Celia Friedman - Black Sun Rising

“What I have, Reverend Vryce, is a haven of absolute safety. A domain that I have built for myself, stone by stone, tree by tree, until the land itself exists only to indulge my pleasure. Should I give that up? Commit myself to the eastern ocean, with all the risk that entails? I’m amazed you want me with you in the first place.”

“Your power’s unquestionable. Your insight—”

“And it would keep me out of trouble, eh? For as long as I was with you, there would be no hunting in the Forest. No innocent women suffering for my pleasure. Isn’t that part of it? Isn’t that how your conscience would deal with the fact of my continued existence, when you’ve sworn on your honor to kill me?”

Despite himself, Damien smiled. “It has its appeal.”

“Let me tell you what that ocean means, to my kind. Thousands upon thousands of miles of open water, too deep for the earth-fae to penetrate. Do you understand? The very force that keeps me alive, that I require for most of my Workings, would be inaccessible. Which means I couldn’t help you, or myself, if anything happened. One good eruption out of Novatlantis when we’re in that region and no power of mine or yours could do anything to save us. Why do you think no one crosses that water? Why do you think it was only attempted five times, in all the years that man has been here? And, I would be all but helpless. At your mercy. Do you think that appeals to me? Such vulnerability is unthinkable, for one of my kind.”

“I gave you my word before. You know I was good for it. Try me,” he dared him.

The figure stared at him in silence for a moment; unable to see the Hunter’s expression, Damien was unable to read its cause.

“I thought you traveled alone,” Tarrant said at last.

“Yes. Well.” He looked back toward the camp. “Hesseth’s going. She insisted. You should have seen her when we learned the truth, when she realized that her own species was being corrupted . . .”

“And the lady Ciani?”

His expression tightened; it took him a moment to find I the proper words. “This is her life’s work,” he told the Hunter. “The rakhlands. Their culture. I didn’t know that before because she didn’t have the memory . . . but then, I didn’t know so much about her.”

For a moment there was silence, then: “I’m sorry,” the figure said softly.

He forced a shrug. “It was good while it lasted. That’s the most you can ask for, isn’t it?” He forced his hands to unclench inside his pockets. Forced his voice to be steady. “We’re from two different worlds, she and I. Sometimes you forget that. Sometimes you pretend it doesn’t matter. But it’s always there.” He looked up at the figure, toward where his face would be. Like all of him, it was sheathed in darkness. “There’s something growing in the east,” he said. “Something very powerful, and very evil. Something that’s had both the time and the patience to rework the very patterns of this planet, until Nature was forced to respond to it. Don’t you want to know what that is? Don’t you want to make it pay for what it did to you?”

“Set evil against evil, is that it? In the hope that they might destroy each other.”

“You were the one who recommended that. Or don’t you remember?”

“I was very young, then. Inexperienced. Naive.”

“You were the voice of my faith.”

“Past tense, Reverend Vryce. Things have changed. I have changed.” The figure stepped back, breathing in sharply as it did so. In pain? “Years ago, I decided that I would sacrifice anything and everything in the name of survival. My blood. My kin. My humanity. Should I render all that meaningless now, by courting death at this late age? I think not.”

Damien shrugged. “We’ll be leaving from Faraday if you change your mind. In late March or April, probably; it will take at least that long to work out the practical details. I’ll save you a private berth,” he promised. “With no windows, and a lock on the door.”

For a long moment, the dark figure just stared at him. Though the silver eyes were lost in shadow, Damien could feel them fixed on him.

“What makes you think you know me so well?” the Hunter asked hoarsely. “What makes you think you can anticipate me, in ways that go against my nature?”

“I know who you were,” Damien answered. “I know what that man stood for. And I’m willing to bet that somewhere in the heart of that malignant thing you call a soul is a spark of what that man was—and the boundless curiosity that drove him. I think your hunger to know is every bit as great as your hunger for life, Neocount. I’m offering you knowledge—as well as vengeance. Are you telling me that combination has no appeal?”

The figure lifted one arm, so that the folds of his cloak fell free of it. “Appeal or no,” he whispered. “The price is too high.”

Moonlight shimmered on the wetness of bloody flesh, on muscle and veins stripped bare by the force of the sun’s assault. Sharp bone edges poked through strands of shrunken flesh, their tips charred black by fire and crusted with dried blood. The fingers were no more than seared bits of meat, strung together along the slender phalanges like some macabre shish kebob. If a scrap of silk or wool adhered to that flesh, or any other bit of clothing, it had been so torn and so bloodied that it was now indistinguishable from the man’s own tissue.

“Enough is enough,” the Hunter whispered. The arm dropped down, and the cloak fell to cover it. The voice echoed with pain, and with the soft gurgle of blood. “The answer is no, Reverend Vryce. And it will stay no, through all the years that you remain alive.” He gestured toward the distant camp, across the field of spotless snow. “You may consider the life of these tribes my parting gift, if you like—I had once sworn to kill them all, for their audacity in binding me.”

“A few less souls to darken my conscience?” he asked sharply.

“Exactly.”

The Hunter bowed. And the effort that it took was so apparent, his pain throughout the motion so obvious, that Damien winced to see it. How many muscles had been burned to ragged strands, that a man would require for such a gesture? How much blood was being made to flow, for that last show of elegance?

“Good luck, Reverend Vryce,” the Hunter whispered. “I suspect you’ll need it.”

Deep in the bowels of night’s keep, in a chamber reserved for the Lord of the Forest, a figure lay still atop a numarble table. There, where the sun would never shine its baleful light, where earthquakes had never yet disturbed the carefully warded walls, the body of the Hunter lay immersed in dark fae, purple power clinging to his death-pale skin. Utterly cold. Utterly lifeless. Silk robes spilled over the sides of the polished table like a waterfall frozen in motion, their contours hinting at the items that lay beneath. For if this castle was a duplicate of Merentha’s citadel in every other regard, so was its underground workroom a dark reflection of the Neocount’s original—and the straps which had bound Almea Tarrant in her dying adorned the polished worktable like some macabre ornament, now parted to receive the Hunter’s body.

Power: not weakened by sunlight—or even moonlight—and not compromised by the presence of some local primitive mind. Pure power, deep and swift-working—a death-hungry power, that had been building in these caverns for longer than man could remember. It gathered around him like a blanket—a shroud—a barrier against life—and any observer would be hard pressed to say whether the flesh thus protected was cradled in the true chill of death, or in some macabre facsimile.

In that place where no sound had been heard for so many days, footsteps now resounded. Soft and measured, slowly approaching. There was a rattle at the door as the great lock was opened, then the slow creak of steel hinges overweighed by the mass of their burden. Fae-light shimmered on an albino’s brow, purple light reflecting bright magenta in the pigment-free depths of his eyes. He regarded the figure that lay before him, then bowed, ever so slightly. And reached out a tendril of his own dark will, to touch the currents that guarded that motionless form.