The Sacred Hunt Duology (120 page)

• • •

“Master Gilliam,” a voice said softly.

Gilliam looked up into a shadowed light to see the familiar face of a healer. Recognizing him, he relaxed and turned away.

In his arms, Espere stirred. She lifted her head a moment, and strands of matted hair clung to his leathers, wet and sticky where blood had not quite dried. Tensing, he watched her eyelids; they flickered but did not open. He did not know what she felt, could barely guess; she was no longer his. Yet they were not free of each other. If she was not part of his pack, she was part of his responsibility, and he claimed her for Elseth with a sense of quiet, fierce pride.

“Master Gilliam.” The healer, Dantallon, spoke again, his tone strangely gentle. “The Kings are waiting.”

Let them wait
, he thought, but to his surprise, he looked up.

Dantallon's eyes were an unusual color. “Let me take her,” he said softly, gazing down at Espere. “If she'll be safe anywhere—” He stopped, straightened his shoulders, and looked carefully at the man who sat upon the ground cradling an unconscious god-born girl. “I give you my word that I will watch over her.”

Gilliam's arms tightened; he bowed his head a moment, resting dark hair against dark hair, filling his lungs with the scent of sweat and blood and ash. “You'll take care of her?”

“While I have breath,” was the grave reply. Dantallon was not a large man, nor a particularly well-muscled one, but he was strong enough. To be a healer, to take the talent one was born to and temper it, to give everything that one was, and when that failed, still find something left to give—that took a strength that Stephen of Elseth had barely understood, and Gilliam of Elseth had not. Until now.

Quietly, Gilliam gained his feet, balancing Espere's body against his chest and the crook of both arms. Dantallon's sleeves were rolled up and buttoned to the edge of his plain shoulder seams, and his arms were stained with blood. Their hands met a moment as Espere passed from one to the other. Of the two, it was the healer's that was the surer grip. He smiled, his brown eyes ringed with lack of sleep and hollowed with care.

Espere stiffened and raised her head; Gilliam tensed, prepared to take her back should she wake and call. But she did neither; instead, her expression relaxed into something that was almost a smile. Dantallon shifted automatically, juggling her weight so that her head rested beneath the point of his chin.

“We both have our battles to fight,” he told the Hunter Lord. “I envy you your
prowess, Master Gilliam. It is upon your shoulders that the fate of the Empire rides. Do not envy me.”

Oh, the vision of the healer was sharp.

Gilliam stood, feeling a mixture of comfort and, yes, curse him, envy.

“The Kings,” the healer said, turning from him.

Lifting the Spear and girding himself once again with his sword, Gilliam of Elseth called his pack and strode toward the Kings of this foreign land. His leathers were singed, but miraculously whole, and the three burns across the length of his legs had been tended to by Dantallon himself. Gilliam would accept no other's intrusion.

The Hunter Lord returned to the Hunt; it enfolded his vision once again, drew him into its purpose.

Espere would not Hunt further with him this day, and perhaps that was best; after all, what kind of a Lord would force his liege to kill her father?

• • •

The mages had cooled the rock, but the once fine floor now resembled a fallow field after first thaw. The army began to pick its way across the uneven ground, avoiding the wells of unnatural shadow that lingered where the demon had fallen. Of the demon itself, no other trace remained.

The order of march altered as the shadows grew stronger; the Exalted joined the Kings, followed by their priestly attendants. Their braziers now burned bright, and the chanting of the Priests, low and even, filled the halls. This was their battle hymn; there would be no other. The darkness was so pervasive it demanded silence from those that walked toward it.

The landscape changed abruptly; the halls ended, as they had once before. But this time, there was no turning back or turning aside. Earth hemmed them in, tight in places and loose in others; above them, wooden joists, great beams or rock wet with mildew and time.

No normal formations, these.

Meralonne, arm bound tight to his chest, walked the tunnels in quiet thought.

“Meralonne?” Sigurne's voice, soothing in its ordinariness.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the earthen formation above their heads. “Roots. There.”

