Crown of Shadows (53 page)

And then his face bent down close to hers and his hands closed tightly about her wrists—icy flesh, dead and damned, that sucked out her living heat through the contact—and she could feel her frail grip on sanity giving way, the darkness of terror closing in about her brain even as the flesh of the albino’s pack closed in around her body. Sucking her down into depths where was neither terror nor pain, only mindless oblivion.

Andrys! she screamed, as the darkness gathered in thick folds about her. The sound built up in her throat and left her mouth, but made no tremor in the air.
Andrys!

He couldn’t hear her. No one could. No one except the Hunter’s servant, whose beasts even now were mauling her frozen flesh.

Sunset was
sandwiched between earth and ash, its light like a wound in the darkening sky. Though the sun itself had disappeared behind distant mountains, its rays, stained blood red by a veil of ash, lit the bellies of the clouds like the fire of Shaitan itself. Now and then a wind would part the ash-cloud overhead and the light of the Core would lance through, but it was a fleeting distraction. The day was dying.

Pointedly not looking down at the landscape that spread out beneath his perch, Damien squeezed his way back into the shelter that Karril had found for them. The lantern he had left at the first turn was still burning, and he caught it up as he made his way back to the place where Tarrant waited. Unlike the Hunter, he needed light to see.

Tarrant was exactly as he had left him, resting weakly against the coarse wall of the cavern. By the lamp’s dim light Damien could see that his burns hadn’t healed, and that was a bad sign; a full day’s rest should have restored him. His scar alone remained unreddened, and its ghostly white surface, framed by damaged flesh, reminded Damien uncomfortably of the scavenger worms of the Forest.

“Sun’s gone,” he said quietly. No response. He put down the lantern and lowered himself to the ground beside Tarrant, striving to maintain an outer aspect of calm when inside he was anything but.
Come on, man, we’ve got a long way to go and not a lot of time to get there!
But something about Tarrant’s attitude scared him. Something that hinted that the worst damage wrought last night might not be that which was visible, but some wound inside the man that was still bleeding.

At last, unable to take the silence any longer, he ventured, “Gerald?”

The pale eyes flickered toward him, then away. Staring at something Damien couldn’t see, some internal vista.

“We can’t win,” the Hunter said weakly. The pale lids slid shut; the lean body shivered. “I thought we could. I thought there must be limits to his power. I thought that human senses were complex enough to defy absolute control—”

“And you were right—” he began.

“No. They aren’t complex at all. Don’t you see? What we would call a
view of the sun
is no more than a simple pattern of response in the eye, which is translated into simple electrical pulses, which in turn pushes a handful of chemicals into place within the brain ... there are so many places in which that flow of information can be interrupted, and with so little effort! Our enemy has that power, Vryce. One spark in the wrong place, one misaligned molecule ...” He gestured up toward his ravaged face with what seemed like anger, but for once Damien didn’t think the emotion was directed at him. “The only thing stopping him was Iezu custom. Now that he’s willing to disregard the law of his own kind, what chance do we have?”

“First of all,” Damien said, with all the authority his voice could muster, “It isn’t that simple a process. You of all people should know that. Do you think all those molecules in your head are labeled clearly, so that it’s easy to tell which one does what? Oh,
you
could . probably figure it out—I wouldn’t put too much past you—but I doubt if Calesta’s got the patience or the know-how for that kind of work. Which means that he may have the power to screw with our heads, but he’s not necessarily going to do it right every time.”

“He did it well enough to—”

“Shut up and listen for once! Just once! All right?” He waited a moment, almost daring Tarrant to defy him. But the Hunter was too weak to spar with him like that ... or perhaps he was simply too astonished. When it was clear that his outburst had had the desired effect, Damien told him,
“He didn’t do it perfectly.
If you or I had known what to look for, we would have seen the signs, we would have known that trouble was coming, we could have taken precautions—”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The
stars,
Gerald. He could black out the sun from our sight, but he couldn’t change every one of the stars so that its position was right!” He told him about the constellation he had noticed, that shouldn’t have been so high in the sky until dawn was well underway. “Or maybe he just didn’t bother with details,” he concluded. “Maybe his arrogance was such that he imagined simple darkness would work the trick. Well, now it won’t. Now we know how his Iezu mind works. And if he couldn’t pull off that illusion perfectly, maybe all his work has flaws. Maybe, like an Obscuring, a Iezu illusion succeeds because men don’t think to look at it too closly. Well, now we know to look.”

“And do you imagine that we can remain so perfectly alert at every moment, that not a single detail out of place will escape our notice? Because that’s what it would require, you know. Even if his illusions are less than perfect—and we don’t know that for a fact—he’s no fool. He’ll wait until our guard is down, until we’re being less than perfectly careful, and then what?” He raised up a hand to his face, wincing as the pale fingers traced the scar there. “I didn’t feel my own pain,” he whispered. “I could have died out there, and not until the final moment would I have understood what was happening.”

“Karril said he’d protect us,” Damien reminded him. “He can’t stop Calesta from misleading us, or from making others try to kill us, but he won’t let you walk into the sun. He promised.”

The Hunter’s voice, like his manner, seemed infinitely weary. “And what about Iezu law? What about the rule their creator set forth, that there was to be no conflict between brothers?”

“Maybe,” he said quietly, “there are things that matter more to Karril than that.”

“Like what?”

“Like friendship, for one.”

