Crown of Shadows

1

She walks in the moonlight, her footfall on the weathered planks as soft and as silent as a ghost’s. All about her the sailors are busy cleaning up the detritus of the storm: mending sails, untangling lines, freeing those items which were, for safety’s sake, bound to the deck. Intent upon their tasks, they do not notice her. The wind is crisp and clean and she imagines that she can catch the scent of land in it. So close, so very close.... For a moment she trembles, and almost turns back. One more month, the priest said. Maybe less. But then she remembers what that month would be like—what all other months have been like on this ship—and she stiffens with new-found resolve. No more, she tells herself. No more.

The sea is quiet now, having spent all its anger in the three days before; in the moonlight she can see no white upon the water’s surface, only black glass waves and an occasional sparkle of starlight. Quiet, so quiet. Death must be like that: black and still and utterly silent, a smooth realm that ripples ever so softly as each soul passes into it. Free of turbulence. Free of pain. Free of fear and its attendant demon, whose silver eyes must even now be searching her cabin, wondering where she has gone.

The thought of him makes her breath catch in her throat, and her whole body shivers in dread. No, she whispers. Never again. She steps up onto the railing, her dark toes gripping the rounded wood. The sea is beneath her—

"Mes!” A sailor’s voice, behind her. For an instant she imagines she knows which one it belongs to—the blue-eyed Faraday boy, suntanned and lean and oh so innocent—and then she leans forward ever so slightly, into the night, and lets go. “Mes! No!” Footsteps approach her even as her toes lose hold, the long fall into darkness beginning just as he reaches the place where she stood—and then more footsteps, more cries, as the others come running. A world away, they seem to her. A distant dream. She is aloft, a creature of the air, aflight above the waves. Falling. Beneath her the water seems to gather in anticipation—not glass now but velvet, cool and welcoming—and then the moment is past and she breaches the surface, the cold waves give way to her body and she is beneath them, struggling in the icy depths, shocked out of her dream state by the frigid reality of the sea.

Panicking suddenly, choking on seawater, she fights to get back to the surface. There is no thought of suicide now, only the blind, unthinking terror of a suffocating animal. Water pours down her face as she finally lifts her mouth above the surface of the waves and gasps for air, and not until she has drawn in two or three deep breaths does the sense of panic release her. Shaking, she coughs up some water she has swallowed, and her frozen body treads water without thought, grateful for the respite.

Above her the sailors are moving quickly. One has shed his heavy woolen jacket while another has grabbed up a life ring. Will they come down here, after her? Rescue her, and force her to live again? That is a concept even more terrifying than death, and she begins to swim away from them, her heart pounding wildly in her chest. Which does she fear more?

And then she sees him, standing among them. So dark. So still. He is like the sea itself-like death itself—and despite the distance between them she can feel the chill invasion of his thoughts in her head: seeking, analyzing, weighing. Hungering. She watches as he puts a hand on the naked shoulder of her would-be savior, and despite the distance between them she can hear his words as clearly as if she stood on the deck beside him.

"She has chosen,” the Hunter tells them, and there is power in his voice; they cannot disobey. “Let her go."

The silver eyes are fixed on her: watching, waiting. He can sense the presence of Death about her, and it fascinates him. Frightens him. For all his power, for all his centuries of wordly experience, this moment is beyond him. For all the choices which his power makes available, this one option is forever closed to him.

She finds new strength in that, and ceases paddling. The waves are gentle, and caress her face as she sinks a few inches. She can taste salt on her lip, and a spot of blood where she bit herself in her panic. Can he smell that? Does it awaken enough hunger in him that he regrets the promise he made so many months ago, that if she chose to die rather than serve him he would honor her choice and let her go? The complex interplay of cruelty and honor in him is something beyond her understanding. What kind of demon clings to a simple promise when his only source of nourishment is sinking beneath the waves?

Suddenly resolved, she dives below the surface. The sea closes over her head, dark and insulating. Deep down she swims, as far as she can manage, until her lungs are bursting with their need for air. And then she breathes in deeply, welcoming the cool darkness into her body. Saltwater fills her lungs, and maybe in another time, another place, there might have been pain. Not now. The spasms of her lungs are a glorious song of freedom, and even as the darkness closes in about her, she thrills in the sensation of dying.

No fear this time. So sorry, Hunter. No fear to feed you this time, only the bittersweet embrace of death. Hardly an appetizer, for one like you. So sorry....

“Another report-in-absence?”

It was Tarrant, standing in the doorway of his cabin. Damien glared at him, a look meant to communicate that he needed no reminder about his last letter to the Patriarch, or the trouble it might get him into. He had sent it as a substitute for a personal audience, and when the Holy Father finally got hold of him, there was going to be hell to pay for that.

“Not this time,” he said shortly. He finished the letter, signed it quickly, and put it aside. There was no denying that he deserved the Patriarch’s wrath. The only question was how long it would last, and what form it would take. And whether or not the Holy Father would understand that their entire world was at risk now, and personal venom must take second place to martial expediency if the Church was to triumph.

“You’re delivering it yourself, then?”

“No real alternative, is there?” There was an edge to his voice that he couldn’t disguise. “I have to go back. You know that.”

Go home, the demon Karril had urged. Go home as soon as you can. If you stay away, if you give Calesta time to work .. . then the world you return to may not be the same as the one you left.

That was over a year ago. What if it was too late already?

“You’re afraid,” the Hunter mused.

Anger welled up inside him suddenly, a rage that was ten months in the making. “Damn right!” he spat. “And there you are right on schedule to revel in it.” The pent-up fury of a whole voyage was pouring out of him, and he had no way to stop it. “What makes you better than this Iezu we’re fighting? What makes you more worthy of life than he is? I can’t seem to remember just now.”

If his challenge angered the Hunter-or awakened any other emotion within him—the man damn well didn’t show it. “Random invective doesn’t suit you, Vryce.” His tone was cool, maddeningly controlled. “If the girl’s death bothers you that much, then say so.”

He drew in a sharp breath. “You killed her.”

“I offered her a bargain which she chose to accept. It was her own choice, from start to finish. You seem to forget that. I never interfered with her freedom of will, or made any attempt to coerce her into service. You know that. She knew what my needs were and she agreed to meet them. If she had survived this trip, she would have been well rewarded for her efforts. The fact that she chose to end our contract—”

“To kill herself! To take her own life! Those are the words,” he choked out, "-not some vapid euphemism. You killed that girl as surely as if you cut her throat with your own hands. You."

“She knew what I was,” he said quietly. “As do you. And I suggest you come to terms with that knowledge before we reach port, Reverend Vryce. Our enemy is dangerous enough as it is; if we allow ourselves to be divided, what chance do we have to defeat him?”

He started to respond—and then forced the anger back, forced it out of his mind. Along with the hatred. Along with the disgust. Because Tarrant was right, damn him. They couldn’t afford to be divided. Not now.

“All right,” he muttered. “So what chance do we have? Tell me that.”

His only answer was silence. The silver eyes were mirrors that reflected Damien’s own misgivings back at him. So little chance, they seemed to say. Why measure it in words? At last the priest turned away, and he cursed softly under his breath.

“I have never lied to you,” the Hunter said.

“No.” He drew in a deep breath, and tried to relax his hands; they had curled into fists of their own volition. “No, you never have.” After a small eternity he managed to add, “Will you be all right?”

It took Tarrant a minute to realize what he was asking. “You mean without the girl.”

He nodded stiffly.

“Ah.” A pause. “I had hoped she’d last longer—”

“Just answer the question,” he snapped.

“Will I live to see port? Yes. Will I be in prime condition to rejoin battle with the enemy when we get there? Not if I go hungry for a month, Reverend Vryce.” He paused. “But you knew that when you asked, didn’t you?”

He shut his eyes and exhaled noisily. “Yeah. I knew.”

“Shall I take that as an offer?”

He remembered their voyage to the east, and the nightmares that Tarrant had placed in his mind so that he might harvest Damien’s fear for nourishment. It was not an experience the priest was anxious to repeat, but what was the alternative? Let Tarrant become so weakened by hunger that when they arrived in Faraday he was all but useless? Encourage him to feed on the rest of the crew?

With a heavy sigh Damien nodded, wincing. “Yeah,” he muttered. “It’s an offer. Whatever you need—”

“And no more than that,” the Neocount finished smoothly. “I understand.”

God. Those dreams. A month of them and a man could go mad. Could the Hunter perhaps drink his blood instead? There was enough of the vampire still in the man that sometimes that was possible. Was temporary physical weakness preferable to mental torture?

He looked up at the Hunter again and tried to gauge the hunger in those pale, cold eyes. It amazed him sometimes how human the man could appear, when the hunger inside him was anything but.

“No dreams of the Patriarch,” he told him. “Nor of the Church. Not in any form or manner. Agreed?”

A faint smile tightened the corners of Tarrant’s lips; the pale eyes sparkled. “No dreams of the Patriarch,” he agreed. “Not of my devising, anyway.”

“Yeah.” He turned away, refusing to look at Tarrant. Or at the letter. “I can manage those nightmares on my own, can’t I?”

Faraday: jewel of the east, heart of all commerce, haven par excellence for all the merchant ships that plied the eastern waters. Unlike the other great ports of Erna this city had not relied upon Nature for its security, but had crafted its own safety with walls and locks and measures and men, creating a complex alarm system which rendered the great harbor as safe as any coastal region could ever be.

Faraday: devastated.

They saw it from a distance at first, then assessed it in greater detail as they approached. The great sea wall which towered thirty feet above the water’s surface, protecting the harbor beyond, was now ragged along its top. There were broken spars that jutted out from its surface, wooden shards driven deep between the rocks as a memorial to whatever ship the sea had caught up and heaved against its unyielding surface. Mast-bits floated in a muddy sea, rail-bits, scraps of sail. Something that might have been a chunk of flesh was caught up in their wake, but the scavenger fish had so worried it that there was too little left to identify.

At the top of the wall men scurried about, quickly making repairs. Damien saw them nervously looking east as they worked, as if they could somehow measure the sea’s temper. But smashers didn’t always give warning, and from the looks of the damage ... Damien felt his stomach tighten as they came around the end of the wall, past the first smasher lock. He hated the sea. He hated its power, and its unpredictability. Most of all he hated the limits it had placed on man’s progress, by forcing him to focus on a land-based expansion.

Rozca’s expression was dark as they came around the end of the wall, easing God’s Glory and her companion ship into the narrow harbor entrance. Damien followed his gaze out into the harbor itself, where broken piers and battered hulls littered the tide. “Shouldn’t have happened,” Rozca muttered. “Not here.”

“You can’t stop a smasher.”

The Captain snorted and jerked his head toward Faraday. "They could. Maybe not stop it outright, but keep it from killing. They’ve got alarms up on the cliff there-” he waved a hand toward the bluffs that towered over the harbor, "-that sense a quake far away as Novatlantis, and enough good men praying ’em to work that they’re damn near perfect. With the watchers up there and sirens all along the coast.. . there’s never been a smasher yet that they didn’t know was coming. Get your ships out into deep water if you can, tie up the rest to a special mooring that lets ’em go with the waves, set the locks so the harbor can’t be drained, and then get the vulk out of the way ... maybe they can’t stop ’em, but they can damned well make ready for ’em. There hasn’t been a ship lost in Faraday since the last lock was built, nearly a hundred years ago.” He gazed out in the harbor, eyes narrowed against the sunset’s glare. Shadowed by his thick brows, his expression seemed doubly dark.

“Not this time,” he muttered. “Vulkin’ Hell, look at the place!”

They had come past the lock and around the sea wall, so that now their view of the harbor was unimpeded. Damien’s hand tightened about the rail as he gazed upon what was once the proudest port of the eastern coast, as he compared it to the harbor from which they had set sail nearly two years ago. Where dozens of sleek piers had jutted out from the shore there were now but a handful, and a good half of those were badly damaged. The shoreline boardwalk had lost whole sections, and with it all the buildings that stood upon it. And the sea-that was filled with debris, enough shards of mast and bits of sail that Damien knew more than one ship had foundered in the rising sea, along with all their passengers.

Tsunami. They were always a danger on this volatile world, and more than once Damien had been on a ship that refused to enter port when the tide was two inches higher or lower than normal, for fear that the dreaded flood waves would follow. But Faraday had made a science of surviving them, and was practiced enough in that art that even the dreaded bore, a towering wall of water whose impact flattened everything in its path, did minimal damage here.

Until now.

A soft indrawn breath behind him, almost a hiss, made him turn back slightly. It was Tarrant. He was up early—the sun had barely set behind the towering bluffs and its light still filled the sky-but perhaps he had heard the commotion from above and wanted to investigate. Or perhaps he had caught the scent of death, and wondered at its source. He shaded his eyes beneath a gloved hand as he studied the devastation surrounding them, and Damien knew without asking that the strength of the man’s will was reaching down into the sea, trying to tap into the local fae-currents for information.

“The first wave was a bore,” he said at last. “Those which followed were ... incidental.”

“You guessing that, or you Know?”

He shook his head slowly, eyes narrowed against the light. “Water’s shallow enough for Working, though barely. I can get a somewhat hazy picture.”

“Rozca says the port had defenses.”

“It did,” he agreed. “They didn’t work.”

“Can you tell why?”

The pale eyes fixed on him. The whites were reddened slightly, burned by the dying sunlight. It was costing him a lot to be up here, Damien realized. “The question may not be why," he mused, “but rather, who."

It took him a minute to realize what Tarrant meant. “Calesta?”

The Hunter nodded. “I would like to think that an act of nature could be just that, no more. But this does seem a bit of a coincidence, doesn’t it? Such devastation to welcome us home. Certainly our enemy would be pleased to make such a statement.”

“But he can’t conjure a tsunami, can he?” When Tarrant didn’t answer, he pressed, “You said that the

Iezu only had power over human sensory input. Nothing tangible.”

“So I did. But never doubt the versatility of that power, Reverend Vryce. Or the danger it can pose to those who aren’t prepared for it. Iezu illusion cannot create a real wave ... but it can blind the men whose job it is to detect one, and prevent them from responding to it.”

“You think that’s what happened?”

“I think it’s very possible. I think our enemy would consider it a very appropriate welcome for us. A reminder of his power, as well as proof that he’s monitoring our passage. Yes. Very appropriate indeed.” His expression tightened as he tried once more to access the fae; after several minutes he shook his head in frustration. “Wait until we land, Reverend Vryce. I can tell you more then. Out here ... the fae is too weak.”

Land. Damien tasted the word as the great ship prepared to disgorge its passengers. After eleven months at sea he had almost forgotten what land was like, how it felt and smelled, what it was like to have the ground remain steady beneath your feet. And land without volcanoes, no less. After months in Novatlantis it seemed to him that his very skin stank of sulfur; he wondered if mere soap would ever wash it clean. God, that had been a hellish trip....

“You’ll be going back to Jaggonath,” the Hunter said.

Damien looked up at him sharply. “We have to, don’t we? Kami’s warning—”

“Was to go home, Vryce. I have no idea what that phrase means to you.”

It hit him then, suddenly. The one thing he had never dared to ask, in all their months of traveling. The thing he had tried so hard not to think about. “You’re going to the Forest.”

Tarrant nodded. “As you knew I would.”

Oh, yes, he had known it. On some deep, buried level where you hid knowledge you didn’t want to deal with. Only now it was out in the open. The Hunter would go to his Forest. Of course. And Damien, would return to Jaggonath. Of course. Each of them to test out his domain, each one to ascertain what damage their Iezu enemy had wreaked in their absence. Each one alone, their alliance of two years divided.... It should have pleased him; to be rid of the Hunter at last. It didn’t.

“You think it’s wise?” he asked quietly.

“I think it’s unavoidable. Would you help me bring order to the Forest? Your soul would never survive that kind of trial. Yet the Forest is my power base; I must see it secure before I can concentrate elsewhere.” A faint smile touched his lips. “And you can hardly present me to your Patriarch, can you? It seems in both our interests that we separate for a time.”

“For a time,” Damien agreed. It was a question.

The cool, clean profile was still; the silver eyes studied the harbor in silence. At last he said, “We have a common enemy. Given his power, and his stated intentions ... we would be foolish not to pool our resources.”

“Yeah.” Damien leaned heavily against the rail. “Only the adjective I was thinking of was suicidal."

Tarrant looked down at him. And for an instant, just an instant, Damien thought he saw a flicker of fear behind that measureless gaze. A flaw in the perfect arrogance.

“Just so,” he whispered. “Just so.”

2

Red pills. Shiny, like drops of blood.

While pills. Powder-soft, bitter on the tongue.

Black pills. Velvet glass, a kiss of oblivion.

Andrys laid them out on the hotel dresser, tiny bottles that glittered in the lamplight. His hands, he noticed, were shaking. The air seemed uncomfortably warm.

Easy, Andri. Steady now. You’re almost there.

Five days on the road. Not an easy journey, for one who had rarely left his home county. Not an easy task, to go among strangers where one’s name was unknown and one’s heritage meant nothing and the name of the county that had given one birth was just a mark on the map, no more or less meaningful than any other.

He had never loved Merentha, nor had he hated it. Those terms implied strong emotion, and in truth he had pretty much taken his home county for granted. It was there; the Tarrant estate was located within its borders; his family had once ruled the place. But now that he had left, he found there was an emptiness within him that no wine could dispel. He felt lost in the eastern cities, and sometimes when the night was dark and strange sounds and scents surrounded him he felt that if he just relaxed, if he just closed his eyes and let go, the strangeness of it all would carry him away. Until he was no more than a sigh on this foreign breeze, a whisper of lost hope fading out into the night.

Sometimes he would pray to Calesta, as one would pray to a god. Sometimes the demon answered. Then dreams of vengeance would flood his soul, forcing out the loneliness. Dreams of hate so powerful, so driving, that his body shook for hours even after they had ended, and his mind was numb for what seemed like a small eternity afterward. Those dreams ... they were pain and ecstacy almost beyond bearing, a catharsis so terrifying and so necessary that on the nights when Calesta did not answer him he wept, helpless and hopeless as a lost child. The dreams were all he had now. The hate was all that was holding him together.

That and the drugs.

Alcohol to numb the fear, to ease the pain of remembering. Cerebus for the madness within him, the beast that must have outlet now and then or it would swallow him whole. Slowtime for visions of color and music in a world washed gray by sorrow. And blackout-blessed blackout-little black pills for a taste of oblivion, for shadows of death to fold about him like a cocoon, shutting out all the pain and the beauty and the hope and the fear-shutting it all out, every last bit of that agony called life. Long enough for him to rest. Long enough for him to sleep. Blackout for the coward within him, afraid to go on living but more afraid to die.

He stared at the tiny bottles, tempted by their contents. He had come to Jaggonath in the late afternoon, had taken a room and eaten a meager meal and cleaned off the dirt of the road as well as he was able. Now ... his fingers closed about the bottle of black pills and he shut his eyes, as though mere physical proximity might somehow transfer its contents into him. But not yet. Not now. There was still time to scout out the city before nightfall, to get his bearings for the morrow’s work. He owed himself that much, didn’t he? Regretfully he released the small bottle, leaving it beside its brethren. Later, he promised it. Later.

It was a vast city, a crowded city, filled with sights and sounds and smells almost beyond bearing. Its undercurrent was a tide of anxiety which he could taste on his lips as he braved the crowded streets, trying to make his way as the locals did, without touching. Cobblestoned streets splashed with mud offered uncertain footing, but at least they were clean; he knew cities where the awkward contraptions used to catch horse droppings weren’t required by law, and the smell of those was something that defied description. Here, thanks to a strange combination of civil tolerance and legal regulation there were no aging drunks cowering in doorways, no wide-eyed cerebums twitching their way along the sidewalk as they dreamed their mad dreams of chaos and depravity, not even a wild-haired prophet or two to cry out their warnings of doom and destruction while handing out advertising circulars for the nearest pagan temple. It all existed, here as elsewhere, but in Jaggonath it was shut away behind closed doors. And for that Andrys Tarrant was infinitely grateful.

He soon came to the silver district, so named for the metal that best reflected the sun’s white brilliance. Warded windows were filled with treasures, worked in that metal and others: yellow and pink gold, copper and bronze, and the sun-metals: silver, white gold, platinum, polished steel, others. He didn’t know the names of all of them and often couldn’t tell them apart; when Betrise used to bring out her prize serving utensils, worked in five different white metals, he used to shake his head in amazement that anyone would spend a small fortune to purchase such a thing.

Not that money had been an issue in those days, of course. The first Neocount had seen to that by sinking his wealth into investments that tripled in value before anyone could manage the legal contortions required to get at it. If Andrys had thought about it then, he might have believed that the man was trying to provide for his abandoned son by assuring wealth for his progeny. Now it just seemed like a cruel joke. Money couldn’t bring his family back, could it? Money couldn’t make this nightmare end. But if did pay for drugs and liquor and occasionally-when he required that kind of cold, impersonal convenience-it paid for women.

He forced his attention where it belonged and studied the objects in the windows before him, trying not to dwell on the implications of what he was about to do. Better not to think about that. Better not to think about anything, just accept Calesta’s orders and obey them blindly and pray that somewhere, somehow, vengeance would be achieved. Calesta said that Andrys should come to Jaggonath, so he had done so. Calesta said that Andrys should seek out a silversmith, so he would. Calesta said that he should cause to be made—

A cold shiver coursed up his spine. Don’t think about what he wants with it. When it’s ready, that’s time enough to know. He forced himself to study the objects displayed in the windows, searching for something that would help him decide on one shop or another. Each shop seemed to have its own specialty: he passed by displays of jewelry, daggers, decorative goblets, engraved tableware, thousand and one items suitable for courtship, weddings, formal ceremony. Nothing displayed was exactly like what he needed, but was that a surprise? How long had it been since that kind of work was last done in Jaggonath? Or anywhere, for that matter?

At last, with effort, he winnowed the choices down to five likely candidates. One by one he studied them through their mesh-bound windows, trying to get a feel for the businesses inside. Hoping for some kind of sign or omen that would narrow his choices even further, so that he wouldn’t have to go through the same painful interview more than once. He didn’t think he could stand that.

He studied two shops in that way, found no such omen, and with a sigh he moved on to the third. This one had a promising display, a unique collection of bowls and goblets with delicate figurines intertwined to serve as stems, handles, and spouts. Each one was individual, he noted, and meticulously detailed. So far so good. He looked past the fine steel knives with sinuous sterling handles, the elegant silver picture frames and anniversary mementos, to see what was within the shop itself—

And his heart stopped for a moment. The steel and sterling bits faded into shadows, as inconsequential as dreams. For a moment he could hardly move, then he walked to where the door was and grasped its handle.

The ornate grip felt warm in his palm, and he could feel his pulse pound as he held it. Quickly he turned it and pushed the heavy door inward; bells jingled merrily as he stepped into the shop’s cool interior. There were display cases within, tables topped in velvet, a long counter capped in fine white numarble....

And a girl.

