Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [112]
Fear was a sharp thrill inside him. “You’re going to make war against the Forest?”
“I’m going to make war against the Hunter,” he answered coolly. “Once the prince of that domain has been humbled, his unholy construction will topple from the center outward. His most fearsome creations will become no more than nature meant them to be: simple demons, subject to the sword or to prayer or to any of a thousand other simple tools. With our triumphant song resonating from mountaintop to river shore, with our victory echoing in a million human souls, we will do the Forest more damage than all the armies of our greatest age could manage in their time.” He paused then, perhaps waiting to see what Andrys’ reaction would be. Could he sense the hunger in him, Andrys wondered, the fear, the sense of standing balanced on the edge of a pit, so precariously that a light breeze might cause him to topple forward into the darkness? “I was told,” he said at last, “that you might have an interest in serving this cause.”
Heart pounding, he struggled to keep his face and voice calm as he answered, “I might.”
“You have a special connection to all of this, Mer Tarrant.” He stressed the last name ever so slightly, as if testing its veracity. “One that you and I must explore a bit, before I can offer you your place in our enterprise.” With your permission, his eyes seemed to say. As though they were discussing some mundane bit of business over afternoon tea.
“Of course,” he murmured, and he nodded.
He picked up his glass and sipped from it again, studying Andrys over its rim. When at last he was done, he placed it carefully before him, sculpting the moment of silence so that it lent double weight to the words which followed. “How much do you know about your ancestor, the first Neocount of Merentha?”
The only Neocount of Merentha. The words echoed in his memory with stunning power, voiced in the inhuman tones of his family’s murderer. For a moment it was hard not to lose touch with the present moment and return to that time; the scent of fresh blood was thick in his nostrils as he tried to force out some kind of coherent response. “I don’t ... what is it you want to know?”
“Do you know that he lives today?”
He hesitated, knowing that the crux of his future lay in this one moment. If he meant to feign ignorance in order to back out of this enterprise, this was his last chance to do so.
He thought of his family lying dead upon the ancient stone floor. The fire dying in the hearth while he wept, unmanned and unfutured, in a heap in the corner. He thought of all the months that he had suffered after that, the accusations leading to a nightmarish trial, hallucinations driving him to the brink of madness ... and the girl. She knew what was going on. What would she say, if he had his chance and backed away? How could he face her again?
“I know,” he whispered.
Something in the Patriarch’s posture seemed to relax ever so slightly, as if he, too, knew what that acknowledgment signified. “The man once called Gerald Tarrant became transformed at the end of his mortal life, into the creature we now know as the Hunter. He moved into the Forest soon after our last assault against that realm failed, and remade it to suit his own needs. To reflect back upon him his own damned nature.”
He nodded slowly, trying to see where this all was leading. What was it they wanted him to do?
“The Forest in Jahanna is now so perfectly ordered that it functions like a living body, with all its parts in harmony. Like a construct of natural flesh it depends upon its center, its brain, for purpose and for balance. And like a body of flesh it defends its brain with utmost vigor. Anything of foreign origin which breaches its borders would be subject to immediate attack, much as a microbe which invades human flesh would be set upon by antibodies. Only in this case, the antibodies are the stuff of our own nightmares, turned against us by a man who can sculpt