The Hallowed Hunt c-3 Read online

  The room was still present to his physical senses. But equally present was an other place. In it…

  In it, he was standing nude. Above his heart, his pale flesh puckered, then swelled. The skin burst. From it, a vine, no, a vein, sprouted, and began to wind and twist around him, climbing. He felt a second hot bulge burst on his forehead, and saw the vine-vein wind down from it, blurred by its proximity. Another from his navel, another from his genitals. Their moving tips muttered and dripped blood. His tongue, too, was transformed, pushing out from his mouth, forming into a pulsing tube.

  In the material room, his body began to writhe and yank against his chains. Harder. His eyes half rolled back, but still he could see the Learned Hallana leaning near—she scrambled back as he opened his mouth to howl. But between her two glowing hands, held apart, violet fire still roared, spiraling into his horribly transformed mouth.

  The long tentacle growing from his tongue flapped and jerked in agony, its unintelligible whisper speeding into a hiss, yet seemed to devour the heat. The other four, mirroring its excitement, continued to mutter and thicken, splashing him with blood. The hot metallic smell and slippery feel of it drove him to distraction. His real body bucked and arched with near bone-cracking force, straining against his chains. His hair rippled, and his genitals engorged and stiffened. He fell sideways, convulsed, began to try to roll and rock himself across the room toward the wall where his sheathed sword leaned.

  Ijada had fallen to her knees, mouth open, eyes wide. In the second reality, the leopardess appeared…

  Its fur was a silken ripple over moving muscle, its claws carved ivory; its brilliant amber eyes flashed with golden lights. It fell upon the writhing veins for all the world like a kitten upon a mess of cords, paws patting, then clawing, then pulling the hissing things toward it to bite at them with its great teeth. The veins lashed like whips of acid, leaving black burns across the elegant, spotted coat, and the leopardess snarled, a rich sound that shook the air, that shook Ingrey to his heart. From somewhere deep inside him, an answering growl arose.

  His jaw began to lengthen…

  No. No! I deny you, wolf-within! He bit down, clenched his teeth. Fought wolf, fought tentacles, fought his body, fought his mind, rocked nearer to his sword. Fight. Kill… something… everything…

  The tortured chain twisted, an iron link snapping like a stick. His wrists and ankles were still bound, but freed from each other. His body straightened, and then he could writhe and roll, arch and turn. His sword was very close. Panicked feet trampled about him.

  His real hands were as slippery with real blood as his second body now was with the strange red spew that flowed out of himself, onto himself. To his utter horror, he began to feel the links slip from his bleeding wrists, over his yanking hands. If he freed his right hand, reached his sword… surely none would leave this room alive. Perhaps not even himself.

  He would take the yammering manservant’s head first, with a single stroke. Then turn upon the screaming women. Ijada was already on her knees like an executioner’s victim, strands of loosened hair falling forward veiling her face. The whipping sword edge, the pregnant one… his mind shied, denied.

  Then howled denial, so fiercely that it turned itself inside out and transmuted to assent. Help them, save her, uphold me, wolf-within! Take of me, take…

  His jaw lengthened, his teeth grew into sharp white knives. He began to bite and rip at the veins, snarling and shaking his head as a wolf shakes a rabbit to break its back. The hot blood spurted in his mouth, and he felt the pain of his own bites. He gripped, ripped. Pulled the things out of his body by their gory roots. Then it was no longer inside him, but in front of him, wriggling like some malevolent sea creature brought to the lethal air. He kicked at it with naked, clawed feet. The leopardess pounced, batted, rolled the shrieking red thing across the floor. It was, briefly, alive. Dying.

  Then it was gone.

  The second vision vanished, or rejoined the first, melting one into another, the leopardess into Ijada, his wolf-jaw—where?

  His body sagged. He was lying on his back near the door, ankles still bound, bloody hands free. Bernan was standing over him, his face pale as parchment, a short iron crowbar gripped in his shaking hands.

  A little silence fell.

  “Well, “ said Hallana’s bright, strained voice. “Let us not do that again… “

  A rumble of footsteps sounded from the corridor outside the chamber. An urgent thumping on the door: Ingrey’s soldier called in alarm, “Hello? Is everyone all right in there? Lord Ingrey?”

