Crown of Shadows (66 page)

“Do I want to know what this place is?”

“No,” Tarrant stared at the mess on the table for a few seconds, his eyes narrowed to slits. God alone knew what he was thinking. “Suffice it to say that I kept it somewhat cleaner.”

He moved to the far corner of the room, where a lighter door swung open easily at his touch. As they passed through this one, Damien could hear faint sounds from above, murmurs and impacts transmitted down through the layers of rock. The soldiers of the Church must be very close.

“My wards will hold,” the Hunter said quietly, as if sensing his thoughts. As they walked on blistered feet through the fetid darkness, Damien wondered which of them he was trying to convince. Then suddenly the Hunter drew himself up, as if alerted to a hostile presence. Damien stiffened and drew his sword, ready for action. But Tarrant’s eyes were fixed upon the ground, where the earth-fae would be bright and rich with meaning; it was knowledge that had alerted him, not some foreign presence.

At last Tarrant said, in a voice that was still and cold, “He’s dead.”

“Who?”

“Amoril. My apprentice.” The pale eyes narrowed. “My betrayer.”

“Are you sure?”

He seemed to hesitate. Were the messages of the fae less clear to him now that he had no Working to interpret them? “Yes,” he said at last. “He lived—and ruled here—long enough to leave his mark upon the currents. That stink is his as well, no doubt... or that of his animal familiars. He never was fastidious.” The thin mouth curled in distaste. “That he’s gone now is equally clear, and there’s only one way to explain that.” He looked at Damien; his expression was grim. “If they’ve truly killed him, then we have very little time left.”

They moved on, through a space that was more cavern than tunnel, in whose distant recesses water dripped with agonizing slowness. Now and then a noise would drift down to them, echoing through some flaw in the stone overhead. Soldiers’ voices, issuing orders. Animals’ howls, the cries of the dying. It was good that they could hear such things, Damien told himself. It was when the noises stopped that they would be in real trouble.

They came to another door, this one so finely worked that it seemed out of place in the rough stone corridor. Tarrant touched a ward at its center, which may have been meant to unlock it; the polished wood pushed easily inward, and the two men moved into the room beyond. Damien’s lantern light revealed a modest chamber, shelf-lined, which might have been a library in another age. Tarrant’s workshop, no doubt.

Utterly devastated.

He could feel the sight of the destruction strike Tarrant like a physical blow, and he flinched himself as he gazed about the room. Books had been hurled down from the shelves and mangled. Manuscripts had been shredded and wadded up like garbage. Leather covers, ripped from their volumes and scored with claw marks, reeked of urine and decay. He could hear the Hunter’s indrawn breath as he gazed upon the wreckage of his storehouse of knowledge, and he sensed that in some bizarre way this pained him more than Amoril’s other betrayals, or even the loss of the Forest itself.

There was a large trestle table in the center of the room, now overturned. Silently Tarrant moved to one end and reached down for a handhold; Damien put down his lantern and hurried to the other end to do the same.

“At least your people hate fire,” he offered, as they righted it. “If they’d burned the place there’d be nothing left at all.”

Tarrant made no comment. Reaching down into the mess that was under his feet, he brought up a single page, torn and crumpled and crusted with something brown. For a long time he stared at it, and Damien sensed that he was watching how the fae clung to the paper, how the current responded to the words that were on its surface. Then his hand clenched tightly, crushing it.

“We’ll never find the right pages in time,” he muttered. Damien could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “Not without a Locating.”

“Of course we will. We have to, right?” He spotted several whole notebooks on one of the shelves and pulled them out. “Hell, my desk in Ganji looked worse than this.”

For a moment Tarrant’s eyes met his. For a moment he could sense the utter despair welling up inside the man, not a product of this one moment or even of several moments past, but of everything he had experienced since they’d started on this God-forsaken mission. Even the Hunter’s indomitable spirit had its limits, he realized. And there was no sorcery left to sustain him now.

In the distance there was a louder sound; voices arguing, it seemed to Damien, and the impact of metal on stone. It seemed uncomfortably close.

