Black Sun Rising (17 page)

“Lesh ... we can work it out. We can work on it—”

“When you come home again? Two, three years from now? Do you really think I should wait—for this?”

He could say nothing. The words were all choked up inside him. Words of anger, pleading, surprise ... and guilt. Because he had seen it coming. Deep inside him, on levels he hated to probe. And he despised himself for not knowing how to stop it.

“I love you,” he said. Willing all his passion into his voice—wishing he could communicate his emotions directly, without need for such an artificial vehicle as words. “I love you more than anything, Lesh—”

“And I love you,” she whispered back. “I always have.” She shut her eyes tightly; a tear squeezed out from the corner of one of them. “I only wish that was enough to base a marriage on, Zen. But it isn’t. Can’t you see that?”

He wanted to argue with her. He wanted to beg her to stay, to tell her that soon he would be back again soon, they could start all over—he would change, she would see!—but the words caught in his throat and he just couldn’t voice them. Because she was right, and he knew it. He could make all the promises he wanted, and it wouldn’t change a thing. The hunger was first in his life, had always been. Would always be. Mere words couldn’t alter that. And if it wasn’t enough for her that he tried not to express that, that he worked to repress that terrible yearning while they were together, tried to hide it ... then there was nothing he could do to fix things. Nothing at all.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped. Sensing clearly the vast gulf that had formed between them, not knowing how to reach across it. Feeling lost, as though suddenly he were surrounded by strangers. “I’m so sorry....”

“I just hope you find what you want,” she murmured. “Or make some kind of peace with yourself, at least. If there was anything I could do to help ... I would. You know that.”

“I know it,” he whispered.

She came to where he stood, and kissed him gently. He put his arms around her and held her tightly. As if somehow that could make the problems go away. As if a mere demonstration of affection could make everything better. But they had passed that stage, long ago, while his attention was elsewhere. While he devoted the core of his attention to the fae, failing to see that all about him the pieces of his life were slowly dissolving. Withering, like houseplants that had been starved of water. While he failed to see their need.

Numbly he watched as she put the thin gold ring down on the kitchen table; it made a small puddle, mirror bright, with the water that dripped from her fingers.

“I’ll keep the house,” she said gently. “Take care of it, until you come back. So you don’t have to worry about your things ... while you’re gone.” She looked toward the remaining dishes, then away from them. Away from him. “I’m sorry, Zen.” She whispered it, in a voice that echoed with fresh tears. “So sorry....”

She ran from the room. He moved as though to follow her—and then checked himself, with painful effort. What was he going to say to her? Where was he going to find the magic words to make it all better, so that somehow they might pretend it had never happened? So that somehow
he
could pretend that she wasn’t right, that he hadn’t failed her, that when he came back from the rakhlands everything would go back to normal?

He sat in the kitchen chair heavily. And fingered the thin gold ring, with its delicately engraved sigils of love.

And he wept.

“Holiness.”

The Patriarch closed the heavy volume before him and pushed it to one side. “Come in, Reverend Vryce.” He pointed to a cushioned chair set opposite the desk. “Have a seat.”

Damien tried to bring himself to sit, but couldn’t. His soul was wound too tight with tension; he felt that if he tried to bend his body, to relax in any way, something inside him would snap. “Holy Father. I ... need to make a request.”

The Patriarch looked him over, from his rumpled hair and sleepless eyes to the simple beige shirt and brown woolen pants he had worn for the audience. And nodded, slowly. “Go on.”

“I need ... that is, something has come up....” He heard the tremor in his voice, took a deep breath, and tried to steady himself.
It’s not just that you’re afraid he’ll refuse you, remember that. It’s the way the fae responds to him.
He started to speak again, but the Partiarch waved him to silence.

“Sit down, Reverend Vryce.” His voice was quiet but dominant;
authority
flowed forth from him, thickening the fae between them. “That’s an order.”

Damien forced himself to sit. He started to speak again, but again the Patriarch shushed him. He passed a goblet across the desk to him, scarlet glass with a darker liquid within. Damien took it and drank: sweet red wine, freshly chilled. With effort, he forced himself to relax. Took another drink. After a few minutes, the pounding of his heart subsided to a somewhat more normal rythm.

“Now,” the Patriarch said, when he had set the glass aside. “Tell me.”

He did. Not the presentation he had planned, with its careful interweaving of truth and half-truth and insinuation, designed to manipulate the Patriarch into making the decision he required. Something in the Holy Father’s manner inspired him to do otherwise. Maybe it was the fae, communicating between them on levels Damien could hardly sense. Or maybe simply human instinct, which said that the Holy Father was ready to hear—and deserved to be told—the truth.

He told it all. The Holy Father interrupted once or twice, to request that a point be clarified, but otherwise he offered no response. His expression gave no hint of either sympathy or hostility, or of any wariness on his part. Any of the things that Damien might have expected.

“The end result,” he concluded—and he took a deep breath to steady himself—“is that I must request permission to leave my duties here in order to go east. A leave of absence, your Holiness. I believe that the situation merits it.”

For a long time the Patriarch looked at him, clear blue eyes taking the measure of his soul. Or so it seemed. At last he said, “If I refuse you?”

Damien stiffened. “This isn’t merely a personal concern. If these demons are able to leave the rakhlands—”

“Answer the question, please.”

He met those eyes—so hard, so cold—and answered in the only way possible. Though it tore him apart inside to do it. “I swore an oath, your Holiness. To give the Prophet’s dream precedence over my own life. To serve the patterns which he declared were necessary ... including the hierarchy of my Church. If you’re asking me if I understand my duty, that’s my answer. If you mean to use this situation to test me....” He felt his hands tighten on the chair’s wooden arms, forced them to relax. Forced the anger out of his voice.
It is his right. In some ways, his duty.
“Please don’t. I implore you. As a man, and as your servant.”

