Crown of Shadows (54 page)

“You all right?”

He managed to open his eyes, amazed that his flesh still obeyed him. For a while it hadn’t. “Just great,” he whispered. It seemed there was an echo in the chamber, that it took him a minute to place.
Tarrant’s perception.
The thought sent a chill down his spine.
I’m feeling him hear
me. Fear uncoiled anew in his gut, rising up to—

He choked back on it, hard. His whole body trembling, for a moment he could do no more than lie where he was, struggling to get hold of himself. Then slowly, very slowly, he rose up to one elbow. Tarrant offered him a hand for support, and he grasped it in his own. Not cold, that undead flesh, but comfortable in its temperature, comforting in its strength. That, too, made him shiver.

“It won’t last long,” the Hunter assured him.

“Yeah.” He brushed himself off with shaking hands. “Only until one of us dies.”

“As I said.” The Hunter reached down to pick up his backpack, handed it to him. There was a strange kind of echo to the gesture, such that when Damien closed his hand about the leather strap it was as if he had just done so seconds before. Unnerving. “Not long at all.”

He drew in a deep breath, then slipped his arms into the straps. It seemed to him that the air between them was warmer than before; was that some new faeborn sense, or just overheated imagination?

“The strangeness of it will fade,” the Hunter promised. It seemed to Damien that he smiled slightly. And yet his mouth didn’t change, nor any other part of his expression. Weird.

“How about you?” he asked. The Hunter’s face, he saw, was back to its accustomed ghastly color. “Feel stronger?”

“Strong enough to send a Iezu to Hell.” And he added: “Thanks to you.”

For a moment there was an awkward silence. Not quite an expression of gratitude. Something stronger, and subtler.

“All right, then.” Damien shifted the pack on his back until its straps fell into their accustomed position, allowing him free access to his sword. Without further glance at Tarrant he started toward the exit, knowing that the Hunter followed. “Let’s do it.”

The valley was ...

Different.

Where before a dark valley floor had served as backdrop for mist and moonlight, now an ocean of fiery power seethed and frothed, driving itself onto the rocks beneath them with such force that a spray of earth-fae, fine as diamonds, drizzled down the slope of the ridge. Where once vague tendrils of mist had curled about the crags and monuments of Shaitan’s domain, now it was possible to see things stirring, snakes of mist that resolved into semihuman form and then, with a ghastly cry that Damien could feel in his bones more than he could hear, melted into mist once more. The whole of the valley floor was in motion, spewing forth malformed creatures and then swallowing them up again while Damien watched; the sight of it made him dizzy, and he leaned back against the ridge for support, afraid that he might lose his balance and fall into it.

And then that vision faded. Not utterly, though he would have liked that. Out of the corner of his eye he could still sense unearthly motion, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to walk along that ground without feeling the earth-fae twine about his flesh, without knowing that here every human thought became a thing with a face and a hunger and a chance to scream, before Shaitan’s power swallowed it up again.

“A taste of my Vision,” the Hunter said quietly. “Now that you can share it.”

“Is that really what you see down there?”

The Hunter chuckled. “A faint shadow of it, no more. The most your human brain can handle. Here.” He held out something to Damien. “Put this on.”

It was a fist-sized bundle, soft and gleaming. Damien shook it out to its full length, nearly ten feet long. “A scarf?”

“Just so.” The Hunter had taken out one of his own and was wrapping it about his head like a turban. The fine black silk was so thin that it seemed more like smoke than fabric, and when he drew a fold of it across his face and fixed it there, it gave his white skin a weird, ghostly quality. “Shaitan’s breath is hard on the skin. You’ll want to put on your gloves also.”

“Not to climb down a mountain, I don’t.”

“Okay, okay! Gloves it is!” He fumbled in his pack and retrieved them. “God.” He put the wrong hand in the wrong glove and had to start over. “You’re a lot of fun to travel with, you know that?”

“The fun,” Tarrant assured him, “has not even started yet.”

He looked down into the valley again. The ground was dark. The mist was just mist. It was comforting. Damien wrapped the black silk around his head as he had seen Tarrant do—it took three tries—and noted that it had a faint chemical odor, as if it had been treated with something. It did surprisingly little to affect his vision; perhaps it had also been Worked in that regard.
Tarrant’s been here before,
he reminded himself.
He knows what he’s doing.

“Ready?”

The Hunter had brought a special rope for the descent, a thin line meant to steady them on the rubble-strewn slope, long enough to guide them down almost to the valley floor. He tied one end to a spire of rock and sent the other end, weighted, hurtling down into the darkness.

Damien sighed. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Tarrant led the way. Slowly, oh so carefully, they dropped down toward the valley floor and the dangers that made their home there. At times the Hunter would stop and signal for Damien to do the same, and they would grasp the thin rope to keep from sliding while he waited for whatever danger he had sensed to pass them by, or turn its attention elsewhere, or ... whatever. Damien didn’t want to know the details.

The rope gave out at last and they had to make their way without it. Gazing down at the ground by his feet, eerily lit by the orange fire of Shaitan in the distance, Damien couldn’t help but notice the tendrils of mist that played about his feet, couldn’t help but remember the vision that Tarrant had shared with him. When he made the mistake of looking too closely at the misty tendrils, they reared up like snakes and began to take on a more distinct form—but Tarrant ignored them, and just nudged him forward at a faster pace. Soon they were moving too fast to look at things closely, thank God. If you didn’t look, did they leave you alone?