“Come on,” he urged. He put the notebooks down on the table and began to search for more. “We’ve got a lot to go through here.”

He didn’t look at Tarrant again, but focused on the shelves surrounding him. Whoever had ravaged the hidden library might have worked with enthusiasm, but he lacked efficiency; there were several dozen volumes still intact, and he pulled them free and shook them off and brought them to the table. There Tarrant searched through them page by page, sorting through the diaries of his undead centuries to find the notes he needed. God willing, Damien thought, they’d be somewhere in these intact volumes. Otherwise... he looked at the mess on the floor and shook his head, trying not to think about what that search would be like. Or how damned long it would take.

There were voices even closer now. Too close. He looked at Tarrant.

“My wards will admit no one but myself or Amoril to this chamber,” he said, responding to Damien’s unspoken question. “And Amoril being dead—”

“What if they carry his body with them?”

“Even if they think to do that—and I doubt they have so much insight—it won’t work. The wards respond to a man’s vital essence, not to dead flesh.” But despite his assurance it seemed to Damien that he turned the pages faster than before, and his eyes darted up occasionally to ascertain that the door to the library was indeed still shut.

Then footsteps resounded, heavy and purposeful and clearly headed in their direction. “Shit,” Damien muttered, putting down the book he held in order to draw his sword. The Hunter rose, swaying slightly as he did so; clearly his exhausted muscles were less than enthusiastic about the concept of a fresh workout. Damien’s own muscles ached like hell, but that didn’t matter now. Whatever had gotten past the Hunter’s wards was damned likely not to be friendly.

And then the door opened and the light of an unshuttered lantern blinded him for an instant. He took a step backward and squinted against the light, fighting to make out details of a figure that seemed to glow with all the power of the sun—

“Oh, my God,” he whispered. Almost dropping his sword. “Who the hell... ?”

The figure in the doorway was wearing armor cast in silver and gold, that captured his lamplight and reflected it a thousand times over, making the golden sun upon his breastplate blaze like the star of Earth itself. After hours spent in the semi-darkness, the light was blinding. But that wasn’t what stunned Damien so. He was a seasoned enough warrior not to be unmanned by simple pyrotechnics, and even the sight of the Prophet’s famous armor come to life, just as it had been painted on the Cathedral’s high wall, was something he could come to terms with. It was the sight of the man who wore the armor that utterly unnerved him, so that his grip upon his sword grew weak and the familiar steel blade nearly fell from his hand.

The man was Gerald Tarrant.

No, Damien thought. Fighting the power of the image. This man’s skin was tan, where Gerald’s was pale. This man’s eyes were darker, and deeper set. He was slightly shorter than the Hunter, and maybe a little bit stockier, and his hair wasn’t quite the same length. But except for those minor details the resemblance was amazing. Unnerving. Even—given the circumstances—terrifying.

This was how Gerald Tarrant must have looked in his first lifetime, when the heat of life still surged in his veins, when the passions of mortal existence still blazed in his eyes. Even the man’s wounds bore witness to his living state: a livid red scratch mark swelling across his brow, a hot purple bruise along the line of his jaw. And the look in his eyes . . . there was a hate so hot in them that Damien could feel it like a flame upon his face; even the hate-wraiths that wisped in and out of existence about the man were red and gold and orange, fire-hues that sizzled in the keep’s chill air.

The burning eyes fixed on him, then on Tarrant. There was madness in them, and an echo of pain so intense that Damien flinched to see it. With bruised hands the newcomer put down his lantern and then swung a hefty springbolt into firing position, aiming at the Hunter’s chest. But Damien stood between the two of them, close enough to foul a clean shot.

“Get back,” the man rasped. There was a hysterical edge to his voice, the sound of a soul pushed almost to the breaking point. Damien had seen enough men in that state to know how very dangerous it was. “Get out of the way!”

He couldn’t move. He didn’t dare. A
knife in the heart is as fatal to an adept as it is to any other human.
Who had said that? He couldn’t remember. “Who are you?” he managed. Not because he thought the man would answer him, just to buy a precious moment’s delay.

