Celia Friedman - Black Sun Rising

Slowly, he turned from the camp. It was cold outside, but the heavy garments which the rakh had made for him were more than sufficient to ward off the wintry chill. He tucked his hands into his pockets and began to walk eastward, away from the starkly lit celebration. The noise of rakhene chanting faded behind him, as well as the occasional burst of human laughter that sparkled in its midst. Her laughter. He pulled his jacket tightly about him and increased his pace. The trampled earth of the rakhene encampment gave way to half-frozen slush, which in turn gave way to snow: pristine, unsullied, a glistening white blanket that draped over the plains like the softest wool, cushioning the land in silence.

He walked. Away from the camp, from the noise. Away from all signs of life, and all protestations of joy. He had put in one hard night’s celebration, and now he was ready to move again. Restless, as always. To the west of him the Worldsend Mountains loomed, sterile and foreboding. He knew that all its passes were frozen by now, would remain frozen for months to come, and that its slopes were ripe with avalanches in the making, and a thousand other hazards of winter. He would never have risked such a route in this season, not with others by his side—but he might do so alone. Now that Senzei had found his peace, and Ciani had found . . . other things.

And then a movement caught his eye, back the way he had come. And he turned, to see who had followed him from the camp, what rakhene business would disturb his solitude.

When he saw, he froze.

The figure stood with the moon to its back, so that all of its front was in shadow. Thick fabric fell from its shoulders, enveloping it like a cloak, rendering its form doubly invisible. Its face was no more than an oval of blackness, its body an amorphous shadow. But there was no mistaking its shape. Or its identity. “I see that the lady is well,” the Hunter whispered. Relief surged up inside him—and moral revulsion also, as fresh within him as the day on which he’d learned the Hunter’s name. The force of the admixture was stunning, and it rendered him utterly speechless. He was grateful that he had no weapon on him—glad that he was thus spared the trauma of having to sort out his feelings, having to decide whether or not this was an appropriate moment to remind the Hunter of their natural enmity.

At last he found his voice. “You survived. The sunlight . . .”

“It’s all a question of degree, Reverend Vryce, as I told you. Fortunately, the Dark Ones lack such sophistication. Since they had no knowledge of any other option, they died.” His voice was a mere breath, hardly louder than the breezes of the night. It seemed also to be coarser than usual—but it was so hard to hear him at all that Damien couldn’t be certain of that. “I thought you would want to know that I lived. I thought you had that right.”

“Thank you. I’m . . . glad.” “That I survived?” he asked dryly. “That you didn’t die . . . like that.” He meant it sincerely and knew that could be heard in his voice. “I intended . . . something cleaner.”

“So you’ll still be coming after me when you leave the rakhlands. I regret that, priest. There’s a quality in you that I would hate to destroy. A certain . . . recklessness?”

“But you’ll manage it anyway.” “If you try to kill me? With relish.” “Then I’m sorry to ruin your sport,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for that particular pleasure.” He watched the dark figure carefully as he spoke, wondering what it was about it that seemed so strained, so very . . . wrong. “I’m going east.”

The voice was a whisper, no louder than the wind. “East is the ocean. Novatlantis. The deathlands.”

“And more than that, I’m afraid.” He nodded toward the camp; its fires were invisible in the distance. “The Lost Ones returned, you know. The males, that is. I think the risk appealed to them. They’re cleaning out the last of the Keeper’s warren, braving rock falls and tunnel collapse in order to hunt down her servants. For food, they told me. The last of the Dark Ones will be their winter sustenance.”

“That’s impossible,” the cloaked figure muttered. “Demonic flesh wouldn’t be—”

“It isn’t demonic flesh,” the priest said quietly. “Because the Dark Ones aren’t constructs.” He looked east: toward the mountains, toward the fallen citadel. “Hesseth found a body. We examined it. We thought we could determine what sort of construct it was, maybe find out how it had come into being . . . only it wasn’t a construct at all. Hesseth was the first to suspect it, and Ciani confirmed it. The truth.” He drew in a deep breath, remembering that moment. Reliving it, as he spoke. “It was rakh,” he told Tarrant. His own voice little more than a whisper. “The Dark Ones are rakh.”

For a moment, Tarrant’s form was utterly still; Damien imagined he could hear the man’s thoughts racing, aligning fact with fact like the pieces of some vast puzzle. “Not possible,” he said at last. “That would mean—”

“Someone—or something—has been evolving them. Like you did to the Forest, Hunter. Only this time on a grander scale. This time with high-order intelligence.” He felt the tightness growing inside him again, the same restless tension he had felt when the truth first became apparent. His hands in his pockets tightened into fists. “Nature couldn’t do it. Nature wouldn’t. Take a tribe of intelligent, adaptable creatures, and bind them to the night like that? Suppress their own vitality, so that they could only live by torturing others? Those Dark Ones died when you exposed them, Hunter and you didn’t. You, who’ve spent a thousand years avoiding the sun—whose very existence depends upon constant darkness— you survived. Why would Erna imbue one of her creatures with such a terrible weakness? What point could it possibly serve?”

“You think someone’s done it,” he whispered. “Deliberately.”

“There’s no question in my mind,” he said grimly.

“And it would have to be on a massive scale, to succeed like that—the corruption of a whole environment. There’s nothing like that in the human lands. Remember what the rakh-girl said? They came from the east. ”

“So you’re going after them.”

“Five expeditions have tried to cross that ocean. Two in your own age, three in the centuries after. None were ever heard from again. But that doesn’t mean that they failed, does it? For all we know, humankind managed to populate those regions . . . and gave birth to something which has warped the very patterns of Nature. I think that what we saw here . . . that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think we need to know what the hell is going on over there before something far worse comes over.” He looked at the dark figure before him, and felt something stir in him that was not quite revulsion. Not wholly abhorrence.

“Come with me,” he whispered. “Come east with me.”

The figure stiffened. “Are you serious? Do you know what you’re asking?”

“A chance to strike at your real enemy. The one behind all this; the force responsible. Doesn’t that appeal to you?”

“In the past few weeks,” Tarrant said darkly, “I have been bound, humiliated, starved, burned, blasted with sunlight, tortured in ways I will not describe, and nearly killed on several occasions. I, who have spent the last five hundred years building myself a safe refuge from such threats! Are you suggesting that I should court such disasters again? Truly, I shouldn’t have taken so much of your blood,” the dark figure mused. “The shortage clearly affected your brain.”

“You have no curiosity? Or even . . . hunger for vengeance?”