Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [131]
Calesta wouldn’t kill them himself, Tarrant had said. Those were the rules that his kind lived by.
Yeah, but he can manipulate others into doing it for him.
Tarrant led the way to the harbor, following directions that the guards had supplied. The narrow streets were all but silent and the hoofbeats of their horses echoed back at them emptily, as if they were riding in a cavern. It had rained recently, and a thin film of water over the cobblestones made them glimmer like glass in the moonlight. Black glass. Polished obsidian. Bricks like those of the Hunter’s keep, toward which even now the Patriarch and his chosen few were riding. He tried not to think about where the Church’s army was now, or whether or not he hoped they would succeed. Right now they had enough troubles of their own.
They turned down a side street, narrower than before, which curved to the north. They were close enough to the water now that they could smell the rank perfume of the Serpent, salt and seaweed and decay all blended together into a dank miasma. The harbor must be close by.
They came to another intersection and were about to ride through it, when suddenly the Hunter reined up to a stop.
“What is it?”
Tarrant looked down the three roads available, then back the way they had come. Damien followed his gaze. There was an open-air market to the left of them, its wooden tables now empty until the morning. Some kind of factory stood to the right, its windows dark, its doors securely locked against the night. Up and down the street and to both sides of them it was the same: no signs of human habitation, or of any business that might be active after dark.
He watched as Tarrant worked a Locating, and breathed in sharply as the image took focus. The road to the harbor was wide and paved with flagstone, and even at this hour it was not wholly deserted. Not like this road that they had been sent to, which might have been in the midst of a desert for all the human life it contained. They had been sent in the wrong direction ... and that could only mean one thing.
With a sharp curse Tarrant wheeled his horse about, and the Locating shattered like glass as he passed through it. Listening carefully, Damien could hear a faint noise approaching from the way they had come. Voices? There was a similar sound to the west of them, and the clear echo of hurried footsteps. No safety there, either. Damien was willing to bet that the other two roads were similarly guarded, or had been closed off.
“You said they wouldn’t know who we were,” he whispered fiercely.
“I worked an Obscuring,” Tarrant snapped. “Either they’re hunting mere strangers ...” He didn’t finish the thought, but Damien could finish it for him. Or Calesta gave them a vision of who we really were. An illusion of his own, to take the place of the one you conjured. Shit. If that’s what had happened, then they were in real trouble—and not only here, but anywhere that men could be gathered together for action.
“That way will be a dead end,” Tarrant declared, indicating the direction they had been riding. “And that way, too, most likely.” He gestured toward the silent street to the right of them. “With an ambush waiting, no doubt.” He studied the road down which they had come; Damien saw his nostrils flare, as if sifting the scent of the road for more information. “Calesta will have known that our destination is the harbor. Therefore they will have turned