Black Sun Rising (79 page)

She sliced quickly across the ball of her thumb, a cut that slid just beneath the skin. Maximum blood, with minimum damage. He held the makeshift cup for her as she squeezed out a thin stream of red into it, and wondered that his own hand wasn’t shaking. Could one become so inured to the Hunter’s needs that they no longer seemed unreasonable?

When the cup was full, she took it from him and knelt by Tarrant’s side. His nostrils flared as he caught the scent of her offering, and hunger flashed in those silver eyes. Then he turned away, and whispered hoarsely, “Please don’t. I can’t.”

“The cut’s already been made,” she said quietly. “The blood’s already been shed. You wouldn’t be hurting me by taking it.” When he didn’t respond, she whispered, “Gerald. Please. There’d be no risk this way.” Blood dripped from her hand to the snow, staining it purple in the coldfire’s glare.
“I
need you.”

“Don’t you understand?” he gasped. “I gave my word. And keeping it is the only thing that keeps me from becoming like
she
is.” He nodded back toward the citadel, shivering. “Don’t you realize what an addiction power is? Any power? If you don’t impose some order on it, it consumes you—”

“Honor is one thing,” Damien told him. “Stupidity is another. Take the blood, man—or do I have to pour it down your goddamned throat?”

The pale eyes fixed on him. And the Hunter nodded slowly. “I believe you would,” he whispered.

Slowly he raised one hand from the grip of the sword and closed it about Ciani’s. And raised the makeshift cup to his lips, and drank. Damien could see a tremor pass through him as he absorbed the precious fluid. Pleasure? Pain? Tarrant made no protest while she filled the cup again, and made no effort to resist the second offering. While he drank, Damien took out one of the cloth strips he had prepared for bandages, so many nights ago, and offered it to Ciani. She wound it tightly about her hand, forcing the wound closed.

Slowly, when he was done, the Hunter moved. With effort he managed at last to sheathe his sword, sliding it into the heavily Worked enclosure that would confine its power. And he sighed—in relief, it seemed—as the coldfire faded from sight.

“Now tell us: what was that all about?” Damien indicated the carved ward before them. “What are those things?”

The Hunter drew in a deep breath, then said, in a voice that shook slightly, “Our enemy has warded the crust of the planet.”

“To do what?” Ciani asked.

“To Bind the fault, I assume.” His voice was a whisper. “To freeze the earth in its motion.”

“I thought you said that wasn’t possible.”

“It isn’t, in the long run. But if one’s vision were limited enough—or blinded, by dreams of power....” He looked out across the snow-clad mountains, where a vast webwork of coldfire had so recently burned. Where a vast network of wards had been revealed, that stretched across miles of earth in perfect alignment. A thousand or more quiescent Workings that waited to tap the energy of the earth itself, when the tides of the planet’s core released it. “I said she was insane,” he whispered. “I meant it. But insanity on such a scale ... my God. When it fails—and it must fail, some day—what does she think will happen? To her, and to everything she’s built here?”

“You mean the wards won’t hold.”

“How can they? The power of the fae is constant. The pressure along the fault is building. There must have been enough fae in the beginning to make such a Binding possible in the first place ... but now? After pressure has been building up here for a century, unrelieved? It would require more and more fae just to maintain the status quo—and you see how weak the currents are in this region. Where is the power to come from if the earth isn’t moving?”

Damien looked at Hesseth. “What was it your people said? That the storms here were constant, when the Master of Lema first came. And then, after a time, there were fewer.” He turned to the Hunter. “The reference was to lightning, apparently. Ward-lightning. Overload.”

“There would have been more than enough fae at first for her purposes,” he murmured. “When the earth began to shift, the wild power would have surged ... and then her wards would Bind it, and the excess fae would bleed off into the sky. What remained would be safely tamed. Consumable.”

“But why?” Ciani asked. “What purpose did it serve?”

