When True Night Falls (65 page)

Again—in the distance
—
come the whispers. Again comes the certain feeling that things aren’t right, that things aren’t going to be right until they get out of this place. They should turn around and run away as fast as they can
—
to their ship, to a different one, anywhere!
—
before those whispers find them.

She awakened with a suddenness that left her breathless; it took her a minute to get her bearings. The lamp in the galley had been turned down so that shadows reigned in the narrow space, and she shivered as she fought to make out shapes in the darkness. The rakh-woman was by her side and she stirred as Jenseny awoke, alarmed by her sudden tension.
“Kasa?
What is it?”

I had a bad dream
, she wanted to say. But it wasn’t just a bad dream. She knew that as surely as she knew that the Enemy was waiting for them in Freeshore, not Hellsport. The same Enemy who had killed her father, and who would kill her too if he had half a chance. He was in Freeshore. Now. Waiting. She knew it as surely as she breathed.

“It’s a trap,” she gasped. Fighting her way to her feet. She was shaking so badly she could hardly stand upright, and the motion of the ship wasn’t helping. “They’re waiting for us!”

The rakh-woman looked at her strangely for a moment, then said—very quietly, very calmly—“Wait here. I’ll get the others.” Jenseny did so, shivering in the chill of the galley while Hesseth ran to get Tarrant and the priest. There was Light now, but not much of it, and it did no more than exacerbate her fear. What was the Light but a window that opened onto terrible things, a way of seeing the truth when illusion was far, far preferable? In that single instant she would have shut it out of her life forever if she could have. So powerful was the force of her revulsion that she doubled over with it, and was retching dryly when the others came to her.

The priest was by her side in an instant. “Easy now. Easy.” With gentle words and gentle touch he eased her through the last of the spasms, and though she knew that he could work no Healing in this place she felt better for his being there. The cramp in her stomach eased up a little bit and after a few seconds she was able to stand up straight. After a few seconds more, with his help, she managed to sit down on a chair and breathe again.

“Freeshore. Trap.” She gasped the words, shaking so badly she could hardly speak. When she shut her eyes she could see the black figures rising up again, oh so many of them ... the Light was stronger now and it silhouetted them, making their outlines burn like fire. “They’re waiting for us there,” she breathed. Half-sobbing as she forced the words out. “It’s a trap!”

She saw the priest look at his companions, but her vision was too blurred by tears for her to see what passed between them. At last Hesseth volunteered, “She was asleep.”

“Probably dreaming,” the Hunter offered.

“Which doesn’t mean she’s wrong,” the priest snapped.

He knelt before her then, so very gentle in his voice and in his manner, so tender and loving in every way, and he asked her to tell him what she had seen. So she did. Haltingly, hesitant, not quite sure how to capture the terrible vision in words. When she was done she lowered her face into her hands and whimpered softly, and the rakh-woman came over and sat by her side and held her close, so that the voices of all the rakh children could comfort her.

“It’s a dream,” Tarrant said derisively. She could hear the scorn in his voice. “Forged by the mind of a frightened child, manifesting her fears. Nothing more.”

“I don’t like it,” the priest muttered. “I don’t like any of it.”

The Hunter snorted. “Are we to be ruled by dreams now? Not just our own, but those of a half-crazed child?”

“She’s more than that,” he growled. “You know that.”

“What I know is that I chose Freeshore because it seemed the best port for our purposes. And so it remains, despite all dreams to the contrary.”

“But it wasn’t even your idea in the first place. Was it? As I recall, it was Moskovan who suggested—”

“Please, priest! Do you think I’m stupid? Before I sent you to meet with Ran Moskovan, I subjected him to such a thorough Knowing that I could write his autobiography for him—and then I added a few extra Workings just in case, to keep him in line. That man could no more betray us now than he could sail this sea without a ship.”

There was a long-drawn silence, cold and hostile.

“Look.” Tarrant’s voice was like ice. “You do what you want with the child. But if there’s an ambush waiting anywhere for us, it’s probably in Hellsport—and I for one have no intention of meeting it. Dreams or no dreams.”