She nodded. “I noticed. But the tunnel walls, the roof, the ground—none of these have weathered time in any normal fashion. I fear the power that sank the city did not foresee such . . . resistance.”

He shook his head. “No.”

Her plain eyes were almost cutting as she cast a sidelong glance in his direction. “What power sank the city, and when?”

“It was never made clear,” he replied neutrally. “Do you feel it?”

“Yes.” It was as close as Sigurne would come to acknowledging the darkness.
Her eyes sought the earthen roof once more, as she lifted a lamp aloft. “Are we walking on an upward slope?”

“A gradual one.”

They drew closer to air and sky, closer to Averalaan. The thought should have been comforting. “How long?”

“Sigurne, this may surprise you, but Vexusa was not my specialty of study.”

She smiled as smoke eddied up in a slow moving cloud. “Everything is your specialty of study, Meralonne. Give me an educated opinion.”

“Very well, but I won't be found at fault if I prove incorrect.” He paused a moment, lighting dried leaves with a flicker of personal flame. “I would say that we are not fifteen minutes away from the main thoroughfare of the city.”

• • •

Like a falcon loosed to sky in search of earthbound quarry, Kallandras could suddenly see. Imposed upon the rocky twisted wall that was this tunnel's surface, flickering as if it were the fire of a glass lamp in a gale, a vision of the dead came to him. His dead; the brothers that he had left.

“Kallandras?”

They lay stretched and broken in numbers too great to count, heaped like scraps of peel and core—the unwanted portion of a meal. Pressed thickly together by weight, he could discern among these corpses no face, no mark, no uniform.

“Kallandras?”

The vision altered as he searched; he could not hold it long.

• • •

The stretch of Kallandras' mouth, the intensity of his gaze, the way his shoulders curled in told Evayne more than she wanted to know and less than she needed. “Kallandras,” she said for the third time.

“They're in the coliseum.”

She didn't ask who, and as someone—she thought perhaps the ATerafin—began to, she lifted a slender hand, demanding, by gesture, silence.

“We're too late,” he continued, his voice a curious blend of flat monotone and earnest desire. “The prisoners are dead. They've slaughtered them all.”

Her hand rose again, and again questions gave way to silence, albeit annoyed.

“Something's happening to the arch.”

Evayne turned absolutely white.

“The keystone is flickering.” He did not ask her if she remembered either keystone or arch; neither of them had forgotten, nor could. “I think it's going out.” Blinking, Kallandras glanced over his shoulder, surrendering the finding vision to rock and shadow.

Evayne had already turned away. “Your Majesties,” she said, in a voice that carried weight because it also carried fear, “we are almost upon the Cathedral. Follow me now, and
quickly
.”

• • •

The tunnel twisted to the left in a sharp, awkward angle; Evayne did not even pause at the branch to see if the enemy was waiting for them. The time for caution had passed. She moved at great speed and with great silence, unarmed and unarmored as she was; they lost sight of her almost immediately as the darkness began to eat away at the lamps and the torches they held.

But they had enough light to see the walls fall away into blackness on either side; whether they knew it or not, they stepped across a threshold. Above, there was darkness, and at their feet, shadows; they knew that they were no longer in the tunnels because their voices carried higher and farther.

The Exalted paled and began their chant, but Evayne waved them to silence. Pulling her hood from her face, she turned to the Kings, back to the darkness, arms raised high as if in supplication. “So that you will see and remember,” she said, “
Father!
” Her cloak roiled at her feet as if her body itself were changing in shape as Espere's had done. From out of the folds of a midnight-blue so dark it seemed black, the seer's crystal rose.

Cascading down from the heights of a cavern that seemed—that
was
—too vast to be natural, came sparks of angry orange light. They traced a path in air, burning it into the vision not as a band of green afterlight, but rather as a swath of color. Like the brush of a crazed painter, these bands of light grew, ribbon by ribbon, until the whole of the cavern was revealed.

