The Sacred Hunt Duology (92 page)

“What were you before you became a bard?”

Kallandras said nothing at all, and Stephen let the question die into stillness and silence. He had the sudden feeling that to tell Kallandras that he, before his service to Elseth, had been a thief would neither impress nor distress the bard; they had pasts which did not connect or touch, and never would.

But Kallandras surprised him. “I was happy,” he said softly, “learning what it is to be . . . a soldier.” He looked at Stephen, his face hidden by darkness. “Were you happy before she came to you?”

“I don't know.” It surprised him, to say that. “I think so. I was young then.”

“And do you know what she wants of you? Do you finally know what it is that she will cost you?” The words were sharp and intent—used in a way that only a man trained to words could use them.

They demanded a truth that Stephen did not wish to—was not yet able to—part with. But he could not turn away from the bard either; he was compelled to speak, although whether it was Kallandras' desire or his own, he could not say. “Why does she do what she does?” he asked softly. “Why is she young today, and old tomorrow; foolish at one moment and wiser than anyone I've ever met the next?”

“She is trying to prevent the world's end,” Kallandras said, as if he were seeing into the future that Evayne was trying to prevent. “And you and I are pawns to that game.” He turned and walked a bit, surveying the street and listening as if he were testing the wind for the slightest carried sound. Lifted a hand a moment, and then nodded Stephen forward.

“But I have seen the Darkness, I understand the desperation, and one day, I think I will no longer hate her.”

“You hate her?”

Kallandras' smile was bitter. “Stephen, she took me from everything that I had ever been and ever loved, and then forced me to continue to use it. There is no way for me to go home; those who loved me once hate me now, and with just cause.

“And you—do you not feel anger? Resentment? I'm curious, you see. She does not come to many, and of those, you are the only one I know at present.”

But Stephen shook his head softly, seeing the past and the present as things that were lost to him, and seeing the future as a darkness without end.

“I heard you,” Kallandras said quietly. “In the courtyard.”

Stephen nodded.

• • •

Meralonne APhaniel himself came down to the desk to greet Stephen and Kallandras. Of course, he had no choice; the hour was poor and the guards on duty would not see fit to release the two visitors until a member of the council had deemed them safe. The huge foyer of the Order of Knowledge showed starlight through the canopy of glass, filtering its color without losing its flickering brilliance. It was only upon seeing this that Stephen realized that the glass was not glass, but some form of magery. He was not surprised, but he felt a tickle of awe and wonder as he stared at the night sky.

“Gentlemen,” Meralonne greeted them softly, seeing the two who waited. He bowed, and the bow was an unusual one; he bent one knee, although he did not fall to the floor, and his back remained straight, but his neck was bent.

Kallandras raised a brow, and Meralonne stepped smoothly out of the bow. “It is late,” he said softly, “and dark enough. Come. Let us repair to my study.”

• • •

“Why have you come?” Meralonne asked, breaking the uneasy stillness that had settled in the room only after he had picked up his pipe and made certain it was well lit with burning leaves. He did not sit, which was not unusual, but he stood with his back to the open window, staring into the room's center.

“I've come,” Stephen said quietly, “to return to you a book which you dropped.”

The mage nodded, his gaze unblinking and eerily like starlight—flickering with light in an endless darkness. “I see. And?”

“You meant for me to read this.”

“Did I, young Stephen of Elseth?” Smoke rose to the ceiling in a thinning cloud. “And did you understand what you read?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“And no.” He walked to the mage's desk and gently placed the book, cover down, upon its wide, flat surface. It was odd, that the desk was so uncluttered; he couldn't remember if it had been so the last time he had been shown to this tower room. Or perhaps all was becoming uncluttered and unfettered; the illusions were falling away, and the truth, terrible and simple, was all that remained. A window was open somewhere, although he could not see it; the smell of the salt-laden winds, cool now with night, mingled with the scent of burning leaves.

“You have come to me for explanation.”