His footsteps were hard and angry on the cold wooden stairs, and when he had passed through the galley door it slammed shut behind him, as if underscoring his mood. Jenseney cringed deep into Hesseth’s warmth, where the hate and the rage couldn’t reach her. The rakh-children whispered to her, words of comfort in an alien tongue.
Go to Hellsport
, they whispered.
Hellsport is safe. Freeshore is a trap.

I know
, she thought to them. The Light swirled about her, brilliant now.
What can I do? How can I change thingsi Tell me,
she begged. But the voices faded into a dull rumbling, not like speech at all. More like distant thunder.

“What now?” Hesseth asked.

The priest exhaled heavily as he dropped down onto the bench beside them. “What, indeed? I can’t turned the damned ship around by myself, can I?”

“Would you if you could?” she asked quietly.

Jenseny heard him catch his breath. There was a long pause.

“Maybe,” he muttered. “It doesn’t matter, does it? The decision’s been made for us. It’s not like you and I can start off to Hellsport on our own.”

She could hear something else now, a new kind of whisper. Like a wind blowing toward them, sweeping across miles of open water. With it came the delicate percussion of rainfall, the timpani of distant lightning. Too soft yet for other ears to hear; it was the Light that brought it to her, spanning the empty miles for her ears alone.

“God damn it,” the priest muttered. “I hate sea travel.” And then he was gone and the galley door slammed shut behind him also, leaving Jenseny and Hesseth alone.

In the darkness.

With the Light.

With the music of the coming storm....

For all his months at sea, Damien had never gotten a firm grasp on sailing. Oh, he knew that a wind from behind them was good, that a wind from head-on was bad, and that no wind at all was a pain in the ass since it meant either waiting until the breeze kicked in again, or stoking up the furnace with appropriate prayers and meditations so that steam power hopefully would get them moving. But he had never really gotten a sense of the fine points in between: when it was best to gather up some of the sails (but not all of them), why an angled wind was sometimes the best wind of all, and what subtle hints the wind and sea provided when trouble—
real
trouble—was on its way.

What he had learned to interpret were the people around him. By the time they’d been at sea a month he could tell by the lowering of Rasya’s brow when rain was coming, and he’d learned that the best barometer of the sea’s condition was the relative coarseness of Captain Rozca’s manner. After four midmonths at sea he could tell when a storm was on its way by the way the first mate swore, and how fast it was moving in by the portions that the cook doled out at evening mess.

Now, though these sailors were unknown to him and their whistled code was wholly incomprehensible, that same sense told him that something was wrong. He didn’t have to see Moskovan make repeated trips to check his instruments to know that conditions were changing quickly; that was clear in the men’s manner as they worked, in the first mate’s face as he scowled at the sea. He remembered the squalls they had struggled through in Novatlantis—one of which had forced them to land for repairs, at an island so new that parts of its shoreline were still steaming as it cooled—and he felt a cold knot form in his gut at the thought of facing one here.

Moskovon said before we left that the weather looked good. He said it should stay good for a day or two.
But he knew that weather prediction was a chancy art at best. Even Earth, it was rumored, had never fully mastered it.

He located Tarrant, moved to join him. But the Hunter shook his head ever so slightly as he approached, as if to say
No, I have no more information than you do
. Damn, he missed Rozca. And that whole crew. They never would have gone on like this without someone telling the passengers what was happening.

At last—when the last of the sails was set and everything on board the deck had been firmly fastened down—Moskovan vouchsafed them a few words. “Wind’s shifted,” he told them. “And the pressure’s dropping fast. That’s a bad sign in any waters, but here....” He shook his head grimly. “Most likely it’s coming straight up the coast. That means right smack into us, if we keep on going the way we are.”

“Then I assume that’s out of the question,” Tarrant said evenly. “What are our options?”

He looked out at the waves surrounding them, whitecapped and angry. “We’re going in,” he said shortly. “No other way. We can make the cape inside an hour, and that should be good enough. Hellsport’s got a sheltered harbor that’ll keep us safe and sound, if we can get there in time.” He looked up sharply at Tarrant. “Unless you’ve got something that’ll turn this aside. If so, now’s the time to use it.”