The Sacred Hunt Duology (121 page)

As one man, as one spirit, they called the Sacred Hunt, winding the Horn in its dance of three notes.

• • •

In the ancient city of Vexusa, in the heartland of his greatest enemy, the Hunter Lord answered.

And in the center of a Cathedral lost to shadow and magic, before the waiting eyes of demon-kin who stood at rigid, silent attention, the darkness finally became
perfect
.

I
T WAS NOT THE
Hunter's Death, but the Hunter, who came to the call of the Horn. Limned in light, wrapped in robes that no human hands had ever touched, Bredan, Lord of the Covenant, stepped into the streets of the undercity. He seemed at first a ghost, some remnant of a forgotten, long-dead man—but he walked, gaining form as his bare feet traversed the cracked and rubble-strewn ground.

Gilliam felt his chest constrict; words, always a weakness, deserted him. Sinking to one knee, he clutched the Spear as if it were an anchor. The anger and the pain that Stephen's death had left him had been nursed into a cold and bitter thing; he had thought it could grow no worse. He was wrong.

For as the God took final form, his hair was fair, his features fine; he was neither short nor tall, neither broad of chest, nor stripling boy. If a God could be said to be any age, then he was a young man, near his prime. Were it not for the color of his eyes, he might have been Stephen.

Until Evayne gripped his shoulder, Gilliam didn't realize that he'd brought the Spear to bear. “Lord Elseth,” she said softly, “peace.” But the hands that rested upon his shoulder were as sharp and tight as the words she spoke. He looked up to see her face; it was turned toward the God, lips pressed white and thin.

Together they waited in silence; they did not wait long. As the God neared the body of the army, he began to move quickly and surely toward his single follower: Gilliam of Elseth. He ran as Stephen ran, with the same gait, the same rhythm of running step, the same awkward flap of arms. His expression melted into a pained exhaustion, just as Stephen's would have done at the end of the exertion of the Hunt. He wore a slender, unadorned scabbard across his back—for running, this, and not for some fancy Lady's ball—and at his hip, glinting with unnatural light, a horn.

It was too much.

In anger, in outrage, Gilliam of Elseth gained his feet. At his side, Ashfel, growling; to his left, Salas and Connel.

“Lord Elseth,” Evayne said again, her face as pale as his was flushed, “now is not the time to use the Spear.”

No. He knew it well—this was no Hunt, this steady, fleet race
to
the Hunter. But his arms ached with the visceral need to heave the Spear across the vanishing distance and have done.

As if that thought were loud enough to hear, the God stopped fifteen feet away and let his arms fall to his sides. “Gil?”

He spoke with Stephen's voice.

Stunned, Gilliam offered silence as a reply.

“I told him this was a bad idea. I told him you'd think it was an insult. Did he listen?” Snort. “I can understand why he's called the
Hunter
God.”

“Stephen?”
Fifteen feet disappeared in seconds.

• • •

Ashfel was uncomfortable; Stephen didn't smell like Stephen, even if everything else but the eyes was right. The anxious dog grabbed the back of Gilliam's cape between a generous set of teeth and pulled, hard. Gilliam snarled, but would not let go.

“Gil,” Stephen said—for it was Stephen, it
had
to be Stephen—“I'm not—I'm not alive.”

He knew it, of course; knew it because there was no bond—except for this physical embrace that he had forged—between them. But if he could not feel what his brother was feeling, he could hear it in his words, and the words, the sound of his disparagement, were sweet as any Hunter's call.

“But He—Bredan—told me I should speak with you.”

“Where are you?”

Stephen's laugh was shaky. “I don't know. Not here. Not there. I—I don't like it much.”

“I'll get you out.”

“I'm not the important one,” Stephen said, although the intensity of his relief belied that. “I was the last one taken; I still have some . . . solidity.” He turned, then, to face the darkness. “
He's
stepped across, Gil—but he came too quickly—you forced him. Bredan asks your leave to Hunt once more before—before you do.”

“My leave?” Gilliam's tone was bitter.

