Crown of Shadows (8 page)

The albino opened the book he had been handed and scanned its contents. “Iezu?” His tone was scornful.

“Calesta. You recall him?”

“Calesta.” As he sought the proper memory, Tarrant worked a subtle Knowing and cast it about him. Had the Iezu tried to corrupt Amoril while he was in the east? There was no point in trying to Know that directly; the demon’s illusions could mask any trace of contact. But a question like this, so casually voiced, so casually answered ... one might unravel that with care and uncover a hint of artifice, a fleeting breath of warning. “He was the one who tricked you, yes? Before you went east.”

“Yes.” Nothing. There was nothing. Despite himself he relaxed a bit. “Go through that volume,” he commanded. “Look for his name, or anything like it. Or any mention of his aspect, which is sadism. As for his intentions ...” He looked at Amoril and relaxed a bit. What had he expected? That the one man who needed him most would betray him?

Take nothing for granted, Hunter
—
notyour lands, not your people, not even your own power. When your very senses can be warped by another, everything must be suspect.

“We’re at war,” he warned the albino. “So be careful. Unless I can find some means of killing a Iezu ... things may get very unpleasant.”

The albino shrugged. “They’re all just demons in the end, right? How hard can it be?”

He set three more volumes down, which were likely to contain notes on the Iezu. Considering how many Iezu there were and how long they had been active, it seemed a painfully insufficient collection. He would have given anything for Ciani of Faraday’s notebooks right now; she had specialized in that demonic family, and must have uncovered countless bits of lore in her many years of study. But she was in the rakhlands now, and all her notebooks were ash. Not for the first time, he cursed Senzei Reese for his damnable shortsighted ness. Better to shed human blood for sacrifice—even one’s own—than destroy such treasures as that.

“My lord?”

He looked up, saw that Amoril had not even opened his book. “What is it?”

“I have a gift for you.” He grinned, displaying sharpened teeth. “A homecoming present, which I prepared when I Divined you coming. If I may be excused to fetch it?”

Distracted by the task at hand, he nodded.

Perhaps he should contact the lady Ciani. Not with a Working, of course; the fae-wall which the rakh had erected about their domain would prevent him from using the currents to reach her. But perhaps he and Vryce should consider a trek to that land, or at least to its border. It was a good bet that she had useful knowledge, and she should be willing to help him. After all, she had once been his apprentice....

The scent of blood reached him just before the scent of fear; startled, he looked up.

It was Amoril, with a woman in tow. The albino grinned. “I thought you might be hungry after your long flight.” He had bound her hands behind her, and held the end of the binding thong like a leash. She strained against it like a wild animal, consumed by the kind of terror no human heart could sustain for long. She knew who he was, then. Good. It would save him the trouble of inspiring fresh fear. Not that he didn’t hunger for such sport—God knows, after eleven months on that damned ship he could use a hunt—but for once he didn’t want to spare the time.

How good it was to be home again, where women were raised to fear him! How good it was to have five centuries of the Hunter’s reputation to draw upon, to lend flavor to an otherwise quick snack. Her fear was sweet and hot and he drank it in with relish. When he was done, he let the body fall and motioned for Amoril to take it away. Let the albino feed it to his pets if he liked; the warm blood would please them.

But even the pleasure of a kill could not distract him for long. He began to go through his notes, page by page, searching for something useful. Anything. He didn’t expect to find notes on Calesta himself, or any instructions on how to dispatch Iezu. But somewhere, buried in the recorded discoveries of five centuries, there must be a single useful mote of knowledge. Somewhere.

Believe that,
he thought darkly, as he turned the ancient pages, binding fae as he did so to support their brittle substance.
Have faith in it. Because without that one hope, we are surely doomed.

Nighttime
. Dreamtime. The hours when the demons of the mind could take hold, their cold grasp firm until the morning. The hours when the human soul abandoned its struggle against the madness of this world, and the dark things that lurked in the corners of the human heart could take form at last.

Though it was late, the Patriarch was awake. Again. Unwilling to sleep, afraid to rest. Again.

Afraid to dream.

A book lay open before him, but he was no longer reading it. With a sigh he rubbed his temples, as though somehow that could soothe his spirit as well as his pounding head. He really should go to sleep, he knew that. If he didn’t retire soon, he would pay for it in the morning. Nevertheless... he tried to focus on the book again, and only when it was clear that his eyes were too fatigued for the task did he close its cover with a sigh and lean back in his heavy mahogova chair, abandoning the effort. He felt as if he had aged a hundred years in the last ten longmonths. It was the dreams, of course. If only he could somehow shut them out, if only there were some special drug or process, some prayer... but there wasn‘t, he knew that now. He had searched long enough and hard enough to know.

And even if something could make the dreams stop, would that leave the rest of him unharmed? Man couldn’t live without dreams. Not sanely, anyway. That was what half a dozen doctors had told him.

It had all started with visions of Vryce. Fleeting images of the man, sandwiched between the structured narratives of his usual dreaming. Vryce conversing with demons. Vryce surrounded by corpses. Vryce traveling with a creature so evil that its presence was a lightless blot on the Patriarch’s dreamscape, a blackness that reeked of hunger and death and the foulest of human corruption. At first the Patriarch had taken these for simple nightmares, and had thought little of them. Considering his fury over Vryce’s behavior and his dismay at the man’s choice of traveling companion, it was amazing that he had not suffered from such dreams long before this.