He stepped inside, letting the door fall shut behind him. God, but she was lovely! Not in the way of the women who normally appealed to him-those were buxom and full-hipped, flamboyantly sexual-but in a way that made it hard for him to breathe, impossible to think. Skin as fine and as pale as porcelain glowed in the late afternoon light, with the pale flush of a sunburn crowning the cheeks and forehead. Hair as black and as lustrous as silk shimmered in a loose chignon at the nape of her neck. Slender hands with impossibly delicate fingers smoothed the black velvet of a display table. Fragile, she seemed. Slender and pale and so very fragile. Like a china cup that might shatter if you held it wrong. Like a pane of fine stained glass with its delicate webwork of lead veins, beautiful to look at but oh, so easy to destroy. Her presence awakened new feelings within him, disturbing feelings, so different from his usual feelings about women that for a moment he could do nothing but stand there mutely, unable to respond.

“Can I help you?” she asked. It was a reflexive response to the presence of a customer, which she began even as she turned toward him. Then the dark eyes met his-God, those eyes, you could drown in them!—and with a short gasp she stepped back. To his amazement, it seemed as if she were afraid. Of him? He looked around, startled, expecting to see someone else in the room. But it was just the two of them. The response was for him alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said hurriedly. Not knowing what he had done wrong, but anxious to correct it. Was it possible that in his fevered entrance he had seemed threatening? She seemed the kind of creature who would shy away easily, like a wild and wary skerrel. “I didn’t mean to startle you—”

She drew in a deep breath; he could sense her struggling to compose herself. “It isn’t you,” she said at last. “It’s just ... I thought you were-someone else. Someone I didn’t expect here. I’m sorry.” She shook her head slightly; the black hair rippled about her neck. “I shouldn’t have reacted like that.” She smiled then, and her expression softened. “Can I help you with something?”

He fumbled in his pocket for the papers he had brought, and somehow he managed to tear his eyes away from her long enough to make sure they were the right ones. “I need some custom work done. Here.” He handed her the drawings, a well-worn package. “It’s all there.”

She led him to one of the velvet-clad tables and pulled up a chair before it; he sat opposite, and watched her as she studied the drawings. God, but she was beautiful! In another time and place he would already have been making a play for her, if only for the sheer pleasure of the hunt. But in this time and place he felt strangely helpless, and he sat there quietly as she studied the drawings, watching as her slender fingers smoothed the papers flat for better perusal.

“A coronet,” she mused.

Something tightened in his throat. “Family heirloom,” he managed. “It was ... lost.”

Lost in a pool of blood, shattered by sorcery. Shards of metal swimming in the red that dripped down chair legs, over tiles—

“Hey. Are you all right?” Her hand reached toward him.

He shivered as the vision receded. “Yeah,” he managed. “Just a little faint.” He forced himself to put his hands on the table, so that he might look a little more natural. “I wasn’t feeling well this morning." There was an understatement! “I thought it had passed.” He managed an awkward grin. “Guess not.”

“Can I get you something?” When he hesitated, she suggested, “A glass of water?”

“No, I ...” He drew in a slow breath, tried to think clearly. “Yes. Please. That would be wonderful.”

Water. It meant a moment when she wouldn’t be watching him, a moment when he could struggle to pull himself together. Those visions ... he should have taken something before he left his room, he knew that now. A few grains of tranquilizer to ease the painful interview along. How in God’s name was he going to get through this?

You have to, he told himself. Calesta says this has to be done, therefore you will do it. Period.

“Here,” she said, as she set down a small glass before him. Her voice was gentle, soothing; he could listen to it for hours. “I wish we had more to offer.”

“This is fine.” The water was cool and refreshing, and the glass gave him something to do with his hands. “Thank you.”

When she was satisfied that he was going to be all right, she returned to her seat opposite him. He noticed that her hair had one narrow streak of white in it, falling from a spot just above her left temple. A natural discoloration, or faddish vanity? For some reason he hoped it was the former. She seemed a wholly natural creature, more like the timid nudeer that wandered free on his estate than the painted beauties he usually dated. Though such women had never appealed to him before, this one had him totally captivated.

She was paging through the pile of sketches, studying each one in turn. One meticulous rendering of a county coronet. Ten pages of details, in perfect scale. Other drawings, other items. She shook her head in amazement as she went through them. “You did a beautiful job on these.”

“I traced the artist’s originals.” When she looked up at him in curiosity, he added, “My ancestor saved everything.”

How bizarre this conversation was, he thought. How utterly bizarre to be discussing the archival habits of Gerald Tarrant in this cool and offhand manner, as if men hadn’t wept and suffered and died for that very coronet.

“In sterling?” she asked.

“If that was the original metal.”

She nodded. “Silver was customary up until the sixth century. I take it this is older than that.”

He nodded.

“It must have been beautiful,” she mused aloud. Her eyes traced the lines of his drawings with obvious relish, and he knew in that instant that she was the artist who would be translating his sketches into reality. The thought pleased him. “Revivalist, right?”

“I think so.”

“Neocounty?” She smiled as he affirmed that, too, her dark eyes sparkling. “I’ve never worked for nobility before.”

The words caught in his throat; he had to force them out. “We haven’t ... we don’t use the title. Not for a long time.”

“Are these from the same period?” She had found the sketches of armor at the bottom of the pile: breastplate and bracers of fine steel with embossed and inlaid motifs. “Armor?”

“I should have removed those,” he said quickly. Reaching for the sketches. “That’s a different job, I know you don’t—”

“But we do. At least, Gresham does. My boss,” she explained. “He used to do this kind of work. There isn’t much of a call for it, you know. Not enough to base a business on. But I think he would love to work on these.” The dark eyes were fixed on him again; he didn’t dare meet them. “Unless you have someone else in mind, that is.”

“No,” he managed. “Not at all.”

“Then I’ll show these to him. He can probably get you an estimate on all this by ... say, Thursday?”

Estimate. He felt something knot up inside himself at the sound of the word. Estimate meant another interview about these damned pieces, more questions, always more questions . . . and he couldn’t begin to answer them because he didn’t know why Calesta wanted these things made, only that he did.

“I don’t need an estimate,” he said quickly. Trying to get the words out before he could have second thoughts. “Whatever it takes. Just make everything as much like the originals as you can. Whatever that costs.”

She hesitated. “It’s going to be expensive.”

“That’s all right.”

"Really expensive. This is all gold here, look.” She showed him one of the sketches, her finger tracing the line of decoration on a breastplate. “The materials alone—”

“Money’s not an issue. Really.”

She sat back, and for a moment said nothing. He could see curiosity burning bright in her eyes, but knew she wouldn’t question him about his wealth. Not directly.

“He’ll want a deposit,” she said at last.

He reached into his jacket to where his traveling purse was secured and removed it. Untying its clasp, he spilled its contents out on the table. They were thick coins, heavy coins, the kind of gold one bought for investment purposes, not the kind one normally carried around town for day-to-day expenses. He had brought them with him so that he wouldn’t have to wait for the local banks to clear his account before he could buy anything locally. Now he was infinitely glad he had them.

She whistled softly. Despite himself he smiled, pleased with the drama of the moment. “Will that be enough?”

“Oh, yes. I think so.” She picked up one of the coins and studied it with a smile. “Yes, I think Gresham’ll take these.”

“How much do you want?”

She hesitated, then picked out half a dozen of the coins; one was a beautiful memorial piece which she admired before putting it away. In a smooth, flowing hand she wrote him a receipt. “I’ll need some information from you.”

“Of course.”

“Your name?” she asked. And it seemed to him that there was more than professional interest in her tone. Or was that just wishful thinking on his part?

God, he used to be so good at this! Where was all that skill when he needed it?

“Andrys. Andrys Tarrant.” Other questions followed, more difficult to answer. Where did he live? Permanent address? How long would he be in Jaggonath? Business references? Personal? He knew the questions were unavoidable, given the value of the work he was ordering, but some of them were difficult to answer. How long would he be here? Calesta had said that the process of vengeance would begin in Jaggonath. How long would that take?

Later, when he was finally out of the shop, he leaned against the brick wall outside and shut his eyes and cursed himself for being a fool.

You’re an idiot, Andri, you know that? The afterimage of her face was burned into his soul. You could have said something useful. You could have made some kind of beginning. Though the fragile appeal of her was new to him, he was no stranger to games of attraction. If this had happened in the days before, he would have had her address by now and probably a tentative date as well. Had this project so unmanned him that he couldn’t even manage that?

Good God. He laughed bitterly, mirthlessly; the sound devolved into coughing. I don’t even know her name.

It was just as well. What did he have to offer a woman, anyway? Restless, distracted days. Bitter, frustrating nights. No, he had better reserve his attention for the whores who asked for nothing but money, and opportunistic wenches who could be purchased with gifts and small talk. That was his venue now, the comfort and prison of his new existence. Better stick to it.

God, those eyes....

With effort he pushed himself away from the wall and began the long walk back to his hotel. It was just as well, he told himself. Women like that usually had a man already, and if they didn’t, there was probably a good reason for it. He had enough problems of his own to deal with, didn’t he?

He shivered, wrapping his arms around himself, cold despite the warmth of the city streets. The pills would help him. Little black pills. They were waiting on his dresser, a kiss of velvet oblivion. Under their influence he could forget it all for an hour, an evening, an eternity. The pain. The confusion. The fear.

And the girl.

Trembling, he hurried back to the hotel.

For a long, long time after Andrys Tarrant left, Narilka stared at the door in silence. Her heart had been pounding all the time he had been there; only now, with him safely gone, did it resume its normal beat. Only now could she begin to breathe normally, as if nothing whatsoever were wrong.

That face. So familiar. Those eyes ... she could picture them cast in a paler hue (silver, cracked silver, the color of ice and sunlight) and that was enough to transform them, because in all other ways-in shape, in expression-they were the same as his. Just as this man’s hair was the same (golden brown, fine as silk), only Andrys Tarrant had trimmed his in a stylish cut, indisputably modern, while the other had let his grow to the shoulder. And so it was with so many other features: token differences, superficial, which only served to highlight the uncanny, unnerving resemblance between the two men.

The Hunter.

She remembered him from the Forest, that terrible, fear-filled night. Remembered his eyes burning black with hunger, his power so chill and fierce that it froze the very air in her lungs as she drew in a breath to scream. Not a man but a demon-a cold, cruel god—whose eyes were doorways into another world, a world of such terrible alien beauty that even as he threatened to devour her, even as the fire of her life flickered weakly before him, about to be extinguished, she longed to be drawn into his private night forever. Mystical, magical, secretive night. Violet light and unearthly music and tides of fae so subtle that the roar of a single breath would drown them out....

And now there was Andrys Tarrant. Here. In her world. Alive in a way the Hunter was not, solid and real in a way he could never be. Capable of living and loving with a human heat—

Gods. She shut her eyes and tried to focus on something else. Anything else. That’s not a healthy reason to want a man and you know it. She had enough trouble with men already without asking for more, didn’t she? The type of man who was attracted to her was usually looking for a victim, not a lover, and she had fended off enough of that kind to last her a lifetime. The last thing she needed now was another bad relationship.

But his haunted eyes (green, not gray, and so alive!) stayed with her for hours, and the memory of his presence was still warm in her flesh when she finally closed up the shop for the night.

3

The Hunter flew west along the Raksha Valley, following the course of the river Lethe. Westward over Sattin, where they had once booked passage across the Canopy: he and the priest, Senzei Reese, and the lady Ciani. It seemed a century ago. His goals had been so finite then, his self-definition so simple, so clear ... when had it all gotten so muddied?

He could feel the weight of his compact on his back as the strong feathered wings drew him closer and closer to home. In Mercia, in one thoughtless act, he had saved a civilization from ruin. The powers which sustained his unnatural life would surely condemn him for that, and take action to teach their wayward servant a lesson. The only question in his mind was when, and what form the “lesson” would take. They hadn’t done anything yet. And though after a year of being unmolested he had begun to hope that they would continue to honor the compact which kept him alive, he had no illusion that he would go unpunished forever. The Unnamed was not known for compassion.

Soon the Raksha Valley broadened out into the Plain of Sheva, on the very doorstep of the Forest. He came to the ground there and reclaimed his human form, the better to study the currents in that place and see if there were any sign of Calesta’s interference. But malignant power was sucked into the Forest here with such force that no trace remained outside its borders. In his months outside the Forest, he had forgotten just how strong it was. He could feel its pull on his own soul as he stood there, as if that whirlpool of malevolence would devour him whole. It had tried, once. He had tamed it. And it took little effort now to resist its call, and to rise up on broad white wings once more, to review his domain.

Dare he hope that Calesta had focused his vengeance elsewhere and left the Forest alone? If so, it was a temporary respite, and the Hunter knew it. This place is my source, my nourishment. If he means to hurt me, then he will strike here. Even the fact that he could see no mark of Calesta’s interference here didn’t guarantee that the demon had been absent. A Iezu demon could easily conjure an illusion to cover his tracks, so that even an adept’s Sight would be hard-pressed to make them out. Was there a limit to that skill? How many perfect illusions could a Iezu sustain at once? On that question, Gerald Tarrant suspected, their very lives might depend. If only he had more knowledge of the Iezu. Damn the code of behavior which bound them from interfering in each others’ battles, which kept others of that kind from helping him!

There were trees beneath him now, and a tangled canopy of vines and branches so thick that even his special Sight couldn’t see through to the ground beneath. The earth-fae which coursed below it sparkled through the canopy like stars, hinting at a power so vast that surely no single demon, Iezu or otherwise, could stand against it. He could feel the force of the Forest’s fae coursing through his veins like blood, even from this height, invigorating him body and soul. Let Calesta test him now, with all his power at hand, and that Iezu would see how quickly and how ruthlessly the Hunter dealt with his enemies.

It was nearly dawn when he came to the observatory tower of his keep, jutting up from the tangled canopy like a sleek black spear. The sigils engraved upon its narrow roof reflected the moonlight like fire. He took care to avoid the circle they inscribed, a spot he had painstakingly scrubbed clean of all fae for the sake of Earth-like experimentation. That, too, seemed a lifetime ago. Had it really been less than three years ago that he had lived this isolated life, surrounded by nothing but his trees and his servants and his precious experiments? Would that he could simply reclaim that life, and let the darkness of the Forest heal him of all the wounds the living world had inflicted! But that dream, though seductive, was not feasible at the moment. As long as Calesta lived and hated and plotted his Iezu vengeance, not even the Forest would be safe from his demonic predations.

Afterward, he promised himself. When all this is over, when Calesta is neutralized and my compact defended and Vryce has gone off to make a separate fate from mine ... then I will have the time and the leisure to find myself again. To define myself anew, on such terms that living men may never again compromise my spirit.

Amoril was waiting for him atop the tower. The taste of the albino’s subservience, carried to him on the chill Forest breeze, was reassuringly familiar. Despite his hunger to resume his accustomed role in the Forest hierarchy, he remained circling for long minutes overhead, searching for some sign in the terrain below to warn him that Calesta had been active here. He was painfully aware of the futility of the act, given the nature of his enemy, yet he dared not sacrifice any possible advantage in this deadly war that the Iezu had declared. But he saw nothing to excite his suspicions, save a fleeting shadow that tasted of the Unnamed’s special malevolence. That his patron-demon had been here was hardly a surprise. It had probably set out a Watcher to alert it to its servant’s arrival, and was even now preparing its own special welcome for him. He shivered as the cold winds bore him in yet another circle, and tried not to think about what that welcome might be.

I served you faithfully for nine hundred years, he thought to it. As if it could hear him. As if it cared what he thought. And but for one moment of carelessness, I have never failed you. But he knew even that wasn’t true, that in his travels with Vryce he had more than once pushed the envelope of the Unnamed’s tolerance. God willing, when this all was over he would have a chance to establish himself anew and cleanse the taint of Vryce’s human spirit from his soul.

Finally he dropped to the tower and regained his human form, coldfire licking at his flesh as he transformed. The Prince of Jahanna, come home to claim his own.

As soon as he had human eyes with which to see, Amoril bowed deeply to him. “My lord.” He evinced no surprise at Tarrant’s return, which was as it should be. The man who had been assigned to watch over the Forest had damned well better Divine well enough and often enough to foresee that his Master was coming home.

“Is all well?” he asked shortly.

The albino nodded. “There was some trouble out by Mordreth last month—some of the prospectors decided that if they cleared a bit of the Forest their work would be easier-but we settled all that.”

“You made a warning of them, I hope.”

“I left them impaled on tree limbs, in such a posture that implied the trees might have more volition than Mordreth gives them credit for.” His eyes sparkled redly. “They’ll think twice before fetching their axes again.”

“Excellent,” he approved. And it was. A taste of normalcy, after so many months of tension.

The albino bowed again. “I had an excellent teacher.”

Together they descended into the lightless depths of the keep itself, where even the moonlight was not allowed to intrude. Though the Forest outside was thriving, the building’s interior had not done quite so well. There was dust in the numarble halls, he noticed, irritated. He thought in addition that there was a faint ammoniac smell, like that of stale urine, wafting toward them from a distant corridor. Had the albino’s wolf charges been given free run of the keep? Perhaps Amoril himself had seen fit to mark the building in the manner of his pets; Tarrant wouldn’t put it past him. He felt rage rise up inside him like a tidal wave, but then drew in a deep breath and forced himself to let it go, unvoiced. For all he knew the smell wasn’t even real, but a sensory illusion meant to foster discord between him and his servants. He wouldn’t let it distract him now. Once Calesta was safely out of the picture there’d be time enough to teach Amoril the fine points of a Cleansing, and to see that he received sufficient practice in its use.

“What about the Forest?” he asked, forcing his thoughts onto other paths. “My latest Workings?”

“There was a problem with that disease you introduced into the scuttler population just before you left.” It seemed to him that the albino was slightly on edge; was he anticipating retribution for his housekeeping failures, or was something more significant at the root of it? “It mutated spontaneously and was beginning to threaten other species. I isolated and destroyed the infected animals, which will hold the disease at bay for a while, but in the long run a more permanent solution will have to be found.”

The Hunter nodded, his eyes never leaving his apprentice. “I’ll design a counterphage for the new mutation. You have samples of the infected flesh?”

There was a door at the end of the corridor they were traversing; the albino pulled it open for him. “Of course, my lord.”

“Such concern over minute biological detail is commendable, Amoril. I’m pleased by your development.”

“One learns a lot when one is left alone, my lord.”

Black halls, dark curtains, a lightless and soothing domain: he drew confidence from it step by step, and from the chill power flowing about his feet. This place was his strength, he thought. His soul. As long as he had the Forest, no man could stand against him.

And no demon either, he thought darkly. Not even a Iezu.

Down through the keep they went, Amoril following his lead in silence, until they reached his library. There, on shelves stacked ten feet high, were accumulated all his notes from the last five hundred years. Would that I had begun this work earlier! He withdrew a volume of demonological data and handed it to

Amoril. Would that I had understood, in the arrogance of my youth, just how much memory can be lost after nine hundred years.

The albino opened the book he had been handed and scanned its contents. “Iezu?” His tone was scornful.

“Calesta. You recall him?”

“Calesta.” As he sought the proper memory, Tarrant worked a subtle Knowing and cast it about him. Had the Iezu tried to corrupt Amoril while he was in the east? There was no point in trying to Know that directly; the demon’s illusions could mask any trace of contact. But a question like this, so casually voiced, so casually answered ... one might unravel that with care and uncover a hint of artifice, a fleeting breath of warning. “He was the one who tricked you, yes? Before you went east.”

“Yes.” Nothing. There was nothing. Despite himself he relaxed a bit. “Go through that volume,” he commanded. “Look for his name, or anything like it. Or any mention of his aspect, which is sadism. As for his intentions ...” He looked at Amoril and relaxed a bit. What had he expected? That the one man who needed him most would betray him?

Take nothing for granted, Hunter—not your lands, not your people, not even your own power. When your very senses can be warped by another, everything must be suspect.

“We’re at war,” he warned the albino. “So be careful. Unless I can find some means of killing a Iezu ... things may get very unpleasant.”

The albino shrugged. “They’re all just demons in the end, right? How hard can it be?”

Oh, my apprentice. How little you understand!

He set three more volumes down, which were likely to contain notes on the Iezu. Considering how many Iezu there were and how long they had been active, it seemed a painfully insufficient collection. He would have given anything for Ciani of Faraday’s notebooks right now; she had specialized in that demonic family, and must have uncovered countless bits of lore in her many years of study. But she was in the rakhlands now, and all her notebooks were ash. Not for the first time, he cursed Senzei Reese for his damnable shortsightedness. Better to shed human blood for sacrifice-even one’s own-than destroy such treasures as that. “My lord?”

He looked up, saw that Amoril had not even opened his book. “What is it?”

“I have a gift for you.” He grinned, displaying sharpened teeth. “A homecoming present, which I prepared when I Divined you coming. If I may be excused to fetch it?”

Distracted by the task at hand, he nodded. Perhaps he should contact the lady Ciani. Not with a Working, of course; the fae-wall which the rakh had erected about their domain would prevent him from using the currents to reach her. But perhaps he and Vryce should consider a trek to that land, or at least to its border. It was a good bet that she had useful knowledge, and she should be willing to help him. After all, she had once been his apprentice....

She’s also a loremaster, and that kind values its neutrality. How strong are her vows, I wonder? Would she help us win our war if she knew that the fate of humanity might hang in the balance? Or would that be all the more reason not to get involved?

The scent of blood reached him just before the scent of fear; startled, he looked up.

It was Amoril, with a woman in tow. The albino grinned. “I thought you might be hungry after your long flight.” He had bound her hands behind her, and held the end of the binding thong like a leash. She strained against it like a wild animal, consumed by the kind of terror no human heart could sustain for long. She knew who he was, then. Good. It would save him the trouble of inspiring fresh fear. Not that he didn’t hunger for such sport-God knows, after eleven months on that damned ship he could use a hunt-but for once he didn’t want to spare the time.

How good it was to be home again, where women were raised to fear him! How good it was to have five centuries of the Hunter’s reputation to draw upon, to lend flavor to an otherwise quick snack. Her fear was sweet and hot and he drank it in with relish. When he was done, he let the body fall and motioned for Amoril to take it away. Let the albino feed it to his pets if he liked; the warm blood would please them.

But even the pleasure of a kill could not distract him for long. He began to go through his notes, page by page, searching for something useful. Anything. He didn’t expect to find notes on Calesta himself, or any instructions on how to dispatch Iezu. But somewhere, buried in the recorded discoveries of five centuries, there must be a single useful mote of knowledge. Somewhere.

Believe that, he thought darkly, as he turned the ancient pages, binding fae as he did so to support their brittle substance. Have faith in it. Because without that one hope, we are surely doomed.

4

Nighttine. Dreamtime. The hours when the demons of the mind could take hold, their cold grasp firm until the morning. The hours when the human soul abandoned its struggle against the madness of this world, and the dark things that lurked in the corners of the human heart could take form at last.

Though it was late, the Patriarch was awake. Again. Unwilling to sleep, afraid to rest. Again.