At last they reached a place where the ground seemed level enough, and Damien allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Thin orange highlights played along the earth, not enough to see by; with a glance at Tarrant to make sure it was all right, he took out his lantern and lit it. Golden light flickered upon the bellies of mist-clouds, outlining ghostly faces that formed and faded as he watched. “Those are no danger,” Tarrant told him, when he seemed hesitant to move forward. “Come.”

It was an eerie place, and the orange light from Shaitan, flickering and fading as its lava fields pulsed, did little to make it more comforting. Craggy monuments lined the valley floor, and the mist flowed between them like rivers. A handful of plants had tried to take hold on the rocky ground, but they were stunted things, pale reflections of a hardier species, and their leaves and bark had been eaten away in seemingly random patterns, fibers peeling back to reveal a core laced with channels and pockmarks. The very smell of the place was strange, as if the plants were struggling to create some kind of natural perfume but were too wounded to do it right; wisps of unnatural odor came and went with the breeze, mixed with the stink of ash and the omnipresent bite of sulfur in the air. The ground seemed solid enough, but what if that were just another of Calesta’s illusions?
Karril said he would protect us,
Damien told himself as they walked.
He won’t let Calesta kill us with illusions.
Yet there was a vast gap between
killing
and
being safe,
Damien knew that, and if Calesta believed that Tarrant had figured out a way to kill him ... what would he do? Damien gazed up at the mists surrounding them, at the craggy monuments that reared high over their heads, and shivered. That Calesta would strike at them was not to be questioned. The only question was when, and how.

The bastard’s afraid of us,
he told himself. Trying to derive some satisfaction from the thought.

And then something drifted out at them from the mists, all too human in shape for his comfort. Tarrant said nothing, but urged him forward with a touch, and Damien obeyed silently, his stomach a tight knot of dread. They walked like you did with a mad dog, slowly, pretending not to notice its presence, while all the while your heart was pounding, and sweat was running down your face. The figure had come closer now, close enough to investigate, and it took everything Damien had not to turn and look at it. Were there other figures by its side, or was that only his fear making him see things? Or Calesta’s power, turned against them at last? Damn it, if this place didn’t give him a heart attack all by itself, waiting for the enemy to strike at them might just do it.

He was moving forward, watching the strange figure out of the corner of his eye, when suddenly Tarrant grabbed his arm and jerked him back. He felt cold air rush up against his face, and as he looked down he could see that there was no ground in front of him, not by a good fifty or sixty feet. He had almost walked right into it.

“God,” he whispered.

Tarrant had turned to face their pursuer. His body was rigid with tension, which Damien found less than reassuring. With a last glance down at the chasm by his feet, Damien turned as well, and dared to look at the thing that had been following them. At first it seemed no more than a shadow, and then, as he gazed upon it, it took on form and substance. A man’s head, gashed from nose to jaw. A man’s throat, rubbed raw by rope. A man’s body—

“My God,” he choked out, turning away.

A man’s body gutted open, intestines streaming down its legs like worms, heart twisting between the jagged shards of a shattered rib cage. He felt sickness welling up inside him and didn’t know if he could hold it in. Was it better to vomit away from a ghost, or right on top of it?

“Go.
” Tarrant’s voice was no more than a whisper, but the power it bound made the figure’s surface ripple like water. The Hunter put a hand to his sword and drew it out ever so slightly. The coldfire didn’t blaze with its normal brilliance, but curled about his hand and wrist like tendrils of glowing smoke. “You have no business with us. Leave us alone, or ...” He pulled the sword free another inch, to illustrate his intention.

The creature stared at them, and for a moment Damien was certain that it was going to move toward them. But then, with a snarl, it moved back a step. And another. Fading into the mist before their eyes, until its outline could no longer be seen.

Damien allowed himself the first deep breath in several long minutes. “A shadow?”

The Hunter nodded.

“Is it gone?”

“As much as such things ever are, in this place.”

“You could have destroyed it, right?”

The sword snapped shut. The veiled gaze of the Hunter was cold and uncomforting. “Let’s hope I don’t have to try.” He took a step closer to the precipice, and Damien dared the same. A river had cut into the plain before them, etching out a canyon that twisted back in hairpin turns on either side. Water glistened blackly at its bottom, and thick clouds of mist clung to its walls that all but obscured its details.

“The land is filled with these,” Tarrant told him. “They make the plain into a veritable maze, and one wrong turn can leave a man trapped.”

Until sunrise, Damien thought. That would be long enough, where Tarrant was concerned. “You said you’ve been to Shaitan before.”

“Not by this route. From the tunnel that exits under my keep, which leads to much simpler ground. Not through this.” He shook his head tightly, his frustration obvious. “I had hoped the canyons would be visible from above, so that I could sketch out a path for us before we descended. But the view—as you saw—was hardly that useful.”

“So what now?”

He gazed out into the distance, narrowing his eyes as one might gazing into a bright light. “I can make out some of its pattern from here. Enough to guide us, perhaps.”

Perhaps.
How long was the day this time of year, ten hours, eleven? Not long enough to pick their way through a maze of this complexity. Damien looked up toward Shaitan’s light in the distance—not so very far from them, but a world away for all that they could get to it—and then down into the depths again. “What about crossing it?” he asked. “I know it’s a climb, but we’ve got the supplies for it, and even that seems preferable to trying to walk around it.”

In answer the Hunter pointed down into the darkness. It took Damien a minute to figure out what he was pointing at, and then several minutes longer to make out what it was. When he did, he cursed softly.