When True Night Falls (23 page)

“Toshida said they were seers,” Damien told him. “Oracles.”

He shook his head, dismissing the thought. “Neither clairvoyance nor prophecy is strictly a female venue. No, I see no
natural
cause for this system. And that makes me question its source.”

He gazed down at the map as if remembering; his pale eyes flickered from city to city, all along the eastern coast.

“And then there are the wards,” he said softly. “Religious symbols marked on every pillar and gate, surrounding every city. Emblems placed on buoys throughout the harbor, so that even the closer ships are protected. They outline a sphere of protection so powerful, so perpetually reinforced by religious fervor, that not even a high-order demon can get by them. I know. I watched several try. No horror that this world has spawned can get into the northern cities, not by any means.” He turned back to Damien. His pale eyes were blazing. “And yet I can. For me there’s no resistance, none at all. As if the wards didn’t even acknowledge my existence.” He shook his head tensely. “In Jaggonath no ward could stop me, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel them. Sometimes with the good ones I actually had to unWork them partway to get past. But not here. Never here.”

“Are you sure?” Damien asked.

The Hunter nodded. “My nature is demonic, Reverend. Plain and simple. And if I didn’t struggle every waking moment to maintain my human identity, I would become a demon in fact as well as essence. Yet the power which guards this land doesn’t even recognize me as a threat, or make any attempt to keep me out. If so, what else doesn’t it recognize?” he demanded. “And who engineered such a weakness?

“And why,” Damien muttered.

Tarrant nodded.

“Good God.” He reached up and rubbed his forehead. It was too much to absorb; his head was pounding. “Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough?” the Hunter asked softly.

Damien looked up at him. “Is it all?”

Slowly Tarrant shook his head. “No. There was a child outside Penitencia, chained to a rock as an offering to the monsters of the night. There are children raised in every city for that very purpose: to serve as bait for the faeborn, so that men can destroy whatever comes to feed on their fear. They die very young. Or suffer a fate far worse than death. This one recognized what I was, and what I wanted ... and welcomed me.”

Damien was silent. He could feel his own hands trembling—with the force of frustration, of rage. Of betrayal. The dream had seemed so perfect.... What had fouled it? Or
who?

“Listen to me,” the Hunter said sharply. “I don’t know how all these facts connect, but they do. There’s no question of that. And whoever or whatever caused it isn’t going to be out in the open, that’s certain.”

He forced his eyes to look at the map. “South, you think?”

Tarrant looked at Hesseth, who nodded. “Best bet.”

He drew in a deep breath, tried to still the shaking of his hands.
A young girl chained to a rock, bait for demons
.... “We need more information. First.”

“
Listen to me
.” Tarrant’s words were reinforced with earth-fae, and they adhered themselves to Damien’s brain like fire. “Don’t talk to anyone. Anyone! Do you understand? Our enemy is subtle, and his strategy spans centuries. Even men and women who mean well may serve his purpose without knowing it. Isn’t that what we’re seeing here? Good intentions twisted to an evil purpose?” He stood; dark silk rippled about his calves. “I let my guard down once in the rakhlands—for less than a second—and endured eight days of burning hell as a result. Our enemy is subtle, Vryce, and that’s what makes him so dangerous. If he weren’t, don’t you think these people would have fought him? Or at least acknowledged his influence?”

“He must know we’re here,” the priest muttered. The vision of the chained child was still before his eyes. “If his influence is as far-reaching as you say—”

“All the more reason to move quickly,” he agreed. “Since we don’t know how far his power extends, or how many people are under his control. Best to move now.”

He walked to the door, carefully avoiding the maps that surrounded it. Before he left, he turned to look at Damien—and something in the priest’s expression must have displeased him, because the pale eyes narrowed.

“I killed eight times in the cities,” he said. Nostrils flaring as he spoke, as if he were recalling the scents of the kill. “Eight women. And each time the wards let me pass by with not even a murmur. You remember that, if you start to have doubts. If Mercia starts to look good again. You ask yourself what kind of power would welcome the Hunter into its stockyards.”

