Tides of Darkness (9 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Tides of Darkness
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He must have dozed: he opened his eyes, and Merian was sitting on the bed beside him. For a moment before she could have been aware that he had roused, he saw a face that she had not shown him before: soft, reflective, a little sad. He wanted to kiss her, to make the sadness go away.
She came to herself with all her armor intact, and the hard bright edge that forbade anything so familiar as a kiss. Because he was born contrary, he took her hand and kissed it, and held it to his heart. She let it rest there for the whole of a breath before she snatched it away. “Are you a general?” she demanded. “Or a lord of mages?”
He raised his brows. “Why, no. But I am a hunter.”
“So I've been told.” She knotted her fingers in her lap, glaring at them as if they had been as intractable as he. “You have no gift for obedience. I could bind you, and so compel it, but like an idiot, I prefer to trust your sworn word. Will you be obedient to Kalyi and do as she bids?”
“If her bidding isn't mad or suicidal, yes,” he said.
She looked ready to slap him. She breathed deep, straightened her shoulders and face, and said, “She has convinced me to let you lead the expedition. But if she sees the need for a change, you will do exactly as she tells you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said. Then: “Is she in a great deal of trouble?”
“Not as much as you,” she said. “Come back alive, with knowledge that we need, and I may—I may—forgive you both.”
“Forgiveness is worth fighting for,” he said. He kissed her hands again, quicker than she could elude him, and sprang to his feet. The
shadows were growing long. He held out his hand. “Come with me,” he said.
She was taken aback by his presumption, so much so that she had yielded before her wits recovered. He offered no insolence past that of taking her hand in his. Hand in hand they went to find the rest of the hunt.
T
HEY WERE ALL EXPECTING A RITE OR A GREAT WORKING. DAROS hated to disappoint them, but he needed his strength for what might come. The six of them gathered about him, linking arms in a circle, strong as a shieldwall. Merian reluctantly retreated. He was sorry to let go her hand, but this was a deadly thing they did. The imperial heir could not risk herself so recklessly.
He kept his eyes on her as he opened the Gate within. The last he saw of that place was her slender figure in the fading sunlight, the gold of hair and eyes washed over with the color of flame, or of blood.
 
He brought them to a sheltered place just below the crag, a hollow in the stone that was not quite deep enough to be a cave. Merian had
warned them, but they were greatly disconcerted to travel so quickly, without resort to the worldroad.
There was a little time for them to recover while he ventured up the track that led from the hollow. It was not quite dawn; the air was thin and cold. He was glad of the cloak that he had brought from the Fells, and the small working that let him breathe here on the roof of the world.
He peered up the steep slope. The castle loomed above. No light shone from it; no banner flew from its turret. Yet there was life within, a flicker of living presence.
He looked for wards, but found nothing that spoke to him of any such thing. Did they trust in the remoteness of this place, and in the terror of its name?
“It could be a trap,” Perel said, coming up beside him. He had recovered first of all the mages; he was still a little white about the lips, but his eyes were steady, staring upward. “They'll lure us in, then strip us of flesh and souls.”
Daros shuddered in spite of himself. “You know something of them?”
“I've made a study of the dark arts,” Perel said.
“Darkmagery?”
“Nothing so innocuous,” said Perel. “Black sorcery, forbidden arts—we've banished them from the empire. But they're still alive in the world beyond our borders.”
“So I see,” Daros said.
The Olenyas looked him up and down. “You do, don't you? No wonder the mages are in such a taking. You're not supposed to exist. We want all our mages neatly bound up in packets and arranged on a shelf. Not racketing about the world, being much too strong for anyone's good.”
“I hope to be worth something here,” Daros said dryly. He cast his magic up like a line. Part of him was shuddering in instinctive horror; part was raising wards, forging armor of light. This was indeed kin to the thing beyond Gates. It drew its strength from the old dark powers,
from blood and putrefying flesh, from sacrifice of the living soul, and from surrender of all light to the devouring dark.
