Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [95]
Well, you should have thought of that before you came here, priest. It’s too late now.
The lip of the chasm near his feet wasn’t a sheer drop, as elsewhere, but an angled and rocky slope. Clearly it was the only way down, short of jumping. With a last glance at Karril and a pounding in his heart, Damien slipped free of the demon’s grasp and began the precarious descent. Into the black, rent earth. Into a darkness so total that despite the light from above, sharp yellow shafts making the lips of the chasm glow as if they were burning, he couldn’t make out the shape of his own hand in front of his face, much less any detail of his surroundings.
Then the darkness closed in overhead, and all sight of the world above was gone. He breathed in deeply, trying not to give way to the claustrophobia that suddenly gripped his heart. At last, when he felt capable of moving again, he began to work his way down the slope by feel alone. When the path seemed to dissolve beneath his hands, he fought hard not to panic, and waited it out. The blackness surrounding him was close and thick and evil-smelling, but his sense of impending danger had become so great that those things took a back seat in his consciousness. As did the pain of his many wounds, now burning anew as the darkness rubbed against them.
“Karril?” he whispered. “You with me?”
“Unfortunately.” He felt the demon brush against him and reached out to take her hand; from the strength of her returning grip he judged that she wasn’t any happier about this place than he was. He was suddenly glad that she had come here in a female form. It didn’t matter worth a damn in reality—a demon was a demon—but he would have felt like an idiot squeezing hands with a man in this darkness, even knowing the truth. Thank God for Karril’s insight.
Something brushed against his leg—and a wave of loathing rose up in his gut, clogged his throat, made his brain fill with images of hatred and destruction. An instant later it was gone. What—?Then another thing slithered against his back, and for an instant he was consumed by such jealous rage that all conscious thought gave way before it. That, too, passed quickly, fading into the darkness that surrounded as soon as its messenger lost contact with them.
“Hate-wraiths,” Karril whispered. “Rage-wraiths. And more. Every species of evil that man has ever produced is here, given independent life by the force of the planet. Congregating in this one place, like drawn to like, until their sheer mass gave them a kind of consciousness no lone demon could ever enjoy.” Damien could sense her eyes fixed on him; could her Iezu senses function in this darkness? “That’s your Unnamed, priest. Erna’s great devil. Like everything else, a creation of your own species.” Damien could feel her twisting, as if to look about them. “And a damn lousy host, besides.”
He was about to respond when a voice whispered, See. Others echoed it, fragments of speech that entered his skull not through his ears, as human speech might, but through his very skin. Whispers that etched their way into his brain matter without ever making a real sound.
See
Intruders!
No place
Go
Go
See
Invasion!
Strike out
Destroy
And then a deeper voice, more resonant, that seemed to contain a thousand others: See what it is you came to see, priest. Know your own helplessness.
A figure some ten yards distant from Damien was made visible, but not by any natural light. Eerie phosphorescence illuminated the form of a man hanging as if bound to some frame, but gave no view of his supporting device. It gleamed off the polished surfaces of belt buckles, buttons, and embroidery, but was swallowed by the darkness surrounding those things before it could illuminate any details of the chamber surrounding. It etched in harsh relief the visage of a man so wracked by pain that his features were almost unrecognizable, and the