When True Night Falls (36 page)

But Tarrant had other plans. As his horse nervously pawed the rocky earth, he scanned the walls of the crevasse above them with meticulous attention, and Damien could just imagine what he was seeing. Molten power pouring from the clefts like lava, cascading down the walls in sheets of fire to boil about their feet. Too hot to handle. Too hot to use. It would cool off soon, now that the quake was over, but not soon enough. Not for them.

Then the Hunter swung one leg forward over his horse’s neck and dismounted. As Damien slid forward, he put the end of the reins in his hand and instructed them, “Go on, the two of you. Go as far as you can, as fast as you can. Get out of this trap if that’s possible, and then make camp. I’ll see that there’s no pursuit.” Despite the moonlight which illuminated his face, his expression was unreadable. “Go!”

He struck the black horse sharply on the rear and it bounded forward, clearing the nearest obstacle by inches. Damien just had time to see Tarrant take hold of the rock wall as if he meant to climb it, and then a protrusion cut off his sight-line. For a few seconds he could do no more than cling to the horse as it made its way along the rock-strewn ground; then he reined it in and motioned for Hesseth to pull ahead of him.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“I’m going back to him.” He swung his leg back over the horse and dismounted; fire shot through his groin as he landed. “I think he’s going to do something very stupid. I want to make sure he doesn’t do it alone.” He noticed that there was blood on her arm, a crimson smear from elbow to wrist. But since she had chosen to use that arm to guide the horse, he assumed it wasn’t a serious wound. “Take this.” He unclipped the lead line from his saddle and threw it over to her. Tarrant’s horse snorted impatiently as she pulled it into line with her own.

He met her eyes for a moment. Amber, alien, and so very worried. “I’ll be all right,” he promised her. “Go as far as you can. I can Locate you later, when the fae cools down.”

“Be careful,” she whispered. Then, with a fearful glance back over her shoulder—but their pursuers hadn’t caught up with them, not yet—she urged her own horse forward. The black horse snorted once in indignation, but when the lead grew taut it followed, and soon the two of them were out of sight, swallowed by the harsh shadows of the crevasse.

Damien turned back the way they had come and retraced the last few yards quickly. It hurt to walk, it would hurt even more to climb, but he had seen what Tarrant might not have noticed: a perfect half-moon directly overhead, harbinger of the dawn. Maybe the skies hadn’t started growing lighter yet, maybe Tarrant’s special senses hadn’t yet reacted to the threat of the coming sunlight, but Damien had traveled with him long enough to know how acute the danger was. Especially if he couldn’t Work. Especially—and this most of all—if the Hunter was doing something as foolhardy and dangerous as Damien suspected he was.

He ran back to the place where Tarrant had left them and studied the southern wall. When he found sufficient handholds to support his weight, he hoisted himself up. Pain shot up his damaged arm as he shifted his weight onto it, but if it wasn’t broken outright it was just going to have to work for a living. He moaned softly but kept climbing. The wall of the crevasse was rife with fault lines, but they all angled downward; he had no trouble finding a place to dig in with his fingers or feet, but it took all his rock-climbing skill to keep from sliding out as he shifted his weight, ever so carefully (but not too slowly, there were enemies soon to follow), jamming his fingers and sometimes his fists into the cracks so hard that they were forced to support him. Briefly he considered how much danger he was in if Tarrant got to the top before him.
Damned unlikely
, he thought. The Hunter might be unequaled in sorcery, but it was unlikely he had much experience in rock climbing. If he managed not to fall at all, it would be damned slow going.

Twenty feet above the chasm floor. High enough that their attackers might not notice him if they passed beneath. Thirty. He found a horizontal ridge large enough for his feet to fit into and eased his way west along it, back toward where he figured Tarrant must be. Relatively easy going ... and then a chunk of granite broke loose from beneath his foot and plummeted down to the floor so far below. Its impact was like an explosion in the moonlit silence, the sound of which echoed for long minutes afterward. He hugged the cold rock, his heart pounding. His arm throbbed with such pain that he could hardly move it, but move it he did: one foot to the right where a deep chink beckoned, and a hand to follow. Move after move, his practiced eye struggling to make out forms in the darkness. On the floor of the chasm the moonlight had been helpful, but here it merely taunted him, shining its light upon smooth, useless surfaces and casting the areas he needed most into deep black shadow. He made his way more by feel than by sight, hoping that Tarrant’s superior vision wouldn’t give him
too
much of an advantage—