One learned in the Hundred Realms to understand the dark as soul's twin to the light, bound together with it, inextricable and inevitable. Without dark there could be no light; without light, the dark could not endure. This was nothing so beautiful or so balanced. It was to the Dark Goddess, and darkmagery, as diseased and rotting flesh to the cleanpicked bones of the vulture's prey. It was a perversion, a sickness.
He had never understood the old zeal of the priests of the Sun against the powers of the dark. When he heard tales of the Sunborn, Merian's firstfather, that told of his relentless hatred of all that was of the dark, he had been suitably censorious; for after all, as great a king and conqueror as the man had been, his beliefs had been sorely misguided. Now at last Daros saw what the Sunborn must have seen.
He swallowed bile, gagging on it, and forced himself to look at what crouched above. It was a fortress of age-worn stone, built into the crag. He counted a score of living beings within—men, he thought, though he could not be sure. They were bound with cords of darkness.
He was not hunting men, even men whose souls had been walled forever against the light. He needed knowledge—truth of what had overwhelmed the worlds. If not a book, then an image, a song, an inscription, anything at all.
The mages had recovered: he sensed them behind him. He did not turn to look at them. Wordlessly he began to climb.
 
Long before he came to the top, he knew that this place needed no protection but itself. The track was narrow, and in places sheer. It needed the agility of a mountain cat, or of a mage, to ascend that path. The slightest slip or slackening would cast him down a thousand manlengths, and shatter him among the crags.
The castle was aware of him. Its people, no; he would have sworn to that. But the stones themselves, and the darkness woven through them, knew that a stranger had come.
He made himself as small and as harmless as he could: innocuous, insignificant, no danger at all. He cloaked himself in that surety. He was a breath of wind gusting up the mountain, a glimmer of sunlight falling across the gate.
A firm hand of magic closed about him. “Let me,” Kalyi said. He resisted; he had not learned to trust anyone else's power. But he was not altogether a fool. He relinquished the wards and the shield to her, however reluctantly, and turned again to his hunt.
The gate was wrought of iron, enormous and impossibly heavy. Yet it was balanced so lightly that if it happened to be unbarred, the thrust of a hand could shift it. Perel and Irien moved past the rest, laying hands on it, raising powers that made the small hairs prickle along Daros' arms and down his spine. The wall and tower above them seemed to stir in its sleep, half-rousing, opening a blurred eye and peering down.
They passed through the gate as if through a wall of mist. There was darkness within, thick and palpable, and a faint charnel stink. The mortar that bound these stones had been mixed with blood.
They paused in a shadowed court. At a glance from Kalyi, the twins slipped away along the colonnade. Adin and Irien went ahead. Kalyi, with Perel, stood still by the gate, enfolding Daros in the cloak of their magic.
Daros sighed faintly, trying not to breathe too deep of the tainted air. The walls, the tower above him, even the brightening sky, weighed heavy on his spirit.
He turned slowly. The heaviness was stronger—there. Ahead and to the left, toward a corner of the colonnade. His guardian hounds went with him, Perel ahead, Kalyi behind. His shoulderblades tightened. But her knives were not for him—not while he served her order's purposes.
It was a great effort to set one foot in front of the other, to go deeper into the maw of the castle, and not turn and run. He was aware in his skin of the twins in a dim hall, wrapped in shadows, watching as a skein of men with shaved heads and black robes wound, chanting, among the pillars. The shiver along his ribs was the presence of Irien and Adin, seeing
to it that the way ahead was clear: dim passages, sudden turnings, ascents or descents that seemed set at random to catch the unwary.
They had begun to veer off the track, diverted without knowing it, shifted subtly aside by the power that waited in the castle's heart. He could warn them, or he could follow the straight way and let them be drawn to some semblance of safety.
His own guards slowed little by little, almost imperceptibly. He caught a hand of each, and set a spark in each mind: a binding to follow him wherever he led. Perel yielded to it with a twist of wry amusement. Kalyi resisted; but Daros was in no mood to be gentle. She, thank the gods, had wits enough to give way before she broke, though he would pay for his presumption.