But then there came other dreams, with more familiar subjects. And little by little, against his will, he was forced to acknowledge the truth. That these intrusive images weren’t merely dreams but true visions, clairvoyancies that came to him even as the acts they represented took place. When he dreamed one night of the mayor’s corruption, it was only to awaken and find that the morning tabloids were afire with news of blackmail and embezzlement. When he dreamed of Nans Bakrow’s adultery, it was only to hear three days later that her husband had begun divorce proceedings, for exactly that cause. And when he had dreamed of the Gillis child killing himself—

It still pained him to remember that. The midnight awakening. The rapid dressing. The rush to the Gillis’ abode through streets that were alive with demonlings, in the desperate hope that something could be done to avoid the tragedy he had witnessed. All to no avail. By the time he had roused the boy’s parents and reached the site of his vision, the young veins had already rendered up their last drop of blood; the boy’s lips were blue and cold, his dead eyes open and accusatory.
If you knew,
they seemed to say,
why didn’t you come sooner?
Words his parents never voiced, but the Patriarch knew they thought them as well. As he himself thought them, all the hours he lay awake before that dawn, struggling against the bleakness of guilt and utter despair.

Prophecies, his aides and servants whispered. The Holy Father was seeing futures. But they weren’t that, not by a long shot.
Prophecy
implied a temporal framework, a balance between the present and future that might—with care—be altered. Were there not thousands of potential futures for each moment in this world, of which prophecy revealed but one? No,
prophecy
would have been a blessing compared to this. This was a nightmare of clairvoyance, a forced voyeurism that made him witness to the evils of his world without giving him the power to change anything. A pornography of the soul, which had made of him a helpless victim.

He had tried drugs. He had tried prayer. He had even tried sleeplessness, hoping that sheer exhaustion would culminate in a collapse so total that even dreams could not reach him. To no avail. And though he rarely dreamed of Vryce anymore, when he did it was with such power that he would awaken trembling, cold sweat trickling down his face. Images of volcanoes fuming, of a black sky raining hot ash, of a ship rent into pieces, casting its passengers into a boiling sea... and images of a woman suffering such pain and fear that his heart twisted in sympathetic agony, while Vryce stood by and did nothing to save her. Nay, while he
allowed
the suffering to continue, in consummation of some strange demonic pact which he and the Hunter had established.

God help you, Vryce, if those visions are true.
He whispered the words into the night, as the last of the images faded into shadows of fire and ash.
God save you from my wrath.

A knock sounded suddenly on the heavy wooden door of his chamber. He looked up quickly, alerted by its volume. What could be so urgent at this time of night?

“Come in.”

The door swung open hard, banging against the wall behind it. Leo Toth stood in the doorway, breathless, his skin sheened with the sweat of recent exertion. “Street of Gods,” he gasped. It was clear he had been running hard; he put out a hand to steady himself as he drew in a deep breath. “Temple of Davarti.” And he added, almost apologetically, “You said you wanted to know.”

He knew in an instant what the man was trying to tell him and he stood quickly, all thoughts of exhaustion forgotten. There was no time for exhaustion now, nor any other time-consuming weakness. “When?” he demanded.

“Just starting now,” the man gasped. “If you hurry—”

“How many?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know. Two dozen. Maybe more. I passed them just outside the Sangh Shrine, maybe half a block down from Davarti. I stayed with them just long enough to find out where they were headed, then I ran here.” He leaned over to ease the strain on his lungs; his breathing whistled shrilly as he fought for air. “It’s a raid, Holy Father, no question about it.”

A raid.

With quick, decisive steps the Patriarch moved to where his ritual garments hung and layered a thickly embroidered stole over the beige silk robe he was already wearing. He added to that his most formal head-dress, a peaked form layered and crusted in gilt embroidery. No hesitation in these choices, or in his dressing; he had gone over this moment too many times in his own mind to falter now. Other times he had been too late, had learned of the incident after the fact; now, for the first time, he had a chance to change things.

He ushered the man out of the room ahead of him and hurried toward the rear stairs of the building, his soul praying with all its strength.
Help me to serve Your Will in this.
Two flights down he came to a narrow hallway, and he practically flew to the door at its end. Beyond that was a small chamber, sparsely decorated, that opened on the stables. Bridles hung on the far wall, their brass fittings polished and gleaming; a liveried man with coffee in hand relaxed over a magazine, clearly not expecting any custom at this late hour.

“A carriage,” the Patriarch ordered, and there was no need for him to shout the command; his bearing said it all. Startled, the man dropped his reading material and hurredly set his coffee cup aside; brown liquid sloshed over the edge of it, splashing a copy of
Whip and Bridle.
“Of course, Your Holiness.” With a clumsy bow he passed through the far door, into the stables themselves; the Patriarch could hear the snort of horses as he followed.

God willing, the carriage had been kept ready, he thought. God willing, he wouldn’t have to wait while the beasts were brought out and harnessed. Lives could be lost in that much time.

But the carriage was ready, and in less than a minute he was inside it. “Street of Gods,” he ordered, and such was the fever of haste he exuded that the coachman responded immediately, and the carriage began to move the minute the Patriarch’s feet were safely off the ground.

Out of the stable and onto the street. It was dark, very dark, with only one moon visible, and that half-hidden behind a row of townhouses. A suitable night for work like this, he thought grimly. “Faster,” he muttered, but there was no need; the coachman had sensed his need for haste and was barreling down the deserted streets with a speed that would have been unsafe—and strictly illegal—in the crowded daylight hours.