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.