Black Sun Rising (31 page)

Damien forced himself to look away. “All right. You’re hurt, I’m hurt ... simple flesh wounds, maybe an infection or two. Nothing I can’t Heal.”

“Oh, yeah? Using what fae?”

Damien stared at him. And realized what he meant. “Shit.”

“I’ve been a Worker all my life, you know. Moved the toys near my crib without touching them, and all that. Now ...” He wrapped his arms about himself and shivered. “It almost killed me in Kale. It’d be a thousand times worse here, this close to the Forest. I think I’d rather bleed.”

“We can’t wait for nature to heal us before we leave.”

“I know that,” he whispered.

Damien swung his legs over the side of the bed. The pounding in his head—and the pain—had subsided to a mere throbbing drumbeat. “He can only travel at night, right? It was well past midnight when he left here. Dawn came soon after that, and the sun’s still up. That means he got, what, three hours of travel time on us? We push hard, we’ve got him.” He looked at Senzei.
“If
we leave now.”

“All our things are packed,” Senzei said quietly.

“Can you make it?”

The sorceror looked at him sharply. “Can you?”

“No question,” he said. “He’s got Ciani.”

Senzei nodded. “Same here.”

Damien drew in a deep breath, tried to gather his thoughts. “If we’re moving fast, we won’t want all the horses. We’ll keep three—two for us, one for backup. And for Ciani. Drop off some of the duplicate supplies in Mordreth, hopefully where we can get at them later ... but if not, not. We strip down and travel fast. Get that son of a bitch before he knows what hit him.”

“You really think we can take him?”

“Oh, I’ve killed nastier things. None of them were quite so eloquent ... but remember, we’re not playing by his rules this time. And I do have a weapon that’ll hurt him.” He reached for the padded pouch at his belt—and suddenly panicked, when he realized it wasn’t there. “Zen, they—”

“It’s here.” He reached to the side of the bed, where the pouch and its supporting belt lay coiled atop a small table. “They took it off you when they cleaned you up. I didn’t let it out of my sight.”

“Good man.” He opened the flap of the pouch, and saw both the silver flask and the crystal vial cushioned within. The latter had dirt encrusted in its delicately etched surface; he picked at it with a fingernail and muttered, “I’m surprised this survived.”

“You had it gripped so tightly it didn’t have a chance to get broken. Even in your delirium you wouldn’t let go; we had to pry it out of your fingers.”

Damien tried to fasten the belt around himself, but his wounded arm—swollen, stiff, and throbbing with pain—lacked the dexterity. Senzei helped him.

“You sure you can make it?”

Damien glared. “I have to. We both have to.” He patted the pouch into place over his hip, felt the outline of the flat silver flask within. “I guess if we’re going to leave the extra horses behind, we should try to sell them. We’ve been going through capital like water—”

“I sold three of them this morning,” Senzei told him. “Not a great price, but it covered the medical bills. And I gathered our things—what was left of them—and settled with the people here, for their time and supplies. And I found this.” He dropped a small golden object onto the bed beside Damien. It took the priest a moment to realize what it was.

“My God,” he whispered. He picked it up, and held it by the broken chain so that the earth-disk dangled before his eyes. Its reverse side, engraved with a delicate sigil, caught the light as it turned.

“I found it near where he’d been standing. She must have pulled it off him when he attacked her. Damned lucky accident, don’t you think?”

“Knowing Ciani, I would say ... not an accident at all.” He imagined her in that last moment of terror, some precious particle of her mind clinging to sanity long enough to reason out what they might need, striking out in seeming chaos until his tunic front was torn open, until her fingers closed over the precious gold and pulled....

“What a woman,” he breathed. “Give me ten like that, and I could take an empire.”

Senzei forced a smile. “It’s getting hard enough just keeping track of one.”

Slowly, Damien eased himself forward. He braced both his hands against the edge of the bed—and paused for a minute, breathing heavily. Then he pushed upward, forcing his legs to bear the weight. Pain shot like fire up his left arm—but it was going to do that for quite some time, he might as well get used to it. After a moment, he managed to stand. A few seconds more, and the room stopped spinning. He managed a step. Two. The room was steady. The pain in his arm subsided to a stabbing throb.

“All right,” he said. He looked at Senzei. “Let’s do it.”

“And no more going unarmed,” he said harshly, as the ferry carried them across to Mordreth. “I want you with a weapon on you at all times. That means if you go behind the bushes to take a piss, you have a sword in your hand when you do it. You go off to bed a woman, I want a sword on the pillow next to you. Got me?”

Senzei looked out over the water. “I guess I deserve that.”

“Damn right you do. It’s a miracle you didn’t get yourself killed out there. And miracles rarely repeat themselves.”

There were a number of small tables at the center of the ferry, a few of them occupied by travelers: eager merchants conversing over lists of merchandise, a group of laborers quickly bolting down sandwiches, a nursing mother. Damien found them a vacant table and pulled over two chairs for them.

“Let’s get to work.”

He spilled out a box of ammunition on the table between them, picked one bolt up and turned it about, thoughtfully. The short wooden shaft had a metal tip on one end, a curved band on the other. He took out his pocket knife and, with the tip, tried to pry off the two metal pieces. The tip came off easily. The band at the base was tight, and took some work.

