The Sacred Hunt Duology (124 page)

The arena tilted beneath his feet; his ankle rolled gently, refusing to bear his weight. The fine fabric of his tunic clung to his skin in damp, darkened folds as his knees bent beneath him. Sweat trickled into his eyes, rolling down the tip of his nose, his chin; he could not lift a hand to wipe it clear. Never in his years with the Kovaschaii had he ended a dance so poorly.

Never, in all those years, had the Lady's answer been so forceful. Mists which had always been a gentle, subtle presence roiled with the force of a storm; where soft, pale glow illuminated her coming, the air now crackled with sharp shards of light, too harsh to glance at for long. Ah, it hurt to cover his eyes, to lose the glimpse of the Lady that he had sworn to follow—and that he still, in his fashion, served—but instinct forced his hands up and bound his fingers into a tight shield.

“What is this?” she asked, her voice the very thunder.

They answered her with their cries, insensate in their relief, all ceremony forgotten.

She called them to her, and he heard their babbling, their tears; he could almost feel the circle of her arms closing around them in the half-world.

“Where,” she said, speaking again in fury, “were your brothers?”

Kallandras forced his hands away from his eyes, wincing and squinting against the angry radiance. “Lady,” he said, calling her attention to himself although he could not prevent reflex from curling his body inward.

“You,” she said coldly. He could not look upon her countenance, enshrouded as it was in a bitter light, although the tone of her voice forced his head up.

“Lady,” he said quietly.

But when she spoke again, the great anger was gone from her voice. The light dimmed enough that Kallandras might open his eyes to behold the faint luminescence of raven hair in the half-world. Her dark cloak swirled as if caught by wild wind, and at her side, clutching folds of fabric in their unbunching fists, two men. Each bore a delicate, long-fingered hand upon the shoulder closest to her. “Who calls?” Ah, ritual. “Who wishes to meet me in the half-world?”

“I do.”

“And you?”

At once, he bowed the head he had raised. “I am Kallatin of the brotherhood, Lady. You hold my name.” That name was a tremor of shaking lips.

“You are no longer Kallatin,” was her reply. “But, yes, I hold your name.”

He waited in silence, his face the perfect Kovaschaii mask; he was no longer a youth, to have it crack so easily.

The corner of her pale lips turned up in a slight smile; she nodded—approval?—before looking away to the taller of her two companions. Height, rather than age, differentiated them; he was no longer aged, no longer lined with care and the toil of years.

“You have served me well,” she told him, “and I have come to return to you the name that binds us, Allandor nee Eadward Parakis. And you,” she turned to the slender, shorter man, “have earned your name in my service. I return it to you as well, Kyria nee Calavin Warran.”

Tight-lipped, he watched them both as they relaxed in the cover of the Lady's night. He was not a youth, no, but the mask slipped a little.

“Come,” she told them softly. “The path is waiting, and we will walk it together, you and I.”

Kyria turned at once, but Allandor's gaze went not to the mists, but to the man who stood as outsider at their edge. “Why?” he asked softly.

“You saw the Darkness,” Kallandras said, with a bitterness that not even pride could contain.

Allandor nodded grimly.

“None of the brotherhood knew where you were, although they could hear your cries.”

“And you?”

“
She
brought me,” he replied.

Allandor's face darkened. “She who—”

But the Lady raised a delicate finger to Allandor's lips. “Hush,” she told him quietly. “Speak not in anger when that anger is my right.” Turning to Kallandras, she said softly, “you have served me well this day, and I shall not forget it. Speak if you will; I will not prevent it.”

“Allandor,” he said softly, “I would die for the brotherhood.” He paused and smiled bitterly. “But I alone of all of the brotherhood would do more than that: I would
live
for it, and without it, in pursuit of that service.”

“The brotherhood,” Kyria said coldly, speaking for the first time, “
is
the Lady's will. The Lady decreed—”

But the Lady raised a regal hand to stem the flow of his words. “You are young,” she said softly.

And he would never grow old.

Allandor bowed as if Kyria's interruption had never happened. “I have seen the Darkness,” he said, and his fine features twisted in a shudder. “And it has seen us. You are not my brother,” he added harshly. The eyes of the dead met the eyes of the living, and the harshness was lifted slowly as he continued to speak. “And yet we are bound. Or we were. You danced our death, Kallatin. And although you have earned it, I would no longer see you trapped undying upon the plane.” He bowed, touching finger to forehead in a gesture of respect.

Kallandras let nothing show.

