The Complete Chalion

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Horseriver snorted, and Ingrey spun around, growling. The face of the moment stared across at Ijada with a mixture of astonishment and revulsion. “You do keep turning up where you are not wanted, don’t you, girl?” he remarked to the air, or perhaps to Ingrey. Ijada, in any case, did not seem to hear him. “Always in ignorance, but does that slow you? Taste the betrayal of the gods, then; I have dined on it for ages.”

  He turned away and looked across at the gathering of ghosts. “All here now,” he breathed. Now the terrible eyes were distant, removed, implacably calmed. “But not for much longer, I swear to you, beloved ones.”

  The looks the revenants gave him in return were not loving, Ingrey thought, but wary and dismayed. A faint translucence hung about them, and Ingrey realized that they were already starting to fade. The ghost of a man fresh-killed, if he did not go at once to the gods through the gates of his death, might yet be redeemed from sundering during the god-touched rites of his funeral, as Boleso’s had been. Up to a point. But the sundering soon grew irrevocable, the soul, in that last refusal, self-doomed to fade. That period of uncertain grace had been prolonged for these, not for days or weeks, but for centuries. With their link to the Wounded Woods now broken, they would not linger long, Ingrey thought. Hours? Minutes?

  Ijada started to rise to go to Fara, but then gasped and sank back down. Her hand touched her left breast, then her forehead; her lips moved in surprise, then pinched in pain. Ingrey’s whines redoubled.

  The mob of ghosts shuffled aside once more, and a great-limbed warrior strode forward. He wore a broad gold belt, and bore a spearhead-tipped banner staff, its furled flag stippled in grass green, white, and blue. His head hung from the gold belt, tied on by its own grayed-yellow braids. The grizzled head’s gaze flicked up to Horseriver, who started in surprised recognition, and raised his hand to return a salute that had not, in fact, been given; the gesture faded at the end as Horseriver belatedly realized this. The warrior knelt by Ijada, bending over her in concern, his hand touching her shoulder.

  Ingrey danced anxiously around the pair, his wolf’s head lowering to the warrior’s eye level. The warrior stared across at him in some silent query. Ijada’s spine bent, and her grip on Ingrey’s bloody hand grew limp; it slipped from her grasp, and her own white hand fell atop it. “Oh,” she breathed, her eyes wide and dark. She was growing still more pale, almost greenish; when wolf-Ingrey licked her face now, she did not respond.

  Ingrey backed away and looked up. Then rose on his hind limbs, resting one forepaw on the warrior’s shoulder for balance, sniffing; the man stiffened to support him. Something was skewered up there on the narrow, willow-leaf-shaped spear point. A beating heart…no, half a heart. But its rhythm was slowing.

  He bowed low, Ijada had said. And placed my heart on a stone slab, and cut it in two with the hilt-shard of his broken sword… The other half, they raised high upon a spearpoint. I did not understand if it was pledge, or sacrifice, or ransom…

  All three, thought Ingrey. All three.

  He did not know what, on this eerie ground, his actions all meant. But even with his voice muzzled, they were not without power. He was not without power. I brought down Horseriver’s horse, and it is gone. Maybe I can do more. Horseriver plainly thought him spent, his task over, his use used up. Meant to just leave him, perhaps, in this disarray of body and spirit, to die alone upon the ground when the ghosts and all their magic drained away. And in and of himself, lone wolf, he did not think Horseriver was mistaken. But I am not alone, am I? Not now. She said it, so it must be so. Truthsayer. How was it that I came to love the truth above all things?

  “Shall I die of love, then?” murmured Ijada, sinking onto Ingrey’s chest. “I always thought that was a figure of speech. Together, then? No! My Lord of Autumn, in this Your season, help us…!”

  There are no gods here.

  But Ingrey was here. Try something else. Try anything. Maybe the revenant captain had some power here as well; he carried a banner, after all, Old Weald sacred sign of rescues beyond death and the death of all other hopes. Ingrey whined, danced around the man, scratched at his booted leg with one paw, then crouched and nudged his long nose repeatedly at the scabbard hung on the gold belt on the opposite side from his head. Would the revenant understand his plea? The man swiveled his hips to regard him, his sandy gray brows rising in surprise. He stood and drew the hilt shard. Yes! Ingrey nudged the hand some more, and turned to bite at his own side.