The silver eyes fixed on her. “Why did Senzei steal the Fire? Why does any non-adept take in a power wild enough to kill him, if not to satisfy that most primal of all hungers? Every time a quake strikes Jaggonath there’s someone fool enough to try to Work it. Here’s a woman who tamed the earth itself so that she could drink in its power in safety. But only for as long as her wards hold; that’s the catch. Remember what the rakh said? The storms are fewer, now. Not because there’s less power, but because more and more of it is required to maintain the Binding. And as pressure continues to build within the earth, that imbalance will increase geometrically, until one day soon mere wards will no longer be sufficient....”

Slowly, he got to his feet. “We are standing on a time bomb,” he whispered. “Of such immense proportion that it defies description. And if what the rakh say is true ... then it’s very near to going off.”

“You’re thinking you can trigger it,” Damien said quietly.

He looked out over the snow-shrouded earth, at the places where the quake-wards lay.

“It’s a simple series,” he said at last. “Break one, and the rest would go. But would the earth respond immediately? There are so many variables....”

“But the odds are high.”

“Oh, yes. The odds are very high. Higher than they could ever get without man’s interference.” He shook his head in amazement. “Only someone with a complete disregard for seismic law would dare something so intrinsically stupid as this....”

“Or someone so addicted to the rush of power that she can’t think clearly any more. Isn’t that what we’re dealing with?”

“She fed on me,” he whispered. Wrapping his arms about himself, as if that could protect him from the memory. “She used my pain as a filter, to tame the raw earth-fae. That’s what she wants Ciani for. As a living refinery for the kind of power she lusts after. As if by using us in this manner she can somehow break through the barriers inside herself, give herself an adept’s capacity....”

“I thought that wasn’t possible,” Damien challenged.

“It isn’t. But it’s a powerful fantasy, nonetheless. Man has always been loath to accept his limitations. How much easier it is to deny the truth altogether—to imagine that Nature has given us all the same potential, and that a single act of will can suddenly cause all limitations to vanish.” He laughed bitterly. “As if Nature were just. As if evolution hadn’t designed us to compete with each other, so that only the strong would survive.”

“What about the Dark Ones?” Ciani asked. “Where do they fit in?”

“Servants. Symbiotes. She has to remain at the heart of her web in order to maintain its power. They serve as her eyes and ears and hands, to scour the land in search of what she needs ... and in return they have her protection. Which is no small thing, in a land with no other human sorcery.” His eyes narrowed, and a new edge of coldness entered his voice. “If we mean to destroy one of her creatures, then we must deal with her first. That, or have her strike us from behind at a crucial moment.”

“If we could release the earth from her Binding, would that do it?”

He hesitated. “There were wards in her citadel. I remember seeing them when I was brought in. But I have no way of knowing what they were, exactly. Quake-wards? If so, the building might endure for a time. Only a few minutes, at most—but that would be enough. Because she’d have warning, remember. The surge of earth-fae that precedes an earthquake would have reached her minutes before, with all its power intact. She would have known then that her precious system had failed her, and if she could get away from the citadel in time—”

Then he stopped. And said, very quietly, “Unless she was Working when it happened. In that case, there would be no escape.”

“Can we force that?” Damien asked. “Set her up, so that she doesn’t see it coming?”

“How?” the Hunter whispered.

“Some sort of attack. Something she would have to defend against—”

Tarrant shook his head, sharply. “That would require an active assault, which would mean that when the surge hit ... it would be fatal for both parties. No, she would have to be the only one Working, and I don’t see how....”

He stopped suddenly. And drew in a long, slow breath.

“Gerald?” Ciani asked. “What is it?”

His arms tightened about his body. But he said nothing.

“You know a way,” Damien said quietly.

“Maybe,” he whispered. “The risk would be tremendous. If she were sane, if we could predict her response ... but she isn’t, and we can’t.” He shook his head. “Too dangerous, priest. Even for this expedition.”

“Tell me.”

The pale eyes fixed on him. Silver in white, with hardly a trace of red; the man was healing.

“You would have come here alone,” he said softly. A challenge. “If we had not been available—or necessary—you would have traveled to this place by yourself, and dealt with her unaided. Gone into the heart of her citadel, if that’s what it took, with nothing but your own wits and a small handful of weapons. Am I correct?”