“Yes.”

“And I have precious little to give you. The book that you hold was a book written just before, or perhaps just after, the last ride of Moorelas, called Morrel, or Moorel in lands west of these. Very few such tomes survive, and we are not able to authenticate most of them; this is a rare exception. It was written—or so I believe—in the time of Moorelas and his fellowship.”

“Fellowship?” Any question. Any way of avoiding the answer that was fast becoming the only answer.

“The Sleepers, Stephen,” Kallandras replied.

Stephen was quiet as he tried to remember all of the stories that surrounded Moorelas. They seemed to change from region to region, as if each country, even each dale, remembered best the events that marked his coming to that locale. At last, he shrugged.

“But who—what—are they?”

“They are the renegade princes of the First-born,” was Meralonne's cool reply.

“They are,” Kallandras said softly, “the heroes of a very different age.”

“Perhaps they are both; Moorelas was many things to many people.” The mage blew rings into the air and watched them rise and fade. “But they are not the subject of this evening's discourse. Stephen, the answers that you wish, I cannot give you. But what I can tell you, I will.

“The wild girl is the daughter of the Hunter God—the first proof, after decades of study and more, that the Hunter God is, indeed, a God. There is a second proof, but for that, I must delve a moment into a history that most—that even Senniel College—remember only in lay and children's game.

“Because in some measure, Kallandras is correct; there was a different demeanor to the earlier ages. There was the Wild Age, and then the Age of The Powers; there was the Age of Gods—and it is of the Gods that you must ask, for the Gods were, in some manner that we cannot understand, fashioned by men and the dreams of men, even as they fashioned them.

“There were wars,” he continued, staring into the rings of smoke blown parallel to his face, “and dead without number. It was thought that the race of man would perish under the weight of their devastation, for where a God walked the land,
nothing
was impossible.” He reached for a small bowl and began to tap the ashes from the pipe into it. “But humanity survived, greater and lesser in number, and they served the Gods.

“The God that is written of in the book that you possess—he was Bredan, of the Covenant. We know that he sanctified sworn oaths, and made of the breaking of them a fitting and unpleasant death. But we also know, through oblique references, that his powers affected man and God alike, although few indeed were the oathsworn Gods.

“Very little else survives about Bredan. When the Teos-born questioned their
Lord, they discovered only that Bredan was no longer within the Heavens; more than that they could not learn, for the God did not possess the knowledge that we sought. Yet Teos assured us that in the Heavens there was no Hunter God—nor had there ever been.”

Teos-born.
The word, said so casually, brought back the striking and singular image of Zoraban, calling upon his father in the half-world. Stephen stared into the pale darkness, seeing the very God.

“Nothing is learned in vain. When you came to me, you said that the succubus called you Oathbound. You said also that the wild one was Hunter-born. What can we then assume? Either that you have somehow met both the Hunter God—whom you worship—and the Oathbinder, whom you had never heard of, which is unlikely; or that the Hunter God
is
Bredan. And that he is no longer in the Heavens.”

Stephen was silent as he absorbed what Meralonne said. His words filled the room as if he were the Bell of Truth and Stephen had struck him thrice—and yet somehow, Stephen felt that he was not telling all that he knew. But he had said enough. “In Breodanir, we speak of the coming of the Hunter,” he said softly, in a room lit only by the glow of a new-lit pipe and the embers of an old fire. “He was our Lord, and we His people. It was a dry and cold winter, and a dry and hot summer; the Breodani had wandered the lands, searching them for food. The old died, and the young; the weak fell, and the strong became weak. We were starving. At the last, the sons of the Hunter gathered, and together, joining, made a plea that our Lord could hear in the Heavens.” Stephen's face was like the desert as he spoke words which this evening had changed the meaning of forever. “We were His people, and He our Lord, and we had served Him in all ways faithfully, where all others had disappointed Him.