To his surprise it was the Hunter who responded. “Andrys Tarrant.” Was that a tremor of fear in his voice? “Last living descendant of my family line.”

“You killed them!” the newcomer cried hoarsely. His hand on the springbolt was shaking; the dried blood on his face was streaked with sweat. “God damn you to Hell for it.” He reached up with his left hand to wipe away what might have been a tear, or maybe just a drop of sweat, then quickly returned it to the barrel of his weapon. “I don’t know who you are,” he snapped at Damien, “and I don’t care. But I’ve got two bolts loaded and so help me God, if you don’t move out of my way, one of them’s for you.”

There was nowhere to run to. No way to Work a defense. One slender wooden shaft was all it would take, to pierce a heart that had only just started to beat again. In this strange new world they were in, there was no way to stop it.

The Hunter’s manner gave no sign of his desperation, but Damien knew him well enough to hear it in his voice.“It’s over,” Tarrant said quietly. “You’ve won.”

“Shut up!” the man shouted. He raised the weapon higher, and cursed as he confirmed the fouled sightline along the barrel. In a voice that edged on hysteria, he shouted at Damien, “Move!”

“The Forest is dead,” Gerald persisted. His voice was low and even; Damien could sense the monumental self-control required to keep it that way. “That’s what you came to do, isn’t it? The Forest and its current master are dead, and its past master....” He let the sentence trail off into eloquent silence, as if daring his enemy to complete it. “Isn’t that what you wanted, Andrys? To destroy all my work, so that I would have nothing left?” How much did he know about the man from past Knowings, Damien wondered, how much could he read in the currents now, how much was he guessing? His very life depended on those skills. “
You won
. It’s over. Go back to your life.”

“I have no life, you son of a bitch.” The man’s voice was shaking. “Not while you’re alive.”

The finger on the trigger tensed. Damien’s muscles were ready to move, wound taut as the steel springs inside that killing weapon.

“Calesta is dead,” Gerald Tarrant said quietly.

The newcomer’s face went white. He reeled slightly as if struck, and his finger moved a precious inch or two back from the trigger.

“You bound yourself to him,” Gerald pressed. “Didn’t you? What did he promise you? Forgetfulness? Purging? An orgy of vengeance?” He paused. “Did he tell you what the cost of that would be? Did he tell you that you would lose your soul if you served him?”

“That doesn’t matter,” he whispered.

“He was my enemy long before you were involved.” Damien could see the newcomer flinch as each word hit home, forcing him to reconsider a relationship he had clearly taken for granted until this moment. “Did you know that? He’d use any tool that was available to accomplish his ends. Even my own flesh and blood. Or did you think when he offered his power to you that it was only for your benefit?” He shook his head sharply, tensely. His whole body was poised like that of an animal about to bolt for cover, or launch itself at its prey. “He lived for pain and pain alone. Not only mine, but yours. Killing me wouldn’t be enough for him, not unless I knew in my last dying moment that he had also destroyed those things I valued most. The Forest. The Church. And now you.”

“You
value
me?” He spat the words out in disbelief, almost unable to voice them. “What kind of bullshit is that? How stupid do you think I am?”

“You’re my own flesh and blood,” the Hunter said icily. “Not the proudest member of my line, certainly not the strongest, but right now you’re all that’s left. When he claims your soul, he will debase a history that stretches back nearly a thousand years.” The pale eyes were an icy flame that chilled whatever they gazed upon. “That will be his true triumph, Andrys Tarrant. Not my death. Your corruption.”

“If Calesta’s dead, then he has no power now—”

“Doesn’t he?” the adept demanded. “Do you know what will happen if you kill me now? That spark of Calesta’s hate which lies like a dormant seed within you will take root and grow, until it strangles all within you that is still human.
That’s
his vengeance, Andrys Tarrant. Not your paltry campaign, not even the rigors of Hell itself, but the knowledge that as you pull that trigger, you commit yourself to his world, in which the only joy is suffering.”