Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [169]
“Is that really what you see down there?”
The Hunter chuckled. “A faint shadow of it, no more. The most your human brain can handle. Here.” He held out something to Damien. “Put this on.”
It was a fist-sized bundle, soft and gleaming. Damien shook it out to its full length, nearly ten feet long. “A scarf?”
“Just so.” The Hunter had taken out one of his own and was wrapping it about his head like a turban. The fine black silk was so thin that it seemed more like smoke than fabric, and when he drew a fold of it across his face and fixed it there, it gave his white skin a weird, ghostly quality. “Shaitan’s breath is hard on the skin. You’ll want to put on your gloves also.”
“Not to climb down a mountain, I don’t.”
—and his hands are burning, corrosive mist eating into the flesh until the skin peels off in reddened bits, blood welling in the wounds—
“Okay, okay! Gloves it is!” He fumbled in his pack and retrieved them. “God.” He put the wrong hand in the wrong glove and had to start over. “You’re a lot of fun to travel with, you know that?”
“The fun,” Tarrant assured him, “has not even started yet.”
He looked down into the valley again. The ground was dark. The mist was just mist. It was comforting. Damien wrapped the black silk around his head as he had seen Tarrant do—it took three tries—and noted that it had a faint chemical odor, as if it had been treated with something. It did surprisingly little to affect his vision; perhaps it had also been Worked in that regard. Tarrant’s been here before, he reminded himself. He knows what he’s doing.
“Ready?”
The Hunter had brought a special rope for the descent, a thin line meant to steady them on the rubble-strewn slope, long enough to guide them down almost to the valley floor. He tied one end to a spire of rock and sent the other end, weighted, hurtling down into the darkness.
Damien sighed. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Tarrant led the way. Slowly, oh so carefully, they dropped down toward the valley floor and the dangers that made their home there. At times the Hunter would stop and signal for Damien to do the same, and they would grasp the thin rope to keep from sliding while he waited for whatever danger he had sensed to pass them by, or turn its attention elsewhere, or ... whatever. Damien didn’t want to know the details.
The rope gave out at last and they had to make their way without it. Gazing down at the ground by his feet, eerily lit by the orange fire of Shaitan in the distance, Damien couldn’t help but notice the tendrils of mist that played about his feet, couldn’t help but remember the vision that Tarrant had shared with him. When he made the mistake of looking too closely at the misty tendrils, they reared up like snakes and began to take on a more distinct form—but Tarrant ignored them, and just nudged him forward at a faster pace. Soon they were moving too fast to look at things closely, thank God. If you didn’t look, did they leave you alone?
At last they reached a place where the ground seemed level enough, and Damien allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Thin orange highlights played along the earth, not enough to see by; with a glance at Tarrant to make sure it was all right, he took out his lantern and lit it. Golden light flickered upon the bellies of mist-clouds, outlining ghostly faces that formed and faded as he watched. “Those are no danger,” Tarrant told him, when he seemed hesitant to move forward. “Come.”
It was an eerie place, and the orange light from Shaitan, flickering and fading as its lava fields pulsed, did little to make it more comforting. Craggy monuments lined the valley floor, and the mist flowed between them like rivers. A handful of plants had tried to take hold on the rocky ground, but they were stunted things, pale reflections of a hardier species, and their leaves and bark had been eaten away in seemingly random patterns, fibers peeling back to reveal a core laced with channels and pockmarks. The very smell of the place was strange, as if the plants were struggling to create