Black Sun Rising (8 page)

“Hey.” She prodded him. “Ease up. You’re not at work.”

“Sorry.” He caught up half his packages under his right arm, carried the rest with that hand. So that he might walk with her close to his other side, her body heat tangible through the coarse wool of his shirt. His hand brushing hers, in time to their walking.

“Your Patriarch doesn’t approve of this, does he?”

“What? Shopping?”

“Our being together.”

He chuckled. “Did you think he would?”

“I thought you might have charmed him into it.”

“The Patriarch is immune to charm. And most other human pleasantries, I suspect. As for us ... suffice it to say that battle lines have been drawn, and we both are poised behind our armaments. He with his moral obsessions, and I with my fixation on rights to an independent private life. It’ll be quite a skirmish, once it starts.”

“You sound like you’re looking forward to it.”

He shrugged. “Open conflict is infinitely more attractive to me than fencing with hints and insinuations. I’m a lousy diplomat, Cee.”

“But a good teacher?”

“Trying to be.”

“Can I ask how that’s going? Or is it ... classified?”

“Hardly.” He grimaced, and shifted his packages again. “I have twelve young fledglings, ranging in age from eleven to fifteen. With marginal potential at best. I culled out two of the younger ones, who seemed to be in the worst throes of puberty. Damned rotten time to be teaching anyone to Work ... and I think His Holiness knows it, too.” He remembered his own adolescence, and some very nasty things he had unconsciously created. His master had made him hunt them down and dispatch them, each and every one; it wasn’t one of his more pleasant memories. “Hard to say whether they’re more terrified of me or of the fae. Not a good way to start out. Still, they’re all positives on one scale or another, so there’s hope, right? As of yesterday—”

He saw her stiffen suddenly. “Ciani? What is it?”

“Current’s shifted,” she whispered. Her face was pale. “Can’t you see?”

Rather than state the obvious—that only an adept could see such things without conscious effort—he worked a quick Seeing and observed the earth-fae himself. But if there was any change in the leisurely flow of that force about their feet, it was far too subtle for his conjured vision to make out. “I can‘t—”

She gripped his arm with fingers that were suddenly cold. “We need to warn—”

An alarm siren pierced the dusk. A horrendous screeching noise that wailed like a banshee down the narrow stone streets, and echoed from the brickwork and plaster that surrounded them until the very air was vibrating shrilly. Damien covered an ear with one hand, tried to reach the other without dropping all his purchases. The sound was a physical assault—and a painfully effective one.

Whoever designed that siren,
he thought,
must have served his apprenticeship in hell.

Then, just as quickly, the sound was gone. He took his hand down nervously, ready to hold it to his head again if anything even remotely similar started up. But she took his hand in hers and squeezed it. “Come on,” she whispered. He could barely hear over the ringing in his ears, but a gesture made it clear what she wanted. “Come with me.”

She urged him forward, and he went. Running by her side, down streets that were suddenly filled with people. Dozens of people, in all stages of dress and activity: working folk with their dinner plates in hand, children clutching at homework sheets, women with babies nursing at their breasts—even one woman with a hand full of playing cards, who rearranged them as she walked. Pouring out of the houses and shops that lined Jaggonath’s narrow streets like insects out of a collapsed hive. Which brought to mind other images—

He stopped, and forced her to stop with him. His eyes were still Worked enough to let him see the current that swirled about their feet, though the image was little more than a shadow of his former vision. He checked the flow again, felt his heart stop for an instant. It
had
changed. He could see it. Not in direction, nor in speed of flow, but in
intensity....
He gripped her hand tightly. There was less of it than there should have been, less of it than any natural tide could have prompted. It was as if the fae itself were withdrawing from this place, gathering itself elsewhere to break, with a tsunami’s sudden force—

“Earthquake?” he whispered. Aghast—and awed—by the revelation.

“Come
on,”
she answered. And dragged him forward.

They ran until they reached the north end of the street, where it widened into a sizable shopping plaza. She stopped there, breathless, and bade him do the same. There were already several hundred people gathered in the small cobblestoned square, and more were arriving each minute. The horses that were tethered there pulled nervously at their reins, nostrils twitching as if trying to catch the scent of danger. Even as Damien and Ciani entered the tiny square the hanging signs of several shops began to swing, and a crash of glass sounded through one open doorway. Shopkeepers exited the buildings hurriedly with precious items clutched in their arms—crystal, porcelain, delicate sculptures—as the signs above them swung even more wildly, and the panicked animals fought for their freedom.

“You had
warning,”
he whispered. What an incredible concept! He was accustomed to regarding Ernan history as a series of failures and losses—but here was real triumph, and over Nature herself! Their ancestors on Earth had had no way of knowing exactly when an earthquake would strike—when the concentrated pressure that had built up over months or years would suddenly burst into movement, breaking apart mountains and rerouting rivers before man even knew what had hit him—but here, on Ema, they had warning sirens. Warning sirens! And not on all of Erna, he reminded himself. Only in the east. Not in his homeland. Ganji had nothing to rival this.

He was about to speak—to share his awe with Ciani—when a sound even more terrible than the siren split the night. It took him a few seconds to realize that its source was human; it was a voice racked by such pain, warped by such terror, that Damien barely recognized it as such. Instinctively he turned toward its source, his free hand already grabbing for a weapon ... but Ciani grabbed him by the arm and stopped him. “No, Damien. There’s nothing you can do. Let it be.”

The scream peaked suddenly, a sound so horrible it made his skin crawl—then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was cut short. Damien had fought some grotesque things in his life, and some of them had been long in dying, but nothing in his experience had ever made a sound like that.