He dismissed the possibility with a wave of his hand. “The Iezu aren’t capable of friendship. Their venue is limited to one narrow range of emotion, and their only motivation is a hunger for—”

“Oh, cut the crap, Gerald! You know, you’re a brilliant demonologist in theory, but when it comes down to facing facts you can be downright stupid.” He leaned toward the man, as if somehow proximity could give his words more force. “Was it Iezu nature that made Karril take me down to Hell to rescue you? Where does
pleasure
fit into that? And was it Iezu nature to do what he did last night: defy the law of his creator to step into the midst of his brother’s war, at the risk of angering the one creature on this planet who can kill him? He did that to save
you,
Gerald Tarrant. For no other reason. Just to save you.” He leaned back on his heels. “That’s friendship by any standard I know. To hell with who or what he is. I’d be damned proud to have a friend that loyal myself.”

“You wouldn’t have said that once. You’d have damned yourself for even entertaining such a thought.”

“Yeah. Well. We’re worlds away from that time now. I may not like that fact, but I accept it.” He studied the Hunter—his wounds, his weakness—and then asked, “You need blood, don’t you? Blood to heal.”

The Hunter shut his eyes, leaning back against the stone. “I drank,” he whispered.

“Warm blood? Living blood?”

Tarrant said nothing.

“I’m offering, Gerald.”

Tarrant shook his head; the motion was weak. “Don’t be a fool,” he whispered hoarsely. “You need your strength as much as I need mine.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “The difference is that my strength can be renewed easily enough. Or don’t you think that a Healer would know how to accelerate the production of his own blood?”

“You can’t Work here,” Tarrant told him. “Not even to heal yourself. Shaitan’s currents would swallow you whole.”

Damn. Damien drew in a slow breath, trying to think. Were there alternatives? “What about fear? I don’t mean a nightmare this time. The real thing. Straight up.” He managed to force a laugh. “God knows there’s enough of it inside me right now for both of us.”

But the Hunter shook his head, dismissing the thought. “Without an artificial structure? The channel between us isn’t strong enough for that. That’s why I used dreams.”

The words were out before he could stop them. “Then make it stronger.”

Slowly the Hunter looked up at him. Those chill eyes were black now, bottomless, as dark and cold as the fires of Shaitan were bright and hot. “And could you live with that?” he demanded. “Knowing what I am, understanding what such a channel would do to the two of us? Could you live with yourself, knowing that a part of me was in your soul, and would be until one of us died?”

“Gerald.” He said it quietly, very quietly, knowing there was more power in such a tone than in rage. “I knew when we came here that we probably weren’t getting out of this mess alive. So what are we really talking about? A day or two? I’ll deal.”

Tarrant turned away from him. Maybe the channel between them was already stronger than he thought, or perhaps Damien simply knew him well enough to guess at what he was feeling; he could feel the sharp bite of hunger as if it were his own, the desperate need not only to feed, but to heal. Damien reached out and grasped the man’s arm, as if somehow that would lend his words more power. “Listen to me,” he begged. “Deep inside there’s a part of me so afraid I don’t even like to think about it. It’s in that place where you store hateful feelings and then bury them with lies and distractions, because you can’t bear to face them head on. Because you know they’ll eat you alive if you try.” He whispered it, pleading; “Why waste that, Gerald? It’s food to you, and the strength to heal yourself. Take it,” he begged. “For both our sakes.”

For a long, long time the Hunter was silent. Then, ever so slightly, he nodded. Just that.

Damien let go of his arm. His heart was pounding. “What do I have to do?”

Silence again, then a handful of words whispered so softly he could barely hear them. “Complete the bond.”

“How?”

Slowly, the Hunter then reached into the pocket of his tunic for the knife he carried there. Not the same one he had used so long ago to open Damien’s vein, establishing the channel between them in the first place—that had been lost in the eastern lands—but one very much like it, that he had purchased afterward. He opened the blade partway and then quickly, precisely, pressed its point into the flesh of his fingertip.

“Here,” he whispered. Raising up his hand, so that the tiny drop of blood might be visible. Black, it seemed, and so cold that its surface glittered like ice. Or was that only Damien’s expectation, playing games with his vision? “Only once in my long life have I offered this bond to another man ... and that one betrayed me.”

As vulnerable as this will make you
,
it will make me equally so
. The words rose up out of memory unbidden, and for a moment Damien understood just how desperate the Hunter must be to offer such a bond.
You fear this more than I
do, he thought. Reaching out to touch the glistening drop, gathering its dark substance onto his own fingertip.
Damn Calesta, for making us do what we fear the most.

As the Hunter had done to his first offering years ago, so now Damien did to this. Touching his tongue to the cold, dark drop. Forcing himself to swallow it, as one might a bitter pill. Forcing his flesh to take the Hunter’s substance into itself, so that a deeper link might be forged—

—And the monster within him rose up with a roar from those hidden places where it had lain shackled, its bonds shattered, its howling triumphant. Fear: pure and terrible, agonizing, undeniable. Fear of dying in this place. Fear of surviving, but as less than a man. Fear of returning to a world in which he no longer had a purpose. Fear that Calesta would claim his soul, or else leave him unclaimed—the ultimate sadism!—to witness his final holocaust. Fear that the Church would fail and mankind would be devoured by the demons it had created ... and fear that it would succeed, and the world would become something unrecognizable, that had no place for him. Those fears and a hundred more—a thousand more, ten times a thousand—roared through Damien’s soul with such horrific force that he could do no more than lie gasping on the floor of the cavern, shaking as they exploded one after another in his brain.

Then, at last, after what seemed like an eternity, the beast’s roar quieted. He could still hear it growling in the comers of his brain—it would never be wholly quiet again, not while Tarrant lived—but if he tried hard enough, if he focused on other things, surely he could learn not to hear it. Surely.