Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [22]
She’s also a loremaster, and that kind values its neutrality. How strong are her vows, I wonder? Would she help us win our war if she knew that the fate of humanity might hang in the balance? Or would that be all the more reason not to get involved?
The scent of blood reached him just before the scent of fear; startled, he looked up.
It was Amoril, with a woman in tow. The albino grinned. “I thought you might be hungry after your long flight.” He had bound her hands behind her, and held the end of the binding thong like a leash. She strained against it like a wild animal, consumed by the kind of terror no human heart could sustain for long. She knew who he was, then. Good. It would save him the trouble of inspiring fresh fear. Not that he didn’t hunger for such sport—God knows, after eleven months on that damned ship he could use a hunt—but for once he didn’t want to spare the time.
How good it was to be home again, where women were raised to fear him! How good it was to have five centuries of the Hunter’s reputation to draw upon, to lend flavor to an otherwise quick snack. Her fear was sweet and hot and he drank it in with relish. When he was done, he let the body fall and motioned for Amoril to take it away. Let the albino feed it to his pets if he liked; the warm blood would please them.
But even the pleasure of a kill could not distract him for long. He began to go through his notes, page by page, searching for something useful. Anything. He didn’t expect to find notes on Calesta himself, or any instructions on how to dispatch Iezu. But somewhere, buried in the recorded discoveries of five centuries, there must be a single useful mote of knowledge. Somewhere.
Believe that, he thought darkly, as he turned the ancient pages, binding fae as he did so to support their brittle substance. Have faith in it. Because without that one hope, we are surely doomed.
Four
Nighttime. Dreamtime. The hours when the demons of the mind could take hold, their cold grasp firm until the morning. The hours when the human soul abandoned its struggle against the madness of this world, and the dark things that lurked in the corners of the human heart could take form at last.
Though it was late, the Patriarch was awake. Again. Unwilling to sleep, afraid to rest. Again.
Afraid to dream.
A book lay open before him, but he was no longer reading it. With a sigh he rubbed his temples, as though somehow that could soothe his spirit as well as his pounding head. He really should go to sleep, he knew that. If he didn’t retire soon, he would pay for it in the morning. Nevertheless... he tried to focus on the book again, and only when it was clear that his eyes were too fatigued for the task did he close its cover with a sigh and lean back in his heavy mahogova chair, abandoning the effort. He felt as if he had aged a hundred years in the last ten longmonths. It was the dreams, of course. If only he could somehow shut them out, if only there were some special drug or process, some prayer... but there wasn‘t, he knew that now. He had searched long enough and hard enough to know.
And even if something could make the dreams stop, would that leave the rest of him unharmed? Man couldn’t live without dreams. Not sanely, anyway. That was what half a dozen doctors had told him.
If you can call this sanity.
It had all started with visions of Vryce. Fleeting images of the man, sandwiched between the structured narratives of his usual dreaming. Vryce conversing with demons. Vryce surrounded by corpses. Vryce traveling with a creature so evil that its presence was a lightless blot on the Patriarch’s dreamscape, a blackness that reeked of hunger and death and the foulest of human corruption. At first the Patriarch had taken these for simple nightmares, and had thought little of