But a very strange thing happened to me with that song. Master Caldrea repeated it several times, and as each line left his lips, something left me, for all the world like a bird flying out of my body—perhaps through the little wounds left by the silver knife—and vanishing into the wind. And this, for whatever reason, pained me far worse than the cutting itself had done. I think I cried out, as I had not done even when the Hunter was beating me. I know I cried out.
“Hush, my friend,” Master Caldrea said gently, each time I gasped or whimpered with loss. “Hush, it is no more than giving back what never belonged to you—the energy, the spirit, the little part of every Hunter you ever murdered. There…there…now it is free of you, all of it, all you took—can you catch even a glimpse, before it rejoins the Tree, where it belongs? This beloved Tree, that you have injured so cruelly?” The Hunters around me made a low sound that I would not like to hear again, and crowded closer, if that was possible. Master Caldrea waved them back, but they paid him no head.
“But the Tree forgives,” he continued, spreading his arms, as though to embrace me. “The Tree welcomes you.” Abruptly he plucked the trimoira from my belt with one hand, smeared a streak of blood from my chest on the other, and turned to the third Hunter, who knelt and bowed his head. Master Caldrea marked his forehead and cheekbones with my blood, and murmured five or six words that I could not catch. Then he stepped back, and the Hunter rose.
“It ends here.” Master Caldrea’s voice was perfectly cool and sane. “Not for him—not just yet, for he can only sacrifice himself after your blood has soaked into the roots of the Tree, and your soul has already gone to nourish it. Then he will die, on this same dagger, to seal the bargain—do you begin to see, Soukyan? Do you see?” I made no response, and the Hunter waited, his face striped gold and blue-black in the firelight..
“And the Tree will die too,” Master Caldrea said. “Die, and be reborn, mightier than ever, with his blood to guard it, and your soul, your self, prisoned within it. What Hunters will be born of this new Tree? What power and influence will return to our House through them? You will know it better than anyone, Soukyan, and I meant it when I said I envied you. Fare well on your far journey.”
I struggled, but of course it did no good; there were too many of them, dragging me further toward the Tree, whose roots appeared to rear themselves higher in eagerness to receive my blood. Master Caldrea stepped back and raised the dagger, while the third Hunter moved to my side and gripped my hair, hauling my head back to expose my neck for Caldrea’s blow…
…and then froze, as a scream like a rock-targ raped by a lightning stroke tore the night air, and Master Caldrea, along with every Hunter, every monk—everyone but me, my head being held so tightly—turned to see Brother Laska bearing down on us, brandishing his antique sword that I had never imagined he could swing, even with both hands. He was almost upon the Hunters by the time I finally pulled free, and his face was a mask of insane fury. I had to duck myself as the wind of the blade rumpled my hair. Even the Hunters did not move immediately to close with him; they, like everyone else, scattered in all directions to be out of range of that Corcorua two-hander.
Brother Laska was still shrieking his challenge as I caught up the trimoira dagger from where Master Caldrea had dropped it. I ran past him, looking desperately for my bow. I came on it blindly, fumbling in the cold, dry grass, and the quiver just beyond, and turned to face four Hunters, spreading out now to come at me from different directions. Depending on range, and a few other things, I can often have a second and third arrow in the air before the first has found its mark; but the distance was too short and my assailants far too adept to let themselves become easy targets, popinjays, for my convenience. I did bring down one—a lucky shot, he nearly charged right into the arrow—and then the rest were too close for arrows, so I threw the bow away, as far as I could, to keep it from tripping me up.
I can give only a few details of what followed. The Hunters’ hands kill by breaking your neck, crushing your windpipe, rupturing your liver with one open-palmed, stiff-fingered jab. You must keep them at some distance to have any hope at all of survival, and the trimoira gave me a life-saving length of arm. It was all in and out, dodging and lunging, sideways leaps and rolls and back somersaults. I was not nearly as swift as they were, but I had a knowledge of their favored tactics that they did not have of mine, for all they’d been inculcated in their caterpillar wombs with the supreme need to kill me. And even so…
Even so, I should be dead. My one providence lay in the fact that these were not quite the Hunters I had feared and fled and fought since I was too young to understand what they were. Dangerous still—deadly, deadly dangerous—but changed by a shadow’s depth from almost invincible to almost vulnerable. The Tree’s growing exhaustion had made that much difference.
The trimoira and the confusion accounted for one, surprisingly quickly; the survivors drew off, consulting together without speaking, as Hunters do. From the smoothly coordinated way they moved, I thought this pair might have been born a unit, and that much more dangerous for it. I seized the moment to scramble after my bow and quiver, and to loose off two arrows. Both struck home with a satisfying certainty—try that with a dagger, Lal—leaving me in command of a field grotesquely strewn with nearly-identical bodies. Bow taut, my last arrow notched and ready, I looked for the third Hunter, the one wearing my blood, but did not see him among the upright or the slain.
