When True Night Falls (31 page)

And what brought them into existence in the first place
? he wondered.

A shadow fell over their campsite as something passed overhead. He didn’t have to look up to know what it was. Tarrant circled several times before coming to earth, as if he were uncertain about trusting his flesh to transformation. Or perhaps he was just scouting for enemies.

As soon as he had landed and regained his human form, Damien told him, “We were attacked—”

“I saw,” Tarrant assured him.

He pictured the Hunter soaring comfortably overhead while the creatures attacked them and glared. “You could have helped.”

“It’s no easy thing to Work the fae while in a nonhuman form, Reverend Vryce. Nor is there much earth-power to manipulate at that height. But rest assured, if your own defense had failed, I would have attempted ... something.”

“What did you see?” Hesseth asked.

Tarrant considered for a moment. What the rakh-woman had asked for was not a recap of the obvious, but his interpretation of what had gone on. “They were newborn,” he said at last. “Still riding on the force of their creation, not yet accustomed to feeding off humankind. One night old, I would guess. If not younger than that.”

Something in his tone made Damien look up sharply at him. “You’ve seen this kind of thing before?”

The Hunter nodded. “Several times. Ulandra comes to mind, right after the tsunami broke through her sea wall and drowned the entire city. And the fields of Yor, when Hasting’s fortress fell at last and the invading army slaughtered everyone within. And I seem to recall a particularly nasty horde being created when the Neoduke of Moray snapped under siege and slaughtered his entire court for the cookpot.” He smiled darkly. “Unfortunately, his Grace had no idea that the constructs birthed by his victims’ dying screams devoured every soldier outside his gates, and he killed himself in the morning. Which rather negated the point of the whole exercise.”

For a moment Damien just stared at him. He struggled to find his voice. “Mass murder?”

“That, or some natural disaster. Just as the terminal terror of one man can give birth to a demonling, so can the anguish of a thousand souls give birth to ... what you saw. And you were very fortunate,” he added. “They weren’t yet crazed with hunger, as they will be in a few nights. Nor have they developed real intelligence yet, as the faeborn are wont to do.”

“They came from that direction.” Hesseth pointed. “Does that mean—?”

The Hunter nodded. “The source will be there. Less than a night’s journey from us, if I read things correctly.” He looked at Damien and said dryly, “I suppose you’ll want to go to it?”

He hesitated. “It’s along our route,” he said at last. “If there’s some danger there—”

“As there certainly will be.”

“Then we need to find out what it is. Right?” When the Hunter didn’t answer, he pressed, “Don’t you agree?”

The Hunter smiled faintly. It was a tense expression, but not without humor.

“If I didn’t,” he asked dryly, “would it make a bit of difference?”

The village was deserted—

Or so it seemed.

They entered the main gate silently, leading their horses behind them. There were no faeborn predators fluttering about the gate-wards, as there would have been outside any city. It was wrong, terribly wrong. As he passed the warded lintels he noticed that the very air seemed leached of sound, eerily silent. No insects chirruped in the underbrush, nor was there the rustling of any tiny herbivore. In the still night air he could hear himself breathing, and the sound seemed unnaturally loud.

“Can you smell it?” Hesseth whispered. The place demanded whispering.

He lifted his nose to the air and tested the breeze for content. At first he smelled nothing worse than a vague miasma, the kind of damp unwholesomeness common in swamps and mires. Then the wind shifted slightly, and he caught a whiff of something else. Decaying meat. Drying blood. Death.

They moved into the village warily, senses alert for any sign of movement. There was none. The breeze blew a few loose leaves across the street, then stilled. Nothing else.

“Tarrant?” he whispered.

The Hunter looked about, his pale eyes narrowed in concentration. “No life,” he said at last. “No life at all. Nor
unlife
,” he added quickly. An acknowledgment that his own unique state reminded them of questions they might otherwise not think to ask.

Damien looked at the buildings which flanked the narrow street. Simple wood and brick construction, painted long ago in colors that were neither too bright nor too dull; it was hard to tell anything about the people here just from their facades. “We should look inside.”

Hesseth hissed a soft agreement.

“If you want,” the Hunter said softly, “I’ll stay with the horses.”

Damien looked up sharply at him, wondering if there was something here he didn’t want to see. But no, his eyes were fixed on the earth-fae before him, and the silver intensity that glittered in their depths told the priest that he had every intention of finding out what had happened.

Taking two of the small lanterns with them, Damien and Hesseth entered the nearest house.

The door was unlocked, and swung open at their touch. Two feet back it jammed against something, and Damien had to press his weight against it in order to force it open.

A chest. Someone had pushed a heavy chest up against the door, hoping to keep it shut.

Which meant someone was probably still inside.

His first instinct was to call out some reassurance, in case someone was still alive. But while the Hunter might be wrong in other things, Damien trusted his judgment utterly in matters of death. And so he picked his way carefully through the house’s sitting room, over bits of furniture and decor that seemed to have been scattered by some violent movement. The smell grew thicker as he moved toward the back of the house. At the far end of the room was a heavy wooden door, slightly ajar. He walked warily up to it and peeked inside.

No life
, the Hunter had told them.

There were five bodies in the bedroom, strewn about like damaged and discarded toys. One lay on its back across a window seat, and Damien could just make out the look of tortured horror on the young man’s face. That, and the reek of urine and fecal matter which filled the small room, told Damien that death had been neither slow nor secretive in this place.

