The Hallowed Hunt

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  They approached the outlying oak tree, and the name of Wounded Woods seemed doubly earned to Ingrey. The tree was huge and old, but seemed blighted. The leaves still clinging to its withered branches were not crisp, brown, fluted curls, but limp, blackened, and misshapen. Trunk and branches seemed knotted and twisted far beyond the rule for oaks—wrung like rags—and tumorous burls wept sickly black ooze.

  A warrior stepped from the tree. Not from under it, or beside it, or behind it: he stepped from the trunk itself as though passing through a curtain. His boiled leather armor was rotten with age. From the haft of his spear, upon which he leaned as though it was an old man’s staff, an unidentifiable scrap of animal fur fluttered. His blond beard was crusted with dried blood, and he still bore the wounds of his death; an ear hacked away, ax gashes splitting the armor, a dismembered hand tied to his belt with a bit of rag. A badger pelt was attached by its skull to his rusty iron cap, peering through sightless dried eyes, and the black-and-white fur dangled down the back of his neck as he turned to slowly scrutinize each of the three before him.

  Ingrey grew aware only then that sometime during the passage of the marsh they had stepped from the world he knew into another, where such sights were possible; its congruence with the world of matter filling his fleshly eyes was but a feint. Fara, too, was drawn into this vision; her body remained rigidly upright, her face blank, but from the corners of her eyes a faint gleam of moisture trickled downward. Ingrey decided not to draw Horseriver’s attention to this, lest he subtract her tears as well as her voice.

  The warrior straightened, and with his handless stump signed the Five, touching forehead, mouth, navel, groin, and heart—though he could not there spread his fingers. “Hallowed lord, you come at last,” he said to Horseriver. His voice was a groaning of branches in a bitter wind. “We have waited long.”

  Horseriver’s face could have been a carved wooden mask, but his eyes were like a night without end. “Aye,” he breathed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE SENTINEL LED OFF, LIMPING, USING HIS SPEAR AS A walking stick. Horseriver continued to lead Fara. Her hand clutched the banner pole tightly, and its tremble and her horse’s rocking were all that gave the limp flag motion in the breathless twilight. Ingrey’s horse snorted and sidled, and the mount he led yanked at its bridle and dug in its heels, eyes rolling. Disliking the feel of both his hands encumbered, by his own horse’s reins and by the other’s, Ingrey dismounted and let the animals go free. They wheeled and skittered back past the tree, then, too weary to bolt farther, put their heads down and began nibbling the tough marsh grass. Ingrey turned and paced after the hallow king’s banner.

  As they entered the margins of the woods, more revenants stepped from the trees. They were as tattered as their sentry, or worse; most were decapitated, and carried their heads, sometimes still in helmets, variously: tied to belts by the hair or braids, tucked under their arms, over their shoulders in makeshift carrier bags made of rope or rags. It took Ingrey’s disquieted gaze a few moments to wrench from their wounds and begin to take in other details of decoration, weaponry, or garb that told of their kin identities. Or personal identities. See my things that I have chosen; by them you shall know me, silently cried belts, loops of necklaces, and furs and skulls and pelt after pelt of the wisdom animals whose strength they’d hoped to inherit. Everywhere, faded stitchery peeked out, on collars, on baldrics, on the hems of cloaks, on embroidered armbands. My wife made this, my daughter, my sister, my mother. See the intricacy, see the colors intertwined; I was beloved, once.

  A tall soldier, whose head still balanced upon a neck half–cut through and crusted with dark blood, sidled close to Ingrey. He bore a thick wolf pelt over his shoulders, and he stared at Ingrey in as great a wonder as if Ingrey had been a ghost and he a living man. He reached out a hand, and Ingrey first flinched away, but then set his teeth and endured the touch. More than a gust of air, less than flesh, it left a liquid chill in its wake across his skin.

  Other wolf-skin-clad warriors clustered about Ingrey, and a woman as well, gray-haired, stout, her torn dress elaborated with twining strips of gray fur, her looping gold armbands tipped with elegant little wolf’s heads with garnet eyes. Some of these could be my own forefathers, Ingrey realized, and not just on the Wolfcliff side; a dozen other kins’ blood ran through his veins from foremothers as well, in a turbulent stream. It had disturbed him to think himself an intruder in a graveyard; it devastated him to suspect the fascination of the ghostly warriors with him was the excitement of grandparents seeing for the first time a child they’d never hoped to look upon. Five gods help me, help me, help me… to do what?

