The Hallowed Hunt c-3

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Now it was her turn to stare thoughtfully at him. “And what plans have you made to seek out the source of your geas?”

  “None, yet,” he admitted. “Though after, um, Red Dike, I think no such thing could be laid upon me again without my seeing it. Resisting it.” Stung by the doubtful quirk of her eyebrows, he added more sternly, “I plan to be on my guard, and look about me.”

  “I did wonder… are you so certain I was its true target? Perhaps, instead of you being a means to destroy me, I was just a means to destroy you. Whom have you offended?”

  Ingrey’s frown deepened at this unwelcome thought. “Many men. It’s my calling. But I always figured an enemy would just send paid bravos.”

  “Do you think the average bravo would be inclined to take you on?”

  His lips lifted a little at this. “They might have to raise the price.”

  Her lips curved, too. “Perhaps your unknown enemy is a pinch-purse, then. The bounty for a wild wolf warrior might be too steep for him.”

  Ingrey chuckled. “My reputation is more lurid than my sword arm can sustain, I’m afraid. An adversary has merely to send enough men, or shoot from behind in the dark. Easily enough done. Men alone are not hard to kill, despite our swagger.”

  “Indeed,” she murmured bleakly, and Ingrey cursed his careless tongue. After a moment, she added, “It’s still a good question, though. What would have happened to you if the geas had worked as planned?”

  Ingrey shrugged. “Disgraced. Dismissed from Hetwar’s service. Maybe hanged. Our drowning would have passed as an accident, true. Some several men might have been happy that I’d relieved them of a dilemma, but I should not have looked to them for gratitude.”

  “But it would be safe to say you’d have been removed as a force in the capital.”

  “I’m no force in the capital. I’m just one of Hetwar’s more dubious servants.”

  “Such a charitable man Hetwar is to sponsor you, then.”

  Ingrey’s lips opened, closed. “Mm.”

  “When I first saw Wencel’s beast, my mind leapt to him as the possible source of your geas. Still more so, when he revealed its mystery. He as much as said he fancied himself a shaman.”

  You thought it, too? Ijada, Ingrey reminded himself, had never known Wencel as a small, slow child. But did that leave her to overestimate, or Ingrey to underestimate, his cousin?

  Ijada continued, “But in that case, I do not understand why we were both allowed to leave his house alive today.”

  “That would have been too crude,” said Ingrey. “A hired assassin is always his own witness, but the geas would have left none. The spell-caster, Wencel or not, desired greater subtlety. Presumably.” He frowned in renewed doubt.

  “He was never a comfortable man, but this new Wencel scares me to death.”

  “Well, he does not me.” Ingrey’s mouth and mind froze as he was suddenly reminded of how close he’d come to death at his own hand, not twelve hours past. A subtle enough death to pass unquestioned even under Wencel’s roof? It was no geas that time, though. I did it to myself.

  After Wencel cried wolf at me…

  “Now what makes you grow grim?” Ijada demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  Her lips twisted in exasperation. “To be sure.”

  After a few more minutes of riding in silence, she added, “I want to know what else Wencel knows of Bloodfield—or Holytree, as he called it—if he’s such a scholar of the Old Weald as he claims. Tax him on it, if—when—you speak again. But do not tell him of my dream.”

  Ingrey nodded agreement. “Had you ever discussed your legacy with him?”

  “Never.”

  “With Princess Fara?”

  Ijada hesitated. “Only in terms of its value, or lack of it, as a bride-piece.”

  Ingrey drummed his fingers on the thigh of his riding leathers. “It must have been but a dream. Most souls would have been taken up by the gods at the hour of their deaths, whether your woods were Bloodfield or some lesser Wealding defeat. Any sundered who refused the gods would have blurred to oblivion centuries ago, or so the divines taught me. Four hundred years is far too long for ghosts to survive so entire.”

  “I saw what I saw.” Her tone neither offered nor requested rationalizations.

  “Maybe that’s what the addition of animal spirits does to men’s souls,” Ingrey continued in a spurt of inspiration. “Instead of dissolution, damnation becomes an eternal, cold, and silent torment. Trapped between matter and spirit. All the pain of death lingering, all the joy of life stripped away… “ He swallowed in sudden fear.