And then he saw him. Dark silk whipping out from the rock, pale skin against cold granite, the glitter of gold threads on his scabbard. He had found a ledge some two feet in depth and nearly ten feet across, and he was standing on it with his back to the chasm wall, studying the terrain beneath him. He looked over in surprise as Damien’s fingers caught at the ledge, and stern disapproval flashed in his eyes as the priest levered himself up on to it, and eased his way over to him.

“You shouldn’t have come,” the Hunter whispered.

“Yeah. That makes two of us.” He looked down at the rocky wall beneath them, but all he could make out were jagged shadows. Too damned many jagged shadows. In the distance he could hear voices, now, and the sound of men running. “I thought you might do something stupid like trying to bring the wall down.”

The pale eyes glittered. “I might.”

“What about the fae? Is it workable yet?”

“Almost,” he said softly, his voice no louder than the wind. “Not quite.”

“Then what—”

In answer he pulled out his sword. It wasn’t nearly as bright as it had been back in the west, but clearly he had been reWorking it. Its cold light spilled across the rock with viscous luminescence.

“You can’t do that,” Damien whispered. The voices from below were closer now; any moment they might see their pursuers. “Even if you use that for power instead of the earth-fae, you’ll still be making contact with the currents—”

“You see an alternative?” the Hunter demanded.

An instant of silence, night-chilled, eloquent. He looked into those eyes—so cold, so inhuman—and saw in them the truth of what he already knew: that the Hunter feared death more than any living man he knew. So much so that he was once willing to sacrifice his humanity in the name of continued existence. So much so that now, with all the denizens of Hell licking their lips at the thought of his imminent demise, he could commit himself to a mission like this as coldly and dispassionately as if there were no risk at all. Because there was, as he said, no real alternative. If the pass stayed open, their enemies would catch them; it was only a question of time. And he could neither flee to safety nor Work the earth-fae to save them while that power still surged.

This way ... it was a slim chance, but it was all he had. And therefore it was the only path the Neocount of Merentha could possibly choose.

Tarrant turned toward the spot he had chosen, and slid his sword into one of the cracks in the rock. He angled it carefully. Blue sparks played around the lips of the crack as he moved it, and once Tarrant cried out sharply in pain, as if something had burned him. Could he Work the sword’s power on the earth itself without opening himself up to the raging force of the earth-fae? Damien reached out to him——and then the channel between them came alive and he saw as the Hunter saw, saw the hot power cascading down over the rocks, saw it surging into the chasm where it boiled, it fumed, its steam came up and licked the chasm walls, burning, boiling ... he could feel it through his arm as if his own hand grasped the coldfire sword, a power so terrible that his flesh was seared where it touched him, a power that transformed his cells more quickly than they could ever hope to heal themselves, a power that killed, a power that burned, a power that swallowed the whole of the world in blinding white light....

And there. In the center. The point of a sword. The chill of expanding ice. He heard the rock explode, felt the shock drive him back against the granite wall as the chosen fault line gave way and a whole section of wall came loose. It ripped free with a roar like a cannonade and thundered down into the chasm. Striking the far wall with deafening force, shattering into a brittle tonnage of raw granite that bounced and split and fell again, filling the narrow cavity beneath. Each boulder enough to crush a man, each one followed by a thousand more, a veritable sea of rockfall, a tidal wave of granite. Damien felt the ledge shiver beneath his feet, and for a moment he was afraid that it, too, would give way. He moved toward Tarrant defensively, just in time to see him fall. Just in time to reach out with all his strength and slam the man back against the rock, hard enough to keep him there. He could feel the pain raging through him, the fire, the glittering spears of heat. “Gerald!” he yelled. Trying to get his attention. Trying to break the contact. But the Hunter was lost in his own Working, was drowning in the raw power of what he had conjured. Was losing his battle.

