Celia Friedman - When True Night Falls

I could never get used to it, he thought, as they led him through a sea of crystalline chaos. Jenseny kept a hand on his arm, and he could feel her trembling. Had her father described this place to her also? Or had he lacked the words to capture it?

And then the walls before them parted—or seemed to part—and they were standing in a vast room whose ceiling flickered with reflected lamplight, whose walls were spectral panels of shifting color. The room was filled with people—mostly guards—but it was the two figures seated directly opposite him that commanded Damien’s attention. A perfectly matched pair, regal and arrogant.

The Undying Prince sat to the right, and his long fingers stroked the carved animal head of his chair’s gilded arm as he studied Damien. Two guards stood behind him, and their manner made it clear that they were ready to move at a moment’s notice to safeguard their lord and master. It seemed to Damien that the man was older than when last they met—had it been only a day ago?—but that must have been a trick of the light, or the shadow that his princely crown now cast across his face. He was wearing red again, and the thick silk robe spilled like blood over the arms of his chair. So like the Master of Lema, he thought. It was an unnerving comparison.

To the left sat Gerald Tarrant, who sipped casually from a silver goblet as he studied Damien and Jenseny. This was not the dusty traveler who had ridden several hundred miles and then walked half that many, but a nobleman who had at last taken his place among his own kind. His outer robe was silk velvet, midnight blue in color, and the black tunic beneath was richly embroidered in gold. A coronet had been placed on his head so as to catch back his shoulder-length hair, and it made his eyes seem twice as bright, his gaze twice as piercing. By his side was the woman Damien had seen before, kneeling on the floor beside his chair; as the Hunter studied Damien he stroked a finger down the length of her hair, and though the priest saw her shiver she made no move to escape him.

“Reverend Vryce.” The Prince raised up a goblet as he spoke, as if toasting the priest’s arrival. “You claim to be a man of justice. Tell me, then: what judgment should I render to a man who has interfered with my army, disrupted my most vital project, invaded my lands, and plotted the overthrow of my government?”

Damien shrugged. “How about some clean clothes and a bath?”

For a second the Prince’s expression seemed to darken; then he glanced over at Tarrant and asked, “Was he always like this?”

It seemed to Damien that the Hunter smiled slightly. “Unfortunately.” He stroked the woman’s hair absently as he drank from the cup and she shivered audibly with each new contact: a purring of terror. Her eyes were glazed and her lips slightly parted, and Damien knew that even as she sat there part of her was still in the Black Lands, running from a man so ruthless and so cruel that he would not even allow her the privacy of her own thoughts.

Regally arrogant, the prince rose from his golden chair and came toward Damien. As he did so, the priest slid one hand slowly up his sleeve, struggling to keep the rest of his body as still as possible while he did so. Thank God there were no guards directly behind him; he could only hope that the ones at his sides didn’t notice the motion of his hands. In moments the Prince was close enough that Damien could see his face clearly and yes, he was older than before. Much older. There were lines on his face that hadn’t been there the night before, and patches of skin that were just now discoloring. It took effort for Damien not to stare at the man, not to become so fascinated by the change in him that other concerns—like the knife—were forgotten.

Damn the knife! He couldn’t feel it, not even by pressing down where the blade should be, risking a cut to his own skin. Whatever Tarrant had done to the thing to keep the Prince from sensing its presence, it was making it all but impossible for Damien to locate it.

He jerked back as the Prince drew up before him, trying to look fearful enough that the man would attribute his motion to a memory of what had been done to him the other night. In fact, it was meant to cover up the sound of his wrist chain as he slid one hand far up his other arm, scraping desperate fingers along the surface of his skin where he knew the knife should be, must be. And at last he found it. Not by feeling it between his fingers, like any normal instrument. He located it by the space that was left when his fingers closed, the gap between them which seemed to contain no more than air. That had to be it. He stepped back again as he pulled the slender instrument out from under its wrappings—or tried to, who could tell what was happening in that unfelt, unseen space?—and he saw one of the guards step forward, another take up his gun. That was it, then. That was as far as they would allow him to go.

“How old are you?” the Undying Prince asked him.

The question startled him so badly that he nearly lost hold of the knife. “What?”

“I asked how old you were.”

For a moment he couldn’t think, couldn’t remember. The Prince waited.

“Thirty-four,” he said at last. Was he really that old? The number seemed too high, the age unreal. “Why?” he demanded.

The Prince smiled; it was a strangely chilling expression. “The Neocount has told me of your exploits. Tales of your strength, your endurance, your vitality . . . I wondered how much of that was left to you. Such qualities fade quickly once youth begins to wane.”

He had the knife free of its wrappings now, its grip firmly grasped in his right hand. “I expect it’ll fade rather fast sometime in the next few days,” he said dryly. His heart pounding as he fought to keep his voice steady.

The Prince nodded. “I expect so.”

If he could have wished any one change into his life, he would have transformed the steel on his wrists to rope right then and there. Just that. But the substance which bound him wasn’t anything that a mere knife could sever, and he could only pray that the power Tarrant had bound to the blade was sufficient to render the steel links brittle, as he had seen the coldfire do many times in the past. If not . . . then this was the end of it for both of them. Because the minute they moved him they’d see what he had in his hand, and it would take little Work for the Prince to decipher both its nature and its source.

He could feel Tarrant’s eyes upon him, the silver gaze intense. He risked it all, he thought. Everything, just to give me this one chance. He flinched dramatically as the Prince drew closer to him, using the sound of his chains to cover his motion as he slipped the Worked blade between the links. Let the monarch think that he was responding to the threat inherent in his closeness; that excuse was as good as any.

Playing for time, he nodded toward Tarrant and asked harshly, “What did you pay him for this?” Was that a chill creeping up along the steel links, toward his skin? Or simply wishful thinking?

The Prince turned halfway toward the Hunter, acknowledging him with a nod. “His Excellency and I have an understanding. Among men of power such things are not a question of purchase, so much as mutual convenience.”

Time. He needed time. He forced himself to look at Tarrant, to make his voice into an instrument of venom and hate and spit out at the man, “You killed Hesseth, you bastard! As surely as if you’d cut her throat with your own hands.”

Cold. He could feel it now. Cold on his wrists, where the thick steel pressed against his flesh. Ice on his fingertips, where the coldfire licked as it worked. How long would it take to complete the job? How would he know when to chance movement? He’d only have one opportunity, and if he misjudged the timing . . . that didn’t bear thinking about.