“So there’s hope, then.”
“A long shot at best. What runs counter to Calesta’s aspect? Perfectly counter, so that he can’t adapt? Karril can deal with pain if he must, so the matter’s not a simple one.”
It came to him, then, from the fields of memory, so quickly and so clearly that he wondered if the fae weren’t responsible. “Apathy.”
“What?”
“Kami’s negative factor is apathy. The absence of all pleasure. The absence of ability to experience pleasure.”
“Where the hell did you come up with that?”
“He told us. Back at Senzei’s place, when Ciani was first attacked.” Good God! The memory seemed so distant now, half a lifetime away. He struggled to remember what the demon had said, at last had to resort to a Remembering. The fae took shape in response to his will, forming a misty simulacrum of Karril before them. There are few kinds of pain I can tolerate, it said, fewer still that I can feed on. But apathy is my true nemesis. It is anathema to my being: my negation, my opposite, my destruction. Then, its duty accomplished, the image faded. The room’s cool air was heavy with silence.
“Apathy,” the Hunter mused.
“There’s got to be something like that for Calesta, right? Something similar, that we can use as a weapon.”
The Hunter shook his head. “Karril was talking about trying to endure something, not having it forced upon him. How would you inundate a spirit with apathy? If it were deadly to him, he would surely flee from it, like any living creature. And apathy isn’t something you can nock to a bow, or insert into the wood of a quarrel. It can’t be made into a blade, to cut and pierce on its own.”
“Not yet,” Damien agreed. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some way to use it. You and I just have to figure out how.” Exhaustion seemed to cloud the Hunter’s expression; he turned away and whispered, in a voice without emotion, “In a month?”
“If that’s all we have.”
Though the Remembering had faded from sight, some vestige of its power must still have remained in the room; Damien could see bits and pieces of the Hunter’s recollections taking form about his head. Images of pain and horror and terror beyond bearing, still as alive in his memory as they were in that dark place inside his soul. Hell was waiting for him. So was the Unnamed. Thirty-one days.
“Not enough,” he whispered. “Not enough.”
Anger welled up inside Damien with unexpected force. He walked to where the Hunter sat and dropped down beside him, grabbing his shoulders, pulling him around to face him. “I went to Hell and beyond to bring you back, and so help me God you’ll earn it. You understand? I don’t care how little time it seems to you, or how vulking depressed you get, or even whether or not you’re going to make it past that last day. What we’re talking about is the future of all of humankind, and that’s a hell of a lot more important than my fate, or even yours. Even yours." He paused. “You understand me?”
The Hunter glared at him. “Easy enough words, from your perspective.”
“Damn you, Gerald! Why are you doing this?” He rose up from the couch and stepped away, afraid he would hit the man if he remained too close. “Do I have to tell you what the answer is? You’re a free agent for the first time in nine hundred years. Take advantage of that!”
“I am what they made me to be,” he said bitterly. “None of that has been undone. Going against their will means going against my own nature—”
“Damn it, man, no one said redemption would be easy! But isn’t it worth a try? Isn’t that better than handing yourself over to them in a longmonth, without so much as a whimper of protest?”
“You don’t know,” he whispered. There was pain in his voice. “You can’t possibly understand." ,
“Try me.”
The pale eyes narrowed; his expression was strained. “Those sins you saw,” he breathed. “Would you forgive them so quickly, if the matter were in your hands? Would you wipe clean a slate of nine hundred years, for one single month of good intentions? For a vow made in the shadow of such fear that its true motivation could never be judged?”
“I wouldn’t,” he said shortly. “God might. That’s the difference between us.”
"Might is a hell of a thing to bet one’s eternity on.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “About as shaky as trying to stay alive forever. Only in the latter case, you know it has to end someday.” He paused. “You did know that, didn’t you? That it had to end sometime. Today it’s Calesta and tomorrow it might be something else, but you can’t run forever.”
The Hunter turned away from him. Though Damien waited, he said nothing.
“All right,” the priest said at last. “You think about it. I’ll be back in my room if you decide you want my help. Karril has the address.”
He turned toward the stairs and was about to leave, but a single sound, voiced quiet as a breeze, stopped him.
“Damien.”
He didn’t turn back, but he did stop. Waiting.
“Thank you,” the Hunter whispered.
For a moment longer he stood where he was. Then, without voicing a response, he climbed the short flight of stairs and pushed open the heavy door. The sounds and smells of Kami’s temple greeted him, unwelcome reminders of the world that surrounded. Millions upon millions of men and women and helpless children, whose futures were all at risk.
I saved you, he thought bitterly to Tarrant. Now you do your job, and help me save them.
22
Pleasure was to apathy as sadism was to ...
What?
The analogy ran through Damien’s head obsessively, forever uncompleted. And though he tried to satisfy the pattern with over a dozen words, none of them were quite right. The answer continued to elude him, and only the knowledge that it must surely exist gave him the strength to rise above his frustration and keep searching.
The key to it all was the insight that Karril had given them, regarding his own counter-aspect. Pleasure was the opposite of pain, and yet a man’s soul could be filled with both things at once. Apathy was Kami’s true nemesis, the absence of any strong feeling, a state in which pleasure could not even be experienced. Yet it wasn’t an opposite exactly, or a compliment, or any other type of thing which Damien’s language had a name for. That made dictionaries all but useless, and even more sophisticated linguistic tools confusing at best.
It didn’t help to know that Tarrant had indeed confronted the Patriarch. Even after the Hunter had finally admitted that fact, even after the emotional storm that was inevitable had played itself out and subsided to a sullen resentment, Damien couldn’t stop thinking about the incident long enough to focus clearly on anything else. What had the Hunter said to the Patriarch, and how had the Patriarch reacted? Tarrant would say only that he had offered the Holy Father knowledge, and that whether or not the man chose to use it was his own concern. Damien could only guess at the torment such an offer would cause. Worst of all was the guilt in the priest’s own heart, the certain knowledge that if he had only come up with some better plan, if only he had initiated some milder contact on his own . .. then what? What could he have said or done that the Patriarch would accept? The man’s heart was so set against Damien that maybe the Hunter, with his ages of experience, stood a better chance with him. Maybe this was, in its own painful way, a more merciful form of disclosure.
He struggled to believe that, as he applied himself to the challenge at hand. He had to believe it, if he was to think about anything else.
Thirty days left now. He had no doubt that the hours were counting down inside Tarrant’s skull, in much the same way that he had counted seconds when traversing Tarrant’s Hell. And for much the same reason, he thought. It was all too easy to let such small units of time slip by one after the other, until suddenly they were all gone.