“Allandor. Kyria.” The Lady wrapped her cloak tightly about her shoulders. “It is time.” Mist rose, curling in a spiral that began at her hem, streaked with shadow and a hint of the worlds that waited on either side. At her feet, a footpath shone gently, leading into a distance that Kallandras could only guess at; it was not for his eyes.

Raising a finger to forehead and away, he bowed to Allandor, masking his face in a different way. He did not wish to see them leave.

“Bard,” the Lady said. It hurt; it always hurt. For she had his name, and she would not speak it. The years had not gentled the desire at all; he knew then that they never would.

But he lifted his gaze at once. “Lady.”

Anger darkened her eyes and thinned her lips, although it took no grace from her. “I have had no quarrel with my brother; he is but one of many things that brings an end to life, and all life must end.” She paused and the ice reached her voice. “But I have quarrel with him now, for the sake of my chosen. To kill them, if he was capable of the act, was his right. But to keep them from their brothers—and from
me
—was not.” She raised a slender arm, releasing Kyria a moment to point. As he followed the direction of her hand, he heard the sound of battle growing louder, nearer.

“Between you and me, there is no bridge. I know of the wrong that you have done.” Her eyes were cold; she spoke truth, but not to wound him, and if it wounded, she did not care. But she held his name; she knew what the words meant. “However, if you desire it, I give you my blessing; kill the Allasakari in my name.”

“Lady,” he said. “In Your name.” For the first time, a hint of color traced his cheeks. She would not forgive him and accept his return to the only home he desired, but out of the back door she had thrown him scraps from his brothers' table—and to both his gratification and his humiliation, he was hungry enough to joyfully accept them.

For they would know.

S
TEPPING INTO THE WORLD
again, Kallandras called the wind, raising his hand so that the light of the diamond bound there might burn the darkness from his vision. The bodies of the Kovaschaii now lay upon the ground, limp and empty; they had been purified by the Lady's anger, and they would not rise again, not even if the Lord of the Hells himself pulled the strings. Burial, if there was one, would wait. The dance had been danced; all else was illusion.

There were no cries to haunt him, no accusations of betrayal from which to hide behind drug effect and sleep. He—and his brothers—were
free
.

Wrapped in the eye of the storm he stood, seeing for the first time in far too long with the assassin's vision. There were those whose only threat lay in the fact of their death; there were the kin who hunted between the cracks in the army's defense; there were the forms of great light and great darkness, of terrible beauty and danger, that he did not look at for long, precisely because they were all of these things. And there, at the farthest remove the arena allowed, behind the cover the dead provided, the Allasakari.

A chill went through him, bracing in its clarity. Although so much divided them, none of it quiet and none of it still, the face of the First Priest of Allasakar was absolutely clear. Black-bearded and dark-eyed, his lips formed words out of the shadow itself as he made himself a conduit for the power of a God locked in combat.
Marius.
Beside him, tall and slender, a pale-haired Southerner with perfectly chiseled features, a beautiful mouth.
Karnassas.
And beside him, pale and fair as well, a lithe and slender girl.
Loriel.
There were more. He looked at each one.

Their names came to him, and as he collected them, he felt his body resonate as if he were a bell chiming a perfect, high note. What he did not know, he could not kill; the names settled into that part of his soul that the Lady owned.

Kill the Allasakari in my name.

His feet were light against the arena's even floor; had he been a dancer of anything but death, he might have crossed to the theater and back in a light and happy step. He
felt
their names travel down his spine and curl there—and he
knew that far and away, in the streets above the undercity, hunting their own kills or wrapped in personal contemplations, the Kovaschaii felt every name as clearly.

There were no rules to the kill, although each brother often developed his own. There was no stricture, no law of how or when—what mattered was the death itself, for the death was the Lady. Senses heightened, he watched the army of the Crowns battering against both the dead and the demons; the Allasakari were far enough behind their lines that they could not easily be reached. Not by the Kings' men.

And not by Kallandras, a lone brother on the field.

Kill the Allasakari in my name.

Was it the drug that made the words so powerful? Was it the
niscea
that made the sting of fear so enticing? He struggled to mask apprehension, to swallow it with the neutrality of cool indifference. But his throat was dry and his tongue thick with the taste of a familiar bitterness. Ten years ago, the dream of the Lady's favor had been beyond him; to bask a moment in her glory, however much of an afterthought it was, was more than he had ever hoped for.