The monks were rapidly vanishing themselves; only Master Caldrea remained, standing before the Tree with his arms stretched wide, unafraid, but plainly sensing what I had in mind. “There will be others,” he called defiantly as I approached. “There will always be others.”
“Not from this tree,” I said. I took my flint and steel from my pouch and knelt in the grass.
Then I remembered. I remembered the helplessness—the laughing blue eyes—the whisper, so unbearably close. Nothing you do ever harm the Tree, never…no axe you swing…no spade…no poison…no fire you set…
No fire you set…
So be it: let this among his prophecies come true. I put my flint away, and picked up a brand from the monks’ own dying fire. I said, “Come away, Master.”
“No,” he said. His face was like slate, like old ice. “No, you cannot do this. I will not let you.”
“Come away,” I said again. He turned his back on me then and clung to the Tree, crying out in the language of his chant, as though appealing to it for protection, but the Tree had nothing to give him. I pulled him away by main force, and when he struggled free to run back, I hit him. Not hard, just hard enough that he sat down, dazed, which was all I wanted.
The scrubby grass was so parched that it went up with one touch of the brand. A hot wind played across my face, and for a few moments it was difficult to breathe.
Master Caldrea screamed. I turned to lay hold of him again, but he was on his feet, stumbling toward the Tree. I sprang after him, at the same time glimpsing movement in the corner of my left eye. I started to turn my head, and something came down on the back of my skull, just above the neck, so powerfully that I know I lost consciousness for a few seconds. The only reason I lost nothing more than that, I think, is that I was moving when I was struck.
When sense returned I found the third Hunter sitting on my chest, his knees pinning both of my arms. Behind him, the trunk of the Tree was already encased in rippling fire…along with something darker than the flames that could only have been Master Caldrea, leaning pitifully against it. The Hunter smiled down at me, just as he had done when he first put his hands on me. “All my brothers?” he said again. He raised his hand, canting it at an angle, slowly, just so.
Then he turned too late, starting to spring up just as his head vanished, and his body toppled sideways, and I was rolling aside myself, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the terrible cascade of blood that pulsed from the severed neck. Corcorua steel never loses its edge.
Brother Laska was petting the
huge sword, mopping away the blood with a tuft of grass. I thanked him—hardly hearing my own words for the ringing in my head—and he grinned his brown grin at me. “I did well? Hard to remember.”
“You saved my life,” I said. I looked toward the Hunters’ Tree, now completely enveloped in flame. Branches were exploding, bark was peeling away in great sheets and ribbons of fire, the black thorns blazing up and falling to ash just as quickly. I could not see Master Caldrea anymore. I said softly, so as not to disturb my head, “It is over.”
Brother Laska nodded happily. “No Tree, no more Hunters. The House will grow strong again.” He pointed warningly at me. “Best be gone, you. The brothers will talk.”
There is a battlefield prayer to be spoken when there is no way, or no time, to bury the slain properly. I said it, and Brother Laska and I started back the way we had come. I turned once for a last look at the Hunters’ Tree, which appeared to be burning even more fiercely than before. Then we went on.
As fatigued as I was, and as painfully as my head throbbed—the Hunter had missed breaking my neck by little more than an inch—the way back to that place seemed shorter, though the night was no less dark. I had not expected Brother Laska to accompany me as far as the stable, but he insisted on it, as though reluctant for his one adventure to end. “We were together!” he kept saying proudly. “Soukyan and Laska—I saved you, you saved the House. Soukyan and Laska!” He was carrying the two-handed sword now, shouldering it like a spear or a pike, and from time to time reaching to pet it affectionately. I found this touching, and was afraid that he might lose a finger.
At the stable I bid farewell to Brother Laska, saying, “You have done more than save my life; by heroically aiding me to rid the land of these ancient assassins, you have saved the lives of others whom you will never know. You have their thanks, as surely as you have mine.”
I bowed to him, turning my back, and knelt to examine my mare’s off hind foot. And perhaps it was a sound, perhaps a shadow, perhaps the familiar whistle of an old man’s inhalation—one of those, or all, or something else, set me dropping and rolling and scrambling to the side as the Corcorua sword sliced into a truss of hay just above my head.
It took Brother Laska an extra moment to free the great sword, giving me time to get to my feet and put some distance—and a full bale of hay—between us. I was as dumbfounded and speechless as he must have known I would be; not least because his eyes were as bright now as a young man’s eyes, and he was stalking me with a young man’s lithe quickness. Even his voice was changed, turning clearer and stronger, as he said, “But how much more heroic will I be when I bring back the head of the monster, the defiler, who destroyed forever the very heart of our House, the great defenders for whom Master Caldrea unhesitatingly gave his life. How can I pass by such an opportunity, tell me that?”