  The man could not nod, but he half bowed. He knelt, and Ingrey lay down with his paws waving ridiculously in the air, his belly exposed. If this can save her… The sharp shard entered his chest in a long sweep.

  Ijada didn’t say this had hurt! Ingrey strangled a yelp and controlled a twisting jerk away. The ghostly hand descended into the gaping gash in his wolf-chest and emerged dripping red. The shard edge sliced across a slippery object in the warrior’s palm, and then the warrior tossed something skyward. The bloody fist descended once more, and Ingrey’s wolf-self seemed to breathe again as the hand withdrew emptied and the gash closed up in a long red line. Ingrey scrambled upright on his paws once more.

  High on the spear tip, a whole heart beat, picking up the pulse.

  Ijada inhaled sharply and sat up, blinking around. Her eyes met Ingrey’s wolf-gaze, and widened in astonishment and recognition. “There you are!” Her head swiveled, as she took in the mob of agitated ghosts who had crowded up around this strange operation. “There you all are! You!” She struggled to her feet and curtseyed to the bannerman, signing the Five. “I was looking for you, my lord marshal, but I could not see.”

  The ghost bowed back in deep respect. Ijada’s hand curled in Ingrey’s neck ruff, clutching and stroking the thick fur. He pushed up into the caress. She looked down at him—not very far down, for his big head came nearly to her chest. “How came you to be all apart like this? What is happening here?” Her gaze traveled around the clearing till it caught on the multifaced Horseriver. “Oh.” She flinched a little, but then her back straightened. “So that’s what you look like, out of the shadow. What are you doing on my land?”

  Horseriver had composed himself in an attitude of utter indifference, but this last jerked him into rage. “Your land! This is Holytree!”

  “I know,” said Ijada coolly. “It is my inheritance. For you are finished with it, are you not?”

  The form of Horseriver stiffened, and the ironic mouth murmured, “Indeed, we go. Alas that you shall find your enjoyment of your legacy…brief.” That mouth smiled nastily, and Ingrey growled in response. Ijada’s hand tightened in his fur.

  “And these?” Ijada glanced up at the gold-belted marshal, and gestured at the gathered revenants.

  “I am their last true hallow king. Follow me, they must.”

  “Into oblivion?” she demanded indignantly. “Shall they die for you twice? What kind of king are you?”

  “I owe you nothing. Not even explanation.”

  “You owe them everything!”

  He could not, exactly, turn away, with the faces chasing each other around his skull, but he turned his shoulders from her. “It is done. It is long past done.”

  “It is not.”

  He whipped back, and snarled, “They will follow me down to darkness, and the gods who denied us will be denied in turn. Oblivion and revenge. They have made me, and you cannot unmake me.”

  “I cannot…” She hesitated, and gestured at the banner pole upon which the marshal-warrior now leaned, listening. Raising her face, she pointed to the mound where Wencel’s body lay huddled and Fara knelt silent and staring. “You died, I think. Death lays a kingship down, along with all else a life accumulates in the world of matter. We go to the gods naked and equal, as in any other birth, but for our souls and what we’ve made of them. Then the kin meeting makes the king again.” She stared around at the ghosts, challengingly. “Do you not?”

  An odd rustle ran through the revenants. The marshal-warrior was watching with
a most peculiar expression on his face, an amalgam of sorrow and unholy joy. It dawned on Ingrey then that this man must have been the very first Horseriver hallow king’s royal banner-carrier, who had died by his lord’s side at Bloodfield. His body was doubtless buried in this same pit, for Horseriver had said his banner had been broken and thrown in atop him. And this warrior would never have given it up alive. The royal bannerman should have received the hallow kingship in trust, to carry as steward to the next kin meeting, to be surrendered in turn to the new king—but for the great, disrupted spell, that had carried it instead into this far, unfriendly future.

  “You died,” insisted Ijada. “This is an Old Weald kin meeting, the last of all time. They can make another king, one who will not betray them beyond death.”

  Horseriver snorted. “There is no other.”

