Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [168]
Then, at last, after what seemed like an eternity, the beast’s roar quieted. He could still hear it growling in the comers of his brain—it would never be wholly quiet again, not while Tarrant lived—but if he tried hard enough, if he focused on other things, surely he could learn not to hear it. Surely.
“You all right?”
He managed to open his eyes, amazed that his flesh still obeyed him. For a while it hadn’t. “Just great,” he whispered. It seemed there was an echo in the chamber, that it took him a minute to place. Tarrant’s perception. The thought sent a chill down his spine. I’m feeling him hear me. Fear uncoiled anew in his gut, rising up to—
He choked back on it, hard. His whole body trembling, for a moment he could do no more than lie where he was, struggling to get hold of himself. Then slowly, very slowly, he rose up to one elbow. Tarrant offered him a hand for support, and he grasped it in his own. Not cold, that undead flesh, but comfortable in its temperature, comforting in its strength. That, too, made him shiver.
“It won’t last long,” the Hunter assured him.
“Yeah.” He brushed himself off with shaking hands. “Only until one of us dies.”
“As I said.” The Hunter reached down to pick up his backpack, handed it to him. There was a strange kind of echo to the gesture, such that when Damien closed his hand about the leather strap it was as if he had just done so seconds before. Unnerving. “Not long at all.”
He drew in a deep breath, then slipped his arms into the straps. It seemed to him that the air between them was warmer than before; was that some new faeborn sense, or just overheated imagination?
“The strangeness of it will fade,” the Hunter promised. It seemed to Damien that he smiled slightly. And yet his mouth didn’t change, nor any other part of his expression. Weird.
“How about you?” he asked. The Hunter’s face, he saw, was back to its accustomed ghastly color. “Feel stronger?”
“Strong enough to send a Iezu to Hell.” And he added: “Thanks to you.”
For a moment there was an awkward silence. Not quite an expression of gratitude. Something stronger, and subtler.
“All right, then.” Damien shifted the pack on his back until its straps fell into their accustomed position, allowing him free access to his sword. Without further glance at Tarrant he started toward the exit, knowing that the Hunter followed. “Let’s do it.”
The valley was ...
Different.
Where before a dark valley floor had served as backdrop for mist and moonlight, now an ocean of fiery power seethed and frothed, driving itself onto the rocks beneath them with such force that a spray of earth-fae, fine as diamonds, drizzled down the slope of the ridge. Where once vague tendrils of mist had curled about the crags and monuments of Shaitan’s domain, now it was possible to see things stirring, snakes of mist that resolved into semihuman form and then, with a ghastly cry that Damien could feel in his bones more than he could hear, melted into mist once more. The whole of the valley floor was in motion, spewing forth malformed creatures and then swallowing them up again while Damien watched; the sight of it made him dizzy, and he leaned back against the ridge for support, afraid that he might lose his balance and fall into it.
And then that vision faded. Not utterly, though he would have liked that. Out of the corner of his eye he could still sense unearthly motion, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to walk along that ground without feeling the earth-fae twine about his flesh, without knowing that here every human thought became a thing with a face and a hunger and a chance to scream, before Shaitan’s power swallowed it up again.
“A taste of my Vision,” the Hunter