The Curse of Chalion

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Cazaril found himself on his hands and knees on the icy slates, his sword, dropped from his nerveless hand, still ringing faintly. He was trembling all over so badly he could not stand up again. He spat bile from his watering mouth. On his sword’s point, as it lay on the stone, dy Joal’s wet blood steamed and smoked, blackening. Surges of nausea swept through his swollen and pulsing abdomen.

  Inside him, Dondo wailed and howled in frustrated rage, slowly smothered again to silence. The demon settled back like a stalking cat on its belly, watchful and tense. Cazaril clenched and unclenched his hand, just to be sure he was still in possession of his own body.

  So. The death demon wasn’t fussy whose souls filled its buckets, so long as there were two of them. Cazaril’s and Dondo’s, Cazaril’s and some other killer’s—or victim’s—he wasn’t just sure which, or if it even mattered, under the circumstances. Dondo clearly had hoped to cling to his body, and let Cazaril’s soul be ripped away. Leaving Dondo in, so to speak, possession. Dondo’s goals and those of the demon were, it seemed, slightly divergent. The demon would be happy if Cazaril died in any way at all. Dondo wanted a murder, or a murdering.

  Sunk strengthless to the stones, tears leaking between his eyelids, Cazaril became aware that the noise had died down. A hand touched his elbow, and he flinched. Foix’s distressed voice came to his ear, “My lord? My lord, are you wounded?”

  “Not…not stabbed,” Cazaril got out. He blinked, wheezing. He reached out for his blade, then jerked his hand back, fingertips stinging. The steel was hot to the touch. Ferda appeared on his other side, and the two brothers drew him to his feet. He stood shivering with reaction.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” said Ferda. “That dark-haired lady in Cardegoss promised us the royesse would have our ears if we did not bring you back to her alive.”

  “Yes,” put in Foix, “and that she would have the rest of our skins for a drum head, thereafter.”

  “Your skins are safe, for now.” Cazaril rubbed his watering eyes and straightened a little, staring around. A sergeantly-looking groom, sword out, had half a dozen of the toughs lying facedown on the slates in surrender. Three more bandits sat leaning against the stable wall, moaning and bleeding. Another servant was dragging up the body of the dead crossbowman.

  Cazaril scowled down at dy Joal, lying sprawled before him. They hadn’t exchanged a single word in their brief encounter. He was deeply sorry he’d torn out the bravo’s lying throat. His presence here implied much, but confirmed nothing. Was he dy Jironal’s agent or acting on his own?

  “The leader—where is he? I want to put him to the question.”

  “Over there, my lord”—Foix pointed—“but I’m afraid he won’t be answering.”

  Bergon was just rising from the examination of an unmoving body; the grizzled man, alas.

  Ferda said uneasily, in a tone of apology, “He fought fiercely and wouldn’t surrender. He had wounded two of our grooms, so Foix finally downed him with a crossbow bolt.”

  “Do you think he really was the castle warder here, my lord?” Foix added.

  “No.”

  Bergon picked his way over to him, sword in hand, and looked him up and down in worry. “What do we do now, Caz?”

  The female ghost, grown somewhat less agitated, was beckoning him toward the gate. One of the male ghosts, equally urgent, was beckoning him toward the main door. “I…I follow, momentarily.”

  “What?” said Bergon.

  Cazaril tore his gaze away from what only his inner eye saw. “Lock them”—he nodded toward their surrendered foes—“up in a stall, and set a guard. Whole and wounded together for now. We’ll tend to them after our own. Then send a body of able men to search the premises, see if there are any more hiding. Or…or anybody else. Hiding. Or…whatever.” His eye returned to the gate, where the streaming woman beckoned again. “Foix, bring your bow and sword and come with me.”

  “Should we not take more men, lord?”

  “No, I don’t think so…”

  Leaving Bergon and Ferda to direct the mopping-up, Cazaril at last headed for the gate. Foix followed, staring as Cazaril turned without hesitation down a path into the pines. As they walked along it, the cries of the crows grew louder. Cazaril braced himself. The path opened out onto the edge of a steep ravine.