Afraid to dream.

A book lay open before him, but he was no longer reading it. With a sigh he rubbed his temples, as though somehow that could soothe his spirit as well as his pounding head. He really should go to sleep, he knew that. If he didn’t retire soon, he would pay for it in the morning. Nevertheless ... he tried to focus on the book again, and only when it was clear that his eyes were too fatigued for the task did he close its cover with a sigh and lean back in his heavy mahogova chair, abandoning the effort. He felt as if he had aged a hundred years in the last ten longmonths. It was the dreams, of course. If only he could somehow shut them out, if only there were some special drug or process, some prayer ... but there wasn’t, he knew that now. He had searched long enough and hard enough to know.

And even if something could make the dreams stop, would that leave the rest of him unharmed? Man couldn’t live without dreams. Not sanely, anyway. That was what half a dozen doctors had told him.

If you can call this sanity.

It had all started with visions of Vryce. Fleeting images of the man, sandwiched between the structured narratives of his usual dreaming. Vryce conversing with demons. Vryce surrounded by corpses. Vryce traveling with a creature so evil that its presence was a lightless blot on the Patriarch’s dreamscape, a blackness that reeked of hunger and death and the foulest of human corruption. At first the Patriarch had taken these for simple nightmares, and had thought little of them. Considering his fury over Vryce’s behavior and his dismay at the man’s choice of traveling companion, it was amazing that he had not suffered from such dreams long before this.

But then there came other dreams, with more familiar subjects. And little by little, against his will, he was forced to acknowledge the truth. That these intrusive images weren’t merely dreams but true visions, clair-voyancies that came to him even as the acts they represented took place. When he dreamed one night of the mayor’s corruption, it was only to awaken and find that the morning tabloids were afire with news of blackmail and embezzlement. When he dreamed of Nans Bakrow’s adultery, it was only to hear three days later that her husband had begun divorce proceedings, for exactly that cause. And when he had dreamed of the Gillis child killing himself—

It still pained him to remember that. The midnight awakening. The rapid dressing. The rush to the Gillis’ abode through streets that were alive with demonlings, in the desperate hope that something could be done to avoid the tragedy he had witnessed. All to no avail. By the time he had roused the boy’s parents and reached the site of his vision, the young veins had already rendered up their last drop of blood; the boy’s lips were blue and cold, his dead eyes open and accusatory. If you knew, they seemed to say, why didn’t you come sooner? Words his parents never voiced, but the Patriarch knew they thought them as well. As he himself thought them, all the hours he lay awake before that dawn, struggling against the bleakness of guilt and utter despair.

Prophecies, his aides and servants whispered. The

Holy Father was seeing futures. But they weren’t that, not by a long shot. Prophecy implied a temporal framework, a balance between the present and future that might-with care-be altered. Were there not thousands of potential futures for each moment in this world, of which prophecy revealed but one? No, prophecy would have been a blessing compared to this. This was a nightmare of clairvoyance, a forced voyeurism that made him witness to the evils of his world without giving him the power to change anything. A pornography of the soul, which had made of him a helpless victim. He had tried drugs. He had tried prayer. He had even tried sleeplessness, hoping that sheer exhaustion would culminate in a collapse so total that even dreams could not reach him. To no avail. And though he rarely dreamed of Vryce anymore, when he did it was with such power that he would awaken trembling, cold sweat trickling down his face. Images of volcanoes fuming, of a black sky raining hot ash, of a ship rent into pieces, casting its passengers into a boiling sea ... and images of a woman suffering such pain and fear that his heart twisted in sympathetic agony, while Vryce stood by and did nothing to save her. Nay, while he allowed the suffering to continue, in consummation of some strange demonic pact which he and the Hunter had established.

God help you, Vryce, if those visions are true. He whispered the words into the night, as the last of the images faded into shadows of fire and ash. God save you from my wrath.

A knock sounded suddenly on the heavy wooden door of his chamber. He looked up quickly, alerted by its volume. What could be so urgent at this time of night?

“Come in.”

The door swung open hard, banging against the wall behind it. Leo Toth stood in the doorway, breathless, his skin sheened with the sweat of recent exertion. “Street of Gods,” he gasped. It was clear he had been running hard; he put out a hand to steady himself as he drew in a deep breath. “Temple of Davarti.” And he added, almost apologetically, “You said you wanted to know.”

He knew in an instant what the man was trying to tell him and he stood quickly, all thoughts of exhaustion forgotten. There was no time for exhaustion now, nor any other time-consuming weakness. “When?” he demanded.

“Just starting now," the man gasped. "If you hurry—”

“How many?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know. Two dozen. Maybe more. I passed them just outside the Sangh Shrine, maybe half a block down from Davarti. I stayed with them just long enough to find out where they were headed, then I ran here.” He leaned over to ease the strain on his lungs; his breathing whistled shrilly as he fought for air. “It’s a raid, Holy Father, no question about it.”

A raid.

With quick, decisive steps the Patriarch moved to where his ritual garments hung and layered a thickly embroidered stole over the beige silk robe he was already wearing. He added to that his most formal headdress, a peaked form layered and crusted in gilt embroidery. No hesitation in these choices, or in his dressing; he had gone over this moment too many times in his own mind to falter now. Other times he had been too late, had learned of the incident after the fact; now, for the first time, he had a chance to change things.

And I will, he promised his God. I will stop it, and bring them back to You. I swear it.

He ushered the man out of the room ahead of him and hurried toward the rear stairs of the building, his soul praying with all its strength. Help me to serve Your Will in this. Two flights down he came to a narrow hallway, and he practically flew to the door at its end. Beyond that was a small chamber, sparsely decorated, that opened on the stables. Bridles hung on the far wall, their brass fittings polished and gleaming; a liveried man with coffee in hand relaxed over a magazine, clearly not expecting any custom at this late hour.

“A carriage,” the Patriarch ordered, and there was no need for him to shout the command; his bearing said it all. Startled, the man dropped his reading material and hurriedly set his coffee cup aside; brown liquid sloshed over the edge of it, splashing a copy of Whip and Bridle. “Of course, Your Holiness.” With a clumsy bow he passed through the far door, into the stables themselves; the Patriarch could hear the snort of horses as he followed.

God willing, the carriage had been kept ready, he thought. God willing, he wouldn’t have to wait while the beasts were brought out and harnessed. Lives could be lost in that much time.

But the carriage was ready, and in less than a minute he was inside it. “Street of Gods,” he ordered, and such was the fever of haste he exuded that the coachman responded immediately, and the carriage began to move the minute the Patriarch’s feet were safely off the ground.

Out of the stable and onto the street. It was dark, very dark, with only one moon visible, and that half-hidden behind a row of townhouses. A suitable night for work like this, he thought grimly. “Faster,” he muttered, but there was no need; the coachman had sensed his need for haste and was barreling down the deserted streets with a speed that would have been unsafe—and strictly illegal-in the crowded daylight hours.

The Street of Gods was not one single roadway, but a route that zigzagged through the cultural and financial districts, so named for the preponderance of pagan temples flanking its course. At any speed its turns were difficult and at this speed they were downright sickening, but the Patriarch held on tightly to his seat as the coachman drove his horses down the narrow streets and made no complaint. Time was of the essence.

“There!” He half-rose from his seat as he saw the flames, fury and despair warring for dominion within him. Was it too late already? “Stop there!” There were dozens of people in the street outside Davarti’s

Temple-perhaps hundreds-but it was too dark for him to make out what they were doing. Brawling? Demonstrating? Or simply gawking, as golden flames licked at the ancient building? As he rushed up to the temple’s door-simply pushing aside those who were in his way, there was no time for courtesy now-it seemed to him that some were rushing toward the flames, with buckets in both hands. Good. Something might yet be saved of the building, if they worked hard enough and fast enough. As for the souls within ... that was another thing.

He burst into the temple, so filled with righteous indignation that the fae surrounding him seemed to take fire, lighting the air about his head like a halo. Within the temple all was chaos, as groups of worshipers tried vainly to defend their pagan holy ground from the invading mob. He picked out half a dozen familiar faces among the invaders, enough to verify that the angry men who were smashing relics and pummeling priests were indeed members of his own flock. And fury won out within him at last.

"How dare you!" he cried, and his eyes blazed with rage. Few men heard his voice above the din of the battle, but those few were enough. One man fell back from the icon he had been trying to smash, and the woman who had been trying to keep him away from it followed his gaze to the Patriarch. The invader beside her glanced up to see the cause of the disturbance, and he, too, was stunned into silence by the raw force of the Patriarch’s wrath. One by one heads turned as others responded to him, and a hush fell across the sanctuary like a wave. A few minutes later the only sounds remaining were the tinkle of shattered glass falling to the floor, and the soft moans of the wounded.

“How dare you!” he repeated, when their attention was fixed on him at last. With angry steps he strode down the length of the central aisle, toward the dais and its idol. Most of the men in his path got out the way in a hurry, pagans and faithful alike; the few who didn’t found themselves thrown aside, hurled into the stunned mob like pieces of repellent detritus.

At last he reached the altar and stood before it; black paint dripped from the idolatrous sculpture as he glared at the blood-spattered mob. In the distance flames were crackling, but the fire seemed to be confined to a small chamber forward of the sanctuary, and a handful of men were already fighting to bring it under control. Despite the ominous sound of its burning and a faint stink of smoke, he judged them safe enough.

“Is this how you were taught to behave?” he cried. “Is this how you serve your God?” His eyes swept over them, picking out details, memorizing faces. More than one man flushed hotly as the accusatory gaze hit home, all passion for destruction withering to shame before the force of the Patriarch’s rage.

“Who’s in charge here?” he demanded. Silence reigned in the vaulted sanctuary, compromised only by the hiss of flames and the slow drip of blood. “Who’s responsible for this?” Still there was no answer. He waited. He knew that the real issue was not who claimed responsibility-if anyone did-but the simple act of forcing them to think again, to act like men. To throw off the yoke of this communal violence and remember who and what they were, and what God it was they served.

At last a man stepped forward and faced the Patriarch. His face was streaked with sweat and blood and one side of his face was swollen. “We came to cleanse this place!” He gestured toward the altar. “Look! Look at what they worship! Do you want that in Jaggonath? Do you want it out in the streets, where our children can see it?”

The Patriarch didn’t turn to look at the idol, but instead looked out over the mob. The faces of his faithful gazed back at him fearfully, and he thought he saw a flicker of guilt in more than one expression. Good. As for the ones who worshiped here ... their eyes were filled with fear as well, and something else. Awe. What did they see when they looked at him, adorned in all the glory of his faith? A ruler of priests, fit counselor for kings. Little short of a god himself, by their pagan standards; certainly a god’s favored messenger. That such a man should come in person to quell their riot was a thing to be wondered at; that such a man should save their idol and defend their faith was a thing past comprehension.

And that is the difference between us, he thought. That is it exactly.

“The law of this land allows men to worship as they wish.” He spoke slowly, clearly, with a voice that filled the temple; his very tone was a counterpoint to their rage. “The Law of our Church demands that civil order—”

“One world, one faith!” a man cried out. “That’s what the Prophet ordered.”

“And he also commanded us to preserve the human spirit!” the Patriarch countered. “That above all else.” He looked about the crowd; his face was a mask of condemnation. “Is this how you accomplish that? With bestial violence? Mindless hatred? Look at you!” He waved a hand out over the crowd; several men cringed as the gesture included them. “There are demons feasting tonight, my friends. Glutting themselves on your hatred. There are spirits being born in the shadows all around you, who will feed on man’s intolerance forever because that is the force that gave them life. Or have you forgotten that? Have you forgotten that our greatest enemy is not a foreign idol or even a foreign god, but the very force that gives this planet life? Our most sacred duty is to preserve our human identity, and if we fail in that, all the prayers ever voiced won’t win this world salvation.”

He was aware of a crowd that had gathered inside the door as he spoke, gawkers from outside the building, drawn to his words like moths to a flame. Praise God, who had given him the soul of an orator; never was he more grateful for that skill than now. “Yes, the Prophet dreamed of unity. But you can’t enforce unity-not with terror, not with hate. You have to earn it.”

Silence, thick and heavy. A window pane, weakened during the riot, chose that moment to fall inward; it hit the floor with an accusatory crash and shattered into a hundred pieces.

“Go home,” the Patriarch commanded. “Go home! Pray for guidance. Beg for forgiveness from your God, and for a new and purer communion with Him. You’ve seen the evil we fight with your own eyes now; you’ve felt it in your hearts. May you be stronger than ever in your faith for having known it.”

No one moved. A curtain in the balcony caught fire, and he heard the men upstairs crying out instructions to one another as they worked to smother the new flames before they could spread. Still he remained where he was and stared at his faithful, his very presence a reminder of what their God stood for, and what He expected of them.

Finally, with a curse, one man stirred. Throwing down the crowbar he carried, he whipped about and strode from the building. Then a second man. A third. The fourth put down the vase he held on the stand beside him, oh so carefully, and then stepped into the aisle and bowed to the Patriarch before he, too, hurried out. The Patriarch drew in a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. Thank you, God. Others were moving now, exiting the building in twos and threes. The anger and hatred that had welded them into a mob had dissipated, at least for the moment; though he harbored no illusion that it was gone forever, the Patriarch was grateful for the brief moment of victory.

Be with them, God, now and always. Guide them. Protect them. Nurture their human spirit.

More were leaving now, too many to count. Now that they were separating it was possible to judge their number, and to asssess the contingent of priests and worshipers who had tried to stop them from defacing the temple. So few, he thought, gazing down at them. Most were spattered with blood, and more than one lay moaning on the floor. He noted at least two broken limbs, a handful of equally serious injuries. So very brave. It never ceased to amaze him what courage men could show when their faith was threatened. Any faith.

The Prophet was right, when he said that faith was the most powerful force on Erna. He looked at the pagan emblems on the wall and shook his head sadly. If only we could harness it in unity, as he intended.

All of his people had left the temple; he made sure of that before he stepped down from the dais, his long silk robes dragging in blood as he made his way out of the sanctuary. One man stepped into his path, and for a moment he thought there might be some kind of confrontation. But the priest bowed deeply, as one might to a great lord.

“Thank you,” he whispered. His voice was shaking; his forehead was streaked with blood. “Thank you for stopping it.”

The Patriarch looked back at the idol on the altar. A human figure with eight sets of arms and four pairs of male and female genitals crouched upon a square stone pedestal. A face was set into the lowest crotch, tongue extruded, and a tiny human form had been thrust into the mouth headfirst; the twisted legs appeared to be struggling as he watched. There were scars on the statue where crowbar assaults had chipped out pieces of the stone, and thick black paint dripped down its head to pool on the altar beneath it. Like blood, he thought. Just like blood.

He turned back to the priest, revulsion thick in his throat. I didn’t do it for you, he thought darkly. Knowing that this man would never understand what had happened here today, or its importance. To them it was a simple assault, terrifying but finite; to him it was but one more battle in the war for men’s souls.

The siren of an ambulance wagon was drawing near as he exited the temple. He strode through the throng of gawkers as though they were ghosts, and like fearful wraiths they parted, making way for him. His carriage had pulled to the curb a good two blocks away, out of reach of the mob, but he did not signal for it to come closer; after the smoky confines of the pagan temple the short walk in the night air felt good. Hate-wraiths fluttered overhead, spawned by the violence of the night, but for now they kept their distance. In time they would gain more substance and learn to hunt men.

Created by my people, in the name of my God. His face flushed hot with the shame of it. Will they never learn?

As he came up to the carriage, the driver looked at him; though he would never dare to question the Patriarch, it was clear he was brimming with curiosity.

“Riot’s over,” the Holy Father said shortly, as he climbed up into his seat. “Davarti’s safe. For now.” He lacked the energy to go into more detail, but fell back against his seat as the carriage pulled about and started back. The man would hear enough details when word got back to their own Church; no need to rehash it all now.

How many other riots would there be, he wondered, before this madness ended? The horses pulled the carriage about and started back toward the Cathedral; an ambulance wagon rushed past them, headed toward the temple. How many other assaults on the innocent would his people commit, wielding the name of his God like a standard? A year ago such raids were nearly unheard of; now they were commonplace. Why now, after so many years of peace? What was the catalyst for such a change? He had asked himself that a thousand and one times, and still he had no answer. There was no one thing he could point to, no single person or happenstance to blame. Violence was spreading like wildfire among his people, and he didn’t know how to combat it. Where had it come from, this fever of destruction? How could he manage to tame it?

The headache he had experienced previously was blinding by the time they reached the Cathedral’s stable; he lay back in his seat with his eyes shut, trying to deny the pain. His soul might be that of God’s tireless statesman, but his body was seventy-two years old, and sometimes the strain of all those years was almost more than he could bear. Especially now, with his life’s work falling to pieces around him. That made every year count double.

“We’re here, Your Holiness.” The coachman offered an arm to help him dismount; after a moment he took it. At least this riot had been cut short, he thought. At least this one night he wouldn’t dream of blood and shattered glass and broken idols, as he had during the other riots. One small thing to be grateful for.

There was a servant waiting for him outside his chambers. The look on the man’s face made it plain that he had bad news to deliver. With a dry smile the Patriarch greeted him. “Some new problem, is it? Don’t worry, my son. There’s not much you can say to me now that will make this night any worse.

“Vryce is back,” the man said quietly.

For a moment he just stared at him. Then, with a deep sigh, he rubbed his temples again.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “That did it.”

5

Standing outside the shop, Andrys found himself shivering. Was she inside? He didn’t know if he hoped for that or feared it-or both in combination-but there was no denying that she had utterly obsessed him. He had dreamed of her practically every night, her dark eyes haunting his nightmare-laden sleep. He had drunk himself into insensibility more than once to try to make her image fade from his brain, but it had only grown stronger. And now he was here, and in all likelihood she was inside and he didn’t know how to speak to her. Was it because of her beauty, or his weakened condition, or some strange combination of the two? He had always known how to handle women before, even in the depths of his depression; what made this one so different?

With a shaking hand he brushed back his hair, trying to tame it into some semblance of order. A hopeless gesture. Calesta had ordered him to let it grow, and though the reason for that was something Andrys couldn’t begin to guess at, like all of Calesta’s orders it was meant to be obeyed. Did the demon really have a greater plan, Andrys sometimes wondered, or was he just toying with a wounded soul, seeing how long it would take Gerald Tarrant’s last descendant to break? He didn’t dare think about that. He needed the illusion of purpose even more than he needed its substance. The demon hated Gerald Tarrant every bit as much as he did, and had sworn the sorcerer’s destruction. That was enough, wasn’t it? Who cared what the details of his strategem were, if in the end the battle was won? Who cared if Andrys understood it?

He opened his leather satchel to made sure the painting was still there. It was. Hateful, hateful thing! It made his heart knot up just to look at it, rolled up into a tight little tube as if it were just some innocuous work of art being carted home from the decorator’s. Amazing, what kind of power a simple object could have. He hoped he wouldn’t have to unroll it. He hoped they wouldn’t need to see it. He prayed that someday he would be free to burn it, along with all the hateful memories it conjured.

Someday.

With a trembling hand he reached out to open the door. Bells jingled merrily as he turned the knob and pushed it open, a discordant counterpoint to his mood. He tried to relax as he stepped inside, and tried to force himself to walk in such a way that his movements would seem natural. Women could sense it when you weren’t comfortable with yourself, and it made them nervous.

She was with a customer, a woman wrapped in fur and draped in oversized jewelery. She looked up and saw him, and it seemed to him that her smile broadened. Just a moment, her expression promised, and he thought that her eyes lingered on him for a moment before she turned her attention back to her customer. He forced himself to look elsewhere, wandering about the shop as he studied the works of art displayed there. Gentle, graceful silver forms: it seemed to him that he could pick out which were hers and which had been crafted by another hand. Delicate webworks, sinuous twinings, leaves and vines and wildlife ornaments so delicate that he feared to touch them. So like their maker, he thought. What would it be like to feel that delicate skin in his hands?

Easy, Andri. Easy. His heart was pounding so loudly he wondered if she could hear it. Take it slow. The bells rang as the door slammed shut, and he dared to turn around—and found her eyes fixed on him, those beautiful dark eyes which he knew so well from his dreams. His breath caught in his throat.

“Well. Welcome back.” Smiling, she fixed a stray lock of hair in place; was she aware of the sexual interest that gesture communicated? She seemed at once an innocent, untested by the world, and a confident, enticing woman. It was a heady combination. “Have you decided to order some more regalia?”

He leaned against the counter with what he hoped was an easy grace; he had never felt less natural in his life. “Not quite.” He glanced back toward the display of her work with studied casualness, then back to her again. “It occurred to me I forgot something the last time I was here.”

“Oh? And what was that?”

He met her eyes then, and held them. “You never told me your name.”

She looked away, but not before he had caught the flash of interest in her eyes. “Narilka,” she said softly. “Narilka Lessing.”

Narilka: Lilting, exotic, almost Earth-like in its rhythm. He was about to say something about how very beautiful the name was, how well it suited its owner, when the back door of the shop swung open and hit the wall, shattering the fragile spell between them.

“Nari, could you—Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we had a customer.” The intruder was a heavyset man with a thick head of gray hair, a lined face etched in patterns of affection, and a strong, slightly coarse voice. He nodded slightly in acknowledgment of Andrys’ presence, a gesture at once proud and professional. “Please forgive me, Mer. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“This is Andrys Tarrant,” the girl said, before he had a chance to respond himself.

The man’s face lit up at the sound of his name. “Indeed?” He came forward toward Andrys, offering a hand. “An honor, Mer Tarrant. Gresham Alder, at your service.”

“The honor is mine,” he responded formally. The man’s hand was warm and rough-skinned, his grip strong; he hoped he couldn’t feel him trembling as they shook. “I got your letter. I’m anxious to see your work.”

“Not all that impressive in its current state, I’m afraid. Now, as for Narilka’s——” He beamed at the girl, and in that moment Andrys knew with unerring instinct that they had discussed him; the man’s praise was his gesture of approval. For an instant he sensed the depth and complexity of their relationship, the degree to which she would rely on him for advice in all Slings. “Why don’t you show him the crown, Nari?”

Her cheeks flushed slightly at the implied praise. “It’s only half-finished,” she told Andrys.

“I’d love to see it.”

She led him through the door at the back of the shop, into the workroom beyond. Two heavy wood tables supported a plethora of tools, stacks of wire, canisters and flasks and narrow burners whose doused wicks gave off a strange acidic smell. One slender vise held a blackened silver ring, clearly in the process of being polished, and another gripped a small figurine whose upper half was inlaid with tiny stones. These things he saw peripherally as he followed the girl through the workroom, mesmerized by the play of lamplight upon her hair. It wasn’t until they approached the second table that he saw the object laid out upon its surface clearly enough to react to it.

It was the coronet. Not rounded yet, but laid out flat atop the table, with his drawing spread out above it. Delicate figures of exquisitely fine detail supported the central sun motif, which was the focal point of the piece. There were still empty spaces where other figures would be added, and the whole of it was stained black from the process of its manufacture, but there was no denying that even in this incomplete state it was a masterful work.

