The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion) Read online

  “How?” asked the divine curiously. “How did you call them out?”

  “It was but a dream, Learned. One does not expect things to make sense in a dream.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “I was…given a voice.” No need to say how, or by whom, was there?

  “The weirding voice? As the voice you used on the rampant ice bear two days before?”

  A couple of heads along the panel came up at that.

  Damn. “I have heard it called that.”

  “Could you use it again?”

  It was all Ingrey could do not to use it right now; paralyze this roomful of men and escape. Or else squeeze his strangely diffuse wolf into a tight little invisible ball under his heart. Fool, they cannot see it anyway. “I do not know.”

  “More specifically,” the divine went on crisply, “Lady Ijada is imputed to have been defiled with the spirit of a dead leopard. It is the teaching of Temple history, which your vision with the late prince would seem to support, that such a defilement sunders a soul from the gods.”

  “A dead soul,” Ingrey corrected cautiously. For both he and Ijada bore animal spirits, and yet the god had spoken to both. Not to Boleso, though, Ingrey realized. He was moved to explain how the shamans of the Old Weald had cleansed their departed comrades’ spirits, then thought better of it. He was not at all moved to explain how he’d learned all this.

  “Quite so. My question, then, is: were Lady Ijada to be executed as a result of her future trial, could you, Lord Ingrey, remove the defiling animal spirit from her soul as you did for Prince Boleso’s?”

  Ingrey froze. The first memory that roared back into his mind was of Wencel’s worried vision of Ijada as an Old Weald courier sacrifice, opening Holytree to the gods. Wencel had thought that path safely blocked by Ijada’s defilement. Not so safe, and not so blocked, if Ingrey could unblock it again. And I could. Five gods, and curse Them one and five, was this the unholy holy plan for the pair of them? Is this why You have chased us here? Thoughts tumbling, Ingrey temporized, “Why do you ask, Learned?”

  “It is a theological fine point that I greatly desire clarified. Execution, properly speaking, is a punishment of the body for crimes in the world of matter. The question of the salvation or sundering of a soul and its god is not more affected than by any other death, nor should it be; for the improper sundering of a soul would be a heinous sin and burden upon the officers charged with such a duty. An execution that entails such an unjust sundering must be resisted. An execution that does not may proceed.” A silence followed this pronouncement; the divine added solicitously, “Do you follow the argument, my lord?”

  Ingrey followed it. Claws scrabbling, dragged as by a leash. If I say I can cleanse her soul, it frees them to hang her body with a blithe good will. If he said he could not…he would be lying, but what else? He whispered, “It was only…” Stopped, cleared his throat, forced his voice to a normal volume. “It was only a dream, Learned. You refine too much upon it.”

  A warm autumnal voice murmured, somewhere between his ear and his mind, If you deny Me and yourself before this little company, brother wolf, how shall you manage before a greater?

  Ingrey did not know if his face drained white, though several of the judges stared at him in alarm. With an effort, he kept himself from swaying on his feet. Or, five gods forbid, falling down in a faint. Wouldn’t that be a dramatic development, coming pat upon his words of disavowal.

  “Hm,” said the scholarly divine, his gaze narrowing. “The point is an important one, however.”

  “How, then, if I simplify it for you? If I have not this ability, the point is moot. If I have…I refuse to use it so.” Eat that.

  “Could you be forced?” The divine’s tone conveyed no hint of threat; it seemed the purest curiosity.

  Ingrey’s lips drew back in a grin that had nothing to do with humor, at all, at all; several of the men pushed back in their seats in an instinctive recoil. “You could try,” he breathed. Under the circumstances—under those circumstances, with Ijada’s dead body cut down from a gallows and laid at his feet—he might just find out everything his wolf could really do. Until they cut him down as well.

  “Hm.” The scholarly divine tapped his lips; his expression, strangely, seemed more satisfied than alarmed. “Most interesting.” He glanced down the panel. “Have you any more questions?”

  The senior judge, looking vastly disturbed, said, “Not…not at this time. Thank you, Most Learned, for your…um…always thought-provoking commentary.”

