The Hallowed Hunt

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Nothing of spirit can exist in the world of matter without a being of matter to support it. The old catechism rang through his spinning head. Four thousand still-accursed spirits swarmed upon the ground of Bloodfield, upon it but no longer sustained by it. Instead, they were all now connected to…

  Him.

  “Ijada…” His voice came out a wail. “I cannot maintain them all, I cannot hold!”

  He was growing colder and colder as the ghosts pawed him. He grabbed for Ijada’s outstretched hand like a drowning man, and for a moment live warmth, her warmth, flooded him. But she gasped as she, too, felt the unholy pull of the ghosts’ insatiable hunger. They will pull us both to shreds, drain us dry. And when there was no more warmth left to give, his and Ijada’s frozen corpses would be left upon the ground, fog steaming off them in the night air. And all trapped here would dwindle to oblivion in a last, starveling cry of abandonment, betrayal, and despair.

  “Ijada…! Let go!” He tried to draw his hand back from hers.

  “No!” She gripped him tighter.

  “You must let go! Take Fara and run, out of here, back through the marsh, quickly! The revenants will consume us both if you do not!”

  “No, Ingrey! That’s not what is meant! You must cleanse them as you cleansed Boleso, so that they may go to the gods! You can, that’s what you were made for, I swear it!”

  “I cannot! There are too many, I cannot hold, and there are no gods here!”

  “They wait at the gate!”

  “What?”

  “They wait at the gate of thorns! For the master of the realm to admit them. Audar cursed and sealed this ground, and Horseriver held it against the gods ever after in his rage and black despair, but the old kings are gone, and the new king is acclaimed.”

  “I am only a king of ghosts and shadows, a king of the dead.” Soon to join my subjects.

  “Open your realm to the Five. Five mortals will bear Them across the ground, but you must admit Them—invite Them in.” Shivering now almost as badly as he was, she eyed the thronging ghosts, and her voice went quavering up: “Ingrrreyyy, hurry!”

  Terrified nearly to incoherence, he extended his senses. Yes, he could feel the boundaries of his blighted realm around him in the dark, an irregular circle encompassing most of the valley floor, saturated with all the ancient woe of this place. It extended past the marsh, all the way to the wall of brambles. Only now did he become aware that his first act as the last living shaman of the Old Weald this night had passed without his own notice, when he had taken his sword and hacked his way—all of our ways—through the towering thorns, breaking the boundaries of Bloodfield.

  Outside the gate he’d made, a multiple Presence waited, impatiently as supplicants on a king’s feast day. How did one admit Them? It seemed to call for hymns and hosannas, chants and invocations of great beauty and complexity, poets and musicians and scholars and soldiers and divines. Instead, They must make do with me. So be it.

  “Come in,” Ingrey whispered, his voice cracking, and then, I can do better than that, “Come in!”

  The reverberation seemed to split the night in half, and a shiver of anticipation ran through the four thousand like a great wave crashing upon a disintegrating shore. Ingrey set himself again to endure, for all that he felt his strength pouring out in a cataract. The ghostly jostling settled, no less starveling, but with its desperation stemmed by astonished new hope.

  IT SEEMED FOREVER BEFORE A HUMAN SOUND PENETRATED THE dark woods, and a faint orange light drew near. A crackle and crash of brush; a thump and a muttered oath; some rolling argument cut short by Learned Hallana’s crisp cry: “There, over there! Oswin, go left!”

  What was to Ingrey’s eye the most unexpected cavalcade imaginable blundered into the clearing. Learned Oswin rode a stumbling horse, with his wife riding pillion, clutching him around the waist with one arm and waving directions with the other. Prince Biast, a staggered look upon his face as he gawked at the milling ghosts, rode behind on another worn horse, and Learned Lewko and Prince Jokol brought up the rear on foot, Jokol holding a torch aloft. Lewko’s once-white robes were mired to the thigh on one side, and all were sweat-stained, disheveled, and peppered with road dirt.

  “Hallana!” Ijada waved thankfully, as if all was now well. “Come over here, quickly!”

  “You were expecting them?” Ingrey asked her.

