Crown of Shadows (67 page)

The man reeled visibly, as if the words had been a physical blow. “No,” he whispered hoarsely. “You’re just trying to talk yourself out of a—”

“Look within yourself, then! Imagine the hatred taking hold,
Calesta‘s
hatred taking hold, the embrace of vengeance consummated at last ... and then ask yourself how you’ll return to the real world after that. Or did you think it would all end when you pulled that trigger? Did you think your soul would be magically cleansed at the moment of my death?” He shook his head sharply. “This is just the beginning. The easy part.”

“You killed them,” he whispered. Raising up the weapon again, aligning it with his eye once more. “My brothers, my sister, all of them! God damn you to Hell! You deserve to die!”

“Then pull the trigger,” the Hunter dared him. “And destroy us both.”

Andrys Tarrant blinked hard; sweat ran redly down the side of his face. “I don’t ... I can’t....” His hands were shaking. Suddenly he gestured toward Damien with the springbolt. “Go,” he whispered hoarsely. “Get out of here.”

“I think—” he began.

“This isn’t your fight! It’s between him and me. Whoever the hell you are, just get out of here! Now!”

Damien hesitated, then looked at Gerald. The Hunter nodded ever so slightly. “He’s right, Damien.” His voice was quiet but strained. “There’s nothing more you can do here.”

“Gerald—”

The Hunter shook his head. Damien’s protest died in his throat.

“Go,” Gerald Tarrant whispered.

He swallowed hard, trying to think of something to do, something to say, anything that could change this moment. He imagined himself in Andrys Tarrant’s place, and sensed how very easy it would be to fire. How many times had he dreamed of putting an end to the Hunter so quickly, so easily? But now the issue was no longer that simple. Now the Hunter had become ... something else.

Hadn’t he?

You killed my family,
the younger Tarrant had accused.

He forced himself to move as indicated. Andrys took a few steps into the room to give him a wide berth in case he intended to attempt a last minute rescue ... and indeed he might have, if there had been an opening. But there wasn’t. And then he passed through the door and it slammed shut behind him, and he knew that one way or another a man was going to die.

It was justice, surely. Long overdue. Generations would celebrate the death of a man who was every bit as evil as Calesta, whose heart was so like the Iezu’s in its core that when he had beckoned to his enemy with the full force of the Hunter’s sadism, Calesta had come to him like a lover.

His heart heavy, his feet like lead, he ascended the winding staircase that led to the upper levels. Up he climbed, toward the black halls he remembered so well. Up to where the soldiers of the Church were laying down explosives and fixing fuses in place. Up to the living world, where the Forest was dying so that new things might be born, where the legend of the Hunter would give way to other things fearsome and terrible, but none so full of despoiled brilliance, or of courage....

There were tears in his eyes, blinding him. Hot tears.

He kept walking.

They had built a bonfire in the courtyard. He watched as they carried the pieces of Amoril’s body over to it and threw them one by one onto the flames. He watched the pieces char and sizzle and lose their human coherency, and he sensed the relief among the soldiers as it was guaranteed, by that burning, that no undead resurrection would bring their enemy back.

Distantly he watched, as if from another world. No one disturbed him. Not the soldiers whom he knew, not the Patriarch ... no one. Surrounded by a cocoon of darkness he watched as the flames danced, feeling their heat upon his face, an alien thing in the Forest night.

And then there was a stirring in the main portal of the keep, and a figure emerged from the shadows within it. One man, clad in armor of silver and gold, bloodstained sword gripped tightly in one hand. There was a dark-haired girl in the crowd who ran toward him, but something in his manner made her stop before she had reached him. The Patriarch rose up from where he sat and took one step toward him, but then Andrys Tarrant’s gaze—haunted, bloodshot—froze him in place.

Slowly he raised his other hand, along with the trophy it held. His bloodied fingers gripping it by the hair, he raised up the severed head of Gerald Tarrant so that all could see it. Damien shut his eyes, but the image was already burned into his brain and he couldn’t shut it out. That white skin, truly bloodless now. Those silver eyes, emptied of all intelligence. That life which was ever so much more than a mere human life, smothered out like a candleflame....

He mourned. God would condemn him for it, perhaps, but he mourned. The man who had once been called Prophet deserved that much, surely.

Five steps brought Andrys Tarrant to the edge of the fire. For a second he paused, as if giving those about him a chance to fix the moment in their minds. Then he cast the head onto the pyre—that tortured face, so like and unlike his own—and cried out as the first flames licked at it, as if feeling their bite on his own flesh. He fell then, and the dark-haired girl ran to him, and she dropped to her knees and held him and wept. The Patriarch came up beside them and offered his own words of comfort.
God has led us to triumph,
perhaps. Or something like that. Some ritual prayer that couldn’t possibly do justice to this moment, or to the man whose death had made it possible.

