The lip of the chasm near his feet wasn’t a sheer drop, as elsewhere, but an angled and rocky slope. Clearly it was the only way down, short of jumping. With a last glance at Karril and a pounding in his heart, Damien slipped free of the demon’s grasp and began the precarious descent. Into the black, rent earth. Into a darkness so total that despite the light from above, sharp yellow shafts making the lips of the chasm glow as if they were burning, he couldn’t make out the shape of his own hand in front of his face, much less any detail of his surroundings.
Then the darkness closed in overhead, and all sight of the world above was gone. He breathed in deeply, trying not to give way to the claustrophobia that suddenly gripped his heart. At last, when he felt capable of moving again, he began to work his way down the slope by feel alone. When the path seemed to dissolve beneath his hands, he fought hard not to panic, and waited it out. The blackness surrounding him was close and thick and evil-smelling, but his sense of impending danger had become so great that those things took a back seat in his consciousness. As did the pain of his many wounds, now burning anew as the darkness rubbed against them.
“Karril?” he whispered. “You with me?”
“Unfortunately.” He felt the demon brush against him and reached out to take her hand; from the strength of her returning grip he judged that she wasn’t any happier about this place than he was. He was suddenly glad that she had come here in a female form. It didn’t matter worth a damn in reality-a demon was a demon-but he would have felt like an idiot squeezing hands with a man in this darkness, even knowing the truth. Thank God for Kami’s insight.
Something brushed against his leg—and a wave of loathing rose up in his gut, clogged his throat, made his brain fill with images of hatred and destruction. An instant later it was gone. What—? Then another thing slithered against his back, and for an instant he was consumed by such jealous rage that all conscious thought gave way before it. That, too, passed quickly, fading into the darkness that surrounded as soon as its messenger lost contact with them.
“Hate-wraiths,” Karril whispered. “Rage-wraiths. And more. Every species of evil that man has ever produced is here, given independent life by the force of the planet. Congregating in this one place, like drawn to like, until their sheer mass gave them a kind of consciousness no lone demon could ever enjoy.” Damien could sense her eyes fixed on him; could her Iezu senses function in this darkness? “That’s your Unnamed, priest. Erna’s great devil. Like everything else, a creation of your own species.” Damien could feel her twisting, as if to look about them. “And a damn lousy host, besides.”
He was about to respond when a voice whispered,
See. Others echoed it, fragments of speech that entered his skull not through his ears, as human speech might, but through his very skin. Whispers that etched their way into his brain matter without ever making a real sound.
See
Intruders!
No place
Go
Go
See
Invasion!
Strike out
Destroy
And then a deeper voice, more resonant, that seemed to contain a thousand others: See what it is you came to see, priest. Know your own helplessness.
A figure some ten yards distant from Damien was made visible, but not by any natural light. Eerie phosphorescence illuminated the form of a man hanging as if bound to some frame, but gave no view of his supporting device. It gleamed off the polished surfaces of belt buckles, buttons, and embroidery, but was swallowed by the darkness surrounding those things before it could illuminate any details of the chamber surrounding. It etched in harsh relief the visage of a man so wracked by pain that his features were almost unrecognizable, and the shreds of his clothing where they hung from his lean frame were little more than wisps of dying color, bleached by the unnatural light.
“Gerald,” he whispered.
He was bound as he had been in the fire of the earth so long ago: cruciform, his arms stretched out tautly to his sides, his legs separated just far enough to make room for the bonds at his ankles. But where the Master of Lema had used plain iron to bind the Hunter, the Unnamed had more gruesome tools. The ropes that were wrapped about him glowed with an unwholesome light all their own, and they shifted and twitched as Damien watched, like living creatures. Horrified, he saw one raise its head as if noting his approach; when it decided at last that Damien was no threat to it, it returned to the work at hand, burrowing down between the tendons of the Hunter’s forearm like some hungry animal, leaving a band of sizzling flesh wherever it passed. Now that he knew what to look for, Damien could see that the other “ropes” were much the same, serpentine creatures that twined inside and out of the Hunter’s body, their flesh burning into the man’s own like acid every time they moved.
He wasn’t surprised that Karril let go of his hand and refused to approach with him. Gazing at Tarrant’s tortured visage, sensing a man so lost in pain that he wasn’t even aware of their presence, he wondered that the Iezu had managed to come even this close.
You see? a slithering voice pressed, and another whispered, Your Church would approve.
He tried to focus on why he had come here, on the arguments he had been running through his mind since his discovery of Tarrant’s disappearance. It was hard, with that horrific display hanging just overhead. He flinched inside each time he heard one of the serpent-things move, guessing at the pain they caused. “Is this some kind of punishment?” he demanded. This is his judgment, many-voices-in-one answered him.
“For what crime?”
He could sense agitation in the darkness around him; one or two of the damned creatures flitted near him, but none made contact. For the act of forgetting who he is, and what power sustains him. For the crime of pretending to be human.
“It must have been a terrible thing he did, that over-weighs nine centuries of service. Tell me what it was." You were there, priest.
Was that anger in its voice? He tried to keep the fear out of his own as he urged it, “Tell me how you see it.”
He saved a civilization from ruin, one voice whispered into his brain.
He circumvented a holocaust that would have fed us all, another proclaimed.
He gave your Patriarch a weapon no man of the Church should ever have.
“What-?” He looked up at Tarrant, eyes narrowing in anger as he realized what the voices must be referring to. You son of a bitch. You did it! It was hard to say if he was more amazed or angry, now that he knew. What kind of desperation must the man have felt, to have risked such a thing?
He forced himself to turn away from the Hunter’s body, to face the unseen creatures once more. He had an answer for that argument, and for any other they might come up with. “Each thing you name, he did for his own purposes. Each thing he did, he did to stay alive so that he could serve you." Doesn’t matter Doesn’t matter Doesn’t matter Traitor!
His mind racing, Damien struggled to regain control of their interview. “And so what? You’ll keep him here forever? Is that your intention?" Until judgment is rendered Until the compact is broken Traitor!
“A death sentence,” he mused. “Is that what nine centuries of service are worth to you?”
He could feel something swelling in the darkness, like a wave gathering overhead, preparing to crash down on him. The next voice was deeper and infinitely more resonant, and played against a background of utter silence; the whispering voices had been sucked into a greater whole.