  “We all came together, pell-mell down the road for the past two days. Five gods, what a journey. The prince-marshal commanded everything. I galloped ahead at the last—my heart was calling me to hasten, and I was desperately afraid.”

  Learned Lewko limped up to Ingrey and signed a hasty blessing. Jokol trod behind with the sort of breathless, maniacal grin upon his face that Ingrey imagined he’d have worn while facing a storm at sea, his boat climbing mountainous waves while all the sane men clung to the ropes and screamed.

  “Ho! Ingorry!” he cried happily, saluting ghostly warriors right and left as though they were long-lost cousins. “This night will make some song!”

  “Are you the mortal vessels for the gods, then?” Ingrey asked Lewko. “Are you all made saints?”

  “I have been a saint,” wheezed Lewko, “and it isn’t this. If I had to guess…” His glare around the densely haunted clearing ended on a narrow-eyed look at Ingrey.

  Oswin and Hallana abandoned their blown mount and came up, clutching each other by the arm over the uneven ground, staring at the ghostly warriors in wonder tinged with trepidation and, Ingrey would swear, a blazing scholarly curiosity not far removed, in its own way, from Jokol’s appalling enthusiasm.

  “If I had to guess, Oswin,” Lewko continued to his colleague—Ingrey sensed the tail of a hot debate—“I think we are all made sacred funeral animals.”

  Oswin looked at first faintly offended, then thoughtful. Hallana giggled. The sound was overwrought but queerly joyous.

  “Ingrey must cleanse my ghosts,” Ijada said firmly. “I told you it would be so.”

  Two days of debate, Ingrey guessed, but in a company, however odd, fearsomely well equipped for it. The gods have no hands in this world but ours. Hand to hand to hand…

  Biast spied his sister, now sitting slumped on the long mound not far from Wencel’s body, and hurried to her, going to his knees and gathering her in his arms. Their heads bent together; they spoke hastily in low tones. He held her as she shuddered. She did not, yet, weep.

  “Ijada,” murmured Ingrey, “I don’t think we had best delay, if this is to work.” He looked around at the revenants, who had stopped milling and jostling and now stared back at him in yearning silence. As if I were their last hope of heaven. “How do I…what do I…” What do I do?

  She grasped the wolf’s head standard in both hands and set her shoulders. “You’re the shaman-king. Do what seems right to you, and it will be.” Beside her, the gold-belted marshal made a gesture of assent.

  Four thousand, so many! It matters less where I begin, as that I begin.

  Ingrey turned slowly around and caught sight of the tall warrior with the wolf cloak he’d seen earlier. He motioned the revenant forward and stared into his pale features. The ghost smiled and nodded kindly, as if to reassure him, fell to one knee before Ingrey, captured his left hand, and bowed his head. Fascinated, Ingrey extended his right index finger, down which a trickle of blood flowed from the soaked rag wrapping his reopened wound, and smeared a drop across the warrior’s forehead. It disturbed Ingrey more than a little that the ghost felt solid to him now, not liquid as before, and he wondered what it bespoke of his own changed state.

  “Come,” Ingrey whispered, and the warrior’s spirit wolf, so ancient and worn as to be hardly more than a dark smear, passed out through his fingers. The warrior rose and lifted his face to the watching divines, then extended his hand toward Learned Oswin in a gesture half greeting, half plea. Oswin, with an anxious side glance at Hallana, who nodded vigorously at him, held out his hand to grasp the revenant’s. The wolf warri
or clasped it, smiled beatifically, and melted away.

  “Oh,” said Oswin, and his voice shook, tears starting in his eyes. “Oh, Hallana, I did not know…”

  “Shh,” she said. “It will be very well now, I think.” She moistened her lips and gazed at Ingrey as though he were a cross between some famous work of Temple art she’d traveled days to see, and her favorite child.

  Ingrey glanced around again, his eyes crammed with choices, and motioned another warrior to him. The man knelt and awkwardly, hopefully, presented his head held up between his two hands. Ingrey repeated the crimson unction upon the forehead, for whatever this last libation from the world of matter was worth, and released a dark hawk-spirit to fly into the night and vanish. The warrior reached for Oswin again, and this time Ingrey could see, just before he melted away, that the man was made whole. The Father speed you on your journey, then.