“He came to us in our need, and taught us the lesson of the hunt, and when He had taught us all we needed to know, He granted us Hunter Lords, like unto Himself, and bade them return to their people to feed them and succor them. To them, He granted also the Bredari, the first of the hounds; to them, He showed the ways of the land and the creatures that inhabited them.

“In return for this gift, there was a price: that once a year, we who were the most cunning of His creations would become, as any, hunted; that we would know the effect of our power upon the lesser of His creatures. And every year, at the appointed time, one of our number has faced the Hunter's death. None have ever survived it.” He closed his eyes as he spoke and sank further into the chair, allowing the arms and back to shore him up in their wooden embrace.

“Stephen,” Meralonne said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle in the darkened room, “you swore an oath, and you are bound to it with your life. Yet when I called you oathbound, you were surprised. Do you even know what that oath was?”

“Oh, yes,” Stephen said, bitterly and quietly. “There are only two meaningful oaths that I have ever sworn. One, to a woman of my choice, but never, because of
our situations, of my choosing.” He stopped speaking then; it was hard to tell if his cheeks were pinkened by the declaration.

But Meralonne spoke; softly, softly. “There are secrets this room has heard that it will never release; they are hidden, as even Vexusa cannot be. If you will, I would hear the other oath.”

“There is no secret in that,” was Stephen's strained reply. “It was spoken, with the Hunter Lords of Breodanir as my witnesses, when I was eight years old.” He continued, his voice trembling with anger and fear, “I swore that I would hunt, as my Lord will hunt, without use of his gift. That I would be the bridge between this son of the Hunter and the people whom he must succor.” His eyes grew opaque as he stared into a young boy's past, understanding clearly all the fear of his youth. He had
known
, somehow, the truth of the words, when no one else had understood them. The Hunter's Death had always shadowed his life. But the words were impossible to say softly; they had formed him, and informed him; they were the foundation upon which—until this evening—he had stood with pride. “To guard him and protect him and see all dangers by his side; to face the Hunter's Law so that we may remain strong. To remind the Hunter, always, of the people he must defend.”

“It sounds . . . innocuous.”

Stephen shook his head as he raised it. “Yes,” he said. “It does. Because I don't think that we—the Breodani—understand it any better than I did when I said it. For I must face the Hunter's Law, called also the Hunter's Price—the Hunter's Death—
so that we may remain strong.
”

“You all face that,” was the quiet reply.

“Yes. But . . . but I believe that it is the huntbrother, and not the Hunter, who is meant to die in the Sacred Hunt.” Norn's face, ashen and empty, returned to him, as it often did, death already writ large across it, although he was still walking among the living, and would for some months.
It should have been me
, he had said, and Stephen had never forgotten the anguished guilt that he heard there. And now he understood, fully, that it was more than guilt that spoke—it was an absolute understanding, after too long a time, of a sanctified oath.

“Why do you believe this?” Meralonne pressed him.

“Because,” Stephen answered, raising his face to meet the silver gaze of the man across the darkened room, “after the Sacred Hunt, if the Hunter Lord has died, the huntbrother follows months later. They linger in loneliness and guilt, and then they pass away.”

“Does this always happen?”

“Not always,” Stephen continued. “But not all oaths sworn to the God are sanctified.” He made to reach for the book, but Meralonne waved him back. “I am not guessing, Meralonne. I
know
it.”

“And yours?”

“I told Gil that I would face the Hunter's Death for him. After I had made my vows. After I swore, as the Priests would have me swear. I—I added that vow of my own. Because I felt, at eight, that it was the truth. It
was
the truth,” he added, his voice low. “And I knew it because I felt it, here.

“Corinna, the village wisewoman, spoke with me years later about it. She remembered it because Norn had, during
his
first vows, said almost word for word the same thing. It's not so uncommon among the young huntbrothers—especially the good ones. The villagers were so pleased with Soredon's choice of a huntbrother for their young Master Gilliam, because it's believed that a show of loyalty that spontaneous must come from the Hunter Himself.”