The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER FIVE

IJADA'S LAUGHTER WAS ABRUPTLY EXTINGUISHED. INGREY QUIETLY rose and sent the warden out for the meal that he had been diverted from ordering, increasing the servings. This also removed her interested ear from the proceedings. She looked disappointed, but dared not disobey.

He was alert for discrepancies, but the tale Ijada told Learned Hallana was much the same as what she had-finally-told Ingrey, though this time all in order with nothing left out. Except that she revealed much more to Hallana of her suffocating fears. Hallana's expression grew so intent as to be stony during Ijada's account of her leopard dreams. Ijada brought her story up to her nearly disastrous fall at the ford, yesterday, and hesitated, glancing across at Ingrey. “I think the next part should be Lord Ingrey's to tell.”

Ingrey jerked in his seat, flushing. For an instant it almost seemed like the red fog returning, and his hand spasmed on the edge of the sill on which he sat. He became uncomfortably aware that he had grown careless again, on some dim assumption that the sorceress could protect both herself and Ijada. But sorcerers were not proof against steel, not once it closed on them. He'd allowed himself to be alone with the women while still armed. And now his direst secrets were challenged…

He blurted, “I tried to drown her. I've tried three other times to kill her, that I know of. I swear it is not my desire. She thinks it is some spell or geas.”

The sorceress pursed her lips and vented a long, thoughtful stream of breath. Then she sat back and closed her eyes, her face growing very still. When she opened them again, her expression was enigmatic.

“No sorcerer has currently bespelled you. You bear no sustaining link-no spirit-threads wind to or from you. No elemental from the fifth god lies within your soul. But something else does. It seems very dark.”

He looked away. “I know. It is my wolf.”

“If that's a wolf's soul, I'm the queen of Darthaca.” “It always was a strange wolf. But it is bound!”

“I don't know if I am…safe.”

Her brows twitched up; she looked him over, and he grew acutely conscious of his road stains and brigand's beard stubble. “I think I shall not argue with that. Ijada, what do you see in him?”

“I don't see anything,” she replied unhappily. “It is as though the leopard smells him, and I overhear…oversmell? Howsoever, I am lent these unfamiliar sensations. There's the dark wolf-thing you see-at least, it smells dark, like old leaf mold and campfire ashes and forest shadows-and a third thing. Whispering around him like a rumor. It has a most strange perfume. Acrid.”

Hallana tilted her head back and forth. “I see his soul, with my soul's eye. I see the dark thing. I do not see or hear the third thing. It is not of the Bastard in any way, not lent from the world of spirit that the gods rule. Yet-his soul has strange convolutions. A clear glass that one cannot see with the eyes, one might still touch with the fingers. I must risk a deeper touch.”

“Don't!” said Ingrey, panicked.

“Lady, ought you…?” murmured the maid, her face crimped with alarm. “Now?”

Hallana's lips moved on what might have been, Dratsab, dratsab, dratsab. “Let us think.”

A knock sounded at the door; the warden had returned, flanked by some inn servants with trays and the man Hallana had called Bernan, who lugged a large chest. He was a wiry, middle-aged fellow with an alert eye; his green-leather jerkin was spattered with old burn spots, like a smith's. He inhaled with deep appreciation as the trays were borne past him. The delectable odors of vinegared beef and onions seeping from under the crockery covers forcibly reminded Ingrey that he was both ravenous and exhausted.

Hallana brightened. “Better still, let us eat, then think.” The inn servants set the table in the little parlor, but after that the sorceress sent them away, saying she preferred to be served by her own folk. She whispered aside to Ingrey, “Actually, I make such a mess, just now, I don't dare eat in public.” Ingrey, warily circumspect, sent the warden downstairs to eat in the common room and tarry there until called for. She cast a curious look back as she reluctantly withdrew.

Hergi whipped a napkin the size of a tablecloth around her mistress and helped her to her food, deftly catching tilting glasses, skidding jugs, and sliding stew, often before they spilled, but sometimes not. “Drink up your wine,” the sorceress recommended. “It will go sour in half an hour. I should take myself off before the innkeeper discovers the trouble with his beer. Well, his store of fleas, lice, and bedbugs will not survive me, either, so I hope it is a fair exchange. If I linger, I may have to start in on the mice, poor things.”

Lady Ijada seemed as famished as Ingrey, and the conversation waned for a time. Hallana reopened it with a blunt inquiry of the origin of Ingrey's wolf-affliction. His stomach knotted despite his hunger, but he mumbled through an explanation rather fuller than he had yet confided to Ijada, as well as he could remember the confusing old events. Both women listened raptly. Ingrey was uneasily aware that Bernan, who had taken his plate to a seat on his wooden chest, and Hergi, who snitched bites standing between mopping up after her mistress, were listening, too. But a Temple sorceress's servants must surely be among the most discreet.

“Had your father had a previous interest in the animal magic of our Old Wealding forebears?” Hallana inquired, when he had finished describing the rite.

“Why attempt such a thing then?” said Ijada.

Ingrey shrugged. “All who knew died or fled. There were none left to tell by the time I recovered enough to ask.” His mind shrank from the fragmented memories of those dark, bewildered weeks. Some things were better forgotten.

Hallana chewed, swallowed, and asked, “How came you to learn to bind your wolf?”

Things like that, for example. Ingrey rubbed his tense neck, without relief. “Audar's ancient law, that those defiled by animal ghosts should be burned alive, had not been carried out within living memory at Birchbeck. Our local divine, who had known me all my life, was anxious that it not be invoked. As it turned out, the Temple inquirer sent to examine the case ruled that since the crime was not of my making, but imposed upon me by persons whose authority I was bound to obey, it would be tantamount to cutting off a man's hand for being robbed. So I was formally pardoned, my life spared.”

