Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman Read Free Book Online Page A

The darkness? The night itself?”
    She knew she shouldn’t speak of such things, but she couldn’t hold back; his voice compelled response. “The creatures that hunt in it,” she whispered.
    “Ah.” He laughed softly. “And for good reason. They do value your kind, child, that feed on the living. But these—” and he touched the wards embroidered on her sleeve, the warding clasps that held back her hair “—don’t they bind enough fae to guard you?”
    Enough to keep away demons , she thought. Or so it should have been. But now, suddenly, she wasn’t sure.
    He put his hand beneath her chin, turning her gently to face him. Where his fingers touched her flesh there was cold, but not merely a human chill; it burned her, as a spark of fire might, and left her skin tingling as it faded. She felt strangely disassociated from the world around her, as if all of it was a dream. All of it except for him.
    “Do I read you correctly?” he asked. “Have you never seen the night before?”
    “It’s dangerous,” she whispered.
    “And very beautiful.”
    His eyes were pools of silver, molten, that drew her in. She shivered. “My parents thought it best.”
    “Never been outside, when sun and Core had set. Never! I wasn’t aware the fear had reached such an extreme here. Even now ... you don’t look. You won’t see.”
    “See what?” she managed.
    “The night. The beauty of it. The power. The so-called dark fae, a force so fragile that even the moonlight weakens it—and so strong in the darkness that death itself falls back before it. The tides of night, each with its own color and music. An entire world, child!—filled with things that can’t exist when the light in the heavens is too strong.”
    “Things which the sun destroys.”
    He smiled, but his eyes remained cold. “Just so.”
    “I’ve never—been allowed.”
    “Then look now,” he whispered. “And see.”
    She did—in his eyes, which had gone from pale gray to black, and from black to dizzying emptiness. Stars swirled about her, in a dance so complex that no human science could have explained it—but she felt the rhythms of it echo in her soul, in the pattern of mud beneath her feet, in the agitated pounding of her heart. All the same dance, earth and stars alike. This is Earth science, she thought with wonder. The Old Knowledge . Tendrils of fae seeped from the darkness to wind themselves about her, delicate strands of velvet purple that were drawn to her warmth like moths to flame. She shivered as they brushed against her, sensing the wild power within them. All about her the land was alive, with a thousand dark hues that the night had made its own: fragile fae, as he had said, nearly invisible in the moonlight—but strong in the shadows, and hauntingly beautiful. She tried to move toward it, to come closer to a tangle of those delicate, almost unseeable threads, but his hand on her arm stopped her, and a single word bound her. Dangerous, he cautioned; language without sound. For you.
    “Yes,” she whispered. “But oh, please....”
    Music filled the cool night air, and she shut her eyes in order to savor it. A music unlike any other she had ever heard, delicate as the fae itself, formless as the night that bound it. Jeweled notes that entered her not through her ears, as human music might, but through her hair and her skin and even her clothing; music that she took into her lungs with every breath, breathing out her own silver notes to add to their harmony. Is this what the night is? she wondered. Truly?
    She felt, rather than saw, a faint smile cross his face. “For those who know how to look.”
    I want to stay here.
    He laughed, softly. You can’t.
    Why? she demanded.
    Child of the sunlight! Heir to life and all that it implies. There’s beauty in that world, too, although of a cruder sort. Are you really ready to give all that up? To give up the light? Forever?
    The darkness withdrew into two obsidian pinpoints, surrounded by