Only an idiot Works the fae right after an earthquake
, Ciani had once said. Or was it Senzei? Damien leaned over as far as he could and tried to get hold of the Hunter’s other hand, the one clasped about the blazing sword. Its light was blinding now, a cold blue unsun that seared his vision to icy blackness if he looked at it directly.
Have to break the link, somehow
.
Have to get him loose
. The narrow ledge was trembling beneath his feet and he knew that it was now or never, that if he waited for an aftershock to hit they would both be dead. And then what would happen to Hesseth? “Come on,” he muttered, and he reached across Tarrant to get hold of his far arm. For a moment he lost his balance and began to fall backward, then—with an effort that caused him to cry out in pain—recovered his stability. Only one more foot to go. His arm could hang in there. It wasn’t broken. Was it? Now several inches. Now one....

His hand closed about the Hunter’s wrist and he pulled back on it, hard. He had hoped that the sudden movement would break the link, but clearly it would take more than that. “Come on, damn you! Come out of it!” He could feel the cold power surging through his hand, chilling his flesh to immobility. And beyond it—behind it—the power of the earth itself, waiting to surge through him as it had clearly surged through Tarrant.

He tried to focus on the sword. His arm was numb now, and the coldness was spreading. He tried to remember how hungry that steel was for death, how eager it was to consume any human soul that touched it. “Come on,” he whispered to it. “Come and get me.” Gravel trickled from somewhere above, raining down into the chasm. The world was filled with dust. “You want my life? Come get it.” He was trying to focus the sword on him, not the earth, in the hope that would break the link between the two. The cold power licked at him, and spears of ice shot through his veins. “That’s it,” he whispered. “Come to me.”

And then he was slammed back, hard. The breath left his lungs in a short burst and he was gasping, swallowing the rock dust that his motion had dislodged. He was aware that he no longer held Tarrant’s wrist, but it was hard to say just where his arm was; that whole side of him was numb with cold, unfeeling.

He managed to get his eyes open. The first thing he saw was that half the ledge was gone; Tarrant’s blast must have weakened it enough that it finally gave way. Then he looked up and saw Tarrant. The man’s face was white, utterly colorless, and his eyes were flushed red. But he was conscious. Safe. Alive, in a manner of speaking.

“That was a very foolish thing to do,” the Hunter gasped. The hand that held the sword was shaking; he seemed to lack the strength to sheathe it. “Very foolish,” he whispered.

“Yeah.” Damien wiped the dust from his eyes. The feeling was coming back into his arm, but not as fast as he would have liked. Not with dawn coming. “I had a good teacher.”

And then he saw a faint smile on Tarrant’s face—only a flicker, but a smile nonetheless—and he knew deep down inside that they were going to be okay. Both of them.

“Can you climb?” he asked. Flexing his frozen arm. It would move now, though it was still stiff. He didn’t like to think about how close he had come to losing more than an arm. He could still feel the chill power of the Worked steel, even from a distance. “It’s not too far to the top.”

The Hunter looked up. Damien thought he saw him shudder.

“Not much choice, is there?”

“You could always transform yourself.”

Instead of parrying with a dry retort, Tarrant leaned back against the granite wall and shut his eyes.

God in Heaven. He’s in bad shape
. Damien tried to gauge the rock above them—no easy feat at that angle—and wondered if he could get them both up to the top. Probably so, he decided. But not before dawn. Already the sky was lightening in the east, which meant they had, what? Half an hour? Not long enough, he thought, assessing the rock face above them. Not nearly long enough.

He turned to find Tarrant’s eyes also turned toward the east. “I guess it’s time to climb,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Looks like it. Up or down?”

“Up.” He didn’t even look at the rock face before committing himself. “There’s no shelter down there. I checked.”

“And above?”

“One can only hope,” he whispered.

He moved to sheathe the coldfire blade—and almost dropped it, his hand losing strength as it struck against the edge of the ledge. Damien grabbed for it quickly, and for a moment he almost lost his balance. But compared to some of what he’d climbed, a two-foot ledge was practically a luxury accommodation; he managed to keep three points on the rock while he closed his hand about the icy grip, and after a moment he regained his security. He straightened up slowly, caught his breath, and eased the long sword into Tarrant’s scabbard.