Black Sun Rising (14 page)

The Temple of Pleasure was located just beyond the county line, which meant that Jaggonath’s strict laws regarding public intoxication were not in effect there. Accordingly, in response to the warmth of the night, seven of the eight walls had been rolled up. The breeze poured in, and worshipers poured out. Couples and triples and even a few determined loners sprawled on the steps outside the temple, energetically pursuing whatever passed, in their own minds, for
pleasure.
Warm air caught the scent of wine and drugged incense and human pheremones and gusted it out toward the city, along with the sharp aroma of several dozen torches. At the border of the temple’s influence, where the light grudgingly gave way to midnight’s darkness, figures milled about with the energetic restlessness of circling insects. The curious, come from Jaggonath to watch. The demonic, come from the depths of night to feast. A succubus flickered into female form at the edge of one such gathering, eyes hungrily searching for a safe way to approach the well-warded temple. A vampire in male form touched its tongue tip to its dry lips in anticipation, as a local woman accepted its advance. All forms of pleasure were deemed worship here, even such as theirs; as for the safety of those humans who fed them, the pleasure-god Karril protected only his own.

A tall man stood at the edge of the temple’s light. Lean, aristocratic, tastefully dressed, he clearly was no part of the voyeuristic entourage. In confirmation of which he stepped forward, and entered the temple’s circle of light. Women looked up as he passed by, intrigued by his beauty, and one reached out to him. But he failed to notice most of them, and the one whose hand had come too close met his eyes and faltered, then drew back shivering.

There was a fountain in the center of the temple—one might call it an altar—with sexually explicit carvings that spewed forth the drugged red wine of Karril’s worship. Leaning against it was a man of middle age, considerably shorter than the newcomer, whose disheveled clothing and hearty grin implied that he had just found fulfillment in someone’s embrace.

The stranger came to where he stood, and waited.

“Good guess,” the shorter man said pleasantly.

“You forget that I have demon-sight.”

“I meant, that I would be here.”

“You forget that I know you.”

The shorter man chuckled. “So it is.” He sighed, and looked out over the congregation. “They’ll make a god of me in truth someday—isn’t that the way it works? Rather awesome, to be at the receiving end of it. I keep wondering if I’ll feel it when it happens. Or if it will be a gradual conversion.”

“Spare me the pagan philosophy.”

“It’s your philosophy, my friend, not mine.” He dipped a jeweled goblet deep into the fountain, dripped red wine from his sleeve end as he drank from it.

“Can we talk?” the stranger asked.

“Of course.”

He shrugged. “As much as there ever is privacy, in this place.” A room appeared about them, tastelessly luxurious in its trappings. “It’s all illusion anyway, but if it makes you more comfortable....”

“I find the sight of such worship ... unpleasant.”

“Ah. Church sensibilities, once more. My theme for the week.” He chuckled. “Shame on you, my friend. I’d have thought you’d have outgrown all that by now.”

He reclined on a plush velvet couch and pointed to a matching stool opposite. “That one will support you.”

The stranger sat.

“Can I offer you something? Wine? Cerebus? Human blood?”

The stranger’s expression softened into something that was almost a smile. “I always refuse you, Karril.”

“I know. It pleases me to offer, just the same.” He drank deeply from his goblet, then vanished it when it was emptied. “So, what brings the Forest to Jaggonath?”

“A search for beauty. As always.”

“And did you find it?”

“A lovely, overprotected flower, growing in the mud of a farm.”

A shadow passed over the demon’s face. “To be hunted?”

“Curiously, no. She caught me in a rare moment of magnanimity, and I’m afraid I promised her safety.”

“You’re getting soft.” The demon grinned.

“My pleasures vary. Although this one, admittedly, was ... odd.”

“You may lose your reputation for evil.”

The stranger chuckled. “Unlikely.”

“So what brings you to this place? To me? Or am I to believe that you simply desired my company?”

For a long moment the stranger just looked at him. Karril made himself another full goblet and drank from it, waiting him out; such a silence could mean anything.

“What do you know,” he said at last, “about the incident at the Fae Shoppe?”

The demon’s expression darkened perceptibly. He stood, and turned away from his visitor. Goblet and couch both disappeared; the passionate reds of the room’s interior were exchanged for blue, sullen and grayed. “Why do you want to know?”

“I was at the place earlier this evening. At what
remained
of it. I worked a Knowing—and a Seeing, and a Divining, and several more things whose titles you wouldn’t recognize. All blocked. It takes more than an apprentice’s skill to block my sight, Karril. Something about that shop was damned important to someone—and they must have worked one hell of a sacrifice to protect it.”

“It doesn’t concern you,” the demon said quietly.

“Everything concerns me.”

“This doesn’t.” He turned back; his expression was strained. “Trust me.”

“I could take it down, you understand. There isn’t an adept in Jaggonath whose Working could stand before me if I was determined enough. But then it would be down for good. And whatever it’s protecting....” He spread his hands suggestively. Karril winced, but said nothing. “Need I remind you that I could simply work a Summoning and bind you?” the stranger pressed. “That you would then have to tell me what I want to know? That’s a much more unpleasant relationship, Karril. Why don’t you spare us both the trouble.”

“Because there’s someone I don’t want hurt.”

The stranger’s eyes widened with sudden understanding. His voice, when it came, was a whisper. Seductive. “Do you really think I’d use you as an accessory to pain? After all these years, don’t you think I know better?”

“Your standards and mine differ somewhat.”

“You feed on the Hunt.”

“I feed on the Hunter. And if his pleasures changed tomorrow, I would celebrate.”

“Even if—”

“Why do you care?” the demon demanded. “What is all this to you, that you bother?”