  Ijada’s gaze grew distant, looking down the winding road. “I trust not. The warriors were worn and tormented, but not joyless, for they took joy in me, I thought.” Her eyes, turning toward him, crinkled a little at the edges. “A moment ago, you said it must be a dream, but now you take it for truth, and your doom foreshadowed. You can’t have it both ways, however delightfully glum piling up the prospects makes you.”

  Ingrey was surprised into a snort; his lips curled up at the sides, just a little bit. He yanked them back straight. “So which do you think it is?”

  “I think… “ she said slowly, “that if I could go back now, I would know.” Her lids lowered briefly, and the next look she gave him seemed to weigh him. “I think you might, too.”

  They were interrupted then by a crowd on the road, some kinlord’s entourage from Easthome traveling to the funereal duty at Oxmeade. Ingrey motioned his men aside, scanning the mob of outriders for faces he recognized. He saw a few, and exchanged brief, sober salutes. Boarford’s men, and therefore the two brotherearls and their wives sheltered in the tapestry-covered wagon that jounced along the ruts. Almost immediately thereafter, Ingrey’s troop had to make way again for a procession of Temple-men, lord dedicats and high divines, richly dressed and well mounted.

  When they had all sorted themselves out once more, Ingrey found Gesca’s horse pressed up to his side, and the lieutenant favoring him with a mistrustful scowl. Ingrey spurred forward, and led on at a more rapid pace.

  Chapter Ten

  They crested the range of low hills northeast of the capital in the late afternoon. The town and the broad southern plains beyond spread out before their gaze. The river Stork curled away from the town’s foot in a bright silver line, growing more crooked until lost in the autumn haze. A few boats, merchant craft, sculled laboriously up or drifted down its length, making their way from or to the cold sea some eighty miles distant. As Ingrey reined back beside her, Ijada rose in her stirrups and stared.

  He studied her expression, which was part fascinated, part wary. Easthome might well be the largest city she’d seen in her life, for all that perhaps a dozen Darthacan provincial seats eclipsed it, and the Darthacan royal capital could have held it six times over.

  “The town is divided into two halves, Templetown and Kingstown,” Ingrey told her. “The upper town, on those high bluffs, holds the temple, the archdivine’s palace, and all the offices of the holy orders. The lower town has the warehouses and the merchants’ quarters. You can see the wharves beyond the wall, where the drainage runs out to join the Stork. The hallow king’s hall and most of the kin-lords’ houses are on the opposite end from the docks.” His hand swept out the sections. “Easthome used to be two villages, back in the old days, belonging to two different tribes. They feuded and fought across the creek that divided them till it ran with blood, they say, practically up to the time Audar’s grandson seized the place for his western capital, and stamped out all division with his new stonework. You can scarcely see the creek now, it is so built across. And no one now chooses to die for the sake of a sewer. Hetwar told me this tale; he takes it for a parable, but I’m not sure what he thinks the moral is.”

  The cavalcade descended the road to the easternmost gate on the Kingstown side. The stonework was good, it was true, the winding streets lined by high houses of tan blocks or whitewashed stucco, with glints of glass
windows peering out from deep-browed embrasures. Red-tile roofs replaced wattle and flammable thatch; ordinary fires had probably destroyed more of the old twin towns than war. The defending walls were even more improved, although crowded with new building lapping too near and spilling beyond, compromising their purpose.

  They came at length to a narrow curving street in the merchants’ quarter, and dismounted before a slim stone house in a row of several such built abutting one another, though obviously at different times by different masons. Ingrey wondered if Horseriver owned not just this house but the row, and if such lucrative property had come to him with Princess Fara. The house was neither so rich nor so large as last night’s lodging, but it appeared decent enough, quiet and close.

  Ingrey dismounted and passed his and Ijada’s horses to Gesca’s care.