And then he was gone, quickly and silently. Not pausing to work an Obscuring to hide himself, but wrapping the fae about him for that purpose even as the door closed behind him. Damien felt the sudden urge to throw something after him, but the only things at hand were fixtures of the apartment: not his, and far too valuable. At last he saw a shoe peeking out from underneath a couch, that he had kicked off the day before. He grabbed it up and launched it at the door. Hard. It hit with a resounding thwack and slid to the floor, dispelling a small part of his rage. Only a small part.

“Was that because he killed the women?” Hesseth asked. “Or because he told you about it?”

“Neither.”

He sat on the edge of a couch and rubbed his temples; beneath his fingertips he could feel his blood pounding. “Because he’s right,” he whispered hoarsely. “God damn him. He’s right about all of it.”

It was midnight. True midnight, when the forces of dawn and dusk were perfectly balanced.

There was a cold front moving out and a warm front moving in; the turbulent line between the two was just crossing the Five Cities district.

Domina was overhead, Casca low in the east, Prima below the western horizon. In accordance with the complex mathematical dynamics of their positioning—which took into account their mass, gravity, and position relative to the planet—they were just coming into perfect geometric alignment.

The upper current in the Straits of Preservation had been flowing east all night. Now it was still, preparing to flow to the west.

Water condensed in the clouds overhead, transforming from vapor to liquid.

Unseen, unfelt, the Diangelo Fault moved slightly.

The wind began to shift.

—And power shot out across the land, a power born not of moonlight or earthquakes or the motion of the sea, but of the combination of all those things and a thousand, a million more. A power which was as much a part of Erna as her tides, her seasons, her rhythms of day and night. A power which lanced out in gleaming strands across the length and breadth of the continent, shimmering rainbow threads connecting city with city—cathedral with cathedral—

Matria with Matria.

In the far north, where the Teachers waited, one mind reached out to touch the fragile strands. The rainbow web shivered as its message was read, analyzed, considered.

Tides shifted. Power surged across the continent in waves, like bands of spectral light.

The mind reached out again. Its message, a consensus, was placed in the flickering web.

And then the moment passed. The moons moved out of alignment. The wind held steady. Dawn gained in dominance over dusk, and rain began to fall. The upper current in the Straits of Preservation flowed west, as it would until morning.

The power dispersed as quickly as it had appeared, so that no sign of it remained. Whatever message it had carried was likewise dispersed into the night, swallowed by the shadows of oblivion. But not before it had reached its destination. Not before its meaning had been deciphered.

“I understand,” Mercia’s Matria whispered. “Yes. I understand exactly.”

And she promised, “First thing in the morning, I’ll take care of them.”

He couldn’t bring himself to tell Captain Rozca the truth. Couldn’t bring himself to take that newborn faith, so very precious, so utterly fragile, and make it bear the weight of his foreboding. And why should he? The captain had made his covenant with an ideal, with a God, not with any one city or socio-political schema. Let him dream on a little longer in his innocence, Damien decided. Let him taste as much of the sweetness as he could, before the bitter undercurrents of this paradoxical land rose to the surface and fouled his perspective.

He did tell him other things. All of it. He couldn’t expect the man to take a risk for him without knowing what the stakes were; he couldn’t expect him to be convincing in his assigned role without being thoroughly grounded in the details of Damien’s quest. Rozca took it all calmly enough, asking questions only when a turn of phrase was unclear to him; otherwise he absorbed the tale of rakh and demons, torture and vengeance, much as he might any seafaring story told over tankards of ale in a cliffside tavern. He’d heard crazier tales before, he told Damien, though never before had he been thrust into the middle of one. He seemed to handle it well enough. Maybe a man who had devoted his life to dodging smashers and cruising volcanic rifts had partaken enough of life’s risks to put this one, however deadly, in its context.