The stranger sat back, suddenly distant. “A loremaster has been attacked. I happen to be among those who respect the neutrality of such people. Shouldn’t I be upset? The currents in town have shifted—which hint at something much more nasty than a simple accident. Shouldn’t I be concerned? A nonadept sacrifices God knows what, to set up a blockage even I can’t Work through—”

“And something dark that isn’t of the Forest moves into Jaggonath. That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it? Territorialism. Defense of the Hunter’s turf. The loremaster and her mercantile enterprises have nothing to do with it.”

One corner of the stranger’s mouth twitched slightly: the hint of a smile without its substance. “There is that also,” he said quietly.

The blue of the room shifted through gray, to orange.

“I want your word,” the demon said.

“I recently gave that to a young girl,” he mused. “She didn’t know what it was worth.” He looked at the demon sharply. “You do.”

“That’s why I want it.”

“That I won’t hurt the lady Ciani? I have no reason—”

“You can be very tiresome, Karril.” His tone was light, but his eyes were narrow, his gaze dark. “As you wish. I will neither harm Ciani of Faraday, nor cause her to be harmed, until this matter is dealt with.”

“All right—
ever.
Are you satisfied now? Do you trust me?” He smiled, but his eyes were cold. “So few creatures would.”

“But we go back a long time, don’t we? I know where you came from. I know what you are. Even more importantly, I know what you were.”

“Then it’s time you made me equally well-informed.”

“There’s a priest involved,” the demon warned. “A Knight of the Flame. Do you care?”

He shrugged. “His problem, not mine.”

“I wonder if he’ll appreciate that fact.”

Again: an expression that was not quite a smile, a tone that was not quite humor. “It could make it ... amusing.”

The demon smiled. And made himself a chair. And sat in it. The room faded slowly to red again; plush velvet, in quantity.

“You sure you wouldn’t like a drink?”

“Tell me,”
the stranger demanded.

He did.

“This is a rakh.”

Senzei took hold of the ancient drawing with care and gently freed it from its tissue cocoon. The paper had yellowed with age and its ink had browned; he was infinitely careful as he turned it toward the lamplight, sensing just how fragile it was.

On it was sketched a mammal, four-legged and tailed as all Ernan mammals were. Visually unimpressive. He read the Latin name inscribed beneath it (Earth words, Earth terms, the species had been renamed so many times it hardly seemed to matter what it had originally been called) and then the date. And he looked up at Damien, startled. “2 A.S.?”

“The original. This is a copy. Done some two hundred years later, but supposedly an accurate reproduction. If the introduction is correct, the artist was copying from a sketchbook belonging to one of the original colonists.”

“The landing crew,” Senzei breathed. Tasting the concept.

Damien leaned back in his leather-bound chair; overhead, the deeply shadowed vaults of the cathedral’s Rare Document Archives seemed to stretch toward infinity. “That’s the earliest representation we have. And, for quite some time, the only one. Evidently, the original settlers didn’t consider the species worthy of too much attention. Of course, they had other things to worry about.”

“Like survival.”

Damien nodded. “Look at these.” He pushed a pile of sketches—chronologically arranged—across the table. Silently, Senzei began to leaf through them. After a while his eyes narrowed slightly and he shook his head, amazed. Then he went through them again, more carefully.

“It’s incredible,” he said at last.

“One can see why the settlers were frightened.”

“Gods, yes. If they didn’t understand the fae....”

“And this is before First Impression was verified. Before they really understood how man’s presence had altered the natural pattern here.” He picked up the first sketch and studied it. “Animal,” he muttered. “No more than that. Hardly worthy of notice, until Pravida Rakhi declared it to be the most sophisticated life-form native to this planet. That was forty-one years After Sacrifice. Man’s innocence lasted only that long.” He tipped the fragile paper toward the light, careful not to crease it. The creature that posed on its surface could have been related to any one of half a dozen species he knew—or even one that had ceased to exist. With but one aged sketch, it was hard to tell.

“You think they began to change after Rakhi’s announcement?”

Damien shook his head. “No. Before that. As near as I can tell, it started right after the Sacrifice. But when Rakhi declared that this species was man’s Eman equivalent—that but for man’s presence, the species would have developed advanced intelligence and complex dexterity and eventually taken to the stars—the pace picked up alarmingly. Such is the power of the popular imagination.”

Senzei leafed through the sketches again, laid several out before him in chronological order. Though they were done in a variety of hands using dissimilar media, the overall pattern was clear.

The species was changing.

“Of course, now we understand what happened. Now we know that
evolution
is a very different process here than it was on Earth. Here, if trees grow taller, the next gaffi calves are born with longer necks. If lakes dry up, the offspring of underwater creatures are born with rudimentary lungs. Their need affects their DNA, in precise and perfect balance. To us, it seems wholly natural; several adepts have even managed to Work the process, giving us our un-Earth species. But we understand this all now, after centuries of observation. Imagine what it must have meant for our ancestors, to see this happening before their eyes!”

Senzei looked up at him. “When did they guess where it was headed?”

“Not for a while. Not until Rakhi. The settlers observed that changes were occurring—but they were occurring in hundreds of species, in every ecological niche on the planet. And they had, as you say, much better things to worry about.”

“So now, imagine the rakh in that time. Moderately intelligent, seemingly self-aware, possessing opposable digits and thus a fair degree of manual dexterity. Inhabiting the very same ecological niche that man’s primitive ancestors did on Earth, in that evolutionary instant before he gained his true humanity. Changing, generation after generation—adapting to man’s presence, to the sudden appearance of a rival species. Slowly. Erna was feeling its way along genome by genome, testing out each new evolutionary concept before making the next adjustment. Keeping the ecosphere in balance.