“In the dark?” Jenseny demanded.
Startled, he looked out at the enemy’s terrain and reconsidered. In his months with the Hunter he had grown accustomed to traveling in near darkness, to stumbling his way over roots and rocks with nothing more than a single lantern to guide him . . . but this place was different. What if darkness was part of this land’s special power, and once they were within its grasp . . . He shuddered. No. Not this time. The child was right. This time they would wait for the daylight, so that they could at least see what they were walking into. They needed that much.
As if sensing his thoughts, the Hunter warned, “You’re talking about considerable delay.”
He nodded.
“If the Prince has figured out where we are—”
“Then we’d be his prisoners by now, and you know it. At the pace we’ve been forced to travel-” He stopped himself from going on, but it was already too late. The girl had turned away from him, and he thought he saw her trembling. Blaming herself for their delay, no doubt. Hating herself on their behalf. Damn his lack of diplomacy! Stiffly, awkwardly, he continued, “Either your Obscurings worked and he isn’t sure where we are, or else he’s made other plans for dealing with us. Either way, I don’t think a few hours here will hurt us.” Defiantly he added, “I want to see this place.”
For a moment—a brief moment—he thought the Hunter was going to argue with him. But all he said was, “As you wish, then.” Just that. Damien was struck with a sudden urge to strike him, to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, to shout at the top of his lungs, Argue with me, dammit! Tell me I’m wrong! Tell me that I don’t understand the dynamics of this place, or that my vision is too limited, or that we need to keep moving . . . anything! He wanted the old Gerald Tarrant back, the one he understood. The arrogant, exasperating Neocount who had saved his life in the rakhlands even while threatening to destroy him. That Tarrant he knew how to deal with. That Tarrant he trusted.
What had changed the man? What could change such a man? He couldn’t begin to fathom an answer.
“All right,” he muttered. Turning away, so that he need not meet Gerald Tarrant’s eyes. “We’ll camp back there by the stream we passed—” and he pointed to the north, the way they had come, “—for the rest of the night. When the sun rises, we can take a look at what we’re heading into. All right?”
He didn’t wait for the Hunter’s assent. He didn’t dare meet his eyes. He began the treacherous descent with no further word, knowing that his companions would follow him. Hesseth, because she believed in him. Jenseny, because she needed them both. And Tarrant . . .
Tarrant . . .
Tarrant for his own reasons, he told himself. As always.
In this place, the thought seemed particularly chilling.
The dawn shed crimson light on the Prince’s buffer zone, and the details that it illuminated were far from reassuring.
Before them lay a twisted land, its hard black earth rippled and coiled like some swirling mudbath, its surface glistening in the harsh morning sunlight. Here and there a finger of rock jutted up from the ground, or a sun-baked dome blistered its surface, or a jagged crack, earthquake-born, reminded the viewer that even here, in this desolate place, greater destruction was always possible. It was jarring, forbidding, desolate. A sampler of distortion.
It was their destination.
In the distance were Jenseny’s trees, strange jagged blades of sun-bleached white that thrust their way up through the earth all along the blackened plain. Some grew in clusters, twining about each other with serpentine complexity. Others jutted up spear-straight from the dark earth, their slender trunks brilliant against the unbroken black of their surroundings. There was no sign of any leaf on them, or any flower, or any other sign of vegetative normalcy. With their bleached white trunks and their slender, twisted limbs they seemed almost skeletal in aspect, hands and arms and fingers reaching up from the black earth as if struggling toward the sun. It was a markedly unpleasant image, and one perfectly complemented by the aspect of the ground itself. In the distance the ripples of black earth appeared smooth, almost liquid, but where it lapped against the foot of their hill they could see that its surface was wrinkled and pitted, scored with a network of tiny faults in much the way that an aged human face might be riddled by tiny wrinkles. In places these gave the mad swirlings an aspect not unlike that of living flesh: a serpent’s coils resting in the sun, a tangle of intestines drying in the breeze. The combination of images gave Damien a sick, vertiginous feeling, and at last he turned away, to give his stomach a chance to settle.
“Assst!” The hissed exclamation was sharp and hostile. Glancing over at Hesseth, startled, Damien saw that the rakh-woman’s fur was stiffly erect; the coarse bristle about her face banished any illusion of humanity which her altered features might otherwise have conjured.
“It’s lava.” He forced the words out, imprinting the strange land with the ordered power of scientific nomenclature. “Cooled lava flow. Perfectly normal.” He remembered seeing land like this in the Dividers, when he crossed the Fury Basin, and once before that in the desert—north of Ganji. He had even seen trees like that once, trunks and limbs stripped bare by the heat of an eruption. Perfectly natural, he told himself. But though the shape of this land might have its origin in the natural balance of earth and fire, its aura was anything but wholesome. And he needed no Knowing to confirm that a man’s hand, a Prince’s will, was the source of its strangeness.
The crust could be thin in places, he thought. Under our combined weight it might well give way, and then what? Cold tubes and tunnels if we’re lucky, and if not . . . He had broken through the ceiling of an active lava tube once, and only barely managed to throw himself back rather than plummet down into it; the acrid fumes and raw heat that had blasted him in the face were sensations he would never forget. Was there a live volcano somewhere nearby? He searched the hills and mountains within sight for some characteristic sign. There was none. Which didn’t mean that one of those mountains might not explode while they were passing by, or that some hidden vent might not vulk to life without warning, right beneath their feet. Volcanoes were notoriously unpredictable.
The Black Lands bordered on this region, he remembered suddenly. Was the Prince’s stronghold also a lava plain of some kind? The name made it likely. If so, what did that say about the man who had chosen to make such a region his home?
If he’s living this close to a volcano—any volcano—then he’s a lunatic for sure. The woman in the rakhlands had built her home on an earthquake fault, he remembered. She had been quite insane, of course, and twice as dangerous for it. He prayed that the Undying Prince was more stable, for all their sakes; a crazy enemy was impossible to predict.
“Come on,” he whispered hoarsely. “We’ve seen enough. Let’s go back down.”
They had made their camp by a stream some two miles back, and although it was not a difficult journey once they had slid down the north side of the ridge, they hiked it in silence. Hesseth’s fur was still erect, and periodically she hissed softly as she walked; clearly she had never seen such a landscape before, or considered its implications. After a while Jenseny began to come up with questions—mostly about volcanoes—but though he answered them thoroughly and honestly there were things in his experience he was careful not to tell her about. Like the cloud he had witnessed from a distance, that had descended without warning from Mount Kali and scalded nearly twenty thousand people to death. Like the molten boulders he’d had to dodge when he was searching for passage through the Dividers. Like the volcano-born tsunami he had once seen, a wall of water nearly three hundred feet high that had crashed into the shore by Herzog, swallowing half the town in minutes. Those were the kinds of images that would give a child nightmares, and he was careful not to share them with her. But it was humbling to consider the true power of Erna; compared to it even Tarrant’s depredations were mere child’s play, the Forest a mere amusement park.