No one noticed Damien Vryce as he left the courtyard. No one saw him slip into the shadows of the Forest, away from the light of the flames. Away from the keep, and its storehouse of knowledge. Away from ... everything.

In the silence of the Forbidden Forest, in the darkness that the Hunter had called home, Damien prayed for God’s forgiveness, and for the peace of his friend’s soul.

They blew up
the black keep at solar noon, when the hot white light of day set the finials ablaze and the glass stones shimmered like quicksilver. It had taken them all morning to prepare for the act, exposing all the rooms of the keep before a single fuse was lit, so that there was no chamber, no closet, no corner in which a shadow of the Hunter’s power might remain to sabotage their efforts. Amidst the towering, thickly thatched trees of the Forest that had meant waiting until day was well under way, for dawn, like sunset, lacked the angular power to breach the lower windows. In the meantime they mixed the materials they had brought to the Forest with meticulous care and constant prayer, and laid their fuses to the sound of Church-chants. Every grain of powder was tamped down in the One God’s name; every precious fiber was dedicated to His purpose. In a world where one man’s doubts might skew a host of enterprises, one couldn’t be too careful.

They were following a plan set down by the first settlers, in the days when the ravaged colony had struggled to record all of Earth’s knowledge. Inner walls first, and supporting columns, then the outer structure of the keep. On Earth such a pattern would have guaranteed a controlled infall of debris, minimizing the risk to those who watched. On Erna, where there was no guarantee that any of the fuses would fire properly, much less any fantasy that all the explosions could be timed ... call it a dream. Call it an act of faith.

It went off perfectly.

They heard the first blast from down the mountainside, and felt the ground tremble beneath them. The second followed seconds after, and then the third, and a barrage that was more deafening than all three combined. With a sound like thunder the black walls shattered, some blowing outward, most falling inward. Floors collapsed beneath the weight of ceilings, fell to the floors below, collapsed again. The mountain shook. The sun was obscured by smoke. Fragments of obsidian, sharp as arrow points, fell to the ground like rain.

After the smoke cleared, the Hunter’s keep was gone.

Some monuments still remained, spared by the conquerors’ lack of adequate explosives, or else by the limits of their book-learned skill. A single buttress arched up against the sky, seemingly defiant. A segment of the courtyard wall jutted up from the ground, its base buried in rubble. There were parts of walls still standing within the keep, against which debris had drifted like sand, or snow; vast dunes of wreckage that promised frustration to any man or beast that might dare to brave the site in search of buried knowledge, or some key to power.

They said prayers over the rubble, as soon as the dust had settled. Prayers and sunlight would expose and destroy any remnant of power clinging to the ancient stone. No one doubted the power of that combination. No one doubted that the Hunter was now gone forever. No one doubted that a great and terrible age had finally been brought to a close, with this single act that would reverberate through history. Such was the power of symbols in men’s minds, they told each other. Such was the power of their Patriarch.

And Damien alone, sitting apart from all the others, removed from their celebration, saw what was within the Patriarch’s soul that day. Not joy, but a dark and terrible anxiety. Not relief, but a fresh determination. Damien alone, knowing his Church, knowing the Patriarch—but most of all, knowing his fellow men—understood the cause of that anxiety.

And knowing, he mourned.

The Holy Father
walked out carefully upon the rocks, booted feet wary on the slippery surfaces. Thick brush tangled about his ankles, not the twisted, perverted vines of the inner Forest, but the rich green life of a region that was daily bathed in sunlight. After days in that stifling domain, their smell was a heady tonic.

He stood where the rocks went out into the river listening to the waters of the Lethe rush about his feet. Fish darted quicksilver beneath the gleaming surface, and a red crab scuttled out of the way as his shadow fell upon its hunting ground.

He looked at the place—its sun and its water and its rich, teeming life—and he looked at the currents of earth-fae which were bright beneath his feet, and he gazed into a plethora of possible futures, so tangled together now that his best efforts could barely pull loose a single thread. He shut his eyes and let them seep into him, and when he was sure that he liked the feel of them, he nodded and said quietly, “This is the place.”

The soldier who had accompanied him on his search beat his way back through the bushes that lined the river, hurrying back to tell the others. For a short, precious time the Patriarch was alone.

His left leg hurt so badly that he could barely stand on it. There was a good chance that it had broken back when the white beasts attacked them, but he hadn’t told anyone. There could even be an infection by now, if a shard of bone had broken through the skin. No matter. He had managed the tortuous climb despite it, wincing at every step, almost crying out when a misplaced footfall caused his wounded leg to jar against the earth. But he knew that if he’d told them what was wrong, they would have stopped then and there to tend to him, increasing the risk to all at least tenfold. And maybe deep inside, in that hidden place where a man least wanted to look, he was afraid that if he sat down and gave in to the pain, if he offered exhaustion that opening, he would never rise up again.