Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [96]
“Gerald,” he whispered.
He was bound as he had been in the fire of the earth so long ago: cruciform, his arms stretched out tautly to his sides, his legs separated just far enough to make room for the bonds at his ankles. But where the Master of Lema had used plain iron to bind the Hunter, the Unnamed had more gruesome tools. The ropes that were wrapped about him glowed with an unwholesome light all their own, and they shifted and twitched as Damien watched, like living creatures. Horrified, he saw one raise its head as if noting his approach; when it decided at last that Damien was no threat to it, it returned to the work at hand, burrowing down between the tendons of the Hunter’s forearm like some hungry animal, leaving a band of sizzling flesh wherever it passed. Now that he knew what to look for, Damien could see that the other “ropes” were much the same, serpentine creatures that twined inside and out of the Hunter’s body, their flesh burning into the man’s own like acid every time they moved.
He wasn’t surprised that Karril let go of his hand and refused to approach with him. Gazing at Tarrant’s tortured visage, sensing a man so lost in pain that he wasn’t even aware of their presence, he wondered that the Iezu had managed to come even this close.
You see? a slithering voice pressed, and another whispered, Your Church would approve.
He tried to focus on why he had come here, on the arguments he had been running through his mind since his discovery of Tarrant’s disappearance. It was hard, with that horrific display hanging just overhead. He flinched inside each time he heard one of the serpent-things move, guessing at the pain they caused.
“Is this some kind of punishment?” he demanded.
This is his judgment, many-voices-in-one answered him.
“For what crime?”
He could sense agitation in the darkness around him; one or two of the damned creatures flitted near him, but none made contact. For the act of forgetting who he is, and what power sustains him. For the crime of pretending to be human.
“It must have been a terrible thing he did, that over-weighs nine centuries of service. Tell me what it was.”
You were there, priest.
Was that anger in its voice? He tried to keep the fear out of his own as he urged it, “Tell me how you see it.”
He saved a civilization from ruin, one voice whispered into his brain.
He circumvented a holocaust that would have fed us all, another proclaimed.
He gave your Patriarch a weapon no man of the Church should ever have.
“What—?” He looked up at Tarrant, eyes narrowing in anger as he realized what the voices must be referring to. You son of a bitch. You did it! It was hard to say if he was more amazed or angry, now that he knew. What kind of desperation must the man have felt, to have risked such a thing?
He forced himself to turn away from the Hunter’s body, to face the unseen creatures once more. He had an answer for that argument, and for any other they might come up with. “Each thing you name, he did for his own purposes. Each thing he did, he did to stay alive so that he could serve you.”
Doesn’t matter
Doesn’t matter
Doesn’t matter
Traitor!
His mind racing, Damien struggled to regain control of their interview. “And so what? You’ll keep him here forever? Is that your intention?”
Until judgment is rendered
Until the compact is broken
Traitor!
“A death sentence,” he mused. “Is that what nine centuries of service are worth to you?”
He could feel something swelling in the darkness, like a wave gathering overhead, preparing to crash down on him. The next voice was deeper and infinitely more resonant, and played against a background of utter silence; the whispering voices had been sucked into a greater whole.
We reclaim a gift he no longer deserves, it told Damien. What he does after that is his own concern.
“You’re sentencing him to death.”
Again there was the dizzying sensation of something gathering just beyond his sight, drawing