Stephen reached forward, forming a knot of his hands between Gilliam's shoulder blades. Then he shook his Hunter soundly. “This isn't about your loss—or mine—Hunter Lord,” he said, his voice a mix of emotions. “This is about the fate of man. If Bredan doesn't kill the Avatar of the Darkness—”

“I know,” Gilliam said, the words a low growl. His grip tightened; he held fast for five seconds, counting each one slowly and deliberately. And then he let go; he was Lord Elseth of the Breodani; he had called the Sacred Hunt; he was prepared to die so that Breodanir might continue. “Stephen, I—”

“I know.” The huntbrother smiled, and then the smile vanished. “He doesn't
have much power,” he told his Hunter gravely. “The fight with the enemy will drain it all—and more.”

“What does it—”

“It means that all that'll be left is the Hunter's Death. The beast, and not the Oathtaker.” He paused. “That's when the Hunt starts. But, Gil—He says that it will be as if the Hunt hasn't been called in years.”

Gilliam blanched and then nodded stiffly.

“We—He—” Stephen shook his head. “In Mandaros' Hall,” he said.

“Swear it.”

“I swear it.” A crackle of blue light laced the air as the God behind Stephen's eyes witnessed—and accepted—the oath. Time did not allow for any other words, any other regrets or arguments.

As Stephen turned away and began to run toward the darkness, his body lost shape and substance, dissolving into an ethereal, moving mist, and resolving—in the distance a burst of great speed made—into a great, pale beast, a thing of light. That beast lifted its head and, opening its mighty jaws, roared its challenge to the cavern's lofty heights.

Lifting Horn to lips, Gilliam blew a long, loud note in response. A call to arms. It was the only signal that the army of the Kings needed. As one man, they surged into the streets, following the trail that the Hunter God had cut into the ground by his passage.

“Lord Elseth, what did he mean?” Meralonne APhaniel seemed to appear out of thin air, much as the God had done.

“He meant,” Evayne said, choosing to answer for Gilliam, just as Stephen might have, “that the Hunter's Death will kill anything in sight until its need is satiated.”

The silver eyes of the mage narrowed into a dagger's edge as he met the stony gaze of his former pupil. For they both knew that only one sworn to the Hunter could satiate that hunger. But all he said was, “Hunt well, Lord Elseth.”

• • •

In perfect darkness, the subtle senses came into play.

A moment, and the eyes were forgotten; another, and the fear of the loss of vision was eclipsed by the quiet wonder of true night. Listen, and one could hear the sound of breath being drawn, or more significant, the lack of it; then, as the hearing made its adjustment, the sound of nails scratching palms, the rustle of hair, the licking of lips rough with dryness.

But there was more.

Without the intrusion of sight, the smell of blood, of ruptured skin, of human corpses newly made—these became stronger, fuller; laid beneath, the musky odor of human sweat, the scent of dirt, of stone, of rotting damp wood. Even the fabric with which the living and the dead were clothed had a distinct aroma.

Isladar stood, listening; he held himself perfectly, rigidly still, withdrawing from the world that he studied.

There—the sound of chitin scudding gently across the dirt. At its side, the twist of scales, and the pad of soft feet. Perhaps the click of hooves. The air began to turn and move; in minutes a wind with no natural beginning circled the coliseum in a magically contained gale. The other sounds were lost to the storm; Isladar sighed, giving himself over to the movement, the things of the flesh. The Lord was taking form. And what that form would be, no one could predict; the ways and the anchors of the world were strangely changed since the Covenant of the Meddler.

The Lord of the Covenant. He bared his teeth in contempt; that one had no subtlety, no true understanding of the ways of power. Direct, he was foolish; no other Gods would trap themselves so thoroughly on a plane not in their control. The Lord of Wisdom was a more interesting enemy, but even he was not of interest to Isladar. No.

Will you show your hand here?
he thought, as he waited.
Will you, nameless one? Come then. The Covenant was witnessed by your lackey, but it was not his creation and not to his purpose. Do you think I do not understand the target of your maneuvering? You have waited long; here at last is my Lord's opening move.

• • •

The shining beast reached the clouds of darkness first, but instead of disappearing into the beads of black mist, he drove them back as if they were alive and they could not bear his touch. He cut a path through the shadows that the army could follow, a wall of normal seeming, a curtain of light to either side of the magnificent, smooth streets. Into the heart of darkness he ran, and when at last the shadows were unraveled, the army stood mere yards away from the building upon which Vexusa had been founded: The Cathedral of Allasakar. There were no outer walls to protect it, no gates, no guards; in Vexusa, the arrogance of the Dark League had been exceeded only by its power.