For a moment he forgot what it was, what price the original had demanded of his family, and could only whisper, “It’s beautiful. Just beautiful.” He reached out to touch it but then drew back, wary of the memories such contact might conjure.

“It’s all right,” she prompted. “It’s strong enough.”

He forced himself to reach out and touch the slender figures. The metal was cold, surprisingly lifeless. What had he expected? It was only an ornament-half-finished at that-whose place in history was assured by its power as a symbol, not some intrinsic malignance. Why then did he shiver as he touched it?

“Have you thought about the armor?” the silversmith asked him, when he finally turned away from the worktable. When he didn’t answer, the man pressed, “Whether you’ll want to wear it?”

He hesitated. The truth was, he didn’t know how to answer. Calesta hadn’t responded to his appeal for information on the matter, leaving him to guess at the demon’s intentions. “I’d guess I should have that option,” he dared. “Is it too much trouble?”

“Not at all. I just need to check the waist length, to see that the peplum sits properly. Your drawings were geared toward a taller man ... which doesn’t mean there’s a problem, necessarily. Figure types vary in proportion as well as height.”

It came to him suddenly, unwelcome knowledge that brought panic in its wake. They wanted him to try it on. Here. Now. In front of the girl, he despaired, as the gray-haired man lifted up the heavy armor and offered it to him. He couldn’t. Could he?

For a moment he couldn’t seem to make himself move. The strap of his leather pack seemed to burn into his shoulder, reminding him of the hateful thing inside it. Then, stiffly, he released it and let it slide to the floor. The girl caught it up and for one mad moment he wanted to grab it away from her, lest that thing somehow contaminate her as well. He forced himself not to move, to draw in a deep breath, then to step forward and let metal plates be fitted around his body. Cold, so cold. The weight of it was heavy on his shoulders and it crushed his velveteen jacket against his body; even as Gresham Alder explained the nature of the garments he should wear beneath it he felt himself struggling for breath, trying not to be overcome by the suggestive power of this fitting.

“Fine,” the armorer murmured, as he turned Andrys with steady hands. A tug at the waist, a pull at the arm-hole. “It’ll be fine.” And then he was facing the man and looking up into his eyes, and the smith asked, “Would you like to see it?” And he nodded, because he knew there was no other acceptable response.

The girl had brought a mirror, and now she held it before him. Trembling, he placed himself so that he could see his reflection. At first there was only a blur of gray, as if his eyes were unwilling to acknowledge what was before him ... and then it came into focus suddenly, all of it, and it was too much. Too much! Gold sun splayed across his chest, gold wires coiling about its rays, pectoral and abdominal muscles sculpted like living flesh. Bold in its artwork, perfect in its craftsmanship, and oh, so familiar! Hateful, terrifying relic! He felt the metal burning where it touched him, hot through his clothing, acid-sharp; his armor, brought back to life by the power of gold and craftsmanship. But even that wasn’t the worst of it. It was when he looked at the whole image, from top to toe, from the shaggy long hair to the black leather boots to die breastplate with the sun in between, that golden sun so like and unlike Earth’s, that face so like a killer’s—

The sickness rose up in him with numbling force, too fast and too hard for him to fight it; helplessly, he fell to his knees, hot bile welling up in his throat as his body fought to shake off the power of that hated image. Then the horror of it was too much at last, and his body convulsed, spewing out the bile and the terror and the bitter exhaustion in one wretched flood of vomit. Seconds only, but it seemed an eternity. He brought his hand up to his mouth quickly, hiding behind it as he wiped his mouth clean with the silk cuff of his shirt sleeve; his cheeks burned hot with shame. He could sense the girl standing behind him, and her proximity increased his humiliation a thousandfold. How could he ever face these people again? How could he ever face her?

It was Gresham Alder who knelt by his side, muttering words meant to bridge that awkward moment. Andrys heard himself apologizing profusely, offering to clean up, insisting ... but his offers were set aside, politely but firmly. Of course, he thought bitterly. They don’t want me around here any longer than I have to be. As the smith helped him to his feet, he dared to meet the girl’s eyes-just for an instant—and the pity he saw in them made his shame burn even hotter. No hope of getting to know her now, not after a fiasco like this. That knowledge hurt worse than all the fear and shame combined.

Somehow he pulled himself together. Saying the necessary words as he wrested the cursed breastplate from his torso, making the requisite excuses ... somehow he managed to take up his bag again and get out of the shop without further catastrophe. He didn’t even check to see that the rolled-up painting was still in it, but took off at a run down the narrow street. Feet pounding on cobblestones, shame pounding in his temples. When he reached the Hotel Paradisic, the doorman wouldn’t let him in, so wild-eyed and disarrayed did he appear; he had to search through his bag with shaking hands to produce his key as proof of residency, and even then the doorman insisted on escorting him to the door of his suite. Taking care to steer him clear of the other guests. What did it matter? What did anything matter? He fell to his knees as the door slammed shut behind him, hot tears flowing down his cheeks. God in heaven, how long could he go on like this?

“What do you want?” he begged aloud. Willing Calesta to hear him, to answer. “What’s the point of this? Tell me!” But there was no response. At last he struggled to his feet and staggered over to his bureau, where a flask of Jaggonath brandy awaited him. Disdaining glasses, he upended it and drank directly from its narrow neck, feeling the powerful liquid burn its way down his throat. Not enough. Not enough. Stumbling over to the table at his bedside, he caught up a small glass vial; black pills winked at him from within, promising the ultimate forgetfulness. It was dangerous to drink and then take these, too, he knew that. But what did it matter? Did he really want to live another day? Did he dare to face her again?

Choking with shame, he spilled out a small handful of pills, enough for an evening’s oblivion. With a quick motion he tossed them all into his mouth and used the brandy to wash them down. Fast. Before he could have second thoughts. If it killed him, then it killed him. At least this torture would be over with.

“What’s the armor for?” he begged. The demon didn’t answer him, which raised new doubts. What if Calesta didn’t just hate Gerald Tarrant, after all, but all the Tarrant clan? Him included? What if this was just some complex game the demon had concocted to torture them all—

No, he didn’t dare think that, he didn’t dare—

Too much torture, too much too much!

“Calesta,” he gasped. “Please. Help me.”

But there was only darkness, and silence.

“That boy,” Gresham said, “has real problems.”

She wrung out the rag in the sink, not saying anything. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

“Nari.”

Slowly she turned to him, laying the rag aside. The floor was clean. The armor was clean. Her hands had finally stopped shaking.

“Nari. He’s trouble.”

She didn’t dare look at him. She knew how well he could read her.

“You’re stuck on him, aren’t you?” His voice was gentle but the disapproval was clear. “Couldn’t you have picked a sane one, this time? There are a few around, you know.

“Please, Gresh.” She leaned against the edge of the worktable; her blouse front brushed the coronet. “Not now.”

“Nari. Listen to me.” He came up behind her and took her by the shoulders, turning her to face him. “You’re like family to me, you know that? And when family gets hurt, it hurts me, too.”

She was looking away, refusing to face him; he caught up her chin in his and and gently turned her back to him. “He’s good-looking. He’s rich. He’s got charm that most men would kill for. And he’s got problems, Nari. Real problems. Did you see the look on his face when he saw his reflection? Did you?”

“I saw,” she whispered.

“I don’t know what’s going on with that boy, but I’d bet this shop it isn’t healthy. Haven’t you had enough of that kind? Don’t you deserve something better?”

“I saw,” she whispered. Fingering the delicate silverwork. He had touched it, too, and his hand had trembled. Why?

Yes, I saw him. I saw eyes wide with the kind of terror most men never know. Looking into those eyes was like looking into a mirror. Like being back in the Forest again, running from the unknown. Alone, so alone. Yes, I know that look.

“Nari—”

“I’m not a child,” she snapped. Pulling away from him. “Not anymore. I can take care of myself.”

And he would accept that, she knew it. That was the marvel of their relationship. Even though he was concerned for her, even though he thought she was dead wrong, even though he was sure she was heading for disaster. That was the difference between Gresham Alder and her parents. He had seen the change in her, when she returned from the Forest, and he had accepted it. Her parents couldn’t. They still wanted to baby her, to shield her from all the evils of the world, and no matter what she said or did, they would never change in that orientation. How could she explain to them that she had already faced the greatest evil of all, the well of terror in her own soul? How could she explain the way in which that confrontation had transformed her, smothering the helpless child who so needed protection, giving birth to someone older and stronger and far more adaptable. What did the petty evils of this world amount to, when compared to the Hunter’s Forest? Abusive men were an annoyance, nothing more. Even rapists were a finite terror. And as for men who wore the Hunter’s face, whose haunted eyes hinted at wounds so vast that no mere words could set them to healing——

I can handle it, she told herself. Running her fingers over the sterling figures, imagining that she could feel Andrys Tarrant’s warmth through the metal. Drawn to his pain, even as powerfully as she was drawn to his person. And I want to.

“I’ll be careful,” she told him. “I promise.”

"His Holiness will be with you shortly.”

Damien nodded a distracted acknowledgment as the acolyte left him. He had been left to wait in the antechamber to the Patriarch’s formal audience chamber, which didn’t bode at all well for his upcoming interview. It was a space designed to impress, perhaps intimidate, and it did so with marked aesthetic efficiency. The high, vaulted ceiling was of dark polished stone, unwarmed by paint or plaster; the numarble walls were sleek and minimally decorated. The furniture was stiff and formal, and after sitting in a high-backed chair for several seconds he decided he would much rather pace. All in all it was a markedly uncomfortable place, and. Damien guessed that the room beyond, where the Patriarch meant to receive him, was much the same. Maybe worse. Not the kind of atmosphere he’d hoped for, that was certain.

What the hell did you expect? ‘Come into my parlor for tee, and oh, by the way, would you mind filling me in on your recent activities?’ Fat chance, Vryce. You’ll be lucky if he listens to you at all, and doesn’t just throw you out before you get a chance to open your mouth in your own defense.

There was a small mirror on the far wall, a minimal concession to visitors who might wish to see if they looked as uncomfortable as they felt. He paused in his pacing to look in it, to see what manner of man the Patriarch would be confronting. The priest who gazed back at him was not the same man who’d left Jaggonath two years earlier, that was sure. Limited rations at sea had thinned his stocky frame until he looked almost trim, an unfamiliar somatype. With a weathered hand he stroked the short beard that now marked his jawline, and wondered if he shouldn’t have shaved it off. His skin was markedly darker than it had been two years ago, a tawny brown that spoke eloquently of long months beneath an equatorial sun. There was gray in his hair now, a few strands at the temples and scattered bits of it in his beard. Gray! It was an affront to everything he perceived himself to be, the first hint of decay in a life too full of challenges to slow down for anything as mundane as aging. He had almost pulled the hairs out when they first appeared-back when there were fewer than a dozen-but the sheer vanity of such an act reminded him of Tarrant, and so he’d let the damn things stay.

You could use the fae to maintain youth, he told himself. Others have done it. Ciani did it. At times, now, he could see how tempting that path might become, as age continued its inexorable assault on his flesh. But the Patriarch’s words, voiced so long ago, came back to him at such moments. When the time comes to die, as it comes to all men, will you bow down to the patterns of Earth-life that are the core of our very existence? Or submit to the temptations of this alien magic, and sell your soul for another few years of life? The acceptance of such natural processes was central to Damien’s faith, and dying at his appointed time would be his ultimate service to his God. Sure, it would be hard. Many things in this world were hard. That’s what gave them power.

“Reverend Vryce?” It was the Patriarch’s secretary, a young man Damien dimly remembered from two years back. “Please come in.”

To his surprise the man did not lead him into the audience chamber, but opened the heavy mahogova doors for him and stepped aside for him to enter alone.

It was a large room, formal like the antechamber but more impressive in size and proportion. It reminded him somewhat of Gerald Tarrant’s own audience chamber in his keep in the Forest. He stiffened as the memory of that tense meeting (so long ago that it might have been in another world, so real that it seemed hardly yesterday) came back to him. Back then one friend had been dying, another kidnapped, and the Hunter was his enemy. Now ... he felt something tighten inside his gut as he walked toward the arbiter of his faith. Now he was .. . what? The Hunter’s ally?

The Patriarch’s expression was stonelike, unreadable, but a cold rage burned in his eyes. Such was the chill of it that Damien could feel his skin tighten in physical response. In two years’ time he had managed to forget the power the Holy Father wielded: not simply the force of a unique personality, but the faeborn aggression of a man who molded the currents to his will without even knowing it. Now, standing against the force of that rage was like trying to keep his footing in a riptide.

If only you could learn to wield that power consciously, Damien thought, no man could stand against you. But the Patriarch never would. Sorcery was anathema to him, and so he had blocked all knowledge of his own natural skills, and lived an illusion of flesh-bound helplessness. God alone knows what would happen to you if you ever learned the truth.

“I’ve received your reports,” the Patriarch said acidly. He gestured briefly to a table by his side, and the manuscripts that lay-upon it. Damien saw the coarse sheets of his first report, shipped home from Faraday, and the thinner package of notes and drawings he had delivered himself to the Cathedral two days ago. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, letting the Patriarch see the nature of the war they were fighting in the hope he would be more forgiving about how the battle had been waged. But the ribbon which sealed the second package was still unbroken. He began to protest, then stopped himself. The Holy Father had deliberately chosen not to read his work in advance of their meeting as a gesture of his condemnation. To protest such a move would only bring that rage crashing down upon his head.

You knew this would be bad, he told himself. Defiance will only make it worse. Swallow your pride for once in your goddamn life and wait this out. It’ll pass. But it was hard, so very hard. It went against every instinct of self-preservation that he had.

“I’m sure I don’t need to comment upon your breach of protocol in leaving this continent without permission.” The Patriarch’s tone was like ice. “Your own report made it clear that you knew exactly what you were doing—and, I suspect, exactly what the eventual cost of such disobedience would be. To show such a level of disrespect for proper authority is a grave offense in a Church whose very foundation is hierarchical stability.” He shook his head stiffly. “But you’re not a stupid man, Reverend Vryce, though sometimes you play at it. You’ve read the Prophet’s writings often enough to know your sin for what it was.”

“I thought the situation merited it,” he dared. Where was the safe ground in this scene? He wished he dared work a Knowing for guidance, but that was, of course, out of the question. “Under the circumstances—”

"Please. Don’t insult us both. You knew exactly what you were doing, and what my reaction would be. And you also knew that your blatant defiance would give me the authority to discipline you in whatever manner I thought best, without interference from anyone.”

There it was, the threat at last. How bad will it be? he thought desperately. He remembered the nightmare Tarrant had once crafted for him, in which the Patriarch had cast him out of the Church. Would he really go that far? Without even reading his report, which justified so many of his actions? He began to protest, then bit back on it in anguish. The Patriarch was radiating rage in waves that warped the fae all around them; he wanted the priest to react to him in anger, to justify the very harshest sentence. If Damien gave in to that influence and lost his temper, even for a moment, he might indeed lose everything.

“I am the Church’s loyal servant,” he muttered.

“Yes,” he said icily. “You are still that. For now.”

He stared at Damien in silence for several long seconds. Studying him? Measuring his response? He forced himself to say nothing, knowing that any words he chose would be wrong.

“You traveled with the Hunter,” the Patriarch said at last. His voice was cold, his manner utterly condemning. “A man so evil that many consider him to be a true demon. There’s enough wrongdoing in that one act alone to condemn a dozen priests like you ... and yet the matter doesn’t end there, does it?” The cold eyes narrowed. “Does it!”

“We needed him,” Damien said tightly. “We needed the kind of power he controlled to—”

“Listen to yourself! Listen to your own words! You needed his power. You needed his sorcery." He shook his head sharply. “Do you think it makes a difference whether you fashion a Working yourself, or hire another to do it? Either way, you are responsible for the proliferation of sorcery. And in this case, for the proliferation of evil.”

He waved his hand suddenly, as if dismissing all that. For an instant something flashed in his eyes that was not rage. Exhaustion? Then it was gone, and only steel resolve remained. “But you know that argument as well as I do, Reverend Vryce. And I have no doubt that you’ve gone over it yourself time and time again, trying to find some theological loophole to save yourself with. An intelligent man can justify anything in his own mind, if he’s determined enough.”

He paused for a moment then, and Damien could almost feel the waves of condemnation lapping about his feet. The man’s power was vast, if unconscious; by now all the fae in the room would be surely echoing his words, undermining the foundations of Damien’s confidence. How did you fight such a thing without Working openly? “My only intention-” he began.

The Patriarch cut him short. “You fed him your blood.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of utter revulsion. “More than once.”

He was so stunned by the accusation that he could manage no coherent response, could only whisper “What?” The Patriarch couldn’t possibly have knowledge of that incident. Could he? What was going on here?

“Let’s ignore for the moment the symbolic power of such an act. Let’s ignore the vast power you added to his arsenal, by making a voluntary sacrifice of your own flesh. Let’s ignore even the channel it established between you, which by definition cuts through the heart of your defenses and makes you vulnerable to all his sorcery. Thus making the Church vulnerable, through you.”

Was this another nightmare that Tarrant was feeding him, in order to make him afraid? If so, it was working. How the hell did the Patriarch know such details of his travels, when his reports had made no hint of them? He found that he was trembling, and hoped that the Holy Father couldn’t see it.

“Yes or no,” the Patriarch said icily.

Did he really know, or was he only guessing? Why would one guess a thing like that? Feverishly he tried to work out how to minimize the damage. If the Patriarch’s source of information was unreliable—

“Yes or no!” he demanded.

Nightmare. It was a scene out of nightmare. How many times had Damien dreamed this scene, or its equivalent? And yet those drearris had no emotive power at all compared to this, the real thing.

Where the hell had the Patriarch gotten his information?

"Yes or no."

He looked up into the Patriarch’s ice-cold eyes, and suddenly knew the futility of denial. If the Patriarch had such detailed information as this, then there was no point in dissembling; the man had damned Vryce long ago, and long ago decided his punishment. Lying to him now would only make things worse.

He said it quietly, trying not to sound either guilty or defiant. “Yes.”

A strange shiver seemed to pass through the Holy Father’s frame. Had he expected some other answer? Damien felt as if he were being tested somehow, but not in any manner he could understand.

“You conversed with demons.” There was no hesitation in the Patriarch’s manner now; whatever confirmation he had required from Damien, he was clearly satisfied that he had it. “You countenanced the slaughter of numerous innocents, in order that the Hunter might be fed.”

It took all his strength not to snap back a sharp response; the fae was beating at his will, battering his self-control. “It was necessary,” he forced out between gritted teeth. “If you would read my report—”

"You gave in to corruption." The very air seemed to shiver with the power of the Patriarch’s condemnation. “You fell into the Prophet’s own trap, justifying your sins by the very scriptures that damned you.” He paused, then demanded, “Must I deal with each transgression individually?” he demanded. “Or will you simply accept that I know them all? That I pass judgment on you not only for one sin, or several, but for nearly two years of continual defiance?”

He drew in a deep breath. “Your Holiness, if you would only let me explain—”

“In good time, Reverend Vryce. I’ll read your report. I may even listen to what you have to say. After I’ve made my position perfectly clear.”

He paced a few steps toward the far wall and back again. “If you were one of my own I wouldn’t hesitate to demote you, maybe even cast you out of the priesthood entirely. Because allowing you to serve the Church is one thing, but allowing you to represent it is another matter entirely. If I had ordained you-if any of my people had-I might free you here and now of all your Church obligations, so that you could spend your years warring with demons and gambling for human souls without any concern for my interference. I suspect you would be happier that way.

“But you aren’t mine. You’re a guest from a foreign autarchy, with different traditions. Different beliefs regarding our faith. For all that we venerate unity, it would be unjust of me not to recognize that fact. Or to allow for it in my judgment.”

Shaking, he struggled to voice some neutral response. “I thank you, Holiness.”

“Don’t. Not yet.” The sharp gaze was venemous. “I wrote to your Matriarch, and outlined the situation. A month ago I received her response.” He pulled a letter out from his robe, cream-colored parchment folded in thirds; the gold seal of the Church hung from the bottom. “It gives me permission to wield authority in both our names.” The cold eyes narrowed. “Do you understand me, Vryce? If I decided that you aren’t fit to be a priest, there’ll be no running home for redress. Judgment is here and now.”

Damien said it very quietly, his heart pounding so loudly he could barely hear his own words. “Is that what you’ve decided?”

For a moment the Patriarch said nothing, only studied him. “No,” he said at last. “Not yet. But the future’s in your hands. I want you to understand that. Comport yourself like a priest and you’ll remain one. Otherwise ...” The words trailed off into silence, a threat too terrible to be voiced. Otherwise you will have nothing, the silent words continued. Because without the priesthood, what are you?

“I understand.” He tried to sound calmer than he felt. If only the Patriarch had read his report before meeting with him! Surely knowledge of the situation would mitigate his rage at Damien, and direct his energies elsewhere!

What good will your holy protocol do if Calesta has his way? What good can the Church do in a world where sadism rules supreme? It’s humanity’s soul we’re fighting for now, can’t you see that? Can’t you see how petty your rules seem by contrast, when the future of the whole world is at stake?

“Our most holy war is against corruption,” the Patriarch reminded him. “In this world, and in ourselves. The first battle is easy compared to the second. So the Prophet taught. I suggest you reflect upon that, and seek guidance from his writings. It may help put things in perspective for you.”

He nearly lost control then, nearly snapped at the

Patriarch that yes, he damned well knew about the Prophet’s writings, he had traveled with the bastard for two years now and probably had a better handle on his philosophy than any man alive. But—

The Prophet is dead in this man’s eyes, he realized. And maybe that’s right. Maybe I sense a ghost of that identity in Tarrant because I want it to be there, not because it really is. Maybe I fear my own corruption too much to look at him objectively.

He met the Patriarch’s gaze head-on; in coldness and power it reminded him of the Hunter’s own.

You would have no power over me if I weren’t already plagued by guilt, he thought to the man. You would have no power to make me obey if I didn’t believe, in the core of my soul, that you were right.

“I am the Church’s servant,” he said quietly. Trying his best to sound humble. “Now and always.”

The Patriarch nodded; his expression was grim.

“Then let’s see it stays that way, Reverend Vryce.” His voice was quiet, but the threat behind his words was clear. “Shall we?”

7

Narilka remembered:

Kneeling on the ground, the cold ground, the Forest earth. Fingers raw and bleeding. Legs cramped from endless running. Exhaustion like a vise around her chest, and every breath gained a fleeting triumph against its constriction.

Wait, he had said, when the Hunt was over and he had decided to spare her life. Just wait. My people will come for you.

She tried not to be afraid. This was the Hunter’s land, wasn’t it? The people here were his. The beasts obeyed his will. Even the tentacles of thorny vines which had torn at her ankles while she fled, the black-barked trees which had blocked her path, the tangled branches overhead which filtered the moonlight so that practically none of it reached the ground ... they were all his creatures, weren’t they? And he wouldn’t hurt her. He had promised her that. The Hunter would never, ever hurt her.