It was all very reassuring for Damien. And when he asked the captain what he had come to ask—the reason he had been up at the break of dawn to make his way down to the harbor, and out to the
Glory—
the captain simply nodded and said it would be no problem. Or it would be a problem, sure enough, but he figured he could handle it. And he grinned, in a manner that left no doubt that Lio Rozca was up to any challenge this foreign shore could throw at him.

I hope so,
Damien thought grimly. Praying that the man’s courage wouldn’t have to be tested too soon

A tug had brought the priest out to the ship; a rowboat of the Glory, manned by a yawning crewman, took him back. At this hour there was business aplenty in the harbor—the minor tide would be turning in an hour, with Domina’s tide soon to follow—but the crowd of tourists and newsmongers who so often clogged the port was blissfully absent. Everyone working in dawn’s early light had his or her own business to take care of, which meant that as Damien wended his way through the crowds along the shore he could be fairly certain of remaining unobserved. Which was good. Reassuring. And he needed all the reassurance he could get right now.

The scene with Tarrant the night before had shaken him badly. He had hardly slept at all, and what little sleep he had managed to snatch in bits and pieces was riddled with fragments of nightmares, all too familiar in their tenor. It wasn’t what Tarrant had said, or even the way he had said it. It was Damien’s sudden acknowledgment of how careless he had been. How trusting. It was the sudden revelation of how greatly he had put them all at risk by focusing on his religious rapture rather than on the mission at hand. Not that he would have traded those precious moments for anything in the world, he thought. They were part of who he was now, a core of faith for him to draw on. But he should have kept his eyes open. He should have been asking questions. He should have done ... oh, so many things.

No regretting it now. He could only hope that it wasn’t too late. Five days had passed since their quarantine had been lifted, which was a very short time in the scheme of things. Or long enough to mobilize an army, if soldiers had been ready and waiting....

He had done the best he could, given his sleepless state. When the first light of dawn showed over the mountains, he had gone down to the harbor to find Rozca. Now that part of his plan was taken care of, and he felt marginally safer. Later he would talk to Mels and Tyria Lester and see if they would agree to help him—a far less risky role than the one the captain would be playing, but equally important—and then, if all went well, Damien and his companions would be covered. They could leave Mercia on a moment’s notice without anyone being the wiser, and any pursuit which sought them out would inevitably be delayed.

Paranoia in action,
he thought. The only reasonable course.

Tarrant would have been proud of him.

It was still early morning when he made his way back to the Regent’s Manor. He eschewed the more obvious route for one that circled around to the west, through the farmer’s market. Wagons full of fish and game and freshly plucked poultry had been there since first light, and already the restauranteurs and specialty buyers of Mercia’s better districts were picking their way through the heaps of slaughtered flesh, squeezing and sniffing and doing God knows what else to ascertain the value of their wares. The air was thick with the smell of brine and a sweet undercurrent of blood, and for a moment Damien found himself back in the rakhene mountains, a cup of Ciani’s blood in his hand. Knee-deep in ice and snow, feeding blood to the Hunter. He shook his head, banishing the memory with effort. He would have been dead if not for Tarrant, several times over. And vice versa. It was a good thing to remember as they prepared to plunge into this unknown land, with nothing but faith and a tenuous alliance to sustain them.

The market road took him around the back way, so that he approached the Manor from behind. Perhaps if he had come around the front he would simply have entered the great hall, so lost in his musings that he would fail to notice subtle differences around him. Perhaps. But something about the rear walk prodded his attention toward the building and its guards, and what he saw made him stop for a moment, uncertain.

Something was different.

He stepped into the shadow of a tree, wondering why he couldn’t put a finger on what it was that bothered him.
Paranoia in action
he chided himself, but the feeling of wrongness refused to go away.
It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.
He studied the grounds, the building itself, the guards who were stationed by the gate—

The guards.