Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  The fair one, the one they called Alf, had taken the pup from Anna and commanded her to lie down again. After a moment’s rebellion she obeyed. He was absorbed already in the young alaunt, regarding it as if he himself would have liked to weep, speaking to it not in Greek as he had since he appeared in the doorway but in some other, stranger tongue, both harsh and melodious. She recognized only the name, Cynan, and the tone, gentle yet stern.

  Nikephoros blocked her vision, mere familiar humanity beside that shining wonder. For an instant she could only wish him gone.

  Her mind cleared. He had seen; his brows were knit, his jaw set. She flung her arms about him.

  For a long moment she feared that he would pull away. His rigidity eased; he completed the embrace. His sigh was loud in her ears, his voice soft. I think we had better go.

  She drew back to see his face. For once she could not read it at all. “Why? Is there something I’m not supposed to see?”

  She had come close, she could tell by the flicker of his eyes, the quickness of his response. I can’t explain now. Can you trust me, Stefania? For a while?

  Her brows drew together. He did not seem to be mocking her. “You know how I treat mysteries,” she said. “I solve them.”

  I’ll tell you, I promise. But not now.

  He drew her with him away from the others. She considered escape. She did stiffen and refuse to move. “Who is that man? Can you tell me that much?”

  He’s my brother.

  That silenced her completely. She was on the stair before she knew it, walking without thinking, struggling to imagine those two in the same family. Even without the beauty, that other was no more a Greek than he was an Ethiop.

  She stopped in mid-step, bringing Nikki up short behind her. “He’s not,” she said.

  It was too dark for her to see Nikki’s expression, but his voice had a smile in it, a hint of wickedness. My father said he was, and I wasn’t in a position to argue. It was a perfectly legal adoption.

  Stefania hit him. He laughed. She hit him again, but somehow she had his head in her hands and her lips on his. It stopped the laughter at least.

  She pushed him away, not hard. “You’re insufferable, do you know that? Is he real?”

  I’ve always thought so.

  He was not as lighthearted as he pretended. Jealous? She decided not. It was something deeper. Something to do with Anna, and with the conversation she had not understood.

  And with you. She could barely hear him. And how could he have said anything? She certainly had not.

  She had imagined it. She turned and made her way down the stair, surefooted in the dark.

  25.

  “I can’t do it,” Alf said.

  Jehan thought they had settled it, and with no help from himself. Anna was still with the people who had taken her in, who by God’s own fortune were well known to Nikephoros; though that lad was no more a toy of chance than any of Gwydion’s true Kindred, particularly where a woman was concerned. Cynan was here in San Girolamo, sound asleep in his father’s lap, curled nose to tail and most comfortable. He had been there since Alf brought him in, wide awake at first, greeting Jehan with admirable courtesy and an even more admirable vocabulary.

  But of course, he had said when Jehan was amazed. Mother taught me. It was a secret. He was to think us witless.

  He knew how to laugh as Nikki did, in his mind; it emerged as a broad fanged grin. He did, too. So did Anna. She was surprised when I started to talk.

  Not much, Nikki observed, rather uncannily when Jehan stopped to think. Neither of them could or would utter a spoken word. She knows Thea.

  It was Nikki who had told it all, with a little help from Cynan until sleep claimed him. Alf had been silent, remote as he often was in council or in company, stroking the beast who was his son.

  He spoke at last when Nikki was done, breaking into a brief stillness. Nikki was feeding the brazier; he paused in mid-movement. Jehan, who had begun to ponder the whole strange tale, looked up sharply.

  “I can’t do it,” Alf repeated. “Cynan won’t change. His mind is safe enough thanks to my lady’s power, but his body remembers no shape but this. It won’t return to the one it was born to.” He laughed shortly, painfully. “He’s certainly my child. I won’t shape-change either, even to save my life. Though I promised her—when she was strong again—”

  He was closer to breaking even than he had been before Alun’s bier, when Gwydion laid this labor on him. Jehan tried to ease him. “Does it matter so much? You’ve got him back, and he looks sound enough except for this. When you find Thea, she can certainly—”

  Alf raised his head. His eyes were wide, flaring blood-red. “Thea had no part in this. It was the enemy; then he had no need. Cynan holds to the form he considers his own, nor will he alter it even for force. If he keeps to it, however keen his wits or great his power, he’ll end as the enemy desires, a mere beast. A mere, mortal beast.”