They were beyond his reach. No—let him think, let him only think a moment; other deaths had been more difficult—

He called upon calm in this dark and noisy place, and it eluded him as the names of the Lady's chosen, unspoken and unspeakable, twirled like ascension lights before his darkened eyes. It was unthinkable that these not be his; that some other hand might fell them; that this one bridge to the brothers who would never be his again should be crossed by one who could never appreciate the privilege.

Shuddering as if they contained the fear he would not acknowledge, his hands curled into fists. A chill descended upon him, and then a sudden heat; his breath, as it left his open lips, came short and sharp.

What form of attack was this? His vision doubled a moment; he spoke the words of focus, but instead of speaking them in the high, sure tenor for which he had become known throughout the Empire, he spoke them in a guttural, harsh burst, as if they were curses. Sweetly sounded or no, they served the purpose they were meant to in the labyrinths of his childhood, revealing to his inner eye the form and shape of his body and the lines that bound it to earth.

There was no magic. No poison.

But a need drove him from within, slowly consuming his body with a desire that had nothing to do with the mind or the heart.
Niscea.
Siren's song. He thought as clearly as he could, but no matter how he considered it, the timing was wrong; over the weeks, he had become used to the ebb and flow of the drug's demand, and not at such a crucial time would he make so foolish a mistake.

It was very cold in the arena.

Steadying himself, he forced air down his throat, swallowing it as if it were too
thick. At his side, in a slender pouch that conformed to the curve beneath his rib cage, were two stoppered vials; he had not known, of course, that he would need them, or they would already be empty.

Reaching for them, he knew a moment's panic. The pouch was flat and slightly bloused, although it had not been opened. His hands shuddered as he lost his focus; he forced them—forced himself—to stillness. His chest rose and fell, sweat beaded his brow; these two things he had not the strength to prevent.

They were gone.

Not broken, for there would have been shards of glass and pungent liquid as evidence. They were simply gone, as if the deliberate efforts taken to store them there had been the delirium of a cautious man. He spoke a single word, but it held no power; it was a man's word, not a bard's or an assassin's, and it held only the pain of the helpless.

Had he thought the Lady neutral? Had he thought her anger diminished somehow by time or event? Had he truly believed that he could
speak the name
of even one whose death she had refused to sanction to those who were not her chosen?

There were no stories among the Kovaschaii of her cruelty. And even if they knew of his plight, there would still be none: Justice administered, however severe, was not a matter of malice. Time passed strangely in the meeting place, and if one delivered oneself to the will of the Gods, many things might happen there. He passed his hand over his empty pouch numbly.

She had said he might kill in her name; was it mere mockery, then? But no. No—for the names of the living had burned themselves deeply into his center, linking his fate with their own inextricably. What she offered, she offered; if she chose to force him to fight without the weapons he had honed in her studies, she so chose. Who argued with the Lady's will?

A bitterness turned his lips at the corners, although whether up or down, it was hard to tell; they trembled. Curling his hands into fists to still their shaking, he turned once again to face the Allasakari—the men and women who, bound to their God, were now so far from his reach they might never have been named at all.

And then he saw, beneath his hand, the edge of hard, white light that burned away darkness. Diamond, trapped in a delicate platinum lattice, called him with a wildness that he had never heard before. It was the song not of breeze or wind, but of gale, and it roared along the length of his trembling arm as if he were but a leaf caught in it.

But he was the bearer of Myrddion's ring, and upon its altar, that ancient mage had perished in ignominy and defeat so that the elements might be bent into weapon's shape and form against the Lord of the Hells.

A tickle of words played at his ears; he thought he must understand the
language, but the meaning eluded him. A hunger far stronger than that which
niscea
caused forced his hand up in defiance.

Here, in this musty and ancient place, buried so far from sun, rain, and wind, he called what had never been called: the full force of the ring's power.

Brothers!
he cried, but the roar of the wind took the words.

That, and more.

• • •

To force the crystal to release its vision of the here and now was grim work; hard enough for a seer of power that it required focus, concentration, strength of both body and mind. To search for the glimpses of the future that made the seers both feared and respected—to search, and somehow wrest answers from the half-seen, shadowy glimpses of events that might never come to pass instead of waiting for those glimpses to wander across the vision like lightning before the storm took arrogance, a hubristic self-delusion.

Or desperation.

She had not yet entered the battle, although she had been fighting the war for all of her adult life. Scenery flickered before her eyes in a silvered mist, a blurred glow. Glancing up, she saw what she most feared: Bredan was weakening.