“Someone Working when it hit,” she muttered. “Gods help him.”

“Shouldn’t we—”

“It’s too late to help. Stay here.” She grasped his arm tightly, as if afraid he would leave despite her warning. “The siren went off in plenty of time. He had his warning. That’s why we run the damn thing. But there’s always some poor fool who tries to tap into the earth-fae when it begins to surge....”

She didn’t finish.

“And they die? Like that?”

“They
fry.
Without exception. No human being can channel that kind of energy. Not even an adept. He must have wagered that the quake would be small, that he could control a small bit of what it released and dodge the rest. Or maybe he was drunk, and impaired in judgment. Or just stupid.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Only an idiot would bet his life against an earthquake. No one ever wins that game—
no one
. Why do they insist on trying? What can they possibly gain?” Something in his manner made her look up at him suddenly, and she asked, “You were warned about that in the west. Weren’t you?”

“In general terms.” His stomach tightened as his mind replayed that terrible scream. “We were warned. But not quite so ... graphically.”

He was about to say something more when she squeezed his arm. “It’s starting. Watch.”

She pointed across the plaza, to a tailor’s shop that faced them. Sunken into the lintel of its arched doorway was a sizable ward, made up of intricate knotwork patterns etched into a bronze plate. The whole of it was glowing now, with a cold blue light that silhouetted its edge like the corona of an eclipsed sun. Even as he watched the display it increased in intensity, until cold blue fire burned the pattern of its warding sigil into his eyes and his brain.

“Quake wards,” she told him. “They’re dormant until the fae intensifies ... then they tap into it, use it to reinforce the buildings they guard. But if it’s a big one, there’s more than they can handle. What you’re seeing is the excess energy bleeding off into the visible spectrum.”

On every building surrounding the plaza, similar wards were now firing. Awed, he watched as tendrils of silver fire shot across doorways, about windows, over walls, until the man-made structures were wholly enveloped in a shivering web of cold silver flame. And though the force of the earthquake was enough to make brickwork tremble, no buildings toppled. No windows shattered. Furniture crashed to the floor within one shop, glass shattered noisily inside another, but the buildings themselves—reinforced with that delicate, burning web—weathered the seismic storm.

“You’ve warded the whole city?” he whispered. Stunned by the scale of it.

She hesitated. “Mostly. Not all of it’s as well done as this. Sorcerors vary, as does their skill ... and some people simply can’t afford the protection.” As if in illustration, a roar of falling brick sounded to the south of them. Dust and a cloud of silver-blue sparks mushroomed thickly over the rooftops. Damien could feel the ground tremble beneath his feet, could see brick- and stone-work shiver all about him as the force of the earthquake fought to bring the man-made structures down—and the Workings of man fought to keep it all intact. The smell of ozone filled the air, and a sharp undercurrent: sulfur? The smell of battle, between Nature and man’s will.

Incredible,
he thought. He must have voiced that, for she murmured, “You approve?”

He looked into her eyes and read the real question there, behind her words. “The Church should be using this, not fighting it.” The ground was singing to him, a deep, rumbling sound that he felt through his bones. “And I’ll see to it they do,” he promised.

The tremors were increasing in violence, and the wards—fighting to establish some sort of balance—filled the plaza with silver-blue light, as nearly bright as Corelight. Some of them began to fire skyward, releasing their pent-up energy in spurts of blue-white lightning, that leapt from rooftop to rooftop and then shot heavenward, splitting the night into a thousand burning fragments. Nearby a tree, unwarded, gave way to the tremors; a heavy branch crashed to the ground beside them, barely missing several townspeople. It seemed second nature for him to put his arm around Ciani, to protect her by drawing her against him. And it likewise seemed wholly natural that she lean against him, wordlessly, until her hip brushed against his groin and a fire took root there, every bit as intense as the faeborn flame which surrounded them.

He ran his hand down over the curve of her hip and whispered in her ear, “Is it safe to make love to a woman during an earthquake?”

She turned in his arms until she faced him, until he could feel the soft press of her breasts against his chest, the lingering play of her fingers against the back of his neck. Her heat against the ache in his loins.

“It’s never safe to make love to a woman,” she whispered.

She took him by the hand, and led him into the conflagration.

Senzei Reese thought:
That was close.

Behind him, some precious bit of crystal that Allesha had collected—in deliberate defiance of earthquakes, it seemed to him—shivered off its perch and smashed noisily on the hardwood floor. One more treasured piece gone. He wondered why she would never let him bind them in place, with the same sort of Warding that reinforced their building. Wondered if her “mixed feelings” about using the fae might not translate into “mixed feelings” about him.

Power: He could feel it all about him. Power thick enough to drown in, power like a raging fire that sucked the oxygen right out of his lungs, leaving him dizzy—breathless—trembling with hunger. For a moment it had nearly been visible—a sheer wall of earth-force, a tidal wave of liquid fire—but he had forced himself to cut the vision short, and now he was as fae-blind as Allesha herself. Only Ciani and her kind could maintain their fae-sight without a deliberate Working—and a Working, under these circumstances, meant certain death.

He had almost done it this time. Even knowing the risk, he had almost chanced it. Almost gritted his teeth against the bone-jarring pain of the warning siren and continued with his Work as if nothing was happening. What a moment that would have been, when the wild fae surged into Jaggonath—into
him
—burning down all the barriers that kept him from sharing Ciani’s skill, Ciani’s vision ... the barriers that kept him human.
Merely
human.