  The warden’s frightened voice: “Was that really him, screaming like that? Oh, hurry, break it down!”

  A third man: “If you break my door, you’ll pay for it! Hey in there! Open up!”

  Ingrey stretched his jaw, his normal human jaw, not a muzzle, and croaked, “I’m all right!”

  Hallana was standing with feet braced, breathing rapidly, staring at him with very wide eyes. “Yes,” she called out. “Lord Ingrey… tripped and upset the table. It’s a bit of a mess in here just now. We’ll see to it. Don’t concern yourselves.”

  “You don’t sound all right.”

  Ingrey swallowed, cleared his raw throat, adjusted his voice. “I’ll come down to the taproom in a while. The divine’s servants will deal with the… with the… mess. Go away.”

  “We will take care of his injuries,” added Hallana.

  A baffled silence, a mumble of argument: then the footsteps retreated.

  A sigh seemed to go through everyone in the room but Bernan, who still brandished his crowbar. Ingrey lay back limply on the floorboards, feeling as though his bones were turned to porridge. He was sick to his stomach. After a moment, he raised his hands. The chains dangled heavily from his left wrist; his right, lubricated with blood, was free. He stared at it, barely comprehending the torn skin and throbbing pain. By the unpleasant trickle in his hair, his furious thumping around had ripped apart some of his new stitches, as well.

  At this rate, I’m going to be dead before I ever get to Easthome, whether Lady Ijada survives me or not.

  Ijada… He twisted around in feverish concern. Bernan made a warning noise and raised his crowbar higher. Ijada was still on her knees a pace or two away, her face very pale, her eyes huge and dark.

  “No, Bernan!” she said. “He’s all right now. It’s gone.”

  “I have seen a man afflicted with the falling sickness,” said Hallana in a distant tone. “This most assuredly wasn’t that.” She ventured near Ingrey again and walked around him, peering down searchingly over her belly.

  With an eye to the crowbar, Ingrey rolled very slowly and cautiously onto his side for a better look at Ijada. The movement made the room turn in slow jerks, and his grunt came out sounding more like a moan, or perhaps a whimper. Ijada wasn’t leaping to her feet, either. She sat limply, her hands on the floor propping her; she caught his gaze, took a breath, and pushed upright. “I’m all right,” she said, although no one had inquired. All eyes had been on Ingrey’s far more spectacular performance.

  Hallana’s head came round. “What did you just experience?”

  “I fell to my knees—I was still on my knees, in this room, but at the same time, I was suddenly in the leopard’s body. The leopard’s spirit body—I did not mistake it for flesh. But oh, it was strong! Glorious. My senses were terribly acute. I could see! But I was mute—no, beyond mute. Wordless. We were in some bigger space, or other space—it was as big as it needed to be, anyway. You”—her gaze swung to Ingrey—”were in the place before me. Your body was sprouting scarlet horrors. They seemed to be of you, yet attacking you. I pounced on them and tried to bite them off you. They burned my jaws. Then you started to turn into a wolf, or a man-wolf, some strange hybrid—it was as if your body couldn’t make up its mind. You grew a wolf’s head, at least, and started tearing at the red horrors, too.” She looked at him sideways, in a fresh fascination.

  Ingrey wondered, but dared no
t ask, if she’d hallucinated a loincloth for him as well. The wild arousal of his frenzied state was only now passing off, damped by confusion and pain.

  “When we had ripped the burning, clutching things all out of you, they could be seen to be not many, but all one thing. For a moment it looked like a ball of mating snakes, raked from under a ledge in the springtime. Then it went silent and vanished, and I was back here. In this body.” She held up one long-fingered hand before her eyes as if still expecting to see pads and claws. “If that was anything like what the Old Weald warriors experienced… I think I begin to see why they desired this. Except not the part about the bleeding things. Yet even that… we won.” The pulsing dilation of her eyes was not just fear, Ingrey thought, but also a vast, astonished exhilaration. She added to Hallana, “Did you see my leopard? The bleeding things, the wolf’s head?”

  “No.” Hallana huffed in frustration. “Your spirits were very disturbed, but I hardly needed second sight to tell that. Do you think you could return to that place where you were? At will?”