  “But—”

  “The longer we wait, the harder the change will be. This is not a six-weeks’ infant. This is a weanling pup. In a year he’ll be grown and in a decade he’ll die. But he’ll have lost his power long before then. He’ll have lost it before he’s even grown. Time moves so fast for you, who a moment ago were a novice befriending a certain ill-made monk, and now are an anointed bishop. How much faster must it pass for a hound?”

  Jehan spoke with care, considering each word before he spoke it. “You’re saying that there’s no time to lose. That Cynan has to change back now or not at all. But if that’s true, then Liahan, even Thea—” He broke off. “Alf, what have you tried?”

  “Persuasion. Pleading. Compulsion. He’ll let me into his mind willingly, gladly. He’ll give his very soul into my keeping. But his body will not yield.”

  Maybe, said Nikki, it’s your own fear that gets in the way. If you would change, it would convince him to do the same.

  Alf moved not a muscle, but Cynan started awake, snarling. With utmost gentleness his father stroked him into silence. But he did not go back to sleep. He watched them all, eyes gleaming as Alf’s gleamed, fire and silver.

  He let Jehan touch him. More surprisingly by far, Alf let Jehan take him and hold him.

  Over his head the Bishop said, “Nikki may be right. Not that I know much about it, but Thea’s always insisted that you’ve got her gift if you’d only use it. Of course you can speed up the hunt and find her before it’s too late for everyone, and she can change both children back again.”

  “I’m going to find her. I must. But she has the skill to keep the mind whole in the altered body. I don’t. Already I can feel the hound-brain closing, the beast-thoughts gathering. I don’t know how to stop them.”

  “You must!” Jehan burst out. “You’re the strongest power in Rhiyana, bar none. Thea told me that herself. And she’s not given to blind worship of her beloved.”

  Nikki’s amused agreement was meant to ease the tension. It wavered and vanished in the blaze of Alf’s denial. “Brute power means nothing. It’s not a wall I have to batter down; it’s a single thread in a weaving of utmost delicacy, that must be spun and colored and woven in one way and no other, or all the fabric frays and scatters.”

  “So learn how,” said Jehan.

  Alf rose. Jehan braced himself. Small comfort that he had Cynan for a shield; that was all too easily remedied, even if the little warlock did not choose to fight for his father.

  Neither blows nor lightnings fell. Alf circled the room slowly, looking at none of them. Strange how seldom one noticed how very feline his movements were. The grace, yes, that was inescapable, but it was the grace of the stalking panther.

  It was his face. He always looked so young and so gentle. Meek as a maid, people said.

  He was not meek now. His jaw had set, his nostrils flared, his eyes widened and fixed. He stopped and wheeled. “If I fail in forcing the change, I’ll destroy him.”

  You won’t, Nikki said. You’ll have destroyed yours
elf first.

  Terribly, in a mindless, shapeless horror. Jehan did not know whose image that was; he cried out against it.

  Alf was smiling. His smile had the exact curve of a scimitar. “So I will, Nikephoros. My thanks; I had forgotten. And you’ll remain, who’ve hunted to so much better purpose than I. Maybe, after all, there’s nothing to lose.”

  “There certainly is,” Jehan grated, “if you go into it with suicide in mind.”

  Alf’s smile warmed and softened, became his own again. But his eyes were diamond hard. “Jehan my dearest friend, there is no other way to begin. Not for me. My power will only grow on the cutting edge of death.”

  “Now I know for certain. You revel in it.”

  “How not? I cut my teeth on the lives of the martyrs.”

  Cynan yawned noisily. My teeth would cut meat if I had any.

  Alf swept him up. “You’ll have some soon enough, if you’re still in condition to want it.”

  “You’re going to do it now?” Jehan cried.