  “Tell my lord Hetwar I will report to him as soon as I see the prisoner secured. Send me my manservant Tesko, if you find him sober, with what things I am likely to need for the next few days. Clean clothes, for one.” Ingrey grimaced, stretching his aching back; his leathers reeked of horse and the grime of the road, and the stitches in his scalp were itching again, maddeningly. Ijada, stripping off her riding gloves and craning her neck, managed somehow to appear nearly as trim and cool as she had that morning.

  The house’s porter saw them inside; the woman warden-servant, guided by a housemaid, marshaled Ijada at once up the stairs, her leather-strapped case hoisted after by the porter’s boy. Ingrey set down his saddlebags and stared around the narrow hall.

  The porter ducked his head nervously. “The boy will be back in a moment to take you to your room, my lord.”

  Ingrey grunted, and said, “No hurry. If this place is to be my charge, I had best look it over.” He prowled off through the nearest doorway.

  The house seemed simple enough. The cellar and the ground floor were devoted to storage, a kitchen with antechamber and pallets for cook and scullion, an eating hall, a parlor, and a cubby under the stairs where the porter lurked. Ingrey poked his head out the only other outer door, which led to a back court with a covered well. The second floor included what might have been meant for a study, as well as two bedrooms. Passing the door of similar chambers on the next floor up, Ingrey heard the murmur of women’s voices, Ijada and her warden. The top floor was divided up into smaller rooms for the servants.

  He descended again to find the porter’s boy lugging his saddlebags into one of the bedrooms on the second floor. The furnishings were sparse—narrow bed, washstand, a single chair, a battered wardrobe—and Ingrey wondered if the place had been tenanted or not before Horseriver’s couriers had arrived last night demanding its possession. Light, distinctive footsteps and the creaking of, perhaps, a bed overhead marked Ijada’s location. The proximity was both reassuring and unsettling. When he heard her steps on the stairs, he turned for the hall.

  She had her hand raised to knock on his door as he opened it. In the other, she held Learned Hallana’s letter, a little crumpled now. Her warden—or was that, Wencel’s warden?—hovered behind her, peering suspiciously.

  “Lord Ingrey,” she said, reverting to formality. “Learned Hallana charged you to deliver this. Will you do so?” Her level eyes seemed to bore into his, silently reminding him of the rest of the sorceress’s words: to its destination, and no other.

  He took it, glancing at the scrawled direction. “Do you know who this”—he peered more closely—”Learned Lewko may be?”

  “No. But if Hallana trusts him, he must be worthy of it, and no fool.”

  What does that prove? Hallana trusted me. And a Temple-man neither foolish nor untrue might yet be no friend to the defiled.

  Still, Ingrey remained deathly curious as to what Hallana had reported of him, and of the strange events at Red Dike. The only way he might find out short of opening the letter himself was to be there when it was opened. And if he delivered it on his way to Hetwar’s palace, he would be relieved of any possible need to conceal it or lie about it to his master. Hetwar could not demand it of him then. If chided, Ingrey could feign its faithful delivery was just the sort of virtuous act Hetwar might properly expect of his henchman.

  “Yes. I will undertake the charge.”

  Ijada nodded intently, and he wondered if she read his corkscrew thoughts in his eyes, or not: or if she judged him as blithely as Hallana had.

  He added, “Stay in; stay safe. Lock your inner doors as well. I presume whatever comforts this house may offer are yours for the asking.” He let his eye fall on the servant-warden, and she made a circumspect curtsey of acknowledgment. “I don’t know what else Lord Hetwar may want of me tonight, so eat when you will. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He tucked the letter in his jerkin, bowed her a polite farewell, and made his way down the stairs. He wanted a bath, clean clothes, and a meal, in that order, but all such niceties would have to wait.

  Leaving instructions with the porter for his servant, should Tesko arrive before he returned, Ingrey walked out into the town.

  Familiar smells and sights subtly reassured him. He wound his way through the cobbled streets of Kingstown and across the half-buried creek, then climbed the steep steps up the near cliff of the temple side. Two switchbacks and a breathless ten minutes brought him to the stair-gate, winding crookedly under a tower and two houses, into the upper town. In the dark corner where the passage turned, a little shrine for the safety of the city stood, a few candles flickering in the dim drafts flanked by wilted garlands; reflexively, Ingrey made the fivefold sign in passing. He came out again into the early-evening light and turned right.

