Black Sun Rising (71 page)

The pierced male spoke to them. After a moment of waiting, he snapped another few phrases in the rakhene tongue, hurling them at Hesseth like knives. With effort she composed herself, barely enough to translate, “He says these are the fringe-folk, who live on the borders of the ... the no-place. He says ...” She drew in a deep breath, shaking; it was hard for her to translate calmly when all her animal senses were screaming at her to flee. “He is the dream-one, the seeing-one, and they’ll respect his wishes. Because he asks it, they’ll keep us here, so that we may sleep in—in—I’m sorry,” she said, flustered. “I just don’t know that one.”

The pierced one continued. “From here they can show us the House of—the place of blue light,” she corrected herself. Damien could hear the strain in her voice, echo of a self-control that was alien to her and her kind. That’s it, he thought approvingly. Keep it up. “He says that the tunnels we want are under this place, but they are not easy tunnels. The small ways are too narrow, and the walls are ...
falling-threat,
he says. Which is why the tunnels were abandoned.” He saw her nostrils flare in terror, innate response to some half-sensed threat. Once more she drew in a deep, slow breath, as if struggling for air. “Very dangerous,” she gasped. Was she translating the dream-one’s words, now, or referring to their general situation? “In past times there was much death, in the no-place. No rakh ever goes there, now. No rakh
will
ever go there.” The pierced one grinned, displaying crooked teeth. “But I will go there,” she translated, as he slapped his breast proudly. A thin drop of blood welled forth from the base of a pectoral ornament he had struck. “I, the seeing-one, the dream-one, who dares the places of no, I will take you there.” The filmy eyes fixed on Damien with clear hostility. “I think this is some kind of male statement—”

“I understand it,” he told her. Oh, yes: the social pattern was very familiar. Primitive, even bestial ... and not without its congruent among human males. He remembered one young boy braving the true night alone, in order to achieve the status that only foolhardy courage could earn. Because of a dare, he remembered. It was always because of a dare.

“Tell him yes,” he said brusquely. “Tell him I want to see if he can lead us there, to the place where no rakh go. I want to see if his ... if his
seeing
is stronger than his fear.—Say it that way,” he urged her.

He watched the pierced one’s face as his challenge was voiced. And therefore did not see the faces surrounding them, as several rakh gasped in response to his audicity.

But the pierced one merely nodded, once, tightly, as he accepted the challenge. “After sleep, then,” he told them through the
khrast-
woman. “After you have seen the lightning-place. We go then.” We waved to one of the local females, who scurried off ratlike into the darkness. “The fringe-folk give you shelter, for resting in. You will not be sleeping together, so—”

“We stay together,”
Damien said sharply. And he sensed, rather than saw, relief in Hesseth’s eyes. “At all times.”

The pierced one fixed wide black eyes on him, as if trying to stare him down.
Fat chance,
Damien thought. He stared back with equal vigor. At last the rakh nodded, somewhat stiffly. “All three together,” he pronounced. The myriad impalements of his face made his expression particularly grotesque. “You come, then, and the fringe-folk will bring food—”

“No food,” Damien said sharply. He said it again, when the pierced one hesitated.
“No food.”

It seemed to him that several of the smaller rakh giggled—or some gurgly equivalent—and for a brief moment nausea washed over him, as he recognized the source of their mirth. But he kept his expression stem, puffing himself up in his best rakhene-male manner. And after a moment of silent confrontation, the pierced one nodded stiffly.

“There will be no food,” he agreed. “Come,” He waved back the mildewed crowd, giving them room to move. Just in time, Damien reflected; the air had become nearly unbreathable. He kept a protective arm about Ciani as they fell in behind him, and a close eye on Hesseth.

“I gather you got the upper hand,” Ciani murmured to him, as they were led from the common chamber. “I don’t suppose you’d care to explain what that last little bit was about?”

He glanced back toward the vast cavern, towards its ornamented wells, and shivered. “Don’t ask,” he muttered. “Not till we’re out of here, at least.”
Don’t ever ask,
he pleaded silently.

And he remembered the polished bones that he had seen on the cavern wall, remnants of the Lost Ones’ meat-animals applied to decoration. Much as a man might make a rug from the hide of his kill, he thought, or hang its head on the wall. There had been hundreds of bones in that place, all of them smooth and gleaming, some of them carved in intricate patterns ... and among them at least one hand, nearly human-sized, that was not from a beast. He remembered the fingers of that one—remembered them very clearly—slender bones with rakhene claws at the tip. The retractable talons of the plains-rakh, without doubt. Glued to the wall like some grizzly trophy, a momento of past feasts relished.

He hoped with all his heart that Hesseth hadn’t seen it. He wished with all his heart that he hadn’t, either.

“I didn’t think their food would agree with us,” he muttered.

Darkness. Closeness. The chill of stone, close about them. Packed earth, at their backs. In a sleeping-crevice so narrow that the three of them were forced to huddle together, like a family of Lost Ones might have done. It was not uncomforting, under the circumstances. But it was a bad position to be in, should they be attacked.