  “Bastard’s hell,” whispered Foix. He lowered his bow and touched the five theological points, forehead-lip-navel-groin-heart, in a warding gesture.

  They’d found the bodies.

  They were thrown upon the midden, tumbled down the edge of the crevasse atop years of kitchen and stable yard waste. One younger man, two older; in this rural place it was not possible to distinguish certainly master from man by dress, as all wore practical working leathers and woolens. The woman, plump and homely and middle-aged, was stripped naked, as was the boy, who appeared to have been about five. Both mutilated according to a cruel humor. Violated, too, probably. Dead about a day, Cazaril judged by the progress the crows had made. The woman-ghost was weeping silently, and the child-ghost clung to her and wailed. They were not god-rejected souls, then, just sundered, still dizzied from their deaths and unable to find their way without proper ceremonies.

  Cazaril fell to his knees, and whispered, “Lady. If I am alive in this place, you must be, too. If it please you, give these poor spirits ease.”

  The ghostly faces changed, rippling from woe to wonder; the insubstantial bodies blurred like sun diffractions in a high, feathered cloud, then vanished.

  After about a minute Cazaril said muzzily, “Help me up, please.”

  The bewildered Foix levered him up with a hand under his elbow. Cazaril staggered around and started back up the path.

  “My lord, should we not look around for others?”

  “No, that’s all.”

  Foix followed him without another word.

  In the slate-paved courtyard, they found Ferda and an armed groom just emerging again from the main doorway.

  “Did you find anyone else?” Cazaril asked him.

  “No, my lord.”

  Beside the door, only the young male ghost still lingered, although its luminescent body seemed to be ribboning away like smoke in a wind. It writhed in a kind of agony, gesturing Cazaril on. What dire urgency was it that turned it from the open arms of the goddess to cling to this wounded world? “Yes, yes, I’m coming,” Cazaril told it.

  It slipped inside; Cazaril motioned Foix and Ferda, looking uneasily at him, to follow on. They passed through the main hall and under a gallery, back through the kitchens, and down some wooden stairs to a dark, stone-walled storeroom.

  “Did you search in here?” Cazaril called over his shoulder.

  “Yes, my lord,” said Ferda.

  “Get more light.” He stared intently at the ghost, which was now circling the room in agitation, whirling in a tightening spiral. Cazaril pointed. “Move those barrels.”

  Foix rolled them aside. Ferda clattered back down from the kitchen with a brace of tallow candles, their flames yellow and smoky but bright in the gloom. Concealed beneath the barrels they found a stone slab in the floor with an iron ring set in it. Cazaril motioned to Foix again; the boy grabbed the ring and strained, and shifted the slab up and aside, revealing narrow steps descending into utter blackness.

  From below, a faint voice cried out.

  The ghost bent to Cazaril, seeming to kiss his forehead, hands, and feet, and then streamed away into eternity. A faint blue sparkle, like a chord of music made visible, glittered for a moment in Cazaril’s second sight, and was gone. Ferda, the candles in one hand and his drawn sword in the other, cautiously descended the stone steps.

  Clamor and babble wafted back up through the dank slot. In a few moments, Ferda appeared again, supporting up the stairs a disheveled stout old man, his face bruised and battered, his legs shaking. Following in his wake, weeping for gladness, a dozen other equally shattered people climbed one by one.

  The freed prisoners a
ll fell upon Ferda and Foix with questions and tales at once, inundating them; Cazaril leaned unobtrusively upon a barrel and pieced together the picture. The stout man proved the real Castillar dy Zavar, a distraught middle-aged woman his castillara, and two young people a son and a—in Cazaril’s view, miraculously spared—daughter. The rest were servants and dependents of this rural household.

  Dy Joal and his troop had descended upon them yesterday, at first seeming merely rough travelers. Only when a couple of the bravos had made to molest the castillar’s cook, and her husband and the real castle warder had gone to her defense and attempted to eject the unwelcome visitors, had steel been drawn. It truly was the house’s custom to take in benighted or storm-threatened wayfarers from the road over the pass. No one here had known or recognized dy Joal or any of his men.