Ijada looked up with keen attention at the news of this precedent, her lips parting as if to speak, but then just shook her head.

Ingrey gave her an acknowledging nod, and continued, “Still I could not be left to wander freely. Sometimes I was lucid, you see, but sometimes…I could not well remember the other times. So our divine set about trying to cure me.”

“How?” asked the sorceress.

“Prayer first, of course. Then rituals, what old ones he could find. Some I think he made up new out of bits. None worked. Then he tried exhortations, lectures and sermons, he and his acolytes taking turns for days together. That was the most wearisome part. Then we tried to drive it out by force.”

“We?” Hallana cocked an eyebrow. “It was not…not done against my will. I was desperate by then.”

“We tried everything we could think of that wouldn't outright cripple me. Starvation, beatings, fire and threats of fire, water. It did not drive out the wolf, but at least I learned to gain ascendance, and my periods of confusion grew shorter.”

“Under those conditions, I should imagine you learned rather quickly.”

He glanced up defensively at her dry tone. “It was clearly working. Anyway, better to be shoved under the Birchbeck till my lungs burst than listen to more sermons all day and night. Our divine held everyone steadfast through the task, though it was hard. It was the last thing he could do for my father, whom he felt he had failed.”

Ingrey took a swallow of wine. “After some months, I was pronounced well enough to be let out. Castle Birchgrove had been settled on my uncle by then. I was sent on pilgrimage, in hopes of finding some more permanent cure. I was glad enough to go; though as hope failed, and I grew to man size and shed my keepers, my search turned into mere wanderings. When I ran out of money, I'd take what odd tasks came to hand.” Anything had seemed better than turning his steps toward home. And then…one day, it hadn't, anymore.

“I met Lord Hetwar when he was on an embassy to the king of Darthaca.” His desperate contrivances to win access to the sealmaster, he didn't think worth recounting. “He was curious how a Wealding kinsman should be serving strangers so far from home, so I told him my tale. He was not daunted by my wolf and gave me a place in his guard that I might work my way back to my own country. I made myself useful during some incidents on the road, and he was pleased to make my place permanent. I rose in his household thereafter.” Ingrey's mouth firmed in tight pride. “By my merits.”

He applied himself to his spiced meat, sopping up the last of its gingery gravy with the inn's good bread. Ijada had stopped eating a little while ago and sat solemn with thought, running her finger around the rim of her empty wine beaker. When she looked up and caught his eye, she managed a wan smile. Hallana waved away her maid's attempt to feed her a second apple tart, and Hergi rolled up the stained napkin and bundled it away.

“Yes,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Do you have any idea who laid this bridle on you?”

“No. It's hard to think about it. It almost bothers me more that I cannot feel it, between fits. I begin to mistrust everything in my mind. As if straining to see the insides of my own eyeballs.” He hesitated, marshaled his nerve. “Can you take it off me, Learned?”

She huffed uncertainly, while the manservant, behind her, made an urgent negative gesture to Ingrey, and Hergi squeaked protest.

“The one thing I might safely do right now,” said Hallana, “is add to the disorder in your spirit. Whether this would break or disrupt the hold of this strange thing Ijada smells upon you, I do not know. I dare attempt nothing more complex. If I were not pregnant, I might try-well, never mind. Yes, yes, I see you, Bernan, please refrain from bursting,” she added to the agitated manservant. “If I do not vent disorder into Lord Ingrey, here, I shall just have to kill some mice, and I like mice.”

Ingrey rubbed his tired face. “I am willing to have you try, but…fetter me, first.”

Her brows climbed. “You think it necessary?”

“Prudent.”

The sorceress's servants, at least, seemed greatly in favor of prudence in any form. While Ingrey laid his sword and belt knife against the wall by the door, Bernan opened what proved to be a well-stocked toolbox and rummaged within, producing a couple of lengths of sturdy chain. In consultation with Ingrey, he fitted loops tightly around Ingrey's booted ankles, and secured them with an iron staple and hasp. Ingrey crossed his hands at the wrists and suffered a similar arrangement there, then tested both bindings, twisting and straining. They seemed solid enough. Then he sat on the floor with his back to the window seat and had Bernan bolt the wrist chains to the ankle chains. He felt an utter fool, sitting crouched with his knees up halfway to his ears. His audience looked extremely bemused, but no one demurred.

The sense of heat flowing from her touch was pleasant for the first few seconds, and he leaned into her hand. But then it grew uncomfortably warm. A disturbing haze clouded his vision. Abruptly, the heat was roaring like a smithy's furnace across his mind, and he was seeing double. The second image parted from the first: twisted, altered.

The room was still present to his physical senses. But equally present was another 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.

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.

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!”

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.

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 not 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?”

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.

“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.

“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.

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.”

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.

Ingrey shrugged. “It is general gossip, yes. Variously garbled. My reputation is useful to Hetwar. I'm not someone most men want to cross.” Or have around them for very long, or invite to their tables, or, above all, introduce to their female kin. But I'm well accustomed to that, by now. Ijada's eyes widened. “You were chosen because your wolf could be blamed! Hetwar chose you. Therefore, he must be the source of the geas!”

Two extremely unpleasant realizations crept over Ingrey. One was that he was still bearing Lady Ijada toward her potential death. Her drowning in the river yesterday could have been no worse than some later poisoning or strangling in her cell, and a hundred times more merciful than the horrors of a dubious trial and subsequent hanging.

And the other was that an enemy of great and secret power was going to be seriously upset when they both arrived at Easthome alive.