  Ingrey started to shake his head, discovered that his brain felt as though it had come loose, and mumbled, “No!”

  “I’m not sure,” said Ijada. “The leopard took me there—I didn’t go myself. And it wasn’t exactly a there. We were still here.”

  Hallana’s expression grew, if possible, more intent. “Did you sense any of the gods’ presences, in that space?”

  “No,” said Ijada. “None. There was a time I might not have known for sure, but after the leopard dream… no. I would have known, if He were back.” Despite her distress, a smile softened her lips. The smile was not for him, Ingrey knew. It still made him want to crawl toward her. Now, that was madness by any measure.

  Hallana stretched her shoulders, which had alarming effects given her current girth, and grimaced. “Bernan, help Lord Ingrey up. Take off those bolts.”

  “Are you sure, Learned?” the manservant said doubtfully. His eyes flicked toward Ingrey’s sword, now lying in the room’s corner; he had apparently kicked it out of Ingrey’s rolling reach during his scramble to get into striking position with his crowbar.

  “Lord Ingrey? What is your opinion? You were certainly correct before.”

  “I don’t think… I can move.” The oak floor was hard and chilly, but by the swimming of Ingrey’s head, horizontal seemed vastly preferable to vertical.

  He was forced to the vertical despite himself, dragged up and placed in the divine’s vacated chair by the two servants. Bernan tapped off the bolts with a hammer and Hergi, clucking, collected a basin of fresh water, soap, towels, and the leather case of what proved to be medical instruments and supplies that she had brought in with her. She tended expertly to Ingrey’s injuries, new and old, under the divine’s eye, and it occurred to Ingrey belatedly that of course the sorceress would travel with her own midwife-dedicat, in her present state. He wondered if Hergi was married to the smith, if that was Bernan’s real calling.

  Ijada levered herself up as far as her own chair and watched Hergi’s mending in apparent fascination, pinching her lips at the needle pokes. The flap of flesh on the back of Ingrey’s hand was neatly reaffixed and covered with a white-linen bandage, the lesser lacerations on the other wrist cleaned and wrapped. His hand did not hurt nearly as much as the burning muscles in his back, or his throbbing ankles; or perhaps each pain served as distraction from the next. He wondered if he ought to pull off his boots while he still could, and if he didn’t, if they would have to be cut off later. They were good boots; he hated to risk them. The chains had left deep scorings in the leather.

  “In that place you found yourselves,” Hallana began again.

  “It wasn’t real,” mumbled Ingrey.

  “Mm, well, yes. But while you were in that, um, state, what did you perceive of me, if anything?”

  “Colored fire flowed from your hands. Into my mouth. It drove the vein growing there into a frenzy, which it passed on to the others. Its other parts, I suppose. It was as though your fire flushed them from their hiding places.” He ran his tongue around his mouth now, to reassure himself that the hideous distortion was truly gone. More disturbingly, he found his face was slimed with spittle. He started to wipe away the sticky foam with the bandage on his left wrist, but his hand was intercepted by Hergi, protecting her work. She gave him a disapproving headshake and wrung out a wet cloth instead. Ingrey swabbed and tried not to think about his father.

  “The tongue is the Bastard’s own sign and signifier upon our bodies,” Hallana mused.

  As forehead for the Daughter, navel for the Mother, genitals for the Father, and heart for the Brother. “The veins, tentacles, whatever they were, of the geas seemed to grow from all of my five theological points.”

  “That ought to mean something. I wonder what? I wonder if there are any manuscripts of Old Weald lore that would illuminate this puzzle? When I get back to Suttleaf, I will search our library, but I’m afraid we’ve mostly medical tracts. The Darthacan Quintarians who conquered us were more interested in destroying the old ways than in chronicling them. It was as if they wished to put the old forest powers out of reach of everyone, even themselves. I’m not sure they were wrong.”

  “When I was in the leopard—when I was the leopard,” said Ijada, “I saw the phantasmal images, too. But then it was all shut away from me again.” A faint regret tinged her tone.

