Crown of Shadows (46 page)

And then at last he was on shore. A prayer of thankfulness rose to his lips as he struggled along the rocky beach, to a boulder-strewn slope that even the horses didn’t seem anxious to climb. There he collapsed, cursed briefly at the impact of sharp rocks against his flesh, and took a few deep breaths to celebrate his safety. From where he sat he could see Tarrant coming up on the beach, and rather than come up directly to where Damien was he loosed the slip knot at his belt and began to pull in the rope that led back to the boat. For a moment Damien held his breath, wondering if their last-minute plan would bear fruit, and then he saw a low shadow coming toward them, riding the waves. He forced himself back up to his feet and down to the water’s edge, where he helped the Hunter pull. Their makeshift raft trembled as the waves broke over it, but made it to shore without real incident. Quickly they unloaded the supplies they had lashed upon it, and carried them up to where the horses, milling nervously, waited for them.

“Whoever owns that boat isn’t going to be happy about this,” Damien noted, as the last of the small ship’s stores was brought out of reach of the water.

“Let’s hope he has insurance.” The Hunter was running his hands over the horses’ legs, making sure they had sustained no injury in the landing. “This one’s bleeding,” he warned Damien, and the priest limped over to Heal the wound. Was there a category of insurance for having your boat stolen by an undead sorcerer while the owner was away attending a demon-inspired posse? If so, the rate schedule must be interesting.

The Hunter walked back to the edge of the water. Damien almost moved to follow him, then decided that if the man wanted help he would have asked for it. He watched while Tarrant fixed his eyes on the wounded boat. Working, no doubt, but toward what end? Then the boat, half-submerged in the water, tore loose from its rocky mooring with a crack of wood and screech of metal so loud that Damien stiffened despite himself. Slowly, inch by inch, it began to back its way out into the Serpent. He could see it shaking as if struggling to rise up, some trapped air pocket not yet willing to acquiesce to the watery embrace, but Tarrant’s power and the underwater currents held it fast. The rail slipped beneath the water’s surface, then the cabin roof, then the polished wooden wheel, spinning madly as though in protest. Soon only the masts remained, rising up like sea serpents out of the black water. Damien could see Tarrant tense, as an athlete might before lifting a great weight. And then the masts began to bend to one side, and the waves seemed to tremble, and it seemed to him that the earth itself grew warm as the wooden beams finally cracked at their base and plummeted down into the waves. There the power of the Hunter weighted them down, until they sank into a grave that no mere sea might unearth.

“Can’t Calesta just create an illusion that it’s still there?” he asked as the Hunter came back up the slope.

“We don’t yet know the limits of his power.” Damien could hear the exhaustion in his voice, from an exercise which, however impressive, shouldn’t have drained that much. “Why make it easy on him?” How long had it been since Tarrant had fed properly? Four days at least. He’d planned to find fresh blood in Seth, or across the Serpent if that failed. What would he do now that the cities were off limits?

When the animals were Healed and calmed—the latter by Tarrant’s skill, and against considerable resistance—they negotiated the rocky slope at the point where it seemed most navigable. Though their mounts slipped once or twice and Damien had to stop to pry a stone out from between the toes of his, they made it to the top without major mishap, and finally looked out upon the land where fate had deposited them.

It was a bleak and barren landscape, and the cold, lifeless moonlight did little to soften its edge. The rocky ground was softened only by lichens and an occasional island of coarse grass, and jagged black monuments broke upward through its surface like knife blades, eerily aligned all at the same angle. There would be little grazing here, nothing on which to fuel a fire, and no certain cover come daybreak. Thank God they had brought the ship’s store of supplies along with them, now strapped to their saddlebags in makeshift oilcloth packs.

“North,” the Hunter directed, and they proceeded with all due haste. Once or twice he called for a halt, dismounting momentarily so that he might make direct contact with the earth-currents. Damien saw him Working, and guessed that he was doing something to hide their trail. An Obscuring? No, that would be too easily countered by their enemy. More likely some Working that actually stirred the dirt and stones until their marks were truly invisible, so that it would take more than a mere illusion to uncover them. Nevertheless he could see a hard truth in the Hunter’s eyes, backlit by a growing fear: if the demon Calesta knew where they were going, how great an effort would it take for him to lead men to them? “Let him at least work for it,” the Hunter muttered as he remounted. And they started off again.

Some two hours north of the shore the land grew marginally gentler, and plants could be seen to sprout where time and wind had broken the stone down to a hospitable soil. Tarrant Knew some five or six species of grass before at last he pulled up where one clustered, announcing, “This will do.” As soon as he released the horses from the Working that bound them, they lowered their heads to the fresh plants and began to eat as if there were no tomorrow. Which, Damien mused darkly, there might not be.

“Where now?” he asked, as Tarrant rescued his maps from an oilcloth bundle. The well-wrapped papers had suffered little from their immersion, thank Tarrant’s power for that. The Hunter was nothing if not thorough. As Damien rescued a meal’s worth of food from his saddlebag—the horses were so intent on their own meal that they didn’t notice him at all—Tarrant studied the currents to all sides of them as a mariner might study the stars. “We’re here,” he said at last. He spread out the map on a mound of rock and weighted its corners down with stones. Sitting down on the opposite side of it, Damien studied the familiar handwriting with its assortment of notes. They had indeed come to land midway between Hade and Asmody, as Tarrant had guessed; even now the men of those two cities might be searching the rocky shore for traces of their passage. The Hunter’s slender finger marked a place some miles north of the water, then moved upward: over the first line of hills, through the Raksha Valley, up to a mountain range labeled
Black Ridge.
“We have to cross this,” he told Damien. “And there are only three ways to do that, short of riding up over the top. This pass—” and he moved his finger west, to a place near the Forest’s own border, “—is by far the easier crossing, and the one I would have preferred. But there’s little doubt in my mind, given our experience in Seth, that Calesta will marshal local forces to make that pass inaccessible.”