  “Shall I wait for my courage to fail?” Alf’s glance allowed no answer. He set Cynan on the bed and paused, drawing a long breath. “Nikephoros, you had better stand guard. Jehan, you need not watch. Not that there will be much to see, until the end. One way or another. If you wish, I can set a sleep on you.”

  “I’ll watch,” Jehan said almost angrily.

  Alf opened his mouth, closed it, shrugged slightly. “Stay well apart, then. And whatever happens, don’t touch me. Promise.”

  “By my vows,” Jehan said, crossing himself.

  Alf nodded. Abruptly he embraced his friend; just as abruptly he let go, thrusting Jehan away beyond the glow of the brazier. “Remember,” he said.

  Cynan was waiting, expectant, firm and unafraid. But under the boldness, just within Alf’s ken, hovered the faintest of apprehensions. Will it hurt?

  “Not while I have power to prevent it,” Alf said, his own fear walled in adamant. He dropped his robe, aware of Nikki’s studied nonchalance, Jehan’s sharply drawn breath; glancing down and then up again quickly. He had not realized that he was as thin as that.

  He felt well enough. He lay beside Cynan, composing himself as if for sleep, not quite touching the sleek furred body. He allowed himself one brief brush of the hand over his son’s ears; no more. Resolutely he closed his eyes.

  With the sight of the body shut away, the sight of the mind took on a fierce clarity. Jehan was a banked fire, a glow of will and love and intelligence shot through with anxiety. Nikki was a white flame of power, man-shaped yet with wide wings enfolding them all, closing out the powers of the dark.

  Alf paused to wonder at him. This was born human, mortal, blind to his own great strength. His mind touched Alf’s briefly; his power reached as Alf had reached to Cynan, for reassurance, for love.

  As he withdrew, his fire brightened to blinding, deepened and widened and vanished. The shields were complete. While they stood firm, no enemy could come near.

  Alf lay englobed in crystal. His body was far away, that thing of flesh and blood and bone laid naked on a bed, warm in winter’s cold. It breathed; it would have been hungry if he had allowed it.

  He drew a deep, illusory, swimmer’s breath, and dived into it. Its lungs roared with the winds of worlds; its heart beat with a mighty and ceaseless rhythm; its blood surged like the sea. He plunged down and down, straight as a stone, down through the wind, through the tide, through the levin-fires of the brain into a region of stillness.

  Here was the core of his self. Here was the eye of his power. From here came all his arts and his magics, the healing, the seeing, the weaving and the mind-speaking and the myriad lesser witcheries. And here was a ragged center of darkness.

  Once Thea had filled it, Thea and the growing presence of his children. Cynan’s return, his presence so close, was but a waver on the edges.

  The darkness was more than absence. It was fear. Behind it, or within it, glimmered a single spark. The art of shape-shifting, which was Thea’s great art, in him was but a might-have-been.

  The flicker that was Cynan began to dim and shrink, falling toward the heart of the blackness. He snatched wildly, uselessly.

  He had no hands. No fingers to grasp, no feet to bear him where his son had gone. Nothing. He had not the power. It was lost, wasted, abandoned to terror.

  Mortal. Mortal sin. Witch, demon, were-creature, child of the night.

  The darkness spun. He saw light. Dim and distant yet utterly distinct, an image in a glass: grey walls and grey mist, the hunched shadow of a thorn tree, the loom of a tor.

  Names rang through them all. Saint Ruan’s Abbey on Ynys Witrin in the kingdom of Anglia. He had lived there for the whole of a mortal lifetime, cloistered and holy, going quietly, imperceptibly mad.

  The sun was young, the mist like grey glass, thinning and melting to reveal a green undulation of fen and copse. Men were brown-robed giants, kind or stern or indifferent to the youngest of the abbey’s orphans, the one who was all limbs and eyes and questions.

  Too old now for a wetnurse, too young for the schoolmaster, he had no certain place in the scheme of things; he was as free as he had ever been, as free perhaps as he would ever be. Free and strange, but he was not truly aware of either. He knew only that some people shrank from him, their thoughts darkening and twisting when he was near. But others saw him simply as a young creature, a potential noise, an irrelevance; and a precious few were like warmth and music and green silences, and those set all the rest at naught.