  He blinked in astonishment when the growing parade was joined by half a dozen dark-haired hacked-about men wearing the tabards of Darthacan archers of Audar’s day. They swung wide around Horseriver, but crept up to Ingrey’s heels. The other revenants did not seem to mind their presence here; equal in death for four centuries, perhaps they had made their own soldier’s peace. Audar, Ingrey had heard, had carried out his own dead rather than burying them in this accursed ground, sealed from men and gods, but the battle had been great, and conducted largely in the dark; it was no wonder a few had been missed.

  The warriors flowed after the kingly banner like a muster of mourners; a river of sorrow; a whisper of supplication.

  The bowl of the valley had turned shadowless with evening, but the sky above was still pale, and the oak branches overhead interlaced against it like crooked black webs. Horseriver seemed to be aiming generally toward the center of the wood, but not in a straight path; it was as though he searched for something. A faintly voiced Ah told Ingrey he had found it. The roof of branches thinned and drew back around a long low mound upon which no trees grew. Horseriver halted beside it, pulled Fara down from her wary cob, and helped her step up the bank and plant the banner pole by her boot.

  Released, the horse sidled nervously away through the trees, somehow avoiding touching any of the gathering mob of curious revenants. More than curious, Ingrey realized; agitated. His blood seethed in the surf of their excitement. More and more came, crowding up thickly around them, and Ingrey began to feel in his marrow just how many four thousand murdered men were. He tried to count them, then count blocks and multiply, but lost his place and abandoned the attempt. It failed utterly to aid his sweating grip on reason anyway.

  Horseriver knelt upon the mound, pushed aside a thin screen of sickly weeds, and ran his fingers through the dark soil. “This was the trench I was buried in,” he remarked conversationally to Ingrey. “I and many others. Though I never actually spilled my blood at Holytree. Audar was careful about that. That shall be rectified.” He climbed wearily to his feet. “All shall be rectified.” He nodded to the ghosts, who stirred uneasily.

  At the outer edges of the circle, late arrivals milled about; those few who could, craned their necks. It seemed they spoke to each other; to Ingrey, the voices were blurred and faint, like hearing from underwater men calling or arguing on a shore. Ingrey touched the dirty bandage on his right hand, hardly more than a rag wrapped about to keep knocks from paining the healing wound’s tenderness. It wasn’t bleeding again, at least. Yet.

  With difficulty, Ingrey cleared his throat. “Sire, what do we do here?”

  Horseriver smiled, faintly. “Finish it, Ingrey. If you hold to your task, and my banner-carrier holds to hers, that is. Finish it.”

  “Hadn’t you better tell us how, then?”

  “Yes,” sighed Horseriver. “It is time.” He glanced skyward. “With neither sun nor moon nor stars to witness, in an hour neither day nor night; what more befitting a moment than this? Long was the preparation, long and difficult, but the doing—ah. The doing is simple and quick.” He drew his knife from his belt, the same he’d used to cut the throat of Ijada’s mare, and Ingrey tensed. Kingly charisma or no, if Horseriver turned on Fara, Ingrey would have to try to…He made to lift his hand to his sword hilt, but found it heavy and unres
ponsive; his heart began to hammer in panic at the unexpected constraint.

  But Horseriver instead pressed the haft into Fara’s limp hand, then took the banner pole and ground it deeper into the soil so that it stood upright, if slightly tilted, on its own. “This will best be done kneeling, I think,” he mused. “The woman is weak.”

  He turned again to Ingrey. “Fara”—he nodded to his wife, who stared back with eyes gone wide and black—“will shortly cut my throat for me. Being my banner-carrier, she will hold, for a little moment, my kingship and my soul here. You have until her grip fails, no more, to cleanse my spirit horse from me. If you do not succeed, you will have the full, but not unique, experience of becoming my heir. What will happen then, not even I can predict, but I am fairly certain it will be nothing good. And it will go on forever. So do not fail, my royal shaman.”

