“Like you were in the cities?” Damien said sharply.
“Like I was in the cities,” he answered coolly. Not missing a beat. “Cover what ground you can in the next few days. But don’t go into the valley without me. If you get to it before I come back, then stop and rest. The horses will be grateful for it.”
He stood, then, and Damien could see by the motion how weak he was. How stiff. How much blood would it take to heal a weakness like that? How many deaths? He tried not to think about it.
You hire a demon to fight a demon, and this is the price you pay. “Where will you go?” he asked. Hating himself for his curiosity, even as he wondered which Protectorate would surrender its women to sate the Hunter’s appetite. God, if there were only an alternative.
“North,” the Hunter told him. “The way we came. Some place large enough to harbor an army . . . or a sizable raiding party. Some place that already smells of blood.”
He heard Hesseth draw in her breath sharply as she realized what he meant. Who it was he meant to kill.
Damien thought of the village they had passed through. The bodies, the blood . . . the children huddled in the bathroom, their necks cleanly slit. Whoever had killed them, their crime would taint the currents for miles. For one with the Hunter’s sight, they would be easy to find.
Easy to kill.
“The least I can do for the man who saved me last night is choose suitable prey,” the Hunter said. Standing back now, so that the shadows of the night might enfold him. So that the darkness might lend him its power. For a moment Damien was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to summon the power he needed, that his strength was too far gone. Hadn’t he once said that transformation was the most difficult of all workings?
Then the coldfire flared, blindingly bright, and from its pyre arose a great black bird. It beat the night air with its wings—once, twice—and then rose up into the air, where the night obscured its motion. Garnet talons glittered in the moonlight.
“Be careful,” Damien whispered. Watching as its great wings tamed the night wind. Watching as it rose yet higher, until distance and darkness hid it from sight.
Only later, when he knew for a fact that it was out of hearing, did he add—very quietly—“Good hunting.”
22
It took them four days to cross the mountains. They could have made better time if they’d tried, but there was no reason to rush. Knowing after Knowing made it clear that none of their pursuers had followed them, which gave them the luxury of leisure time for the first time in their journey. And after what they had seen and done in the Protectorates they needed it, both to regain their strength and their composure. Fortunately, the fertile silence of the wooded slopes was a perfect balm for human and rakhene soul alike. Even the horses seemed grateful for a few easy days.
Damien tried hard not to worry about Tarrant. Tried not to remember that once in the past the Hunter had left their company and then not returned. It seemed so long ago that he’d been captured, almost in another life . . . but the enemy was the same. In the rakhlands it had taken the form of a woman, here it might be a man or rakh or even a true demon—but there was no question in his own mind that the two powers were linked. And so Damien worried about Tarrant’s safety, and Hesseth no doubt worried about Tarrant’s safety, and they tried hard not to inflame each other’s fears by talking about them. That would only make it worse.
How much I’ve changed, he mused as they made camp one night. Once I would have stood back and let him die. Once I thought that nothing could be worse than freeing the Hunter to feed again. Now I protect him without a second thought, and calmly wave good-bye while he goes off to murder countless innocents. But the situation was different now and he knew it. Tarrant had saved his own life several times, and while he understood that it was always for a selfish purpose—the Neocount never did anything except to benefit himself—the fact remained that he had done it.
That changed how you looked at a man, whether you wanted it to or not. And the people he’d be killing weren’t innocents this time, were they? Murderers deserved to die. Since the justice of the Church couldn’t touch them, let the Hunter provide their punishment. Whatever he did to them, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what they did to that village. Could it?
Be honest, he chided himself. We can’t succeed in this mission without him. That’s the bottom line. You need him, and so you must endure him. Protect him, even. It’s all part of this dark game we’re playing.
Use evil to fight evil, the Prophet wrote. If you’re lucky, they’ll destroy each other. Is that what I want? That Tarrant should die in combat, delivering the world from two evils at once?
He shut his eyes. His hands were shaking.
I don’t know. I’m not sure anymore. Not sure of anything.
He said that his presence would corrupt me. Has it begun already? Is this what corruption feels like?
God, protect my spirit, he prayed. The enemy can have my body, my life . . . but preserve my soul, I beg You. I’ve placed it in such jeopardy with this alliance. But there was no other way. You can see that, can’t You? No other way to succeed.
At night, while they set up camp, he tried to explain to Hesseth about the earth-fae. Though she manipulated it unconsciously—as all native species did—she didn’t really see it, at least not in the sense that Tarrant did. And so she listened to his descriptions in rapt wonder, like a child listening to fairy tales. He tried to explain it all. How the earth-fae surged up from the beneath the planet’s crust with enough force to kill. How it settled down soon after and then flowed like water over the land, in currents that could be mapped and harnessed, from the strongest tide down to the tiniest ripple. Since humans used the earth-fae for their Workings, he explained, then all their Workings must flow with the currents. Thus Tarrant or he could attempt to Know their enemy—in other words, interpret the effect of his presence upon the earth-fae—but it would take tremendous power to launch an active assault against the current. For their enemy, of course, the opposite held true. It would take almost superhuman force to draw information upcurrent for hundreds of miles, but any message or assault which was launched from the south would naturally flow toward them. That’s what had worried Tarrant so much about the foreign touch in the currents near the crevasse, he explained; if it was an attempt to focus on their exact position, it might mean that something very big and very nasty was on its way.
And then, when he was done, he dared to ask her about the tidal fae. It was the first time since the rakhlands that he had broached the subject directly. He wasn’t sure she would take it well—in the past she had responded to such questions with downright hostility—but though she was silent for a moment, he sensed that it was not because she was offended by his question, but because she was trying to find words for something that was beyond all language.
“It’s like a heartbeat,” she said at last. “Like the whole world has a heartbeat, very slow and very resonant. Sometimes, when I want to Work, it’s as if I can feel the blood of the planet surging through everything, through the land and the sky and through me, and I can shape it with a thought . . . and sometimes the world is silent, and there’s nothing to shape. Nothing at all. There’s no telling which it will be, either. No predicting any given moment. Because I say it’s one heartbeat, but it’s really like a thousand, and the rhythm between them is what matters . . . including my own pulse. And all the rhythms of my body. Do you understand? It’s so hard to explain something you don’t think about. Something that humans never sense.”