The dusty ruins of old stone buildings lined rubble-strewn streets. Brass railings and verandahs that looked down with suspicious ease on the grounds below were still intact. Doors, where doors might have once been, had long since rotted away; shutters were nowhere in evidence. But here and there, bottom-heavy glass work had not been shattered by the city's descent.

And the city must have descended with speed and a terrible force. At the edges of the tunnels, halves of buildings stood, their rotted, snapped joists revealed as if a dull sword had cut from roof to basement in one stroke.

• • •

“My Lord, they are in the city.”

Sor na Shannen's glassy eyes took in the keystone's flickering light as if by doing so she could drain the last of it into her private darkness.

“Lord Isladar, should we—”

“No. Stand ready. He is almost nigh.”

• • •

“What brought this here?” King Cormalyn's hushed voice.

Evayne pointed. At the center of the city, darkness lay like a formless cloud. But it rose almost to the cavern's height, and it was wide and long.

The King nodded to the seeress; at his back, his men began to form up. Where light could not go, they would. The air was heavy with things unspoken.

“Now is the time,” she told them, seeing their apprehension and their determination. “Kings, Exalted, Sacred; Members of the Order of the profound; Astari, Defenders, and Priests—to the heart of a history that you could not have made, I have brought you.

“The darkness rises; beneath the shadows that light cannot pierce, the citadel is waking.
Allasakar
takes the last steps upon his path to this world. Let us meet him, as Moorelas met him; let us tender no less an answer.”

There was silence, and then from the men of the North—and there were few—the sound of sword against shield. Tentative at first, it grew louder and surer, and the cavern caught its tumult and echoed it. Then a single voice joined it, raised in a rough and uneven bass. King Reymalyn was singing “
Morel's Final Rider
.”

As if his unaccompanied chorus was a command and an invitation, others began to join him, searching memory for the words that most had not sung since they were very young. The song that had eluded them in their march through the tunnels finally gave them strength now.

“Lord Elseth,” Evayne said, grave but loud, “the time has come. It is the first of Veral. The sun is breaking across the horizon in Breodanir.” She lifted her crystal high enough that he might see it; it looked for a moment as if the sun had been cupped in her hands. “Call the Hunt, Hunter Lord, and join it.”

Gilliam took the simple, unadorned Horn in his large hands and raised it, shaking, to his lips. He had come this far for only this reason: to Hunt the Hunter God, and have peace. But here, at the very threshold of an ancient, nigh forgotten city, his lungs faltered; he could not draw breath.

• • •

Isladar raised his head from the position of supplication to stare, not at the keystone, but at the darkness itself. To either side, the tentacles that had form and substance began to uproot themselves, taking great clods of dirt and flesh as they rose.

The shadows were omnipresent, but the darkness was not yet complete. With a mere gesture, Isladar doused the pathetic human lamps and plunged the coliseum into night. If the Allasakari objected, they did not give their anger voice—and in that, they were much like the kin in the face of their Lord.

The keystone was so pale it was almost simple stone. It flickered once, twice. Almost. Almost.

• • •

Was it fear?

Evayne watched his face as he pulled the Horn back to study it. “Lord Elseth?”

To his shame, his hands shook. Could it be that he was
afraid
to test his skill against the Lord of the Hunt—the very God who had given the trance, the bond and the hunting art to the Breodani? Angry, he gripped the shaft of the Spear and brought it down upon the ground in time to the beating of the shields.

Lifting the Hunter's Horn, he drew breath as if it were blood. And half a continent away, at exactly that time, on exactly that signal, the King of the Breodani stood at the edge of the Sacred Forest, surrounded by the sound of the beating drums, the heightened awareness of breath and heartbeat filling his ears, the smell of his chosen quarry coming from eight different noses, the drive to be gone, be running, be
hunting
not quite driving away the sure and certain knowledge that by the end of this day one of his valued Hunters would lie dead at the hands of the Hunter.

The King of the Breodani lifted his intricate, ancient horn to lips as Lord Elseth—the lone Hunter Lord in the King's lifetime to miss the call at the edge of the Sacred Forest—tipped smooth bone upward.