Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [212]
Distantly he watched, as if from another world. No one disturbed him. Not the soldiers whom he knew, not the Patriarch ... no one. Surrounded by a cocoon of darkness he watched as the flames danced, feeling their heat upon his face, an alien thing in the Forest night.
And then there was a stirring in the main portal of the keep, and a figure emerged from the shadows within it. One man, clad in armor of silver and gold, bloodstained sword gripped tightly in one hand. There was a dark-haired girl in the crowd who ran toward him, but something in his manner made her stop before she had reached him. The Patriarch rose up from where he sat and took one step toward him, but then Andrys Tarrant’s gaze—haunted, bloodshot—froze him in place.
Slowly he raised his other hand, along with the trophy it held. His bloodied fingers gripping it by the hair, he raised up the severed head of Gerald Tarrant so that all could see it. Damien shut his eyes, but the image was already burned into his brain and he couldn’t shut it out. That white skin, truly bloodless now. Those silver eyes, emptied of all intelligence. That life which was ever so much more than a mere human life, smothered out like a candleflame....
He mourned. God would condemn him for it, perhaps, but he mourned. The man who had once been called Prophet deserved that much, surely.
Five steps brought Andrys Tarrant to the edge of the fire. For a second he paused, as if giving those about him a chance to fix the moment in their minds. Then he cast the head onto the pyre—that tortured face, so like and unlike his own—and cried out as the first flames licked at it, as if feeling their bite on his own flesh. He fell then, and the dark-haired girl ran to him, and she dropped to her knees and held him and wept. The Patriarch came up beside them and offered his own words of comfort. God has led us to triumph, perhaps. Or something like that. Some ritual prayer that couldn’t possibly do justice to this moment, or to the man whose death had made it possible.
No one noticed Damien Vryce as he left the courtyard. No one saw him slip into the shadows of the Forest, away from the light of the flames. Away from the keep, and its storehouse of knowledge. Away from ... everything.
In the silence of the Forbidden Forest, in the darkness that the Hunter had called home, Damien prayed for God’s forgiveness, and for the peace of his friend’s soul.
Forty-one
They blew up the black keep at solar noon, when the hot white light of day set the finials ablaze and the glass stones shimmered like quicksilver. It had taken them all morning to prepare for the act, exposing all the rooms of the keep before a single fuse was lit, so that there was no chamber, no closet, no corner in which a shadow of the Hunter’s power might remain to sabotage their efforts. Amidst the towering, thickly thatched trees of the Forest that had meant waiting until day was well under way, for dawn, like sunset, lacked the angular power to breach the lower windows. In the meantime they mixed the materials they had brought to the Forest with meticulous care and constant prayer, and laid their fuses to the sound of Church-chants. Every grain of powder was tamped down in the One God’s name; every precious fiber was dedicated to His purpose. In a world where one man’s doubts might skew a host of enterprises, one couldn’t be too careful.
They were following a plan set down by the first settlers, in the days when the ravaged colony had struggled to record all of Earth’s knowledge. Inner walls first, and supporting columns, then the outer structure of the keep. On Earth such a pattern would have guaranteed a controlled infall of debris, minimizing the risk to those who watched. On Erna, where there was no guarantee that any of the fuses would fire properly, much less any fantasy that all the explosions could be timed ... call it a dream. Call it an act of faith.
It went off perfectly.
They heard the