The horses were all stamping and whinnying anxiously now, as Brother Laska kept coming after me and I kept backing, sidestepping and dancing away. But a stable is a limited arena for a man trying not to be cornered, and the advantage is all with the attacker. I said, “You saved my life. I do not want to kill you. I don’t want to fight you at all.”
Brother Laska replied with a swing of the Corcorua sword that came so close I had to leap up on a haybale to keep from losing a leg on the spot. I pointed out desperately that the monks who had seen us together that night would indeed talk—“and how will you explain that you stood with me against the Hunters? That you took a Hunter’s head yourself before ever you took mine? Had you thought at all about that, old man?”
I had hoped to anger him, calling him that, and perhaps to goad him into a foolish mistake. But he kept coming, “Old man, aye—and what can a frail old man do in the hands of a maniacal killer? You dragged me along on your mission of massacre, and I was so shaken and so terrified that when I tried to kill you I slew a Hunter instead, by awful accident. But when it is known that I avenged them all, and avenged our blessed Master Caldrea as well…why, I would not be surprised if they named me his successor.” He beamed at me, his jagged smile no longer grotesquely endearing, but the bared fangs of a predator. “Would you be surprised?”
“No,” I said. “I must admit I would not be at all surprised.” And with that I threw the last strength remaining to me into a twisting leap from an overturned barrel to the top of a stall door, which I rode swinging straight into Brother Laska, knocking him down and jarring the sword from his hands. I was on it—and then him—in an instant, pressing the flat of the blade to his throat with the palm of one hand, grinning with my teeth clenched tightly, and rasping, “But not tonight, Brother, not tonight. This night, this head stays on these shoulders.” And I patted his wrinkled cheek insultingly, as one pats a child. As the Hunter had done to me.
And my own trimoira dagger came up from the stable floor in his free left hand, missing my neck, gouging the flesh over my collarbone. There was that much fight in him still; and more yet, as we wrestled for the dagger. Even then, truly, I was not trying to kill him, but only to hold him off while keeping the trimoira out of his reach. But my left hand was on the sword against his throat, and I felt something go, collapsing under the increased pressure. He coughed, and his eyes widened, and he looked for a moment as puzzled as a child. Then he shivered once, just the one long shiver, and died beneath me. It was that fast, and that quiet.
There were spades in the stable. I carried him outside and buried him and his ancient sword under a wild bilibro bush, which bears great purple flowers in the spring. The blood from my gashed shoulder fell on the petals. When I was done, I said aloud, “You were not always a doorkeeper, Brother. Sunlight on your road.”
When I turned toward the stable again, I saw the monks. Four or five of them, all faces I recognized from the firelit circle around Master Caldrea and the Tree. “I have done what I came to do,” I said. “I wish no harm to any of you. Let me pass.”
None of them moved, neither to permit nor to hinder me.
I took a pace toward them, a very weary hand on the hilt of the trimoira dagger, seriously doubting whether I had strength enough remaining to pull it from my belt. But the oldest monk—Brother Thymanos by name, a tall man with thin blue lips—stepped forward to say, “We have come to offer you all that your passage has left us.” I stared at him. Thymanos continued, “Caldrea is dead. The Hunters are ended with the Tree. If this house is to survive, it must do so, not only under a new Master, but under a new sort of Master.” He dropped to his knees beside me, then took my hand from the dagger-hilt and placed it on top of his bald head.
“No,” I said. “No. Oh, no.” But I said it in a slow whisper, because there was a strange dark justice in such a proposal, and genuine temptation as well. If I have never been much more in my life than a wandering mercenary of one sort or another, it has not been entirely out of laziness or uninterest. But most other possibilities had never endured beyond a drink and a daydream. Not once had I ever had to face the truth of what Master Caldrea had said of me: that I fled power because I desired it so much, because I feared my own ambition. I faced it now, in the eyes of the monks who had offered me their leadership—a mighty matter once again, with the Tree no longer draining the secret strength of that place—and also in my imagining of Lal’s raised eyebrow and the fox’s short, cold laugh if I should ever tell them of this moment. I said “No,” once more, no louder, but differently, and walked past them to fetch my mare out of the stable.
No one moved or spoke until I had mounted and turned the mare’s head toward the road. Then a younger monk, a shy man named Joshuo, “It could be different here. We could be different.”
“No,” I said, “you never could. But that is not my business, not at all. My business is to tell you that if anyone—anyone—from this place comes after me again, I will not only kill him, but I will return one last time and destroy this entire house, as I destroyed the Hunters’ Tree. You know I can now.”
And I rode away without a backward glance.
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