“No argument there,” he muttered, thinking of all the violence that had been taking place at the Forest’s edge. The men of Yamas and Sheva would be all too happy to ambush a pair of sorcerers, if they believed that by doing so they might render their families safer.

“So: here.” The Hunter moved his finger eastward along the Ridge, until it came to rest at a place labeled
Gastine Pass,
some forty miles north and twenty miles east of them. “It’s bound to be safer than the other right now.”

“And pretty far out of our way.”

“Do you see an alternative?”

“You’re the one who cares about time.”

Did it seem that the Hunter flinched? Certainly he hesitated before answering, “I would rather lose a day reaching my goal than lose my life getting there.”

“You’re that sure he’ll be waiting for us?”

The silver eyes met his. “Aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “That’s the rotten part about traveling with you, you know? Even your enemies are competent.” He took a short swig from his canteen, and watched as Tarrant did the same, trying to assess the weight of the Hunter’s canteen by the way he handled it. Half-empty at least, he judged. Did he have others like it, or was he reaching the end of his supply? “What about the Gastine? Won’t he try to whip up some kind of ambush there, once he guesses where we’re headed?”

“Without doubt. But the towns near there are farther from the Forest, and its people will be less ready to rally to his cause.” He paused. “The trick is to beat them there.”

He drew in a sharp breath and glanced back at the grazing horses. “Our mounts—”

“Will need attention,” he agreed. “And as Healing is your department, not mine, I leave you to it.” He rose to his feet in a fluid motion, not unlike a snake uncoiling. “The currents here are strong, but you should be able to Work them. One benefit of having been driven so far from our chosen course,” he said dryly. And then he began to walk away from the camp.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Far enough from the three of you that I can Know what’s happening in the Forest. Or, at least, try to.”

“I thought it was all but impossible to do that from here.”

“Yes. Well.” The Hunter’s eyes glittered in the moonlight, half-lidded and thoughtful. “Doing the impossible seems to be our order of business, doesn’t it?” He gazed out at the endless dark vista to the west of them, and Damien thought he saw him stiffen in anticipation. “You just see to the horses.”

See to the horses.
Easier said than done, when the problem was not one wound or a simple illness but general systemic exhaustion. The animals needed sound sleep and a few good meals, not another Working. But with fifty or more miles ahead of them before they reached the Ridge, Damien and Tarrant had little choice. Calesta would certainly make sure that no town let them come close enough to purchase—
or steal,
he added grimly—fresher mounts.

“Don’t go far,” he warned Tarrant. The man was too far away to hear him now, but what the hell. He felt better for saying it.

With a sigh, he braced himself for a Healing.

They pushed hard for the rest of the night, hard enough that Damien wondered if the horses wouldn’t collapse before dawn. If so, he didn’t know that he could do much to save them. It was one thing to spruce up an animal’s biochemistry when it was still relatively healthy, another thing entirely to save it once systemic breakdown had begun. But to his surprise they kept up a hard pace through the remainder of the night, enough to get their riders across the sloping line of hills which bordered the Raksha Valley to the south, and partway across the valley itself.

By morning’s light Damien could see their eventual destination, a solid black wall that stretched as far as the eye could see to the east and the west of them, cutting short not only routes of travel but the very winds themselves. Weather systems rarely crossed the Black Ridge, he knew that from Geography 101, and the currents likewise tended to flow around it instead of across it. Which was in the long run what made the valley habitable, since the fae beyond that barrier was hot enough and wild enough that even sorcerers feared it.

And that’s where we’re headed,
he thought, gazing at the snow-clad peaks. Not a happy thought.

From where they made their camp, Damien could see the pass itself, a place where the great ridge had folded in its making, creating a deep cleft through which men might travel without braving its heights. His stomach tightened at the thought of what might be waiting for them there, but he knew in his heart that there was no alternate route. Unlike the varied ranges of the east, the Black Ridge was an all-or-nothing climb for most of its length. And while they could push their horses hard along open ground and hope to make good time, Damien knew that if they tried to ride up there, where heat and oxygen were both in short supply, they would soon find themselves walking.

Nevertheless ... “No other way?” he asked Tarrant as the man dismounted. Hoping that there was some route he didn’t know about, which they could turn to.

“I’m afraid not,” the Hunter told him. And that was that. Because if there was any man Damien trusted to know the layout of this land, and to assess its hidden potential, it was the Hunter.

He watched as Tarrant drained the last of his canteen’s contents, and waited for him to say something about his need for further nourishment. But the Hunter offered no information, and he didn’t want to ask him about it. If he needed something more than he carried with him, surely he would tell Damien. The Hunter had never been shy about his needs.

1’ll feed him if I
have to, he thought. Wondering even as he did so how he could do battle with Calesta’s troops with less blood in his own veins than he needed, or weakened by an endless assault of nightmares. Then he thought about the pass and what would be waiting for them there.
Can you make me more afraid than I already am?

“Get some sleep,” Tarrant urged him. “Tomorrow will be a hard day.”

Sleep. Could you sleep in the shadow of such a threat, pretending that it was just another day? When the wind grew quiet, he imagined he could hear men’s voices in the distance, as Calesta used the daylight hours to prepare for combat. How many local warriors had he gathered there, how had he prepared them for the battle to come? Did they think they were fighting demons, or some other faeborn threat? What manner of illusion served them in the place of courage, that would keep them fighting long after every human instinct cried,
Enough!