“Wax,” he muttered. “Adhesive.”

Senzei rummaged through the pack that held their smaller supply items. After a few minutes he managed to find a small chunk of amber wax. The stick of glue took longer.

“Would there be any point in asking what you’re doing?”

“Preparing for war,” Damien muttered. “Watch and learn.”

He laid the naked shaft before him on the table, and rolled it over until he was satisfied with the placement of the grain. Then, carefully, he used his knife blade to split it open. It took little encouragement to get it to crack open along the grain, down the length of the shaft.

He looked about to see if anyone was watching. But the other passengers were perusing their own work at their own tables, or sitting on the long benches that flanked the staircase to the second level, casually chatting, or else standing at the rail that guarded the edge of the deck, watching the muddy green water course by.

He took the silver flask out of its pouch and carefully—reverently—opened it. And he dribbled a few precious drops down the exposed center of the wooden shaft, until the Fire was absorbed into the wood. The shaft glowed dully, like cooling charcoal.

“Now.” He capped the flask and put it beside him—carefully, oh so carefully—and took the glue from Senzei. The halves went together easily, with only a narrow scar where his knife had been applied. Next he briskly rubbed the wax onto the surface of the shaft, until the whole of it was coated. The metal tip and anchoring band he glued carefully back in place.

“There.” He set the finished product before him. It looked little different than the other bolts, and Senzei had to fight to keep himself from Working his sight to see if there was indeed a difference. The change would be visible enough when molecules of the Fire, seeping through the dry wood, reached the surface of the shaft. Maybe.

“You think it’ll work?”

“I think it can’t hurt to try. A few dozen drops of Fire at risk ... and if it works, it gives us one hell of an arsenal.” He looked up at Senzei—and for an instant, just an instant, the sorceror thought he saw a flicker of fear in the priest’s eyes. He felt his own throat tighten, knowing what it must take to cause such a thing.

“You okay?” the priest said quietly.

He met his eyes. And managed to shrug. “I’ll be all right.”

“There’s nearly two hours of daylight left. We should reach the Forest’s border by then. He can’t be too far ahead of us. If we can find a physical trail—”

“And what if we can’t?”

Damien forced his knife into the center of another shaft. The wood snapped apart with a sharp crack, into two nearly equal halves.

“Then I’ll have to Work to find one,” he said quietly. “Won’t I?”

Mordreth. It was a mining town, a gold rush town, a trapper’s camp ... and all the worst elements of those things combined, with none of their redeeming features. It was a transitory camp somehow made permanent by sheer persistence on the shoreline, by the need for its dismal bars and rat-trap inns and cheap entertainment halls, as well as the manpower that was its most precious commodity. But if the inhabitants of Mordreth had any hunger for beauty, they clearly indulged it elsewhere. The place was gray: muddy gray along the water, dirty gray in the streets, weathered gray about the houses. The only color that existed in the town was in a few garish signs, a tattered line of pennants, and occasionally the undergarments that the whores wore as they gathered in the brothel windows, beckoning to passing strangers.

Damien and Senzei rode through the muddy streets at a rapid pace; the horses seemed as anxious as they were to get through the town quickly. The place had an aura of entrapment about it—as if by staying too long within its borders, one might lose the will to leave. By the time they reached the far side of the dingy settlement Senzei was shivering—and not from the cold.

“You really want to leave our supplies here?” he asked.

Damien shook his head grimly but said nothing.

They rode through a long stretch of flatlands, the only vegetation sparse patches of dead grass that reminded them how very close at hand winter was. The ground was hard, nearly frozen. Which was something to be grateful for, Damien pointed out; in another season, it might have been mud.

Senzei was beginning to understand why he had never traveled.

A few miles later they came upon the first signs of human life. A scrap of cloth, lying in a clump of dead grass. The shards of a packing crate, long since dismembered. A circle of stones, blackened by fire, and beside it the marks of a recent encampment. Damien glanced at the latter once but gave it no more notice; their quarry would not be camping.

They rode on. The sun dropped lower and lower in the west, the colors of dusk adding their own special tenor to that sullen, swollen star. Greenish-yellow light spilled across the landscape: skies before a storm. It was becoming easier to spot the artifacts on the ground around them now, outlined as they were by vivid black shadows. They came to a low rise, then another. And another. Shallow rises became rolling hills: the vanguard of a mountain range. How far north had they come?

Senzei watched it all pass by, clutching himself against the chill of nightfall. The pain in his side was growing worse and worse, each jolt of the horse on the uneven ground driving spears of fire deep into his flesh. He tried to ignore it, tried to overcome the faintness that threatened to overwhelm him, the grayness that had fogged all but the very center of his field of vision. Because they couldn’t afford to slow down, not for him. Slowing down meant losing Ciani.
Taking time to heal now is as good as committing her to death
, he told himself. And so he clung unsteadily to the saddle beneath him, and somehow managed to keep riding.

And then they came to it. Damien first, topping a particularly high rise. He pulled up suddenly, to the confusion of his mount. Senzei followed suit. The extra horse snorted in alarm and tried to break away, but their own two mounts were calm enough and a sharp jerk on the reins of the third served to discipline him for the moment.