  Ingrey’s pulse throbbed in his ears, and his stomach knotted. “I thought you could not die. You said the spell held you in the world.”

  “Follow it around, Ingrey. The trees, and all the living web of Holytree, are bound to the souls of my warriors, and support them in the world of matter. These”—he gestured broadly at the clustering revenants—“create my hallow kingship that binds them to me. My spirit horse”—he touched his breast—“my power as a shaman, binds the trees to the men. I told you that the hallow king was the hub of the spell for invincibility, I do remember that. Cut the link at any point, and the circle unwinds. This is the link you can reach.”

  And you cannot? No…he could not. Horseriver was bound up in his own spell, like a key locked inside its box. “That’s what this has all been about, then? An elaborate suicide?” said Ingrey indignantly. He struggled once more to move, to jerk his physical body into motion, but achieved only a shudder.

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  “How many people did you actually kill to arrange this?” As carelessly as you set me on Ijada?

  “Not as many as you’d think. They do die on their own.” Horseriver’s lips twisted. “And to say I would rather die than to have all this to do over again both sums and fails even to touch the truth.”

  Ingrey’s mind lurched. “This will break the spell.”

  “It’s all of a piece. Yes.”

  “What will happen to these, then?” Ingrey waved about at the crowding ghosts. “Will they go to the gods as well?”

  “Gods, Ingrey? There are no gods here.”

  It is true, Ingrey realized. Was that part of what disturbed him so deeply about this ground? The interlocking boundaries of the spell, the will of this unholy hallow king, excluded Them. Had done so for centuries, it appeared. Horseriver’s war with the gods had been in stalemate for that long, while his host had slowly become instead his hostages.

  Horseriver pressed Fara to her knees and knelt in front of her, facing away. He pulled her knife hand round over his right shoulder and briefly kissed the white knuckles. A flash of memory washed over Ingrey, of his wolf licking his ear before he’d cut its throat.

  The unmaking of this twisted spell, the long-delayed cleansing of Bloodfield, seemed no intrinsic sin, apart from Wencel’s self-murder. Yet five gods had opposed this, and Ingrey could not see why. Not till now.

  Once broken free from the misfortunes of the world of matter, the divines said, souls longed for their gods like lovers, save for those who turned their faces aside and chose slow solitary dissolution. And the gods longed back. But this was no mutual suicide pact between Horseriver and his spirit warriors. Even as his fortress fell, he meant to slay his immortal hostages along with him: eternal revenge, a death beyond death and a denial absolute.

  “You will be sundered? Wait—you will all be sundered?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  Not enough. A very late one came to Ingrey then. Ijada, she had said, had given half her heart to these revenants. They held it still, somewhere here, somehow. What would happen to whatever piece of her soul she had pledged when these lost warriors went up in smoke? Could a woman live with half a heart? “Wait,” said Ingrey, then, reaching deeper, “wait!”

  A ripple ran through the revenants as if they swayed in an earth shock, and Fara looked up, gasping.

  “And you argue too much,” Horseriver added, and drew Fara’s knife hand hard around his throat.

  Blood spurted for three heartbeats while Horseriver stared ahead, his expression composed. Then his lips parted in relief, and he slumped forward out of Fara’s grasp. She clutched the banner pole to keep from falling atop him, her lips moving in a soundless cry.

  The world of magic peeled away from the world of matter then, ripping apart the congruence, and Ingrey found his vision doubled as it had been in Red Dike. Wencel’s body lay facedown upon the mound, and Fara bent over it, half-fainting, the bloody knife fallen from her grasp. But upon the mound there arose…

  A black stallion, black as pitch, as soot, as a moonless night in a storm. Its nostrils flared red, and orange sparks trailed from its mane and tail as it shifted. It pawed the mound, once, and a ring of fire shimmered out around its hoofprint, then faded. Upon its back a man-shaped shadow rode astride, and the figure’s legs curved down into the horse’s ribs and united with them.

  This brutal, ancient power was not at all like Boleso’s thin, miserable menagerie. I don’t know what to do with this, and I have no god on my side in this place. Frenzy reverberated in Ingrey’s belly. His beginning howl of terror transmuted in the voicing of it into a bellow of challenge. He leapt away from his frozen body, landing astonished on all four paws, heavy claws ripping up the dirt in clots. Completing a transformation he had only been half-able to effect, to mere man-wolf mixture, the time before.