  “Yes,” muttered another under his breath, “trust you to come up with a horrible complication no one else ever thought of.”

  A slight tilt of the scholarly divine’s head and a glint in his eye took this as more compliment than complaint, despite the tone. “Then I thank you, Lord Ingrey.”

  It was clearly a dismissal, and not a moment too soon; Ingrey managed a civil nod and turned away, quelling an urge to run. He turned onto the gallery outside the chamber and drew a long breath, but before he could entirely compose himself again, heard footsteps behind him. He glanced back to see the strange divine following him out.

  The lanky man signed the Five by way of greeting; a swift gesture, but very precise, neither perfunctory nor sketched. Ingrey nodded again, started to rest his hand on his sword hilt, decided the gesture might be interpreted as too threatening, and let his hands drift to clench each other behind his back. “May I help you, Learned?” Over the gallery rail, headfirst, perhaps?

  “My apologies, Lord Ingrey, but I just realized that I was introduced before your party came in, but not again after. I am Learned Oswin of Suttleaf.”

  Ingrey blinked; his mind, briefly frozen, bolted off again in a wholly unexpected new direction. “Hallana’s Oswin?”

  The divine smiled, looking oddly abashed. “Of all my titles, the truest, I fear. Yes, I’m Hallana’s Oswin, for my sins. She told me much of your meeting with her at Red Dike.”

  “Is she well?”

  “Well, and delivered of a fine little girl, I am pleased to say. Who I pray to the Lady of Spring shall grow up to look like her mother and not like me, else she will have much to complain of when she is older.”

  “I’m glad she is safe. Both safe. Learned Hallana worried me.” In more ways than one. He touched his still-bandaged right hand, reminded of how close he had come to retrieving his sword, in his scarlet madness in that upstairs room.

  “Had you time to know her better, she would not have worried you.”

  “Ah?”

  “She would have terrified you, just like the rest of us. Yet somehow, we all survived her, again. She sent me here, you see. Quite drove me from her bedside. Which many women tend to do to their poor husbands after a childbirth, but not for such reasons.”

  “Have you spoken with Learned Lewko?”

  “Yes, at length, when I arrived last night.”

  Ingrey groped for careful wording. “And on whose behalf did Hallana send you?” It occurred to him belatedly that the divine’s alarming theological argument back in the chamber might well have been intended to impede Ijada’s execution, not speed it.

  “Well…well, now, that’s a little hard to say.”

  Ingrey considered this. “Why?”

  For the first time, Oswin hesitated before he answered. He took Ingrey by the arm and led him away, around the corner of the gallery, well out of earshot of the door where a couple of what looked like more servants from Boar’s Head were just being led inside by a gray-robed dedicat. Oswin leaned on the rail, looking down thoughtfully into the well of the hall; Ingrey matched his pose and waited.

  When Oswin resumed, his voice was oddly diffident. “You are a man with much experience in the uncanny and the holy, I understand. The gods speak to you in waking visions, face-to-face.”

  “No!” Ingrey began, and stopped. Denial again? “Well…in a way. I have had many bizarre experiences lately. They crowd upon me now. It does not make me deft.”
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  Oswin sighed. “I cannot imagine growing deft in the face of this. You have to understand. I had never had a direct experience of the holy in my life, for all that I tried to serve my god as seemed best to me, according to my gifts as we are taught. Except for Hallana. She was the only miracle that ever happened to me. The woman seems vastly oversupplied with gods. At one point, I accused her of having stolen my share, and she accused me of marrying her solely to sustain a proper average. The gods walk through her dreams as though strolling in a garden. I just have dreams of running lost through my old seminary, with no clothes, late for an examination of a class I did not know I had, and the like.”

  “Taking the examination, or giving it?” Ingrey couldn’t help asking.