  A woman revenant came forward, young-looking, carrying a banner that unfolded to display the ancient spitting-cat sigil of the Lynxlakes, a kin that had dwindled to extinction in the male line two centuries past. When Ingrey took her hand, he was startled to feel two other tattered souls clinging to her through her banner. Her lynx was sad and shabby, and the other two creatures so ragged as to be unidentifiable, in passing away. He signed her forehead in three parallel carmine strokes, which seemed to suffice, for she rose and strode to Jokol, who brightened and stood very straight, taking her hand to kiss it and murmuring something in her ear before she vanished. Ingrey swore he heard a faint low laugh, suddenly merry, linger for a moment in the air behind her. Jokol for the Daughter, aye. The Lady of Spring gives notoriously abundant blessings.

  The next was a thin old man who went to Lewko, who stood looking very reflective as the revenant passed through. Lewko for the Bastard, naturally.

  “Prince Biast,” called Ingrey softly. “I’m afraid I need you here.” Biast for the Son. Of course.

  “I suspect I will be least used, this night,” murmured Hallana. She cast a shrewd glance toward the mound. “I will sit with poor Fara till you need me. I would guess she’s had a time of it.”

  “Thank you, Learned, yes,” said Ingrey. “She was treated most miserably from first to last. But in the end she remembered she was a princess.”

  Biast came forward to Ingrey’s side, studying him warily. The entranced expression upon his face when he looked at Ingrey was laced with a thread of defiance. In an attempt at irony that faltered, he murmured, “Should I call you sire, here?”

  “You need not call me anything, so long as you turn your hand to the task. Will Fara be all right?” Ingrey nodded across the clearing to where the princess sat huddled, watching grimly, as Hallana lowered herself beside her.

  “I offered to take her to where Symark and the divines’ servants wait, but she refused. She says she wants to bear witness.”

  “She has earned that.” And it would make her the one person besides Ingrey who had seen all of Horseriver’s actions from her father’s death to…whatever the end of this night brought. If he survived, that could be important. And if I don’t survive, it could be even more important.

  “The most here will be yours, I suspect,” Ingrey told Biast. “The old kings had two tasks: to lead their men to battle and to lead them home again. Horseriver lost sight of the second, I think, in his black madness and despair. These warriors of the Old Weald—their duty to their king is done; there remains only their king’s duty to them. It’s going to be”—Ingrey sighed—“a long night.”

  Biast swallowed, and nodded shortly. “Go on.”

  Ingrey looked around at the apprehensive revenants, pressing close again, and raised his voice, though he was not sure he needed to; within the bounds of Bloodfield, his voice carried. “Fear no stinting, kinsmen! I will not end my watch till your long watch is done.”

  A blond-bearded young man knelt, first of a long string of such youths, many desperately mutilated. Ingrey released creature after creature: boar and bear, horse and wolf, stag and lynx, hawk and badger. Biast studied each man, as they passed through his hands, as though looking in some disquieting mirror.

  It had taken a cadre of Audar’s troops two days to slay all these here; Ingrey did not see how he was to release them all in a night, but something odd seemed to be happening to time in this woods. He was not sure if it was a variant upon what happened to his flow of perception in his battle madness—a shaman skill—or if the gods had lent some element of Their god-time, by which They attended to all souls in the world both simultaneously and equally. Ingrey only knew that each warrior was owed a moment at least of his hallow king’s full regard; and if the debt had not been Ingrey’s to contract, it had still fallen to him to pay. Heir indeed.

  Then he wondered which he would come to the end of first, his warriors or himself. Perhaps they would end together, in perfect balance.

  The Darthacan archers came forward midway through the night. Ingrey puzzled mightily over them, for they bore no spirit beasts for him to release. In what backwash of the uncanny their souls had been caught up, by what concatenation of disrupted magic, god-gift, night battle and bloody sacrifice they had been imprisoned here, he could not imagine. He signed them in his blood all the same, they thanked him with their eyes all the same, and he handed them off to their waiting gods, all the same.