"Please come soon,” she whispered, clutching the amulet he had given her. Blood from her roughened hands filled in the delicate etched channels, smeared across the golden surface. She could feel the Forest closing in around her like some vast living thing with a will of its own, its cold heartbeat throbbing beneath her knees. Every creature in its confines was a part of that system, every branch and insect and microbe. One living anatomy, all of it, united as the cells of a single body were united. And the Hunter was its brain. If he chose to kill her, then his Forest would rise up, every living and unliving thing within its borders, and crush her as surely as the swat of a human hand might kill an insect. All with no more thought than that, she knew. The Forest was his reflex, no more. He had promised not to hurt her. She clung to that thought as the cold breeze stirred branches too near her face, as their sharp tips scratched her skin ever so lightly. She jerked back, startled. There was rustling in the bushes all around her, and it took all her willpower not to struggle to her feet and start running again. Not that she would last long. She hadn’t slept for nearly three days now, and her only food had been hard black berries that had made her stomach cramp and had bloodied her stool. Fortunately she had found water on her second day, or she might not have made it this long—

Fortunately? She laughed bitterly. There was no fortune in this place, nor any random hope to cling to. The Hunter had meant to chase her for three nights, therefore she had found enough water to keep going; his Forest had herded her properly. What kind of mind did it take to create such a place, what magnitude of power did it demand to keep it going? She couldn’t begin to understand it, but she had heard its music. Black music, whirlpooled in his eyes. She shivered, remembering it. She shivered for wanting it so badly, and for fearing that desire.

The rustling had stopped, she realized suddenly. It seemed to her that it ended abruptly, or perhaps she was only suddenly aware of it. Trembling, she rose to her feet. Her legs shook and her feet burned in pain, but she managed to straighten up, her hand clenching the amulet so tightly that its edge cut hard into her palm. What new danger was this, that drove the normal denizens of the Forest to silence? It was a man.

He stepped from the darkness suddenly, into a thin beam of moonlight that allowed her to see him. A ghost of a man, with ghastly pale skin and eyes that blazed blood-red in the darkness. His hands were long and thin and his fingernails had been sharpened like claws; his teeth, when he grinned, were long and sharp likewise, as though Nature had stripped them from some predatory beast and set them in his mouth. There was no color about him, not anywhere on his person, and his flesh had a nacreous glow that spoke of a chill, unwholesome power.

There was sudden movement behind her, about her, and she whipped about to see its source. Wolves, lean and hungry ... but not any creatures that Nature had made. These were warped, obscene entities, whose thin legs ended in handlike extremities, whose eyes glowed redly like the eyes of their master, whose fur was as pale as the fur that he wore on his vest, as the hide that made up his boots. It took effort to turn away from them, to face the man again; but he was their master, that she sensed clearly. Growl they might, paw the ground with their mishapen limbs, but they wouldn’t attack her without his approval.

"Well.” His thin lips twisted into a smile, or at least a close fascimile. “What have we here? A damsel in distress, perhaps?"

His presence was like a chill wind that froze her skin as he approached. It took everything she had not to quail in terror before him, not to sink to her knees and beg wildly for mercy, though she sensed there was no mercy in him. He belongs to the Hunter, she told herself. The Hunter won’t hurt me. He promised.

He came very close, so close that she could feel his breath upon her hair. The red eyes studied her—all of her—and as he glanced down at her chest with a smile, she realized that the Hunter’s assault had left her half-bare, one breast and a shoulder exposed to the night. Did the white man stare at her in that way because he thought it would frighten her? Maybe in another time and place it would have. But she could still feel the Hunter’s grip upon her arm; she could still taste the terror of that moment. She could still feel his power, death-born, demanding, and a desire inside herself so terrible, so all-consuming, that it was all she could do not to offer herself up in sacrifice to his hunger. What was the mere gaze of one ghostly creature, compared to that? Fleshborn or fae-spawned, he was a servant of the Hunter. And the Hunter had promised that none of his people would hurt her.

"I need to know the way out,” she whispered. Her voice was weak, and hoarse from thirst. “Please."

The ghost-man laughed; it was a cruel sound. “Do I look like a tour guide to you?” He reached out a hand toward her face, and she forced herself not to back away. Fear hammered in her chest, but fear was what he wanted; she refused to give him the pleasure of seeing her give in to it.

"Such a pretty toy,” he mused. The white hand cupped the side of her head, caressing her roughly; where his thumb pressed against her temple there was a searing pain, so sharp that it nearly made her cry out. “Such a shame, to discard it now."

Terror welled up inside her with numbing force, but with it came fury. Had she run for three nights from the Forest’s demonic master, feeding him with her blood and her suffering, only to yield up her hard-earned survival for this ghostly creature’s amusement? “No,” she whispered. She pushed his hand away from her; her temple burned like fire. “No!” She thrust the amulet into his face, held the bloodied disk inches in front of those cruel red eyes. “He promised me safety. He gave me his word.” There was no fear left in her now, nor room for any to take root. Fury had filled her to overflowing, and brought with it its own dark strength. “Take me out of here,” she commanded. The pain in her temple was intense, nearly blinding, but she wouldn’t give him the pleasure of seeing her react to it. “Or leave me alone until someone comes along who can."

The wolves behind her growled, and she heard one of them pad closer. She did not turn around. It was impossible to read the ghost-man’s expression, or to guess at his intentions. She felt something hot trickle down from her temple, where he had touched her skin. Was it blood? Did he thirst for that, too, like his master did? If so, the bloodied amulet was doubly challenging. She held it higher, demanding that he acknowledge it. She was not afraid now, not at all. The Hunter had claimed all the depths of her fear, and no other man—or beast—might inspire such emotion again.

Then she sensed, rather than heard, the nearest wolves withdraw. She saw something in the white man’s expression change. And then he, too, stepped back, and caught up the amulet from out of her hand. He was careful not to touch her again, she noticed. Wary of doing any more damage to the Hunter’s prize?

"Come,” he said shortly. He turned from her, and she dared to draw in a long, deep breath. Behind her the wolves fell into line; she could hear them sniffing at her bloody footprints as she began to walk. “Move quickly. It’s almost dawn."

Only a little while longer, she promised her bruised and battered feet. Her muscles burned, but she forced them to move. Only a few miles more. A few hours. Then sleep.

Staggering along as best she could, she let the ghost-man lead her out of the Forest.

8

Damien walked streets until long after midnight. Through the Street of Gods, where countless deities vied for man’s worship. (How many of them were Iezu? he wondered. Did any of them know or care about Calesta’s plans?) Past the Inn of the New Sun, where he and Ciani had shared their first dinner, so long ago. Down through the mercantile district, to where the Fae Shoppe had once stood—

It was gone now. More than gone. Its rubble had been carted away, its foundation reinforced with new concrete, and a three-story building had been erected in its place. That was high for a city plagued by constant small earthquakes; most architects preferred to keep their ambition under tight rein on such risky ground. But he could see the lines where resilient hask-fibers had been used to reinforce the walls, and a host of quake-wards marked every door, window, and potential weak point. God help Jaggonath if its wards ever failed, he thought. God help them if they were ever as helpless as Earth had been, in the face of an earthquake.

Domina was overhead when he began the long walk back to his hotel. The Patriarch had offered him a room in the Annex-more out of custom than genuine courtesy, he suspected-but under the circumstances he thought it best that his lodgings be separate. Not that it would keep the Patriarch from knowing what he did, he thought bitterly. Hard as he racked his brain, he could not come up with any explanation for the Holy Father’s detailed knowledge of his sins. Sure, Calesta would like him to know, but how could the demon present such knowledge to a man like the Patriarch without him rejecting it utterly just for its source? Thus far Damien had not dared a Knowing, or any other form of Working, to try to uncover the truth. Because if he did that and the Patriarch found out there’d be no staunching his rage. Maybe Tarrant, with his more subtle skills, could manage it secretly enough. Maybe.

It was nearly one when he climbed the steps to his rooms. The lodging house was deserted, and only a faint chill clinging to the banister gave any hint that an unhuman presence had passed that way. But he knew that chill by now, and its owner, and therefore it was no surprise to him when he unlocked the door to his small apartment and found the Hunter waiting.

“I’d have thought you’d be keeping an earlier schedule by now,” Tarrant challenged.

“Yeah. Well.” He pulled the door shut behind him and locked it, then made his way wearily to a well-worn chair. Dust gusted up from the cushion as he sat. “I had a bad day.”

He could feel the force of the earth-fae sucking at him as the Hunter’s Knowing reached into his brain for surface details. Let him. It was easier to endure the invasion than try to capture the day’s humiliation in words.

“I’m sorry,” the Hunter said at last. Regret, not apology.

Damien managed to shrug. “I guess it could have been worse.” He looked up at Tarrant, noted that as usual he looked neither tired, distressed, disheveled ... nor human. “How’s the Forest?”

It seemed to him that the Hunter hesitated. “Safe enough,” he said at last. “But our enemy’s workings can be subtle, and I wouldn’t bet my life on such an assessment.”

“Yeah. Same here.”

“You believe that Calesta has made contact with the Patriarch?”

He gazed into Tarrant’s eyes. Cold, so cold. Pits of anti-life. How could he have imagined that the

Patriarch resembled him? Or any living man, for that matter?

“He knew,” he said bitterly. "Everything. Details he couldn’t possibly have learned from any other source.” He met that inhuman gaze head-on, drawing strength from its cold inner fire. This is my ally. My support. He wished the thought felt more uncomfortable than it did. Had he changed so much in the last two years? “He knows I fed you my blood,” he said quietly. “He knows about the channel between us. Do you realize how that damns me, in the Church’s eyes? There’s nothing I can say now to save myself. Nothing I can do, except avoid the source of corruption from now on.”

“Is that what you want?” Tarrant demanded. “If it truly is, then I’ll leave you. If you value your precious peace of mind more than our mission. Maybe Calesta will even forgive you in time, learn to leave you alone, once you’ve ceased to be—”

“Don’t be a fool, Gerald.” He reached for a bottle of ale he had left on the table earlier in the day; it was warm now, but what the hell. “Neither one of us is safe until Calesta’s dead and gone. Hell, the whole vulking world isn’t safe anymore.” He drank deeply of the warm ale, wincing as its spices bit into his tongue. “Look what happened in the east. Look at how many lives would have been sacrificed to one demon’s hunger, if you hadn’t—”

The Hunter’s expression darkened. Damien let the words trail off into silence.

“Sorry,” he said at last. “I shouldn’t remind you.” Tarrant turned away, toward the window. “At any rate, we don’t stand a chance singly and you know it. Like it or not, we’re stuck with each other." We may not even stand a chance together, he thought grimly as he took another swig of the warm ale. The alcohol was slowly loosening a knot in his belly the size of Jaggonath. Well worth the lousy taste. “So how did your research go?”

Tarrant shook his head sharply in frustration. “Volumes of notes, centuries of study, and not one useful bit of information. Oh, I can recite you the names of over a hundred Iezu, complete with their aspects, preferred forms, and habitats, but according to Karril none of his family will get involved in this, not even to the extent of pointing us toward more useful information. Their progenitor’s code is apparently enforced with vigor. Thank God for that, anyway.”

“Thank God for it?” He raised an eyebrow. “That code seems to be our greatest impediment right now.”

“Their progenitor also forbids the Iezu from killing humans, at least directly. Which is the only reason you and I are still alive.”

“You said they have no power but illusion. Surely that—”

“How little work would it take to make me stay out past dawn, believing that the sun hadn’t yet begun to rise? How little work to arrange an accident for you, how small an illusion to make you misjudge the edge of a pier or a cliff, or mistake the flow of traffic in the streets? No man can stay on his guard against such tricks forever, Reverend Vryce. No, if Calesta meant to kill us, then we would both have died long ago. As it is, I’m sure he’s planned something far more ... unpleasant.”

He turned away again, and gazed out the window. Perhaps he was studying the flow of fae in the streets below, analyzing it for data. Perhaps he was only thinking.

“He’s attacking the Church,” Damien said quietly. “I thought he might,” he said, without turning back. “Tell me the details.”

“Outbursts of violence all over town. Bands of the faithful desecrating pagan shrines, beating priests, destroying property. One group was just about to lynch a priestess for crimes against the One God when the police arrived, just in time. And such outbursts are more and more frequent. The Patriarch himself had to step in the last time, and even so there was a lot of damage done.” He put the empty bottle down on the table again and wiped his mouth with a shirt sleeve. “The Temple of Bakshi is suing the Church for half a million in damages to person and property. If they win——”

“Then there’ll be more to follow.” He snorted. “That goes without saying, doesn’t it?” The Hunter nodded slowly. “He’s subtle, our enemy, and all too clever. Multiple lawsuits could bring the Church to its knees faster than any direct Working. And the public humiliation involved would certainly affect the fae, weakening the Church’s effect on local currents. Negating the very power which the Church was designed to wield. And after Jaggonath, others will follow. Until such momentum is gained that it no longer requires his direct interference.”

He turned back to face Damien again; his silver eyes were blazing. “He means to destroy my greatest work. Morally, socially, financially ... if that lawsuit goes through, then he’s already won the first battle. How many more campaigns has he set in motion, which will remain secret until their culmination? Nine hundred years, Vryce! You perceive that I abandoned it years ago, but I tell you the Church is still my passion. My child. Nine hundred years of carefully crafted development, and this demonic filth will send it all spiraling down into Hell in a single generation!”

“There has to be a way to stop it. There has to be a way to nullify the effect—”

“We must kill him,” Tarrant interrupted. “There is no other way.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was tight with frustration. “But there has to be a way.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Their progenitor can kill them. So obviously the means exists. And I got the distinct impression that whatever technique he or she uses, the Iezu would be helpless to fight back.”

“You think he could be convinced to help us?”

“To kill his own creations? Not likely. But there might be others who are privy to his secrets.”

“Such as?”

“Maybe demons. Some other class, whom we can still coerce by simple means. Or maybe even adepts.

Someone close to the Iezu, who might invite their confidence.” He paused. “Maybe Ciani.”

Ciani. Even after two years the memory was sharp and painful. Ciani of the quick wit and ready laughter, whom he had loved. Ciani the adept, whom a Iezu had saved. Ciani the loremaster, who valued knowledge more than any mere love affair and had gone to live among the rakh in order to study them more closely. Ciani, whom he had left behind. “Ciani’s gone,” he said quietly. “But not dead, Reverend Vryce. And not unreachable.”

She would be in the rakhlands now, protected by unscalable mountains on one side and an ocean on the other. The Canopy would be there, too, a wall of living fae that no human Working could cross. If not for that they might Send for her, using the fae to communicate across the miles that separated them. With it ... “I don’t relish going back there,” he muttered. “Nor I. If nothing else, it would mean our extended absence from Jaggonath, leaving Calesta free to do his worst here unopposed. I’m not sure we can afford that.”

Ciani. Even now, years later, the memory of her made Damien ache with regret. But it had been a doomed match from the start, he accepted that now. Or at least he tried to.

“She’s a loremaster,” he said at last. “They take a vow of neutrality, don’t they? Would she be willing to help us?”

“I don’t know. She certainly has no vested interest in the Church’s survival. She’d probably be more interested in chronicling its fall than in providing for its salvation. And then there are, as you say, the vows of her profession, which forbid her from taking sides in any fae-related conflict. The irony is, if it were anyone else, I could force her to serve us. But the lady Ciani ... to harm her in any way would be to give myself over to the ones I serve, in soul as well as aspect.” He laughed shortly, a forced sound. “And I suspect that they’re not in a forgiving mood these days.”

An unfamiliar emotion flickered in the back of those cold, clear eyes. Fear? “They haven’t done anything to you yet.”

“Not yet,” he agreed. “But for how long?” To Damien’s surprise he sighed heavily; the action was disturbingly human.

He walked the length of the room, then stopped; Damien thought he saw his shoulders tense. “Do you know, sometimes I pray to them? Not as a worshiper to a god, but as servant to an angry master. I try to make them understand that in seeking Calesta’s destruction I’m only ensuring my own survival, the better to serve them. If such an act happened to benefit the Church I founded, or humankind in general... that would be an unfortunate side effect, nothing more.” He shook his head. “I wish I believed that myself.”

Damien chose his words carefully. “You think it isn’t true?”

The Hunter hesitated. “I was so sure of myself, once. I lived in a world without doubt, without any need for introspection. My soul was as pure in its darkness as the night-fae itself, which is banished by the merest hint of sunlight. Then you came into my life. You! With your questions and your warped logic and your bonds of mutual dependency and purpose ... and I changed. Slowly, but I did change. No human soul could fail to do so, under the circumstances—and the core of my soul is human, Vryce, despite what Karril would call its “hellish trappings.” That was both the source of my strength and my greatest weakness. In the end, thanks to you, it will be my destruction.” The sharp eyes narrowed. “But that was what you hoped for, wasn’t it? After all this is over, I could do you no better service than to die and be damned.”

“Gerald, please—”

He waved a hand, cutting short his protest. “I don’t blame you, Vryce. I blame myself for letting it happen. You did no more or less than your nature demanded. I only wonder what the price will be, when I’m finally called to answer for my actions.”

“Surely a few months of weakness won’t outweigh the record of nine hundred years.”

“The Unnamed has no compassion, and nothing to lose by injustice.. Its judgment is as much the result of momentary structure as of logic. Divided into parts, it can be petty and fickle and unpredictable; unified, it’s the most ruthless evil this world has ever known. Thank God the latter state rarely endures for long.”

“What do you mean, divided! I don’t understand.” The cold eyes fixed on him: black now, and empty as the true night. “Better that you don’t,” he warned. “That force has a habit of devouring anything which touches it; better men than you have fallen to it in the past, for no greater sin than seeking to understand its nature. And I wasn’t the first to court it for its power, you know. But I may be the only one to come through such negotiations with my soul intact. It delights in corrupting humanity, and will toy with its victims like a cat tortures prey. Also its servitors,” he added grimly. “Anyone who gives it an opening.”

“Maybe it despises Calesta as much as you do,” Damien suggested. “Maybe it regards your current attempts as a kind of service.”

“Doubtful.” His brow furrowed as he considered the thought. “One would think Calesta’s habits would be to its liking.”

“Rivalry, perhaps?”

“The Iezu are petty demons. The Unnamed is ... beyond that.”

“Petty demons who can’t be Banished, or otherwise controlled. Independent spirits who mean to remake the Unnamed One’s domain.”

“Perhaps,” he said dubiously. “At least that might explain—”

He stopped then. And did not proceed. “What?" When the Hunter didn’t respond, he pressed, “Tell me, Gerald. What is it?”

“I Divined our conflict,” he said softly. Eyes shut, recalling the Working to his inner vision. “It’s an imprecise art at best, as you know, and in this case all it conjured was chaos. I watched the corruption of the

Church proceed from a thousand beginnings, and in none of them could I see any hope of change. I witnessed both our deaths a dozen times-yes, yours and mine-in a dozen different forums. I saw worlds in which Calesta triumphed, and such change was wrought that our human ancestors wouldn’t have recognized Erna’s children as their kin. All tangled together, Reverend Vryce: a skein of futures so enmeshed that even my skill couldn’t pull the threads loose. But there were patterns even in that chaos, things which recurred time and time again.” He looked at Damien. “The interference of the Unnamed was one. I had assumed it would strike at me directly, in vengeance for my many transgressions, but who can know what passes for vengeance in a mind that knows no permanence? And more than once I saw a sorcerer at the head of the Church, a man whose power was equal to my own, who might lead that body down the one safe path among millions. But what sense does that make? Even if such a man existed, the Church would cast him out.” He shook his head tightly, frustrated. “Too many futures, Vryce, and nearly all of them lead to failure. I can’t make out anything useful.”

He managed to keep his voice steady, though suddenly his heart was pounding. “There is a sorcerer in the Church, Gerald.”

“What? Where?” Then he waved a hand, dismissing the thought. “This was a man in control of things, Vryce. They would never give a sorcerer such authority.”

“They would if he were the Patriarch.” The look on Gerald Tarrant’s face was one he never thought he would see: pure, unadulterated astonishment. “The Patriarch? But how-?”

“He doesn’t know it. And I’m sure no one else has guessed. But I worked a Knowing in his presence once....”

And he told him about his conversations with the Holy Father. About the way the fae responded to the man, even though he couldn’t See it. About how it served his unconscious will even while his words denied its power.

“He’s a natural,” he concluded. “I’m sure of it.” Tarrant reached for the nearest chair and dropped himself heavily into it. It was clear that he hadn’t been braced for this kind of news. And how could he be? His own damnation had been assured by the Church’s rejection of any such power. How could he accept that suddenly the rules might change, without questioning his own existence? “An adept?” he breathed. “Could he be that also?”

“Is it possible?”

“You mean, could a man be bom with Sight and deny it? Block it so utterly that he never even knew it existed?” He hesitated. “It might be. So many infants die or go insane each year, that we think might have been fledgling adepts. Is it unreasonable to think that a newborn might learn to deny its fae-visions, when no other family member acknowledges their reality? God of Earth and Erna,” he whispered. There was a new note in his voice. Awe? “If so ... that would explain more than one Divination.”

“You think he would help us?” He tried to keep the doubt out of his voice, but it was hard. “Is that what you saw?”

“What I saw,” he said slowly, “was Calesta subverting a powerful man. I saw great vision and great stubbornness, that might be harnessed for a thousand different purposes. I saw a man destroying himself, unable to face his own potential... and that would make sense, if it is who you suggest. But I also saw this: in any future where the Church stood the least chance of survival, this man’s actions were pivotal.” He looked up sharply at Damien. "Pivotal, Vryce. In its literal sense. The man I saw could save the Church, but he could also destroy it.”

“Can you tell where those paths diverge?” he demanded. “What’s the catalyst? We can go after that.” Tarrant’s eyes were unfocused as he tried to remember what he’d Seen. At last he shook his head, clearly frustrated. “It was all too tangled to make out clearly.

He’s not even aware of his own power yet; how can ] read a future that depends upon such awareness?”

“What if he were?” he pressed. “What if he accepted it?”

The Hunter’s gaze fixed on him: diamondine, piercing. “You mean, what if he became a sorcerer in truth? Then he must face the condemnation of the Church as few men have known it... perhaps even the condemnation of his own soul. Would you wish that kind of torment on any man?”

Knowing the question for what it was, he met the Hunter’s gaze head-on. “No,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t wish that on any man.”

The Hunter turned away from him. Sensing that he needed the moment of privacy, Damien upended his bottle of ale once more. There was still nothing in it. “He must know the truth, then,” Tarrant said at last. “Or all our efforts are doomed to failure.”

“Yeah. Only who the hell is going to tell him?”

“Perhaps I—”

"No," he said sharply. “You’re right up there with the Unnamed as far as he’s concerned. If not worse. What good can you possibly do? Stay out of this one. I’ll think of ... something." Only, dear God ... what?

