“No!” the girl cried out, suddenly panicked. “Not here! Not with the voices!”
“Quiet,” the Hunter breathed, and his words, power-laced, made the very air shiver. “Now.”
Choking, she swallowed back on her fear.
“Look at her!” he demanded. “Do you doubt my judgment now? There’s no place in this mission for a child. You should have known that from the start.”
“I couldn’t leave her there.”
“No? So now what? Do you suggest we start interviewing nursemaids? Every time we stop to talk to a local we increase the risk of detection! Perhaps we should approach an adoption service.”
“Then what do you suggest?” the priest demanded. “You tell me.”
His gaze was like ice as it centered on the girl. “You know what I suggest,” he said coldly. There was death in his voice. “You know what my answer is.”
“No,” the rakh-woman hissed, as his meaning struck her. “You have no right—”
“Ah. Are we back to morals again? Have we so soon forgotten the lesson our enemy taught us—that if we hope to succeed, we must be willing to sacrifice everything? Even that?”
“I don’t remember learning that,” Damien growled. And Hesseth protested, “She’s just a child—”
“And you think I don’t know that? I had children of my own, Mes rakh, have you forgotten? I raised them and I nurtured them, and when they got in my way I killed them. Children are expendable—”
“Two,” Jenseny interjected.
Startled, the Hunter blinked. “What?”
“Two of them,” the girl said. Her thin voice shaking. “You only killed two.”
For a moment he stared at her in amazement. And in fear? Then he whipped about and caught up his pouch, shoving it into a pocket of his tunic. “You found her,” he spat at Damien. “You get rid of her.” It seemed to Damien that there was something else in his tone besides anger now, something far less confident. Was it possible the Hunter was afraid?
And then he was gone, and the door slammed shut behind him. Dust coiled thickly in the yellow light.
“Is that true?” Hesseth asked him. “What she said.”
He looked at the girl—and discovered that he, too, was afraid. Was it truly her power that was wild, or was that a manifestation of her own unstable nature? Was there any safe way to distinguish between the two?
“About what?”
“His children. Not killing them all.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t know. The Church says . . . I don’t know, Hesseth.” Then he looked toward the door, so recently shut behind the Hunter, and muttered, “I’d better go after him.”
“Damien—”
“He’s right, we can’t waste time here.” And we can’t let our party fall apart now, not when we’re almost within striking distance of the enemy.
He grabbed up his jacket and started toward the door, but her voice stopped him.
“That was tidal fae, Damien.”
He turned back, aware that his expression was one of utter disbelief.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
“But humans can’t-” He couldn’t finish. The mere thought of it was too incredible.
“Maybe now they can,” she said quietly. She had drawn the child to her again, was stroking the long dark hair with half-sheathed claws. “Maybe your species is adapting to this world at last. Once upon a time your people couldn’t see or work the earth-fae at all; now human adepts take those skills for granted. Maybe the fae can alter humans, after all—but only slowly, over the course of generations.”
A chill ran up his spine,. If the fae was capable of changing humanity like it changed the native species . . . he looked at Hesseth’s half-human form, at her oh-so-human features, and shivered. What if adaptation to this world meant giving up the very things that made them human? What if the price of universal Sight was the loss of their human heritage?
He couldn’t afford to think about that. Now now. That was a whole new domain of fear, and he had enough to deal with. He reached for his sword, then decided not to take it. Too conspicuous. He grabbed up a hunting knife instead and tucked it inside his sleeve, where no stranger would notice it. “Keep her in here,” he warned. “Keep her quiet.”
“Don’t leave me,” the girl whispered.
He looked at her—and knew then and there that Tarrant was right, that the risk involved in taking her with them was incalculable, that she might well cost them all their lives . . . but she knew the way. She had seen the Black Lands. Wasn’t it less risky to take her along than to go on that journey blind, feeling their way along trap by trap, danger by danger? Suddenly he didn’t know. Suddenly he wasn’t sure of anything.
“I’ll be back,” he muttered. And he shut the door firmly behind him as he committed himself to the Hunter’s trail.
Cool night. Heavy air, dank with the smell of fish and mildew and human refuse. He breathed in deeply, as if somehow he could catch the Hunter’s scent. A whore stumbled past him, muttering a drunken apology as she banged her shoulder against a brick wall. A young man came over to help her and they moved off together, laughing at some crude sexual innuendo he had improvised. The life of the city, Damien mused. Any city. In the end they were all the same.
He leaned back against the coarse brick of the hotel’s facade, all too aware of how well he fit in with the natives here. I’ll buy a clean shirt first thing in the morning, he promised himself, fingering one spot on his elbow where the heavy linen was wearing through. Clean pants. A change of underwear.
God! What a sad luxury . . .
When he was sure that no one was watching him, he relaxed against the building, half-shutting his eyes as he fought to concentrate. Although there was a channel established between him and Tarrant, he had never before tried to access it, or to use it for his own purposes. On a certain level it bothered him to do so, for there was certainly an unspoken agreement between himself and the Hunter that neither of them would use that channel for a Working except by mutual agreement. To hell with that, he thought grimly. He tried to sense that tenuous link, tried to grab hold of it with his mind and lend it some real solidity. It wasn’t easy. A channel wasn’t a thing in itself, simply a path of least resistance for the fae to follow. It took him some time to figure out what it felt like and an even longer time to become sensitive to its messages. Where is he? he demanded of it. Trying to sense its strength, its direction, its tenor. How far? He received no answer in words, nor in images as such, but had a vague feeling of which way to go. Good enough. He started off down the narrow street, and just in time; a head peeking out of a third-floor window warned him that he had been noticed, and no doubt if he had stayed in place a few minutes longer some kind of local policeman would have stopped by to see what he wanted. And that . . .
Would have been the end of it, he thought. Chilled by the image the Hunter had raised, of a whole city primed for ambush. If they didn’t get out of here soon, he realized, they might never get out of here at all.
He followed Tarrant’s trail through the heart of the slums, feeling the flow of earth-fae along the channel that bound them and guiding his steps by its direction. Past the crowded slums of the city’s center, past the tightly packed houses of its outer districts, past the wider lawns and whitewashed walls of a richer residential neighborhood at its border . . . at first he was afraid that the Hunter might have gone out to kill, to slake his fury in a brutal bloodletting, but now he knew better. If Tarrant had gone this far without feeding, then he was after something else. Escape. Solitude. Silence within and without him, in which to gather his thoughts. In which to regain control.