For a long time the Patriarch was silent. Damien met his gaze for as long as he could, but at last turned away. He felt helpless, not being able to Work the fae to his advantage. Doubly helpless—because the Patriarch, just by existing, did.

“Come,” the Holy Father said at last. He stood. “I want to show you something.”

He led Damien through the western wing in silence, the whispering of his hem against the smooth mosaic floors the only sound to accompany their footsteps down the long, vaulted corridors. Soon they came to a heavily barred door, whose steel lock was inscribed with passages from the Book of Law. A thick tapestry ribbon depended from the ceiling, and this the Patriarch pulled. They waited. Soon, hurried footsteps could be heard coming from down the hall, and the tinkling of metal upon metal. A priest appeared, still shuffling through the key ring that depended from a gold chain around his neck. He bowed his obeisance to the Patriarch even as he managed to single out the key he wanted. Damien turned toward his Holiness—and saw a similar key cradled in his hand, its grip made of fine gold filigree, fragments of bloodstone set in a spiral pattern.

Together, synchronized, they unlocked the heavy door. The Patriarch nodded for Damien to pass through, then took down a lamp that hung by the threshold and followed. The door was then shut behind them and locked.

“This way,” he said.

Down stairs. Into the depths of the building, into the very foundation of the structure—into the earth itself—until they were far enough beneath Erna’s surface that the earth-fae grew thin and feeble. Damien cautiously worked a Seeing, could barely see it clinging to the rock that surrounded them. Curiously—or perhaps ominously—there was no dark fae present. There should have been in such a place, this far beneath the prayers that safeguarded Church property. Was there some sort of Warding here? Or ... something else?

At last they came to another door, with a single keyhole. A sigil was inscribed in the aged wood, and Damien thought,
A ward? Is that possible?
The floor creaked as they approached, and Damien heard machinery shift behind the walls; an alarm system of some kind. He imagined a thief being trapped in this place; it wasn’t a pretty picture.

The Patriarch touched the engraved sign with reverence, then carefully unlocked the door. Despite its weight, he pulled it open without assistance—

—and
power
washed over them like a tidal wave, tamed fae in such concentration that it was impossible not to feel it, even without a Working; impossible not to
see
it, a light that glistened like molten gold sprayed into the air, a fine mist of luminescence that glittered like the stars of the outer Core, making the flame of the Patriarch’s lamp seem dull and dark by comparison.

“Relics of the Holy War,” he said quietly. He set the lamp on a table by the door and stepped aside, nodding for Damien to enter. “Take a look. See, if you need to.”

He did so. Carefully. Despite the relative lack of earth-fae underground, his vision burst into full being the moment he Worked it. And suddenly he could barely see the objects that surrounded him, so bright was their power; the intensity of it brought tears to his eyes. After a moment he was forced to desist, and let the Working fade. The world returned—very slowly—to normal.

“Light was, of course, their primary weapon. Their tool of invasion. There are other things bound into each item here ... but always light. They thought they could conquer the Forest with it.” The Patriarch reached out to the wall beside him, fingered the edge of a rotting tapestry. “Sometimes, I think, that’s what was responsible for our defeat. When we play by the rules of the enemy, we inherit his weaknesses.

“Go ahead,” he urged. “Look around.”

The chamber was large, its high, vaulted ceiling more reminiscent of the cathedral that towered high above it than the rough stone tunnels which led to its entrance. Niches had been carved into the walls and sealed with glass; the more delicate relics had been protected thus, safe from the moisture that might otherwise damage them. Most of these were mere fragments—a scrap of cloth, a few golden threads, a bit of rusted metal—but power poured forth from all of them equally, as if the fae that had been bound to them in the days of their use was unaffected by their material state. On the walls, warded shields bore mute witness to the desperate fervor of those days, in which priests served as sorcerors and soldiers simultaneously—and eventually, as martyrs. For the Forest had triumphed. The creatures which humanity had given birth to in its violent years had accumulated far more power than a single army of sorceror-priests could hope to conjure.

At the far end of the room, in a gilt-edged case, a crystal flask filled with golden liquid glowed richly with internal light. The Patriarch walked to it, gestured for Damien to follow. “Solar fae,” he explained. “Bound well enough to survive even in this place, where no sun ever shines. No single adept could have managed it; only the prayer of thousands has that kind of power. Imagine a time when that kind of unity was possible....” His voice trailed off into silence, but Damien continued the thought:
When our dream was that close to completion. When consummation of our Purpose was still within sight.

Then the Patriarch reached out and opened the case, and lifted the flask up from its velveteen bed. “They bound it to water. Such a simple substance ... they reasoned that since all living things consume water, and ultimately incorporate it into their physical being, this would be the perfect tool of invasion.” He held it up so that the crystalline facets caught the lamplight, reflecting it back in a thousand scintillating fragments. “In here is all the power of sunlight. All the force of that heavenly warmth. Whatever it is in the solar fae that weakens night’s power, this fluid contains it. If a thing runs from light, this will hurt it. If it can’t bear the heat of life, this will burn it. All this ... bound to the most common substance on Ema.” He turned the flask slowly, watched the light revolve around it. “They meant to seed the Forest with it. They meant to give it to the ground and let every living thing that took root there suck it up for nourishment. In time, it would have infected the entire ecosystem. In time, it might have defeated even that great Darkness.”