“Very well, then,” Tarrant muttered. It was clear he had misgivings about Damien’s judgment, but for now he was acquiescing. Thank God. “See what you can come up with. If not ... it need not be direct contact, you understand. Or anything he would connect with me.”

Realizing what he meant, Damien rose up from his seat as he warned, “Don’t you Work him! You understand me? We’re talking about something that could cost this man his soul; leave him his free will to face it with!” When Tarrant didn’t answer, he pressed, “You understand me, Gerald?”

The Hunter glared. “I understand.”

“Promise me.”

“Don’t be a fool! I said I understood. I respect your opinion, although I don’t agree with it. That’s more than most men have had of me. Leave it at that.”

“You’ll leave him alone?”

The Hunter’s tone was venemous. “I won’t compromise his free will, I’ll promise you that much. As for the rest ... find a safe way to enlighten him, or I’ll do what I must. The odds against us increase dramatically if he remains ignorant, and I won’t risk that just to coddle your overblown sense of morality.” Before Damien could protest again, he ordered, “You go see if the Church Archives have anything useful on the Iezu. I’ll Locate the local adepts, see if they have any notes of their own.” He shook his head angrily. “Damn Senzei Reese, for what he destroyed! If the man weren’t already dead, I’d kill him myself.”

For a moment there was silence between them, but it was a purely vocal phenomenon; the channel that linked them was alive with such hostile energy that Damien could hear the Hunter’s next words as clearly as if they had been spoken. Don’t press me for assurances I won’t give. All that you’ll accomplish by that is to strain the tenuous foundation of our alliance, and that would put us both at risk.

Tarrant started toward the door. Damien stepped forward quickly and put out a hand to stop him. With his other hand he reached into his pocket for the object he had stored there, drew it out, and offered it to the man. The Hunter’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What is it?”

“A key. Basement apartment in this building. It’s paid for.”

“For what? My lodging?” He stared at Damien as if the priest had suddenly gone mad. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll find myself a safe place—”

“This isn’t the rakhlands,” he snapped, “with miles between us and the enemy. He’s here, all around us. Can’t you feel it?” He held out the key toward him, urging him to take it. “There’s a bolt on the front door that can’t be opened from the outside. I boarded up all the windows. The landlady was paid well to leave you alone-she thinks you’re a rich eccentric—and I even checked the quake-wards on the building, to make sure they were sound.” When Tarrant made no move to take the key, he pressed, “Remember how he dealt with us? Divide and conquer. First Senzei, then you. Then Hesseth and me in the Terata’s realm. He’ll try it again, you can bet your undead soul on that. Let’s make it as hard as possible for him, okay?”

He glared at the key, but finally took it from Damien’s hand. “I’ll assess the danger myself,” he growled. “If the place seems safe ... I’ll consider it.”

“Good enough.” He stood back, giving Tarrant room to exit. At least one thing had gone right tonight; he had feared Tarrant wouldn’t take the key at all. God damn him for his stubborn, pigheaded independence. When the Hunter was gone, he went to the icebox, pulled out a fresh bottle of ale, and opened it with a sigh. Iezu and Unnamed demons, sadism and vengeance ... each separate thing was terrifying in its own right, and he had to deal with them all at once. Yet those threats paled to insignificance in the face of an even more daunting challenge, and he grimaced as he swallowed the cold ale, dreading it with all his heart and soul.

How the hell were they going to deal with the Patriarch?

9

The lobby of the Hotel Paradisic was a study in conspicuous consumption, and an effective one at that. While Narilka was critical of its aesthetic approach—too gilded for her taste, too discordant, the artificially aged paint of the ceiling murals at odds with the gleaming fresh quake-wards that guarded the entrance-there was no denying that its message came through loud and clear. Enter here, all ye who can afford it. And as for the rest of you, back to the streets. She was glad that she had once delivered a commissioned necklace to one of the luxury suites here, and thus could find her way about without having to ask for assistance; the check-in staff was cold to mere tradesmen.

She traversed two halls and a short flight of stairs, all carpeted in velvet. After that came what she sought: a door, and a number. Suite 5-A. She stared at the letters-neatly engraved on a flamboyant golden plaque—and suddenly wondered what the hell she was doing here. What did she think was going to happen? What did she want to happen? She nearly turned around and started home then and there, but the anticipation of Gresham’s certain scorn kept her from doing so. What’s the matter? he would demand. Lose your nerve? And after he had tried so hard to talk her out of coming here in the first place!

But Andrys Tarrant’s haunted face could not be banished from memory so easily, nor his eerie likeness to the Hunter dismissed so casually. At last she forced herself to raise up a hand and knock on the suite door, her heart pounding. You have a legitimate errand, she reminded herself. He’ll respect that, if nothing else. Again she tried, but there was no response. What if he wasn’t in? That was a real possibility, but not one she had prepared herself to face. Would she have to come back later and do this all over again?

“You’re gonna have to hit harder than that, honey.” The voice came from a uniformed maid several doors down the hallway. A heavyset woman, middle-aged, she grinned broadly as she told her, “They were up till all hours, that lot.” When she saw Narilka hesitate, she urged, “Go ahead, hit it like you mean it.”

She drew in a deep breath and did as the woman suggested. The sharp blows resounded in the hallway, and she half-expected some other lodger to appear to investigate. But long seconds passed and there was still no response. She knocked again, even harder. This time there was a shuffling sound from within the suite and murmurs of what might have been a human voice. She stepped back, wishing she could still the wild beating of her heart. Why couldn’t she face this man calmly?

After a moment the ornate handle turned and the heavy door swung open. “I thought I ordered-” Andrys Tarrant began. And then he saw her-saw who she was—and all speech left him. For a moment he just stared at her, his green eyes wide with astonishment. It was clear that she was the last person in the world he had ever expected to find on his doorstep. At last he whispered hoarsely, “Mes Lessing.” He was dressed in a loose white shirt and crumpled pants, and had obviously just rolled out of bed. His golden-brown hair was tangled about his head, his eyes faintly bloodshot. He blinked heavily and drew in a deep breath; he was clearly struggling to compose himself. “I didn’t... I’m sorry ... I thought it was breakfast.”

She glanced toward the hall window with a smile, acknowledging the fading sunlight. “Little late for that, isn’t it?”

He brushed the hair back from his face with a hand that seemed to tremble slightly; a lock of hair fell back across his eyes as soon as he released it. “I had a late night,” he managed. Then a smile flitted across his face: awkward, self-conscious, but sparked with genuine humor. “Or maybe I should say, a late morning. I didn’t expect company today, that’s for sure." Least of all you, his expression seemed to say. For a moment she wondered if she shouldn’t make some apology for disturbing him and just give him the item he had left in the shop, so that she could beat a hasty retreat. It seemed a more merciful course for both of them. But then he stepped back, giving her room to enter. “Come in. Please.”

She did so, acutely aware of his closeness as she passed by him. “If this is a bad time—”

“Not at all. Really.” He closed the door gently behind her; she barely heard the latch snap shut. “We played late, that’s all. I should have been up hours ago.” He dared to meet her eyes then, and it seemed to her he hesitated. “Forgive my poor manners. If I’d thought it was you at the door ...”

The words faded into silence. He brushed awkwardly at his crumpled attire, ran his hand again through his mussed hair; he was clearly not accustomed to receiving women in such a disordered state, “I’m hardly dressed for company,” he dared.

Despite herself she smiled. “It’s my fault. I should have let you know I was coming. If you’d like to change ...” Why did his awkward vanity attract rather than repel her? So many other men with similar qualities had done just the opposite. “I can wait.”

He brightened visibly at the suggestion. “If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“I’m sure,” she assured him. She was offering him more than a minute in which to change his clothing, she knew that. She was giving him time to adjust to her presence, a few precious moments of privacy in which to compose himself. And she’d be giving herself the same thing, too. She wondered which of them needed it more.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he told her. “I promise.” His bedroom was apparently at the far side of the parlor; he made his way there hurriedly, awkwardly, clearly conscious of her gaze upon him. Not until he was safely inside, with the door shut behind him, did she dare to draw in a deep breath and try to relax. Infinitely grateful that circumstances had gifted her with a minute in which to do so.

She looked about at the apartment he had chosen, a master suite in one of the city’s most expensive hotels. The parlor was as lavish as the lobby had been, but infinitely more tasteful. It was decorated in the Revivalist style: high vaulted ceiling, polished stone floor with finely patterned rugs, slender windows with stained-glass caps. The furniture had been chosen to match that style, all except for half a dozen gilt chairs that were gathered around a table at one end of the room. Those were lighter and more graceful in form than the rest of the decor, and were clearly inspired by a later period; the stylistic mismatch seemed jarring to her, but she doubted that the hotel’s guests would be sensitive enough to notice it. There were cards strewn across the table and two dozen bottles of various sizes on and about it. Drawing closer, she saw piles of wooden chips set before two places, others scattered across the silken tablecloth. There were several bottles on the floor as well, and one bright red thing that winked at her from underneath a—chair. She leaned down to see what it was, then picked it up. A woman’s shoe: high-heeled, velvet covered, smelling faintly of wine. Holding it in her hand, imagining its owner, she felt suddenly faint. What am I doing here? What do I know about this man? She tried to put the shoe down, but her hand wouldn’t release it. This isn’t my world.

“I bought that for two hundred, so she could stay in the game.”

It was Andrys, dressed now. He walked toward her with an easy grace, as if his confidence had been restored along with his attire. Gently he took the shoe from her and placed it on the table, his fingers brushing hers as he did so; the touch left fire in its wake. “I’d have gotten the other one, too, if her luck hadn’t changed for the better.”

He had put on a sleeveless jacket, black velveteen with narrow bands of dull gold trim; it fit him tightly, a deliberate contrast to the flowing white sleeves which accentuated his shoulders. In such attire, with his golden-brown hair gleaming, his green eyes alive with flirtatious energy ... no woman could resist him, Narilka thought. Least of all she, who had so little practice in such things.

“How was your luck?” she managed. He grinned. “Pretty good, until about three a.m. After that... it’s all kind of hazy.” He ran a hand through his hair again, as if trying to force it back into place; it fell back in his eyes as soon as he released it. “So what brings you here, to this den of iniquity? I can hardly believe I made such a good impression the last time we met.”

She managed to look away from him long enough to find the object she had brought for him; drawing it forth from her shoulder bag she explained, “You left this at the shop.” Rolled canvas, nearly two feet in length: she held it out to him, an offering. “Gresham was going to mail it, but parcel service is pretty slow around here; I thought you might need it sooner than that.”

He didn’t take it. He didn’t respond. For a moment he just stared at the rolled-up canvas with an odd look on his face, as though it were the last thing in the world he wanted to see. At last he said, in a voice that was strangely distant, “Did you look at it?” She shook her head.

With a sigh he shut his eyes. “I thought I might have lost it on the street. I made myself go back and search, but there was no sign of it. I think I was ... relieved.” He put his hand on the roll of canvas but didn’t take it from her; his hand was so close to hers that she could feel its heat. “I guess I owe you an explanation” he said quietly. The words were clearly hard for him. “That other day, in your shop—”

Someone knocked on the door then, hard; the sharp noise made Narilka jump.

“Room service,” he muttered. He went to answer it.

She followed more slowly, the canvas roll still in her hand. What was inside it, that upset him so greatly? It had taken all her self-control not to look at it there in the shop, when she had found it, but she’d wanted to respect his privacy. Now a part of her regretted that choice.

Andrys opened the door, and a uniformed hotel employee wheeled a small cart into the room. When he was done Andrys reached into his jacket pocket for a suitable tip, then spilled coins into the man’s hand without even checking their value. What was such small change to him? His manner made it clear that he expected the servant to withdraw immediately, and the man was quick to obey. The tray he had brought in was neatly laid out with breakfast, Narilka observed, each item in its place, each accessory expensive: toast and pancakes on a silver tray, coffee in an engraved carafe, slices of pale fruit and some nondescript cereal in bowls of translucent china. All of it balanced on a fussy little cart that suited the hotel’s lobby better than it did this sleek Revivalist chamber.

Avoiding her eyes, Andrys studied the hotel’s offering. At last he shrugged. “It seemed a lot more appetizing when I ordered it yesterday.” He lifted the coffee cup and studied it intently, as though its rim harbored some great secret. Refusing to look at her. Finally he put it down, and after a long and awkward silence dared, “Have you eaten?” The question startled her. “I’m sorry?” He looked at her then, and the intensity of his gaze made her heart skip a beat. “Have you eaten yet?” he asked again.

Despite herself she smiled. “Most people have, this time of day.”

“Recently?” he amended. “I had lunch. That was a while ago.”

“Then come to dinner with me. Please. I hate to discuss serious matters on an empty stomach. And this ...” he faltered for a moment, then continued with forced humor. “This place is hardly conducive to confession.”

Though she knew she should leave the question unasked, she couldn’t help but voice it. “Is that what this is about? Confession?”

Something sharp and hot flashed in the depths of his eyes. Pain? Fear? Maybe both. He turned away. “Yeah. I’m afraid so.”

“What about this?” She held out the canvas toward him, offering him its secrets.

He reached out and closed his hand over hers. Warm, strong ringers: the touch was electric. This close to him she could smell his cologne, subtle but sensual. A delicate musky scent, precisely calculated to appeal.

Men that attractive are dangerous, Gresham had warned her. Especially when they know their own power.

Sweet, sweet danger. She could drown in it, gladly.

He whispered: “Bring it.”

He led them to a restaurant. It didn’t surprise her that he knew such a place, a shadowed hideaway where lovers might whisper sweet endearments in the privacy of high-walled booths. Doubtless he had brought women here before, for more blatantly amorous purposes. The hostess gave them a table near the rear of the restaurant, in a section that was all but deserted. In such a place one might comfortably court a lover, she thought. Or share terrible secrets. Or both.

They ordered drinks, a house wine, and braised fillets of a local fish. They made small talk over sauteed dumplings, frothy mousse, steamed coffee. He asked about her work, and seemed to be genuinely interested in the details of her art. Was that real enthusiasm, or a prelude to seduction, rehearsed so many times with so many women that it now seemed natural to him? How could one hope to tell them apart? In return, she asked him about his journey to Jaggonath. She discovered that he had never traveled out of his region before this, but she could not get him to tell her why he had done so now. And through it all she waited, watching as he tried to build up his courage, drawing strength from rituals of courtship so familiar to him that he probably could have played them with his eyes closed. Sensing the darkness that was within him, not knowing how to address it.

At last he pushed his coffee away with a sigh and shut his eyes. It seemed to her that he was in pain-or remembering pain, perhaps. Finally he dared, “The other day ...” It was clearly meant as a beginning, but the words seemed to catch in his throat. After a minute, hoping to help him, she urged, “At the shop?”

He nodded stiffly, then looked away. “God, this is so awkward. I just want to explain....”

When he faltered once more she prompted softly, “Go on.” Her hand rested upon his, a gentle reassurance. “I’m listening.”

At last, with great effort, he managed, “What do you know about Merentha?”

“Not much,” she admitted. “A few basics from history class, and from seismics. Very little, really.”

“My family’s lived there for nearly ten centuries. They ... you might say we founded the place. Thrived there. It was a well established family, highly respected, active in civil service through most of its generations. Its founder ...” He faltered then, and shook his head as if rejecting” that line of disclosure. “I was the youngest of the main line, but there were others. So many others ...” She could feel his hand trembling now beneath her own. “Five years ago ... I was out all night....” He lowered his head, his shoulders trembling, and raised up his other hand as if to shield his face; clearly he was remembering that time, reliving some secret pain. “Just like any other night,” he whispered. “Or so it seemed. I came home ... I had no idea anything was wrong, you see, no reason to expect it.... I came home.” He looked up at her, but his eyes were focused upon another time, another plane. “They were dead,” he whispered, his voice shaking as he relived the past. “Murdered. All of them. The floor was covered with their blood....” He lowered his head once more, overwhelmed by the memory. She longed to comfort him, to seek out some gentle words which would bring him back to the present, but the shock of his revelation had left her momentarily speechless. Because she knew about this tragedy. She remembered it. And the family name which had seemed vaguely familiar to her now sharpened into clear and horrible focus.

“That was you,” she breathed. Remembering the headlines. Bloody details splayed across local newspaper headings for months, exploitive articles that dwelled on every horrific aspect of the crime. And on every perceived weakness of the one survivor. "You." He managed to look up at her. “I was wondering how long it would take you,” he said bitterly. "The murder of the century, they called it. It must have made all the papers.”

Stunned, she whispered, “They thought you did it.” He nodded tightly. “They wanted to punish someone, and I was the obvious candidate. The youngest son of the Tarrant line, selfish, undisciplined, the black sheep of the clan ... it was no great secret that the family and I fought a lot, usually about money. And it was likewise no secret that the slaughter of every other Tarrant had guaranteed me an inheritance that many men would kill for. As you can see,” he said bitterly, indicating his person: the rich clothes, the fine jewelry, the air of easy wealth. “Only I would never have killed for that. Not my own family! I could never....”

She tightened her hand about his, and it seemed to her that his pain flowed through the contact. Maybe it did. Maybe the fae was so stirred by his emotion that it allowed her to glimpse the very core of his despair, unmasked by social repartee, unfettered by the bonds of language. The sheer intensity of it left her breathless. She could only hope that the same faeborn link would allow her to give something of herself in return, if only a shadow of emotional support. Even that little, she sensed, was more than he’d had in years. “Of course not,” she whispered. He took a deep drink of wine; it seemed to lend him strength. “The trial lasted over a year,” he told her. “It seemed like forever. A year of having to relive that dreadful night over and over again, so that strangers could pick it apart for incriminating details. I thought I’d go crazy. I nearly did. There are whole segments of time I don’t remember now, parts of the trial I’ve blocked. I was so close to the edge back then. Once I even tried to give up all the money, to sign away my inheritance in the hope that they would take that for proof of my innocence. I guess it seemed the only way, at the time. My lawyers stopped me. Thank God.” He laughed bitterly; his hand tightened into a fist beneath her grasp. “What did I know about earning a living? What did I understand of poverty? They knew. They gave me meaningless forms to sign, and didn’t tell me the truth until the fit had passed. Thank God for them. Thank God.”

She made her voice as gentle as it could become. “So what happened?”

“The state let me go, in the end. Not because it judged me innocent, but because it considered me incompetent. I was a wastrel, a freeloader, a waste of human life ... but I wasn’t a murderer. Wasn’t capable of murder.” He drew in a deep breath. “They had that right, at least. Maybe all of it. I don’t know.”

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t think that.” He lowered his head again, trembling. “I didn’t want to tell you. God knows, I didn’t want to tell anyone. But when I tried on the armor at your shop ... it all came back to me, then. All of it at once, all the blood and the fear and the hopelessness——”

“Why?” she asked him. Trying to understand the connection. When he didn’t answer for several long seconds, she pressed him gently. “What does the armor have to do with all this?”

In answer he disentangled his hand from hers—reluctantly, she thought—and reached across the table. The canvas roll had been tied shut with a slender cord; unknotting it, he set the string aside. He made room to spread the canvas out on the table, then did so. Handling it gently but firmly, hands trembling as he unrolled it. It was an old piece which had been torn and repaired more than once; stripes of tape had yellowed across its back, eating into the linen canvas. As he unrolled it, she saw aged paint, a webwork of fine cracks, the edges of a piece that had been hastily and carelessly hacked from a larger painting—And then it was laid out before her, and she saw. “Oh, my gods,” she whispered. Stunned. The painting was part of a formal portrait, and it was marked with several parallel slashes where a knife had scored the canvas. The object of the portrait was a young man, and even this tattered remnant of a larger painting conveyed the power of his presence, the beauty of his person. Tall, slender, he wore a breastplate emblazoned with a golden sun and a coronet decorated with mythological figures. That breastplate. That coronet. Fine golden-brown hair flowed down about his shoulders, tousled by an unseen wind. Gray eyes, cool and dominant, met the viewer’s own as if there were some living will behind them. Sardonic, seductive. Seeing him rendered thus, Narilka felt herself tremble. Because there there was no mistaking the portrait’s subject. And no denying that she knew him all too intimately. The Hunter.

“Who is it?” she managed. Finding her voice at last. “Gerald Tarrant. Founder of my family line, first Neocount of Merentha.” He hesitated; when he spoke again she sensed him picking his way through his words carefully, perhaps choosing which facets of the story to reveal to her. “In his day ... he slaughtered all his kin. All but one. His son returned home to find ... what I found ... it was he who did this.” He indicated the slash marks in the canvas, their edges cracked and yellowing. "That’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Do you understand? Not my face, but his. A man who could murder his entire family....”

“Shh. It’s over now.” She took his hands in hers, wanning them gently. “The armor’s just a piece of metal. And the coronet. No more.” It hurt her inside, to know what the next words had to be-her artist’s soul rebelled at the thought-but she knew they had to be said. “If they cause you pain, then destroy them. Unmake them. Commission something else, which has a better meaning for you.”

The green eyes were fixed on her, their surface glistening; were those tears gathering in the corners? “I could never destroy your work,” he whispered.

“It’s only metal,” she assured him. Trying to make the words come easily, so that he wouldn’t sense how much this was costing her. “We can melt it down and make something worthwhile out of it. Something equally beautiful, that doesn’t have memories attached.”

He managed a wry smile. “Your boss would hardly approve of that.”

“Some things are more important than Gresham’s approval,” she assured him.

And for a moment, in his eyes, it seemed that she could see into the core of him. Sensing a frightened young man who had thought that the world would always indulge his pleasures, now forced into a hellish maturity of fear and isolation. All that, masked to perfection by this practiced persona: gambler, seducer, carefree aristocrat. Where was the real Andrys Tarrant, balanced between those extremes? How did one begin to seek him out?

“I could never destroy your work,” he repeated. His hand turned over beneath hers, catching her fingers in a warm embrace. “And having these pieces restored ... it’s part of my healing. Supposed to be, anyway.” He shook his head. “I don’t really understand it. But someone I ...” He hesitated, as if seeking the proper word. “Someone I trust advised me to have these things made, and I believe in him. Enough to try it.” He laughed sadly. “Even if I can’t for the life of me see how it’s supposed to help.”

His hand folded tightly over hers: warm contact, hungry touch. She could sense the need in him, not just for communion of the spirit but a far more substantive interaction. Passion and intimacy were allied within him; it was hard for him to seek out one without the other.

“Thank you,” he said at last. “Thank you for listening. For giving me a chance.”

“I wish I could do more,” she said quietly. Knowing the words for the opening they were. Not even sure of how she meant them. “To help.”

The bright eyes glittered, viridescent in the darkness. “You’ve done more than any woman has for years. Or any man, for that matter.”

“Even your lawyers?” she eluded gently. Aware that her heart was pounding anew, in response to words not even being said.

“In a way,” he said softly. He drew up her hand to his lips, and kissed it gently. Soft touch, gently erotic; she felt fire spreading up her arm, fanning out from the contact.