He looked at them a moment longer, but couldn’t determine the cause of death. Let Tarrant discover that with his Knowing. He backed out of the small room and shut the door gently, feeling his gut unknot just a little as the powerful stench was closed away. Flies buzzed past his face as he forced himself to breathe deeply. Once. Twice. Again.

He looked about for Hesseth. He didn’t see her in the sitting room, but there was another door open at its far end. As he made his way toward it he heard her hiss softly; the sound was more anguished than hostile.

He found her in a back room, kneeling in a narrow doorway. Looking beyond her Damien saw the fixtures of a primitive bathroom, the walls and floor awash with blood.

“What happened?” he whispered.

She pointed to where a pile of bodies lay in the far corner, huddled together like a pile of broken dolls. Four children, all pale and lifeless. By their feet lay another body, that of an older woman.

He squeezed his way into the small room, casting his lantern light on the bodies. There was a dark gash visible on the neck of one of the children, and he pushed the small head gently to one side in order to get a better look. The cut was deep and long and there was no question about its being the cause of death. Another child was positioned so that its neck was also visible; he studied that also, nodding to himself as the grisly pattern made itself clear. Then he stopped by the woman’s body long enough to see the two deep cuts that grooved her wrists, the blood-covered knife in her hand. And he ushered Hesseth out.

“She killed them,” he said quietly. “Most likely they were her own children, and she killed them to save them from ...
that
.” He nodded back toward the room he had inspected, not willing to put the horror into words. Not just yet. “A cut to the carotid artery is a quick and almost painless death. She knew what she was doing.”

“What happened here?” the rakh-woman whispered.

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Hesseth. But it didn’t happen quickly, that’s for sure.”

The relatively clean air of the streets was a welcome relief after the poisoned closeness of the house’s interior; he breathed deeply when they exited, trying to clear his lungs.

Then he looked up at Tarrant, a question in his eyes. The Neocount said nothing, but nodded toward a building across the street from them.
Meeting Hall
, the sign over the door said. “In there,” he directed them. His tone communicated nothing.

Filled with more than a little misgiving, Damien and Hesseth moved toward the building. The smell was stronger there, sick and forbidding. His stomach was tight with dread as he turned the worn brass handle and pushed it open, as he stepped forward to look inside—

Oh, my God
.

He was back out on the street again, reeling as though something had struck him in the face. The afterimage of the meeting hall’s contents was burned into his vision, shadows and highlights of utter horror sculpted by the lantern’s light. Bodies that were nailed to the wooden floor and gutted. Intestines wound about a desk leg, their owner still attached. More brutal, malevolent destruction than he had ever seen in one place before. And on every face, in every staring eye, a look of such utter horror that there was no question in Damien’s mind that these people had been alive while they were eviscerated. Perhaps being tortured in a careful progression so that future victims could see their coming fate, writhing terrified in their bonds as body after body was vivisected....

It was too much. Too much. He leaned over and vomited in the street, bitter fluids surging from his gut in violent revulsion. Again and again, until his stomach was more than empty. Still it spasmed, and his mouth burned with the fluids of his revulsion.

He didn’t look at Tarrant. He didn’t want to see those eyes—so cool, so utterly inhuman—fixed on his helplessness. He didn’t want to acknowledge what he knew deep inside, which was that even a horror such as this would fail to move the Hunter. Had Gerald Tarrant not done a similar thing to his own wife and children? Would he not gladly do worse in the future, if he felt that survival demanded it?

Instead Damien looked for Hesseth. She was nowhere to be found. He was just about to start worrying when she staggered out of the meeting hall doorway, one hand clenched shut about something. Under the angry red patches of her perpetual sunburn her face was drained of all living color, and her mouth hung slack as if she lacked the strength to shape whatever words she needed.

She walked to him. Slowly. Like him, she refused to meet Tarrant’s eyes. When she was no more than two feet away her hand uncurled, slowly. Flakes of blackened blood clung to her palm, making it hard to see what she held. A thin, curving object with shreds of flesh still adhering to its wider end. As if it had been torn from some living thing so violently that the flesh itself had given way.

It was a claw.

She gave him a moment to study it, flexing her own claws so that he might compare. The curve was the same, the composition, the proportion—everything but the size, which was slightly larger. There was no question what manner of creature it had come from.

“My people did this,” she whispered hoarsely. “Rakh.” Her hand started to tremble so violently that she had to close it again, rather than drop the grisly thing. “Why?” she whispered. “Why?”

He drew her to him because she seemed to need it, and carefully, delicately, folded his arms around her. For a moment he was afraid that she might respond badly, that her natural aversion to humankind might overpower her need for comfort. But she buried herself against his chest and shivered violently, so he held her tightly. No tears came from those amber eyes; the rakhene anatomy did not allow for it. But she trembled with a grief that was every bit as genuine and as passionate as that which a human woman might know, and he did his best to comfort her.

“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.

Tarrant stirred. “Let’s collect some weapons and then get out of here.”

Damien looked up at him. The pale eyes contained neither disdain nor impatience, but something that in another life might have been called sympathy. “It may be our only chance,” the Hunter pointed out.

After a minute Damien nodded. He disentangled Hesseth from his embrace, gently. “Come on,” he said softly. “We need supplies. Let’s find them and then we can get out of here.”

“What if they come back?”

He looked up at Tarrant, then back toward the meeting hall. “I don’t think they will,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing here for them. Not anymore.”