  “I, on the other hand”—the sorceress’s fingers drummed on the closest level surface, which happened to be the top of her stomach—”saw nothing. Except for Lord Ingrey ripping his way out of iron chains that should have held a horse, that is. If that was typical of the strength their spirit animals lent the old warriors, it’s no wonder they were prized.”

  If the old warriors had hurt like this afterward, Ingrey wasn’t so sure their ghost animals would have been as prized as all that. If the forest kin had carried on as he just had… he wanted to ask about the noises he’d made, but was too mortified.

  “If there was anything to see, I should have seen it,” Hallana went on in increasing exasperation. She plunked down on a spare chair. “Dratsab, dratsab. Let us think.” After a moment, she narrowed her eyes at Ingrey. “You say the thing is gone. If we cannot say what it was—can you at least now remember who put it on you?”

  Ingrey leaned forward, rubbing his scratchy eyes. He suspected they were glaringly bloodshot. “I’d better have these boots off.” At Hallana’s gesture, Bernan knelt and assisted; Ingrey’s ankles were indeed swelling and discolored. He stared down at them for a moment more.

  “I did not feel the geas before I first saw Ijada,” he said at last. “For all I know it could have been riding me for days, or months, or years. I thought it was years, at first—I thought it was my wolf, as much as I could think about it at all. If not for Lady Ijada’s testimony, and… and what happened just now, I might still think that. If I had succeeded in slaying her, I would certainly have gone on believing so.”

  Hallana sucked on her lower lip. “Think harder. A compulsion to kill your prisoner was more likely laid on you between the time the news came of Boleso’s death and the time you left Easthome for Boar’s Head. Before then, there was no reason, and after, no time. Whom did you see in that time?”

  Put like that, it was even more disturbing. “Not very many men. I was called to Lord Hetwar’s chambers in the evening. The courier was still there. Hetwar, Hetwar’s secretary of the chamber, Prince Rigild the king’s seneschal, Earl Badgerbank, Wencel kin Horseriver, Lord Alca kin Otterbine, the kin Boarford brothers… We spoke but briefly, as Lord Hetwar gave me the news and my instructions.”

  “Which were?”

  “Retrieve Boleso’s body, transport his killer… “ Ingrey hesitated. “Make his death discreet.”

  “What did that mean?” asked Ijada, sounding genuinely puzzled.

  “Make all evidence of Boleso’s indiscretions vanish.” Including his principal victim?

  “What? But aren’t you an
officer of the king’s justice?” she said indignantly.

  “Strictly speaking, I serve Sealmaster Hetwar.” He added after a cautious moment, “It is Sealmaster Hetwar’s steadfast purpose to serve the closest needs of the Weald and its royal house.”

  Ijada fell silent, dismayed, her brows drawing down.

  The Temple sorceress tapped her lips with one finger. She, at least, did not look shocked. But when she spoke again, her swift thoughts had plainly darted down yet another road. “Nothing of spirit can exist in the world of matter without a being of matter to support it. Spells are sustained by sorcerers through their demons, which are necessary but not sufficient; the demon’s sustenance must come from the sorcerer’s body, ultimately. But your spell was being sustained by you. I suspect… hm. To use your word, Ijada, a parasite magic? The spell was somehow induced in you, and your life maintained it thereafter. If this strange sorcery has any resemblance to my own, it flows most readily, like water, downhill. It does not create, but steals its capabilities from its host.”

  This made a visceral sense to Ingrey, but it was not really something he wanted Lady Ijada to hear of him. All sorts of men had the capacity to kill for the convenience of their betters; though usually, the only spell required could be fitted in a clinking purse. He had ridden guard, ready to draw steel in his lord’s defense, any number of times, and wasn’t that much the same thing?

  Wasn’t it?

  “But… “ Ijada’s lovely lips thinned with thought. “Sealmaster Hetwar must have a hundred swordsmen, soldiers, bravos. A half dozen of his guardsmen rode out with you. The… the person, whoever—might have laid the geas on any of them just as well. Why should the only man in Easthome who is known to bear an animal spirit be sent to me?”

  A flash of expression—insight, satisfaction?—flew across Learned Hallana’s face and vanished. But she did not speak, only sat back more intently, presumably because leaning forward more intently was not feasible. “Is it widely known, your spiritual affliction?” she asked.