Celia Friedman: Black Sun Rising

Filled with more than a little misgiving, she descended the winding staircase that led down to the belowground rooms.

The library was empty, and lit only by a single candle. Kindled long ago, she thought, noting its length; he must have been down here most of the day. Its four walls were lined with books, a history of man from the time of First Sacrifice to the current day—scribbled in tight, fearful letters, by the settlers of the Landing, printed in the heavy ink of Erna’s first mass-production presses, or painstakingly copied from holy scriptures, with letter forms and illuminatory styles that harkened back to nearly-forgotten ages back on the mother planet. She recognized the leather bindings of his own twelve-volume treatise on the arts of war, and less formal notebooks, on mastering magic. Only . . .

Don’t call it magic, he would have said to her. It isn’t that. The foe is as natural to this world as water and air were to our ancestors’ planet, and not until we rid ourselves of our inherited preconceptions are we going to learn to understand it, and control it.

And next to those books, the handbooks of the Church. They caused this, she thought. They caused it all, when they rejected him. Hypocritical bastards! Half their foundations were of his philosophy, the genius of his ordered mind giving their religious dreams substance, transforming a church of mere faith into something that might last—and command—the ages. Something that might tame the fae at last, and bring peace to a planet that had rarely known anything but chaos. But their dreams and his had diverged in substance, and recently they had come but one word short of damning him outright. After using him to fight their wars! she thought angrily. To establish their church throughout the human lands, and firmly fix their power in the realm of human imagination . . . she shuddered with the force of her anger. It was they who changed him, slowly but surely—they who had planted the first seeds of darkness in him, even while they robed him in titles and honor. Knight of the Realm. Premier of the Order of the Golden Flame. Prophet of the Law.

And damned as a sorcerer, she thought bitterly. Condemned to hell—or just short of it—because he wants to control the very force that has bested us all these years. The force that cost us our heritage, that slaughtered our colonial ancestors . . . is that a sin, you self-righteous bastards? Enough of a sin that it’s worth alienating one of your own prophets for it?

She took a deep breath and tried to steady herself. She had to be strong enough for both of them now. Strong enough to lead him back from his fears of hell and worse, if they had overwhelmed him. He might have gone on for years, bitterly cursing the new Church doctrine but otherwise unconcerned with it, had his body not failed him one late spring night and left him lying helpless on the ground, bands of invisible steel squeezing the breath from his flesh as his damaged heart labored to save itself. Later he could say, with false calm, this was the reason. Here was the cause of damage, which I inherited. Not yet repairable, by my skills, but I will find a way. But she knew that the damage had been done. At twenty-nine he had seen the face of Death, and been changed forever. So much promise in a single man, now so darkened by the shadow of mortality . . .

The door opened before she could touch it. Backlit by lamplight, her husband stood before her. He was wearing a long gown of midnight blue silk, slit up the sides to reveal gray leggings and soft leather boots. His face was, as always, serene and beautiful. His features were elegant, delicately crafted, and in another man might have seemed unduly effeminate; that was his mother’s beauty, she knew, and in its male manifestation it gave him an almost surreal beauty, a quality of angelic calm that belied any storm his soul might harbor. He kissed her gently, ever the devoted husband, but she sensed a sudden distance between them; as he stepped aside to allow her to enter she looked deep into his eyes, and saw with sudden clarity what she had feared the most. There was something in him beyond all saving, now. Something even she could not touch, walled away behind fear-born defenses that no mere woman could breach.

“The children,” she whispered. The chamber was dark, and seemed to demand whispering. “Where are the children?”

“I’ll take you there,” he promised her. Something flickered in his eyes that might have been pain, or love—but then it was gone, and only a distant cold remained. He picked up a lamp from the corner of a desk and bid her, “Come.”

She came. Through the door which he opened at the rear of the chamber, leading into an inner workroom. Artifacts from the Landing caught his lamplight as they passed by, twinkling like captive stars in their leaded glass enclosures. Fragments of unknown substances which once had served some unknown purpose . . . there was the soft silver disk that tradition said was a book, although how it could be such—and how it might be read—was a mystery her husband had not yet solved. Fragments of encasements, the largest barely as broad as her palm, that were said to have contained an entire library. A small metal webwork, the size of her thumbnail, that had once served as a substitute for human reasoning.

Then he opened a door in the workroom’s far wall, and she felt a chill breeze blow over her. Her eyes met his and found only cold there, lightless unwarmth that was frightening, sterile. And she knew with dread certainty that some nameless, intangible line had finally been crossed; that he was gazing at her from across an abyss so dark and so desolate that the bulk of his humanity was lost in its depths.

“Come,” he whispered. She could feel the force of the fae about her, bound by his need, urging her forward. She followed him. Through a door that must have been hidden from her sight before, for she had never noticed it. Into a natural cavern that water had eroded from the rock of the castle’s foundation, leaving only a narrow bridge of glistening stone to vault across its depths. This they followed, his muttered words binding sufficient fae to steady their feet as they crossed. Beneath them—far beneath, in the lightless depths—she sensed water, and occasionally a drop could be heard as it fell from the ceiling to that unseen lake far, far below.

Give it up, my husband! Throw the darkness off and come back to us—your wife, the children, your church. Take up your dreams again, and the sword of your faith, and come back into the light of day . . . But true night reigned below, as it did above; the shadows of the underworld gave way only grudgingly to the light of the Neocount’s lamp, and closed behind them as soon as they had passed.

The water-carved bridge ended in a broad ledge of rock. There he stepped aside and indicated that she should precede him, through a narrow archway barely wide enough to let her pass. She did so, trembling. Whatever he had found in these depths, it was here. Waiting for her. That knowledge must have been faeborn, it was so absolute.

And then he entered, bearing the lamp, and she saw.

“Oh, my God! . . . Tory? . . . Alix?”

They were huddled against the far wall, behind the bulk of a rough stone slab that dominated the small cavern’s interior. Both of them, pale as ice, glassy eyes staring into nothingness. She walked slowly to where they lay, not wanting to believe. Wake me up, she begged silently, make it all be a dream, stop this from happening . . . Her children. Dead. His children. She looked up at him, into eyes so cold that she wondered if they had ever been human.

She could barely find her voice, but at last whispered, “Why?”