Celia Friedman - When True Night Falls

“Tarrant. Please.” How he hated his helplessness! His hands closed tightly about the thick iron bars, but mere desperation couldn’t bend them. “She just came to bring you a message. Don’t hurt her.”

The Hunter chuckled coldly. “Our journey together is over now, priest. I no longer have to indulge your tedious morality.” He leaned down to the girl and kissed her gently on the forehead, a mockery of human affection; Damien saw the girl shiver violently. “Sisa belongs to me. A gift from the Prince, to cement our alliance. A fitting tribute, don’t you think?”

“You can’t own a person,” Jenseny protested.

“Can’t I?” the Hunter smiled. “Last night I hunted her in the Black Lands. Tonight she lives only because I chose to spare her life. From this moment onward her every breath will be drawn in at my will—or extinguished at my command. That’s ownership in my book, Mes Jenseny.”

He had to turn away. He couldn’t watch it. Helplessness was a cold knot in his gut, a tide of sickness in his soul. “Listen to yourself!” he said hoarsely. “Look at what you’re doing! That isn’t the Gerald Tarrant I knew. What’s happening to you?”

“Come now, priest, you would be the first to catalog my sins. What makes this woman different from a thousand others? My hunger hasn’t changed. My techniques are hardly different.”

“You told me once about how you hunted when you were in the Forest. How you gave your victims a chance to escape you—”

“A chance so slim it was all but nonexistent.”

“But you gave it to them! Slim or not. You told them that if they could evade you for three nights you’d let them go free. Didn’t you?” He waited for an answer, and when none came pressed on. “You told me how you hunted them on foot, and how you wouldn’t Work even if you wanted to because then they would have no chance at all. Remember that? Remember how you told me that at the end of three nights they would either die for your pleasure or be free of you forever, that that was part of the game?” He drew in a deep breath, struggling to make his voice steady. “What you did to those women was finite, Tarrant. It tore them apart, but it ended. What you’re doing here . . .” He couldn’t look at the woman’s face. It would bring tears to his eyes, to match those which were forming in hers. “This place is corrupting you,” he whispered. “First your loyalties, now your pleasures . . . what will you be when it’s all finished? Immortal and independent? Or a slave of the Black Lands?”

“Maybe I have changed,” the Hunter said quietly. “Maybe the freedom to cast off all fear of death has given me options that I lacked before. Or maybe . . . maybe you never really knew me as well as you thought. Maybe you saw what you wanted to see and no more. Only now the blinders have been removed.” He stroked the woman’s hair possessively. “Now the truth is uncovered,” he said. “Now I can be what I was meant to be, what I might have been centuries ago had I not wasted half my energies in the paltry mechanisms of survival.”

“Come,” he said to the woman, when he released her. “I’m finished here. Let’s go see your Prince.”

She went up the stairs ahead of him, one slender hand brushing the wall for support as she climbed. Damien watched until they were out of sight, then listened until the last of their footsteps echoed down the winding staircase, into silence. When the two were truly gone, he lowered his face into his hands, his shaking angry hands, and his whole body shook from rage. And sorrow. And fury, at his own helplessness.

After a time, Jenseny asked gently, “You okay?”

He drew in a deep breath, tried to make his voice as steady as it could be. “Yeah. I’m okay.” He lifted up his face from his hands; his eyes were wet. “Deal the cards, all right?”

As she laid out the decorated cardboard rectangles, he remembered the food that Tarrant had brought, and after a moment he mastered his anger enough to reach through the bars to get it. There was no space large enough for the tray to pass through, so he had to collect it piece by piece: bread, cheese, meat, something wrapped in a napkin . . . the last thing struck him as odd, he couldn’t remember anything like it coming down with previous trays. Maybe silverware, he thought as he unwrapped it. Maybe the Prince was going to trust them with a fork-

It was a knife.

Its handle was mother-of-pearl with a fine silver filigree. Its hilt had the crest of the Tarrant clan embedded in its center. The blade was as bright as sterling, and it glimmered with a light which was too cool to be reflected lamp-glow, too shadowless to be natural.

He stared at it, stunned. Coldfire. It had to be.

What the hell . . .

Jenseny crawled over to where he was and pulled his hand toward her so she could see. “What is it?”

“It’s his,” he breathed. He remembered it from Briand, drawing blood from a young boy’s arm. From the Forest, slicing loose infected bandages from Senzei’s stomach. From so many other places . . . “His knife. Only it wasn’t Worked back then . . .”

It was now, there was no doubt of it. And yet . . . if that light was the Hunter’s coldfire, then he should be able to feel it through the cloth. He closed his hand about it—gently, lest he tempt the blade—but still he felt nothing. No cold. No evil. None of the sensations he had come to associate with Tarrant’s power, or with the charged sword he carried.

“Is it now?” she asked.

He opened his hand again. The folds of the cloth were dark about the knife, yet the blade was bright. That was the unlight of coldfire, no question about it. He had seen it often enough to know.

“I think so,” he whispered. Thinking: Coldfire! He might be able to control it. No other man could. Even the Prince wouldn’t dare attempt such a thing, not with a power that could suck the life out of him as surely as he drew a breath. The only reason Damien could was because of his link with Tarrant, the living channel between them. But to draw on that now . . . he had to fight off a wave of hatred and revulsion just to consider it. That lying, scheming bastard . . . but Tarrant had given them this. One chance. One slim, almost nonexistent hope.

The only hope we had, he realized suddenly. The only possible chance he could see.

“Why didn’t he tell you about it?” Jenseny asked.

Even as he heard the words he realized the answer, and his hand closed reflexively about the knife. Wrapping it in its cotton shroud, hiding it from sight. “Because the Prince doesn’t trust him yet,” he told her. “Because he watches him, always.”

As he might be watching us, even now.

“No,” he whispered. “He thinks we’re helpless. Tarrant’s a possible threat; we’re not.”

“What?”

He opened the cloth again and took up the knife to study it; after seeing that it was hinged, he folded the blade into its handle. Thus arranged it was slim and compact, and fitted easily within his hand. Or within a pocket. Or within a sleeve.

“We can’t talk about this,” he told her. Very quietly. “Because if we do, and someone is listening . . . then it’s all over. You understand, Jenseny? Not a word.”

Eyes wide, she nodded. He wrapped the knife back up in its napkin, then slid it into his pants pocket. Later, when he was calmer, he would think of what to do with it. Where to keep it. How to use it.

A knife in the heart is as fatal to an adept as it is to a common man. Who had said that? Ciani? Or was it Tarrant? The memories were all muddled. God, he needed time to think. He needed time to plan.

“What should I do?” the girl whispered.