Black Sun Rising

Prologue

She wondered why she was afraid to go home.

She was within sight of the castle now, and its proximity should have calmed her. She loved the traditional building which her husband had designed, and all the men and women who lived inside it. The seat of the Neocounty of Merentha was a gleaming, ivory-colored monument to the Revivalist dream: all the elements of Gothic perpendicular architecture that seemed so oppressive elsewhere—at the royal seat, for instance—were here combined by that unerring aesthetic sense that was her husband’s strongest attribute, to create a building that was at once a soaring display of stone arches and finials, and a very real, very comfortable home.

For a moment she reined up her unhorse, commanding it to stillness, and tried to focus on the source of her anxiety. As ever, the effort was doomed to failure. She wished she had her husband’s skill to name and analyze such feelings. He would have taken one look at the building and said there, you see? The demonlings are out early tonight, it’s their presence you sense. Or, the currents are unsteady tonight, of course you’re nervous. Or some other explanation, equally dependent upon his special vision, that would render up the source of her discomfort in small, comprehensible packets of knowledge, so that it might be dealt with and then discarded.

The sun had set. Maybe that was it. The piercing white sun which bathed the land in sanity was gone, and the Core had followed it into its westerly grave. Only a few stars remained, and soon they too would be swallowed up by darkness. Things were abroad now that hid from the light of day, maverick human fears that had taken on a life of their own and coursed the night in search of a bodily home. She looked up at the sky and shivered.

Even Erna’s moons were missing now, two having already set and one, the smallest, yet to rise. Soon there would be as much darkness as the Earthlike world could ever know. A true night, her husband would have called it. A very rare, very special occurrence, for a world near the heart of the galaxy.

A night of power.

She kneed her unhorse gently into motion again and tried to lose herself in memories of her family, as a means of combatting the uneasiness that had been growing in her since she left the Bellamy household nearly an hour earlier. Her daughter Alix, barely five, had already mastered the rudiments of riding, and delighted in bare-backing the castle’s miniature unhorses whenever her parents would let her. Tory, nine, had clearly inherited his father’s insatiable curiosity, and could be found at any given moment in the place he least belonged, doing something that was only marginally allowable. Eric, the oldest, proud master of eleven years of lifely experience, was already practicing his charm on all the household staff. He alone had inherited his father’s manner, which would serve him well when he received his lands and title; the Neocount had charmed many an enemy into martial impotence with the force of his presence alone.

As for her husband, the Neocount himself . . . she loved him with a passion that was sometimes near to pain, and adored him no less than did the people he ruled. He was an idealist who had swept her off her feet, caught her up in his dreams of Revival and then set her by his side while king and church jockeyed to do him the greatest honor. A young genius, he had turned Gannon’s wars into triumphs, thus abetting the unification of all the human lands. He had bred unhorses from local stock that were almost indistinguishable from the true equines of Earth, imposing his will on their very evolution with a force and efficiency that others could only wonder at. Likewise his uncats chased the local rodents with appropriate mock-feline fervor, ignoring the less harmful insects which were their grandsires’ preferred prey; in two more generations he would have the fur looking right—so he promised—and even the behavioral patterns that accompanied their hunting.

In truth, she believed there was nothing he couldn’t do, once he set his mind to it . . . and perhaps that was what frightened her.

The castle courtyard was empty when she entered, which was far from reassuring. She was accustomed to returning home at dusk, and her children were accustomed to meeting her. Pouring forth from the house like a litter of overexcited unkittens, plying her with a thousand questions and needs and “look-sees” before she could even dismount. Today they were absent—a disconcerting change—and as she gave her reins over to the groom she asked him, with feigned nonchalance, where they were.

“With their father, Excellency.” He held the unhorse steady while she dismounted. “Belowground, I believe.”

Belowground. She tried not to let him see how much that word chilled her, as she walked through the evening shadows to the main door of the keep. Belowground . . . there was only his library there, she told herself, and his collection of Earth artifacts, and the workroom in which he studied the contents of both. Nothing more. And if the children were with him . . . that was odd, but not unreasonable. Eventually they would inherit the castle and all that was in it. Shouldn’t they be familiar with its workings?