He had the power that any God might have should he walk again in mortal lands, but the will—the ability—to use that power was diminished by the wielding. He had chosen, wisely, to attack Allasakar and press him closely enough that sheer physical strength, the instinct of the beast, would serve him best.

She had thought it would be enough, but watching the sands drain, she knew it for a fool's hope. The dead that walked upon the stage set by the Allasakari were a testament to their foresight; the God was well fed.

To interfere was death, and it wasn't even a good one; where Gods walked, very few could challenge—and no matter how learned she was in the ancient ways, Evayne did not count herself among that number. The Sleepers, yes. She cursed, wondering what tragedy would bring about their hour of waking if this did not.

The mists roiled, pulling her gaze and repelling her vision at the same time. A fleeting glimpse of one, where two now stood locked in combat, emerged from beneath the veil; it was gone before she could glean anything but the terrible sense that the battle was over.

• • •

Carver and Angel worked their way through the crowd; Jewel could hear the muttered curses as she watched the bobbing of a shock of white hair.

“Jay?”

She was glad, fiercely glad, that they were with her. Finch, Teller, and Jester were nowhere in sight, and Arann was on duty.

“We started this together,” she told Carver grimly.

“Yeah.” Pause. “How's it going to end?”

“Wrong question,” Angel said sharply. “Are we going to win?”

But Jewel offered no answer to the question that everyone was thinking. Instead, paling, she pointed. The land rumbled; the waters shook. In the heart of the old city, the shadow was coalescing into a tall, dark shape.

Listening, she thought she could hear screams in the distance.

“What—what is it?”

“
The Shining City
,” she said. “
It's rising
.” But she said it softly, and the words only carried to her den, The Terafin, and Morretz.

Angel and Carver knew that voice.

• • •

“Lord Elseth,” Evayne said, through lips so white they seemed bloodless, “the time is coming.” Suspended in the air inches before her unblinking eyes, the seer's ball spun in an even, slow circle. What it showed the seeress, he did not know.

Lord Elseth stood in the silence of the coming Hunt. Evayne had let him play no part in the battle below; he had become audience to the arena, mere observer. His eyes, human, were drawn again and again to the complex struggle of giants—a struggle that at last seemed to be reaching its end. At their feet, the ground was liquid fire, frozen rock, melting dirt, shadow and light; the air was sparks of storm and summer heat. Where they met, the warcries of the battle surrounding them became, for a second, meaningless.

Hunter
, he thought, and drew breath on the word. The darkness seemed stronger, fuller, richer, the howls of the Death that he had faced yearly for all of his adult life, weaker.

He had thought of nothing but the Hunt since the moment Stephen died. He thought of it now, for if the Lord fell here, there would be no Hunting. No vengeance.

No life.

He felt the rustle of midnight-blue fabric an instant before he heard the sharp intake of breath. Turning, he saw the profile of the seeress cast in fleshly alabaster as she stared, her lips parted slightly over two words. “Kallandras, no!”

Kallandras?
Gilliam's eyes narrowed as he tried to find the lone bard in the chaos below. No sight of the golden curls and dark clothing on first pass—but he did not search for long. A howling, as if from the throat of the beast that coiled at the earth's heart, began. Wind rose, wild and chill; dirt and stone formed a flailing curtain.

Evayne did not speak again; instead she lifted both hands and grasped the sphere, although whether to wrest answers from it, or to protect it, he couldn't say. The edge of raven hair brushed the smooth, curved surface as she bowed her forehead a moment.

Light, glimmering and tenuous, shot out of the crystal's core, growing and changing as it unfurled in flight. It was not so vast or so dramatic a calling as the
unveiling of Vexusa, but her fear made it more intense, although only Gilliam could sense it.

The army of the Kings, buffeted by wind and the sting of sand through helmet visors, held their lines; the mages at their back attempted to calm the wind, to somehow shield the Crowns—and their followers—from its effect. But it was no normal wind; it was Air in wild fury.

The lightest of the corpses that lay sprawled across the ground began to shudder and roll.

“Kallandras!”

“What is he doing?” Gilliam had to shout to be heard—and if the wind grew much stronger, even that would not suffice.

But Evayne did not answer; her robes rose on either side like dark, layered wings. She pulled the crystal sphere to her breast, and the cloak's folds swallowed it. “Lord Elseth,” she cried, hurling her words against the wind as if she, too, realized that the time for speech had almost passed, “join the fighting below. Stay as close to your Lord as you dare.” She opened her mouth to say more, but fell silent instead, searching his eyes intently.