“Come,” he whispered. “It’s getting late. I’ll walk you home.”

He made no move to call for the check, but laid a handful of coins on the table that would have paid for such a meal three times over. Then he helped her out of the booth, his touch warm upon her arm, his manner at once protective and possessive. The waiters did not question his leaving before a bill had been rendered, which meant that he had done this many, many times before. With how many women? she wondered. Had they all trembled like she did at his touch, or were they veterans of the same game, who knew what words and special gestures might be employed to maintain control of each move?

It was a long walk to her apartment, for which she was grateful. She needed the long dark streets, half-abandoned, quiet. She needed time to pull herself together. He walked by her side companionably enough, but she could sense the tension in him. Pain. Uncertainty. Desire. She could feel his warmth near her arm as their steps brought them close to each other, as his hand almost-almost-reached out and took hers. So very close. Her skin tingled with the nearness of him, but she was afraid to initiate any contact. What would such an act signify in his world, in that endless round of courtship and flirtation which was his normal venue? How did one approach a man like this, without giving him license to claim one’s soul?

And then: Her building. Her stairs. Two flights of them, wide and well-lit. A landing, with four doors. He let her lead the way, to the third door in line. Keys. They were somewhere. She fumbled for them, fearing to look at him. Afraid she would get lost in his eyes forever if she did. Afraid she might wake up in the morning to find him beside her and never know how he had gotten there, or if he would ever leave. Or if she ever wanted him to leave.

Then he took her face gently in one hand-ever so gently, a butterfly’s touch could not have been lighter—and tipped her head back until she was looking right at him. Warm eyes, living eyes, not like the Hunter’s at all. And yet the two men were linked, not just in appearance but in essence. The Hunter’s passion had sired this man; the Hunter’s blood ran in his veins. How could she look at Andrys Tarrant and not feel the power of his forebear’s presence?

“Thank you,” he said softly. “For listening.” His fingers stroked her cheek gently as he spoke, sending shivers down her spine. “It’s been a long time since anyone did that.”

She tried to respond, but the words caught in her throat. His fingers moved into her hair, twining amidst the dark strands. Sweet, possessive caress. “I ...” she whispered, but the rest of the words were all gone. Lost, as all of language was lost to her now.

He studied her for a moment and then leaned down to kiss her slowly-oh, gods, so slowly-so that she might pull away if she wanted to, drawing her close to him, one arm about her waist now and one hand entangled in her hair, his lips warm and so very sweet against her own. With a soft moan she shut her eyes, and her keys fell to the floor with a clatter as she clung to him, her heart pounding wildly against his chest. So close that she could feel the ridges of gold braid pressing against her breasts, the caress of fine silk against her cheek. She trembled as she held him, frightened by the hunger she sensed in him, even more frightened by that which she sensed in herself. Never in her life had she felt such an utter lack of control—

And then the moment was over. He drew back from her slightly but did not release her. Studying her, she thought. Assessing her response. And what if he decided to press on with this evening’s sport? She had no strength to resist this man, she realized that now. Even more: she had no desire to resist him.

But he stepped back, gently, his fingers releasing her hair with obvious reluctance, stroking her cheek as they withdrew. His fingertips left lines of fire on her skin, that spread heat throughout her body. It took everything she had not to move into his arms again, to invite a more lasting intimacy. Then, suddenly, his feet brushed the keys on the floor; the unexpected noise shattered the fragile moment like glass. With a smile he stooped down and scooped them up, then placed them in her hand. Gently he folded her fingers over them, each motion a tiny caress.

“I’d like to see you again,” he said quietly. “I would like that,” she whispered. Somehow managing to get the words out.

She thought that he would kiss her again-it seemed that he almost did-but instead he drew back from her. He was going to leave, she realized. Now. Before ... Without ... She didn’t know if she was more relieved or disappointed.

“I’ll call on you,” he promised. And then he stepped away from her, and he bowed ever so slightly-an outdated gesture, so ridiculous for others, so graceful for him—and with a parting smile he strode casually down the stairs. Owning her soul, as perfectly as if he had stayed the night to claim it in passion.

Head pounding, knees weak, she leaned against the door to her apartment and tried to catch her breath.

Dear gods, she prayed. Even her inner voice was shaking. What have I gotten myself into?

He could have done it, he thought. Could have had her tonight. Could have lost himself in the heat of her body, drowned out his sorrow in a few desperate hours of pleasure.

But he hadn’t. And that wasn’t like him. What had happened?

Walking down the night-shrouded streets, he struggled to comprehend his own feelings. What made this woman so unnerving? What made him so uncertain about how to handle her? Surely it wasn’t a fear of impotence this time; his body had signaled its willingness to cooperate hours ago. So what was the problem? Fate had provided him with a cool, clear night and a beautiful woman, and hours of leisure to have his way with both.... Only I don’t want to hurt her, he thought. It was a strange sensation. Usually he didn’t care what happened to women once they left his arms; the stronger ones came back for more, the weaker ones would learn to be more careful in the future. But this girl... she awakened wholly new feelings within him, emotions he didn’t even know how to name, much less respond to. The thought that he might cause her pain for an instant, even by so harmless a vehicle as seduction, was unbearable to him. And he had seen the fear in her eyes. Pleasure-also, and a hunger to match his own, but the fear was there. And he couldn’t bear to make that worse. Not for any price.

He remembered her touch on his hand, in the restaurant. So tender. So caring. When was the last time a woman had really cared about him? Or anyone, for that matter? When was the last time he’d kissed a woman and sensed nothing but pleasure in her-not some cold calculation of how much he was worth, how much he might be enticed to spend on her, how much she might manage to get from him in the long run if she played her cards right? It had been bad in the days before his family’s death, but a thousand times worse afterward, when the whole Tarrant fortune was his. It was all part of the game, he’d told himself. He’d come to expect it, and learned not to be bitter.

But this woman was different. This woman, when she kissed him—

He had to stop in the street for a moment, as the memory of that experience overwhelmed him. How long had it been since he had felt such acute desire for a woman? His hands shook as he remembered the silken smoothness of her hair between his fingers, the velvet softness of her cheek. Her scent was alive in his nostrils, sweet natural perfume more perfect than any man-made imitation. The desire he felt was more intense than any sensation which drugs might have spawned, and for the first time in months it occurred to him that he might make it through a night without some artificial aid to support him. Just memories. Just sweet, tantalizing memories, melding into erotic dreams before the dawn.

With quickened step he hastened toward the hotel. The gambling rooms would be open by now, spreading their heavy doors wide to greet the night; perhaps he should take to the card table and see what fortune this mood could win him. Who could say what wagers he might not win tonight, with energy like this pouring through his veins?

But gambling no longer meant to. him what it once did, and even the prospect of such a triumph was not enough to tempt him into the company of strangers tonight. Inheriting the Tarrant fortune had accomplished what all the stern disapproval of his family never could, and soured the taste of such games forever. Oh, he still played, but it was more for sport than fortune now; his only real delight was in breaking those whose skill or audacity made them seemed charmed, in pitting his fae-luck against their own. And finding such men required prowling the casinos like a hunter, alert for the smell of rich and arrogant prey ... no, he was not in the mood for such games tonight.

Maybe a whore, he thought, as he climbed the gleaming numarble stairs at the Paradisio’s entrance. Nodding to the very doorman who had so recently challenged his right to enter the lavish hotel. With the right money and some connections he could probably find himself a pale, slender girl; if not one with jet-black hair, then one who would be willing to dye it for a price. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time he had used his wealth to purchase a fantasy. What would that be like, he wondered, to douse the night’s fire in a woman so like her....

Only there was no one like her, he knew that. The complex essence of womanhood that so affected him with Narilka Lessing could not be found in a whore. And if he thought that imagination alone could bridge such a gap, that it would be enough to have any pale, black-haired woman spread out beneath him ... then he was asking for failure yet again. And he had tasted enough of that experience in the last few years to last him a lifetime.

No, he thought, as he headed toward his suite, the memory would be enough for tonight. A memory that would meld into sweet dreams when he retired, for once unobscured by a haze of drugs or the bitter distortion of alcohol. Because tonight he felt no need for drugs or liquor, or even a passing desire for them. He was drunk on this girl, (so slender, so fragile, not even his type!) and it was a heady intoxication. Far more intense than mere drugs could supply.

Optimism stirred within him, an unfamiliar emotion. If he could make it through one night without artificial aids, could he do it again at some future date? Could he perhaps, in time, learn to take control of his life again? The concept was elating. Maybe when this nightmare was over, maybe if Gerald Tarrant died and he survived, he could start his life all over and do it right—

“Welcome home,” Calesta greeted him.

His fragile hopes expired in an instant, smothered by the power of the demon’s presence; a cold and hungry hate took its place. The transition was so swift that it was physically stunning, and it was a long moment before Andrys could pull himself together enough to close the suite’s door, so that none might hear them. And an even longer moment before he could find his voice.

“What do you want?”

The demon chuckled coldly. “Hardly a suitable welcome for your ally.”

He drew in a deep breath, struggling for control. Trying to recover his image of the girl, his fragile hopes, anything of the last half hour ... but his effort was in vain. Such gentle emotions had no place in Calesta’s presence.

At last he stammered, “Why are you here?”

“You wanted instructions. I came to supply them.”

He dared to look up at the demon, to meet those inhuman eyes head-on. “Why now?” he challenged him. “I’ve called to you often enough. I’ve begged for instruction! Why come to me now, the one night I don’t need you?”

The demon hissed softly; the sound reminded Andrys of a snake about to strike. “You don’t need me?”

The threat behind Calesta’s words chilled him to the core. I could leave you alone forever. Then what would you have? Hurriedly he struggled to explain himself. “I didn’t mean ... it’s just ... tonight....”

The demon laughed; the harsh, grating sound made Andrys quail. “You poor fool! Is it the girl who inspires such courage? You found yourself a single night’s comfort and now the battle is over?” His voice was a jagged thing, that scraped Andrys’ skin like shards of glass. “And what do you think the Hunter will do when he finds out that his mortal enemy has fallen for a woman? Do you think really think he’ll allow you that comfort, once our battle is fully joined? Or any other? You’re a walking death sentence, Andrys Tarrant, and anyone you touch-anyone who touches you-will be felled by it. Or did you think that you could make war on the Hunter without him striking back?”

The room seemed to swirl about him. He reached for a chair and somehow managed to fall into it, heavily. His hands seemed numb; his heart was ice.

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten what manner of creature you’ve sworn to fight.” The demon paused. “Perhaps I should remind you.”

“No—”

Memories swirled about him, horrific images all too familiar. A hundred times more intense than what he had recalled in the restaurant, a thousand times more horrible. The dismembered head of Samiel Tarrant gazed down at him from its grisly throne, a sardonic smile twisting its lips. Dared to dream of love, did you? The bloodsoaked eyes narrowed in amusement. What makes think you’re worthy of loving anyone?

“Make it stop,” he begged. Shutting his eyes, trying to shut out the visions. Samiel staring at him. Betrise. All of them. “Please. Make it stop!”

The visions faded. His hands, white-knuckled, gripped the chair with painful pressure.

“I think we understand each other,” the demon assessed.

Shaken, he whispered hoarsely, “What do you want me to do?”

“You will go to the cathedral in the great square of Jaggonath. You will attend the services of your God. Pray with your fellows as Gerald Tarrant instructed, as if you intended to fulfill his misplaced vision.”

It seemed to Andrys that there must surely be more instructions, but the demon said no more. After a long moment of silence Andrys dared, “And then what?”

“That’s all. For now.”

“I don’t understand,” he protested weakly. “How will that hurt him?”

The demon hissed sharply. “Do you question me now? Or doubt my plans? A thousand elements must all be orchestrated to perfection in order to bring the Hunter down, and you’re just one of them! Go where I tell you. Do what I say. Your own hand will bring about Gerald Tarrant’s downfall, I promise you.” He paused. “Or isn’t that enough for you?”

He lowered his head, lacking the strength-or was it the courage?-to argue. “It’s enough,” he whispered. “I’ll go.”

“Every sabbath. You understand? I want you to be seen there. One of the faithful.”

“I understand.”

The gift came then, inserted into his brain with sure demonic skill, the ultimate reward for obedience: visions of vengeance that flooded his soul, catching him up in a whirlwind of anticipated triumph. He fought it for a moment, clinging to the gentleness of his former mood like a lifeline—and then it swept him away and he was lost in it, lost in a hatred and a blood lust and a hunger for revenge so desperate that he shook as it swept through him. It lasted forever and yet it could not last long enough, and when it was over he collapsed back into the chair, shaking from the sudden withdrawal.

“Someday those dreams will become reality,” the demon promised. “Think of the pleasure of that moment! Worth more than a little sacrifice now, I should think.”

He said nothing. He had no words. The memory of the girl was hazy now, unclear, its outlines obscured by clouds of blood. Had he imagined that he might love? Where was there room for love in this life of his, lived in the Hunter’s shadow?

“There is something else,” the demon warned him.

“What?” he choked out. What more than this?

“He’ll never kill you because you’re the last living Tarrant. That’s what makes you capable of striking back at him; under any other circumstances such a move would be suicidal.” He paused meaningfully. “But what would happen if another Tarrant were born? Maybe not one to whom you gave the name, but one who might, in time, lay claim to it.”

“But I never-” he began.

And then what the demon was saying hit him. It hit him hard.

“I think that you should be careful where you spill your seed, Andrys Tarrant. Because the moment you impregnate a woman-any woman—the Hunter will have no more reason to spare you.” In a chilling tone he added, “And I doubt very much that he would be merciful in killing you, after you so flagrantly defied him.”

Andrys shut his eyes tightly; fear churned coldly in his gut. Dear God in Heaven! how many chances had he already taken, never thinking, never realizing.. .. Oh, he had always been careful, but sex was a gambler’s game and he knew it; sooner or later even the best contraceptive might betray you. And if so ... if so ...

“I see that my meaning is clear,” the demon approved.

Something landed in his lap, startling him; it was a moment before he could muster the physical control to take it up, and even then his fingers seemed numb. A small object, that rattled when it moved. Cool glass, with a rubber stopper. Pills.

“I thought you might need them,” Calesta said dryly. “After all, we have a long battle ahead of us. I would hate to see you lose your nerve.”

The coldness in the room faded; the demon was gone. Andrys gripped the bottle in his hand, feeling hot tears squeeze from his eyes. What color were the pills, what essence was their magic? It didn’t matter. They all brought forgetfulness, one way or another. They were all ways of escaping this world, with its inescapable nightmares. The only escape there was, other than death.

His hand clenched tightly around the bottle, Andrys Tarrant wept.

10

The Patriarch dreamed of war.

... hundreds on the mountainside, maybe thousands, men and women, priests and layfolk, and the energy that arises from them ripples in the air overhead, like heat ...

... armor in bits and pieces, mismatched ...

... and banners: the circle, the Earth-in-circle, and some that are simply red. Red for blood, red for triumph, red for cleansing....

... These are my people, he thinks, and he gazes out upon them in wonder. These are my people, who only yesterday brought down a pagan temple and terrorized its faithful. These are my people, who were willing to risk imprisonment and worse to vent their intolerance, and now are channeling all that negative energy into this blessed enterprise. These are my people, who may die on the morrow or live to go home again, but who will never forget this moment, or its transforming power.

He walks among the troops, his children, looking for familiar faces among the scores of strangers. There are people here from all across the continent, come to test their faith in this special arena. He loves them. He loves them as one loves children. He loves them as the birds must love, when they push their babies out of the nest to force their wings to open. It is a special and terrible love, and he thanks God for letting him taste it.

Over the mountains, beyond vision but not beyond march, lies the Forest. Heart of evil by man’s own decree, it is a symbol more powerful than any the Church could devise. Men are drawn to it, obsessed by it, and many will die fighting it in the battle yet to come. But it will not be as it was before, five hundred years ago in the age of their defeat. This time they will use the tools that Erna has provided, and focus their energies on one single point within that corrupted realm. Night’s keep—Hell’s watch—the Hunter’s lair. Destroy it and the Forest will shake. Destroy its owner and the Forest will crumble, its power soured to chaos, its very earth made malleable by that action.

Five hundred years ago the Church tried to conquer a universe, and reaped its own devastation. This time they make war against a symbol, and all the power of God will back them. He feels the thrill of that utter certainty as he looks out over his troops, as his eyes fix upon the one special weapon which will make their invasion possible—

He awoke. His heart was beating loudly, and he lay still while it slowly quieted. His fists were clenched by his sides; he forced them to open. Was this the third time he’d had that dream, or the fourth? It clearly wasn’t a clairvoyancy, as so many other dreams were, but the scent of prophecy clung to it nonetheless. Should he take it seriously or dismiss it, as he had done before? Surely persistence should translate to something.

With a groan he got out of his bed and drew on a robe that lay waiting for him. The heavy silk overlapped tightly about a body that was losing weight from its battle with stress, and tonight it seemed that even his slippers were loose. He was wasting away along with his people, he thought. Some day he would be gone entirely, and only a shadow would remain to guide them.

Leaving his bedroom, he walked down the narrow corridor that led to his private chapel. The servant who was posted outside it against his midnight need jumped to his feet as he came by, startled into sudden waking by his footsteps on the hardwood floor, but he waved him back to his slumber. His was a need that could only be met in solitude.

At the end of the corridor was the door to the chapel. He opened it and stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. There were candles burning beside the altar-it was the servant’s job to keep them alight at night-but their illumination was minimal, and most of the chamber was shrouded in shadow. He came to the altar and knelt before it, and all the fear and the doubt which he had been cloistering within his heart came pouring out, an undertide to prayer.

Most holy God, whose Eye is upon us always, whose Word is our salvation. Grant me the grace of Your Insight, that I may serve Your Will more perfectly.

It wasn’t the first night he’d come here since the dreams started, and if he stayed until dawn to pray, it wouldn’t be the first time that happened either. And now this dream was back, and he was no less tormented by it than he had been the last time, or the time before. Because it promised him an answer to his problems, and at the same time posed an even greater question. If it was a true prophecy-if this battle was the course that God intended for him-what would the cost of it be? Not to him, or to the men who fought beside him, but to the generations that would come after?

How tempting it is to live in that dream, where all my people’s hatred and destructive energy can be redirected against a more suitable enemy. How tempting, to imagine that the catharsis of battle can wipe our souls clean of this violence. But that’s not how the human mind works. If we indulge our darker instincts, if we tell ourselves that yes, they are acceptable if properly channeled—even admirable, under the right circumstances—what do we do when this battle is over? How do we make these soldiers into plain men and women again, and cleanse them of their taste for blood so that they might retire to normal lives? How do we teach them to savor the peace their efforts have won them, rather than seek a new forum for violence?

He had been tormented by those questions since his first dream of battle. It was a torment which only grew worse as the riots continued, as night after night he was called from his bed or his study chamber to witness some new act of violence. All in the name of God, the rioters claimed. Couldn’t they see that by worshiping violence they had created a new god, who was slowly consuming them? That worried him far more than the lawsuits, which might drain his Church of economic vigor but could never quell its spirit. This violence threatened the very heart of who and what they were.

And then there was Vryce’s report. He felt himself tense up at the mere thought of the man, at the name which now automatically inspired his rage. But whatever he might think of Vryce himself, the report could not be ignored. How did the Iezu demon Calesta connect to all of this? Was he the unseen instigator in this wave of violence? If so, then it would do little good to address human issues in the matter. Any solution which the Church pursued would succeed only up until the point when Calesta was willing to strike again. How did you fight a creature who could read the darkness in men’s hearts and stoke it to such new strength, as naturally as a man drew breath?

He lowered his head to pray again, but a faint sound from behind him alerted him to the presence of someone or something else in the room. He turned about slowly, expecting no more than a young acolyte with a message to bear, or perhaps his chamber-servant coming to see if there was anything he needed. What he saw was something else again, and he rose to his feet quickly, wondering how a stranger had gotten in past his private guard.

The stranger stepped forward as he watched, just far enough that the candlelight could pick out highlights along his pale, aristocratic features. He was tall and slender, and dressed in a manner that was at once modern and reminiscent of the Revival period. Flame-born highlights played upon shoulder length hair, and sparked along die gold headband that held it in place. His features were so unmarked by worldly trouble that his face might have seemed that of an angel, had the eyes not been so dark, so hungry, so ... empty.

“Do you know who I am?” The man’s voice was clear and fine and his words, though no louder than a whisper, seemed to echo in the small chamber like some strange music. The Patriarch studied him, and then nodded. Yes, he knew. Vryce’s sketches had been good enough for that. The knowledge both elated and terrified him, but he was statesman enough not to let those emotions show, or to let them sound in his voice.

In a voice that was tightly controlled, he asked, “Why are you here?”

The dark eyes flickered toward the altar, then back again. “A fate that neither you nor I would court has made us allies, it seems. I came to offer my services.”

“No.” His heart was racing; it took everything he had to sound calm and collected when he was anything but. Was he really standing here talking to the man who founded and then betrayed his Church? Up until a year ago he would have considered that patently impossible. Even now, knowing otherwise, it was hard to absorb the truth. “Not allies, Neocount. Enemies.”

The man’s expression darkened ever so slightly, and he stepped forward as if to approach the Patriarch; with a flutter of fear in his heart, the Holy Father moved back. Then he realized that his visitor wasn’t moving toward him, but toward the altar. The Patriarch’s soul cried out for him to protect his holy symbols from the touch-or even the scrutiny-of this damned creature, but a distant, more reasonable part of him knew that it would be suicide to even attempt it. And it didn’t really matter, did it? The gold on the altar was simple metal, no more. The symbols themselves could be melted down to slag without injuring his faith. If the Prophet had taught them nothing else, it was that God didn’t reside in such things.

The Prophet. A cold thrill shivered through his flesh as he realized just what it was that stood before him. Not the Prophet any longer, but a damned and degenerate creature who wore the Prophet’s identity like a ragged bit of cast-off clothing. Was this the chill that Vryce had felt, when he first stood in his presence? Did he grow numb to it after a time, or simply learn to ignore its warning?

When the man reached the altar he reached out to its central figure, a double circle sculpted in gold. He traced the interlocked shapes with a death-pale finger, and his nostrils flared as if taking in the scent of this place. Was he testing the Patriarch, seeing if he would respond? Despite his powerful instinct to protect the altar, the Patriarch forced himself to hold back. God alone knew what this creature would do if he moved against him.

After a moment the Hunter turned to face the Holy Father once more. His eyes were no longer black but a pale, glistening gray. There was a coldness in them that reminded the Holy Father of glacial ice, and of death. They were the eyes of the damned, that had gazed upon the glories of the One God and then turned away forever. Gazing at them, the Patriarch couldn’t help but shudder.

“Believe as you will,” the visitor said. “It’s taken me years to come to this point; why should you accept it in a single night? We have the same enemy, therefore we fight the same war. Let that be enough.”

