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Celia S. Friedman

Black Sun Rising

This book is for several very special readers:

Rick Umbaugh, who started it all; Kellie Owens, Linda Gilbert, Lori Cook, David McDonald, and Joe and Regina Harley, who keep it going; and Betsy Wollheim, whose criticism is, as always, worth its weight in gold.

The author would like to thank the following people for their insight, inspiration, and/or vital emotional support during this novel’s formative period: Jeanne Boyle, Adam Breslaw, Christian Cameron, Tom Deitz, Nancy Friedman, Bob Green, John Happ, Delos Wheeler, Karen Martakos, Robin Mitchell, Steve Rappaport, Vicki Sharp, Mike Stevens, Sarah Strickland, Mark Sunderlin, and Glenn Zienowicz.

Prologue

She wondered why she was afraid to go home.

She was within sight of the castle now, and its proximity should have calmed her. She loved the traditional building which her husband had designed, and all the men and women who lived inside it. The seat of the Neocounty of Merentha was a gleaming, ivory-colored monument to the Revivalist dream: all the elements of Gothic perpendicular architecture that seemed so oppressive elsewhere—at the royal seat, for instance—were here combined by that unerring aesthetic sense that was her husband’s strongest attribute, to create a building that was at once a soaring display of stone arches and finials, and a very real, very comfortable home.

For a moment she reined up her unhorse, commanding it to stillness, and tried to focus on the source of her anxiety. As ever, the effort was doomed to failure. She wished she had her husband’s skill to name and analyze such feelings. He would have taken one look at the building and said there, you see? The demonlings are out early tonight, it’s their presence you sense. Or, the currents are unsteady tonight, of course you’re nervous. Or some other explanation, equally dependent upon his special vision, that would render up the source of her discomfort in small, comprehensible packets of knowledge, so that it might be dealt with and then discarded.

The sun had set. Maybe that was it. The piercing white sun which bathed the land in sanity was gone, and the Core had followed it into its westerly grave. Only a few stars remained, and soon they too would be swallowed up by darkness. Things were abroad now that hid from the light of day, maverick human fears that had taken on a life of their own and coursed the night in search of a bodily home. She looked up at the sky and shivered.

Even Erna’s moons were missing now, two having already set and one, the smallest, yet to rise. Soon there would be as much darkness as the Earthlike world could ever know. A true night, her husband would have called it. A very rare, very special occurrence, for a world near the heart of the galaxy.

A night of power.