowledged how deadly it was to gaze upon that blazing sphere for more than an instant—but then he knew with utter certainty that it had changed, that
he
had changed, and that no mere light could harm him. And so he stared at it defiantly even as new pain racked his flesh; kept his vision fixed on it as his muscles spasmed erratically, pain overwhelming him in spurts of fire. The very woods about him seemed to be burning now, with a flame as pure and as white as that of the sun itself; he heard its roaring eclipse the sound of his racing pulse, felt the song of its burning invade the very marrow of his bones. The clearing he was in was surrounded by fire, and white flames licked at him, smoking his clothing, scalding his flesh. He fought the urge to flee, to scream, to try to unmake the bond that was transforming him.
Whatever it takes!
he repeated, as fresh pain speared through his flesh. Blood sizzled in his ears, his fingers, its red substance boiling within his flesh.
Whatever is required!
The whole sky was ablaze with light, the whole forest filled with fire—and he was a part of it, his flesh peeling back in blackened strips as he embraced the flames, his blood steaming thickly in the superheated air. A sudden pain burst in his eyes and his vision was suddenly gone; thick fluid, hot as acid, poured down his cheeks.

It was then that he began to fear. Not as he had before, but with a new and terrible clarity. What if he didn’t consume the Fire, but rather, it consumed
him
? What if its power was simply too vast, too untempered, for mere human flesh to contain it? He tried to move his body, but the roasted meat that his flesh had become would not respond.
Daylight can’t hurt you,
Ciani had said—but it could, he realized suddenly, in enough quantity. It could burn, and dehydrate, and inspire killing cancers ... he struggled to move again, to gain any sense of control over his flesh, but the precious nerves that connected thought to purpose had sizzled into impotence, and his body would not respond. Uncontrolled, his body spasmed helplessly on the dry, cracked earth. Flame roared skyward with a sound like an earthquake—and then was suddenly silenced, as the mechanism that allowed him to hear split open and curled back in blackened tatters, releasing one last bit of moisture into the conflagration.

And somewhere, amidst his last fevered thoughts—somewhere in that storm of pain, that endless burning—the knowledge came to him. Not a knowing of his own devising, but one placed there: a last sharp bit of suffering to make the dying that much more painful, so that the creature who fed on it might be wholly sated. Knowledge: sharp, hot, and terrifying. Despair burned like acid inside him as he saw her approach—as he submitted to the vision that was placed in his brain, in the absence of true eyes to see it with.

Ciani. Cold, and dark against the fire. She came to his side and knelt there. Not concerned, not upset ... only hungry. And he could feel the hot tongue of her hunger lapping at his suffering, as he slid down into the fevered blackness of utter despair.

The last thing he saw was her eyes. Backlit by fire.

Gleaming, faceted eyes. Insect eyes.

Damien scanned the sky anxiously. In the east the sun had already set, and the bloodstained bellies of the farthest clouds were the last vestige of a short but dramatic sunset. Soon the last of the stars would follow, leaving Domina’s crescent alone in the heavens. Dark, it was nearly dark. So where the hell was he?

“There.” Ciani pointed. “See?”

In the distance: white wings, gleaming like silver against the evening sky. Not for the first time, Damien wondered at the Hunter’s choice of color; black seemed much more his style, both for its ominous overtones and its very real value as camouflage. Of course, it was always possible that he did it just to irritate the priest. That would be very much his style.

While the three of them waited anxiously, Tarrant circled twice above the camp, checking out the surrounding terrain before he landed. Damien wondered what he would find. Would his bird’s-eye view give him some insight into what had happened, and make explanations unnecessary? Or would he come to ground as ignorant as they were, and thus dispel the last of their fevered hopes? Something in Damien’s chest tightened as he watched.
He doesn’t know what happened,
he told himself.
So if he doesn’t see anything special in the currents, it might be because he doesn’t know what to look for.

The Hunter came to ground before them, wings curling so fluidly to brake his flight that the action seemed a ballet, a dance of triumph of one man’s will over mere avian flesh. Then coldfire blossomed, consumed him; white features melted into flesh with practiced efficiency, a display that never ceased to awe. But this time Damien had other more important things on his mind, and the few minutes that it took for the Hunter’s flesh to readopt its human form seemed a small eternity. At last, when the coldfire finally faded, he searched the Hunter’s face anxiously, looking for some hint of what the man might have discovered. But the adept’s expression was the same as always: cool, collected, a smooth stone mask meant to frustrate prying eyes. If he had seen anything useful, it couldn’t be told from his face.

So he said the words, and made it official—the act, and the fact of their ignorance. “Senzei’s gone.”

The Hunter drew in a breath, sharply; he didn’t like it any more than they did, though probably for other reasons. “Dead?”