  “Either, variously.” Oswin’s brow furrowed. “And then there are the ones where I am wandering through a house that is falling apart, and I have no tools to repair…well, anyway.” He took a long breath, and settled into himself. “The night after our new daughter was born, I slept once again with Hallana. We both shared a significant dream. I woke crying out in fear. She was utterly cheery about it. She said it meant we must go at once to Easthome. I asked her if she had run mad, she could not rise and go about yet! She said she could put a pallet in the back of the wagon and rest the whole way. We argued about it all day. The dream came again the next night. She said that cinched the matter. I said she had a duty to the babe, to the children, that she could neither abandon them nor drag them along into danger. She gave way; I gloated. I took to my horse that afternoon. I was ten miles down the road before I realized that I had been neatly foxed.”

  “How so?”

  “Separated, there was no way for me to continue the argument. Or to stop her. I have no doubt she’s upon the road right now, not more than a day behind me. I wonder if she will have brought the children? I shudder to picture it. If you see her, or her faithful servants, in this town before I do, tell her I have taken rooms for all of us at the Inn of Irises across from the Mother’s Infirmary.”

  “Would, um, she be traveling with the same ones I met in Red Dike?”

  “Oh, yes, Bernan and Hergi. They would not be separated from her. Bernan was one of her early triumphs in sorcerous healing, you see. Hergi brought him to her in agony from the stones, clawing himself and shrieking of suicide, close to heart failure from the pain, his life and sanity despaired of. Hallana exploded the stones within his body, and he passed them at once—she had him on his feet and smiling in a day. They would follow her into any folly she chose.” Oswin snorted. “I construct the most excellent arguments in the Father’s name that my intellect and deep training can devise, yet with all my reason I cannot move people as she does just by—by standing there breathing. It is entirely unjust.” His tone tried to be incensed, but only managed wistful.

  “The dream,” Ingrey reminded him.

  “My apologies. I do not normally rattle on like this. Perhaps that explains something about my Hallana…I have laid it before Learned Lewko, now you. There were five people in it: Hallana, me, Lewko, and two young men I had never seen before. Until today. Prince Biast was one of them. I nearly fell off my bench when he walked into the chamber and was named. The other was a stranger fellow still; a giant man with long red hair, who spoke in tongues.”

  “Ah,” said Ingrey. “That would be Prince Jokol, no doubt. Tell him to give Fafa a fish for me, when you meet him. In fact, you might catch him now; I just sent him to Lewko. He could still be there.”

  Oswin’s eyes widened, and he straightened as though to dash off at once, but then shook his head and continued. “In the dream…I am a man of words, but I scarcely know how to describe it. All the five were god-touched. More, worse: the gods put us on and wore us like gauntlets. We shattered…”

  They harry me hard, now, Horseriver had said. So it seemed. “Well, should you determine what it all meant, let me know. Were any others in the dream?” Me or Ijada, for example?

  Oswin shook his head. “Just the five. So far. The dream did not seem finished, which upset me yet Hallana took in stride. I both long and fear to sleep, to find out more, but now I have insomnia. Hallana may be willing to run off into the dark, but I want to know where the stepping-stones will be.”

  Ingrey smiled grimly at this. “It was lately suggested to me, by a man with longer experience of the gods than I can rightly imagine, that the reason the gods do not show our paths more plainly is that They do not know either. I haven’t decided if I find this reassuring or the reverse. It does hint they do not torment us solely for Their amusement, at least.”

  Oswin tapped a hand on the railing. “Hallana and I have argued this point—the foresight of the gods. They are the gods. They must know if anyone does.”

  “Perhaps no one does,” said Ingrey easily.

  The expression on Oswin’s face was that of a man forced to swallow a vile-tasting medicine of dubious value. “I shall try Lewko, then. Perhaps this Jokol will know something more.”

  “I doubt it, but good luck.”

  “I trust we will meet again soon.”

  “Nothing would startle me, these days.”

  “Where might I reach you? Lewko said you were set as a spy upon Earl Horseriver, who also seems somewhat involved in this tangle.”

  Ingrey hissed through his teeth. “I suppose it’s fortunate Horseriver already knows that I spy on him, with that sort of loose gossip circulating.”

  Oswin shook his head vehemently. “Neither loose nor gossip, and the circle is a tight one. Lewko had something like the dream, too, from what he says.”

