“Shall I guess what you’re thinking, Reverend Vryce? That all happened four hundred years ago. These people are different now. Maybe so. So let’s consider something else.” He walked to where Damien was and crouched down opposite him again; only the map was between them. “Fact: there’s an Order called the Sanctified. You know what they do. But do you know how they purify themselves for doing it? With a Vow of chastity, Reverend. For three years, for five years, or for life. Now, another man might applaud that—purity of the body equals purity of the soul—but you’ve read my writings. You know how destructive it is to build into any religion an assumption that natural, healthful urges are unclean. For every Sanctified man in this region there are at least ten who wallow in guilt each time they have an unplanned erection. Is that the kind of emotion you want the fae responding to? Not to mention the repressed energies of the Sanctified themselves.”
“So they made a mistake,” he growled.
“Did they? I wonder. The people who came here from the west had no such tradition. So where did it come from? When did it start?” He leaned forward. “And the Matria. Haven’t you wondered about that? Doesn’t it strike you as odd that only women can head the Church here?”
“Why should it?” Hesseth demanded. “Division of labor according to gender is part of your human heritage. What makes this so significant?”
“First, because the colonists who were chosen to come to this world had no such tradition. Each colony had its own socio-psychological profile, and that was part of ours. Second, because there are real biological differences between men and women, and those should serve as a template for any division of labor which develops. It did in my own time, when we resurrected the so-called “traditional” roles as part of the Revivalist experiment. Men competed for the reins of power and women adopted roles of protection and nurturing. That arrangement worked because it was compatible with our biological heritage; this one isn’t.”
“Toshida said they were seers,” Damien told him. “Oracles.”
He shook his head, dismissing the thought. “Neither clairvoyance nor prophecy is strictly a female venue. No, I see no natural cause for this system. And that makes me question its source.”
He gazed down at the map as if remembering; his pale eyes flickered from city to city, all along the eastern coast.
“And then there are the wards,” he said softly. “Religious symbols marked on every pillar and gate, surrounding every city. Emblems placed on buoys throughout the harbor, so that even the closer ships are protected. They outline a sphere of protection so powerful, so perpetually reinforced by religious fervor, that not even a high-order demon can get by them. I know. I watched several try. No horror that this world has spawned can get into the northern cities, not by any means.” He turned back to Damien. His pale eyes were blazing. “And yet I can. For me there’s no resistance, none at all. As if the wards didn’t even acknowledge my existence.” He shook his head tensely. “In Jaggonath no ward could stop me, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel them. Sometimes with the good ones I actually had to unWork them partway to get past. But not here. Never here.”
“Are you sure?” Damien asked.
The Hunter nodded. “My nature is demonic, Reverend. Plain and simple. And if I didn’t struggle every waking moment to maintain my human identity, I would become a demon in fact as well as essence. Yet the power which guards this land doesn’t even recognize me as a threat, or make any attempt to keep me out. If so, what else doesn’t it recognize?” he demanded. “And who engineered such a weakness?”
“And why,” Damien muttered.
Tarrant nodded.
“Good God.” He reached up and rubbed his forehead. It was too much to absorb; his head was pounding. “Is that all?”
“Isn’t it enough?” the Hunter asked softly.
Damien looked up at him. “Is it all?”
Slowly Tarrant shook his head. “No. There was a child outside Penitencia, chained to a rock as an offering to the monsters of the night. There are children raised in every city for that very purpose: to serve as bait for the faeborn, so that men can destroy whatever comes to feed on their fear. They die very young. Or suffer a fate far worse than death. This one recognized what I was, and what I wanted . . . and welcomed me.”
Damien was silent. He could feel his own hands trembling—with the force of frustration, of rage. Of betrayal. The dream had seemed so perfect . . . What had fouled it? Or who?
“Listen to me,” the Hunter said sharply. “I don’t know how all these facts connect, but they do. There’s no question of that. And whoever or whatever caused it isn’t going to be out in the open, that’s certain.”
He forced his eyes to look at the map. “South, you think?”
Tarrant looked at Hesseth, who nodded. “Best bet.”
He drew in a deep breath, tried to still the shaking of his hands. A young girl chained to a rock, bait for demons . . .” We need more information. First.”
“Listen to me.” Tarrant’s words were reinforced with earth-fae, and they adhered themselves to Damien’s brain like fire. “Don’t talk to anyone. Anyone! Do you understand? Our enemy is subtle, and his strategy spans centuries. Even men and women who mean well may serve his purpose without knowing it. Isn’t that what we’re seeing here? Good intentions twisted to an evil purpose?” He stood; dark silk rippled about his calves. “I let my guard down once in the rakhlands—for less than a second—and endured eight days of burning hell as a result. Our enemy is subtle, Vryce, and that’s what makes him so dangerous. If he weren’t, don’t you think these people would have fought him? Or at least acknowledged his influence?”
“He must know we’re here,” the priest muttered. The vision of the chained child was still before his eyes. “If his influence is as far-reaching as you say—”
“All the more reason to move quickly,” he agreed. “Since we don’t know how far his power extends, or how many people are under his control. Best to move now.”
He walked to the door, carefully avoiding the maps that surrounded it. Before he left, he turned to look at Damien—and something in the priest’s expression must have displeased him, because the pale eyes narrowed.
“I killed eight times in the cities,” he said. Nostrils flaring as he spoke, as if he were recalling the scents of the kill. “Eight women. And each time the wards let me pass by with not even a murmur. You remember that, if you start to have doubts. If Mercia starts to look good again. You ask yourself what kind of power would welcome the Hunter into its stockyards.”
And then he was gone, quickly and silently. Not pausing to work an Obscuring to hide himself, but wrapping the fae about him for that purpose even as the door closed behind him. Damien felt the sudden urge to throw something after him, but the only things at hand were fixtures of the apartment: not his, and far too valuable. At last he saw a shoe peeking out from underneath a couch, that he had kicked off the day before. He grabbed it up and launched it at the door. Hard. It hit with a resounding thwack and slid to the floor, dispelling a small part of his rage. Only a small part.
“Was that because he killed the women?” Hesseth asked. “Or because he told you about it?”
“Neither.”
He sat on the edge of a couch and rubbed his temples; beneath his fingertips he could feel his blood pounding. “Because he’s right,” he whispered hoarsely. “God damn him. He’s right about all of it.”
11
It was midnight. True midnight, when the forces of dawn and dusk were perfectly balanced.
There was a cold front moving out and a warm front moving in; the turbulent line between the two was just crossing the Five Cities district.