Damien felt that bitter sense of helplessness rising in him again, which he had been fighting all afternoon. The frustration of total ignorance. The shame of forced inaction. “Missing. Sometime in the afternoon. He was in the camp with me, sleeping ... and when I awoke he was gone.” He shook his head tightly. “No sign of why or where.”

“Did you track him with the fae?”

Damien’s face darkened in irritation. “Of course. And we found a trail leading to the edge of the forest. That ended there. Abruptly. As if—” He hesitated.

“Something had erased it,” the Hunter supplied.

Damien felt something cold stir inside him, that was half fear and half anger. “Possibly.”

“Did you search for him? Bodily?”

It was Ciani who spoke. “As much as we dared.” Hearing the tremor in her voice, Damien took her hand and squeezed it. Her flesh was nearly as cold as his own. He explained, “It meant dividing the party so that one of us would be alone. Or leaving the camp unguarded. We didn’t dare—”

“No,” the Hunter said shortly. “Because if something had waylaid Mer Reese for the express purpose of rendering you vulnerable, you would be playing right into its hands.” He glanced at the party’s mounts—packed and dressed and ready to go—and at the campsite, already scrubbed clean of any sign of human habitation. “Did you find—”

“Nothing,” Ciani whispered. She lowered her head. “No sign of him beyond that which led to the edge of the camp. No trail.”

“We could hardly scour the woods at random,” Damien said.

“You did exactly what you should have done, and—more important—you avoided doing those things which might have gotten you killed.” The silver eyes fixed on Damien and seemed to bore into him. “To feel any guilt over the matter—”

“That’s my business,” the priest said harshly. “And if I want to feel lousy because a friend of mine might have been in danger—dying, possibly—while I had to sit here and twiddle my thumbs until night fell ... you just stay out of it, all right? That’s part of being human.”

The breeze had shifted direction, bringing a gust of cold toward them from the east. Tarrant blinked a few times, as if something in the chill air had caught in his eyes. “As you wish,” he said quietly. “As for the trail, or lack thereof ...” He turned to the rakh-woman. “Did you search with them?”

Her lips parted slightly, displaying sharpened teeth. “I packed the camp,” she told him.

“She hasn’t tracked in the woods before,” Damien said. “I asked. She wouldn’t know the kind of sign—”

“Maybe not. But there are senses which atrophied in humankind that may still function among the rakh. And if our enemy doesn’t yet know that a nonhuman travels with us, he might not have allowed for them.”

“You mean, that a trail might still exist for her.”

“Precisely. His attempts to obscure—”

He coughed suddenly, and brought his hand up to his mouth in unconscious reflex, to mask the rasping sound. Such behavior was so uncharacteristic for him that no one said anything, merely watched as he breathed once, heavily, as though testing the air. And then coughed again. When at last it seemed that the spasm had ended, he lowered his hand from his mouth and seemed about to speak. And then he looked down at his hand, and all speech left him. What little color he had faded into white—the hue of fragile vellum, of corpses. It made Damien’s blood run cold.

“Gerald?” It was Ciani. “What is it?”

Silently he opened his hand, and turned it so they could see. Moonlight illuminated a smear of deep carmine. Blood. His.

“Something’s very wrong,” he whispered. He looked up, and out into the night. His manner reminded Damien of a hunting dog, testing the air for a scent of its prey. Or perhaps of a deer, seeking the smell of predators.

At last he turned to the priest. His eyes were bloodshot, their pupils shrunk to mere pinpoints. His face was flushed, as if from fever. Or sunburn?

In a voice that was tense, he asked, “
Where’s the Fire
?”

It took Damien a moment to realize what he was asking, and why. When he did so, he reached to the pouch at his side and hefted it slightly in answer. But the weight that should have been in it wasn’t. He fumbled with the catch, finally got the small pouch open. The crystal vial was still intact, and it glowed with reassuring light—but the silver flask, its companion, was gone.

Gone.

He looked up at the Hunter. The man had one hand raised, while the other was shielding his eyes. It was clear that he was Working—or trying to. His breathing was labored, and obviously painful. After a moment, the wind shifted direction. After several moments, it held.

The Hunter lowered his hand from before his eyes—they were red, a terrible red, like balls of congealed blood—and asked, in a hoarse whisper, “Is it possible that Mer Reese would betray you?”

“Never!” Ciani cried, and Damien muttered, “No. Not that.”

“Are you sure?” He looked at each of them in turn, fixing them with his bloodshot gaze. “So very sure? What if our enemy offered him what he wanted most of all—an adept’s vision, in return for one simple betrayal of trust? Wouldn’t that tempt him?”

Damien shook his head—but something in him tightened, something cold and uncertain. “Tempt him, maybe. Seduce him, no. Not Senzei.” His voice was firm, as if he was trying to convince not only Tarrant but himself. Was he? “Not like that.”