Damien cradled the clear vial of Fire against his chest, and let its light drive back the dark fae that even now was trying to reach them. As soon as the cave-rakh had left them, that dark force had begun to manifest their fears, with the result that several amorphous shapes were now lying in sliced-up bits around the party. But that was before. The golden light of the Fire was enough to keep it at bay, and Damien meant to keep it out until the Lost Ones returned to them. After one-sleep, they had said. Whatever the hell that meant.

Beside him, cradled against his chest, Ciani moaned softly, trapped in the grip of some nightmare. He nudged her gently, hoping to urge her out of the dream state without quite awakening her. On his other side Hesseth slept fitfully, deep growls and animal hisses punctuating the soft, whistling snore that counterpointed her slumber. And he ... he needed sleep desperately, but didn’t dare succumb to it. There was too much here that was unknown—too much that was dangerous. If the Lost Ones considered their cousins to be food-animals, what would they make of the humans, who were even more unlike them? He was acutely aware of the stone shelf close overhead, of his inability to swing a sword without first climbing down from the sleeping-crevice. But to take up guard elsewhere meant that either he or his companions must be without the Firelight, and that was simply unacceptable; the dark fae was too responsive, their fearful imaginations too fertile. They would be overwhelmed in moments. So the best he could do for them was to remain where he was and doze as he had in the Dividers: mere moments of sleep, quickly claimed and quickly abandoned. Mere moments of darkness, punctuating long hours of alertness

Too many hours. Too long a vigil. But who could say how long the night took to pass, in a place where the whole world was darkness?

“There it is.”

They stood upon a ridge of naked granite which the wind had scrubbed clean of snow, and tried to adjust to the harsh morning light. In the distance, barely visible to the naked eye, the House of Storms rose from the ground like some sharp, malignant growth. All about it the land had been flattened, a no-man’s waste of barren ground that made their enemy’s tower all the more visible by contrast. Whatever defenses their enemy might value, invisibility was clearly not one of them.

“Don’t Work,” Damien warned Ciani. “Whatever you do, don’t Work to see it. Or for any other reason.” Not knowing how much she remembered—or, more accurately, how little—he explained, “Any channel we establish can be used against us, no matter what its purpose. We’re too close now to chance that.”

“And it would let him know we’ve arrived?”

“If he doesn’t already know,” he said grimly.

“What’s the chance of that?” Hesseth asked.

“Hard to say. We’ve had nothing happen since Tarrant’s death, to further thin the ranks of our party ... but that could just mean that he considers us sufficiently weakened already.”

“Or that his attention’s fixed on the simulacra instead.”

He hesitated. All his gut instinct warned him not to bank his hopes on that one deception—
never count on anything you can’t See yourself,
his master had cautioned him—but to deny Ciani such a small hope now was little less than cruelty. “Let’s hope so,” he muttered. And he raised the small farseer to his eye.

The fortress seemed to leap toward him: slowly he coaxed it into focus. And drew in his breath sharply as its bizarre design gradually became clear.

“Damien?”

“No windows,” he muttered. “No windows at all.” But even those words couldn’t capture the oddity of it. The utterly alien quality of its design. “He’s a paranoid bastard, that’s for sure.”

What rose up from the distant ground was a polished obelisk of native stone, whose slick surface betrayed no hint of doorway, viewport, or any structural joining. It was as if it had not been raised up from the earth, but rather carved from the mountainside itself. A massive sculpture of cold, unliving stone that required no petty adornments—such as entrances or windows—to proclaim its purpose. He studied its surface for many long minutes, and had to bite back on his urge to Work his sight further. That would be too dangerous. He sought mortar lines, the thin shadows of juncture, any hint that mere mortals might have erected that eerie sculpture, but there were none. Not a single crack in the polished surface, that might serve as handhold to an invader. Not even a tiny viewport, through which weapons or gas might enter.
Or an agile invader,
he thought. Fear of attack was written across every inch of the structure.

“Utterly defensive,” he muttered. “To say the least.” He handed the farseer to Ciani, heard her gasp as she brought the strange edifice into focus. For a moment he looked at her, concerned; was it possible that old memories were surfacing, this close to her tormentor’s fortress? Her hands shook slightly as she held the farseer, and she drew in a long, ragged breath as she stared through it. But no, that was impossible. Her memories weren’t buried, but wholly absent. Taken from her. And if he made the same mistake Senzei had—of confusing
absence
with
suppression
—he might well be courting a similar fate.

“Cee?”

“I’m all right. It’s just that it’s so ...” She fumbled for an adjective, shivering. “That’s it, isn’t it? Where we’re going.”

“That, or somewhere beneath it.” He took the farseer back from her and handed it to Hesseth. Who looked it over with catlike curiosity before finally raising it to her eye to look through it.

Naked stone, polished to an ice-slick surface. A six-sided tower that rose up from the earth like a basalt column, as though Erna herself had vomited it up from the volcanic depths of her core. A structure that widened as it rose so that the walls were forced outward, doubly discouraging anyone who might try to scale it.

It was structurally impossible, plain and simple. Earthquakes might not strike here, but the sun still shone and the seasons still progressed, as in any normal place. And any mass that huge, that solid, was bound to develop flaws as Nature went through her paces. Uneven expansion and contractions, the erosion of wind and ice, the deforming pressure of its own top-heavy mass ... such a monument could not exist and therefore it did not, simple as that. Not even a Warding would hold it together, against such complex forces. Which meant that something else was involved.