“If she is an illusion-” Tarrant began.
“Then she can’t kill us like this. Remember? Karril promised.”
“Karril promised Calesta wouldn’t kill us. I don’t remember him saying anything about my wife.”
Silent, she waited. Without her help there was no way to go on.
“Look,” Damien said at last. “She hasn’t got any reason to hate me, right? So I’ll go first. If it’s a trap for you, maybe ...” He couldn’t finish the sentence. Maybe she’ll take pity on an innocent man and warn me back. “Maybe it’ll be okay,” he finished lamely.
He walked to the edge of the canyon and started to look down into it ... and then forced his eyes up, fixing them on her. There was no way to read in her face what she intended, or how far she might go to entice Tarrant over that edge. Finally he drew in a deep breath and forced his right foot forward. He kept his eyes fixed on her as he moved, resolve like an iron fist around his heart. He moved his foot forward a few feet and down, to where open air seemed to be, and then he was stepping forward but there was nothing solid under him, nothing! and his survival instinct cried out in panic for him to throw himself back hard and fast, before his full weight was committed ... but he knew that a good illusion would feel like that, too, and so he didn’t. Eyes shut, cold sweat breaking out across his brow, he committed his full body’s weight to his forward leg. And it held. Praise be to God, it held! He took another step forward, and then another. Slowly exhaling, he opened his eyes and looked down. It was a dizzying sight.
He turned back to where Tarrant stood and tried to force a smile to his face. “Well? You coming?” The Hunter hesitated, then approached the edge himself. Damien watched as the man made the same wary foray that he had, and saw how his face went white with shock as he felt the ground fall out from beneath him. But he, like Damien, persisted, and soon they both stood free on the ground that had been so effectively hidden from them, Calesta’s illusion spread out beneath their feet.
“Apparently he hasn’t forgotten us,” the Hunter whispered.
The Almea-shadow led them onward, deeper and deeper into the maze of mist and acid. They skirted one canyon, turned away from another, and came to yet another which the shadow led them across. This time they followed her without hesitation. How many hours were passing while they fixed their attention on the next stretch of poisoned earth, sour odors rising from the mutated plants at their feet as if to welcome them? It seemed to Damien that the ground had begun to incline; how far from Shaitan’s peak did the volcano’s slope begin? His legs ached and his throat felt raw from breathing the sulfurous air, even through Tarrant’s silken filter. Even as he prayed that it wasn’t much farther to Shaitan’s peak, he remembered the sight of that looming cone, and knew that his legs would hurt much worse before this was over.
And then there was a wall of rock before them, and Almea stepped into it and was gone. The two travelers looked at one another, and then Damien, holding his breath, followed her. For a moment it seemed as if he had indeed walked into a stone wall—and then that feeling was gone, and the illusion also, and the open plain stretched out before them, with Almea waiting just ahead.
“I do believe we found the right guide,” he whispered. And he could have sworn that Tarrant smiled, albeit weakly.
The ground became rougher after that and walking slowed accordingly; the shadow set as fast a pace as she could, but she wouldn’t leave them behind. It seemed to Damien that he could sense a growing tension in the air; Calesta’s, perhaps? If the Iezu were truly worried about Tarrant reaching Shaitan, then he must be near panic now. What had the Hunter told him, that they had no power other than illusion? And he had clearly lost that hand. Good God, they might make it after all.
The gradual slope became a steep incline, and walking turned to climbing. Through the thin silk veil he could taste the biting sulfur of Shaitan’s winds, the reek of foul gases vented up through the volcano’s crust. Gouts of fire blocked their path, some whistling, some roaring, some burning in eerie silence. They skirted most, but some they simply walked through. All felt equally hot. Once Damien saw his pants catch fire, and the heat about his legs almost drove him to run for cool earth to roll it out. But she wasn’t running and so he didn’t either, and within minutes-as soon as Calesta realized that his newest gambit had failed—that vision faded as all the others had, into the stuff of memory.
Damien found that he was gasping for breath, and his heart had begun to pound so loudly in his chest that it drowned out the other sounds around him. The ground itself was trembling as if from an earthquake, but unlike an earthquake the motion was continual. It made for an oddly vertiginous sensation, in which nothing about or beneath him felt solid. As he climbed, he could smell the dry heat of lava nearby, hopefully not too close to where they were. How high up did Tarrant need to go, to do whatever it was he had come here to do?
And then they came around a chest-high boulder, and saw that right ahead of them a thin stream of lava blocked the way. It had vented through the mountainside not thirty feet away, and though it was narrow enough to jump over, Damien wasn’t sure that was the kind of exercise he wanted. “Is there another way?” he asked the ghost. She turned back to him slightly, just long enough to meet his eyes, then faced the stream and started toward it. But he didn’t move.
“Vryce?”
Her eyes. It was only for a moment that he had looked at them, but that moment made him tremble. “Not the same,” he whispered. He looked at the lava stream, so dangerously close, and began to back off. “We’ve lost her....”
The shadow turned back to them. She was the same as before in all superficial aspects, but something indeed had changed within her. That hint of softness Damien had sensed, behind all the pain. That one emotion in her that didn’t reek of hate. That thing which Damien had interpreted as love....
“Damn!” he whispered. When had they lost the real one? He whipped about as if hoping that she was waiting there behind them, but all that was behind them was a pitted slope strewn with boulders. When and where had Calesta made the substitution? All that it would have taken was a moment of inattention, easy enough in this land where every shadow seemed threatening.
“If he means to hide her, then we won’t be able to find her.” Damien could hear the exhaustion in Tarrant’s voice, of a soul wrung dry by fear. “We’ll have to go on alone.”
“No. We can’t.” He was remembering all the obstacles they had walked through, or walked over, or simply ignored. “We don’t stand a chance without her guidance." Think, man, think! “What are the limits of his power?” he demanded. Think!
The dead thing that wasn’t Almea watched as Tarrant considered. “He can create images that appear real. He can cause us not to see things that truly exist. He has some ability to affect the internal senses—hence our sensations of heat and of falling as we defied his illusions-but that ability must be limited, or else he could simply incapacitate us with pain.”
Internal. That was the key. Was there some kind of internal link between Tarrant and his wife’s shadow, that might help them find her? Evidently the Hunter had thought of the same thing, for he shook his head. “If it were really my wife, perhaps. But this isn’t the woman I lived with, remember that. It’s a construct of the fae, which contains no more of Almea Tarrant’s true substance than would her reflection in a mirror.