“If I judged it to be worth the risk,” Damien said warily.

“The rakhlands won’t support her forever. Already the currents are too weak to truly satisfy her, drained as they are by her Wardings. Soon she would begin to draw on the Canopy itself, and after that ... I imagine she would move into the human lands. Utterly mad, forever hungry, and backed by a horde of demons capable of reducing her enemies to brainless husks. Would that be worth the risk, Reverend Vryce? Would you brave her citadel alone, for that—risk her rage, and that of the earth itself, to gain the upper hand in this war? Because I think I know a way that she might be rendered vulnerable, but it would have to be done by a single man. Human, and not an adept. There’s only one of us who fits that description. How great is your courage now?

“If I’d come alone, as you say, I would expect to do no less,” he said tightly. “What are you thinking?”

“It wouldn’t be pleasant, I warn you.”

“As opposed to the rest of this trip?”

Despite himself, the Hunter smiled; the expression was edged with pain. “You’re a brave man, Reverend Vryce, and true courage is rare. I respect you for it. But there’s more than simple risk at issue here.” The silver eyes burned like fire. Coldfire, unwarm and uncomforting. “Could you trust me, priest? Without reservation? Could you give yourself to me, for the lady’s sake? Entrust your soul to me, for safekeeping?”

Damien remembered the touch of the man’s soul against his own, which he had endured once in order to feed him. The mere memory of it made his skin crawl—and that had been but a fleeting contact, with no real depth to it. Even the Hunter’s coldfire in his veins, for all the pain and horror it had inspired, had been nothing compared to that. The utter revulsion. The soul-searing chill. The touch of a mind so infinitely unclean that everything it fixed upon was polluted by the contact. He shivered to recall it ... but said nothing in response. The man hadn’t asked if he would enjoy such contact, but if he could endure it. If he would trust him.

He looked at the man’s face, at the taut tissue so recently ravaged by fire. At the weakness that lurked just beneath his facade of arrogance, which had so nearly consumed his life just now. All this, in a man who feared death more than any other single thing. All these things he had risked, and suffered, for the sake of one promise. One word. One single vow, which his present companions had not even witnessed.

“I assume it would be temporary,” he said quietly.

“Of course.” The Hunter nodded. “Assuming we both survive to undo it.”

“I have your word on that?”

“You do.” The pale gray eyes glittered with malevolence; toward him, or toward their enemy? “And I think you know what that’s worth, Reverend Vryce.”

He felt himself on the brink of a vast cliff, balancing precariously on its crumbling edge. But the darkness of the citadel which loomed overhead was even more threatening than the imagined depths beneath, and at last he heard himself say, in a voice that seemed strangely distant, “All right, Hunter. Tell me what you have in mind.”

Tarrant nodded. And turned to the pierced one. In all the time he had been awake, he had made no move to acknowledge the Lost One’s presence. Now he gazed upon the crouching form, whose cave-pale fur protected it from the night’s chill, and seemed to consider what the others had told him about it.

“Go back to your people,” he told the cave-rakh. Gesturing for Hesseth to translate his words. “Tell them they must leave this region quickly. The earth will move soon, and the caves here are too fragile to protect them. Tell them they must go down to the plains, or else head west. Away from the fault zone, as quickly as possible. Their lives depend on it.” He glanced up at the night sky as if trying to judge the time by it. “They’ll have till tomorrow night,” he said. “Tell them that. We won’t begin until nightfall, and even then it may take some time.” He looked at the rakh-woman. “But not much,” he warned. “Make that clear.”

She stared at him for a minute—suspiciously, it seemed—and then finished translating his words. It took some time for their meaning to sink in; when at last it did, the Lost One rasped a few hurried questions at Hesseth. Her answers were short hisses, and the hostility in them was clear even to those who didn’t speak her language. Finally the Lost One stood, stiffly, and looked at the party—looked long and intently at Tarrant with an expression that was unreadable—and then turned away sharply, and moved off into the night. Motion silent in the soft snow, long tail curled tightly in foreboding.