  The old castillar gripped Ferda’s cloak anxiously. “My elder son, does he live? Have you seen him? He went to my castle warder’s aid…”

  “Was he a young man of about these men’s age”—Cazaril nodded to the dy Gura brothers—“dressed in wool and leathers like your own?”

  “Aye…” The old man’s face drained in anticipation.

  “He is in the care of the gods, and much comforted there,” Cazaril reported factually.

  Cries of grief greeted this news; wearily, Cazaril mounted the stairs to the kitchen in the mob’s wake, as they spread out to regain their house, recover their dead, and care for the wounded.

  “My lord,” Ferda murmured to him, as Cazaril paused briefly to warm himself by the kitchen fire, “had you ever been to this house before?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you—I heard nothing, when I looked in that cellar. I would have left those poor people to die of thirst and hunger and madness in the dark.”

  “I think dy Joal’s men would have confessed to them, before the night was done.” Cazaril frowned grimly. “Among the many other things I intend to learn from them.”

  The captured bravos, under a duress Cazaril was happy to allow and the freed housemen eager to supply, told their half of the tale soon enough. They were a mixed lot, including some lawless and impoverished discharged soldiers who had followed the grizzled man, and a few local hirelings, one of whom had led them to dy Zavar’s holding for sake of its amazing vantage of the road from its highest tower. Dy Joal, riding to the Ibran border alone and in a hurry, had picked them all up from a town at the foot of these mountains, where they had formerly eked out a living alternating between guarding travelers and robbing them.

  The bravos knew only that dy Joal had come there looking to waylay a man expected to be riding over the passes from Ibra. They did not know who their new employer really was, although they’d despised his courtier’s clothes and mannerisms. It was abundantly clear to Cazaril that dy Joal had not been in control of the men he’d hastily hired. When the altercation about the cook had tipped over into violence, he’d not had either the nerve or the muscle to stop it, administer discipline, or restore order before events had run their ugly course.

  Bergon, disturbed, drew Cazaril aside in the flickering torchlight of the courtyard where this rough-and-ready interrogation was taking place. “Caz, did I bring this wretched chance down upon poor dy Zavar’s good people?”

  “No, Royse. It’s clear dy Joal was expecting only me, riding back as Iselle’s courier. Chancellor dy Jironal has sought to tear me from her service for some time—secretly assassinate me, if there proved no other way. How I wish I hadn’t killed that fool! I’d give my teeth to know how much dy Jironal knows by now.”

  “Are you sure the chancellor set this trap?”

  Cazaril hesitated. “Dy Joal had a personal grudge against me, but…the world knew merely that I’d ridden to Valenda. Dy Joal could only have had surmise of my true route from dy Jironal. Therefore, we may be certain dy Jironal had some report of me from his spies in Ibra. His knowledge of our real aim lags—but not, I think, by much. Dy Joal was a stopgap, hurriedly dispatched. And certainly not the only such agent. Something else must follow.”

  “How soon?”

  “I don’t know. Dy Jironal commands the Order of the Son; he can draw on its men as soon as he can evolve a plausible enough lie by which to move them.”

  Bergon tapped his sheathed sword against his leather-clad thigh, and frowned up at the sky, which was clearing as evening fell. The mountain spines to the west were black silhouettes against a lingering green glow, and the first stars shone overhead. The grizzled man’s tale of an approaching blizzard had proved a mere decoy, although a light snow squall that had blown through earlier might have been the seed of the idea. “The moon is nearly full, and will be well up by midnight. If we ride both night and day, perchance we can push across this disturbed country before dy Jironal can bring up any more reinforcements.”

  Cazaril nodded. “Let him rush his men to patrol a border that we’re already across? Good. I like it.”

  Bergon studied him in doubt. “But…will you be able to ride, Caz?”

  “I’d rather ride than fight.”

  Bergon sighed agreement. “Yes.”

