Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [66]
If I let myself love him, I’ll lose myself forever. It was a thrilling, terrifying thought. Guide me, she begged. Not knowing who else or what else to turn to, not even sure that her goddess would listen. Help me!
Slowly an image began to form within the smoke, that was not of her own making. The heady scent of nuviola filled her lungs as she watched it, trembling. Wisps of silver danced in the smoke, twining about each other like serpents. Slowly, sensuously they knotted, melded, re-formed, redefined themselves ... with a start she realized that the vision had begun to take on human form, neither male nor female but a wispy, slender figure that might be either. Or both. The image looked so solid that she felt as if she could reach out and touch it, and yet it seemed utterly weightless as it floated there before her. Silver eyes. Silver face. Silver hair like fine-spun silk, that wafted weightless in an unseen breeze. The smoke became a silken veil that rippled across the figure’s surface, adorning rather than concealing its form. It was so detailed, so lustrous, so real.... With a start she realized that she couldn’t see the far wall through it, as she should have been able to do with a normal vision. Nor did the walls at her sides frame the vision with clean white plaster, as they should have done. The entire room seemed to have faded—walls and pillows, brazier and herbs and yes, even the smoke—leaving her alone in a sweet-scented darkness with a figure that gleamed like moonlight.
“Saris?” She whispered. She barely got the name out past the tightness in her throat. “Is it ... ?”
Tell me your need.
She opened her mouth to speak—and emotion poured out, raw and primitive, unfettered by the bonds of language. All the hope and fear and lust and need and love (was that love?) in a flood tide of memory that she could neither control nor comprehend. Pouring out of her blindly, into the surrounding darkness. When it was over, she fell back shaking, and her eyes squeezed forth hot tears. “Saris?”
For a moment the figure just stared at her. Digesting her response? At last it said, in an even voice, Andrys Tarrant is doomed.
It took the words a moment to sink in, and then it was a few seconds more before she found her voice. “What?”
He’s fighting a war he does not understand, for stakes he cannot begin to comprehend. He has given himself to one who will use him and then discard him, taking pleasure from the destruction of so tender a soul. He is a pawn, Narilka Lessing, nothing more. A blind, unwitting soldier in a war of gods and demons. The figure paused. A sacrifice.
“No,” she whispered.
I speak the truth, it assured her. Its tone was cool, emotionless. I have no vested interest in this matter to cause me to lie.
“No!”
If you bind yourself to him, you will make yourself part of his war.
“What war?” she demanded. “Who’s he fighting? Tell me that.”
The figure seemed to hesitate. A cloud of silk twisted about its thighs.
He means to kill the Hunter, it said at last.
The words were a cold thrill in her flesh. “He can‘t,” she whispered. “No man can.”
A single man, no. But a man with a demonic ally and an army behind him ... perhaps.
“An army? What army?”
The figure hesitated again, then shook its head. I can’t tell you that.
“What demon?”
I can’t tell you that.
“Why? Because I know the Hunter?”
The figure didn’t answer.
Wrapping her arms even tighter about herself, Narilka shivered. Andrys or the Hunter. If the two of them pitted all their strength against each other, one would surely die. Maybe both. The thought of that loss was an ache within her. The thought that the loser would probably be Andrys—desolate, wounded