Pausing at the foot of the black marble steps that reached into the depths of the Cathedral, the great beast shook its hoary head and roared.

A man in dark robes appeared at the top of those stairs, standing beneath the first of the five recessed arches that formed the complicated doors' architrave. In the shadows to his left and right stood two tall creatures that in poorer light might have been mistaken for gargoyles. As if aware of that, they flexed long, thin wings that stretched from triple-jointed claws to delicate, three-toed feet. Their eyes were an unblinking brown, their faces pointed, their ears very large for their faces; if not for the fact that they stood eight feet tall, they might have been deformed bats.

But when they opened their mouths, teeth glinted across the distance, and when they exhaled it was clear that their very breath was the darkness.

The man laughed; his voice, laid above the hiss of the demons to either side, was undeniably a human voice, even if one heavy with Allasakar's touch. “You are too late,” he said. “Our Lord has come.” He raised an ebon staff in the light, and called darkness, icy and chill. “Prepare, sacrists. Prepare, exultants. Allasakar—” The rest of the sentence was lost with his throat as the muscled hind legs of the beast coiled and then sprang, propelling him up the stairs in a single, powerful leap.

The demon-kin to either side leaped up and away, but they were not fast enough to avoid the shining glory of a forgotten God. Shreds of their wings and limbs fell to ground as the beast, unopposed, raced into the long hall that wound itself through this monument to Allasakar's fallen glory.

All this, the Kings took in as they reached the foot of the grand stairs that formed a graded semicircle. The Exalted girded at last for war; the braziers that had burned by chant and dint of magical grace in the winding tunnels of the maze to the undercity were now lit in earnest. No breeze or gale or mage-cast shadow would dim these lamps; nothing but the touch of the god-born or the God. And of the Lord of the Hells, there was no human-born offspring; it was well known that the very taint of the darkness was death, and if there were women who survived the start of such an engendering, there were none in all of history who had survived the term of the pregnancy to bear living offspring.

Many of the soldiers said a prayer—and many of those prayers were rusty with disuse, but all the more fervently said for it. Those who had not yet tied their sword knots did so now, taking care to knot the cords tight enough that sweat—or worse—couldn't loosen them on either wrist or haft. They hadn't chosen the field of battle, but they knew it for what it was when they saw it; this was their last chance to prepare.

The Astari stood guard over the Kings. They did not move, or speak, or pray; the time for these things had passed before the monument—the cenotaph—of Moorelas had been opened to them.

All of these things and more Kallandras saw as he stood at the foot of the shadows. He, too, knew that this was the last breath before the dive; once inside the Cathedral, the only certainty was that there was no safety. Quietly, he pressed his hands together and bowed his head, his lips moving to form words that he couldn't give voice to.

Would she hear him? Would she listen? Did she know that he alone, of all the Kovaschaii, could dance the dance and call her to the meeting place? He touched his ear a moment, his fingers following a pattern that had been magically pressed into the soft lobe. It was prayer, of a sort.

His hands shook; he had to lower them.

For the first time in years, his mission was not one of disgrace, not one of indifference. It mattered, all the more so because the death that he danced was not a
death that he had caused.
It doesn't matter
, he told himself.
You will never be forgiven; the backs that are turned to you will not be turned again.
He believed it with the terrible conviction of dispassionate intellect; it was true.

Yet beneath that belief was another truth.

While the soldiers readied their weapons, he readied himself.
Do not
, he told the Allasakari,
stand between a brother and his fallen.
But he both knew, and hoped, that they would.

• • •

Darkness closed around them like a velvet glove as they took the stairs and passed beneath the recessed arches of the doors; the lights of the Exalted burned more brightly for the lack of any other visual distraction.

Evayne led them.

The vaulted ceiling of the grand hall was hidden by unnatural shadow, which was just as well; it was a grand and glorious sight when given the light of day, a testament to the aesthetic sensibilities of the Dark League's guiding members. Having seen it once before, at the height of its power, she would not forget—but she would pay dearly to avoid having to view it again.