  THE GRATEFUL, GRIEVING CASTILLAR DY ZAVAR pressed all the refreshment his disrupted household could spare upon them. Bergon decided to leave the mules, injured grooms, and lamed horses in his care, to follow on when they could, and lighten his own party thereby. Ferda selected the fastest, soundest horses, and made sure they were rubbed down well and fed and rested until time to start. March dy Sould had recovered after a few hours of rest in this more nourishing air, and insisted on accompanying the royse. Dy Cembuer, who had suffered a broken arm and some freely bleeding cuts in the courtyard fight, undertook to stay with the grooms and baggage and assist dy Zavar until all were ready to travel.

  The problem of justice upon the brigands, Cazaril was relieved to leave to their victims. Bergon’s midnight departure would spare them having to witness the hangings at dawn. He left the scattered portion of Dondo’s pearls for the stricken household to collect, and tucked the remains of the rope back in his saddlebag.

  The royse’s cavalcade took to the road again when the moon rose over the hills before them, filling the snowy vales with liquid light. There would be no turning aside now before Valenda.

  24

  They retraced Cazaril’s outbound route across western Chalion, changing horses at obscure rural posts of the Daughter’s Order. At every stop he inquired anxiously for any further ciphered messages from Iselle or news from Valenda that might reveal the tactical situation into which they rushed. He grew increasingly uneasy at the absence of letters. In the original plan, they had envisioned Iselle waiting with her grandmother and mother, guarded by her uncle dy Baocia’s troops. Cazaril feared this ideal condition no longer held.

  They checked at midevening twenty-five miles short of Valenda at the village of Palma. The region around Palma was noted for its fine pasturage; a post of the Daughter’s Order there devoted itself to raising and training remounts for the Temple. Cazaril was certain of obtaining fresh horses in Palma. He prayed for fresh intelligence as well.

  Cazaril did not so much dismount from his blown horse as fall slowly, all in a piece, as if his body were carved from a single block of wood. Both Ferda and Foix had to support him through the order’s sprawling compound. They brought him into a shabbily comfortable chamber, where a bright fire burned in a fieldstone fireplace. A plain pine table had been hastily cleared of someone’s card game. The dedicat-commander of the post hurried in to wait upon them. The man glanced uncertainly from dy Tagille to dy Sould; his gaze passed over Bergon, who’d dressed as a groom since the border for caution’s sake. The commander fell into apologetic confusion when the royse was introduced, and sent his lieutenant scurrying for food and drink to offer his distinguished company.

  Cazaril sat by the table in a cushioned chair, wonderfully unlike a saddle even if the room did still seem to be rocking around him. He was beginning to dislike horses almost as much as he disliked boa
ts. His head felt stuffed with wool, and his body didn’t bear thinking about. He broke into the exchange of courtly amenities to croak, “What word have you from Valenda? Do you hold any new messages from the Royesse Iselle?” Ferda pressed a glass of watered wine into his hand, and he gulped half of it at once.

  The dedicat-commander gave him a little understanding headshake, his lips tightening. “Chancellor dy Jironal marched a thousand more of his men into the town last week. He has another thousand bivouacked along the river. They patrol the countryside, looking for you. Searchers have stopped here twice. He holds Valenda tight in his grip.”

  “Didn’t Provincar dy Baocia have any men there?”

  “Yes, two companies, but they were badly outnumbered. No one would start the fight at Royse Teidez’s interment, and after that they dared not.”

  “Have you heard from March dy Palliar?”

  “He used to bring the letters. We’ve had no direct word from the royesse for five days. It’s rumored that she is very ill and sees no one.”

  Bergon’s eyes widened in alarm. Cazaril squinted and rubbed his aching head. “Ill? Iselle? Well…maybe. Or else held close-confined by dy Jironal, and the illness a tale put about.” Had one of Cazaril’s letters fallen into the wrong hands? He had feared they might have to either spirit the royesse out of Valenda, or break her free by force of arms, preferably the former. He hadn’t planned what to do if she had fallen, perhaps, too sick to ride at this critical moment.

  His muzzy brain evolved a mad vision of somehow sneaking Bergon in to her, over the rooftops and balconies like a lover in a poem. No. A night of secret love between them might break the curse, channel it back somehow to the gods who had spilled it, but he couldn’t see how it would miraculously make away with two thousand or so very fleshly soldiers.

  “Does Orico still live?” he asked at last.