  The rustle grew, racing around the mob like fire, then back to the beginning. The marshal-warrior stood up straight, then saluted Ijada with that eccentric looping sign of the Five. The ghostly lips turned up in a smile. He let his banner pole fall out of his hand; Ijada’s hand caught it and gripped it tight.

  Wait, thought Ingrey, we living ones cannot touch these ghostly things, they run through our fingers like water…

  Ijada grasped the pole with both hands and gave it a great yank. Above her head, the banner unfurled and snapped out in no breeze. The wolf’s head badge of the Wolfcliffs snarled upon it, black on red.

  Ingrey blinked up through his human eyes and wrenched to his feet, stunned. He was back in his body again, and it felt astounding. He inhaled. His wolf was gone… No. He clutched his heart. It’s right here. Howling joyously through his veins. And something more… A line ran between him and Horseriver: the current between Ingrey and Ijada that Horseriver had made, broken, and bound again to his kingship. Tension seemed to reverberate back and forth along that line now, its power ascending. The pull between them was massive, straining.

  Horseriver reached down and yanked Fara to her feet, and clasped her hands around his banner pole. “Hold!” She stared at him in terror and gripped as though her life depended on it. Grounded upon that mound of death and woe, the strength of the old kingship was vast.

  Ingrey moistened his lips, cleared his throat. Found his weirding Voice. “What do you have to say, Fara?”

  He could feel Horseriver’s geas of silence fly away from around her face like a spring of metal released, spinning away in the air. Fara took a huge breath.

  Horseriver turned to her, and Wencel’s face rose fully to the surface for the first time. One hand reached out toward her. “Fara…?” that young voice quavered. “My wife…?”

  Fara jerked as if shot with a crossbow bolt. Her eyes closed in pain. Opened. Glanced at Ijada, at Ingrey. At the ghastly revenant before her. “I tried to be your wife,” she whispered. “You never tried to be my husband.”

  And she lowered the tip of the banner pole to the ground, the gray rag falling in a silky puddle, put her foot upon the dry wood, and snapped it in half.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  HORSERIVER FELL BACK A PACE. HALF HIS FACES SEEMED contorted in rage. Others registered ironic resignation, disgust and self-disgust, and one sad visage an ageless, dignified endurance. His hands dropped to his sides, and the current between him and Ingrey faded away like sparks burning out in the dark. The unspeakably agonized eyes stared across at Ingrey, and almost all of his expressions melted into a bitter pity.

  Ingrey found himself clinging to Ijada’s banner pole lest he fall down. The immense flaring pressure of Horseriver’s kingship was not gone, exactly, but it seemed to become dispersed, as if pouring in from all sides and not just from the one quarter. And then there came a moment of stillness, hushed hesitation, and the inward flow of the kingly current seemed to turn, becoming an outward urgency. And with that came a diffuse dread unlike any other he had experienced in these long hours filled with fierce shocks.

  “You shall find,” breathed Horseriver, “that a hallow kingship looks different from the inside. And my revenge shall be redoubled thereby. And oblivion…shall still be mine.” His voice faded away in a sigh.

  Though Horseriver did not move from his burial mound, he grew distanced, silenced at last, like a corpse seen underwater. Stripped of both his yoked powers—his great horse and his hallow kingship—he was reduced to one revenant among the many, except for his dire multiplicity, an extra denseness that lingered about him. Yes, thought Ingrey, he, too, is a ghost of Bloodfield, who died on this sacred and accursed ground; he is no longer more, but he cannot become less.

  But what have I become?

  He could feel the mystical kingship settle into place upon him, in him, through him. It did not make him feel as though he’d been stuffed with pride and power, replete and overflowing. It made him feel as though all his blood was being drawn out of him.

  Ijada and Fara both, he realized, were staring at him with that same openmouthed awe tinged with physical desire that Horseriver had inspired. Such stares ought to make any man preen, surely. Instead, he felt as though they contemplated eating him alive.

  No, not Ijada and Fara—well, yes, them, too—it was the ghosts that alarmed him now. They crowded up closer as if fascinated, reaching for him, touching him in chill liquid strokes that stole the warmth from his skin. They were growing unruly in their urgency, shouldering past and even climbing over one another, thicker and thicker about him. Famished beggars.

  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 swor
d 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.