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.
4
Nighttine. 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 them. Considering his fury over Vryce’s behavior and his dismay at the man’s choice of traveling companion, it was amazing that he had not suffered from such dreams long before this.
But then there came other dreams, with more familiar subjects. And little by little, against his will, he was forced to acknowledge the truth. That these intrusive images weren’t merely dreams but true visions, clair-voyancies that came to him even as the acts they represented took place. When he dreamed one night of the mayor’s corruption, it was only to awaken and find that the morning tabloids were afire with news of blackmail and embezzlement. When he dreamed of Nans Bakrow’s adultery, it was only to hear three days later that her husband had begun divorce proceedings, for exactly that cause. And when he had dreamed of the Gillis child killing himself—
It still pained him to remember that. The midnight awakening. The rapid dressing. The rush to the Gillis’ abode through streets that were alive with demonlings, in the desperate hope that something could be done to avoid the tragedy he had witnessed. All to no avail. By the time he had roused the boy’s parents and reached the site of his vision, the young veins had already rendered up their last drop of blood; the boy’s lips were blue and cold, his dead eyes open and accusatory. If you knew, they seemed to say, why didn’t you come sooner? Words his parents never voiced, but the Patriarch knew they thought them as well. As he himself thought them, all the hours he lay awake before that dawn, struggling against the bleakness of guilt and utter despair.
Prophecies, his aides and servants whispered. The
Holy Father was seeing futures. But they weren’t that, not by a long shot. Prophecy implied a temporal framework, a balance between the present and future that might-with care-be altered. Were there not thousands of potential futures for each moment in this world, of which prophecy revealed but one? No, prophecy would have been a blessing compared to this. This was a nightmare of clairvoyance, a forced voyeurism that made him witness to the evils of his world without giving him the power to change anything. A pornography of the soul, which had made of him a helpless victim. He had tried drugs. He had tried prayer. He had even tried sleeplessness, hoping that sheer exhaustion would culminate in a collapse so total that even dreams could not reach him. To no avail. And though he rarely dreamed of Vryce anymore, when he did it was with such power that he would awaken trembling, cold sweat trickling down his face. Images of volcanoes fuming, of a black sky raining hot ash, of a ship rent into pieces, casting its passengers into a boiling sea ... and images of a woman suffering such pain and fear that his heart twisted in sympathetic agony, while Vryce stood by and did nothing to save her. Nay, while he allowed the suffering to continue, in consummation of some strange demonic pact which he and the Hunter had established.
God help you, Vryce, if those visions are true. He whispered the words into the night, as the last of the images faded into shadows of fire and ash. God save you from my wrath.
A knock sounded suddenly on the heavy wooden door of his chamber. He looked up quickly, alerted by its volume. What could be so urgent at this time of night?
“Come in.”
The door swung open hard, banging against the wall behind it. Leo Toth stood in the doorway, breathless, his skin sheened with the sweat of recent exertion. “Street of Gods,” he gasped. It was clear he had been running hard; he put out a hand to steady himself as he drew in a deep breath. “Temple of Davarti.” And he added, almost apologetically, “You said you wanted to know.”
He knew in an instant what the man was trying to tell him and he stood quickly, all thoughts of exhaustion forgotten. There was no time for exhaustion now, nor any other time-consuming weakness. “When?” he demanded.
“Just starting now," the man gasped. "If you hurry—”
“How many?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know. Two dozen. Maybe more. I passed them just outside the Sangh Shrine, maybe half a block down from Davarti. I stayed with them just long enough to find out where they were headed, then I ran here.” He leaned over to ease the strain on his lungs; his breathing whistled shrilly as he fought for air. “It’s a raid, Holy Father, no question about it.”
A raid.
With quick, decisive steps the Patriarch moved to where his ritual garments hung and layered a thickly embroidered stole over the beige silk robe he was already wearing. He added to that his most formal headdress, a peaked form layered and crusted in gilt embroidery. No hesitation in these choices, or in his dressing; he had gone over this moment too many times in his own mind to falter now. Other times he had been too late, had learned of the incident after the fact; now, for the first time, he had a chance to change things.