  A few more minutes’ walk brought him to the main square before the temple. He strode under the pillared front portico and into the sacred precincts.

  The central court was open to the air, and in its middle the holy fire burned quietly on its plinth. Through an archway into one of the five great stone domes surrounding it, Ingrey could see a ceremony beginning—a funeral, he realized, for he could glimpse a bier, surrounded by shuffling mourners, being set down before the Father’s altar. In a few days, Prince Boleso’s body, too, would pass through these rites here.

  On the other side of the court, the acolyte-grooms were marshaling their sacred animals for the little miracle of the choosing. Each creature, led by its handler dressed in the color of his or her order, would be presented before the bier, and the divine would interpret by its actions which god had taken up the soul of the recent dead. This not only guided the prayers of the mourners, but also their more material offerings, to the altar and the order of the proper god. Ingrey would be more cynical about this, but that he had more than once seen results clearly unexpected to all parties involved.

  A woman in Mother’s greens had a large green bird, which cawed nervously, perched upon her shoulder. A maiden in Daughter’s blue held a young hen with purple-blue feathers tightly under her arm. An immensely fluffy gray dog cowered close to the gray robes of an elderly groom of the Father’s Order. A young man in the reds and browns of the Son led a skittish chestnut colt, its coat brushed to a shimmering copper and its eyes rolling whitely. The animal snorted and sidled, yanking its groom almost off his feet, and in a moment, Ingrey saw why.

  Pacing slowly after the others loomed the most enormous white ice bear Ingrey had ever seen. The thing was as tall as a pony, and as wide as two. Its narrow eyes were the color of frozen urine, and about as expressive. At the far end of a long, thick silver chain, its handler followed, dressed in the white robes of the Bastard’s Order. The young man bore an expression of suppressed terror, and his head swiveled a little frantically between his charge and a towering man who followed after, murmuring encouragement.

  The man was nearly as arresting as the bear. He was broad-shouldered to match his height, with hair in a dense red horsetail down his back. Thick silver clamps held it in place, and thick silver bracelets clanked on his arms. Bright blue eyes held an expression of amiable bemusement which Ingrey was not su
re whether to take as acuity or vacuity. His clothes—tunic, trousers, a swinging coat—were simple enough in cut, but colorfully dyed and decorated with elaborate embroidery. Big boots were stamped with silver designs, and the hilt of his long sword glittered with crudely cut gems. In the belt sheath at his back rested not a knife, but an ax, also elaborately inlaid, its blade gleaming razor-honed.

  A brown-haired man in similar but less gaudy dress, a good head shorter than his fellow yet still tall, leaned against a pillar with his arms folded, watching the proceedings with a most dubious expression. Some of the grooms shot him looks of supplication, which he steadfastly ignored.

  Ingrey tore his attention from this peculiar drama as he saw an older woman in the white-and-cream robes of the Bastard, the loops of a divine’s braid bouncing on her shoulder and her arms laden with folded cloth, scurry through the court, evidently intent upon some shortcut. Ingrey barely caught her sleeve as she sped past. She jerked to a halt and eyed him unfavorably.

  “Excuse me, Learned. I carry a letter for one Learned Lewko, which I am charged to deliver into his hand.”

  Her expression altered at once into something, if not more friendly, much more interested. She looked him up and down; indeed, he imagined he looked the part of a road-weary courier, just now.

  “Come with me, then,” she said, and abruptly reversed direction. Though Ingrey’s legs were longer than hers, he had to stretch his stride to keep up.

  She led him through a discreet side entry, down and up some steps, back outside behind the temple, and past the archdivine’s palace into the next street. Down one more narrow alley they came to a long stone building some two stories high, passed through a side door, and wended up more stairs. Ingrey began to be grateful he hadn’t just asked for directions. They passed a succession of well-lit rooms devoted to scriptoria, judging by the heads bent over tables and scratching of quills.

  Coming to a closed door in the same row, she knocked, and a man’s calm voice bade, “Enter.”