Black Sun Rising (2 page)

Filled with more than a little misgiving, she descended the winding staircase that led down to the belowground rooms.

The library was empty, and lit only by a single candle.
Kindled long ago
, she thought, noting its length; he must have been down here most of the day. Its four walls were lined with books, a history of man from the time of First Sacrifice to the current day—scribbled in tight, fearful letters, by the settlers of the Landing, printed in the heavy ink of Ema’s first mass-production presses, or painstakingly copied from holy scriptures, with letter forms and illuminatory styles that harkened back to nearly-forgotten ages back on the mother planet. She recognized the leather bindings of his own twelve-volume treatise on the arts of war, and less formal notebooks, on mastering magic. Only....

Don’t call it magic,
he would have said to her.
It isn’t that. The fae is as natural to this world as water and air were to our ancestors’ planet, and not until we rid ourselves of our inherited preconceptions are we going to learn to understand it, and control it.

And next to those books, the handbooks of the Church.
They caused this,
she thought.
They caused it all, when they rejected him. Hypocritical bastards!
Half their foundations were of his philosophy, the genius of his ordered mind giving their religious dreams substance, transforming a church of mere faith into something that might last—and command—the ages. Something that might tame the fae at last, and bring peace to a planet that had rarely known anything but chaos. But their dreams and his had diverged in substance, and recently they had come but one word short of damning him outright.
After using him to fight their wars!
she thought angrily. To establish their church throughout the human lands, and firmly fix their power in the realm of human imagination ... she shuddered with the force of her anger. It was they who changed him, slowly but surely—they who had planted the first seeds of darkness in him, even while they robed him in titles and honor. Knight of the Realm. Premier of the Order of the Golden Flame. Prophet of the Law.

And damned as a sorcerer,
she thought bitterly.
Condemned to hell—or just short of it—because he wants to control the very force that has bested us all these years. The force that cost us our heritage, that slaughtered our colonial ancestors ... is that a sin, you selfrighteous bastards? Enough of a sin that it’s worth alienating one of your own prophets for it?

She took a deep breath and tried to steady herself. She had to be strong enough for both of them now. Strong enough to lead him back from his fears of hell and worse, if they had overwhelmed him. He might have gone on for years, bitterly cursing the new Church doctrine but otherwise unconcerned with it, had his body not failed him one late spring night and left him lying helpless on the ground, bands of invisible steel squeezing the breath from his flesh as his damaged heart labored to save itself. Later he could say, with false calm,
this was the reason. Here was the cause of damage, which I inherited. Not yet repairable, by my skills, but I will find a way.
But she knew that the damage had been done. At twenty-nine he had seen the face of Death, and been changed forever. So much promise in a single man, now so darkened by the shadow of mortality....

The door opened before she could touch it. Backlit by lamplight, her husband stood before her. He was wearing a long gown of midnight blue silk, slit up the sides to reveal gray leggings and soft leather boots. His face was, as always, serene and beautiful. His features were elegant, delicately crafted, and in another man might have seemed unduly effeminate; that was his mother’s beauty, she knew, and in its male manifestation it gave him an almost surreal beauty, a quality of angelic calm that belied any storm his soul might harbor. He kissed her gently, ever the devoted husband, but she sensed a sudden distance between them; as he stepped aside to allow her to enter she looked deep into his eyes, and saw with sudden clarity what she had feared the most. There was something in him beyond all saving, now. Something even she could not touch, walled away behind fearborn defenses that no mere woman could breach.

“The children,” she whispered. The chamber was dark, and seemed to demand whispering. “Where are the children?”

“I’ll take you there,” he promised her. Something flickered in his eyes that might have been pain, or love—but then it was gone, and only a distant cold remained. He picked up a lamp from the corner of a desk and bid her, “Come.”

She came. Through the door which he opened at the rear of the chamber, leading into an inner workroom. Artifacts from the Landing caught his lamplight as they passed by, twinkling like captive stars in their leaded glass enclosures. Fragments of unknown substances which once had served some unknown purpose ... there was the soft silver disk that tradition said was a book, although how it could be such—and how it might be read—was a mystery her husband had not yet solved. Fragments of encasements, the largest barely as broad as her palm, that were said to have contained an entire library. A small metal webwork, the size of her thumbnail, that had once served as a substitute for human reasoning.

Then he opened a door in the workroom’s far wall, and she felt a chill breeze blow over her. Her eyes met his and found only cold there, lightless unwarmth that was frightening, sterile. And she knew with dread certainty that some nameless, intangible line had finally been crossed; that he was gazing at her from across an abyss so dark and so desolate that the bulk of his humanity was lost in its depths.

“Come,” he whispered. She could feel the force of the fae about her, bound by his need, urging her forward. She followed him. Through a door that must have been hidden from her sight before, for she had never noticed it. Into a natural cavern that water had eroded from the rock of the castle’s foundation, leaving only a narrow bridge of glistening stone to vault across its depths. This they followed, his muttered words binding sufficient fae to steady their feet as they crossed. Beneath them—far beneath, in the lightless depths—she sensed water, and occasionally a drop could be heard as it fell from the ceiling to that unseen lake far, far below.

Give it up, my husband! Throw the darkness off and come back to us
—
your wife, the children, your church. Take up your dreams again, and the sword of your faith, and come back into the light of day....
But true night reigned below, as it did above; the shadows of the underworld gave way only grudgingly to the light of the Neocount’s lamp, and closed behind them as soon as they had passed.