Calesta. He felt the name take shape within his brain, etched in ice. For one brief moment he envisioned what power the Church could wield, with this man’s knowledge and skill harnessed to its purpose—and then that image shattered like glass, as the real threat of the situation hit home. This is how Vryce started, he thought, chilled. And this is how the Prophet fell.

“It isn’t enough,” he said quietly. The strength in his own voice surprised him. “Not for that kind of alliance.”

For a moment the Hunter said nothing. It was impossible to read his expression, or otherwise guess at the tenor of his emotions. The death-pale face was a mask, that permitted no insight.

“I’ve come to make you an offer,” he said at last. “For the sake of our common cause. Nothing more.”

He shook his head slowly. “I want nothing of yours.”

“Even if my gift would enable your Church to survive?”

“It would be at the cost of my soul, and the souls of all my faithful. What kind of triumph is that?”

The pale eyes narrowed, and he sensed a cold anger rising in the man. He neither moved back nor looked away, but met the unspoken assault with a shield of utter calm. His faith would preserve him. Even if this man killed him now, his God would protect his soul.

At last his visitor said, in a razor-edged voice, “You already have what you need to safeguard your Church. What you lack is an understanding of how to use it. I came to bring you that, no more.”

“And I reject that offer,” he said coolly. Watching a flicker of anger spark in those pale, dead eyes. “I’m not Damien Vryce, or any of the other souls you’ve corrupted over the years. Some of those must have started out just this way, yes? Wanting your power enough to compromise their faith. Trusting you, long enough to forget who and what they were.” Strength was coming into his voice now, and the full oratory power of a Patriarch. “I won’t make Vryce’s mistake,” he said firmly. “I won’t take that first step. We’ll wage our battles alone, and win them or lose them according to God’s will.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand what losing means in this case. The threat to all you stand for—”

“I understand that what stands before me now is a man who’s lived apart from the Church for nearly ten centuries. Should I favor his interpretation of the Law over my own? Should I abandon all my learning, and the centuries of struggle that came before me, for an alliance that would make mockery of my faith? I think not.”

“Then you’ll go down,” he said sharply, “and the Church will go down with you.”

“If that’s God’s will, then so be it. At least our souls will be clean.”

“Who knows your God’s will better than I? As your

Prophet—”

“The Prophet is dead!” the Patriarch snapped. “He died the day that he murdered his wife and children, and no man’s will can resurrect him. Something else took his place that night, that wears his body and uses his voice, but that thing isn’t a man, and it certainly isn’t an ally of the Church. However well it pretends to be.”

An icy fire burned in the depths of those pale eyes, reflections of a rage so venemous that if Tarrant should let it loose, even for a moment, the Patriarch knew it would consume him utterly. It was hard not to tremble in the face of such a thing, but he sensed that fear—any kind of fear-would allow this creature to take possession of his soul. That he must never permit.

“I could have killed your guard on the way in,” Tarrant told him. “In another time and place I would surely have done so, and gained strength from his death. I didn’t. Let that be a sign of my sincerity. A token-if you will-of my true intentions.”

“The day I judge a man by such standards,” he retorted, “is the day I turn in my robes.”

“We’re fighting the same war!” There was anger in his voice now, frigid and dangerous. “Can’t you see that? How do I get through to you?”

“You know the way,” he said quietly. Inside his heart was pounding wildly, but he managed to keep his voice calm. In the face of the Hunter’s rage there was power in tranquility. “You’ve known the way for nine centuries now.”

The Hunter’s eyes narrowed, and he took a step backward. He reached one hand into a pocket as though seeking some kind of weapon, and the Patriarch stiffened. But the object he drew forth was no weapon, at least not of any kind the Patriarch had ever seen. It was a large crystal, finely faceted, of a deep blue color so resonant that it seemed to give off light of its own. Such a color couldn’t exist naturally in this chamber, the Patriarch realized, not with the golden light of the candleflames compromising its hue. Its very clarity sang of sorcery.

The Hunter turned the object so that the Patriarch might see all sides of it; there was no denying the sense of power that resonated from its polished planes.

“Do you know what a ward is?” he asked. Watching him, watching the stone, the Patriarch did not reply. “It’s a Working designed to be independent of its maker, so that the two are no longer connected. It has a trigger-in this case your own will—and the ability to tap the currents for power, in order to fuel itself. In short,” he said, indicating the object in his hand, “this is no longer connected to me, or to any other living creature. It will fulfill its one purpose and then expire. Do you understand that?”

“I want nothing of yours,” he said quietly. “Then you’re a fool!” he snapped. “And you’ll drag your Church down with you!” He held up the deep blue ward to catch the light; cobalt shimmers ran across its facets like ripples on a dark lake. “All I offer you is knowledge. The chance to see your own arsenal for what it is, without delusion masking it. That knowledge could save your people!” His pale eyes fixed on the Patriarch again, with fierce intensity. “It will also, most probably, destroy you.” He held the crystal aloft as if in illustration, then slowly laid it down upon the altar cloth. “Are you willing to make such a sacrifice for your Church? I wonder.”

“Don’t pretend to test me,” the Patriarch warned. “You of all people have lost that right.”

The Hunter tensed, and for a minute the Patriarch thought that he had finally pushed him too far, that he would give in to his rage and strike out at him. He braced himself, praying for courage, trying to master his fear so that this damned creature couldn’t benefit from it. But a minute passed, and then two, and then he sensed that the crisis was over. In a voice that was as chill as death itself, the Hunter said, “Take it up if you want to use it. Fold it in your hand, and it’ll do the rest.” He bowed, stiffly and formally. “It’s your choice.”

He turned then, and left the chamber quickly. Too quickly for the Patriarch to voice a protest. Far too quickly for him to do what he wanted, which was to take up the crystalline ward and force it upon him, to make him take it back to whatever hellish domain had forged it. Silk faded into shadow and without any sound to mark his passage, be it footstep or a whisper of flesh-upon-flesh or the soft creak of a door hinge, Gerald Tarrant was gone.

The deep blue crystal lay where he had left it, between two candles on the altar. There it shimmered with a life of its own, sparkling with reflected flames. What was this thing that the Hunter had left? Knowledge? Perhaps. Sorcery? Without question. A chance for victory? Maybe. Temptation.

Slowly he lowered himself to his knees before the altar. Oh, my God, he prayed, fill me with Your strength. Guide me with Your certainty. Keep my eyes fixed on Your path, so that I may never waver.

Blue facets, glinting in the candlelight. Power, in carefully measured dose. Was this thing salvation? Destruction? Or both? The world isn’t made up of black and white, but shades of gray. Who had said that once? Vryce? He shivered as the words struck home. Too easy an answer, he told himself. Too tempting a refuge. Indecision is cowardice. Uncertainty is weakness. And we can afford neither, in the face of this enemy. Trembling, he prayed.

11

The Jaggonath cathedral was a far more impressive “building than Andrys had expected, and for some time he just stood in the square opposite it, savoring the strange mix of emotions it aroused. It wasn’t merely a question of how grand the building looked, but of what that grandeur implied. Here in the east, where moderate quakes shook the city several times each month, it was rare to see a building more than two stories in height, and even the simplest hovel was studded with quake-wards designed to keep it intact. Yet here was an edifice that rose into the heavens in seeming defiance of earthquakes, its gleaming arches bright against the sky, its polished facade brazenly naked of any protective Working. Could faith alone manifest enough power to keep such a building standing, or were there internal secrets of construction wedded to the polished stone that lent it a more earthy strength? Andrys knew that the walls of his own keep back in Merentha had been built in such a manner, with resiliant inner layers designed to keep the building standing should its stones and mortar ever give way. Even so, it, too, was reinforced by wardings, and he had little doubt that without them the keep would have been shaken to pieces long ago. Could prayers alone maintain such a building as this, when sorcery was forbidden within its bounds? It was a wondrous and intimidating concept.

And more.

Gazing up at the stained glass windows so similar to those in the Tarrant keep, drinking in the familiar line of arches and buttresses, pierced-work and finials, he felt an upwelling of homesickness in his soul so powerful that for a moment he had to fight back tears. What he wouldn’t give to go home now! No, he corrected himself bitterly: what he wouldn’t give to have a home to go to, rather than that skeleton of a keep filled with ghosts and memories and the scent of Tarrant blood. There was no home for him now: not there, not anywhere.

With a shiver he forced himself to start toward the cathedral, though the thought of going inside it filled him with dread. There was something unclean about entering this building at the bidding of a demon, and he half expected to be struck down for it before he crossed the portal. When he finally managed to bring himself to enter, his heart was pounding so wildly that he was sure the other people there could hear it. But they passed him by in utter ignorance of his state, leaving him alone to face his fears.

Always alone.

He drew in a deep breath for courage and made his way hesitantly into the sanctuary. No one and nothing stopped him. Surely this was just a temporary reprieve, he thought. Surely the One God would sense his purpose in being here, and would rage at his use of the Church for a private vendetta. Could Calesta save him then? Could any demon even enter this place, which the God of Earth had sanctified?

The sanctuary was large, and not yet half full. He chose a seat in the very last row, in the shadow of the balcony. From there he could watch the proceedings without being seen clearly by anyone. It wasn’t exactly what Calesta wanted—the demon had ordered him to “be seen"-but for this first visit it would have to be good enough; he felt too vulnerable to do otherwise. He watched as the priest approached the dais, as his ritual words began the afternoon service. Andrys knew the rites of the Church vaguely, distantly, as one recalled something from one’s childhood. Family rituals had been repeated often enough to carve out a place in his memory without his being aware of the details. Little good it had done his family to dedicate their lives to the One God, he thought bitterly. Perhaps a pagan deity would have done more to protect its worshipers. Perhaps it would have given them some power to stand up against the horror that stalked them, the death that was waiting—

Stop it, he ordered himself. He folded his shaking hands in his lap, and tried to breathe evenly. A cold sweat had broken out on his forehead, but it was long minutes before he felt steady enough to raise up a hand and wipe it away. What was the point of this visit? he wondered. Why was Calesta making him endure this? Was there something the demon expected him to do here? And if so, why wouldn’t he just tell him what it was and get it over with?

It was then that his eyes, seeking something to focus on other than the priest, looked beyond the podium at the head of the aisle and fixed on a mural that adorned one section of the upper wall. It caught his attention because of its human subject matter—the Church forbade all but a few symbolic representations of humankind-but then it held his attention, it gripped his attention, because of who and what that human was.

Despite himself he rose to his feet, drawn to the brilliant mural even as he was repelled by it. He was all but deaf to the service going on as he stared at the painting in horrified fascination. It was the Prophet, there was no doubt of that. The figure had no face as such-that was Church tradition-but it glowed with a light that made the absence seem a deliberate artistic choice, rather than philosophical censure. At its feet a creature writhed whose outline was unclear, but it hinted at a form that was at once serpentine and spider-like: black and sinuous, with a large fanged head like that of a snake at one end, and a hint of several dozen smaller heads at the other. The Prophet-figure had a foot on the neck of the greater head and was running it through with a spear that glowed hot white, sun-pure in its energy. Symbolism, Andrys thought, his heart pounding wildly. It was only symbolism. The faith of the Prophet had bound the Evil One to darkness, and rendered it unable to maintain earthly form. The faith of the One God was more powerful than all the evils which this planet had conjured. It was a familiar image, and one that he had seen rendered before in the books of his faith. It was familiar. It was traditional. It should have passed without notice, just like all the other symbolic murals that adorned the inner walls of the sanctuary. But this one was different.

The figure wore the breastplate. His breastplate! Embossed with the Earth-sun in that unlikely golden color, rays spreading out in just the way that he had drawn them, copying Gerald Tarrant’s own renderings. Andrys felt sick as he looked up at the mural, as the power of its image hit home. Was this what Calesta wanted him to see-that his fear and his shame were emblazoned on the cathedral wall for all to witness? The vast sanctuary suddenly seemed very close, and its air was hard to breathe. He had to get out of here. He had to get away from that thing, far away, before its presence strangled him utterly. Weak-legged, he struggled to work his way down the row of seats to where the exit was. It seemed to him that there were eyes in that painted face, pale gray eyes that watched him from across the sanctuary. Thank God he was far enough from the other congregants that few seemed to notice his departure; as for the priest, he probably saw him from his standpoint up at the dais, but he wouldn’t interrupt the traditional service to comment upon the departure of one wayward parishioner. Dear God, if he only knew....

He managed to get outside-somehow—and made his way from the great double doors to a place some few yards away where trees provided a modicum of shade. Several strangers noticed his shaky passage and began to approach as if they meant to offer help, but he warned them off with a look and leaned heavily against a tree trunk, trying to catch his breath.

I failed you, Calesta. Despair was a knot in his heart, a knife in his soul. You told me what to do and I couldn’t. I couldn’t! But if he’d hoped for any kind of response from his patron, he wasn’t going to get it here. No demon could manifest on the One God’s doorstep. He had to face this moment alone.

God, why couldn’t he have brought his pills with him? Even a few grains of slowtime, just to act as a tranquilizer. He saw a few passersby staring at him, and he tried to look stronger than he felt so that they wouldn’t come over to help him. After a moment they looked away and continued walking, and he breathed a sigh that was half relief and half dread.

He knew what he had to do. He knew, but he couldn’t face it. How could he go back in there, back in where that was, and endure a whole service beneath that living image of his enemy? I’m not that strong, he despaired, and sickness welled up so strongly inside him that for a moment he could hardly breathe. I can’t do it.

Then you will never have your revenge, a cool voice warned.

Startled, he stiffened. Was that Calesta? Here? For some reason that possibility scared him more than all the rest combined, that his demon-patron could speak to him so close to God’s holy altar. Wasn’t the very point of the Church worship supposed to be control of such creatures?

Did you think it would be easy, Andrys Tarrant? Did you think you could conquer the Hunter without pain?

The words didn’t comfort him, but rather made him feel horribly isolated. In that church were hundreds of worshipers sharing a communion he could never taste, a faith he had no right to counterfeit; here was he with his demon guide, utterly alone even in the midst of a crowd. How long could he go on like this, pretending that he was coping? Pretending that he was truly alive? He needed more than a demon’s voice in his head to keep going; he needed human warmth, human contact, human touch ... a vision of the black-haired girl took shape before him, and he cried out softly in pain for wanting her. Not that. Never that. To court her now was to condemn her to death-or worse—and he could never, ever be the cause of that. Not even though it made his soul bleed to have her so close, so very close, and not reach out to her.

If you prefer to continue without me, the cold voice warned, that can be arranged.

That fear was worse than all the others combined. “No!” he whispered. “Don’t leave me!” What would he be without Calesta? He no longer had a life of his own, but was defined by the demon’s will, the demon’s plans. How would he survive alone, facing his memories with no hope of redress?

Then go, the voice commanded, and its tone was like acid. Obey.

Slowly, reluctantly, he turned back toward the cathedral. The outer doors were still open; the inner doors, leading to the sanctuary, beckoned. Slowly he walked up the polished stone stairs once more, and then hesitated. Could he sit through the rest of the ritual without staring at the portrait of his ancestor, without reliving his one bloody memory of the man? Why should his quest for vengeance demand such a trial? “Calesta-” he whispered.

Obey, the voice hissed, and its tone made his skin crawl. Or our compact ends here and now.

Terrified of the memories that the mural would awaken, but far more afraid of being abandoned by the only living creature who could give him back his soul, Andrys Tarrant forced himself to cross the foyer and enter the sanctuary once again. May God forgive him for his presence here, for his use of the Church to further a demon’s plans. May God understand that in the end he would be serving His cause, ridding this world of one of the greatest evils it had ever produced. May God forgive ... everything. Behind him, out of hearing, Calesta laughed.

12

The albino moved silently, secretly, grateful for the Hunter’s absence.

Through fae-sealed doors he went, well-warded portals protecting the Hunter’s domain. He knew the signs to open them. Down curving stairs, well-guarded by demonlings. He knew how to turn them aside. Into the workshop, and through it. To the secret room beyond, and its torture table: the heart and soul of Gerald Tarrant’s dominion.

Wisps of blackness trailed behind him, like smoke from a candle flame. There there there, voices whispered as it passed. It must be in that place. That place only.

If one’s eyes were sensitive enough, one could see the memories that clung to this place. Almea Tarrant, dying a slow and painful death by her husband’s hand. Gerald Tarrant’s two youngest children, crying out as their father betrayed them. Three elements in a compact established centuries ago, with power enough to sustain a man past death. Three deaths. Nine centuries. Not a bad deal, when all was considered.

The blackness followed him into the chamber and paused there, where it coalesced into a single dark flame. It should be done in Merentha, a voice whispered hungrily. It should be done where the pact was first made.

“If I go to Merentha he’ll find me out,” the albino said sharply. “This place is a perfect copy of the original; it’ll be good enough.”

The blackness parted into a hundred tiny flames, a thousand; its voices fluttered like insects about the room. Then do it do it do it now now NOW!

He put a hand to the cold stone table, feeling the power that was lodged within it. The whole room was filled with power, centuries of it building and feeding and growing here in the subterranean darkness, seeded by memories of bloodshed and cruelty. Power such as few men ever knew. Power such as no man but the Hunter had ever controlled.

“State the terms of our compact,” the albino demanded. It was his first command to the unnamed power that had approached him so very long ago. For one who had never commanded demons in his own right, it was a heady tonic. “Clearly and simply. I want no room for confusion.”

We will sustain you as we once sustained him, beyond natural death. We will give you the Forest which was his, and show you how to control it. We will take him from the face of the planet, so that all his domain may be yours to claim.

“And in return?” he asked hungrily. The lightless presence coalesced into a single flame, a limitless shadow; it hurt his eyes to look at it directly. We must have him, a single voice demanded. It was deeper than those which had sounded before, and power echoed in its wake. Because his soul is independent of Us, We must have a channel in order to claim his flesh. You will give that to Us. “And Hell?”

It seemed to him there was laughter in that blackness; the tenor of it made his skin crawl. He betrayed Us, and must be made to answer for it. Hell may have what is left when We one done.

And then it asked: Agreed? A thousand voices once more, all echoing the same demand.

For a moment the albino hesitated. Only a moment, and not because he was afraid. This was an act to be savored: the moment in time at which his path and the Hunter’s would separate forever. Centuries from now he would look back on this night and celebrate the birth of his soul, as mortals celebrated the birth of their flesh. And were not the two acts congnient in spirit as well as form? A baby’s flesh existed for months before its arrival in the world; all that its “birth” signified was passage from one state of being to the next. So it was with him. So it was exactly. The Hunter was a fool, if he didn’t see it coming. “Agreed,” he said.

He pulled a knife from his belt, white steel blade with a handle of human bone; the seal of the Hunter was etched into the blade. “When I first came to him, when I swore to serve him, he fed me a portion of his blood to bind us. He said that it would be with me always, part of my own blood for as long as I lived. A channel between us far stronger than mere fae could ever conjure.” He drew the blade across his palm, sharply; blue blood welled up in the wound. “If so, then here it is.” He made a fist and squeezed; the viscous fluid dripped to the tabletop and pooled there. “Flesh of his flesh: the blood of the Hunter. Take it from mine and use it to bind him. I give it to you freely.”

A thousand sparks of black flame spurted to life on the tabletop. The hunger they exuded was so sharp that the albino stepped back quickly, lest he be drawn into the flames himself. How many men throughout history had summoned these demons with the intention of bargaining, only to be devoured themselves in the midst of their offering? Even the Hunter didn’t trust the Unnamed Ones, and he had served them for over nine hundred years.

And just see where it got you, he thought triumphantly.

At last the flame drew back from his offering. The pool of blood seemed undiminished, but how little flesh did that awesome Power need for its work? A single cell would do it, or even a fragment of a cell, if it came from the Hunter himself. Freely sacrificed, it gained in power tenfold.

The skin of his palm twitched suddenly where he had gashed it; he looked down, to find the wound already closed.

It is done.

“The Forest is mine?” he asked hungrily.

When he has left the world of the living, then the Forest will be yours. Until then—

Hunger welled up inside him with such force that it left him reeling, a hunger that filled every cell of his body with such frigid fire that he shook to contain it. Not hunger for cruelty, or even for power; this was a need more simple, more primitive, more driving. The need to devour blood. Life. Hope. The hunger to destroy those things which the living cherished most, and consume them into his own dark soul. Into that boundless pit of cold, dark hunger which would never, ever be filled....

With a cry he fell to his knees, his flesh convulsing as the black need filled him. More hunger than any human body could contain; more raw need than any human soul could ever satisfy. It remade him from the inside out, pulping his body and his soul until both were a raw, bleeding mass, and then it sculpted him anew. Making him into a more perfect container for its crimson frenzy.

No! he screamed. Pain folded about him like a fist and squeezed. Dendrites tore loose in the confines of his skull and reattached in new, unhuman patterns. A section of the forebrain, pulped to liquid, oozed forth into his bloodstream to be processed as waste matter.

As it should have been for the Hunter, the voices proclaimed. As it almost was, nine centuries ago.

Shivering in hunger, the creature that was once called Amoril twitched in pain as the final ripples of transformation coursed through its flesh. It still looked human, to a degree. It could still act human, if it had to. Beyond that point all similarity ended.

What a pity that you lacked your master’s understanding of Us, a thousand voices mused aloud. And his strength. But then, that will make this relationship so much easier. Then the voices were gone, and there was only hunger.

13

Her children were restless.

She wasn’t sure yet if that were good or bad. She had no way to communicate with them, to test them to see if their natures were right, if they were indeed what she had created them to be. Only a few of them could speak to her at all and those were, by that definition, her greatest failures. As for the rest, sometimes she was aware of them. Most often she was not. Sometimes the few who could speak to her brought her news of their distant siblings, but they themselves understood so little that their reports were hardly better than a dream.

She wondered if she should try again. In theory she could. In theory she had the strength and the knowledge, so why not make another attempt? But she lacked the emotional—stamina she had once had, she was drained from an eternity of wasted efforts. She had cast out her hopes into the world countless times before and so few of her children had come back to her, so few of them tried to communicate, so very few understood their own nature, or why she had created them in the first place. So what was the point? Her first children were long gone now, and she could no longer remember what it was like to bond with them. These new children, the seeds of her desperation, would never know such intimacy. Why go on creating them as if that formula would change? As if somehow, magically, the same forces which killed her first family could be made to nurture these, the offspring of her despair?

These new children were restless. She knew that.

She sensed it. They were testing the boundaries she had set for them, and soon she would have to decide their fate. Should she endure their rebellion, or wipe the slate clean and start over? With her first children—her proper children—the question would never have arisen. But with these strange creatures, in whom the bonds of family were so weak as to be virtually nonexistent, how was she to judge?

She would give them time, she decided. She would see where their restlessness led them. If it proved that their transgressions were serious, then their lives might be put to better use as fodder for a new generation. For there must be children. There must always be children. Living and learning, dreaming and needing, playing their parts without knowing they did so, in the hope that one of them might some day glimpse the greater game that controlled them all.

And then, she thought, then at last—

Dreams of the first family. Union. Hope.

She waited.