  The Wolfcliff woman with the gold wolf’s head arm rings gave him a kiss upon the brow in return for his blessing of blood, then, apparently in a moment of pure self-indulgence, a kiss upon the lips, before she turned to Hallana. His lips stiffened with the chill of her mouth, but her lips warmed to a faint color, like a memory of happiness, so he thought it a fair trade.

  It was in the dark before dawn, the stars and the waning half-moon shuttered behind deep clouds, when he came to the bitter end of his task. Some two dozen or so ghosts hung back, turning their wan faces from the gods.

  Ingrey turned to Oswin. “Learned, what shall I do with these?” He gestured to the revenants: unable to flee him, unwilling to come to him.

  Oswin took a deep breath and said reluctantly, as if reciting an old lesson, “Heaven weeps, but free will is sacred. The meaning of yes is created by the ability to say no. As a forced marriage is no marriage, but instead the crime of rape. The gods either will not or cannot rape our souls; in any case, They do not. To my knowledge,” the meticulous scholar in him added.

  These, too, died at Bloodfield; my duty to them does not change. All the same. Ingrey unlocked his voice and ordered each dark despairing revenant forward, and gave them their little gift of blood, and freed their spirit beasts. And let them go. Most unraveled, fading into utter nothingness, before they even reached the trees.

  Two left now: the marshal-warrior, who had stood all night with Ijada and the royal Wolfcliff banner; and the being beside whom—for whom—he had once died at Bloodfield. It took most of Ingrey’s remaining strength to compel Horseriver forward to face him; they both ended on their knees.

  This one is not the same. Horseriver’s spirit horse was gone, his kingship rescinded, but the concatenation of souls remained, generations of Horserivers still churning through his anguished form. Tentatively, Ingrey reached for the shreds of Wencel in the mass, and whispered, “Come.” And, louder, “Come!” A shudder ran through the being in front of him, but no individual soul peeled out. Ingrey wondered if he’d made a tactical mistake; if he had attempted Horseriver first, before he’d been exhausted by this night, could he have taken apart what Horseriver’s long curse had welded together? Or was this simply not within his earthly powers? He was almost certain it was not. Almost.

  Some of Horseriver’s faces, rising to the surface of that dreadful skull, looked longingly toward the gates of the gods, the five ill-assorted persons who now leaned on each other in a fatigue that nearly matched Ingrey’s. Others looked away, with all of Horseriver’s bitterness and rage and endless agony in their devastating eyes.

  “What is your whole desire?” Ingrey asked it. “Lo
st centuries are not within my gift. The revenge of sundering these other souls from the gods I have denied you, for that was not the right of your hallow kingship, but its betrayal. What then is left? I would give you mercy if you would take it.” The gods would give you rivers of it.

  “Mercy,” whispered some of the voices of Horseriver, looking to the gates, and “Mercy,” whispered the rest, looking away. One word, encompassing opposite and exclusive boons. Could Ingrey, by any physical or magical strength, wrestle this divided being to any altar? Should he try?

  Time had lingered for Ingrey this night, but time was running out. If dawn came without a decision, what would happen? And if he waited for dawn to carry the choice away from him, was that not itself the same decision? If Ingrey fell into his judgment out of sheer weariness, well, he would not be the first man or king to do so. He had thought leading men into battle against impossible odds to be the most fearsome task of a king, but this new impossibility enlightened him vastly. He stared at Horseriver and thought, He must have been a great-souled man, once, for the gods to desire him still, here in his uttermost ruin.

  He looked around at the witnesses: three Temple divines, two princes, a princess, and the two royal banner-carriers, the quick and the dead. Biast’s earlier little flash of princely jealousy was entirely drained from his face now. Not even he wanted the hallow kingship in this moment. The marshal-warrior’s watching face was without expression.

  Ingrey squeezed his aching right hand till the blood ran down his fingers, and dribbled a thick line all around the tortured revenant’s head. And drew a long inhalation of the foggy night air, and breathed out, “Mercy.” And let Horseriver go.

  Slowly, like thick smoke rising up from a pyre, Horseriver dissipated, until soul-haze could not be told from the hanging fog. The marshal-warrior’s dead eyes closed, for a moment, as if it would spare him the knowledge with the sight. Of all here, he was the only one Ingrey was sure understood the choice. All the choices. The clearing was very silent.