  Somewhat involved, indeed. “Stay away from Horseriver for the time being. He is dangerous. If you wish to see me, send a message there, but put no matter of import in the writing—assume it will be intercepted and read by hostile eyes before I see it.”

  Oswin nodded, frowning. They walked together down the circling stairs and out to the street. Ingrey bade the divine farewell and turned his quickening steps down the hill toward Kingstown.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  INGREY COULD NOT MUSTER MUCH SURPRISE WHEN, AFTER crossing the buried creek into the lower city, he rounded a corner and found Hallana’s wagon blocking his path.

  The two stubby horses, dusty and sweaty from the road, were standing hip-shot and bored, and Bernan sat on the driver’s box with reins slack and his elbows on his knees. A riding horse, unsaddled, was tied on behind the wagon by a rope to its halter. Hergi crouched behind Bernan’s shoulder. Hallana was hanging off the front brace of the canopy with one hand, shielding her gaze with the other, and peering dubiously up an alley too narrow for the wagon to enter.

  Hergi pounded on Bernan’s shoulder, pointed at Ingrey, and cried, “Look! Look!”

  Hallana swung around, and her face brightened. “Ah! Lord Ingrey! Excellent.” She gave Bernan a pat on the other shoulder. “See, did I not say?” The smith gave a weary sort of head bob, halfway between agreement and exasperation, and Hallana stepped over him to hop down to the street and stand before Ingrey.

  She had abandoned her loose and tattered robes for a natty traveling costume, a dark green coat upon a dress of pale linen, notably cinched in around the waist. Her shoulder braids were absent—traveling incognito? She remained short and plump, but trimmer, with her hair neatly braided in wreaths around her head. There were no visible signs of children or other trailing chaos.

  Ingrey gave her a polite half bow; she returned a blessing, although her sign of the Five more resembled a vague check mark over her torso. “So glad to see you,” she told him. “I’m seeking Ijada.”

  “How?” he couldn’t help asking. Presumably, she was once more in command of her powers.

  “I usually just drive around until something happens.”

  “That seems…oddly inefficient.”

  “You sound like Oswin. He would have wanted to draw a grid over a chart of the city, and mark off sections in strict rotation. Finding you was much faster.”

  Ingrey started
to consider the logic of this, then thought better of it. “Speaking of Learned Oswin. He told me to tell you he has taken rooms for you all at the Inn of the Irises, across from the Mother’s Infirmary on Temple Hill.”

  A slight groan from Bernan greeted this news.

  “Oh!” Hallana brightened still further. “You have met, how nice!”

  “You are not surprised to be expected?”

  “Oswin can be terribly stodgy at times, but he’s not stupid. Of course he would realize we’d be coming. Eventually.”

  “Learned Sir will not be pleased with us,” Hergi predicted uneasily. “He wasn’t before.”

  “Pish posh,” said Oswin’s spouse. “You survived.” She turned back to Ingrey, and her voice dropped to seriousness. “Did he tell you about our dream?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Where is Ijada, anyway?”

  The passersby all seemed ordinary folk, so far, but Ingrey declined to take chances. “I should not be seen talking to you, nor overheard.”

  Hallana jerked her head toward the canopied wagon, and Ingrey nodded. He swung up after her into the shadowed interior, clambering over bundles and seating himself on a trunk, awkwardly adjusting his sword. Hallana sat down cross-legged on a pallet padded thickly with blankets and looked at him expectantly.

  “Ijada is being kept in a private house not far from the quayside.” Ingrey kept his voice low. “Her house warden is Rider Gesca, for the moment, who is Hetwar’s man, but the house belongs to Earl Horseriver. The servants there are the earl’s spies, and Gesca’s discretion is not to be trusted at all. You must not go there as yourself. Have Learned Lewko take you, perhaps in the guise of an examining physician for the inquest or some such. That would give you an excuse to exclude the servants and speak privately with Ijada.”

  Hallana’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting. Is Fara’s husband no friend to Ijada after all—or too much the reverse? Or is it that wretched princess who is the problem?”