Better to face her wrath later than to pay for her weakness now. His companions' rites and vows made them vulnerable. The power here knew mages and priests of the Sun, and turned on them as on an enemy. Daros it seemed not to perceive at all. He was small, he was harmless, he carried no taint of the Sun's priesthood. It took no more notice of him than of a rat in the wall.
Even ignored, he felt the power growing darker, deeper, eating away at his memory of light. He must come to the center of it, but whether he would be alive then, or sane, he did not know. He could only press forward.
These halls were deserted. The order must once have been numerous and strong: the castle was ample to house hundreds, even thousands. The score that were left huddled together in a tower near the outer wall.
There were guards ahead of him, but they were not human. They crouched like great beasts athwart the path that he must follow. Their eyes were shut, their bodies still; they might have been carved of stone. Yet they were alive, although they slept. Their dreams were all of the terrible light, how it burned, how it destroyed what they were bound to protect.
He was a shadow, a breath of wind, a skitter of leaf across the floor.
The sun did not stain him. The light did not rule him. He was utterly a part of this place and this darkness.
The guardians of the secret crouched on either side of its door. To the eye they were a pair of stone lions, each sitting upright, one paw uplifted, one resting on the globe of the world. Their eyes were living darkness.
Daros paused between them. They focused outward, not on him at all, and yet the force of their watchfulness buckled his knees. It was all he could do to shield himself and his companions, and walk forward, and keep both his fear and his purpose buried deep.
The door had no earthly substance. It melted before him. The heart of the darkness was almost painfully ordinary. It was a room, bare, with no beauty of carving or gilding. There was no inscription, no carving or painting, no book, nothing that might contain knowledge as his people understood it. Only a wooden table such as one might see in any poor man's house, and on the table a bowl no more beautiful than the room. It was made of unfired clay, the color of drab earth, and not well shaped, either; its rim was crooked, and it sat awry.
Kalyi moved away from Daros. He reached too late to pull her back. The shield stretched and snapped. She staggered and fell to her hands and knees in front of the table.
The thing that came down had neither shape nor substance. It seemed to grow out of the bowl, pouring over the table, hovering above Kalyi's bent head. It reared like a snake. Daros cried out, scrambling together his power. The dark thing struck.
He leaped, not at Kalyi, but at the table. The bowl writhed in his hands like a living thing. He could see—he could feel—know—understand—
He thrust the bowl at Perel and spun. The dark thing coiled about Kalyi. He struck it with an arrow of pure light.
It burst asunder. The floor rocked underfoot.
“The book!” Perel cried. “Where—”
Daros gathered all six of them together, wherever in the fortress they
were. Something was surging up from below, some child of old Night, waking from a long sleep to a terrible wrath.
“Take the bowl,” Daros said to Perel, quite calmly. “Bring it to her. The secret is in it. Tell her.”
“But—”
Daros silenced him with a lift of the hand. The truth was as clear as daylight, as sharp as a sword. It was in the bowl, which contained all the world. He knew where he must go. What he must do … that would come to him in time.
The Gate in him was open. It must be shut before the child of Night came up out of the earth. He thrust Merian's mages through, and the bowl with them. The floor bucked under him; he struggled to keep his feet. The Gate had begun to fray.
His heart was hammering. He sucked in a breath and leaped. Even as the Gate swallowed him, the tower crumbled in ruin. A vast maw opened below, jagged with teeth. The castle whirled down into the oblivion to which it had been consecrated.
Daros too fell into dark, but it was no earthly night. The devourer of Gates had found him. Only one spark of light offered refuge. He spun toward it. Darkness clawed at him. It burned like hot iron, shredding flesh and spirit. He twisted wildly. The spark was close—so close—if he overshot it—if he fell short—
Hope was all he had, and knowledge that had flooded into him when he touched the bowl, knowledge more complete than could ever have been written in a book. He clung to it as he whirled down through the darkness.

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