Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [165]
Andrys! she screamed, as the darkness gathered in thick folds about her. The sound built up in her throat and left her mouth, but made no tremor in the air. Andrys!
He couldn’t hear her. No one could. No one except the Hunter’s servant, whose beasts even now were mauling her frozen flesh.
Oh,Andrys....
Thirty-six
Sunset was sandwiched between earth and ash, its light like a wound in the darkening sky. Though the sun itself had disappeared behind distant mountains, its rays, stained blood red by a veil of ash, lit the bellies of the clouds like the fire of Shaitan itself. Now and then a wind would part the ash-cloud overhead and the light of the Core would lance through, but it was a fleeting distraction. The day was dying.
Pointedly not looking down at the landscape that spread out beneath his perch, Damien squeezed his way back into the shelter that Karril had found for them. The lantern he had left at the first turn was still burning, and he caught it up as he made his way back to the place where Tarrant waited. Unlike the Hunter, he needed light to see.
Tarrant was exactly as he had left him, resting weakly against the coarse wall of the cavern. By the lamp’s dim light Damien could see that his burns hadn’t healed, and that was a bad sign; a full day’s rest should have restored him. His scar alone remained unreddened, and its ghostly white surface, framed by damaged flesh, reminded Damien uncomfortably of the scavenger worms of the Forest.
“Sun’s gone,” he said quietly. No response. He put down the lantern and lowered himself to the ground beside Tarrant, striving to maintain an outer aspect of calm when inside he was anything but. Come on, man, we’ve got a long way to go and not a lot of time to get there! But something about Tarrant’s attitude scared him. Something that hinted that the worst damage wrought last night might not be that which was visible, but some wound inside the man that was still bleeding.
At last, unable to take the silence any longer, he ventured, “Gerald?”
The pale eyes flickered toward him, then away. Staring at something Damien couldn’t see, some internal vista.
“We can’t win,” the Hunter said weakly. The pale lids slid shut; the lean body shivered. “I thought we could. I thought there must be limits to his power. I thought that human senses were complex enough to defy absolute control—”
“And you were right—” he began.
“No. They aren’t complex at all. Don’t you see? What we would call a view of the sun is no more than a simple pattern of response in the eye, which is translated into simple electrical pulses, which in turn pushes a handful of chemicals into place within the brain ... there are so many places in which that flow of information can be interrupted, and with so little effort! Our enemy has that power, Vryce. One spark in the wrong place, one misaligned molecule ...” He gestured up toward his ravaged face with what seemed like anger, but for once Damien didn’t think the emotion was directed at him. “The only thing stopping him was Iezu custom. Now that he’s willing to disregard the law of his own kind, what chance do we have?”
“First of all,” Damien said, with all the authority his voice could muster, “It isn’t that simple a process. You of all people should know that. Do you think all those molecules in your head are labeled clearly, so that it’s easy to tell which one does what? Oh, youcould . probably figure it out—I wouldn’t put too much past you—but I doubt if Calesta’s got the patience or the know-how for that kind of work. Which means that he may have the power to screw with our heads, but he’s not necessarily going to do it right every time.”
“He did it well enough to—”
“Shut up and listen for once! Just once! All right?” He waited a moment, almost daring Tarrant to defy him. But the Hunter was too weak to spar with him like that ... or perhaps he was simply too astonished.