The water-carved bridge ended in a broad ledge of rock. There he stepped aside and indicated that she should precede him, through a narrow archway barely wide enough to let her pass. She did so, trembling. Whatever he had found in these depths, it was here. Waiting for her. That knowledge must have been faeborn, it was so absolute.

And then he entered, bearing the lamp, and she saw.

“Oh, my God! ... Tory? ... Alix?”

They were huddled against the far wall, behind the bulk of a rough stone slab that dominated the small cavern’s interior. Both of them, pale as ice, glassy eyes staring into nothingness. She walked slowly to where they lay, not wanting to believe.
Wake me up,
she begged silently,
make it all be a dream, stop this from happening....
Her children. Dead.
His
children. She looked up at him, into eyes so cold that she wondered if they had ever been human.

She could barely find her voice, but at last whispered, “Why?”

“I need time,” he told her. There was pain in his voice—deeprooted pain, and possibly fear. But no doubt, she noted. And no regret. None of the things that her former husband would have felt, standing in this cold stranger’s shoes. “Time, Almea. And there’s no other way to have it.”

“You loved them!”

He nodded slowly, and shut his eyes. For an instant—just an instant—the ghost of his former self seemed to hover about him. “I loved them,” he agreed. “As I love you.” He opened his eyes again, and the ghost vanished. Looked at her. “If I didn’t, this would have no power.”

She wanted to scream, but the sound was trapped within her.
A nightmare,
she begged herself.
That’s all it is, so wake up. Wake up! Wake up....

He handled her gently but forcefully, sitting her down on the rough stone slab. Lowering her slowly down onto it, until she lay full length upon its abrasive surface. Numb with shock, she felt him bind her limbs down tightly, until it was impossible for her to move. Protests arose within her—promises, reasoning, desperate pleas—but her voice was somehow lost to her. She could only stare at him in horror as he shut his eyes, could only watch in utter silence as he worked to bind the wild fae to his purpose ... in preparation for the primal Pattern of Ema. Sacrifice.

At last his eyes opened. They glistened wetly as he looked at her; she wondered if there were tears.

“I love you,” he told her. “More than everything, save life itself. And I would have surrendered even that for you, in its proper time. But not now. Not when they’ve opened hell beneath me, and bound me to it by the very power I taught them how to use.... Too many prayers, Almea! Too many minds condemning my work. This planet is fickle, and responds to such things. I need time,” he repeated, as though that explained everything. As though that justified killing their children.

He raised a long knife into her field of vision, even as his slender hand stroked the hair gently out of her eyes. “You go to a far gentler afterlife than I will ever know,” he said softly. “I apologize for the pain I must use to send you there. That’s a necessary part of the process.” The hand dropped back from her forehead, and the glittering blade was before her eyes.

“The sacrifice is not of your body,” he explained. His voice was cold in the darkness. “It is ... of my humanity.”

Then the knife lowered, and she found her voice. And screamed—his name, protests of her love, a hundred supplications ... but it was too late, by that point. Had been too late, since true night fell.

There was no one listening.

Damien Kilcannon Vryce looked like he was fully capable of handling trouble, for which reason trouble generally gave him a wide berth. His thick-set body was hard with muscle, his hands textured with calluses that spoke of fighting often, and well. His shoulders bore the weight of a sizable sword in a thick leather harness with no sign of strain, despite the fact that the dust stains on his woolen shirt and the mud which caked his riding boots said that he had been traveling long and hard, and ought to be tired. His skin had tanned and scarred and peeled and tanned again, over and over again with such constancy that it now gave the impression of roughly tanned leather. His hands, curled lightly about the thick leather reins, were still reddened from exposure to the dry, cold wind of the Divider Mountains. All in all a man to be reckoned with ... and since the thieves and bravos of Jaggonath’s outskirts preferred less challenging prey, he passed unmolested through the crowded western districts, and entered the heart of the city.

Jaggonath. He breathed in its dusty air, the sound of its name, the fact of its existence. He was here. At last. After so many days on the road that he had almost forgotten he had a goal at all, that there was anything else but traveling ... and then the city had appeared about him, first the timber houses of the outer districts, and then the brick structures and narrow cobbled streets of the inner city, rising up like stone crops to greet the dusty sunlight. It was almost enough to make him forget what it took to get here, or why they had chosen him and no one else to make this particular crossing.

Hell,
he thought dryly,
no one else was fool enough to try
. He tried to picture one of the Ganji elders making the long trek from westlands to east—crossing the most treacherous of all mountain ranges, fighting off the nightmare beasts that made those cold peaks their home, braving the wild fae and all that it chose to manifest, their own souls’ nightmares given substance—but the diverse parts of such a picture, like the facets of a badly-worked Healing, wouldn’t come together. Oh, they might have agreed to come, provided they could use the sea for transport ... but that had its own special risks, and Damien preferred the lesser terrors of things he could do battle with to the unalterable destructive power of Erna’s frequent tsunami.

He prodded his horse through the city streets with an easy touch, content to take his time, eager to see what manner of place he had come to. Though night was already falling, the city was as crowded as a Ganji marketplace at high noon. Strange habits indeed, he mused, for people who lived so near a focal point of malevolence. Back in Ganji, shopkeepers would already be shuttering their windows against the fall of night, and making ward-signs against the merest thought of Coreset. Already the season had hosted nights when no more light than that of a single moon shone down to the needy earth, and the first true night was soon to come; all the creatures that thrived on darkness would be most active in this season, seeking blood or sin or semen or despair or whatever special substance they required to sustain themselves, and seeking it with vigor. Only a fool would walk the night unarmed at such a time—or perhaps, Damien reflected, one who lived so close to the heart of that darkness that constant exposure had dulled all sense of danger.