  The stallion snorted. Ingrey pulled back his black-edged lips along his long jaws, bared his sharp teeth, and snarled back. His tongue lolled out to taste a rank sizzle in the air, like burning rotted hair, and saliva spattered from his jaws as he shook the toxic tang from his mouth.

  The stallion stepped off the mound and circled him, tracking little flames.

  If I lose this fight, what returns to my body will not be me. It would be Horseriver re-formed. With such a prize, no wonder Wencel had not bothered to bespell him further in his cause. Ingrey was battling for more than his life.

  So.

  He circled the stallion in turn, head lowered, neck ruff rising, the earth cool and damp under his pads. Fallen leaves crackled like real leaves, and the sharpness of their musty scent amazed his nose. The stallion swirled, its hind legs lashing out.

  Ingrey ducked, too late; one hoof connected with a heavy thunk to his furry side, and he rolled away, yelping. How could an illusion not be able to breathe? He would have to pay as implacable an attention as in any sword fight, but now he had to watch four weapons, not just one. How do you kill a horse with your teeth? He tried to remember dogfights he had witnessed, boar-baitings, the climaxes of hunts.

  Any way you can.

  He gathered himself on his haunches and launched himself at the horse’s belly, twisting his open jaws at an awkward angle. He scored the skinless surface in a long slash, and barely made it away from a retaliating stamping. The—not blood—uncanny ichor, ink-black fluid, burned his mouth as the red snakes had, before. Worse. His jaws foamed madly in pained response.

  The ghosts crowded around in a ring for all the world as though they were watching a boar-baiting. Which beast were they betting on, whom did they cheer? Not their lives but their souls had been wagered, and not by them. That Horseriver rode himself to oblivion, to sundering from the gods, was regrettable, but not even the gods could override a person’s will in that matter. That his will overrode all these other wills seemed a blacker sin. Ijada would surely weep, Ingrey thought bleakly as he dodged the stallion’s snapping teeth, swung round at the end of a suddenly snaky neck, ears back flat. And, Five weapons. I have to watch five weapons.

  This is going badly. He was too small; the stallion was too large. Real wolves hunted p
rey this size in packs, not alone. Where can I get more me? Nothing of spirit could exist in the world of matter without…He eyed his standing human self, shivering mindlessly on his feet at the edge of the clearing. Dolt. Dupe. Useless son. All or nothing, then. All.

  He pulled strength from his body, all he could. The emptied form swayed and collapsed onto a drift of leaves. Everything in the clearing slowed, and Ingrey’s already-searing perceptions came ablaze. His wolf-body felt at once both dense as the past and weightless as the future. Yes. I know this state. I have traveled this path before.

  He was, abruptly, half the size of the horse, and it shied back. But slowly, so slowly, as though it swam in oil. His mind sketched his strike at his leisure, measuring the arc of his leap. This looted strength could not last. No time. Now.

  He plunged forward and sank his teeth into the horse’s neck, shaking his head wildly. He could not flip it back and forth as a dog shook a rabbit, but it went down under his twisting weight, and something snapped and something spurted. Around them, the ghosts dodged back as though to avoid a splash from some tainted puddle.

  The thing in his jaws stilled. Then melted away and ran down his lips like a bite from an icicle in winter. He spat and backed up. Horse-shape became shapeless, a mound, a puddle, a blackness soaking into the ground like a spilled barrel of ink. Gone.

  Wencel stood up, freed from his dark mount. On two bowed legs. His shape was restored to humanity, but his face…

  “I’m glad I didn’t use that stag,” he remarked from one of his mouths. “It would not have had the strength for this.” Another mouth grinned. “Good dog, Ingrey.”

  Ingrey backed away, growling. Across Horseriver’s skull, faces rippled, rising and sinking like corpses in a river. One succeeded another haphazardly, all the Earls Horseriver for four centuries and more. Young men, old men, angry men, sad; shaven, bearded, scarred. Mad. Young Wencel passed like a bewildered waif, his dumb gaze alighting on Ingrey in recognition and plea, though plea for what, Ingrey could not tell.