Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [177]
The gradual slope became a steep incline, and walking turned to climbing. Through the thin silk veil he could taste the biting sulfur of Shaitan’s winds, the reek of foul gases vented up through the volcano’s crust. Gouts of fire blocked their path, some whistling, some roaring, some burning in eerie silence. They skirted most, but some they simply walked through. All felt equally hot. Once Damien saw his pants catch fire, and the heat about his legs almost drove him to run for cool earth to roll it out. But she wasn’t running and so he didn’t either, and within minutes—as soon as Calesta realized that his newest gambit had failed—that vision faded as all the others had, into the stuff of memory.
Damien found that he was gasping for breath, and his heart had begun to pound so loudly in his chest that it drowned out the other sounds around him. The ground itself was trembling as if from an earthquake, but unlike an earthquake the motion was continual. It made for an oddly vertiginous sensation, in which nothing about or beneath him felt solid. As he climbed, he could smell the dry heat of lava nearby, hopefully not too close to where they were. How high up did Tarrant need to go, to do whatever it was he had come here to do?
And then they came around a chest-high boulder, and saw that right ahead of them a thin stream of lava blocked the way. It had vented through the mountainside not thirty feet away, and though it was narrow enough to jump over, Damien wasn’t sure that was the kind of exercise he wanted. “Is there another way?” he asked the ghost. She turned back to him slightly, just long enough to meet his eyes, then faced the stream and started toward it. But he didn’t move.
“Vryce?”
Her eyes. It was only for a moment that he had looked at them, but that moment made him tremble. “Not the same,” he whispered. He looked at the lava stream, so dangerously close, and began to back off. “We’ve lost her....”
The shadow turned back to them. She was the same as before in all superficial aspects, but something indeed had changed within her. That hint of softness Damien had sensed, behind all the pain. That one emotion in her that didn’t reek of hate. That thing which Damien had interpreted as love....
“Damn!” he whispered. When had they lost the real one? He whipped about as if hoping that she was waiting there behind them, but all that was behind them was a pitted slope strewn with boulders. When and where had Calesta made the substitution? All that it would have taken was a moment of inattention, easy enough in this land where every shadow seemed threatening.
“If he means to hide her, then we won’t be able to find her.” Damien could hear the exhaustion in Tarrant’s voice, of a soul wrung dry by fear. “We’ll have to go on alone.”
“No. We can’t.” He was remembering all the obstacles they had walked through, or walked over, or simply ignored. “We don’t stand a chance without her guidance.” Think, man, think! “What are the limits of his power?” he demanded. Think!
The dead thing that wasn’t Almea watched as Tarrant considered. “He can create images that appear real. He can cause us not to see things that truly exist. He has some ability to affect the internal senses—hence our sensations of heat and of falling as we defied his illusions—but that ability must be limited, or else he could simply incapacitate us with pain.”
Internal. That was the key. Was there some kind of internal link between Tarrant and his wife’s shadow, that might help them find her? Evidently the Hunter had thought of the same thing, for he shook his head. “If it were really my wife, perhaps. But this isn’t the woman I lived with, remember that. It’s a construct of the fae, which contains no more of Almea Tarrant’s true substance than would her reflection in a mirror. Believe me,” he said, “under the circumstances I wish it were otherwise.”
No help there, then. Damien looked desperately about the landscape as if seeking inspiration for some new line of attack ... and he found it. It was streaming along the ground not