“Like hell you will.” Damien reached down to catch up the canteen. Tarrant was moving quickly; he had to jog to catch up with him. “Who’ll get you out of trouble next time if I’m not there?” The Hunter made no answer.
The tunnel began to slope upward at last, hinting at an end. Damien’s legs hurt so badly as he forced himself up the angled floor that he feared they would lock up from exhaustion and refuse to carry him; he didn’t even want to think about what Tarrant was feeling. How long had they been walking now-one day? Two? If they did get blown up they’d have a chance to rest, at least. It didn’t sound all that bad right now.
At last, just when it seemed that neither of them could manage another step, they came to the base of a staircase carved into the mountain’s stone. Without even pausing for breath, the Hunter began to ascend. Damien saw him stagger once and he braced himself to catch him from behind, but the Hunter put out a hand against the wall of the tunnel for balance, paused long enough to draw in one long, shaky breath, and began to climb once more. The man’s determination was inhuman, Damien observed as he climbed unsteadily behind him. And why should that surprise him? This was a man who had once bested Death by sheer force of will; why should a little detail like physical pain slow him down?
They climbed two flights’ worth of stairs, maybe more. At the top there was a small landing where they paused to catch their breath, and a heavy alteroak door barring the way beyond. Thick iron braces were clearly meant to hold a wooden bar that would lock it from this side, but-thank God-that wasn’t in place. Damien wasn’t sure he could have lifted it. Without asking for help, Tarrant grabbed hold of the nearer brace and began to pull; when it was clear that his effort wasn’t enough, Damien grabbed hold of the other one and added his strength to the effort. Together, inch by inch, they pulled the massive door open. Its hinges made a creaking sound loud enough that Damien flinched, and a foul smell gusted through the opening, right into—his face. It was an odor of rotting meat and bodily waste and at least a dozen other things that he didn’t care to identify, and for a minute or two it was all he could do not to vomit. What the hell was going on here?
If Tarrant noted the smell, he made no mention of it. When the door was open far enough to admit a man, he slipped through, and Damien followed. As he did so, he turned up the wick of his lantern a bit so that they could see the space they were entering. It was a small chamber, crudely carved, with little in the way of comfort or decoration. There was a large slab table in its center, carved whole from the same gray stone, and his lantern’s dim light picked out several objects that lay upon its surface. Damien took a few steps closer, trying to make out what they were. Chains. Manacles. Feces of some sort, possibly human, that had been smeared across the table’s surface. The latter smelled pungently recent.
“Do I want to know what this place is?”
“No,” Tarrant stared at the mess on the table for a few seconds, his eyes narrowed to slits. God alone knew what he was thinking. “Suffice it to say that I kept it somewhat cleaner.”
He moved to the far corner of the room, where a lighter door swung open easily at his touch. As they passed through this one, Damien could hear faint sounds from above, murmurs and impacts transmitted down through the layers of rock. The soldiers of the Church must be very close.
“My wards will hold,” the Hunter said quietly, as if sensing his thoughts. As they walked on blistered feet through the fetid darkness, Damien wondered which of them he was trying to convince. Then suddenly the Hunter drew himself up, as if alerted to a hostile presence. Damien stiffened and drew his sword, ready for action. But Tarrant’s eyes were fixed upon the ground, where the earth-fae would be bright and rich with meaning; it was knowledge that had alerted him, not some foreign presence.
At last Tarrant said, in a voice that was still and cold, “He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“Amoril. My apprentice.” The pale eyes narrowed. “My betrayer.”
“Are you sure?”
He seemed to hesitate. Were the messages of the fae less clear to him now that he had no Working to interpret them? “Yes,” he said at last. “He lived—and ruled here-long enough to leave his mark upon the currents. That stink is his as well, no doubt ... or that of his animal familiars. He never was fastidious.” The thin mouth curled in distaste. “That he’s gone now is equally clear, and there’s only one way to explain that.” He looked at Damien; his expression was grim. “If they’ve truly killed him, then we have very little time left.”
They moved on, through a space that was more cavern than tunnel, in whose distant recesses water dripped with agonizing slowness. Now and then a noise would drift down to them, echoing through some flaw in the stone overhead. Soldiers’ voices, issuing orders. Animals’ howls, the cries of the dying. It was good that they could hear such things, Damien told himself. It was when the noises stopped that they would be in real trouble.
They came to another door, this one so finely worked that it seemed out of place in the rough stone corridor. Tarrant touched a ward at its center, which may have been meant to unlock it; the polished wood pushed easily inward, and the two men moved into the room beyond. Damien’s lantern light revealed a modest chamber, shelf-lined, which might have been a library in another age. Tarrant’s workshop, no doubt.
Utterly devastated.
He could feel the sight of the destruction strike Tarrant like a physical blow, and he flinched himself as he gazed about the room. Books had been hurled down from the shelves and mangled. Manuscripts had been shredded and wadded up like garbage. Leather covers, ripped from their volumes and scored with claw marks, reeked of urine and decay. He could hear the Hunter’s indrawn breath as he gazed upon the wreckage of his storehouse of knowledge, and he sensed that in some bizarre way this pained him more than Amoril’s other betrayals, or even the loss of the Forest itself.
You believed that knowledge like this would be sacred, he thought. You thought that even the Evil One, being man-made, would respect its value. He shook his head sadly. Welcome to the real world, Gerald.
There was a large trestle table in the center of the room, now overturned. Silently Tarrant moved to one end and reached down for a handhold; Damien put down his lantern and hurried to the other end to do the same.
“At least your people hate fire,” he offered, as they righted it. “If they’d burned the place there’d be nothing left at all.”
Tarrant made no comment. Reaching down into the mess that was under his feet, he brought up a single page, torn and crumpled and crusted with something brown. For a long time he stared at it, and Damien sensed that he was watching how the fae clung to the paper, how the current responded to the words that were on its surface. Then his hand clenched tightly, crushing it.
“We’ll never find the right pages in time,” he muttered. Damien could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “Not without a Locating.”
“Of course we will. We have to, right?” He spotted several whole notebooks on one of the shelves and pulled them out. “Hell, my desk in Ganji looked worse than this.”
For a moment Tarrant’s eyes met his. For a moment he could sense the utter despair welling up inside the man, not a product of this one moment or even of several moments past, but of everything he had experienced since they’d started on this God-forsaken mission. Even the Hunter’s indomitable spirit had its limits, he realized. And there was no sorcery left to sustain him now.