  He was watching Brother Radbod. Brother Radbod was one of the warm ones, a dark pockmarked man whose eyes were always sore, but who was the finest illuminator in the abbey. He was setting gold leaf on an intricately decorated page, fleck by precious fleck, creating a wonder of gold on the painted wonders of blue and green and scarlet, white and yellow and royal purple.

  He was aware of his audience but not distracted by it, even though it was almost in his lap, watching and playing. The game was a new one, better even than calling clouds and making it rain, or walking up ladders of moonlight, or talking to the cows. Alf would look at one of the twining creatures on the page, or at one of the manifold shapes of leaves and vines, and his thoughts would turn and stretch and flex, so, and the hand on his knee would be a claw or a paw or a curling tendril. The tendril was strangest; it had its own will, and that was to reach for the light.

  With some small regret, he turned the flexing on itself. The tendril shrank and broadened and divided into a hand. It was odd to feel skin and bone again, the coolness of air, the warmth of blood.

  He watched Brother Radbod’s swift sure fingers. They were setting spots in a leopard’s flank, while Brother Radbod filled his mind with leopards. He had seen one once, somewhere warm and far away, a splendid dappled creature, somnolent on a chain yet alive with power and menace.

  It was far easier to change completely than to change a mere hand. The image set, so; the will flexed; the world shifted.

  Everything was larger. Sight was dim, all greys and blacks; sensation came muffled through thick fur. But sounds and scents burst in a flood, more intoxicating even than when, having played inside Brother Aimery’s mind, he returned to his own; all his senses then had been dizzyingly keen, though Brother Aimery was young and strong and reckoned uncommonly sharp of ear and nose and eye. Yet even Alf’s ears and nose could not compare with those of a young leopard.

  He flexed his fingers. Claws arched forth from the velvet paw. His ears could move, cupping sound; he flicked his tail and stretched every fierce singing muscle. His murmur of pleasure came forth as a purring growl.

  Brother Radbod turned. To leopard-eyes he was a shadow and a rustle, a quickening of heartbeat, a sudden sharp scent. Alf coughed at its pungency.

  His back prickled; his body begged to spring. His throat craved warm thirst-stanching blood, welling thick and sweet from a torn throat.

  Brother Radbod was standing, hugely tall. Alf flexed and the world was itsel
f again, except that he had lost his tunic somewhere.

  Brother Radbod’s face was yellow-green; he crossed himself and backed away. Even Alf’s dulled nose caught his rankness. Alf’s mind, reaching in bafflement, found no warmth at all. No love, no indulgence, no quiet pleasure in his presence. Only a winter blast of horror.

  Mortal. Mortal sin. Witch, demon, were-beast, child of darkness.

  Alf tried to embrace him, to make him stop. He recoiled with searing violence. “Abomination! Hell-spawn, get thee hence, in nomine Patris, in nomine Filii, in nomine Spiritus Sancti… Angels and saints, Saint Michael Defender, Saint Martin, Saint George, O blessed Christ, if ever I have loved you—”

  Mortal, mortal sin. Hate it, drive it away, wall it and bar it and ban it forever. But Brother Radbod would hear neither pleas nor promises. He would never be warm again.

  oOo

  “I remember,” Alf cried, or gasped. “I remember.”

  The window was dark, the vision gone. But the memory was there. The image, the precise turning of power about its center. It struggled, slipped, began to fade. He was letting it go. Yes; let it. It held only pain, a rejection as deep as Hell. He was monster enough. He need not be more.

  Cynan. The name stabbed like a needle. Cynan—for Cynan.

  He had it. It was briefly quiescent, like a page from a grimoire clutched in his hand. He could read it even thus. He could not will it to be. Even the thought was a tearing agony.

  Cynan.

  Thea. Thea in a blur of shapes: wolf, alaunt, lioness, lapcat; falcon and dove, mare and dolphin and Varangian of Byzantium. Always, regardless of outer semblance, she remained herself, without either sin or guilt, nor ever a hint of fear.

  He had promised her. They would be wolves in Broceliande, falcons above the House of the Falcon.