Nevertheless she was chilled to the bone as she entered the cold stone keep, and only her knowledge that the chill was rooted deep inside, in the heart of her fear, caused her to give over her cloak and surcoat to the servant who waited within.

“Here’s a message for you,” the old woman said. She handed her an envelope of thick vellum, addressed in the Neocount’s neat and elegant hand. “His Excellency said to see you got it, as soon as you arrived.”

With a hand that was trembling only slightly she took it from her, and thanked her. I won’t read it here, she told herself. There was an antechamber nearby that would give her more privacy. Not until she was well inside it, with the heavy alteroak door firmly shut behind her, did she remove the folded sheet from its vellum envelope and read the words her husband had written.

Please come to me, it said, at your earliest convenience. The workshop below. There was little more than that—his family crest imprinted above, the swirl of his initials below—but she knew as she read it that there was a volume of meaning between the lines . . . and that she lacked the resources to read what they said, and thus must descend to him uninformed.

She glanced into the huge glass mirror that dominated the low-ceilinged room, and briefly wondered if she should change her clothes before joining him. Her gown, true to Revivalist style, had dragged in the dust all day; its warm cream color was nearly rust about the hem, stained dark by the red clay of the region. But elsewhere it was clean, its soft woolen nap protected by the heavy surcoat she had worn. She pulled the few pins out of her hair, and let red-gold curls pour down about her shoulder and back. He loved her hair, and this style of gown; he loved her, she told herself, and would never let her come to harm. She settled for fluffing the curls to more volume and using a dampened cloth to wipe the dust from her eyes and off her face. That would be enough. That had to be enough, if he wanted her to come to him quickly.

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?”

“I need time,” he told her. There was pain in his voice-deep-rooted pain, and possibly fear. But no doubt, she noted. And no regret. None of the things that her former husband would have felt, standing in this cold stranger’s shoes. “Time, Almea. And there’s no other way to have it.”

“You loved them!”

He nodded slowly, and shut his eyes. For an instant—just an instant—the ghost of his former self seemed to hover about him. “I loved them,” he agreed. “As I love you.” He opened his eyes again, and the ghost vanished. Looked at her. “If I didn’t, this would have no power.”

She wanted to scream, but the sound was trapped within her. A nightmare, she begged herself. That’s all it is, so wake up. Wake up! Wake up . . .

He handled her gently but forcefully, sitting her down on the rough stone slab. Lowering her slowly down onto it, until she lay full length upon its abrasive surface. Numb with shock, she felt him bind her limbs down tightly, until it was impossible for her to move. Protests arose within her—promises, reasoning, desperate pleas—but her voice was somehow lost to her. She could only stare at him in horror as he shut his eyes, could only watch in utter silence as he worked to bind the wild fae to his purpose . . . in preparation for the primal Pattern of Erna. Sacrifice.

At last his eyes opened. They glistened wetly as he looked at her; she wondered if there were tears.

“I love you,” he told her. “More than everything, save life itself. And I would have surrendered even that for you, in its proper time. But not now. Not when they’ve opened hell beneath me, and bound me to it by the very power I taught them how to use . . . Too many prayers, Almea! Too many minds condemning my work. This planet is fickle, and responds to such things. I need time,” he repeated, as though that explained everything. As though that justified killing their children.

He raised a long knife into her field of vision, even as his slender hand stroked the hair gently out of her eyes. “You go to a far gentler afterlife than I will ever know,” he said softly. “I apologize for the pain I must use to send you there. That’s a necessary part of the process.” The hand dropped back from her forehead, and the glittering blade was before her eyes.

“The sacrifice is not of your body,” he explained. His voice was cold in the darkness. “It is . . . of my humanity.”

Then the knife lowered, and she found her voice. And screamed—his name, protests of her love, a hundred supplications . . . but it was too late, by that point. Had been too late, since true night fell.

There was no one listening.